At the stroke of the midnight hour of 15 August 1947, India "awoke to life and freedom" in the words of its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly on the eve of independence, Nehru insisted that the dreams of independence "are for India, but they are also for the world" — taking aim at a colonial order that extended from Accra to Jakarta, and made Delhi, for a generation, a capital of the Third World.

For the past twelve years, the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi has steered the vast country — a population the size of Africa's, a diversity of language and faith rivalling Europe's — in a very different direction. Courts, media, election authorities and investigative agencies have been bent into instruments of the ruling party; violence against minorities became the dominant language of the regime as vigilante gangs policed inter-faith love and bulldozers demolished Muslim homes and shops. Three national elections later, the Bharatiya Janata Party governs 22 of India's 31 states, up from seven in 2014 — the latest expansion won this year by striking 9.1 million voters from the rolls. India is classified as an "electoral autocracy."

As India marks its 80th Independence Day, the most credible claim to Nehru's inheritance is found instead in scores of young people wearing cockroach masks through the streets of the capital. The name began as an insult: India's Chief Justice dismissed young activists as cockroaches, and the young seized the word and inverted it, forming the "Cockroach Janata Party" — the party of everyone the system treats as vermin.

Among graduates aged 25 to 29, 20 per cent are without work. In Jharkhand, half a million people recently applied for just 583 government jobs. More than 600,000 Indians emigrated last year alone; those who remain confront an economy that is really three economies — a sliver of 25 million consuming at Australian standards, 200 million clinging to a precarious middle, and over a billion left in poverty. Research led by Thomas Piketty has delivered the verdict: the Billionaire Raj is now more unequal than the British Raj it replaced.

What began in June as a small, almost desultory encampment calling for the Education Minister's resignation swelled into the largest youth uprising India has seen in half a century. Every act of state repression multiplied the crowds: the destruction of the encampment, the forcible removal an activist on hunger strike, and police beating protesters with batons and firing tear gas as thousands marched on Parliament. For eight weeks this summer, the cockroach protests swept Delhi.

The government capitulated. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned — the first time in twelve years that Narendra Modi has been forced by popular protest to sack a cabinet colleague. For a regime built on the affectation of Olympian impunity, the crack in the facade is significant.

Through more than two years of genocide in Gaza, as Israel grew isolated even among its Western allies, Modi's India stood resolutely at its side, an alliance rooted in the ideological kinship of Hindutva and Israel's ethno-nationalist right, and cemented in the material interests of the oligarchy. Gautam Adani, Modi's leading corporate backer, manufactures Hermes reconnaissance drones with Elbit Systems and small arms with Israel Weapons Industries, and paid $1.2 billion for a 70 per cent stake in the port of Haifa. India’s turn away from the Third World and the turn against its own poor were a single movement.

As Modi builds alliances around the world, the cockroaches of India are not alone. In Sri Lanka in 2022, an economic collapse brought hundreds of thousands into the streets and into the presidential palace itself, sweeping away the Rajapaksa dynasty — and opening the road for the left-led National People's Power government that followed. In Bangladesh in 2024, students rose against a rigged quota system for government jobs and, within weeks, ended Sheikh Hasina's fifteen-year rule. Nepal's youth followed in 2025.

Delhi's commentators reached for conspiracy — a "foreign hand," a "colour revolution" but the conditions that produced Colombo and Dhaka exist in India at vastly greater scale. The educated young, promised mobility and delivered immiseration, are rebelling against ruling families and parties fused with crony capital. The cockroach movement's first battle has been won; the war for direction lies ahead. India's own history shows the energy of the 1974 youth uprisings flowing into both the politics of social justice and, ultimately, the Hindu right. Whether this generation's anger is captured by the oligarchy or turned against it depends on the work of organisation — of unions, movements and parties.

India's freedom was wrested as part of a worldwide revolt against empire, and it electrified anti-colonial movements from Accra to Jakarta. It will be recovered the same way — by yoking the energy now erupting from India's streets to the international movement against oligarchy, occupation and empire.

A fifth of humanity lives in India; its fate was never going to be a domestic matter. Held by an alliance of ethno-nationalism and oligarchy, post-fascism at continental scale, the world's largest country has become a buttress of the global reaction, from Washington to Tel Aviv. But if India's young succeed in turning it — toward equality and dignity at home — they carry with them the possibility of upending the balance of wretched world order.

Eighty years ago, Nehru saluted "a new star... the star of freedom in the East." This month, in the streets of Delhi, it flickered back into view. Our task is to keep it burning.

Latest from the Movement

Malaysia detains Israel-bound container

Malaysia has detained a cargo container suspected of being bound for Israel at the Port of Tanjung Pelepas, enforcing its ban on direct and indirect exports to the country. The No Harbour for Genocide campaign identified the container as a shipment destined for a facility of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said the action reflected Malaysia’s commitments as a member of The Hague Group — translating international law into concrete measures to cut the supply lines sustaining Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people.

DSA defies Rubio’s attack on Cuba solidarity

Progressive International member the Democratic Socialists of America has vowed to continue organising against the US blockade of Cuba after a new State Department report sought to portray socialist, anti-racist and Cuba solidarity movements as products of foreign influence. DSA rejected the charge as “racist and absurd”, noting that the report itself concedes the organisation does not act on behalf of the Cuban government. As the Trump administration intensifies pressure for regime change in Havana, DSA pledged to defend its members’ right to organise and to build “a mass movement in solidarity with all working people around the world suffering under the boot of US imperialism.”

Abahlali turns Women’s Month into a month of struggle

Progressive International member Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack dwellers’ movement, has marked Women’s Month by honouring the women who organise under conditions of poverty, violence and state neglect — and those killed in the struggle for land and dignity. Remembering murdered organisers including Nqobile Nzuza, Thuli Ndlovu and Nokuthula Mabaso, the movement rejected symbolic celebration in favour of concrete demands: secure land and housing, water and electricity, an end to political killings and gender-based violence, decent work and healthcare, lower food prices and a livable guaranteed income. “Poor women are not asking to be celebrated,” the organisation’s statement declared. “We are demanding to be safe, to be housed, to be heard, to be alive.”

Kenya’s left builds people’s power from below

The Kenya Left Alliance has convened People’s Assemblies in Mathare, Nairobi, and Kisauni, Mombasa, this week as it works to build permanent structures of popular power across the country. In Mathare, residents drawn from all six wards gathered at Muthoni Nyanjiru Park to identify shared demands and elect local leaders to carry them forward. Residents raised the denial of water, sanitation and decent housing, unemployment among young people and women, insecurity, extrajudicial killings and abductions — connecting everyday struggles to a wider programme for social transformation. The assemblies are now spreading to Kayole, Dagoretti and Ngong as the Alliance seeks to build its People’s Agenda from the ground up.

Women drivers organise against exploitation in Dar es Salaam

In Tanzania, Progressive International member UWAWAMA continued its grassroots outreach and political education programme with women drivers in Dar es Salaam, bringing members together to share their daily struggles and strengthen cooperative organising. The session focused on collective resistance to exploitative contracts, poor working conditions and predatory lenders, while connecting workplace organising to the wider fight against the commodification of essential public services. Through political education and mutual support, the women drivers are building the solidarity and organisation needed to challenge exploitation from below.

Our History

8 August 1942 - Quit India

On 8 August 1942, the Indian National Congress launched the Quit India Movement in Bombay, demanding that Britain leave the subcontinent immediately or face a mass movement for decolonisation. Within hours of the movement’s launch, Gandhi and most of the Congress leadership were arrested, the organisation’s committees outlawed and thousands of its members detained. But Congress had prepared for repression. Strikes, demonstrations and attacks on the infrastructure of colonial rule erupted across the country in what became known as the August Revolt. By the end of 1943, more than 91,000 people had been arrested and more than 1,000 killed. The British Viceroy described it privately as “by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857”. Five years later, after nearly two centuries of British domination, India won its independence.

Read more about and share this history with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

9 August 1971 - Operation Demetrius

On 9 August 1971, British troops launched Operation Demetrius across the north of Ireland, imprisoning hundreds of Irish republicans without trial in an attempt to “shock and stun the civilian population” and crush resistance to British rule. No loyalist paramilitaries were detained in the initial swoop. Fourteen internees — the “hooded men” — were subjected to torture techniques used across Britain’s colonial counterinsurgency campaigns. But internment provoked resistance: communities erected barricades, tens of thousands joined rent strikes and workers walked out in Derry and Belfast. Rather than pacifying the north of Ireland, Operation Demetrius deepened the conflict and exposed the colonial methods at the heart of British rule.

Read more about and share this history with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

13 August 1926 - Fidel Castro is born

On 13 August 1926, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro was born. “When he talks with people in the street, they call him: Fidel,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez. “They address him informally, they argue with him, they claim him. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being that the reflection of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know.”

This was the “unusual being”, who from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra to the plains of southern Angola, never shirked the struggle for liberation. The Fidel who survived more than 600 assassination attempts to construct socialism on a small Caribbean island just 90 miles from the heart of imperialism. The Fidel who abhorred iconography, refused recognition and, when asked what he most wished to do most in this world, immediately replied: "stand on a corner."

Today, as the Trump administration prepares to invade Cuba, Fidel’s centenary is of particular importance. It reminds us that, in spite of Washington’s decades-long shadow war, the Cuban revolution endures.

To mark El Comandante’s centenary, the Progressive International Workshop has released a limited-edition commemorative poster. All proceeds from the museum-quality product will support our internationalist campaigns.

Art of the Week

Dividing Line (2001) is a woodcut print by the Indian-born artist Zarina that portrays the painful and arbitrary nature of borders, specifically the Radcliffe Line drawn in 1947 to partition the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan.

The work depicts a jagged, black line carved across handmade paper representing the border that the artist experienced firsthand, as her family was displaced and forced to migrate from India to Pakistan during the Partition. Her artistic choice to depict the line as a rough, bleeding, and uneven wound rather than a straight line emphasizes the violence of this division.

By portraying the line on a bare, unmarked background, Zarina also highlights the arbitrariness of political boundary-making, which was executed by a British lawyer who had never visited India and at times split villages and houses in half. The laborious creation process, where she "gouged out" the spaces on either side of the line to create the border, has been interpreted as a metaphor for the deep scars borne by people and land, challenging the idea that adjusting borders can be a simple act.