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The arrival ceremony for Narendra Modi at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 22, 2023. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who is on a state visit to the White House this week, is one of the most significant far-right leaders in the world. His persecution of religious minorities has troubled even the US State Department, which has taken note of the problem in its annual Religious Freedom Report. His administration has passed discriminatory laws against Muslims that have helped lead to a horrifying rise in violence against Muslims in India. Modi has also jailed journalists and activists and attempted to use the judicial system to suppress a BBC documentary critical of him. He was denied a US visa for years because of his role in a 2002 anti-Muslim riot in which more than a thousand people, mostly Muslims, were slaughtered.
If this sort of fascistic politics has a home in the United States, most people would assume it would be in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Yet Joe Biden and the Democrats are laying out the red carpet for Modi this week.
Modi doesn’t eat meat, so Jill Biden had a chef from California prepare millet and stuffed mushrooms for a Thursday state dinner of four hundred guests, including a saffron risotto and a strawberry shortcake infused with rose and cardamom, a menu the first lady described as “stunning.”
During their joint appearance Thursday, President Biden not only did not mention any of the human rights problems with Modi’s regime, he heaped explicitly misleading praise upon it.
“Equity under the law, freedom of expression, religious pluralism, diversity of our people — these core principles have endured and evolved,” said Biden, in direct opposition to the evidence about Modi’s record, “even as they have faced challenges through both our nations’ histories.”
The ass-kissing began before Modi even arrived. Biden told Modi last month, “I should take your autograph. You are causing me a real problem. Next month we have a dinner for you in Washington. Everyone in the whole country wants to come. We have run out of tickets.”
The administration’s Modi fandom is not new. Last summer, at a US embassy–sponsored event in India, US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo called the prime minister “unbelievable, visionary.” She gushed, “He is the most popular world leader for a reason. . . . His level of commitment to the people of India is just indescribable and deep and passionate and real and authentic.”
Why do the Democrats love Modi? After all, they hate Trump, a domestic right-wing leader whose politics are similar in many ways to the prime minister’s.
Partly, it’s geopolitical imperial strategy. Just as the United States was happy to back General Augusto Pinochet in Chile during the Cold War, today Biden seeks a partnership with Modi to counter China. The visit has included a rollout of the two major powers’ plans to cooperate on defense.
Democrats also love Modi’s commitment to neoliberal capitalism. Some big corporate partnerships between Indian and US companies have been announced this week, including one between General Electric and Hindustan Aeronautics. During the visit, some big arms sales and a massive push by US company Micron to build semiconductors in India have also been announced.
As well, Indian-Americans are an important voting bloc. More than 70 percent of Indian-Americans are believed to have voted for Biden in 2020, yet Modi also remains extremely popular here. This includes Indian-Americans who are more conservative in an Indian context: many US supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s far-right party, vote for and even donate to Democrats. Indian-Americans are seen as important voters in some swing states. In giving Modi this over-the-top welcome, the US president is keeping these Democratic Party supporters happy, too.
Of course, the president of the United States should talk with every powerful world leader, regardless of how unsavory. But a state visit expresses special diplomatic regard. This, combined with the pomp and praise, is revolting and insulting to everyone engaged in fighting the global far right.
Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boycotted Modi’s address to Congress, pointing out that for the president to invite another world leader to give a joint address with him is “among the most prestigious invitations and honors the United States can extend” — a privilege that should not be extended to the leader of a country that the US Holocaust museum has warned is at high risk of mass killings.
The other democratic socialists in Congress — Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman — also boycotted the address, as did Rep. Ilhan Omar, who introduced a resolution condemning the Modi government’s human rights abuses. Indian human rights and leftist groups have been protesting Modi’s appearance. Liberal Democratic representative Ro Khanna, on the other hand, dismissed the socialists’ boycott, saying it comes across as “the West lecturing.”
The effect of all the official praise from the Democrats is to whitewash what’s happening in India. The same people who will tell you to vote blue no matter who because Trump is a fascist don’t seem too worried about fascism in a country like India. The disgraceful episode shows that centrists can’t be counted on to fight the far right; they’ll often strategically ally with the Right when they feel they need to counter communism or advance neoliberalism.
Among US elected officials, the only people condemning the Modi lovefest have been socialists and our close allies. It’s fallen to the Left, as it often has throughout recent history, to stand steadfast in the fight against fascism.
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Dock workers on strike in London, circa 1910. (Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The following is an excerpt from Ralph Darlington’s new book, Labour Revolt in Britain 1910–14, available now from Pluto Press.
The so-called “Labor Unrest” — or what more accurately should be termed “Labor Revolt” — swept through Britain in the years leading up to the outbreak of World War I between 1910 and 1914. It was one of the most sustained, dramatic, and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict the country has ever experienced. After some twenty years of relative quiescence in strike activity, there was a sudden and unanticipated eruption that spread rapidly on a scale well in excess of the “New Unionism” upsurge of 1889–1891.
By the time Robert Tressell’s celebrated classic novel of working-class life and politics, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, had been published in 1914, its representation of the apparent weakness and “apathy” of exploited workers had been superseded by the actuality of an explosion of self-confidence, organization, and militancy by a working class that had, according to historian James Cronin, “thrust itself into the centre of Britain’s social and political life.”
The strike wave involved a number of large-scale disputes in strategically important sections of the economy. A protracted strike in the South Wales coalfields in 1910–11 was followed in the summer of 1911 by national strikes of seamen, dockers, and railway workers, as well as a Liverpool general transport strike. There were national miners’ and London transport workers’ strikes in 1912, a series of Midlands metal workers’ strikes and a Dublin transport workers’ lockout in 1913, and a London building workers’ lockout in 1914.
A significant minority of the industrial workforce were involved in forty-six hundred other strikes for higher wages, better working conditions, and trade union organization. Women workers played an active and prominent role within a number of strikes, and what the Fabian couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb described as the “spirit of revolt in the Labour world” even spread to school students’ strikes in September 1911.
Britain’s ‘Labor Unrest’ of 1910–14 was one of the most sustained, dramatic, and violent explosions of industrial militancy and social conflict the country has ever experienced.
It was not only the scale and diverse range, but also the character of strike action that seemed extraordinary. It was a revolt dominated by unskilled and semiskilled workers, encompassing members of established and recognized trade unions as well as workers hitherto unorganized and/or unrecognized who became engaged in a fight to build collective organization and secure union recognition against the hostility of many employers.
Action largely took place independently and unofficially of national trade union leaderships. Workers rejected those leaderships for their unresponsiveness, their attempts to channel grievances through established channels of collective bargaining and conciliation machinery, and their advocacy of compromise and moderation, favoring militant organization and strike action from below instead.
An important factor in the development of this assertion of independent working-class power was the role assumed by young workers (both men and women). They were largely free from the defensive mentality associated with earlier forms of official trade unionism conditioned since the defeat of New Unionism and eagerly sought new forms of militant organization that would allow a direct struggle against the employers and the state.
“Direct action” became the gospel of the day — the notion that no one could help the workers unless they helped themselves, by taking into their own hands the task of organizing against employers. Belligerent working-class self-confidence, and the vigorous and emancipatory nature of much strike activity with its underlying demand for dignity, self-respect, and control over working lives, was a defining feature. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union strike leader, Jim Larkin, captured the spirit of revolt when he observed: “Labour has lost its old humility and its respectful finger touching its cap.”
The realization that militant strike action could win major concessions from employers had a “demonstration effect” that encouraged strikes as a key weapon across many industries. This led, despite a dramatic reversal of fortune in some individual battles, to a spectacular growth in the total power of organized labor.
Previously unorganized workers flocked into unions, with the general unions catering for less skilled workers growing much faster than the movement as a whole. In the process, trade union organization in Britain was completely transformed, surpassing (in absolute if not relative terms) the New Unionism strike wave achievements of 1888–89. There was a 62 percent increase in union membership, from 2.5 million in 1910 to 4.1 million by 1914, and an accompanying increase in union density from 14.6 percent to 23 percent.
The realization that militant strike action could win major concessions from employers had a ‘demonstration effect’ that encouraged strikes across many industries.
An important novel characteristic was the willingness of significant sections of workers to take sympathetic action for others in dispute, both within and between different industries. In doing so, they often took the opportunity to press demands on their own employers, with strikers from separate but simultaneous disputes pledging not to go back to work until the demands of all had been satisfactorily settled.
Such widespread solidarity broadened day-to-day struggles against individual employers into a struggle against employers in general. It was accompanied by the widespread appeal of industrial unionism as the means to overcome the inherent fragmentation and sectionalism of existing trade unionism. This led to breakthroughs and innovations in union organization straddling a multiplicity of occupational and industrial boundaries.
Thus in 1910, there was the establishment of the National Transport Workers’ Federation that brought together numerous unions organizing in ports across the country, with the amalgamation of three existing organizations into the National Union of Railwaymen in 1913. By 1913–14, there was a formal attempt to link the action of 1.5 million miners, transport workers, and railway workers into a “Triple Alliance” of their unions that raised the potential for coordinated strike action between its three powerful affiliates.
Ministers from the Liberal government became increasingly alarmed at the danger posed by nationwide strikes, which were perceived as being severely disruptive to the functioning of the economy as well as a threat to social order. The waterside and transport strikes held up perishable goods and considerably disrupted food supplies, the miners’ strike threw up to a million workers from other industries out of work, and the railway strike paralyzed the movement of goods and passengers.
Ministers from the Liberal government became increasingly alarmed at the danger posed by nationwide strikes.
The cabinet responded with a series of initiatives. These initiatives included the spread of conciliation and arbitration boards and the utilization of George Askwith, the Board of Trade’s indefatigable industrial troubleshooter, who rushed from one dispute to another to assist parties in negotiating settlements. There were also various social and industrial legislative reforms, including the 1911 National Insurance Act and 1912 Miners’ Minimum Wage Act. But the government’s response also involved encouraging hard-line police action against mass picketing and supporting or authorizing the deployment of large detachments of troops in numerous industrial disputes.
In July 1911, Home Secretary Winston Churchill acknowledged in a cabinet memorandum that the government needed to use the police and military. The leaders of the unions were unable to control their members, he explained, and there was widespread adoption of the sympathetic strike:
There is grave unrest in the country. Port after port is called out. The police and military are asked for at place after place. Fresh outbreaks continuously occur and will go on. The railways are not sound. Transport workers everywhere are getting to know their strength . . . and those conversant of labour matters in practice anticipate grave upheaval . . . and now specially a new force has arisen in trade unionism, whereby the power of the old leaders has proved quite ineffective, and the sympathetic strike on a wide scale is prominent. Shipping, coal, railways, dockers, etc. etc. are all uniting and breaking out at once. The “general strike” policy is a factor which must be dealt with.
Throughout 1910–14, employers attempted to break strikes by encouraging “blackleg” labor. Combined with the unequivocally partisan intervention of police and troops, this led to repeated outbursts of dramatic violent confrontation (including sometimes even street rioting) in numerous places across the country (including Liverpool, Tonypandy, and Llanelli). These confrontations resulted in numerous casualties and on occasion fatalities.
The aggressive challenge to the legitimacy of public order and state power mounted by strikers produced deep levels of social polarization. A divide opened up between local communities in which strikebound workplaces were located, on the one hand, and the employers and the representatives of civil, police, military, and government authorities, on the other.
This spurred a culture of community solidarity and self-defense that involved the relatives and friends of those directly involved in strikes, as well as local trade unionists and other supporters, in picketing and direct action. This collective willingness to flout, challenge, and defy the established authorities encouraged a serious questioning of traditional patterns of respect for “law and order” and constitutional behavior and allegiance.
The aggressive challenge to the legitimacy of public order and state power mounted by strikers produced deep levels of social polarization.
There was also widespread questioning of the political system. In pursuing their immediate goals of increased wages, better working conditions, and trade union organization, workers were confronted not only with intransigent employers and hesitant union leaders, but also hostile government officials and magistrates, and persistent attacks by police and troops.
Many workers became disaffected with parliamentary politics because of the functioning of the newly formed Labour Party in the House of Commons, which acted as a mere adjunct of the Liberal Party government and frowned on militant industrial struggle. Consequently, the established “rules of the game” — piecemeal social reform by means of institutionalized collective bargaining, on the one hand, and parliamentary action, on the other — were widely questioned and put under considerable strain, reinforcing the appeal of combative industrial struggle as the weapon to advance labor-movement interests.
Even the government’s own leading industrial relations adviser viewed the unrest as motivated by a “general spirit of revolt, not only against the employers of all kinds, but also against leaders and majorities, and Parliamentary or any kind of constitutional and orderly action.” It encouraged a process of radicalization, a counter-politics which stood for the celebration of class solidarity, aggressive strike action, and mass picketing. This had the effect of shifting the balance of class forces in society toward the working class.
This workers’ rebellion took place within the broader context of a battle for Irish independence from British imperialism and the threat of civil war in Ireland arising from a Home Rule Bill. There was also an escalating, militant campaign of civil disobedience mounted by the suffragettes under the slogan “Deeds not Words” to force the Liberal government to give women the vote. This fed the wider challenge to the political system in Edwardian Britain.
Within this process of political radicalization, a number of combative leaders and activists, including militant trade unionists, socialists, Marxists, and syndicalists, played a significant role.
Strike action derived from factors directly related to economic grievances, work intensification, erosion of job control, and either lack of union recognition or the constraints of existing union organization, as well as certain contingent circumstances that gave workers the self-confidence to take collective action. Yet the readiness of workers to engage in militant strike action also often critically depended upon the encouragement they received from the minority of uncompromising propagandists and agitators within their own ranks, with the radical left’s anti-capitalist objectives proving to be of appeal to a large minority of workers.
However, the forward momentum of this working-class revolt, let alone any revolutionary outcome, was to be seriously undermined by numerous underlying limitations and weaknesses. There were some serious strike setbacks and even disastrous defeats, which combined with the way in which national trade union officials were often ultimately able to reassert their authority and control over embryonic rank-and-file networks and organizations with detrimental consequences.
The Liberal government was able to accommodate the simultaneous three “rebellions” — labor strikes, the threat of civil war in Ireland, and the campaign for women’s suffrage — because they were essentially discrete struggles only bound together tangentially in a diffuse and uncoordinated fashion. The political, organizational, strategic, and tactical shortcomings of the radical left, notably the separation made between industrial and political struggles, also hampered developments. And of course, the strike wave was to suddenly shudder to a halt, stopped in its tracks by the onset of World War I in August 1914.