Here is the full text of Sidharth Bhatia’s discussion with Tariq Ali, a radical Left campaigner active from the 1960s onwards – who, in today’s language, would be called the OG of protests and activism – about the Cockroach Janta Party-led youth agitation in India.The 82-year-old said the protests are “one of the most positive developments in India for some time” and chalked them up to Indian youths reaching the end of their rope after being ‘not only unemployed but abused’ by the likes of the Chief Justice.But drawing from his own experiences Ali said the youth protesters have only secured a “temporary victory” that can “disappear very quickly”: “My one message to them would be this. Look, don’t think you’ve won. You’ve won a temporary victory. It’s psychological, partially psychological, partially political. But the only way to cement this victory is to create independent bodies, independent assemblies,” he told Bhatia.§Sidharth Bhatia: Hello and welcome to The Wire Talks. I am Sidharth Bhatia. The massive street protests in Delhi and elsewhere in the last few weeks are the biggest scene in India in the last decade or more. Moreover, the outcome was a success. The protesters managed to get the resignation of the minister, and this has never happened before.In recent years, there have been a few public protests in other South Asian countries too, such as Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, all of which resulted in a change of government. Young protesters have also come out on the streets in different parts of the world against the Israeli bombing in Gaza and in the United States under the banner of Black Lives Matter.These protests take us back to the 1960s when students, workers and others held huge protests in France, Britain and the United States. Our guest today was among those who organised and participated in protests in London in the 1960s and has been a radical Left campaigner from his Oxford days during that time. His name has become a byword for activism, and he was a prominent face in the leading Left causes of the time, including protests for nuclear disarmament and against the Vietnam War. In today’s language, he would be called the OG of protests and activism.An author and a public intellectual with friendships ranging from Marlon Brando to Hugo Chavez, he has written several books, including five novels which collectively are called the Islam Quintet. But it is his first book, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the 1960s – which has been published in several editions – that he is best known for. Tariq Ali, welcome to The Wire Talks.Tariq Ali: Sidharth, very happy to be with you. I read what you write and other journalists write in The Wire with great interest and regularly. So I’m happy to be with you. Sidharth Bhatia: Thank you. Did you follow what happened in India over the last few weeks?Tariq Ali: Yes. And I wrote about it on my Substack under the title of ‘The People’s Republic of Cockroachia’, pointing out that this was a major development in Indian politics since the election of this government, and a huge shift in the political-cultural consensus that used to prevail in India, and that it should not be underestimated. I mean, getting rid of the education minister was a concession that they had to make to try and stop the movement. But the guy who’s replaced him – I don’t know who it is. Will he be any better?So it’s just a word of warning really to the young people who organised these amazing mobilisations. And I read yesterday that school students have started coming out with their own particular demands.For a country the size of India to ignore its educated citizens – I mean, the rate of unemployed graduates is at 40%. And I have to stress this, that this is nothing new. I mean, it’s very high now, but graduate unemployment has been a problem in India for many, many decades and under every government. It’s a problem they haven’t been able to solve because it’s linked to the system as a whole and how that system functions.But it’s now reached a level where not only are they unemployed but they’re abused and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court calls them cockroaches. And that is what has triggered this off – an immediate, angry reaction by young people saying ‘We’re not going to take it anymore’.When young people – or not just young people, even old people, lose their fear of death, then it’s impossible to crush them too easily. You have to kill tens and tens of people, hundreds of people. And if you look in the Middle East today, of course, they’ve killed tens of thousands, the Israelis in the Gaza genocide, and still they have not given up fighting, the Palestinians.So the development in India is very positive in my opinion for a number of reasons. That the opposition political parties, whatever their complexion, had effectively got a bit scared or worried to raise too many awkward questions for the BJP regime, and these students now and non-students and unemployed have come out onto the streets of several big Indian cities, should give them some courage that if these young people can do it, we political parties shouldn’t remain so passive.They shouldn’t simply try and jump on this bandwagon. I mean, they can do that, who can stop them? But they should think for themselves what they have been up to, what their tactics have been, what their strategy has been and why they have been so incapable of taking on this particular government.So on all these different levels, I think that the cockroaches have been one of the most positive developments in India for some time. And it’s a spontaneous movement. Everyone knows that. This is not a movement orchestrated by China or Pakistan or internal opposition parties.This is a movement that has risen from below, and it is a movement that consists of many who were supporters of this government, who even voted for this government. That is the significance. It’s the first real break with the politics that have been accepted by India, we have to say, since the Modi government has been elected – it’s not been imposed, with whatever authoritarian style; that’s a different matter.But this break, I think, could be more important than what happened – which you referred to – in Bangladesh. And Nepal we will see, because the new government is just in motion.And in Pakistan too there have been protests now, in Azad Kashmir, as they call it, where Kashmiris in Pakistan have come out onto the streets. Some were killed a few days ago. So the sort of moral imbalance, as the Pakistani government used to see it, no longer exists. There’s a moral equivalence for many, many Kashmiris in India and Pakistan, saying ‘you’re both the same’. They won’t say it in Pakistan because the military rules, and in India they’ve become careful because of continuous repression.But so these are changes which are taking place slowly in the subcontinent.Sidharth Bhatia: One of the things that you would have read is that many of these young cockroaches or Gen Zs who came out on the streets have been accused by a lot of people, especially older people, saying ‘why did you use abuses against the prime minister?’ And at the same time the office of the prime minister and the government in general has gone after social media accounts and social media companies and said ‘scrub everything that makes fun of the prime minister’.Now the thing to point out here is, as you said, many of these youngsters and their parents certainly would have been BJP supporters. And now they are using the ultimate weapon, against which it is impossible to fight, which is ridicule and comedy. So have you seen this kind of ridicule and making fun of and abusing – using abusive language left, right and centre – including horrors by women?Tariq Ali: Sidharth, it goes on in many parts of the world. I mean one country where the president is subjected continuously to ridicule is the United States of America. I mean, it’s difficult to go into a social network and read some of the stuff without seeing absolutely vicious and savage attacks on Trump, who replies in kind. I mean unlike the Indian prime minister he doesn’t say ‘oh I’m above all this, you shouldn’t abuse me’; he replies, he abuses back.What we may think of that in the level of a sort of coarsening of the culture is something else, but certainly he gives it back, he hits out and they hit back and this goes on nonstop. It’s never happened on this scale in world politics before.Certainly the president of the United States has never descended to this level, and he knows it’s coming back, and he then denounces people who are doing this. Recently he’s invented this thing of ‘communism is threatening us again’ and all this rubbish, which people laugh at. So there is more laughter on a political level in the United States – mocking laughter – than I have ever noticed before.And so politicians, if they go into politics, they seek to be reelected again, have to be prepared for it. What is this nonsense about saying ‘you can’t attack us’? I mean the BJP themselves in their early days as they were forming themselves, and the RSS as well, used to mock all the leaders of the Indian National Congress they didn’t agree with, including Gandhi. No one said to them ‘don’t say this’ till after Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated – after that drew back a bit.But I mean they do it in private, they do it in public. So what is so special about you? You know, it’s not a religious thing, that this is some very great religion and the leader of this religion shouldn’t be attacked etc, which happens.But I just can’t understand it. And the response of the Indian government [is to] close down more and more networks, put more and more pressure on the mainstream media – which is already obedient to an extraordinary degree, I have never known the Indian press to be so servile in my years of active life.We, growing up in Pakistan under a military dictatorship, used to be desperate to get hold of the Times of India, The Statesman, weekly papers from India, to get some idea of what was going on in the world because our papers had been taken over by the military and we had very little access to news. Those were early days. There wasn’t even television in the ’50s, and we relied on the state radio channels, trying to find other channels.So today it’s impossible to stop this. It’s one of the positive things that the internet has brought us: that we can find stuff. This is true for young people in China. It’s true for young people everywhere. So you ban it, someone else will start something. So what are you going to do? I mean, completely cut down? You might as well then declare a one-party state, since the other parties aren’t even given a chance to explain their views in the national media. It’s totally absurd.I was in Kolkata when The Telegraph was launched. There was, they had a founding debate on left versus right, socialism versus capitalism, and they invited me to speak in that debate – to launch a newspaper. The Sarkars did it and MJ Akbar at that time was the first editor, and a good editor in the early years of The Telegraph, and then he became – he went off on his own path. But it was a debate attended I think by over a thousand people.And that model – ‘here we are, we are setting up a new newspaper with a debate to express differences of opinion’ – that has disappeared.Sidharth Bhatia: The protests in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh changed the government. All governments had to step down, were toppled or ran away. In the case of Sri Lanka, the president ran away. Others ran away. In Nepal, it was brutal, and they held an election. Bangladesh, they held an election after a long time, but governments came in.You think this is possibly the new language, this kind of outpouring of protest and demonstration, the new language of democracy?Tariq Ali: Well, I think it is an important element of the demands being made by new social movements. They don’t trust their politicians. They have tried out many parties. I mean, this is true all over South Asia. And so the central demand becomes ‘get rid of the incumbent’, and how you get rid of the incumbent, you know, is largely through a combination of mass protests and new elections.No one has, you know, got even the consciousness to demand, leave alone even think about, what a revolution would be in today’s world. The old models have disappeared from national consciousnessness. Which wasn’t the case.That’s the big difference between the ’60s and now: that the consciousness, and the degree of politicisation in the ’60s, was created by what was happening in the globe – the resistance of the Vietnamese, the general strike in France, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, to crush an incredibly positive movement which called itself socialism with a human face. That’s what created a feeling that we can do better than these people.And so the aim was to try and take power somewhere. The closest we came to that in the ’60s was in Portugal, where the soldiers joined a revolution to topple a dictatorship. And in Pakistan, which was probably the most consequential student uprising, from November ’68 to March 1969, when the dictator was toppled, free elections were held in the real meaning of the word.And the majority of the country, which was in East Pakistan as it was known then, the Bengali people of East Pakistan, voted for their party – a party they identified with, at that time the Awami league, which got an overall majority in parliament. And the Army wouldn’t accept that, so they preferred to break up the country rather than accept an elected government. That was the cause of the break up of Pakistan.Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who I met a number of times in that period, did not believe they could do that. When I spoke to him in Dhaka just before the crackdown, he said to me, ‘I hear you’ve been speaking under the Amtala tree at Dhaka University, and you’ve said to us that you will be crushed by the Army unless you prepare. How do you know this?’ I said, ‘I know people. The Bengalis are treated in a colonial fashion by the Pakistani rulers. The landlords and the Army who run that country, and they will try and crush you’. And Mujib said ‘very difficult to believe, I know them all’.So it was an amazing result which completely tilted the balance within South Asia, and I always say, to this day, that the most dramatic of the ’60s uprisings was the one in Pakistan, which toppled a government but did more than that. Not deliberately, but it broke up a country.So today it’s very different. Today people want immediate results, and they search for them and get them. And as you’ve been mentioning, you know, we’ll see what happens in Bangladesh. The students, I think, in the leadership of that uprising – and I’ve said this, you know, in public and in letters to them – were politically very weak and accepted, effectively, the advice of the Army and others and made Yunus the president.And this is a guy who, despite his Nobel Prize, does not have a good reputation amongst the people he supposedly worked for. I mean, there are stories of massive corruption long before he became president with the Grameen Bank and all that.So it was a bad choice. And then, you know, you get rid of a government because it’s been repressive, it’s manipulating election results, etc etc. Fine, good. But then if you bring in another government which begins to behave in a similar fashion to the people you’ve chucked out, what else can you accept but demoralisation? So the situation, in my opinion, in Bangladesh isn’t great. It’s not a good example.In Sri Lanka and Nepal, we will see. As you say, in Nepal the mood was really angry. I mean, when they threw that cabinet minister into the river and he was shouting ‘I can’t swim, I can’t swim’ and they said ‘good’ and threw him in – he didn’t die – but that was the degree of anger.And in India, I think they are angry, very angry, and prepared to make sacrifices to win their demands, which is why I think the government caved in, on some levels, very quickly. They didn’t want this to carry on. But the Indian movement, which we’re witnessing, also had a sense of humour, and this sense of humour I think appealed to large numbers of young people. ‘You’re calling us cockroaches. Okay, fine. We’ll accept the appellation and call our party that. What more? Insult us some more’. I mean, it’s a total, open act of defiance.Sidharth Bhatia: Nothing that the administration threw at them – they owned it. You use water cannons, they start dancing. You call them names. The only problem is, after that, the police started using pellet guns, and these are lethal, and they have, you know, not killed yet but maimed somebody. The pellet guns have maimed people in Kashmir and blinded them.So I think most people have realised that the minister has gone, yes, but the brutality of the system, of the police, of the state at the centre as well as in the states in Bihar, is something that I think these parents and the children are not going to forget easily. So I think getting the education minister to – it’s like, you know, sacrificing a piece or a pawn or something.Tariq Ali: Exactly…Sidharth Bhatia: Yeah. So how do you gauge the success of a movement? For example, there were a number of huge demonstrations in Western countries against the brutal bombing in Gaza. Israel didn’t stop. So what would you say is the metric for success, and more importantly, is holding a protest in those circumstances when, you know, countries are now becoming more and more autocratic, and the policing systems are becoming tougher, is the holding of that level of demonstrations and protest itself a success?Tariq Ali: I think it is and for the following reason. I was discussing this with my Palestinian friend Rashid Khalidi, and we had this conversation which will soon be a book. But I said, ‘Rashid, throughout the history of Palestine, I have never seen such a global response. That whatever else, Palestine is now on the world stage as it has never been before, and whatever the horrors of the genocide, that is our victory. That the solidarity movements have grown, that they have disrupted politics in the United States and in Britain and some other European countries but the United States is the most important’.I mean, Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of New York, refusing to cave or capitulate as the elections came closer on any of the main demands in his programme, especially but not exclusively, on Palestine, referring to America’s closest ally, Netanyahu, as a war criminal who should be arrested, and winning New York.And we now know through various research that at least 40% to 50% of New York’s Jews voted for him. That he showed that many, many Jews are not Zionists, don’t support Israel, and many of them have been supporting him, both Orthodox Jews and Liberal Jews.So this is something new, and for the first time all the Israeli lobby organisations in the United States are worried because young Jewish people, when they are interviewed and polled, say that they don’t see Israel as their state at all. And this is going to be the death in the next 20-25 years of the Israeli lobbies and related organisations in the United States.The reason the Israelis have ignored the big protests is because they have the backing of the United States and the Western powers. I mean this genocide could not have taken place without the support of the United States.The assault on Iran could not have taken place. It was a joint assault this time by the United States and Israel against Iran, which has also given them a few things to think about. They thought Iran would collapse. Trump lied every week. ‘We’ve won. We’ve destroyed them. We’re going to destroy their civilisation.’ All this nonsense being floated out into the video sphere by the propaganda departments of the White House and the Pentagon. And a total lie. And people have now seen through that.So a lot of things have happened in the United States since 2023 which have changed things. And now you have an opposition building up inside the Democrats. You know, we have elections in Michigan for the Senate, where we’re going to see a Muslim challenger and AIPAC has poured in $50 million to help the opponent to win the primary. So, it’s a big test. And this is happening, I mean not everywhere but in quite a number of places. So it has affected politics.And in Britain the hatred for Starmer, who’s the sacked British prime minister, removed by his own party, because they thought they couldn’t win with him. One key reason which the mainstream media here underplays or even sometimes doesn’t mention is his attitude on Israel. He actually defended the Israelis withdrawing water, electricity and food from the Palestinians, went on television – that people don’t forget. So it’s removed a British prime minister, this movement, and in the United States it’s put the Democrats on the spot, with their own supporters saying ‘behave like an opposition’.And I think the effect in India probably will be the same in terms of many of the opposition political parties trying to think of how to fight politically against the incumbent. So though we haven’t won a victory in the traditional sense of the word, the impact of the global solidarity with Palestine has been great.I was, you know, interviewed by Frontline and The Hindu on this, and I said, ‘you know, of all the big countries in the world, the only one where there haven’t been any big demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine is India’, and I said ‘the Indian Left has a lot to answer for. They should have organised them even if just a few thousand people turned up’. Not to organise in solidarity with Palestine is to cave into the rampant Islamophobia that this government has imposed on the country. It’s like a sort of curtain, a permanent fog that people are scared of defending Muslims under attack both at home and abroad.And one thing that impressed me very greatly, Sidharth, was the statement of the Boston[-based] Indian student [Abhijeet Dipke] who came back here, and he was the one who basically set up the cockroach party, and one of his speeches in Delhi which I saw being livestreamed, he said ‘don’t forget that if the leaders of our movement had been Muslims or Adivasis they would probably have been shot, killed or imprisoned by now’. And I thought this was very significant because–Sidharth Bhatia: He himself is a Dalit.Tariq Ali: Is he?Sidharth Bhatia: And that has not gone unnoticed, even though he hasn’t played that card, so to speak, he hasn’t mentioned it, but everyone knows. Because with crucial elections coming up in Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state, which the BJP must win, they cannot afford to do either of those two things. Alienate the students and their parents – with its own ripple effects – and also alienate the Dalits. Because the Dalits now are politically conscious and powerful.But he’s right in the broader sense of what he did say, he’s right, but I’m just giving you this additional kind of information.Tariq Ali: That’s very interesting actually. The figures I saw for the last election were that a significant number of Dalits were voting for the BJP as well. I don’t know how many, but I was quite taken aback and because the BJP at some stage said, you know, had this line that all Hindus including Dalits are the same. So there was this promise of equality on an ideological level, if you like, and a cultural level, though not on a social and economic level, but still it makes sense with their own ideology to say that.I’ve always felt, you know, some of us have been educated on Ambedkar’s writings. I was very surprised when I first saw a letter from Ambedkar to Muhammad Ali Jinnah saying ‘I support your struggle for Pakistan because these Hindus in Delhi will never let you have any independence at all inside a united India’. And that was what first made me realise how deep this had gone.And my first knowledge of caste, not knowledge; I knew it even as a young person growing up in Lahore. We heard stories … by reading a novel by Mulk Raj Anand called The Untouchable. And later I met Mulk Raj at a peace conference in 1965, and he was a friend of my parents. So he hadn’t been back for ages. So we sat and chatted, and being himself, he said, ‘Have you read my novels?’ I said ‘Yeah I’ve read them’. He said ‘Which ones?’ I said ‘All of them’.And he said ‘Which one did you like the most?’ I said ‘I liked The Untouchable the most. Because I felt really educated after that in terms of what was going on’. He said, ‘Yeah, I fear that that novel might just last forever’.Tariq Ali: But there have been changes. I mean, I don’t think we should…Sidharth Bhatia: Major changes, major changes. And there have been attempts even now, but I’m just giving you this as a sidelight to say ‘okay, we’ve managed to get the education minister out, and let’s now talk about reservations’. And, you know, that’s a code word and it comes from a certain mindset. And fortunately – and unfortunately for those who are promoting that mindset – nobody has picked on that and people have moved on.But coming to–I thought this would be a good point to talk about: your leftist family in Lahore. I was enchanted by some of the stories you gave about your father and your mother, and the books you were reading. Then you go to Oxford, where you soon move into radical activist groups.Was there something in the ’60s in the air, or was it just for you a natural progression, or was there an atmosphere that was building up in Britain and elsewhere? In America, certainly, about young people taking to leftist-oriented politics, radical politics?Tariq Ali: I think it was in the air. I mean Bob Dylan in one of his songs, you know, sings ‘there was revolution in the air’. And that was absolutely true. There were lots of radical ideas. Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists, Che Guevarists. The Cuban revolution had been very popular because it was a non-dogmatic revolution, my generation felt, which hadn’t been brought by the traditional Left parties but a movement created from below. Then Che Guevara had said ‘it’s time for me to leave the Cuban revolution, which has been successful and’…Sidharth Bhatia: Sorry to interrupt. You were actually there around the time Che Guevara was killed.Tariq Ali: Sorry, I was where?Sidharth Bhatia: Weren’t you arrested somewhere in Bolivia or something?Tariq Ali: That was in Bolivia. That was – I had gone to Bolivia together with others to attend the trial of this French intellectual, Regis Debray, who had been arrested with Che’s guerrilla band and was being tried. And we wanted to show him solidarity. So the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation sent us to stay in the court. So you could see there are some friendly faces.And the funny thing is when I arrived in Bolivia at La Paz airport in ’67, I only had a Pakistani passport, and it created some panic at the airport. They said ‘Pakistan? We have never heard of this country before. Where is it?’ So I said, ‘Bring me an atlas and I will point it out’. They said ‘There’s no atlas here. India? You mean India’. I said, ‘No, no, no, I mean Pakistan’. And then I said ‘Don’t worry, I don’t think anyone in Pakistan has heard of Bolivia either. So we’re in the same camp’. Then they laughed and let me in. But…Sidharth Bhatia: Sorry, you were talking about, sorry to interrupt. You were talking about atmosphere.Tariq Ali: Yeah. The atmosphere created in South America and North America by the Cuban Revolution went quite deep, and then the continuous wars being waged by the United States, against Korea first and then Vietnam in particular. Vietnam had fought the French, the Japanese, the French again, and the American invasion was the fourth time an imperial power had invaded them.At the same time, there existed on a global level a non-aligned movement in the real sense of the word that had been created by three iconic leaders of newly independent countries in one shape or another. Tito of Yugoslavia, Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of India. These three got together and created a non-aligned movement, and Kwame Nkrumah joined from Africa, the ANC were affiliated to it.So you had two camps, the Western camp and the Soviet camp, and in between you had a whole number of countries who wanted to be influential without joining any camp, and they were. They played a major part.I mean, you know, let me tell you something which might surprise, not you particularly, but many of your viewers, is that when the Israelis and French invaded Egypt in 1956 in order to topple the regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser, because he had nationalised the Suez Canal and he was a radical Arab nationalist, wanted to unite the Arab world. They said ‘let’s topple him’. The mistake they made was they did so without getting the green light from the United States, which had its own projects in relation to Nasser.But the world erupted. You know, Britain was divided. Nehru was very angry about this invasion and it actually helped to create the non-aligned movement … and attacked it very savagely and declared support for Nasser and Egypt against the Western powers and Israel. We had a government in Pakistan which supported the British.So here you had people who think exclusively in terms of religion, a supposedly Islamic state, backing the West to try and topple an Arab nationalist regime, and the prime minister of India and the Congress party, which represented a majority of Indians, backing Egypt. And some years later an Egyptian journalist came to our house in Lahore and we were discussing all that and he said ‘You know, in 1957, the most popular name in Egypt [for people who just were having children in 1957] – the most popular boy’s name was Jawaharlal’. They didn’t forget. And it’s worth recalling these things at a time when the world is very different and the politics are very different.So you know even in the late ’50s things were beginning to change. And the big difference in terms of progressive forces in India and Pakistan was this. In India, you had the CPI, the Communist Party of India, which was like the main opposition to the Congress. You know, and finally in 1956, the communists won the elections in Kerala, which created shockwaves. Now we can’t imagine it, but at that time it created shockwaves and jubilation, saying ‘you can win an election’, ‘you can be a communist and win an election’.And in Pakistan, we didn’t have a strong communist movement, because the bulk of the communists in the Punjab were Sikhs and Hindus and they left after Partition – left or driven out because of the nightmare that Partition was – and that left a very weak party. And so the Indian Communist Party sent some intellectuals from Uttar Pradesh into Pakistan: Sajjad Zaheer, Sibte Hasan, Imtiyaz Ali and others to help build the party. But there was no real material base for it at the time.So what the communist intellectuals did in Pakistan – and many progressive intellectuals, not just communists – they created a chain of newspapers called the Progressive Papers Limited. And Miyan Iftikharuddin, who took the initiative together with Faiz Ahmad Faiz and my father, created this chain of papers: an English-language daily (the Pakistan Times), an Urdu-language daily (Imroz) and a cultural weekly (Lail-o-Nihar) which dominated the culture of the country. Other papers did exactly the opposite, but this actually educated a layer of the intelligentsia and young people growing up in Pakistan.So when the Suez crisis took place, the government was supporting the West. The progressive papers campaigned for big demonstrations against the government. And you know, hundreds of thousands of people showed up. It was my first political demonstration, a major one, was the anti-invasion of Suez, pro-Nasser demonstration.So that created – it was very different. And then finally when the military took over, one of the first things the Americans asked them to do was to take over the Progressive Papers Limited. ‘They’re a thorn in our side.’ So the first act of attacking the freedom of the press was taking over the Progressive Papers and making them government papers supported by the United States 100%.Sidharth Bhatia: And your father was the editor of the Pakistan Times?Tariq Ali: He was the editor, yeah. The minute they took over the papers, he resigned. They sent two cabinet ministers to our house to try and persuade him, saying ‘It’s not against you personally. You know, you can be the chief editor of the whole outfit’. He said, ‘How can I be anything remotely resembling that?’ And Bhutto, who was one of the cabinet ministers, said to him, ‘Now that the papers are owned by the government, we could impose the Essential Services Act. That you have to work’. So he said, ‘Try it, because then I’ll be working from prison’.So he left and he was blacklisted. He never worked again on a permanent basis for anyone.Sidharth Bhatia: So in an atmosphere today, when you look around, neoliberalism everywhere, you know, India certainly I can say with some confidence, is very, very neoliberal.There are actually institutions – schools and colleges – which don’t have history, which don’t teach history, because they say ‘It’s pointless, it won’t get you a job’. I was shocked when I first heard this. You know what is happening with our history books here. You know what’s happening in America. Perhaps in Britain there is also a new neoliberal kind of mood.How can progressive movements survive, or do they have to adapt?Tariq Ali: I don’t think they should adapt. I think progressive movements should never adapt. It’s a similar process of what you describe in India, where, you know, all this rewriting of history is taking place with very heavy government pressure. In other parts of the world, it’s voluntary, but the pressure is there to change the curriculum.So the way history is taught has changed considerably; narrative history was denounced. Little globules are created. So you only know a tiny bit of the history; you don’t contextualise it, and that means that there is a lot of ignorance.And the way to deal with it, I think, is like we deal with, you know, other aspects of the same authoritarianism which is sweeping many countries in the Western world, and that is by trying to build alternatives.I mean, I’m not saying this to flatter you, Sidharth, but you know, you exist in India in times that are very bad and where the mainstream media has capitulated. And I think we have to do that within education as well. You know, there are enough people around to create a university of the air where you have alternative discussions. I mean, there are history channels; most of them are not great, but there is room to create history channels of a very high quality in India, in the United States and other countries. It is happening slowly, and that is very important.Yeah, history was under very heavy attack in the ’90s because people felt the slate had been wiped clean. You know, the memory of the Russian Revolution is nothing. The Soviet Union collapsed. It’s a new world. It’s a new world we’re living in now. So, why go back to that particular past? But they don’t go back to that particular past, but they go back to a past where they paint the horrors which brought about the revolutions in glowing colours.So you have a big revival of interest, thank God that has died out, of the Tsar and the Orthodox church in Russia. You have the revival of fascists in the Ukraine. You know, a million Ukrainians fought with the Third Reich against the Red Army in the Second World War. One million. Their heirs were then promoted by the CIA, recruited by them to destabilise, and some of these people are now having statues built in their honour in Ukraine.There’s been a big fight recently between Ukraine and Poland because the guy the Ukrainians picked to build a statue to and honour was in charge of massacring large numbers of Polish members of the resistance and others. Big row.In Germany, you have a big rise of the far-right. In France, you could have a victory of the people who are lineal descendants of those who collaborated during the Vichy regime.So this is the world we live in. So India is part and parcel of that world, as it was part and parcel of the social democratisation of the Western world after the Second World War. That was the mood. The friendship between Attlee and Nye Bevan and Nehru and Krishna Menon was all part of that. Now we have a turn to the far-right and Trump very proudly says ‘Yeah we are creating a far right international’, to counter the progressives who barely exist as we know.And so the United States has been toppling regimes right, left and centre through electoral and you know money injections in Argentina, in Bolivia. They’re trying to do it in Brazil, where there’s an election in a few weeks time. I hope they fail. And Mexico is the only country that remains.They’ve kidnapped the president of Venezuela and locked him up in a New York prison. And I’m told that behind the scenes they are offering to release him if he goes publicly and admits in court that the 2020 election in the United States, which Trump lost, was rigged by Venezuelan hackers. To be honest, it’s such a joke that he should get them to put it on paper, say it, and get back to Venezuela, a country which is now totally occupied by the United States. They recently took $8 billion out of its oil money. No one knows where it’s gone.So, this is what’s happening in the world, and India is part and parcel of that in its own particular way. But then, as we see in India today, there are oppositions arising and people shifting allegiances, and we shall see. I mean, I don’t think anything major is going to happen, but the desire to get rid of incumbents is very strong.And this is why, if the opposition in India ever manages to, you know, pull together a coalition that wins. Not an easy thing to do, but I hope it does. It has to have a very concrete plan; otherwise, the BJP will come back. You know, it’s musical chairs saying, ‘okay, we tried you, we thought things would change, but only the mood music has changed nothing else’. And so this has been a big, big problem.I mean, you know, sometimes you have defeats from which parties just don’t recover. Look at the CPI(M) in West Bengal. Just wiped out. Gone. Can’t get back. The BJP wins West Bengal. I never thought that would happen because of the particular political culture of the Bengalis, but it’s happened. So, we shall see. They might, I think the BJP, they’ll probably lose again in West Bengal, but the CPI(M) isn’t going to come back. And they have to ask the question of why. What mistakes did they make? They had power for so long, decade after decade, and you couldn’t give the people something to which they felt really attached and remain loyal to you; even 50% of them.Sidharth Bhatia: A last question which I will divide in two parts, actually three. Firstly, do you think there is a continuum between the 1960s and now of any kind? And the other two are, you know, suppose, would you have liked to be – I know that you follow everything, that’s become very apparent – but would you like to have been out there on the streets and if not, what message would you give? So there are two questions really, do you see the link?Tariq Ali: The link now that exists is largely through a few old guys and girls like myself who have basically you know explained at length in writing books, lectures, interviews that the ’60s were an important period, but why also it’s very different today.The whole world has changed. I mean the total collapse of the Soviet Union. We haven’t discussed China today because that’s a sort of subject on its own. But the Chinese example is the only thing that has shaken the West since the ’60s. The incredible pace of the development of China. Which if you compare to India, I mean, India is a joke compared to what the Chinese have achieved; transformed the social infrastructure of the country. Huge rise in living standards, huge rise also in inequality. But the rise in inequality is in their opinion, not mine, compensated for by all the big developments that have taken place technologically.And China is now the major power in the world. It’s responsible for shifting the world market from the West to the East. China is the center of the world market and this is what they are planning now in the United States. ‘How can we get rid of this? We can’t do it economically. We can’t impose sanctions on them because they’ll wreck the Western economies as well. Should we dare invade them?’ First, the hope used to be Tibet. Now, they’ve given up on Tibet. ‘So should we invade them by provoking them to take Taiwan by force?’ But the Chinese are now well prepared for that.So they offered–which is why, you know, this continuing divide between China and India is very damaging to the world and to the South in particular, but to the world at large. If China, India and, with all its defects, Russia work together on some levels, they could really shift the balance of forces, without any doubt. But that’s what we talk about now, geopolitics. We don’t talk about revolutionary politics anymore. It’s geopolitics. That’s the big difference.To the second part of your question, I would say yeah, I would have loved to be on the streets, and am on the streets sometimes in London for Palestine and I speak and talk a lot. But I would have loved to be on the streets in Jantar Mantar with the young, Indian unemployed and angry citizens who have done a thing which I admire greatly.They shouldn’t give up. My one message to them would be this. Look, don’t think you’ve won. You’ve won a temporary victory. It’s psychological, partially psychological, partially political. But the only way to cement this victory is to create independent bodies, independent assemblies.So all of you who participated in these movements, have a monthly assembly and have report-backs on what advances are being made. Monitor the governments from the outside. Don’t get sucked in. And something like that, which is completely independent of the state and its different apparatuses, and is seen by people as something truthful and independent – that can help build something. A new way of looking at politics. That politics doesn’t just mean, you know, going and raising money and getting votes. It’s not worked like that since Independence, really.And so a different way of institutionalising the independence you created on the streets with this movement. Don’t let it die. It can disappear very quickly. Don’t let it disappear. That would be my message.Sidharth Bhatia: Oh, that’s wonderful. I hope, and I will make sure, that the progressive and the Gen Z element and protester get a chance to see this, because I know for a fact – this is just because of our constant research, our constant talking to people – that we are read and seen and heard by a lot of young Indians across the land.So I hope they, and I’m sure they will probably hear this, listen to this, and make something out of it. Institutional and organisational structure, as you said, is critical.So on that note, I must tell you that I detected, all throughout, with whatever is happening and your analyses, a generally optimistic tone. And that was wonderful to note, that there was no despondency at the way the world is going. So on that note, Tariq Ali, thank you very much for joining us at The Wire Talks, and I look forward to hearing more from you, reading your Substacks especially, and your tweets. I look forward to reading them.That was Tariq Ali. Nothing much can be said about him, but shall I just say: a campaigner and activist from the 1960s onwards, talking to us at The Wire Talks. Till next week from me and the rest of the team, goodbye.Transcribed by Saras Anand.