Video: Modi, COP26 & climate reparations

Narendra Modi was at COP26 in Glasgow and announced India will be net-zero by 2070. Net-zero means that the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere will be offset equally by a huge array of green-based solutions, like planting more trees. Ask any serious environmentalist and you will discover net-zero is a huge con.
We in South Asia Solidarity Group, stand with everyone around the world fighting against the causes of climate change; which is Capitalism, born through colonialism and imperialism of the last 500 years. To make such an unethical, unsustainable, exploitative and murderous economic system work, governments and corporations globally must always manufacture racism and division through violence and authoritarianism to make it work. Under Narendra Modi, the BJP government is turning India into an authoritarian Hindutva corporate state. All dissenters are targeted and human rights trashed.

Scholars, journalists and academics are gunned down by BJP affiliated gangs. Human rights activists are thrown in jail for sedition and left to die there. Adivasi or indigenous people are being tortured and raped and imprisoned by police and militias for trying to defend their forests from mining companies. Farmers are being run-over and murdered by Government officials for protesting the corporate takeover of India’s food supply chain. Muslims are being regularly lynched by Hindutva groups and are being targeted in laws which disenfranchises them and are a prelude to ethnic cleansing.

We stand with Adivasis, Dalits, farmers, Muslims, refugees and migrants and other workers and minorities being demonised, attacked, thrown in jail, murdered and lynched. We stand with the Kashmiri people against occupation and militarisation. We stand with everyone in the fight to protect their lands from corporates and governments who fuel religious and race wars in attempts to weaken us with divide and rule. During the pandemic last year, the number of billionaires went up as they continue to suck wealth upwards under this financialised, casino economic system that commoditises every conceivable part of life.

During the last year alone, the number of billionaires in India went up by almost 50% and their wealth nearly doubled to three quarters of a trillion dollars. It confirms what we already know, capitalism causes inequality but also entrenches power into a few hands who dominate politics and policies. With wealth comes political power, which in India under Modi, presents as an authoritarian, fascist state embracing neoliberal capitalism including fossil fuel financing from British banks.

They push for more growth through more production output and consumption. They are driven to fossil fuels because the margins are greatest there. To get the fossil fuel they must violently and murderously throw indigenous communities off their land.

Globally, we are being dispossessed to allow for the unimaginable accumulation of wealth and power, where trillions and trillions of dollars end up in government sanctioned tax havens. Climate change, like poverty and inequality, are political projects, reversible by mass movements.

An important part of our resistance is to come together and fight for revolutionary reparations, and not to give in to liberal reformist solutions like net-zero, green-growth or green consumption as this means more capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. There is no ethical production or consumption under capitalism.

We must remember grassroots reparations is about power – getting power out of the hands of corporations and fascist governments. The fight for climate reparations is the fight to kill the causes of climate change and create true democracies and peace – by the people, for the people.

South Asia Solidarity Group stands with everyone fighting for revolutionary climate reparations and justice.