Resistance efforts often do not extend beyond certain boundaries. Because it’s more convenient to form solidarities selectively and to position oneself on the right side of history when it is so far away from home.
Recently, the world witnessed a powerful student-led working-class movement toppling Bangladesh’s Awami League regime. What started as a movement to amend a discriminatory quota system transformed into a one-point nationwide demand for the despotic Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and her entire governmental party cabinet’s dissolution. As a Bangladeshi who participated in the countrywide protests, I saw how brutal the violence was firsthand, including the slaughters and enforced disappearances executed by the Bangladeshi military apparatus amid a week-long communications blackout.
In the early afternoon of August 5, while the Long March to Dhaka was underway, we received word that Hasina fled the country by boarding a helicopter to Delhi. The streets erupted in celebration and disbelief shortly after, while the Bangladesh army announced the formation of an interim government to be led by Dr. Muhammad Yunus.
Unfortunately, the state violence occurring in Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi people’s resistance is happening simultaneously with Israel’s year-long unabated genocide of Palestinians — a liberation struggle that South Asians living in the Western empire have joined. Thus, as troubling as it has been to watch the violence in my country unfold, I have also been extremely perplexed by the lack of solidarity and silence from many across the globe on the Bangladeshi people’s fight for freedom.
This includes members of the elite and upper-caste South Asian diaspora who have simultaneously resisted interrogating the genocidal tactics being waged regionally and within their respective homelands’ occupied colonies, namely Kashmir, at such a transformational moment.
Beyond just the idea of principled solidarity, however, is the fact that a growing Hindu nationalism and Islamophobia played a significant role in establishing India as a neocolonial power with Sheikh Hasina by its side, all of which has led to a cemented India–Israel–U.S.–Bangladesh alliance. For decades, Brahminism, which informs the core tenets of Hindu nationalism, has been spearheaded by the Indian state with immense repercussions for the country’s minorities.
An important element underpinning Hindu nationalism is caste, an insidious system of stratification that has also migrated to the South Asian diaspora and dictates important social and cultural practices. Since most diasporic lobbying organizations are led by Brahmin and upper-caste Hindus, they have built the organizations primarily in their own image and in accordance with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) logics.
Whether it’s Bangladesh’s fascist regime collapsing, the people of the Hill Tracts chanting for their freedoms, the demands for Azaadi in the Kashmir valley, or the agitation for Palestinian self-determination, all the movements have spoken. Their message is clear: The time for justice is now, and if the system won’t deliver it, the people will. The people are seeing through the veil of representational politics, which is not a replacement for social progress.
In other words, the individuals leading these institutions have used their upper-caste privileges in the West to hoard resources and assume a ‘person of color’ identity. They also heavily relied on American ignorance about caste and religious differences in India to make sure they could push their own Hindu nationalist agenda in the name of all South Asians. It is also important to note here that caste is not restricted to Hindus; it exists among Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists alike and influences codes of everyday behaviors.
For several decades, Hindu nationalism and Zionist ideologies have joined forces to form ethno-religious states based on ethnic cleansing, forced disappearances, and curtailing of Kashmiri and Palestinian people’s agencies. Through cozy diplomatic relations, the exchange of weapons, surveillance tools, and military training, the Indian and Israeli states are joined by their singular desire to annihilate these two territories living under occupation.
The same playbook has also been administered by Bangladesh’s Awami League and previous parties on the large Adivasi population residing in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The military has played a central role in the land theft, clampdown on free speech, murders and abductions, and the eventual flourishing of the tourism industry for the influx of Bengali settlers.
The United States has been implicated in all these interventions. Before Bangladesh’s formation, U.S. engineering technology enabled the Kaptai Hydroelectric Dam to be built in CHT, which flooded Adivasi villages and the Chakma royal palace in 1965, a catastrophe that is forever etched in Adivasi memory.
The multi-pronged alliance is integral in understanding the South Asian diaspora’s responses to global genocidal forces as the centering of upper-caste purity, comfort, and diversion of resources toward the expansion of Hindu nationalism in the U.S., Europe, and Canada. When the Bangladeshi student movement started gaining traction, various protestors on the ground noted the exchange and deployment of violent technologies between these sets of countries, including, for example, the Awami League’s use of Israeli technology, Pegasus, which had previously hacked Palestinian activists’ digital spheres, was used to spy on critiques of Bangladesh’s autocratic regime.
The communications blackout that Bangladeshis were subjected to are methods borrowed from India’s crushing of Kashmiri dissent via communications blackout isolationist strategies in the Jammu & Kashmir territories. Such draconian partnerships have escalated the state-sanctioned brutality that is currently underway and will exponentially escalate upon caste-oppressed, indigenous, and Muslim populations in the homelands.
Till now, right-wing Hindu media outlets in India and social media users in the diaspora are trying to delegitimize the Bangladesh democratic movement by spreading misinformation on the violence being perpetrated upon Hindus in Bangladesh to establish their anti-Muslim, casteist, and anti-Indigenous settler colonial objectives.
Thus, while the South Asian diaspora has rightfully joined the calls for Palestinian liberation, those in the ‘imperial core’ must also reckon with the authoritarianism in their respective homelands to fulfill the demands for global liberation and recognize what’s at stake if we choose apathy. Since 1947, historical narratives of India and the rest of South Asia have always emphasized an ‘anti-colonial’ and ‘anti-oppression’ stance to gain support for its nationalistic fervor.
Yet India’s strong collaboration with Israel, its everyday lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, the occupation of Kashmiris, and Bangladeshi Bengalis destroying Adivasi livelihoods, and other fascist state-building mechanisms coupled with casteism enveloping Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, South Asia are melting pot of various violent settler colonial projects. At this current moment, rather than brushing aside our histories and how we got here, the South Asian diaspora, namely those with caste and/or wealth privilege, need to deepen their transnational solidarities in a principled manner.
An important barrier I’ve encountered in a South Asian leftist’s commitment to anti-imperial and anti-caste struggle is their hesitation to concede power once they move past a certain stage of political education. Large numbers of politically educated upper-caste South Asians who have fundraised for and joined Palestine solidarity actions have been hesitant to mobilize around the occupation of Kashmir, a genocide that’s unfolding in their backyard.
The same analyses can be applied to Bangladeshi settlers plundering the CHT region. Do our resistance efforts not extend beyond certain boundaries? If so, is it because it’s more convenient to form solidarities selectively and to position yourself on the right side of history when it is so far away from home? Are we afraid to face our own failures? We are often saying ‘no’ to fascism, policing, and misogyny, to name a few. But what are we saying ‘yes’ to? And are our no’s louder than our yes’es?
One cannot fight for the liberation of a completely distinct population while denying it to an ostracized community that is demanding the same liberation from us. As caste-privileged people join the global anti-caste movement, their primary focus has been to share proximity with Dalit, Adivasi, Bahujan (DBA), and Muslim folks to form anti-caste solidarities.
While redistributing wealth, forming kinships, and collaborating with religiously marginalized and caste-oppressed friends is a great first step, the work tends to stop there for the majority of caste-privileged leftists. Such relationships, while seemingly harmless, end up serving upper-caste desires of appearing intersectional and further institutionalizing spaces to relieve caste or settler guilt.
The refashioning tactics mentioned above have done very little to curb the increasing cycles of exploitation and cooptation that DBA and Muslim communities are subject to. Caste supremacy, which shares some similarities with white supremacy, is the set of political and social levers that still get fired up whenever we interact with the world. All of us are drowning in it — it’s the price one pays for owning everything.
For dominant-caste progressives to truly restructure the global caste order around DBA and Muslim populations, they need to build and leverage their most intimate relationships with their upper-caste friends, lovers, family members, and larger communities to understand shared complicities and concede their caste and material pride. Caste-privileged people need to convene together to unpack their violent histories and social positions to see what anti-casteness can really offer them, and what it will take away from them.
While there may be discomfort and fear in broaching such topics and organizing them against one’s interests, inaction will only strengthen the deadly systems of Brahminism and Islamophobia. It’s essential to ask oneself in those moments, is the ease of caste and wealth-privileged people more important than the lives of those facing genocide and intense suffering under these systems?
Whether it’s Bangladesh’s fascist regime collapsing, the people of the Hill Tracts chanting for their freedoms, the demands for Azaadi in the Kashmir valley, or the agitation for Palestinian self-determination, all the movements have spoken. Their message is clear: The time for justice is now, and if the system won’t deliver it, the people will. The people are seeing through the veil of representational politics, which is not a replacement for social progress.
As the stories of the survivors and martyrs come to light, it is up to the upper-caste and wealth-privileged South Asian diaspora to ensure that such horrors never occur again. This entails having conversations and planning actionable steps with your chosen networks and, more urgently, with people holding contradictory viewpoints to unapologetically unsettle the settler-colonial-casteist machines in our homelands, both ideologically and materially, in the name of justice.
Now is the time for the dominant-caste South Asian diaspora to put themselves on the line for liberation movements happening in real-time in the region. Otherwise, the wounds will remain in our memory as a collective stain. Freedom has always meant taking great risks, yet its outcome has always pierced through the darkness. Let’s choose life and step into the light.
