The shaky ceasefire secured between India and Pakistan, and brokered by the U.S. government, on Saturday, May 10, seems to hold as gunfire has stopped and commercial flights over the region have resumed. Short or long this respite might be, however, the intense struggle between India and Pakistan, initiated by the murder of 26 people and the injury of others in India-controlled Kashmir on April 22, is a direct result of the centuries of British colonial exploitation in Southeast Asia.
The historical discourse around this iteration of the conflict largely begins with the violent partition of 1947, where the British colonial government divided India into two separate states: Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
The British government, however, gave the Kashmir region the ability to decide whether it would be its separate entity or join the newly independent India, kick-starting the decades-long conflict, war and carnage that was temporarily stayed by the UN-sponsored compromise in 1949 that split Kashmir itself in two.
This process ushered in decades of social and political unrest as it oversaw the displacement of millions, the brutal murder of thousands and sporadic clashes between India and Pakistan over Kashmir throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
It is no surprise that 63 years after the Berlin Conference of 1884–where Africa was scribbled all over like a piece of drawing and divided among European countries like a large piece of cake–that Britain, the greatest perpetrator of them all, failed to change its way.
British colonialism in India
Though 1947 was a crucial moment in the relationship between India and Pakistan, British colonial presence in the region stretches as far back as the 1600s, with the arrival of the British East India Company in 1608.
This delegation was sanctioned by the first queen Elizabeth to establish the expropriation of spices, textiles and Indian labor in the process economic historians term mercantilism: a fancy word where one country builds its economic power and capacity at the expense of another. In other words, colonialism or the colonial mode of production.
In “Vanguard: The Advanced Detachment of the African Revolution,” Chairman Omali Yeshitela aptly explains that “the system of oppression under which…we live and struggle, is a parasitic capitalist system that owes its existence to and is nourished by slavery and colonialism.”
The colonial mode of production is what pays workers pennies, while the CEO makes millions; it is what makes housing, medicine and food unaffordable, while keeping wages stagnant; it is what locks Indian, Pakistani and African people into a relationship where their goods and labor are valued exponentially less, despite their goods and labor fueling the engine that keeps the world running.
It is under this system that, in 1858, official direct rule was established as “The British Raj” or “British India.” India was among the many territories annexed by Britain’s slithering grasp that helped make a reality that detestable phrase, “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”
The 1700s and 1800s oversaw the plunder of the long-standing tradition of Indian commerce and production of fine textiles and goods like ivory, carpets, muslin and more. While the Industrial Revolution may have enabled the improvement of the standard of living for colonizing countries, in places like India and Africa, it had the complete inverse effect.
Colonialism here, colonialism there
The ability to mass-produce cotton meant that Indian industry was destroyed and relegated to exporting, at Britain’s needs and behest, goods valued less by the colonizer like tea, indigo, coffee and more. That Europe could fuel its burgeoning automobile industry in the late 1880s is the direct result of the murder and maiming of millions of Africans in the extraction of rubber from Congo.
“It was Europe and imperialism that required Africa to be divided so that the resources of Africa, both human and material, could come and pave the streets in London, ” declared Chairman Omali Yeshitela in his seminal 2019 Oxford Union presentation.
He continued, “It is necessary to keep Africa divided by European imperialism and by all the imperialism in order to continue to suck the resources from Africa.”
Just like in Africa, the history of colonialism and hence the ongoing nature of the colonial mode of production, have expressly informed the day-to-day reality of India and Pakistan.
But rather than turning the barrels of their guns and their nuclear warheads on the colonizer, India and Pakistan fight each other instead.
Infighting among the colonized, product of colonialism
Colonized people perpetrating violence against each other is the result of colonialism because the truth of our material reality–one that has as its base the ongoing exploitation of African people and colonized people’s labor and resources–is habitually and systematically obscured by the superstructure of bourgeois academia and media; infrastructures that reflect and promote the value of the ruling class, the ultra-rich, the one percenters–simply, colonizers.
It is in the interests of the colonizers that colonized states do not band together against Western civilization.
This is why the anti-colonial formation of the Alliance of the Sahel States in Africa, symbolized and spearheaded by Colonel Assimi Goïta of Mali and Captain Ibarhim Traoré of Burkina Faso, has induced a level of anxiety in the West on par with that of the Cold War era, Red Scare politics. For those who have paid attention to the FBI raids on the Uhuru Movement in July 2022, and the raids and deportations of students and many other activists in recent months, however, this anxiety has been abundantly clear.
The economic and the political are one
The African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), however, shares no such anxiety because the task of the colonized is clear. The APSP understands that the economic and the political are one, and that our resistance will be scaffolded and bolstered by our material power, our control over natural and manmade resources at every step of production.
Sustained economic exploitation makes the development of a cohesive state impossible. When a society’s ability to produce and reproduce life for itself is compromised, the ability to create a true polity, representative of its people’s will, is in turn greatly impaired if not obliterated. This is what we are seeing in India, Pakistan, Africa and the whole of the colonized world.
African and colonized people need control over their own resources to build workers’ states free from colonial capitalist exploitation–a process that necessitates revolution. Thus, the APSP works to build dual and economic power wherever the African Nation is located in preparation for this exact eventuality.
Liberation in our lifetime will become a reality when economic power is in the hands of the colonized masses.
To that end, it is the duty of all colonized people, whether African, Indian, Pakistani, Palestinian, Indigenous and more, to actively organize against this world system, of which we all have a stake in radically reordering.
Join the Uhuru Movement!
Join the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement!
This time, til it’s won!
Uhuru!
