Ashna Sarkar was born in London in 1992.[1][2][3] Her great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist who participated in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal.[4] Her grandmother is a hospital carer.[5] Her mother is a social worker[5] who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s,[4][6] helping to organise marches following the racially motivated murder of Altab Ali.[6]
In July 2021, Bloomsbury said it would publish Sarkar's debut book, Minority Rule.[15]
In 2023, Sarkar was ranked forty-fifth on the New Statesman's Left Power List, described by the magazine as "one of the left’s most ubiquitous commentators".[16]
After a clip of her telling Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain that she was "literally a communist!" went viral, Sarkar clarified her views as libertarian communist, a "long termist" who supports the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity policies.[7][21][22] Sarkar has described her view on communism as being "about the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun. It's not about driving everybody down to the same level of abjection, but making aesthetic pleasures and luxuries available to all."[7]
In September 2018, Sarkar defended anti-Zionist activist Ewa Jasiewicz, who, together with Yonatan Shapira, had painted "Free Gaza and Palestine, liberate all ghettos" onto a wall of the Warsaw Ghetto. Jasiewicz was scheduled to speak at a Momentum conference that was running alongside the official Labour conference. Sarkar wrote on Twitter that Jasiewicz and Shapira's words were anti-racist, not anti-semitic. In 2019, Sarkar said that, on reflection, she should have "drawn a line between defending Ewa, criticising the coverage and being more critical of the action itself which I don't think was well thought out".[26][27]
In a 2018 interview with Teen Vogue, Sarkar described herself as being a "fierce critic" of the prison industrial complex, military industrial complex, the expanded use of drone warfare and the expansion of deportation under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She said the loss of jobs due to automation could give rise to fascism as a way of controlling the "surplus disposable population". Alternatively, the extra time created by automation could liberate people to "imagine different ways of living" and "pursu[ing] your passions".[28]
Defamation and harassment case against Julie Burchill
On 16 March 2021, Sunday Telegraph columnist Julie Burchill was ordered to pay 'substantial damages' to Sarkar after writing posts alleging that Sarkar sympathised with fundamentalist Islam and that she "worship[ped] a paedophile" in the Islamic prophetMuhammad. Burchill also wrote a sexual poem about Sarkar, 'liked' Facebook posts saying that Sarkar should kill herself and suggested that she was a victim of female genital mutilation.[29][30] Sarkar wrote in The Guardian that the abuse had affected her mental health and that she had been prescribed anti-anxiety drugs for the first time in her life.[31] Sarkar said she had no part in the decision by the publishers Little, Brown to cancel Burchill's book contract. She also wrote: "The media's reporting of the issue ignored the defamation, racism and harassment in favour of framing me as part of the woke mob—and Burchill as its victim."[31] An apology published by Burchill included, "I should not have sent these tweets, some of which included racist and misogynist comments regarding Ms Sarkar's appearance and her sex life" and acknowledged that it was her publisher, not Sarkar, who was responsible for the cancellation of her book deal.[32]
Personal life
Sarkar lives in North London.[33] She is Muslim[7][34] and she has said: "I pray, I meditate – it's loosey-goosey, pick'n'mix spirituality probably, if I'm being honest with myself; but for me the name I can give to it is 'Islam'."[1]
