 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Geeta Sahigal and we are going to discuss the attitude shall we say the liberal state, the so-called liberal state in the West, particularly UK and in the US and it has to what would be called the right wing or the rightist Islamic right and the Hindu right, what is called the Hindu right, what we call the Hindutva right that there is seems to be still a continuation of what would be the colonial policy that the colonial state was in bed with the Islamic right as well as the Hindutva right in India as you know and their basic enemy was the liberal secular left forces in the country. Is that a continuation the same policy when we see the protection of different kinds of right wing groups in the UK for instance and you had some cases regarding the charity commission and so on. Do you think that policy still continues? I think that policy continues with modifications because of course the secular left has had many victories over the years and we should never forget that. We have fought racism, we fought for the emancipation of women what's called that these days called gender equality, we fought for issues that are faced specifically by what we call black women so Asian women, Afro-Caribbean women to be recognized in Britain. So there are a level of victories that we have been able to fight and get those victories from the state but the state's own management policies and by the state I mean institutions various institutions but also political parties. Both of them have seen minorities just as sometimes in this country as vote banks of course the Labour has had much closer relationship between with the Afro-Caribbean and Asian minorities but both Labour and Conservative and some of the smaller parties see themselves as making alliances with the most conservative forces within these minorities and they have actively encouraged fundamentalists on all these sides on from various different backgrounds and certainly Hindu and Muslim fundamentalists by giving them their institutions charitable status by allowing them to open schools by allowing them a huge amount of institutional space which they needn't have allowed and there I think that two reasons well there are a number of reasons for this one is it's a security strategy so although people talk a lot about Islamophobia and there's certainly a lot of anti-Muslim feeling but many of us prefer to use the term anti- Muslim bigotry or anti-Muslim racism because we want to distinguish the attacks on people from the right to criticize religion because many of the people who get called Islamophobes are precisely the secular left from within those same backgrounds who are criticizing their own religions so we prefer to not use this term which is in common use because it elides these two issues but definitely recognize that there is severe anti-Muslim racism that the far right makes use of and indeed the institutions of the government and the state are institutionally involved with but so in combating that what people don't realize is that both the conservatives and labor at various times have made alliances with the Muslim right so the leadership of the fundamentalists is actually gaining at the same time as a vast majority of Muslims are losing from this attitude you know you talked about the Islamic right and the in that sense the UK state's security states alliance with these groups we saw that in Libya and the blowback of Manchester bombing isn't it that the in trying to protect these groups because they were anti-Ghadafi they actually helped jihadist forces in Libya and UK and not just Libya Algeria the French had been talking about that Algerian left activists have been talking about it for years that Algerians when they were not able to get refugee status because they were fleeing from violence by so-called non-state actors from militant groups so they had fled up to various countries abroad they were not able to get refugee status yet you see known jihadists including leaders of the FIS but also people involved with the illegal jahadi movements back in the 90s being protected in Britain and we now know from diaries of coming out of people who had spied for both of them and so on and eventually gathered evidence that put some of them in jail that MI6 was very reluctant to act against them they basically wanted to keep an eye on them but they had what the Islamists called a covenant of security they actually have a term for this they say we have a covenant with the British state that we will obey their laws here while we create mayhem abroad now those of us who are internationalists do not think this is acceptable we don't think it is more acceptable to go and kill people in Pakistan or Somalia or Nigeria or Syria or anywhere else if you keep your nose clean in Britain and run various charities and so on it's also interesting issue that the UK or the the United States and the French for that matters have you not have actually allied with the most reactionary sections say in West Asia and have mostly been against secular nationalist states whatever may be the shall we say the authoritarian or the brutal nature of the states but it's not that the Saudi Arabian state has been kind it's not authoritarian as we know but the alliance of UK and US has always even the as I said all the NATO powers have been much more with these countries so that would explain the covenant of security covenant that we talked about. Indeed and a lot of Saudi money that has built certain mosques and put people in power in them I did a film many years ago in the 90s which became one of the rallying films among a lot of other work done by Bangladeshi activists which led to the tribunals in Bangladesh now the tribunals are legally flawed but I think what we must not lose sight of is that they're the only legal tribunal that I know of international crimes that has really come from a mass people's movement so whatever their flaws in execution I think you know it's it's the the lobbying of the Islamists in they had very expensive lawyers in Britain and in America and America they had to register themselves as lobbyists so they were exposed in Britain there are no laws like that but they lobbied very hard with these fancy lobbyists who said this is a vanity project of Sheikh Hasina she wants to get rid of her opponents now of course it may have fitted her political aims and she certainly has emerged as a very authoritarian leader herself arresting people who are part of the pro- liberation forces and voices like Shahidullah Alam putting them in jail but the point is that the tribunal was holding to account people who had been involved with mass crimes in 1971 and who had fought consistently in mass mobilizations and forced her to make it part of her electoral platform that's the part that we haven't to lose sight of now I had actually investigated one of the men who was in in a death squad Chaudhry Moynuddin responsible for what's called the killing of the intellectuals he went round in a van with a whole bunch of other young men who are part of the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islami and formed the Al-Badr death squad and picked up people who were I mean people like us academics journalists doctors many of them not even politically engaged but doing things like promoting to go promoting Bengali literature and took them to torture centers and had them tortured and killed them just before the liberation in fact they knew they'd lost in fact the idea was to leave the Bangladesh emerging Bangladesh state without its intellectuals that is really the problem exactly now several of these people went abroad and got shelter in Britain we did this film in the 90s we presented the information to Scotland Yard there was no political will and there are laws in Britain where international crimes can be prosecuted in Britain even if they've been committed abroad laws of universal jurisdiction there was no political will in Britain to do this prosecution and Chaudhry Moynuddin in fact rose to a very senior position as looking after spiritual care in the NHS so an institution like the National Health Service which is a great public institution is is actually staffed by people that he is appointed so people involved with extreme right Islamic groups as the chaplains and the same thing is happening in the prisons so we're talking about the institutions of the British state itself being absolutely people are being embedded in them so on the one hand you have a rhetoric going on about de-radicalizing people which is a term of course I hate because as a leftist I think we should you know put it in its proper context of what it means to be a radical and not apply it to the far right but there is this security term of de-radicalization how can you de-radicalize when the state itself all these institutional areas are actually full of people who've been put there with the blessing of the authorities now this is also the same policy when it comes to the Hindu right in in the UK we have a lot of the RSS wings operating there pretending to be relatively liberal only fighting for Indian identity but really far right group Hindu identity I mean they don't make the mistake of I mean they will of course call themselves Indian in the context of the prime minister's visit or something but they're very clear and I saw this emerging and in fact wrote about it post Ayodhya and which was also post the the Rushdie affair in Britain so post H and 9 when the Fatwa against Rushdie happened and then you have Ayodhya in the early 90s and you have at that time a very clear view coming from the Hindutva group saying they didn't say it overtly but they're saying where the other of the Muslims you know we are integrated we conform and so on but we are not getting enough space as Hindus so they began to attack and the Muslim right has done it as well so it's come from every side the attack of a of a much more progressive anti-colonial anti-imperialist black identity and they said oh this is all nonsense this is not a I mean there's a lot of academic work done to deconstruct that because of course it's not an ethnic it's a political identity it's a clearly unashamed political identity saying that we have common origins we've had common a sense of dispossession sense of you know the the the colonel you know we the slogan was we are here because you were there you know anti-racist slogan anti-colonial anti-racist yeah so it was a clear political identity it was not an ethnic identity or a religious identity we were clear about that and it's not always possible to make policy based on that identity in terms of if you're looking at you know what provision there should be however a lot of extremely progressive things were done with that framework that has been whittled away where you have more and more communal groups forming but the communal groups are not just communal in the sense that they're old-fashioned orthodox people you know it's not just religious orthodoxy I mean or religious traditionalism somebody who's a believer it's not about that you can actually trace in Britain whereas the first generation of activists every variety of the communist party was active the from the Pakistanis a PPP there were Kashmiri workers associations there were Indian workers associations Pakistani workers association they had various affiliations with all the various branches of MML etc and congress and people's party I mean the whole every gamut of political views where but broadly progressive secular and with either nationalist or left credential so fighting against colonial British rule and now what is much much more visible you have of course there's a huge Diobandi presence which is a you know in in the institutional presence then there's the Muslim Brotherhood which has been allied with the left the SWP in the anti-war movement then there's the Jamaat-e-Islami they the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami were allied with each other right because they had brother organizations but one was in bed with Tony Blair and delivering within you know the government and the other was with the SWP so they had everything stitched up and those of us who were saying a box on all your houses we are also marching in the anti-war movement but we don't believe in either of these sides effect the you were talking about the Hindu right over there so the Hindu right has also played both many of these cards because and they played it in a sense even better because there's not a security threat connected to them in Britain right so they again are the other of the security threat they're the good immigrant and the the the ones who've come in and there has been propaganda produced particularly by the Tories I've not seen it on Labour although Labour has very strong links with them as well but the Tories for the mayor's election for their Tory candidates Zach Goldsmith and also for David Cameron's election have produced election material which I think they use this sort of Cambridge Analytica style of slicing up the electorate so in the same household if you get two different names they were they were trying to appeal to Hindus but not only as Hindus but as Tamils or or Sikhs you know that they said the Prime Minister's visit to the Golden Temple to somebody else they said Labour's taken away or jewelry they were trying to really sexualize and communalize the electorate and appeal to each one on that basis and Cameron had a video called Neela Hai Akash with a sort of boppy you know Bollywood type song which had a lot of images and it showed how they the Tories have adopted multiculturalism because Samantha Cameron was in Asari Cameron was in garlands and teacups and things and they're bowing between before various Godmen they're showing them in front of the Golden Temple there's not a single Muslim image in any of that so it's a clearly communal way I mean that you know they're taking over Labour's policies of saying look how nice we are how we go to all these different religious institutions so they did that they also have strong institutional links with the Hindutva groups in Britain so does Labour but they of course flow with power so they're you know very keen on having strong Conservative party links and the main thing that they've done has they have successfully derailed efforts to get caste classified as a form of discrimination which is prohibited in Britain so like racism is prohibited as a form of discrimination there's been a long battle to get caste accepted as a form of discrimination that is alive and well in Britain unfortunately and first they refuse to accept that there is such a form of discrimination that it happens then they said anyway we'll deal with it internally then I actually went and I heard a spokesman of one of the Hindu forum groups talking and he was talking at length and passionately about cultural genocide this is cultural genocide this is what they're doing and he was attacking the Christian Bishop and eventually I worked out that he's talking about this this proposed legislation on caste discrimination that he was calling it a form of genocide against Hindus if we don't keep caste alive it's cultural genocide exactly exactly so you can imagine that actually the discussions on caste are like generations ago in Britain and what the government has said is because of course they can't say we're pro-caste so I mean they can't say that so what they've said is we are we are going to allow if you want to bring cases on a case by case basis then this can come through case law but we're not going to legislate right now so the category as such is not going to be made yes which makes everybody I mean you know I know people who are trying to prepare cases and say they're saying it's not that we can't fight but it's it's just raised the bar it made the fight much harder it's going to be a legal aid has been cut so it's much harder to you know even launch a case Britain had a world standard legal aid much better than the American public defender system I mean Britain had a state that worked much better for the people the national health service the legal aid system it had accessible systems and they have been viciously cut and whittled down so it's it's made the bar higher and the fight harder its fight is not going to end but it's going to be much much harder and that is a deliberate act of the British the conservative government you said another very interesting issue you said the traditionalist were conservative traditionalist Hindu lobbies were conservative lobbies but this is different and I would like to come back to it that what is the difference is really its identity rather than about traditions so it's more the Hindu identity and therefore Hindutva identity Hindu and Hindu but this aggressively Hindutva form of Hinduism which is promoting Modi promoting him as our leader I would like to say Hindutva has always been Hindu identity politics in that sense you know Hindu as an identity not as a belief system as an identity but also about a new set of things you know so you see the differences Ramjanma Bhumi movement you see the difference is a traditionalist would be saying I believe in religion the Hindu identity is what Savarkar says I don't believe in Hinduism I as a religion for me it's about identity really that's what he was really talking about and he was an atheist and and they they're they taught that I mean their shakhas in Britain you know people attend courses they go on courses they trained in this and so for instance they trained I mean I was involved with an undercover film that looked into a number of charities promoting hate difference so far right sort of pro-jahadi and an hss branch was investigated and they they were showing these young kids footage again and again a BBC film about Godseh and the killing of Gandhi and they're saying it's wrong to call him a Hindu fanatic so on the one hand they're claiming the suppression that we have been collectively damned because yeah stigmatized because he's been called a Hindu fanatic on the other hand when asked why he killed Gandhi they they they're really producing a sort of justification while trying to appear not so there's a clear training going on where they told that every time you hear the word Hindu fanatic you must challenge it you cannot and yet he's a proud member of the fold still so they're getting this double training and these are young children teenagers you know and it's it's frightened and of course they're you know told that you know we have to contain Muslims and young men are coming out with this I mean I get children still saying oh you know there are too many of them so very similar to the kind of the set of myths you know there's too much population growth there's they're you know they're spreading everywhere you know there's this sort of fear factor and they have to be contained of course not in concentration camps as one of these young men but you know we have to somehow deal with them so it's it's the same kinds of stories that are being told here are spreading in Britain where when I first went to Britain 30 odd years ago you know they're and in fact indeed in the women's movement and so on where you know I still work the the organizations were secular in fact it was a huge chance where where people from were particularly with common languages so the North Indian Pakistani women were always meeting they're always together they do things together they work together look you know that's also the other interesting part if you take the earlier generation of immigrants from India a lot of them really were working class and that's why they you're the Indian working class Indian working men's association and so on and therefore they tended to gravitate to the left but a lot of the middle class migration has taken place which is really doctors engineers this lot has been relatively relatively more right-wing in terms of a little different from America I think there's a lot of state employment of whoever you were whether you're middle class or not so people were in the public sector you know they were so even the middle classes I mean now of course there are lots of businessmen and entrepreneurs some people who often started with nothing and became very successful as independent entrepreneurs or shopkeepers or something but they moved out of shopkeeping in one generation but there's also a large area of public sector employees so doctors nurses teachers lecturers council employees this is the backbone of the left and written I mean they're the labour voters so they've been that but you do see a new class both of the Hindu right and the Muslim right so it's not just a ghettoized group these are people who are well established so for instance you see corporate lawyers who are sort of defending these Sharia councils or courts that are tolerated and that are issuing basically worthless pieces of paper but claiming they're a judicial piece of paper that's a divorce a so-called Muslim divorce so these are working all the time and you see people very much working in the city who are promoting this kind of stuff for the Muslim right and then the Hindu right hasn't concentrated so much on separate law although if this allows goes on expanding they will say me too and say we want it also you know yeah but exactly but the they are now embedded also in many I mean I I gave a lecture on Hindutva recently for the national secular society and I was challenged by some Hindutva activists one of whom was a doctor and who was defending the banning of Ramanujan's book and saying there's only one version of the of the Ramayana and so on I mean he was in a British audience that understood that he was talking about censorship even if they didn't understand the details of what the book was and so on they completely got that he is basically talking about censoring a text that was at the university and they weren't very sympathetic but you know he was talking about his hurt feelings and his sentiment and so forth yeah yeah the sentiments tend to get hurt very easily and this is a professional who's extremely protected in the system has risen in the system has done extremely well and it doesn't get hurt in when all kinds of other things happen including as you said caste discrimination discrimination against women and so on then he said these guys these these sentiments are very very robust they don't get hurt but if any of these things happen on which there's a challenge to specific construction of Hindu Hindu identity then of course the sentiments get hurt very easily Gita look forward to your writing and being with us in other locations when you are visiting Delhi and we hope that you know you're going to write more fort news click as well as for the cultural forum and such allied organizations look forward to seeing you it's been a great pleasure thank you this is all the time we have for news click do keep watching news click and do visit our website and our youtube channel