Ashna Sarkar was born in London in 1992.[1][2][3] Her great-great-aunt,Pritilata Waddedar, was aBengali nationalist who participated in armed struggle against theBritish Empire in 1930sBengal.[4] Her grandmother is a hospital carer.[5] Her mother is asocial 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 ofAltab 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 theNew Statesman's Left Power List, described by the magazine as "one of the left’s most ubiquitous commentators".[16]
After a clip of her tellingPiers Morgan onGood Morning Britain that she was "acommunist" went viral, Sarkar clarified her views aslibertarian communist, a "long termist" who supports the formerLabour Party leaderJeremy 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 defendedanti-Zionist activistEwa Jasiewicz, who, together with Yonatan Shapira, had painted "Free Gaza and Palestine, liberate all ghettos" onto a wall of theWarsaw Ghetto. Jasiewicz was scheduled to speak at aMomentum conference that was running alongside the official Labour conference. Sarkar wrote onTwitter 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 withTeen Vogue, Sarkar described herself as being a "fierce critic" of theprison industrial complex,military industrial complex, the expanded use ofdrone warfare and the expansion of deportation under bothBarack Obama andDonald Trump. She said the loss of jobs due to automation could give rise tofascism 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]
In 2025, she will release her debut book,Minority Rule.[29][30] In the book and its promotion, she criticisedidentity politics, believing it to divide minorities and the working class.[31][32]
Defamation and harassment case against Julie Burchill
On 16 March 2021,Sunday Telegraph columnistJulie Burchill was ordered to pay 'substantial damages' to Sarkar after writing posts alleging that Sarkar sympathised withfundamentalist Islam and that she "worship[ped] a paedophile" in theIslamic 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 offemale genital mutilation.[33][34] Sarkar wrote inThe 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.[35] Sarkar said she had no part in the decision by the publishersLittle, 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."[35] 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.[36]
Personal life
Sarkar lives inNorth London.[37] She isMuslim[7][38] 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] In July 2023, Sarkar married her partner with a civil partnership held in the London Borough of Hackney.[39]
