In the run up to the assembly polls in Maharashtra and Haryana, which were held two days ago, the BJP pulled out all the stops with Narendra Modi addressing 27 rallies in Maharashtra and ten in Haryana.
Earlier this week, much to the chagrin of the opposition, local television channels in Maharashtra began broadcasting the speech Modi had made at Madison Square Garden last month. This pharaonic celebration of Modi at Madison Square Garden on 28 September had been reportedly attended by some 20,000 people. However, about a thousand people had protested across the street. Given how much press this event garnered both in the US and in India, it is worth asking who exactly all these supporters and protestors were.
Modi’s fan base in the US has been pegged as “cash rich and prosperous,” “fairly large and rich,” and “one of the wealthiest diaspora communities in the US.” In a separate article, I argued that “the crowd of supporters” was “solidly lower middle class and aspiring to much more.” Modi personifies that aspiration, and this helps explain why he has so much cache among Indian Hindus in America, as does Hindutva and pro-corporate politics.
The protest crowd reflected a different set of religious, class and political complexities among South Asians in the US.
The complexities of these political affiliations were represented by groups that identify themselves as part of the South Asian left, or as South Asian progressives. Given the level to which anti-capitalist movements have been decimated by the American state in the past (for example, when the American anti-war movement was infiltrated and attacked during the 1960s and 1970s) and the level to which it continues to do so (for example, the crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street protests), the terms “left” and “progressive” are used more loosely in the US than they are in places where a functioning party-based left survives. In the US, the terms “desi left” and “South Asian left” do not refer to any specific political party or affiliation in the US or in India. “South Asian left” or “desi left” in the US usually refers to the network of anti-Hindutva activists who initially came together after the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
The first self-identified Indian left formation in the US was the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL), a network that, at its inception, was largely made up of progressive Indian graduate students in the US who had been distressed by the rise of Hindu fundamentalism that the demolition of the Babri Masjid represented. Although most of the people who formed FOIL and who were part of these early networks were also politically or economically on the left, the network mainly focused its work on forming a secular, diasporic, South Asian space that was opposed to Hindutva.
There is a long history of various kinds of South Asian community formations all over the US. Any South Asian person who was born or grew up in the US has memories of attending community “functions” with our parents and their friends. These were organised by Hindu, Sikh, Christian, and Muslim organisations that were, when they first came together in the 1970s and early 1980s, barely larger than a few dozen families. These loosely defined “organisations” were local community networks based on religious, caste and South Asian regional affiliations, and involved copious socialising. Along with the secular left activists and organisations, the protest on 28 September also included members of Muslim, Sikh and Christian community-based organisations that began as these local community networks. The South Asian secular left was represented through two national networks, the Alliance for Justice and Accountability and the Ghadar Alliance, which just published a report criticising the Modi government by enumerating the regressive policy changes it made in its first 100 days.
Also represented at the protest were people who work with South Asian arts, feminist, youth and LGBTQ organisations, and anti-domestic-violence groups. This unwieldy cadre comes together from time to time for major protests and events, remaining connected otherwise through networks of friends, social media, and shared campaigns. The Babri Masjid demolition, 9/11, and the 2002 Gujarat riots have all been moments that have required a response, drawing various groups of South Asian activists in the US together. All three of these events have been meaningful in the histories of the groups and individuals that converge in protests like the one at Madison Square Garden. For the feminist, LGBTQ and youth organisations in New York, their genealogies also include the formation of networks of progressive young South Asian people meeting one another through one of several educational projects for progressive South Asian youth, such as the now-defunct Youth Solidarity Summer in New York, or the ongoing Bay Area Solidarity Summer in San Francisco. Taken together, all of these groups have vast areas of political disagreement, such as on LGBT rights, or on the question of free markets. Yet they do converge during moments that demand such a presence.
The politics of Hindutva in the broader US context has also brought about unusual alliances. Hindutva previously drew criticism from both major American political parties, although American conservatives were historically much more vocal, on the grounds of preserving religious freedom and speaking against the persecution of Christians by Hindutvavadi forces in India. For example, it was well documented that Modi’s visa ban in 2005 had legal traction because of legislation—the International Religious Freedom Act—that had been passed in 1998 by religious conservatives in the US Congress, and because of support for the ban from Christian evangelicals, from both the US and South Asia, who saw the Gujarat riots of 2002 as a gross example of religious intolerance. Since that time, however, the Republican Party has been rocked by a wave of fiscal conservatism that claims to be powered by the libertarian ethos of Ayn Rand. Whereas some political conservatives were allies of anti-Hindutva activists a decade ago, the anti-government, pro-corporate ideology that seems to be driving the Republican Party’s economic policies today, embodied by a faction called the Tea Party, loves the Modi government’s “pro-business” agenda.
If Modi’s visa denial was wrought by a strange mix of South Asian progressives and American conservatives, the alliances in the current moment are being made according to more predictable alignments. Also present at the Madison Square Garden protest were Joe Lombardo, Co-Chairman of the United National Antiwar Coalition, and Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, a long-time activist against police violence, racism and the targeting of Muslims by police surveillance programs in New York City.
Even from the highly incomplete, India-oriented and somewhat New York–centric list of organisations I review here, the diversity of the groups represented at the protest, and of their politics, should be clear. “Coalition” and “solidarity” are the terms of the hour, and these are still unwieldy coalitions at best. At the same time, when asked by members of the press why we were standing outside Madison Square Garden holding placards depicting scenes of carnage in Gujarat on a beautiful Sunday, most of us simply said it was important to be there that day, together.