Kalpana Wilson is a professor of Geography at Birkbeck, University of London. She co-founded the South Asia Solidarity Network (SASG) with her mother, Amrit Wilson. Her daughter is Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya, whose father is Dipankar Bhattacharya, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, CPI(ML). Her research areas are race, gender, neoliberalism, imperialism, and reproductive rights, with a particular focus on the Indian sub-continent and its diasporas. She is a Communist-Marxist and a contributor to The Sage Handbook of Marxism, Chapter 60: International Development.
In 2022, Kalpana Wilson, Amrit Wilson and their group blamed Hindus for the violence in Leicester, United Kingdom. They protested outside the Indian High Commission in London against the influence of Hindutva in UK politics. They held a similar protest to waive off Pakistan’s debt, against bulldozer action on illegal constructions, against the film The Kashmir Files, which they called “Turning Tragedy into Propaganda”, supported Indian farmers’ protest and a vigil for the 2002 Gujarat “massacre” of Muslims.
As a communist, Kalpana Wilson opposes capitalism in India. She has often accused big industrial houses of spreading inequality in society and, in turn, Hindutva. She has also called the RSS/BJP and other Hindu groups “pro-capitalist.” Her articles have regularly appeared on the Communist Party of India – Marxist Leninist Liberation (CPI-ML) website.
In October 2022, Burnel University‘s South Asia Research Group (SARG) invited Kalpana Wilson for a roundtable discussion, “Unpacking communal tension, inequality, and media in Leicester.” The event will be held on the 1st of November 2022.
During the hijab debate in Karnataka, India, Kalpana Wilson accused the Karnataka government of “systematic exclusion from their colleges purely because they expressed their faith by wearing the hijab and seen young women students being taunted and harassed by gangs shouting Islamophobic abuse empowered by the ruling party……”
Kalpana Wilson also came out in support of Maoist Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest accused by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) of waging war against the state. He was a member of the banned CPI (Maoist) and was undergoing treatment in a private hospital when he died at the age of 84.
In 2021, Kalpana Wilson was one of the speakers at the IAMC and Foundation’s The London Story-sponsored India-EU Summit. Some of her co-panelists were Anand Grover, husband of Vrinda Grover who fought for Mohammed Zubiar, and LeT terroist Ishrat Jahan, French Hinduphobe Christophe Jafferlot, Congress party member Jairam Ramesh’ son, Pradyumna Jairam, Nodeep Kaur, Ravinder Kaur, Umair Khan from Indian Council of International Muslims (ICIM), CPI-ML party member Kavita Krishanan, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation member, Harsh Mander, Hindus for Human Rights‘s Nikhil Mandalparth and Sravya Tadepalli, Ritumbra Manuvie of Foundation, The London Story, Islamist formerly associated with Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece Al Jazeera, Raqeeb Hamid Naik, Karuna Nandy, former Amnesty India head, Aakar Patel, The Wire’s, Pamel Philipose, The Hindu’s N.Ram, Live Law’s Managing Editor, Manu Sebastian, Alt News‘s Pratik Sinha, Hinduphobe professor in Sweden Ashok Swain, Audrey Truchke, and Stop Funding Hate’s Richard Wilson among others.
Kalpana Wilson was also a speaker on “India at the Brink: Preventing Genocide” along with Australian Greens Party members David Shoebridge, Janet Rice, and Lee Rhiannon, The Humanism Project‘s Haroon Kasim, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, CPI-ML member Kavita Krishnan, Massey University‘s Mohan Dutta, Pieter Friedrich, AAP member R.B. Sreekumar, currently in jail, Teesta Setalvad, IAMC’s Rashid Ahmed, Delhi riots accused Safoora Zargar, The Polis Project’s Suchitra Vijayan, Aakar Patel, Raqeeb Hamid Naik, Ritumbra Manuvie of Foundation, The London Story, Sunita Viswanath of Hindus for Human Rights, and Angana Chatterjee.
In an event organised by Educate, Organise, Resist, Australia (EOR_au), Kalpana Wilson and her team member Keval Bharadia attended a session on “Exposing the Myth of Hinduphobia, Building Anti-Fascist Solidarities“. In the programme on EOR_au’s YouTube channel, Kalpana Wilson says “..it’s not useful to describe the killings and attacks on temples taking place in Bangladesh as Hinduphobia. Communal and sectarian violence of all kinds….has been endemic in South Asia since the colonial period….. intensified across the region now by the changes, the rise of Hindutva fascism in India, and the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan”. She then goes on to argue that attacks on Hindus are not global like attacks on Muslims and Jews. Kalpana Wilson opines that Hindutva are appropriating calls for decolonisation.
Kalpana Wilson also supported the extremely Hinduphobic conference, Dismantling Global Hindutva, where the facade of ‘Hinduism is different from Hindutva’ was broken, and the event ended in the need to dismantle Hinduism to dismantle global Hindutva.
In a conversation with The Polis Project in 2019, Kalpana Wilson talks about “Hindu fascism and Hindutva ideology that drives the fascism”. The Polis Project is an anti-India, anti-Hindu group founded by Vasundhara Sirnate and Suchitra Vijayan, among others. Suchitra Vijayan attended a conference where Pakistan’s ISI spy, Ghulam Nabi Fai, was also a speaker. The Polis Project and Suchitra Vijayan have supported the separation of Kashmir from India. In the interview, she says that when Article 370 and 35A were removed, outsiders bought land and started plundering Kashmir.
In 2020, writing on India’s Covid lockdown, “Locking down rights, ramping up hate: fascism and Covid-19 in India“, Kalpana Wilson makes plenty of accusations against Hindus without facts or evidence. She then goes on to say, by revoking Article 370, India is ‘occupying’ Kashmir in an Israeli-style ‘settler-colonialism’ to deny people of Kashmir access to life-saving information and communication by partial internet shutdown.
The experience of the pandemic so far in India has held few surprises for the many on the left who characterise the regime as representing a brand of fascism in which Hindu supremacism and neoliberalism are inextricably intertwined. The Modi government’s main preoccupation from the start of the crisis has been weaponising the virus as part of its core agenda of mobilizing religious and caste-based hate and violence which is so central to the fascist project. Locking down rights, ramping up hate: fascism and Covid-19 in India, Kalpana Wilson, April 2020, Counterfire.org
Kalpana Wilson has shown support for anti-Hindu Delhi riots mastermind, Umar Khalid, who has been denied bail by the Delhi High Court for having evidence of premeditation and causing anarchy and violence during President Donald Trump’s visit to India in February 2020.
In another tweet she asks for repealing UAPA (Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act) and to free all political prisoners including Umar Khalid.
In 2017, Kalpana Wilson made a bizarre comparison between lynchings, development and Swacch Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), saying the clean India mission is violent for the poor.
CPI-ML, in their article “Resisting Fascism, Building Solidarities, India Kashmir and Beyond“, covering a panel discussion held by SASG in 2019 at SOAS, London, made a pitch for freeing Kashmir. The event was attended by the then CPI-ML member Kavita Krishnan, queer activist Dibyesh Anand, SASG’s Amrit and Kalpana Wilson, UK caste activist Satpal Muma, Sajjad Hassan, Rajratna Ambedkar and Stand with Kashmir sympathiser Nitasha Kaul, Palestinian Musheir Al-Farra, among others.
In a 2014 article, “It’s not just India’s middle classes who have a problem with Narendra Modi“, for the British newspaper, The Guardian, Kalpana Wilson writes a glowing piece for the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist’s (CPI-ML) victory in a village in the Indian state of Bihar. In the same article, Wilson also maligned India’s premier investigating agency, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), without providing any evidence for his claims.
Since a series of unexplained blasts during a Modi rally in Patna, the state capital, Muslim communities have experienced a reign of terror in which teenage boys have been indefinitely detained without charge by the National Investigation Agency and tortured in an attempt to extract false confessions. Family members of these youths were also interrogated by NIA officers who demanded, "Why won't you and your family vote for Modi?" It's not just India's middle classes who have a problem with Narendra Modi, May 2014, The Guardian
Writing for the Communist website, Salvage, Hedge-funds, Hype and Hindu Fascism, Kalpana Wilson links, RSS, cow rescuers, brahmins, Gujarat 2002, poverty, malnutrition, capitalism, British colonialism, and accused Hindus of the 1984 Sikh genocide, white-washed Islamic invasion and genocide of Hindus, among other falsehoods and outright fabricated history.
The Hindu supremacists’ Hindutva ideology does not represent a return to ancient Indian traditions as its exponents claim. It is in fact deeply colonial, a product of the nineteenth century. It was informed by the British rulers’ ‘scriptural’ understandings of Hinduism which, in a context of multiple understandings and practices within Hinduism, drew on specifically elite, upper caste, and patriarchal interpretations. Part of the Hindutva project continues to be one of homogenising, Brahmanising and masculinising Hinduism – for example destroying temples to Hindu Goddesses and Gods whose origins are in indigenous religions or those worshipped by Dalits. Hedge-funds, Hype and Hindu Fascism, November 2015, Kalpana Wilson, Salvage.zone
Kalpana Wilson was a signatory on a letter condemning the so-called assault on students and staff at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the Rohith Vemula case, and a signatory on “India’s government fails to act on violence against women and girls“.
The below chart maps out the links of various anti-Hindus forces and their links with Islamist organisations and people.
Below are some of her social media posts.
STOP HINDU HATE ADVOCACY NETWORK 