The whole world is watching the massive demonstrations in India against the Modi-Shah government.

We, students in New York City in the United States, join with students at universities across the country to voice our solidarity with the struggling people of India who are in the streets resisting the imposition of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

By overturning the present constitutional definition of citizenship with the introduction of religious criteria, the latest anti-Muslim measure of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is another step advancing the historical plan of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to transform the character of Indian society and the state in a communal fascist direction. The future they want is one where the workers and the people are divided in public life into rival religious-national groups, branded by mutual suspicions and prepared at any moment to slaughter their neighbors. The fascists have pitted the working class against itself, rendering the people fragmented and weak, which only serves the interests of the big bosses. Or the smaller bosses, as in the case of the national-chauvinist, anti-immigrant turmoil in Assam and Tripura.

In the face of these maneuvers, and others like it by retrograde nationalists everywhere — including here in the US — the people have the solution. It is embodied in a slogan of the Great French Revolution: “Peace to the cottages, war on the palaces.” This means: peace to the destitute of all lands, peace to the hungry of all lands, and peace to the worker who labors beside you, though he might speak or dress or pray differently, or not pray at all. This also means: prepare to fight the corrupt rich who loudly yell about patriotism, leading the perpetual hunt for the so-called “anti-national” enemy, all the while robbing the people of their wealth.