 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch, special coverage of the Indian elections. The elections, which began on April 11th, will last till May 19th and have been termed one of the most important in independent India's history. Across the country, popular movements have joined forces to ensure that the far-right Narendra Modi government does not come back to power. To know more about this resistance, we have with us today, Kavita Krishnan. For it be remembered, of the Communist Party of India, Marxist-Leninist Liberation. Thank you, Kavita for joining us. Could you first talk about a bit of the resistance that you encountered on the ground? You have been campaigning across the country. So what is the sense you got of the resistance against the Modi government? I think the resistance is at many levels and it has expressed itself not only in the elections but in movements before that. And one of the key issues is unemployment because thanks to the Modi government's policies, you have unemployment at a 45-year high in India. And so that is a really big issue which is especially for young people, for the younger demographic. It's a very big question. The other very big question, especially because India has such large parts which are rural India, they're the issues of farmers who have been suffering, who have been suicidal because of the agrarian crisis in India. That is also a very big issue because they had certain very simple demands from the government which they felt that the government could have implemented very easily in order to protect them from at least a part of the crisis. And even that was not done and this government instead fired on farmers and killed protesting farmers and so on. So these are early big issues. Apart from that also even prices are a big issue, a lot of bread and butter issues of this kind are. And I would say that in addition to all of that, the issue of justice, the sense that this is a government which is playing with hateful sentiments, which is causing, which is patronizing lynch mobs which are attacking Muslim minorities, which are attacking Dalits, which are attacking the indigenous Adivasi tribal populations. Many, many such incidents are happening even during the elections. And so I think that these are also a concern for people because the sense that this is not something which used to happen like this in India on this scale and that you did not have governments which were patronizing and protecting such violence. This is something which is being felt very much by people. And this election has also seen an unprecedented amount of left solidarity and the combination of leftist parties against the Modi government. So could you talk about what critical component does the left bring to the opposition's campaign right now? I think that on the whole the left parties have tried to even strike a coordination with other non-left opposition parties as well in order to maximize the impact of opposition unity to make sure that the Modi government and the far-right BJP are not re-elected in this election. I think what the left brings to the table is basically a very, very hands-on movemental role. For instance, the role in the farmers' movements. The red flags visibility in the farmers' movements and the role of many left parties in these movements was enormous. And so you have farmers' movement leaders contesting elections from the left and they do so then with a lot of credibility. I think the other thing that the left brings to the table in, for instance, a place like Bihar where I've been campaigning is its history, for instance, of fighting for democracy. So in some of the seats which my party is contesting, these are places where although the oppressed castes had a right to cast a vote, they were killed for doing so. And so our party has the history of actually organizing people to assert that right to vote and actually avail of it and elect people on the left. And also to resist communal anti-Muslim violence, to resist anti-Dalit violence. All these are things which the left has done with a far greater credibility and consistency than many other parties. And this is something which is recognized. So in places where the left is contesting very strongly, the places where I've been campaigning, for instance, in Bihar, four seats in Bihar and two in Jharkhand, and those are my party. And there are also two other seats in Bihar where the left is contesting as well. And on those seats, this is what is making the left candidates a very attractive option for people because they feel that while they would like to vote to defeat the BJP, they are happier to be able to vote for a left candidate who would defeat the BJP because then they know that that is a candidate who is actually going to voice the concerns of the street and the concerns of the people in parliament as well. And you mentioned the anti-caste struggle. So could you also talk a bit about the trajectory of the anti-caste struggles over the past five years since the Modi government came to power in the current situation? I think some of the most remarkable movements of the anti-caste movements have been seen in the past five years. And so while the Modi regime has been responsible for unleashing some of the most terrible violence on the oppressed castes and exploitation of the oppressed castes, doing away with trying to erode caste-based reservations in jobs and education and so on. In spite of that, the movements have been very remarkable. So just to quickly name three or four really key movements, one was of course the movement after the suicide of a Dalit university student who had been targeted for his political activism by central government ministers, Modi's ministers. So this was Rohit Vemula. And so the movement which followed his death was something which was a national phenomenon and very important. After that there was an incident where one of these lynch mobs which claimed to be protectors of cows, they targeted Dalit young men in Gujarat and stripped and paraded them and beat them up and videotaped the whole atrocity and circulated the videos. This led to a very remarkable protest which combined cultural as well as material questions by saying that Dalits traditionally are supposed to be the ones who dispose of the carcasses of dead animals. And they said that if you're saying that you protect the cow and the cow is your mother, then you dispose of the cow's carcasses. We won't do it anymore. So this was a refusal to do demeaning labour and also then it turned into a demand for land and a demand for remunerative employment and all of that. And so leaders of that movement, one of the leaders of that movement, Jignesh Mewani, is one of the leading voices who is seen as a voice in the Dalit movement who is also sympathetic to and espouses the causes of the left as well. So I think that's another very remarkable. Then there's this very remarkable young activist called Chandrasekhar Ravan and his organization, the Bhima Army in UP. Their movements also have been against the BJP. Their leader Chandrasekhar has been targeted, arrested under a very draconian law, jailed for a very long time and all of that. So that is also an emerging interesting movement in leadership. And last but not least, I would say the Bhima Koregaon incident and the second April last year. Those two incidents, let me quickly recap what those were. The Bhima Koregaon event is an event which commemorates the victory of a Dalit army, a Dalit contingent, which was then fighting of course with the colonial British army but which defeated a Brahmin feudal leadership at that time, the Peshwa leadership. And so the Dalits have been commemorating it every year at that place, Bhima Koregaon, the Bhima Koregaon victory as being an assertion of their own history. And two years back when this happened, then there was a tremendous crackdown on this movement. And people were, the Dalits were attacked and all of that. And the attackers were not jailed. Instead, those who organized that particular event have been picked up and put in jail on all kinds of trumped up charges. And that includes a lot of Dalit activists as well, as well as trade union activists and left activists as well. And so that is also something that's very much felt. And finally of course the, when there was an attempt to, via a Supreme Court order to erode the prevention of atrocities against Dalits, you know, that law, at that time there was a huge movement. And many, there were mass arrests of people who participated in that movement. And no arrests of people who unleashed violence on the participants in that movement. So all these are really, and these are very much resonant in this election as well. And Narendra Modi is also, he's right now still in campaign mode, of course. And this campaign has again been unprecedented because there's been a massive attempt at polarizing, maybe unlike any other election in the past. So could you talk about some of the, some of the methods of his campaign and how they're having an impact on the ground? Yeah, I'd like to, you know, summarize some of the key things which the BJP leadership is doing in order to polarize the elections. Of course you have everyday statements by BJP leaders which say if Muslims don't vote for us, then we will not get, we will ensure that they don't get jobs, we will ensure that they are punished and so on and so forth. So these threats are of course happening all the time. But there's also a much more dangerous thing which the BJP is very key leadership including the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as his key left-ment to the BJP President Amit Shah, who's also a candidate in the election, are doing. So what Amit Shah has said, for instance, is that the BJP, if it gets another term in power, will bring into place something called a national register of citizens. And he's also made it very clear that he will also enact a Citizenship Amendment Bill, which means that basically the combination of the two will mean that those Hindus or non-Muslims who are refugees, you know, who are immigrants, who are immigrants and maybe illegal immigrants, will be given citizenship and they will be offered citizenship of Indian citizenship, whereas Muslims, all Muslims, you know, will be branded as potential illegal immigrants and be forced to prove their citizenship. So they will be rounded up, put in detention camps and disenfranchised, their voter rights taken away, they will be called doubtful voters and they will be asked to prove. Now there's a similar thing which is going on in Assam of course, but at least the NRC in Assam does not say that it is only targeting Muslims. It says that it is there to identify illegal immigrants. There are many problems with that process, but there's something significantly different about what Amit Shah is promising for the whole country as well. Now the other thing that Narendra Modi is doing is to build on the acquittal of certain far-right Hindu supremacist terror-accused persons in a recent court judgment. So he is building on that. Of course, the acquittal happened, the judge himself said that the acquittal has happened because the prosecution deliberately weakened the case. A special public prosecutor who was prosecuting the case in the past, she came on record to say that she had been pressurized to go soft and that evidence had been destroyed, very strong evidence against the accused had been destroyed. Now building on this acquittal, Narendra Modi has of course endorsed the candidature of one such accused person who is not yet acquitted. She is still charged with terror against Muslims, bomb blast in a mosque in order to kill Muslims in a mosque, Pragya Thakur. She is a candidate from a very important urban seat in Madhya Pradesh called Bhopal and Narendra Modi has endorsed her candidature. So in an election speech in Vardha as well as in an interview to a television channel where he defended Pragya Thakur's candidature, Narendra Modi said something very significant. He said that the cases that were filed against the Hindu far-right terrorists are an insult to 5000 years of Hindu civilization because no Hindu by definition can ever be a terrorist and you should not file a terror case against Hindus. Now what is the implication here? The implication is that there have been many cases in which Muslims have been acquitted in terror cases and courts have even said that the police should be punished for having framed Muslims. So he is not referencing those cases. And the other thing is that this is a Prime Minister who was silent on the Christ Church attack because the victims of terror there were Muslims. And in contrast to what the New Zealand Prime Minister said after the Christ Church attack, she said, she told Muslims, you are us. And she said the terrorist is not us. What Narendra Modi is doing is the exact opposite. He is saying that if you are a Hindu who has been charged with terrorism against Muslims, you are us. And we won't allow you to be prosecuted, charged. We won't even, we will not allow it. And the police that charges you with these crimes will be abused and will be accused of being anti-Hindu. Whereas the Muslims who are victims of hate crimes in India, whether they are lynch mob hate crimes, whether they are mass, you know, massacre crimes, which Narendra Modi himself has decided over as Chief Minister in Gujarat, or whether it is acts of terror like this one. He is telling Muslims, you are not us. You are put always potentially alien and you will be continuously asked to prove your citizenship by singing certain songs which the Hindu groups associate with nationalism. So there are many instances where Muslims have been picked up and forced to sing those songs, which they are reluctant to because these are songs basically in praise of a Hindu goddess, not in praise of India as such. And so Narendra Modi is using this in the election, this kind of polarization tactic to take attention away also from all the other issues on which he has no answers, right? On jobs, on unemployment, on the farm crisis, on corruption, where there are many very severe corruption charges, even on the issues of terrorism or the attacks like the one that happened in Pulwama in Kashmir recently. The government itself is, you know, its Kashmir policy is an obvious failure. And there are many, many questions about the government's own complicity in allowing or failure in allowing such attacks to happen. But he wants to evade all those questions and turn an election which should be a BJP versus opposition election into a Hindu versus Muslim election. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.