CSGI stands in international solidarity with tens of millions of farmers and workers in India, who will be on a historic general strike on January 8th, 2021, against exploitative laws by the Hindu Nationalist BJP Government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This international solidarity is crucial not only to ensure the farmers in India win their demands, which will not be easy, but also because if they win, it will be a victory for the oppressed and the working class globally. Hundreds of thousands of farmers in India have been courageously protesting for nearly three weeks, facing down brutal repression by police using tear gas and water cannons. These new policies would carry out ruthless privatization and push the overwhelming majority of farmers and agricultural workers into deeper poverty and indebtedness, while billionaires and agribusiness multinationals will become even more obscenely wealthy at the expense of the most vulnerable.
The success of the Jan 8th general strike in India is necessary to further put the Modi regime on the back foot and force them to concede. As the global capitalist system goes into a deep and long-term crisis – a crisis predating and exacerbated by the COVID pandemic – the fundamental question that faces us is: who will pay for the crisis, big corporations and the already super-wealthy, or ordinary working people and impoverished communities?
Throughout the history of capitalism, periods of crises such as the current one have also been used by the ruling class to carry out serious attacks against working people, the public sector, and vulnerable people. The new agriculture privatization laws in India are an example – an attack on the majority of farmers. We need to help successfully defeat this.