On Sunday 18th May, British bulldozer manufacturer JCB, notorious for profiting from the destruction of homes in occupied Palestine, India and Kashmir, was due to celebrate its 80^th anniversary at its headquarters in Rocester in the British midlands with a so-called ‘sportive’, a cycle ride which aimed to raise money for the children’s charity NSPCC. However, the sportive did not go according to plan.

Activists from the Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign disrupted the event to expose JCB’s complicity in ethnic cleansing and genocide, while shaming NSPCC for accepting funds from a company which has destroyed children’s lives in Palestine, India and Kashmir, plunging them into homelessness, poverty and lasting trauma.

Despite strict security, the activists managed to enter the sportive. When the event began with the cyclists being flagged off, several cyclists revealed striking black and yellow T shirts with the message “Stop Bulldozer genocide In Palestine, India and Kashmir”. Simultaneously supporters of the campaign shouted slogans and held banners accusing JCB of complicity in genocide and NSPCC of a callous and racist lack of care for children in Palestine, India and Kashmir. Despite the JCB security guards’ best efforts, this scene was enacted over and over again through the 50 km route of the sportive.

JCB’s Chairman, billionaire Anthony Bamford or Baron Bamford of Daylesford and Wooton is a ‘super donor’ to the British Conservative Party and a close friend of Boris Johnson.

More recently, Bamford has been getting closer to the far-right Reform Party. In March this year party leader Nigel Farage entered a major Reform rally on a JCB machine lent to him by Bamford. Earlier Bamford had treated him to a £8,000 helicopter flight to tour a JCB site.

So why is the  NSPCC, the children’s charity whose aim is the “prevention of cruelty to children” accepting funds from a company which is complicit in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, India and Kashmir?

 Over the years the NSPCC has been frequently asked to stop taking funds from JCB and provided with evidence of the callous home demolitions carried out by JCB. As the UK Palestine Mental Health network puts it: “It would appear that children’s services provided by the NSPCC in the UK are financed in part by profits from state crime and the abuse and traumatisation of children overseas.”

In India, state governments controlled by Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have consistently used JCB bulldozers to demolish Muslim homes, shops and places of worship,  an ongoing project disturbingly named ‘bulldozer justice’. In fact, JCB is so closely intertwined with this project that it has come to symbolize attacks on Muslims. The harm to children is incalculable.

For example, on 2nd February 2024 the demolition of a madrasa and 600 year old Mosque in  Mehrauli, South Delhi left more than 20 orphaned children who lived in the madrasa displaced and traumatised. There was no notice given before the JCB bulldozers moved in.

In Kashmir, in the name of development drives, houses have been demolished across large areas, affecting whole communities and of course numero,us children, permanently damaging their physical and mental health.

The Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign which is a coalition of organisations based in Britain, including South Asia Solidarity Group and Nijjormanush, produced a report titled Stop JCB’s Bulldozer Genocide: A report on human rights violations in Palestine, India and Kashmir, referencing a large number of cases where JCB has been involved in serious human rights violations.

The campaign has also filed a complaint with the UK National Contact Point, a government body promoting OECD guidelines on responsible business conduct, alleging that the manufacturer had failed to address the adverse human rights impacts from the use of its products in India. 

 The Stop JCB’s Demolitions Campaign has two main demands, firstly that JCB must end its relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence and cease all activities in occupied Palestine; and secondly, that JCB must commit to ensuring that its products are not used for human rights violations in India and Kashmir through robust monitoring and prevention systems. This includes making compulsory the use of its existing LiveLink technology to trace and locate JCB machines. JCB’s failure to use this technology is a deliberate violation of its human rights responsibilities.

Mukti Shah, Stop JCB Demolitions Campaign, said: “The fact that JCB continues to operate on behalf of the Israeli state in ethnically cleansing Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and that they have also failed to make use of the technology they already have to prevent horrific human rights violations in India and Kashmir, despite an Indian Supreme Court ruling is utterly shameful.”

Josh, a cyclist who took part in the sportive, said: “I am glad to be here exposing the crimes of JCB, a British company which hypocritically poses as family-friendly when in fact it is destroying communities in Palestine, India and Kashmir. As for the NSPCC, the fact that they are accepting JCB’s blood-stained money shows that they think only some children matter. This is blatant colonial racism.” 

Further information from southasiasolidaritygroup@gmail.com