India, Usa, Cina, rel. int.li Wsws 06-03-01
Editoriale WSWS
Gli obiettivi dell’alleanza strategica USA-India proposta da
Bush:
- appoggio per contenere la Cina. Gli analisti americani
paragonano l’ascesa di India e Cina del XXI sec. a quello di USA e Germania nel
XIX, con corrispondente spostamento del futuro teatro di conflitti. - ottenere l’appoggio indiano contro l’Iran, evitare acquisti
di energia da Iran e Siria. - le elite al potere, pur preoccupate per i tentativi
americani di controllare la strategia di sicurezza globale dell’India, desiderano
l’appoggio americano in modo che l’India possa presentarsi sulla scena politica
internazionale come paese dotato di arma nucleare, membro permanente del C.d.S.
ONU, e potenza predominante in Sud-Asia e nella regione dell’Oceano Indiano.
Sarebbero 100 000 i partecipanti (musulmani e comunisti) alle manifestazioni di protesta contro
gli USA, 25 000 comunisti a Calcutta, in occasione della visita di Bush.
- gli organizzatori sono gli stalinisti del Partito
Comunista dei marxisti d’India (CPI-M) e i loro alleati del Fronte della
sinistra e i sindacati, tutti però contrari ad una mobilitazione politicamente
indipendente della classe operaia. - Il Fronte della sinistra e i sindacati cercano di
utilizzare le proteste per far pressione sulla coalizione di governo UPA,
controllata dal partito del Congresso, affinché persegua una politica estera
indipendente; - essi cercano anche di legare la classe operaia e il suo
anti-imperialismo alla propria borghesia. - con questa richiesta fanno causa comune con partiti
borghesi come il Samajwadi party, e frazioni dell’establishment della
sicurezza nucleare e militare, che teme
che la proposta alleanza con gli USA non lasci alla borghesia indiana la libertà
di perseguire i propri interessi. - Il CPI-M è favorevole al multipolarismo del presidente
francese Chirac e propone esplicitamente che l’India forgi un’alleanza tripartita
con Cina e Russia. - Il Fronte della sinistra vuole mantenere al potere il governo
UPA, pur riconoscendo che esso ha intensificato le riforme neo-liberiste e l’avvicinamento
agli USA precedente del governo a guida del Bharatiya Janata Party, come unico
mezzo per evitare il ritorno al potere del BJP. - Fronte della Sinistra e CPI-M si riallacciano al
non-allineamento indiano durante la guerra fredda, che fu un’arma usata contro
la classe operaia per illuderla del carattere progressivo della borghesia indiana
e del suo Stato.
Lo scorso settembre si è avuto in India uno sciopero di massa
contro la politica economica dell’UPA.
Di recente il Fronte della sinistra assieme ai sindacati ha
fatto rientrare uno sciopero contro la privatizzazione degli aeroporti.
Il Fronte della sinistra è al governo nel West Bengala, dove
persegue lo stesso programma di riforme del UPA e del suo predecessore NDA.
Prima dell’arrivo a New Delhi Bush ha fatto tappa (a sorpresa
in Afghanistan, e poi si recherà in Pakistan)
In Afghanistan le truppe americane sono 19 000, il maggior
contingente NATO nel paese.
Wsws 06-03-01
Protests against Bush in India: For an international socialist strategy to
fight imperialism
By the
Editorial Board
Supporters of the World Socialist Web
Site will be distributing this statement at rallies in India
protesting against the visit of US President George W. Bush. The statement is
also available as a PDF file. We urge readers and supporters in India to
download the statement and distribute it as widely as possible.
Hundreds of thousands of workers,
peasants, students and other youth will participate in rallies and
demonstrations across India
in the coming days to protest against the visit of US
President George W. Bush and the drive of the Indian bourgeoisie to forge a
“global” partnership with US
imperialism.
The demonstrators rightly recognize Bush
to be the head of a rapacious regime that has waged two wars of conquest in the
past five years with the aim of securing US
domination over the oil resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, and is
now threatening to make Iran
or Syria
its next target.
To the dismay of India’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, the Bush administration
has bullied India into
participating in the international gang-up against Iran
and is seeking to prevent Indian energy purchases from Iran and Syria.
Bush and Indian Prime Minster
Manmohan Singh will no doubt spout platitudes about
the blossoming of a new friendship between the world’s two largest democracies.
In reality, what the US and India have in
common is a phenomenal growth in social inequality and economic insecurity—the
result of their ruling elites’ neo-liberal programs of privatization,
deregulation, and unfettered domination of the market over all facets of social
life. They also have both seen a growing state assault on democratic rights.
The Indo-American strategic
partnership that the Bush administration and the UPA regime are seeking to
forge is directed against the interests of working people in India, North America,
and around world.
The US has been
aggressively courting India,
with a view to making it a linchpin of its efforts to prevent China from becoming a threat to the US’s position as the premier power in Asia.
The Bush administration has made no
secret of the anti-Chinese thrust of its India policy.
US intelligence and
geo-political analysts, reports the Financial
Times, regularly compare
the rise of China and India at the beginning of the twenty-first century
to the late nineteenth century emergence of Germany
and the US
as the world’s most dynamic industrial powers—that is, to the geo-political
shifts that set the stage for the world wars of the last century.
While wary of the US’s effort to
harness India to its global security strategy, the Indian elite is anxious to
secure Washington’s support for India’s acceptance as a major player in world
politics: a nuclear-weapons state, permanent UN Security Council member, and
acknowledged dominant power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region.
A second key aim of the proposed Indo-US partnership is to press forward with the
transformation of India
into a cheap labor site of global information technology, business-processing,
scientific research and manufacturing production. Although there are differences
between US and Indian big business over the speed at which India should be
fully integrated into the world capitalist economy, they are agreed that
price supports and subsidies must be eliminated, business allotted the pivotal
role in the construction of public infrastructure, the agricultural sector—in
which 60 percent of Indians work—thrown open to agribusiness, and labor laws rewritten
so as to facilitate the contracting-out of work, layoffs and plant closures.
In other words, US and Indian capital
agree that the very policies that have produced dire social distress in rural India—as
exemplified by the phenomenon of farmer suicides—and jobless growth in the
cities must be intensified.
The mass protests that will shadow Bush
during his two days in India,
like the proposed Indo-US strategic partnership, objectively raise the vital
question: on what basis can a successful movement against imperialism and the
global offensive of capital be built?
At the outset, it must be bluntly said
that those who are in the
leadership of the anti-Bush protests—the Stalinists of the Communist Party of
India-Marxist (CPI-M), their partners in the Left Front, and the trade unions—are adamantly opposed to the
independent political mobilization of the working class in India and around the
world against the capitalism.
Rather the Left Front and the unions are using the protests against Bush
to press the UPA to position India
differently in the struggle among the great powers for economic and
geo-political advantage, and to provide themselves a political cover for their
support for the UPA regime.
The Left Front readily admits that
the 21-month-old UPA government has intensified
the neo-liberal reforms and pro-US tilt of its predecessor, the Bharatiya
Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance
government. Yet they insist that the UPA
coalition—which is dominated by the Congress, the traditional governing
party of the Indian bourgeoisie—must be sustained in office, claiming that
this is the only means of blocking the Hindu supremacist BJP from returning to
power.
There is no question that the BJP is a
vile enemy of working people. But it was not inevitable that the shipwreck of
the Indian bourgeoisie’s post-independence national economic development
project should have redounded to the electoral benefit of the Hindu right,
which for decades was a marginal force in Indian politics.
The emergence of the BJP and a host
of casteist parties as major political players during the 1980s and 1990s was
directly attributable to the CPI-M’s and the Communist Party of India’s (CPI)
decades-long restriction of the working class to a perspective of
parliamentarism and trade union struggles. While
the two Stalinist parties differed at times over which parties or parties constituted
the “progressive” wing of the Indian bourgeoisie that merited support
against the feudal reactionaries and pro-imperialists, they both insisted
that the working class must not counterpose itself as the leader of the
toiling masses to the Indian bourgeoisie and the capitalist social order.
In keeping with same outlook, the
CPI-M and CPI today insist that a government committed to a socially regressive
neo-liberal agenda and to forging a strategic partnership with US imperialism
must be sustained in office so as to bar the way to an even more
reactionary BJP regime.
Events have repeatedly demonstrated
the enormous social anger that prevails among India’s
toilers and the potential for a working-class led political offensive against
the bourgeoisie’s drive to make India a world power through ruthless exploitation
of its vast reserves of cheap labor, a massive military build-up, and alliances
with the US
or other imperialist powers.
The Indian ruling class—as exemplified by the New Indian Express editorial that
called for the suppression of all strikes and unions—was shaken by the mass
participation in last September’s one-day strike against the UPA’s economic polices.
But the Left Front has systematically
suppressed the class struggle, most recently joining with the unions to
shut down a militant strike against the privatization of the countries airports,
so as to ensure the survival of the UPA regime. And in West Bengal, where
it forms the state government, it is pursuing the very same economic “reform”
program the UPA and its NDA predecessor.
By tying the working class to the
reactionary UPA, the Left Front is not only facilitating the implementation of
the bourgeoisie’s neo-liberal agenda, it is creating conditions whereby the BJP
and other discredited communalist and casteist parties can batten off the
popular opposition to the UPA socially regressive policies.
In the campaign against the UPA’s
embrace of the Bush administration, the Left Front and the trade unions are
likewise seeking to tie the working class and popular anti-imperialist
sentiment to the bourgeoisie. With their demand that India’s government pursue an “independent foreign
policy,” they are making common cause with former Prime Minster V.P. Singh,
regionalist-casteist bourgeois formations like the Samajwadi party, and
sections of the nuclear and military-security establishment who fear that the
proposed alliance with the US will deny the Indian bourgeoisie the freedom of
action it needs to pursue its own predatory ambitions.
The CPI-M champions French President Jacques Chirac’s notion of a
multi-polar world and explicitly couterposes to the proposed Indo-US
alliance, the call for India
to forge a tripartite alliance with China
and Russia.
Similarly the CPI-M and Left Front
point to the non-aligned posture of the India during the Cold War as a
progressive legacy on which to build. (The CPI-M’s party program says
non-alignment “by and large served the country’s interests well.”)
In reality, “non-alignment” was an
instrument of the Indian bourgeoisie. It leaned on the Soviet Union, while
seeking to develop an industrial economy relatively free from the control of
the transnationals, through important substitution
and national economic regulation. Non-alignment was also a weapon against
the working class. It was used to systematically foster illusions in the progressive
character of the Indian bourgeoisie and its state through largely rhetorical
support for various anti-imperialist struggles. J. Nehru and Indira
Gandhi also calculated that good relations with Moscow would be a further guarantee of the
good behavior of the Communist Party.
So flagrant was the CPI’s support for
the Congress Party, a section of the leadership broke away to form CPI-M. But
they did so on an entirely nationalist basis and throughout its history the
CPI-M has otherwise upheld all the basic tenets of the CPI: support for the
privileged bureaucracy that under Stalin’s leadership usurped power from the
working class in the USSR and the Stalinist doctrine of “socialism in one
country”; the claim that important sections of the Indian bourgeoisie have and
can continue to play a progressive role in the struggle against imperialism;
the assertion that the Indian state, which was born in 1947 as the outcome of
the abortion of the anti-imperialist struggle by the Congress leadership and
the communal partition of the subcontinent, must be defended as a conquest of
the masses and made the focal point for opposing imperialism today.
The World Socialist Web Site and the
Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution founded by Leon
Trotsky, champion an entirely different course.
The true allies of workers in India
in opposing both imperialism and the socially regressive impact of capitalist
globalization are workers in North America and
around the world.
Workers in India
must mobilize themselves as an independent political force and rally the
toiling masses in support of an anti-capitalist program.
Caste oppression, landlordism and other legacies of India’s imperialist subjugation and
belated capitalist development will only be liquidated as a by-product of the
international socialist revolution.
While US imperialism is at present the
most assertive and aggressive imperialist power, a genuine struggle against
imperialism requires a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole and
the outmoded nation-state system in which it is historically rooted.
All those who support this program
should strive to make the WSWS the political and organizational spearhead of a
revival of the world workers movement on an international socialist
perspective.
Usa, Pakistan,
India
Faz 06-03-01
Erster
Besuch – Bush landet überraschend in Afghanistan
01. März 2006 Der amerikanische Präsident George W. Bush
ist am Mittwoch auf dem Weg nach Indien überraschend in Afghanistan gelandet. Der
Zwischenstopp war aus Sicherheitsgründen nicht angekündigt worden. Er ist der
erste Besuch Bushs in dem Land.
Die
Präsidentenmaschine war auf dem Luftwaffenstützpunkt Bagram nördlich von Kabul gelandet. Dann machte sich Bush auf den
Weg zum Präsidentenplast, wo er mit dem
afghanischen Präsidenten Hamid Karzai zusammentraf.
Bush: Werden
Bin Ladin vor Gericht bringen
Grüße an die
Truppe
Mehr als vier
Jahre nach Beginn dem Sturz der radikal-islamischen Taliban in Afghanistan ist
es der erste Besuch des amerikanischen Präsidenten in der Krisenregion. Bush
zeigte sich zuversichtlich, daß Al-Qaida-Chef Usama bin Ladin noch gefaßt wird.
Über ihn und und Taliban-Führer Mullah Omar sagte Bush in Kabul: „Es ist nicht
die Frage, ob, sondern wann sie vor Gericht gebracht werden.” Im afghanisch-pakistanischen Grenzgebiet
suchten amerikanische, afghanische und pakistanische Truppen nach den
untergetauchten Terroristen und deren Unterstützern.
Bush sagte, er
sei beeindruckt von den Fortschritten Afghanistans. Der afghanische Präsident Hamid Karzai bedankte sich bei den
Vereinigten Staaten und nannte Bush den Mann, „der geholfen hat, uns zu
befreien”. Eine von Amerika geführte Koalition hatte die
radikal-islamischen Taliban, die Bin Ladin beherbergten, Ende 2001 gestürzt. Die
Vereinigten Staaten stellen in Afghanistan mit rund 19.000 Soldaten das mit
Abstand größte Truppenkontingent.
Tote bei
Anti-Terror-Offensive in Pakistan
Karzai über
Bush: Er hat geholfen, uns zu befreien
Bush wird
am Mittwoch abend in der indischen Hauptstadt Neu Delhi erwartet. Am Samstag besucht Bush auch
Pakistan. Dort sind am Mittwoch bei einer Anti-Terror-Offensive vor dem
Besuch des Präsidenten mindestens 25 mutmaßliche Terroristen getötet worden. Die
Operation habe am frühen Morgen in Nord-Wasiristan an der Grenze zu Afghanistan
begonnen, berichtete der private Fernsehsender „Geo TV” unter Berufung auf
die Regionalverwaltung. 25 bis 30 mutmaßliche Terroristen seien getötet worden.
Der Sender
berichtete weiter, Ziel der Anti-Terror-Operation im halbautonomen
Stammesgebiet sei ein Ausbildungslager mutmaßlicher Terroristen gewesen, das
zerstört worden sei. Auch ein Waffenlager sei ausgehoben worden. Mehrere hundert
Soldaten seien aus der Luft von Kampfhubschraubern unterstützt worden.
100.000 demonstrieren in Indien
Demo in Neu
Delhi: Nicht jeder heißt Bush willkommen
Armeesprecher
Shaukat Sultan bestätigte eine Anti-Terror-Operation. Er sagte, Soldaten hätten
die betroffene Gegend umstellt, nannte aber keine Einzelheiten. Pakistan ist
ein sehr enger Verbündeter der Vereinigten Staaten im internationalen Kampf
gegen den Terrorismus.
Unterdessen demonstrierten in Indien mehr als 100.000
Muslime und Kommunisten gegen den Besuch von Präsident George W. Bush, den sie für den Tod unschuldiger
Menschen verantwortlich machen. In Kalkutta gingen etwa 25.000 Anhänger der Kommunisten auf die Straße.
„Die indische Regierung beugt sich schändlicherweise dem imperialistischen
Druck der Vereinigten Staaten”, hieß es in einer Mitteilung der Organisatoren.