2024 became a year of change of the guard for several countries, even as the genocide of Palestinians by Israel continued unabated in Gaza. In our region, Sri Lanka ushered in a left-leaning regime for the first time in the island's history. A popular upheaval in Bangladesh compelled former PM Sheikh Hasina to flee the country and seek refuge in India, but the prospect of restoration of democracy remains rather uncertain in the face of the consolidation of reactionary Jamaat-aligned forces. Syria too witnessed the long-awaited fall of the highly unpopular and dictatorial Assad regime, but the country now finds itself at the receiving end of a US-backed Israeli offensive. France managed to stave off the immediate danger of a far-right victory, but the United States could not escape the trajectory of a Trump comeback.
For India, however, 2024 did not deliver the change that millions of Indians had long been awaiting. Even as the BJP lost its independent majority, it managed to retain power as a coalition. And subsequently, making a complete mockery of established standards of electoral transparency and institutional impartiality and accountability of the Election Commission, it went on to retain power in Haryana and sweep the polls in Maharashtra in a highly unequal and dubious electoral battle. The aftermath of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections has now made it abundantly clear that India cannot expect an easy electoral exit from the fascist stranglehold. Nothing short of a defiant democratic upsurge of 'we the people of India' whose forefathers adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949 can free the republic from the clutches of the fascists.
The experience of a decade of the Modi government has also shown us enough signs of the potential of such an upsurge. The economy remains the weakest point of the Modi government's track record and the popular mood, which had somewhat welcomed the advent of the liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation package in the early 1990s, has clearly started turning against the crony capitalist order of loot and plunder. Indiscriminate transfer of natural resources and economic infrastructure to a few chosen corporate houses has only meant massive unemployment, chronic deprivation, escalating cost of living and a veritable crisis of livelihood for millions of Indians. The stubborn defence of the Adani group by the government in the face of growing charges of corruption shows the regime's extreme dependence on corporate backing. The farmers' movement has already given us a glimpse of the potential of popular resistance against corporate takeover.
The quest for social equality and gender justice is another plank that has been periodically galvanising large sections of Indian people into determined resistance, most recently in the surge of popular outrage against the brutal rape and murder of a post-graduate trainee doctor in Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The patriarchal and misogynistic backlash under the Modi regime, from violent so-called moral policing of young women to the protection and even felicitation of rapists (particularly of Dalit and Muslim women) to the celebration of feudal-patriarchal khap panchayats as indigenous democratic institutions, has also not gone unchallenged. Amit Shah's contemptuous remarks about Ambedkar on the floor of Rajya Sabha and the popular outpouring of anger against this insult to India's most powerful anti-caste icon has also been a pointer to the deep fascist discomfort and vulnerability on the question of social justice and equality.
The most powerful weapon in the hands of the Indian people is of course the inspiring legacy of India's anti-colonial freedom movement and the Constitution emerging from the vision of the freedom movement that proclaimed India as a secular socialist sovereign democratic republic. Against the relentless fascist weaponisation of communal hate, Brahmanical supremacy, and patriarchy, the dreams of the freedom movement and the vision of modern India enshrined in the Constitution remain a most potent platform of a renewed quest for a robust democracy in an egalitarian social order. In 2025 as both communists and fascists observe the centenary of their respective movements on Indian soil, let every Indian communist rise to the occasion and turn 2025 into a year of bigger victories over the fascist disaster.
