Category Archives: Forum

The SANSAD Forum is a space for the discussion of issues of urgent concern to members and friends of SANSAD. Its goal is to develop understanding, solidarity, and direction for change. People are welcome to propose issues that concern them, explaining their urgency if necessary, and focusing them into questions as much as possible. Both questions and responses will be published on the site at the discretion of the moderator. People who raise questions are advised to request particular individuals whose response they consider valuable by email. Comments can be posted directly on the site.

Published opinions are solely the responsibility of the authors and may not be attributed to SANSAD.

SANSAD Supports Hilton Metrotown and Pacific Gateway Hotel Workers 

Forum, Solidarity Links, Statements/News Releases

At a meeting organized by the Hilton Workers Support Committee held on Saturday, May 7, the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), represented by its long serving members and its president, unequivocally expressed its full support to Hilton Metrotown and Pacific Gateway workers in their struggle for reinstatement of terminated workers as well as new collective agreements.

Hilton Metrotown workers, primarily women of colour, most of whom are South Asians, have been locked out by Hilton for more than a year. Hilton locked out room attendants, front desk agents, banquet, and kitchen staff on April 15, 2021, after terminating 97 long-term staff — a move that can only be called “mass firings” amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

UNITE HERE, Local 40, which represents the workers at Hilton Metrotown, is calling on management to end the lockout, reinstate all employees and offer them an agreement enjoyed by other hotel workers in British Columbia.

Pacific Gateway hotel workers have been on strike and picketing every day since May 3, 2021. Pacific Gateway terminated 143 long-term staff, many of them South Asian women, during the pandemic. This happened after the hotel owner allowed the federal government to take over the hotel as a quarantine site and brought in contractors.

The federal government terminated its contract with the hotel earlier this year after workers urged them to do so and the hotel is now open to the public. But workers continue to fight back against management’s mass firings and economic rollbacks. The hotel still refuses to return the 143 terminated workers to their jobs and wants to get rid of everything workers worked so hard for (pension, job security, good wages, etc.).

The BC Federation of Labour issued a public boycott of both hotels last year and BC’s major unions have withdrawn their business from the hotels. 

Statement on the Historic Victory of Indian Farmers and Workers

Bulletin Board, Forum, Solidarity Links, Statements/News Releases

12 December 2021

We congratulate Indian farmers and workers on their historic victory!

After 378 days of continuous non-violent, peaceful protest, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha—SKM (United Farmers Agitation) that represents over 40 farm unions formally announced the suspension of their protest on 9 December 2021. A written document from the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was received by SKM on Thursday stating that the government had agreed to their pending demands: withdrawal of cases lodged against protesting farmers and compensation to over 700 farmers and workers who died during the protest. Earlier, on 19 November PM Modi had announced that he was repealing the three farm laws thereby acceding to the foremost demand of the protesting farmers and workers. 

This has been a historic protest by hundreds of thousands of farmers and workers against the three farm laws—called black laws by farmers—that would have deprived them of land and livelihood. The government failed to break the protest despite resorting to violence and demonizing the farmers and their unions. The protesting men and women from different communities, including marginalized Adivasis and Dalits, braved a bitter winter, a scorching summer, and torrential monsoons. We salute their tenacity and steadfast resolve underpinned by a belief in non-violence and peaceful resistance.

The SKM expressed gratitude for the international solidarity they have received during the protest. Many Canadian unions, including the Canadian Labour Congress, supported the farmers’ and workers’ movement; several Canadian cities and municipal councils passed resolutions in support of the farmers and workers. As with the protesting farmers and workers, the supporters in the diaspora were also vilified by the Indian government.

Dismantling their temporary hutments from different sites, protesting farmers in convoys of tractor trolleys and other vehicles began leaving Delhi border sites on 11 Dec in a “Fateh [Victory] March” to return home. The protest is “suspended” keeping in view how their demands are fulfilled in accordance with the written statement by the government. With elections looming in some of the pivotal states in February 2022, it appears, the government has backed down. The leaders of the SKM will meet on 15th January to review the situation and prepare their next steps which could include returning to the protest sites if the government does not fulfill its commitment. 

While the demands of the protestors have been met and there are celebrations at this fantastic victory, there are outstanding issues that are yet to be addressed. For example, an agricultural growth model long past its sell-by date which rather than prosperity, now generates inter-generational debt traps and often leads to farmer and worker suicides—on average 28 per day since 1995 when India first joined the WTO. Agribusiness corporations that plan to take control of Indian markets are continuing their lobbying efforts. At COP26, the US and UAE, backed by most of the so-called developed states, called for an increased involvement of Ag Tech and Big Tech in agriculture, with so-called developing countries expected to “open up” their markets to corporations, which already control more than 70% of the global agricultural markets. Unlike what the Modi government had been promoting–that the farmers are opposed to reforms—the farmers had been opposing the pro-corporate reforms that the government had tried to legislate; their struggle continues and we stand in solidarity with them.

CERAS (Centre sur l’asie du sud), Montreal

Indian Farmers & Workers Support Group, Edmonton

Secular Peoples Foundation, Edmonton

Indian Farmers & Workers Support Group, Vancouver

Indian Farmers & Workers Support Group, Winnipeg

Punjabi Literary and Cultural Association Winnipeg 

SANSAD (South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy), Vancouver

cerasmontreal@gmail.com

sansad.president@gmail.com

Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en

Forum

We stand in Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en People

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), comprising members of the South Asian diaspora living in Canada express our deepest gratitude to the indigenous people of Turtle Island/Canada as guests on their lands and our solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people in their just struggle to defend their unceded ancestral territories against the extractivist despoliation by corporations aided by the settler-colonial violence of the Canadian state and its judicial apparatus.

South Asians bring with us the history of two hundred years of colonialism. This is a history of extreme violence in the appropriation of the land, destruction of its established systems of irrigation and agriculture and its industry and crafts in the service of colonial commercial and industrial interests causing massive famines that killed tens of millions, creating divisive identities through colonial administrative apparatus and policy that continue to haunt South Asia, creating colonial ways of thought and practice that are reproduced by the inherited system, moving masses of people to serve colonial revenue interests, bestowing on them a legacy of conflict and genocide,  as in Assam in India and Rakhine in Burma/Myanmar and leaving in its departure borders marked in blood and  a legacy of repressive governance.

Nor is colonialism a matter of the past. It continues both in the institutional heritage of the state, particularly in law and policing, (as in the many draconian laws in India, including laws prohibiting assembly, preventative detention and sedition) and in the on-going practices of internal colonialism. Adivasis (indigenous people) are systematically dispossessed and displaced,   their lands  drowned by the construction of mega dams,  their forests sacrificed  to the interest of timber companies, their cultivated lands taken away for the lack of legal documents of ownership, their rivers polluted and habitat destroyed by mining corporations, and their living space taken away whenever needed for the development of real estate or tourism. All this is done in the name of “national interest” and through colonial laws of land acquisition and forestry.

The parallel between the logic of settler colonialism and the internal colonialism in South Asia is obvious despite differences. We recognize the similarity of the oppression experience by indigenous people everywhere and stand in solidarity with them. The logic by which the interest of the settlers or the local elite drives the indigenous people to extinction through displacement must be challenged.

The Wet’suwet’en people are engaged in a principled and courageous resistance against the BC and Canadian government ‘s effort to overrule their hereditary and legally established rights over their unceded territories in the interest of carbon extraction.  Their civil disobedience is rooted in the history of the moral struggle against injustice and oppression that has been used all across the world, and famously with great success in India against colonial power. We salute the many people who have courted arrest in this struggle and commit ourselves to soliciting funds for their defense.  Many people across Canada have come out in support of this struggle not only because it is just but because this struggle is the frontline in the global struggle against a carbon-based economy that threatens human survival. We demand that all levels of government and the RCMP respect the jurisdiction of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary leadership over their territories and their right to self -determination. We further demand that all charges against those arrested be dropped unconditionally.

Copy and Paste the links below in your browser to donate:

 Unist’ot’en Legal Fund:

 Gidemt’en Fund

South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) https://sansad.org

Photography as Witness and Memory

Forum

KASHMIR: PHOTOGRAPHY AS WITNESS AND MEMORY

Sanjay KaK in conversation with Samir Gandesha on “Witness/Kashmir”

November 16, 2.00 pm – 4.00 pm

Room 7000 SFU Harbor Centre

515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

Seven million people in Kashmir valley are under virtual imprisonment since August 5, 2019, with little freedom of movement, no communication, and the armed presence of some seven hundred thousand military, paramilitary, and police. This is the culmination of thirty years of repression. Filmmaker Sanjay Kak speaks of Kashmiri photographers as witness.

The stunning archive of images in Witness is. . .an excavation of Kashmiri public memory, of the sort that almost never gets seen outside the state… leave us in no doubt about what it is like to live and work in Kashmir—what it has been like for 30 years.

Trisha Gupta / MINT

. . .the story behind how each of the nine became witness-photographers. . . their experiences allow us to understand how in extraordinary circumstances, instead of fleeing or fighting, some of us are compelled to become storytellers.

Blessy Augustine / HINDU BUSINESSLINE

Sanjay Kak is an independent documentary filmmaker and writer whose recent work includes the films Red Ant Dream (2013) about the persistence of the revolutionary ideal in India, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom, 2007) about the idea of freedom in Kashmir, and Words on Water (2002) about the struggle against the Narmada dams in central India.

In 2017 he curated, edited and published the critically acclaimed photobook, Witness – Kashmir 1986-2016, 9 Photographers, published independently under the imprint of Yaarbal books. He is the editor of the anthology Until My Freedom Has Come – The New Intifada in Kashmir (Penguin India 2011, Haymarket Books USA 2013). A self-taught filmmaker, he writes occasional political commentary, and reviews books that he is passionately engaged by. He has been active with the documentary cinema movement in India, and with the Cinema of Resistance project.

Samir Gandesha is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. His work has appeared in Political Theory, New German Critique, Kant Studien, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Topia, the European Legacy, the European Journal of Social Theory, Art Papers, the Cambridge Companion to Adorno and Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader as well as in several other edited books. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of “Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations” (Stanford, 2012). He is coedittor with Johan Hartle of “Reification and Spectacle: On the Timeliness of Western Marxism” (University of Amsterdam Press) and of “Aesthetic Marx” (Bloomsbury Press) also co-edited with Johan Hartle.

Organized by South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) with the support of Hari Sharma Foundation, Institute for the Humanities at SFU, Centre for India and South Asia Research (CISAR) at UBC, and Indian Summer Festival.

 Contact: Chinmoy Banerjee: cbanerjee@telus.net

https://www.facebook.com/events/1151161938407062/