Religion & politics

The religiosity of Connolly and Larkin (1)

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly Introduction: Connolly, Larkin and The Irish Worker , by Sean Matgamna Both Jim Larkin and James Connolly were Catholics, children respectively of Liverpool and Edinburgh Irish immigrants. Connolly was a “mick-mac”, an Irish Scots Catholic. Both received the religion as part of what they were. Both passed themselves off in Ireland as Irish-born, Connolly from Monaghan. Connolly’s real age and origins were given in the official history of the Social Democratic Federation in 1935. With Desmond Greaves’s biography in 1961 they...

Gujarat 2002: the mass killings that launched Modi's rise

Hindu nationalist "rioters" in Gujarat, 2002 Twenty years ago, from the end of February 2002, the Indian state of Gujarat saw horrific, arguably genocidal, violence against Muslims, with its government implicated in the pogroms. Gujarat’s chief minister then was Narendra Modi, now the prime minister of India. The 2002 events were linked to a chain of sectarian conflicts in the state, involving Hindu-chauvinist attacks on Muslims, going back to the late 60s. These outbreaks were exploited by the organised Hindu right and far right to feed their rise. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party...

Uttar Pradesh election: UK left, pay attention!

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and his comrade, fundamentalist monk and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath Starting on 10 February, the giant Indian state of Uttar Pradesh - population over 230 million! - is voting in crucially important state elections, in a major test of how much last year's victorious farmers' struggle has pushed back India's far right. The left and labour movement in the UK should be paying much more attention. Many farmers’ leaders are vocal about their desire to drive Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government from power. In March 2021 much of...

After the farmers' victory, a hundred million vote in India

Protesters burn an effigy of Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, fundamentalist monk Yogi Adityanath, after the gang rape of a Dalit woman, October 2021. Effigies of Adityanath were also burnt during last year's farmers' struggle During the year-long farmers’ movement which humbled India’s far-right government in 2021, forcing repeal of its pro-corporate agricultural reforms, many farmers’ leaders were vocal about their desire to drive that government from power. In March 2021 much of the movement’s leadership went to West Bengal, target of a huge campaign by prime minister Narendra Modi’s...

The churches and the mobs in the battle for human freedom

This puncturing of the smug self-satisfaction of the Protestant Unionists in this article is valuable, not least in teaching socialists why we must fight religious bigotry in all its forms. The article is also an illustration of the limitations of the “but-what-about…” riposte in politics.

The MP banned for being an atheist

It could be a question in a pub quiz: which MP was consistently denied his seat in the House of Commons for six years, between 1880 and 1886, despite being elected by the voters of Northampton? The MP in question is Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) and the reason for his exclusion is simple — he was an atheist. His experience led him in 1866 to found the National Secular Society, which is still going strong today (I confess to membership). He was also prosecuted for publishing information about birth control, and advocated the abolition of the monarchy. However, he was staunchly anti-socialist...

It's time for Georgia to choose

Two weeks ago, far-right thugs attacked the LGBTI community’s “March for Dignity” in Tblisi, Georgia. Dozens of people, mostly journalists, were badly beaten. It was a tragedy that could easily have been foreseen — and prevented. And it has triggered a historic fight led by the journalists’ union with the full support of journalists’ unions around the world. The attacks were orchestrated by supporters of the ruling party in Georgia, whose leaders bear some responsibility for what happened. Prior to the march, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said it was “not reasonable” to organise such an...

Three books by Eric Vuillard

A review of: The Order of the Day (2019, Picador); Sorrow of the Earth (2019, Pushkin Press); The War of the Poor (2021, Picador) I had never heard of Éric Vuillard before, although he has a reputation both as a writer and documentary filmmaker in his native France. So far, these are the only books of his translated into English. All three are fascinating, beautifully written and deeply moving. The Order of the Day revolves around the meetings that took place between the European powers in the months preceding the outbreak of World War Two; Sorrow of the Earth considers the exploitation of...

India: farmers' movement grows

The far-right Hindu nationalist government of India is also a radical neo-liberal government. Not long ago buffeted by a wave of protests against its anti-Muslim changes to citizenship laws, it is now being rocked by mass demonstrations against its neo-liberal policies — by India’s farmers. There have been five national general strikes against the Modi regime’s privatisations and weakening of labour laws, including two in 2020, mobilising tens and maybe hundreds of millions of workers. Although they slowed the assault on workers’ rights, these mobilisations were over quickly. The 2020 strikes...

Wadsworth on Saklatvala

Sacha Ismail reviews Marc Wadsworth’s biography of Shapurji Saklatvala, Comrade Sak: A Political Biography (Peepal Tree Press, 2020) There are four biographies of 1920s revolutionary socialist MP Shapurji Saklatvala. Marc Wadsworth’s is the most recent, originally published in 1998 and republished in an updated version in September this year. It’s very good – mostly (when I started writing the recent series of articles on Saklatvala in Solidarity , I tried but failed to get hold of the original edition of Wadsworth’s book; the new version didn’t arrive until five out of six articles were...

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