South Asian resistance movements offer vital strategies for combating rising fascism globally through transnational solidarity, grassroots organizing, and cultural defiance.
The presence of Kash Patel at the head of the FBI, Usha Vance in the White House, and Vivek Ramaswamy in and out of DOGE may seem unusual to observers of the predominantly white right wing in the US. But South Asians with privilege, particularly Indians with caste privilege, have a long history of throwing in their lot with forces of oppression and power, from the genesis of British colonization in South Asia, to the former leadership of Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, and Suella Braverman in Britain’s Conservative Party.
In India, the current government’s Hindu fascism—also called Hindutva—hinges on the elevation of those whose privilege comes from caste, which is a violent hierarchy of religious oppression, and its intertwining with class. This is coupled with state-sanctioned Islamophobia and deep investment in extractive neoliberalism, land theft, and anti-indigenous violence. Buddhist Sinhala supremacy has similarly used violent rhetorics of purity and belonging to oppress and murder Tamil, Muslim, and other minority populations across Sri Lanka. And the recently toppled neoliberal dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh formed deep relationships with American strongmen to embed power and financial gain. These systems of dominance and oppression trace easy parallels with Christofascist white supremacy and racial capitalist structures in the US. Thus, diasporic South Asians with privilege can find easy bedfellows with white capitalists and even white nationalists.
But South Asians on the margins have a long history of pushing back, in South Asia and in the UK, the US, and elsewhere in the diaspora. Over the last six years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of South Asian activists in the US, the UK, and South Africa, and I’ve organized alongside Desi activists in the subcontinent and the diaspora for 15 years more. These South Asians resisting fascism in both the subcontinent and the diaspora share lessons for fighting fascism on two fronts. Their practices hold rich lessons for all our movements fighting authoritarianism and fascism today.
Legacies
In 1914, the anti-imperialist, US-based and India-focused Ghadar party lambasted Indian collaborators with British colonialism, writing, “They have become Rai Bahadur, Khan Bahadurs—all monkey imitators, pretending to be our protectors while betraying the country / Save yourself from these sinners, take this opportunity to rebel together.”
The Ghadar party was made up of Indian students and organizers based largely in California who fought militantly against British colonialism in the South Asian subcontinent. Ghadar also built ties with Black organizers resisting white supremacy in the US, and collaborations with indigenous organizers fighting white supremacy and capitalist rule in Mexico and elsewhere. They rejected those who consolidated power in South Asia by aligning with colonizers. And they used political education, lobbying, and in some cases taking up arms, to fight back.
In 1976 in the UK, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, a Tamil activist who was part of the Political Blackness movement of Black and Brown resistance, similarly wrote,
[The state] has taught the Blacks [including Asians] to accept the white power structure. It has successfully taken politics out of the Black struggle and returned it to rhetoric and nationalism on one hand and to the state on the other. It has created a Black bourgeoisie, especially West Indians – the Asian bourgeoisie was already in the wings, to which the state can now hand over control of Black dissidents in general and Black youth in particular.
Sivanandan was part of a movement that embraced Black as a “political color” of resistance to unite working-class and ghettoized South Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in the UK. Antifascist activism under Political Blackness, from the Asian Youth Movements to Rock Against Racism, was far-reaching and massively shifted British governance and culture.
Like organizers and activists today, members of Ghadar and the Politically Black movement resisted right-wing forces in their own South Asian communities as well as the white ruling class. Activists in all of these times have woven collective research with local and transnational campaigns, creative visioning, and community care. Their methods offer lessons for fighting fascism on multiple fronts.
Grassroots political education, research and action
Local organizations build membership structures, grassroots bases, and cadre formations to grow political education and organizing capacity to resist fascism. By better understanding how fascism works in the diaspora and the subcontinent, organizers apply analyses and strategies that draw from learnings in both contexts.
In the US, the Youth Solidarity Summers launched political education and grassroots research against “Yankee Hindutva” and seeded a progressive South Asian Left in the 1990s that understood right-wing threats from within the diaspora and the subcontinent. This bore fruit in political education spaces like the East Coast, Chicago, Texas, and Bay Area Solidarity Summer schools, which created an infrastructure of leftist and progressive South Asian Americans resisting fascism in the diaspora and the subcontinent.
Major cities host leftist grassroots South Asian organizations or spaces with high South Asian membership. In New York, DRUM, CAAAV, SALAM, SASI, and the Bangladeshi Tenants Union all bring migrants who hold recent histories of antifascist organizing in South Asia together with diaspora activists rooted in their US hometowns. Members participated in Bangladesh’s liberation war, led caste abolitionist cells across India, fought against the targeting of Sikhs, and resisted Sinhala supremacy in Sri Lanka—and bring this experience to US contexts. These dynamics also energize ASATA in the Bay Area, Stop LAPD Spying and Anwar in LA, and Jakara in the California Central Valley, where members often hold firsthand or generational experience of fighting against fascism in their subcontinental homelands.
Many of these organizations grew out of responses to Islamophobic and anti-AMEMSA sentiment post-9/11, and retain a strong infrastructure of rapid response when members or allies are attacked. Groups also helm long-term campaigns against local violent and fascist actors, like arms manufacturers, the New York and Los Angeles police departments, and members of the South Asian American Right. Local organizations push back against faux-progressive but fascist-aligned South Asian political candidates, electeds, and power brokers, as well as against explicitly fascist-aligned organizations on a local and national level, like the Hindu American Foundation.
Alongside these local organizing forces, allied research collectives explore the parallel structures of power, oppression, and state power consolidation in South Asia and the Global North. They use this analysis to resist fascism in both spaces. Groups like Savera, the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI), Maynmai, PEARL, the Dismantling Global Hindutva Conference, Hindus for Human Rights, and others reveal the parallels between Hindutva, Sinhala Buddhist supremacy, the Awami League’s dictatorship in Bangladesh, and white nationalist Christofascism in the US. Journalists like Azad Essa and the Polis Project lift up the parallels and connections between theo-fascism in India, Israel, and the US, and the violent carceral programs and funds they mutually invest in.
These leftist research spaces share lessons on resisting fascism: the need to build strong cadres of allied activists, to resist politics based on ethnic representation alone, and to build internationalist solidarity. And their research unveils transnational funding networks that invest in neoliberal fascism in South Asia, the UK, the US, South Africa, and beyond. Revealing material supporters of fascist organizations allows grassroots organizers to identify local targets, from individual funders to companies like Ambani who are in bed with fascist governments across borders. By clarifying where to resist, this research supports diasporic politics that is vehemently anti-fascist.
These leftist research spaces share lessons on resisting fascism: the need to build strong cadres of allied activists, to resist politics based on ethnic representation alone, and to build internationalist solidarity.
Mass and sustained resistance through disruption
Antifascist organizers disrupt the functioning of daily life, obstruct the flow of capital, and resist information overwhelm and the slow creep of normalization. In the US, South Asian diasporic organizers often have had lived experience, community connection, and direct solidarity with South Asian uprisings that do this well. And these lessons translate into interventions in the US.
During the 2020–2021 Kisan Andolan—India’s massive farmer uprisings—and the 2019–2020 protests against the Islamophobic and anti-Indigenous CAA and NRC bills, activists shut down swaths of India’s capital city, and conducted occupations and the world’s largest labor strikes. In the working-class Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, women organized an occupation that fed thousands in 2019 and 2020 and sustained resistance to Islamophobic bills. Organizers leaned into deep hyperlocal relationships, and grew politically savvy bases. These movements were supported by longstanding labor unions, non-governmental organizations, and in some cases oppositional political parties.
In uprisings in Sri Lanka in 2022 and in Bangladesh in 2024, activists took over the homes and offices of senior government officials and shut down traffic flow and normal functioning across their capital cities, forcing the regimes to step down. Diaspora activists in cities across the US and the UK supported with media outreach, international journalism, and legal aid and resource mobilization.
Diasporic activists in the US have disrupted major fascist gatherings, like Trump’s Howdy Modi mega-rally in Texas. They took part in port shutdowns in Oakland to block weapons shipments to Israel, and shut down roads and rails across the Northeast in support of a liberated Palestine and in solidarity with the Kisan Andolan. And recent protests against fascism and Zionism in LA, the Bay Area, and elsewhere have been scaffolded with infrastructure from South Asian leftist groups and multiracial groups where South Asian activists play key roles. Desi activists played key roles in making No Kings actions more confrontational and working-class-led, and helped lead an antifascist and diasporic South Asian candidate to victory in New York City’s mayoral primaries through base- and coalition-building. US-based organizers building long term antifascist resistance keep their attention on the same bread and butter as activists resisting fascism in the subcontinent: organizers doing the daily work of base building support the ecosystem of direct action groups and rapid interventions.
Solidarity across borders, identities, and geographies
Local and national formations in the diaspora and in South Asia invest in solidarities across identities, issues, and geographies. By organizing diverse coalitions through building deep trust, organizers are able to withstand crackdowns, intervention, and the ups and downs of antifascist resistance.
In the US, national networks build critical relationships, trust, and praxis online, while supporting local fights in the Global North and the subcontinent. Equality Labs grows a national base of caste abolitionist activists and co-conspirators and throws down on local campaigns such as efforts to win caste protections in Silicon Valley. They partner with Dalit-led organizing groups in India as well as those elsewhere in diaspora, such as the Dalit Solidarity Network and Caste Watch in the UK.
Grassroots Asians Rising supports working-class Asian American organizing while developing thought leadership around resisting the rise of the Asian Right in the US, China, India, and beyond. The South Asian Network and the now-shuttered SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) help South Asian-specific organizations develop deeper leftist political education alongside their direct service and nonpartisan electoral and advocacy work. They also support progressive South Asian voting blocs, electoral mobilization, and advocacy at the local, state, and national levels.
Maynmai and PEARL partner with Tamil resistance organizations on the ground in Sri Lanka and provided key capacity-building and support in 2022 uprisings against former President Rajapaksa and his government. Groups like the South Asian Solidarity Group in the UK and SASI in New York City target local bastions of South Asian fascism in the diaspora, while partnering with other antifascist organizations in their local terrain and in the subcontinent.
Looser networks organize directly in solidarity with groups resisting on the ground in South Asia. They do everything from providing cover in the press and offering research capacity against Hindutva, to funneling resources to the 2024 student uprisings against dictatorship in Bangladesh. Many of these networks also lead trainings on digital security to resist hacking and doxing commonly used by the right-wing in South Asia and the diaspora to target activists.
Many of the national networks active in the US engage in direct action and movement-building with the Rising Majority, supporting a Black-led formation of racialized organizers and groups in resistance to racial capitalism.
In South Africa, Indian South African organizers fight growing Hindutva and state capture by Indian companies through the intervention of Indian business interests in South Africa. They participate in coalitions like Stop BRICS that link resisting Hindu fascism to pushing back against South African racial capitalism. These organizers also support worker- and trade unionist–propelled campaigns like those in solidarity with the Marikana and Stilfontein miners and Clover dairy workers. These activities against neoliberalism at home seed relationships with antifascist organizers in the subcontinent, yielding South-to-South collaborations like the Stop BRICS coalition.
In the UK and the US both, Asian diasporic organizers grow solidarity with allied prison, police, and border abolition campaigns, seeing these as key arms of state violence in life both in the diaspora and in the subcontinent. DRUM and CAAAV have called their work across racial and other groupings a practice of transformative solidarity—moving beyond allyship or transactional alliances to engage in solidarity that involves sacrifice, relationship, and building new worlds together.
Care, culture, vision
Activists prioritize relationships and intimacies, community care, and welfare in local and national organizing and coalition building, and use this commitment to feed more expansive dreams about how we can live. In Black organizing and Black and Palestinian solidarities, Robin DG Kelley calls these “freedom dreams.” Freedom dreams also animate struggles against fascism across the subcontinent, from Muslim, Dalit, and Adivasi resisting Indian Hindutva through forms like hip hop and South Asian classical music, to the viral graffiti of Bangladesh’s student uprising against Hasina’s dictatorship, to the jokes and memes of the Gota Must Go protests and the infrastructure of Tamil community care in Sri Lanka. In the UK and the US, Desi organizers resisting state austerity and fascist cuts to national welfare programs similarly follow processes of freedom dreaming through culture work and care.
Organizers have emphasized community-based healthcare through efforts like BIPOC herb walks and herbalist infrastructure, local agricultural systems and gardening cooperatives, and grief circles and somatic trainings to support activists in the face of state violence. In cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, London, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, South Asian activists couple antifascist direct action with mutual aid networks and community fridges. These mirror the commitment to community care grown in occupations that fed their activists in Shaheen Bagh and the Kisan Andolan in India, and working-class youth uprisings against fascist leadership in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
In collaboration with Black, Indigenous, and other racialized activists, South Asian antifascist organizers adopt a commitment to moving at the speed of trust, prioritizing building authentic relationships as the central part of base building, rapid response, and the movement ecosystem. Organizers build welfare systems into all direct actions and convenings, and plan support for mental and physical health and disability. Relationships and systems of care grow through community planning sessions as well as block parties, nightlife events, and shared neighborhood meals.
In collaboration with Black, Indigenous, and other racialized activists, South Asian antifascist organizers adopt a commitment to moving at the speed of trust, prioritizing building authentic relationships as the central part of base building, rapid response, and the movement ecosystem.
During Shaheen Bagh’s months-long feminist occupation in a Muslim-majority neighborhood of Delhi, India, as well as during the Kisan Andolan, community feeding programs were a core part of animating and lengthening local resistance to Hindu fascism. These paralleled the community survival programs that were a core element of the Black Panthers’ resistance to white supremacy. Dismantling fascism is a long-term fight that requires investment in community, care, and trust.
To defeat fascism, organizers prioritize creativity, visioning, and narrative shift. Antonio Gramsci, an antifascist theorist and activist under Mussolini’s fascist Italy, seminally emphasized breaking ruling-class cultural hegemony, and seeding alternate culture-making on the Left that offered alternate ways of being. Black and Indigenous groups and the working class have long done the same in the US, while Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi, Muslim, Tamil, Christian, working-class, and other marginalized groups in South Asia have led antifascist culture-making in the subcontinent.
The work of defeating fascism requires telling the stories of the futures we want to build together—ones where there is enough for all, where we can be in right relationship with each other and the earth. For example, Equality Labs particularly partners with Dalit feminist artists, musicians, and culture workers to trace alternate narratives and orient towards hope and beauty in resistance. Their numerous cultural summits, online and offline festivals and concerts, and affirmations of Ambedkarite and caste abolitionist traditions offer a pathway for anti-caste activists across backgrounds to gather together in joy as well as struggle.
Local organizing groups like DRUM, ASATA, and others frequently host gatherings where members strategize and collectivize their hopes and dreams for resistance in the US and in their countries of origin. Nijjor Manush and ROT (formerly the Rights Collective), two leftist British Asian collectives based in London, resist Tory austerity through creativity and visioning in the form of zines, melas (festivals), art-making workshops, and collective music, alongside their day-to-day base-building and campaign work. And in South Africa, the Kutti Collective offers a home for Indian South African artists with roots in the violence of indenture to shape a joint narrative of belonging and strength rooted in South African and Indian traditions both. Queer activism has been a core thread in many groups, where ideas of queer utopia have offered visions forward, alongside nightlife, intimacies, art, and organizing that sustain and propel Desi activists at the margins across the US, UK, South Africa, and the subcontinent. Embracing alternate ways of being in the world animates new ways of imagining the future.
As organizers in both South Asia and the South Asian diaspora can show us, we must clarify our political alignments beyond identity factors alone and lean into relationship and care across groupings to sustain vehicles of mass resistance. We need to continue to grow deep transnational solidarities, hone political formation and base-building, and sharpen our analysis and praxis to disrupt the status quo. Our organizing must be polyvalent to meet the growing polycrisis and to move in the direction of our dreams.
Photos in featured image by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash.
