Revolt spreads in India and Pakistan

Student protests in India earlier this year (Photo: WikipediaCommons)

A storm is gathering during this monsoon season in South Asia. Uprisings and protests are spreading across the subcontinent like thunderous clouds.

In Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, a government crackdown on democracy protests has failed to quell growing anger. And now, politicians fear they could spread beyond the disputed region and engulf the whole country.

They are right to worry. Everywhere there is fury at rising prices of food and fuel, at youth unemployment—and at the looting and corruption organised by the rich.

In India, the mainstream media were quick to forget the Cockroach movement’s humiliation of Narendra Modi’s far right government. Just weeks ago, tens of thousands of students and young people were fighting their way through police lines to protest at parliament.

They defied the cops’ tear gas, steel barricades and relentless beatings to force the resignation of Modi’s education minister.

But the core issues of unemployment, rigged exams and a system that favours the rich remained.

Now, students are back on the streets. In the state of Jharkhand, in India’s far north east, thousands of students and jobless young people clashed with the police.

The cops used water cannon against those protesting at the way lucrative civil service jobs are handed out to the children of the rich.
Meanwhile, another unsettled revolt has also sprung back to life.

Farmers and agricultural workers took to the streets in towns and cities across India to demand that multinational agribusinesses “Quit India.”

Taking its slogan from the freedom movement that drove out the British Raj in 1947, the farmers want to scupper a deal between Modi and the US. They fear it will flood the Indian food market with American produce and destroy the lives of many of India’s poorest.

Workers’ trade unions also joined the protests, angry at the prospect of electricity privatisation.

That there are today so many discontented people is a rebuff to the glowing reports of an “Indian economic miracle” trumpeted by international bankers during globalisation’s highpoint.

Millions of people in South Asia bought into the dream, believing a better education would help them grab one of the many jobs that rapid economic growth was sure to deliver. Many poor families sold everything they could to send at least one child into higher education.

But across the subcontinent, most of those children are now without work—and their families are without money.

This is what lies behind the explosive torment that gripped Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024 and Nepal in 2025.

Each wave terrified the ruling class and removed governments.

Now, finally, both Modi and the generals in Pakistan must look on in fear that maybe the storm is coming for them next.

Share the family fate

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—the paedophile former prince—will still be given a royal funeral when he dies.

He’ll get a lavish service at St George’s chapel—the queen’s burial place—and he’ll be buried in the Royal Burial ground, near his Nazi great uncle, according to senior Whitehall sources and royal experts. All at the taxpayer’s expense.

He could even be honoured with naval pallbearers.

Andrew’s relationship with infamous billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has been known since at least 2011, emails released by the US government show Andrew asking Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell for new “inappropriate friends”.

The royal family has protected Andrew the whole way, the queen helped to cover up his horrific crimes and they’ve sheltered him in the “modest” Marsh Farm, which is on a 20,000 acre estate.

Back in February, Andrew was finally arrested—but not for his sexual offenses, instead for “misconduct in public office”.

The royals want to keep Andrew out of the public eye to hide their complicity in his crimes, and so they can give him a hero’s burial.

A “royal funeral” of the kind given to his ancestor Charles I and his relatives, the Russian Romanovs, is much more fitting for a monster like Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.