Show Stopper

Firecracker activist Ash Sarkar first grabbed headlines last year when she spoke truth to power on national TV in the UK. She talks to Nishat Fatima about life as a viral sensation.

- Nishat Fatima

In July 2018, 26-year-old Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at left-wing independent media organisation Novara Media, went on the show Good Morning Britain to talk about the anti-Trump protests on the occasion of his visit to the UK that month. In a debate that would have been right at home on Indian TV, the host Piers Morgan, an infamous rabble-rouser, repeatedly baited Sarkar, interrupting her, talking over her and falsely labelling her an Obama supporter. When he wouldn’t stop, she finally burst out, “He’s not my hero. I’m a Communist, you idiot!”

She went further, calling out Morgan on his incompetence as a journalist for not holding Trump adequately to account when he interviewed him. And when Morgan once again tried to call her pro-Obama, Sarkar said, “I’m not pro-Obama. I’ve been a critic of Obama. I’m a critic of the Democratic Party because I’m literally a Communist.”

It’s been six months since that comment went viral, since Novara Media began selling T-shirts with “I’m literally a communist” on them and people started to recognise Sarkar in “bizarre” places.

I meet the second-generation Brit, who has family in India and Bangladesh, on a cold morning in London. This is her last stop before she leaves for a week-long holiday in Morocco where she will find herself recognised from ‘that’