14/15 August Statement

Friends, thank you for gathering here today.

We are here, in Gordon Square, at the statue of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet, philosopher, and anti-colonial visionary, remembering his words:

“I will never allow chauvinism to triumph over humanity for as long as I live.”

We stand here not simply to mark the 78th anniversaries of India’s and Pakistan’s independence from British colonial rule, but to confront the truth: independence did not mean liberation. The colonial project did not end in 1947, it simply changed hands. Power passed from foreign rulers to local elites, who have built their own states on the same foundations of division, otherisation, and violence.

Across South Asia today, people are still struggling for real freedom and justice. They face repressive, majoritarian governments; communal, casteist, and patriarchal social forces; and the ongoing plunder of their lands and labour by imperial powers and corporations.

In India, the current Hindu supremacist government wages war on its own people; demolishing Muslim and Dalit homes, deleting millions from electoral rolls, and now, detaining, torturing, and deporting Bengali-speaking Muslims to Bangladesh for the crime of simply existing. That is why being here, by Tagore, a Bengali, is so significant. We honour his vision of humanity while standing with the very people now facing erasure in the land of his birth.

Kashmir remains under brutal occupation, its people denied their right to self-determination, its voices silenced through disappearances and detentions. In Pakistan, the state carries out its own internal colonialisms; from enforced disappearances in Balochistan to the mass deportations of Afghan refugees who have lived there for decades, with no regard for their safety or rights.

And this dispossession and dehumanisation cannot be separated from the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialist relationships. India may be independent in name, but Modi’s government maintains close ties with imperialist powers including the UK, the US, and Israel. British corporations like JCB are literally on the ground demolishing Muslim and Dalit homes, fuelling the government’s fascist programme. We are witnessing the undoing of key post-independence protections. From the revocation of Article 370, which stripped Kashmir of its special status, to open threats to replace the Indian constitution itself with the Manusmriti, an ancient patriarchal Brahmanical text. Let us ask: is this the independence our ancestors fought for, or the continuation of colonial rule, only with local rulers wearing the crown?

Tonight, through the poetry of resistance from India, Pakistan, and Kashmir, we remember that the struggle for liberation is unfinished, and that independence without justice is hollow. We gather as part of the diaspora, not to romanticise the past, but to commit ourselves to solidarity across borders, across identities, and against every system that thrives on division.

Let this gathering be a reminder: our histories are intertwined, our oppressions connected, and so must our struggles be. As Tagore’s words challenge us, we must never allow chauvinism to triumph over humanity.