Letter from India: Nationalism incites racist mass slaughter

Nearly three long months. That’s the duration of an attempted ethnic cleansing in Manipur, a small province of extreme geopolitical importance, bordering Myanmar in North-Eastern India. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological fountain head Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are deeply experimenting with a neo-Nazi model there. Why so?

The seven states in that part of India (often nicknamed as Seven Sisters) are overwhelmingly indigenous in terms of their ethnicity, language, culture, and belief systems. Such thriving diversity doesn’t fit into the fascist ideas of Hindutva brigade there. As a result, this murderous plot was hatched, when Indian prime minister Narenda Modi came to power in 2014, to divide the people across their religious and ethnic identities. In Manipur the majority Hindu Meiteis are living in and around the valley of Imphal, the state capital. In contrast the minority tribes belonging to the three clans Kuki-Zo-Naga are mostly residing in the hilly and forest areas.

To extract the resources from these latter areas, particularly the mineral and hydrocarbon reserves, the rulers (BJP) at the national and regional levels are trying everything to displace and disperse the non-Hindu population. The present mayhem in Manipur, therefore, comes out imperialists and nationalists blueprints of terror.

As of July 21, more than two hundred people, including women and children have died there. Thousands are wounded and a quarter of a million people have either fled the state or live in rescue camps in subhuman conditions. Numerous cases of rape, torture, and large-scale atrocities with active participation from the state police are also coming out in the open as the internet blockade there was partially withdrawn after a directive of Supreme Court of India.

At the height of such large-scale violence, it’s ironic that the fascist Modi was touring the US and the Middle East, meeting the state heads there and was giving lectures on the “great tradition of Indian democracy.”
The experience of Manipur reaffirms the historical necessity of working-class unity, cutting across all other lines at the local, regional, national, and international levels as  the imperialist world system plunges into a third world war.