#berlinforindia

BerlinforIndia stands with the participants and supporters of Pakistan’s Aurat March.

On March 8, since 2018, women from various backgrounds risk their personal safety to join public demonstrations organised in cities across the country. This year in particular, the organisers of the march have been targeted through incendiary statements and deliberate misinformation by the right-wing, including death threats from the Pakistani Taliban.

We are unequivocal in our support for the slogan “Mera jism, meri marzi” (my body, my choice), which calls for women and men to have autonomy over what happens to their bodies.  You can read more here.

Show some support for the event on Facebook.

Grupper Arbiterrinenmacht have called for an expression of solidarity from anti-fascist groups in Berlin at a protest demonstration on Wednesday, March 24 at Hermannplatz. We will also be present at the event.

We invite you to commemorate the legacy of a forgotten workers’ and soldiers’ revolution at the Berlin Graveyard of Socialists.

More details here: https://m.facebook.com/events/466498044356476

We read out this statement at the protest demonstration called by CoLiberation at Hermannplatz on February 13, 2021

We stand in firm solidarity with the women and people in Poland in their fight for self-determination, bodily-autonomy, and in co-creating a future where abortion is legal; and sexual and reproductive health care is available and accessible.

The systemic power wielded by patriarchal, neoliberal, fascist, racist and casteist states in Poland and India have unleashed deliberate havoc on women’s bodies, health and their right to a life free from violence.

As we speak, India is alight with the fire of resistance as farmers from across the country have been organising for over three months against the regressive farm laws in India. Striking along with their comrades are women farmers and labourers, as they occupy the borders to Delhi and demand their right to shape their own futures. Braving poor sanitation facilities while protesting in the cold and facing the wrath of the police, they continue to make their voice heard. The Indian government is clamping down on them through placing industrial scale physical barricades, raining down tear gas, and shutting off the internet.

Last month, Nodeep Kaur, a Dalit woman and trade union activist who was protesting at one of these border sites was arrested. Since then she’s been tortured and sexually assaulted while in police custody. Nodeep Kaur has faced (and continues to face) violence for resisting and being vocal in ways that have managed to shake the fragile foundations of the casteist and patriarchal Indian state. We will not rest till she is freed.

But our fight is longer. The Polish anti-abortion law, in denying women their autonomy, is similar to the systems of control exercised by Indian brahminical patriarchy. In seeking to control women’s bodies, they seek to control not only their autonomy and choice, but it is part of a broader quest for holding on to caste power by forcing caste endogamy so that wealth and capital remain in the hands of upper castes. By controlling these most intimate aspects of women’s lives, including love and where they seek to find community –  they also seek to dismantle equality.

These systems of control are aided and abetted by global capital. One only needs to remember, how last month, when Jayasre Kathiravel, a 20-year-old Dalit worker at an H&M apparel factory in Tamil Nadu, a state in Southern India, was found dead after reportedly being raped and murdered by her supervisor at the factory, after facing months of harassment at his hands.

It is more urgent than ever to resist common forces of oppression and create communities of care. We join you today in an endeavour to create such a community that can thrive.  We stand together with queer-feminist, socialist, LGBQTI, and progressive alliances to do the work of solidarity, to strengthen one another, and amplify our demands.  Your struggle, organising, and mobilisation has energised and inspired us. We will continue to fight till Polish, and all women can determine their own self-hood and live with dignity.

We read out this statement at the protest demonstration on January 30 called by Constellation of Liberation after Poland’s constitutional tribunal published the justification of the ruling which declared abortion arising from severe, incurable, and fatal foetal defects to be unconstitutional.

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We stand with our Polish sisters and comrades in their fight – solidarity is our weapon! #strajkkobiet

On 9 January 2021, we will be demonstrating in solidarity with the protesting peasants in India.

On 26 November 2020, an alliance of ten trade union organisations and over 250 peasant collectives called for a nationwide general strike in India, in which hundreds of thousands of workers, students, unemployed, peasants and farmers participated.

On 8 January 2020, the Common Platform of Central Unions (CTU) had organised a general strike against three new labour laws that, among other things, severely restrict the right to strike. Now, three new agricultural laws aimed at deregulating the agricultural sector are driving farmers onto the streets, with another general strike on 8 December.

At the centre of the recent protests are three new agricultural laws aimed at “reforming” the agricultural sector. Doubling farm incomes was one of the biggest promises of the Narendra Modi government after it took office in 2014, but incomes have rather declined. The new laws – which also break with the principle that laws on agriculture actually lie with state governments – are being sold by the central government as a way to increase incomes. They envisage a greater role for the market and the private sector in agricultural value addition by deregulating contract farming, lifting restrictions on food transport and storage, and allowing trade in agricultural products outside the mandis (the regulated markets for agricultural produce). In almost all states, farmers receive licences and pay commissions to sell their produce on registered mandis.

However, 85 per cent of Indian farmers own less than two hectares of land. Most of them do not have access to mandis. They lack storage capacity and other infrastructure, and are already forced to sell their produce immediately at the prices offered. The vast majority of farmers from India’s marginalised communities fall into this category.
(For more info, see here.

We therefore want to express our solidarity with the affected farmers together with comrades from different social movements worldwide.
We thank the following collectives for their support:
– El Bloque Latinoamericano
– La Via Campesina
– Dziewuchy
– Die Linke Internationals
– Farmers Protest DE
– The Independent Farmers’ Voice

Against neoliberalism and fascism everywhere!

Feel free to bring comrades, friends and companions. See you next Saturday at 12pm at the Rathaus Neukölln.

Please join us on Thursday (Dec 8) at Rathaus Neukolln to resist attempts made for the corporate takeover of Indian agriculture and to demonstrate in solidarity with striking Indian farmers.

This is our statement in support.

Earlier this year, even as the pandemic raged outside, India’s Parliament passed three legal codes on labour that have mainstreamed hire-and-fire-provisions and criminalised most trade union activity. The regulation of agriculture markets was also amended, threatening to leave small and marginal farmers at the mercy of agricultural corporations and large-scale institutional buyers.

These are part of the BJP-led Indian government’s direct attacks on the working class. Since 2014, India has been ruled by this party, which believes that India belongs to the Hindus and that minorities, including Muslims, indigenous people, women, and the so-called “lower castes” among the Hindus, are a secondary class of citizens.

Narendra Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 and his re-election in 2019 have emboldened “cow protection” vigilantes, lynchings of Muslim men, online armies of hate-spewing trolls, and fake news farms. With a massive majority in India’s parliament, Modi has also taken a more direct control over institutions like the judiciary, the election commissions, the central bank, universities, and the information commissions. The party and the government have tried to make journalists, editors, and public intellectuals toe their line. Except for a few small publications now, the Indian media offers largely uncritical coverage of the government. The annexation of Kashmir in 2019 and the pogroms against Muslims in Delhi in 2020 are two examples from a long list of human rights violations and anti-democratic actions. The “largest democracy in the world” is on the way to becoming a religiously founded dictatorship.

To stand firm against the historic attack on the democratic, social, and trade union rights of workers, farmers and workers’ organisations of India have called for a general strike in India on November 26. The struggle to defend democratic and social rights must cross borders.

We invite you to stand by our Indian brothers and sisters and express your solidarity with the general strike at a protest demonstration at 1800 on Thursday, November 26 at the Weltzeituhr in Alexanderplatz.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, India’s Parliament passed three legal codes on labour. Statements from ministers of the BJP-led Union government make it clear that these new codes, which replaced 44 federal laws dealing with the subject, were aimed at improving India’s ranking in the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” index.

Workers and trade unions have called these reforms “anti-working class”, with some suggesting that even under British rule, labour laws were more favourable for Indian workers. Ten central trade unions of India have called a nationwide general strike on November 26 to protest against these laws.

For instance, the Code on Wages has even rejected the moderate recommendations of the Supreme Court of India and India’s premier tripartite labour policy body. The Code on Industrial Relations increases the already high burden on representative unions and enables hire-and-fire practices. The Code on Social Security does not increase welfare benefits. Instead, the burden on businesses of complying with labour standards has been reduced.
By attempting to shackle trade unions and weaken labour standards, these new laws further the neo-liberal conception of the state’s role as a mere facilitator of private enterprise, further exacerbating the exploitation of the working classes.
Around the world, labour laws have been similarly under attack. We invite you for an internationalist panel and discussion on how to organise the fight back.

#BerlinforIndia and Gruppe ArbeiterInnenmacht present an important conversation to build a bridge between labour organisations in India and Germany.

Panelists:

AR Sindhu is a Secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions

Matthias Fritz is active with the Arbeitskreis Internationalismus Berlin of IG Metall

Gautam Mody is the General Secretary of the New Trade Union Initiative

Michael Fütterer works with the Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE)

Maitreyi Krishnan is a labour law expert who works with the All India Central Council of Trade Unions

Moderator:

Martin Suchanek, Gruppe ArbiterInnen Macht

<!–Please use the comments below to ask questions to the panel.–>

We attended the Second Bloody Week in Berlin in solidarity with the Polish women protesting the pseudo-constitutional judgment banning abortion in Poland. We read out the following statement:

Wir stehen in Solidarität mit den Frauen und Menschen in Polen, die für ihre Selbstbestimmung streiken – Selbstbestimmung über ihre Körper, ihre Gesundheit, und ihre Zukünfte. Der Kampf gegen das Abtreibungsgesetz ist, wie Marta Kempart vom “polnischen Frauenstreik” es neulich ausgedrückt hat, “ein Kampf gegen eine patriarchale Kultur, gegen den patriarchalen Staat, gegen den fundamentalistischen religiösen Staat, gegen den frauenfeindlichen Staat”.

Sowohl in Indien, als auch in Südasien steigen die Gräueltaten gegen Frauen und nicht-cis-Minderheiten, besonders unter den Faschist:innen und Hindunationalist:innen, die seit 2014 das Land regieren. Insbesondere sind Dalit, muslimische, Adivasi oder indigene, Kaschmiris, und andere unterdrückte Menschen davon betroffen, wie wir neulich in Hathras gesehen haben, und seit Jahrzenten in Kaschmir, Manipur und anderen militarisierten Regionen mitbekommen. Zusammen mit den strukturellen Ebenen, erfahren Frauen auch auf zwischenmenschliche Ebene in Familien, von Männern in Partnerschaften, Freundschaften, Bekanntenkreisen, und von fremden Gewalt. Die Rolle der Männer auf allen Ebenen ist wichtig zu betonen, und dementsprechend auch die notwendige Arbeit, die Männer für diesen Kampf leisten müssen.

In Polen hat die Bewegung anscheinend schon einen kleinen Erfolg, aber der Kampf gegen das Patriarchat ist lang, und endet sicherlich nicht mit diesem widerlichen und menschenfeindlichen Gesetz.

Die sogenannte “Recht und Gerechtigkeitspartei” in Polen kollaboriert aktiv mit der indischen Regierung der BJP oder “indischen Volkspartei”, und zeigt, dass sowohl religiöse Fundamentalist:innen, als auch rechte Parteien und Kapital- und patriarchale Interessengruppen sich international vernetzen. Die beiden Regierungen sind sich in ihrer Islamfeindlichkeit, Migrationspolitik, Ausbeutungspolitik, ihrem ethnischen und fundamentalistischen Nationalismus und ihrer patriarchalen Politik einig, und stärken sich gegenseitig.

Deshalb stehen wir zusammen in Solidarität mit euch, mit den unterschiedlichen queer-feministischen, sozialistischen, und LGBTQI Bündnissen, um uns in der Diaspora, sowie in den jeweiligen Regionen, in denen wir aktiv sind, besser zu vernetzen, uns gegenseitig zu stärken, in Bündnissen, auf den Straßen, und in dem gemeinsamen Kampf. Solidarität ist unsere Waffe!

Laal salaam