Bites # 143- Narendra or Alexis

Translated by  Jenny Bright, Tlaxcala

 To my right, the biggest-democracy-in-the-world: India. To my left, the cradle-of-Western-democracy: Greece. The two countries have come up to voting time, with diametrically opposing results.

 

Narendra Modi,  as seen by Satish Upadhyay

On the side of the Asian giant, it's the Hindu Mussolini, Narendra Modi, who has won an overwhelming success, crushing the Congress party of the Gandhi dynasty, and turning the BJP into the subcontinents most famous brand. BJP stands for Bharatiya Janata Party, the People's Party of India, and the name alone is a campaign in itself. Bharatiya is the adjective of Bharat, an old Sanskrit word which officially designates "India" in Hindi. The word "India" was coined by the ancient Greeks, and transmitted to Latin, then to English and French. Janata means "people" in Sanskrit and Hindi.

The BJP has long been the most zealous defender of India as "Hindu Rashtra", Hindu nation, besieged from outside by its "natural enemies" - Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka - and undermined from within by Muslims and other non-Hindus- Christians, animists, Jews. The great "national" cause of the BJP is Kashmir, which plays the same role in India as the Western Sahara does in Morrocco, or the Falkland Islands in Argentina. Although it is mainly populated by Muslims, it belongs to India, end of, says the BJP.
 

Over the years, the BJP, born out of the most rabid Hindu fascist networks, has gradually transformed itself into a respectable, fashionable protagonist, just like the Italian, French and, more generally, European neo-fascists, which, since the little groups of thugs that they were in the 70s and 80s, have become "democratic parties of government" at the end of the last century. To answer charges of Hindu supremacism, the BJP claims that it has among its leaders many Muslims, and even a Jew! So, what are we complaining about?
 

Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat when the 2002 pogroms erupted, which resulted in ​​at least 2,000 Muslim deaths. Not only has he never been held accountable for his responsibility and complicity in the pogroms, but he has won the esteem of the great Indian capitalists, who finally chose him to do the work that the Gandhi dynasty was getting worse and worse at. The task that the big bosses of India ask from the national political power is simple: to jump the obstacles- legal, regulatory - to predation of territory and resources, and to eliminate all forms of resistance- popular, peasant, worker, tribal, civil, non-violent or military - against this disaster capitalism, by articulating official repressive forces and paramilitaries.

On the side of the European dwarf, it's the leftist Kennedy Tsipras and his party Syriza (acronym of Synaspismós Rhizospastikís Aristerás, Coalition of the Radical Left) which topped the municipal elections in Athens, which bodes well for an excellent score in the European elections next Sunday. Tsipras is sure to sit in the European Parliament, and why not - we have the right to dream - to take the place of the infamous Barroso as President of the European Commission, the unelected government of the European Onion, sorry, I mean Union. In any case, the Italians of the list L'Altra Europa con Tsipras (The Other Europe with Tspiras) are campaigning for it.
 

You can make a striking parallel between India and Greece: in the first instance, that a former head of a fascist band became respectable Prime Minister of a kolossal country; in the second, that a former head of a leftist splinter group made his way to become Great Helmsman of that bizarre gizmo, at once gigantic (economically speaking), and dwarfish (politically). In one case as in the other, the key to power are the guarantees given to those who hold the knife by the handle, and not the voice of small anonymous voters. And there, as here, those who hold the handle are the same: you know, the famous invisible hand of the market, in other words Big Money.
 

Since even before his first electoral victory (June 2012: 26.9%), Tsipras began to add more than a little bit of water to his Retsina: it went from "Greece must refuse to pay the odious debt" to "we must renegotiate the debt "and started to give SYRIZA a bit of a feel of deja vu, in the order of "we are the new PASOK" (social democrats).One can only hope he does not end up like Barroso, who, remember, was in his misspent youth the great leader of nothing less than the Movement for the Reconstruction of the proletarian party, the MRPP (which survives under the name Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers), whose idols were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. May the beautiful Alexis defy the adage "leftist at 20, communist at 35, socialist at 45, liberal at 60, neo-conservative at 70."

AEK, coordinator of FARA-CH (Front révolutionnaire d'action des alligatoridés-Canal historique)

Have a good week, anyway!
May the Force of the spirit be with you! 
... and til next week