PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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As anticipated, Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again); withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, completing a process he began in 2020; suspending all U.S. foreign aid programs for 90 days, in part because the industry and bureaucracy “serve to destablize world peace”; insisting that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and ending “the Federal funding of gender ideology.” He also unleashed a number of aggressive economic threats, potentially sparking a global trade war.

But beyond these attention-grabbing gestures designed for both domestic and international audiences, Trump is engaged in a game of international high stakes poker. At his inauguration, Silicon Valley leaders shared front-row space with Cabinet picks, visual confirmation that Trump primary allegiances are to the tech billionaires. It is these already stratospherically wealthy men, that Trump seeks to further enrich – the unseemly scramble to buy TikTok, effectively the seizure of a foreign-owned asset, being an example of how the administration and the broligarchs will work together. 

In response, countries in Trump’s crosshairs – China particularly – will reconfigure their own alliances to counter the effect of the U.S. president’s penchant for protectionism and isolationism. Tellingly, Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a widely publicized video conference call just hours after Trump’s inauguration to reaffirm their deep, abiding strategic partnership and to reform the “global governance system” dominated by the United States.

It was a strong move in the geopolitical chess game. Here's how some of the key players are positioning themselves for what comes next:

China: Unspecified Chinese goods will be subject to a 10% tariff from February 1, claims Trump. "We always believe there is no winner in a tariff or trade war," said a Chinese spokesperson in response, continuing China's tactic in the face of the U.S. president’s pronouncements of acting like the only adult in the room. If anything, by saying he would impose only a 10% tariff, Trump had climbed down from his earlier talk of 60% levies. Still, both the Chinese yuan and stock markets fell in response to Trump’s threats. Before the inauguration Trump and the Chinese president had apparently had a productive call. But, as noted earlier, the most prominent call in the hours after Trump began his second term was between Xi and Putin and their ambition to reshape the global order .

Russia: President Trump used his first day in office to issue a rare and blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin. "I think he should make a deal," Trump said about Putin's position in the war with Ukraine. "I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia is kinda in big trouble." It suggests Trump believes Putin is feeling the heat and might be pushed, however unwillingly, to take a seat at the negotiating table. Putin, for his part, praised Trump's character and courage and willingness to "avoid World War III." His chummy tone was followed through by the state-owned Russian media, which uniformly praised Trump's values as aligning with Russian values. Still, Putin's first call was to Xi, not Trump – a reminder that Russia intends to play a key role in a new global order that challenges American dominance.

Canada: It’s not just China that is Trump’s crosshairs. Also on February 1, Trump insists he will impose 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico as retribution for apparently letting swathes of illegals and fentanyl, the drug synonymous with the opioid crisis, cross over into the United States. The fentanyl, incidentally, Trump insists, comes from China. Justin Trudeau, Canada's lame duck prime minister, said Canada would be willing to "inflict economic pain" on the U.S. if necessary to get Trump to back off. Will Trump really begin his term in office with a trade war against America's closest allies? The European Union too, Trump says, “treats us very, very badly, so they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

India: As with Putin, Trump is said to have chemistry with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But in keeping with his belligerent post-inauguration mood, Trump threatened to levy "100% tariffs" on BRICS nations, including India, if they sought to reduce dependence on the dollar as the currency of international trade. Indian stock markets traded lower with investors nervous about retaliatory tariffs against India. But the Indian government is reportedly mulling tariff cuts on U.S. goods to placate Trump. Other placatory gestures include India indicating its willingness to take back 18,000 illegal migrants. Modi is said to be desperately seeking bilateral talks with Trump in February. Trump’s decision to end so-called birthright citizenship from February 20, thus denying babies born in the U.S. citizenship if their parents are not permanent residents, has left hundreds of thousands of Indians on temporary visas in limbo. India has long maintained that the movement of skilled Indian labour from India to the U.S. benefits both countries.  Should Modi get his longed-for audience with Trump next month, they will have a lot of tensions to address.

Trump's first week back in the White House reveals a clear strategy beneath the apparently freewheeling threats. America first, in his view, has always meant not just putting the interests of America and Americans first but maintaining America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power. And that means eliminating or at least neutralising the opposition.

From his actions in the first week, it’s clear Trump’s mind is on China. His newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held his first meeting not with European allies but with counterparts from India, Australia and Japan - members of the Quad, a group explicitly intended to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region. While Trump builds this coalition with one hand, with his other hand he wields targeted economic threats against BRICS, a group which has proposed itself as an alternative to Western hegemony. India happens to be a member of BRICS too, though key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, which had said it would join BRICS, have postponed any such step, perhaps recognising Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Meanwhile, Putin and Xi's video call signals the possibility that Trump's return to office might accelerate the urgency to execute on their shared vision of a post-American world order. The question is whether Trump's strategy of mixing economic coercion, even against allies, with strategic coalition-building will hold them at bay or further weaken America’s global standing.

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Elon Musk isn't just inserting himself into national conversations in democracies around the world - he's taking a flamethrower to them. "Who would have imagined," asked French president Emanuel Macron this week, "that the owner of one of the world's largest social networks would be supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections?"

The question encapsulated the growing concern among European leaders about Musk's increasingly aggressive intervention in European politics. But what appears to be Musk’s penchant for spreading digital chaos may actually be a calculated business strategy.

European Leaders React

Norway's Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre finds it "worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and huge economic resources involves himself so directly in the internal affairs of other countries. This is not," tutted Støre, "the way things should be between democracies and allies."

Germany's Olaf Scholz says he is trying to "stay cool" despite being labeled "Oaf Schitz," as Musk openly cheers for a far-right, pro-Putin party before next month's federal elections. "The rule is," Scholz told Stern magazine, "don't feed the troll."

Britain's Keir Starmer has had to deal for days with an onslaught of inflammatory posts about historical sexual abuse cases, with Musk using his platform to resurrect decades-old stories about grooming gangs in northern England. He finally bit back, declaring that those “"spreading lies and misinformation” were “not interested in victims,” but “interested in themselves.”

But Italy's Giorgia Meloni broke ranks with her counterparts, praising Musk as a "great figure of our times" while negotiating a $1.6 billion SpaceX deal - after a telling weekend visit to Trump's Mar-a-Lago.

Following the Money

Musk’s targeted invective against European leaders isn't just digital trolling - it's a business strategy. He is courting right wing parties, whatever their particular ideologies and rhetorical excesses, because he sees them as less likely to impose regulation, to seek to rein in Big Tech. Despite the concerns of European leaders, though, as long as Musk appears to have president-elect Trump's ear, they will continue to walk on eggshells around him. They will have noted how the outgoing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has been celebrated by the global right as an early triumph of the coming Trump-Musk world order. Musk derided Trudeau as an "insufferable tool" just last month and rubbed it in after the latter stepped down. “2025,” Musk announced on X this week, “is looking good.” 

Musk's influence over global discourse, heavily reliant on distortion and half-truths, will likely grow. The question is: who will dare to challenge him? Not Mark Zuckerberg who is abandoning fact-checking to pivot to X-style “community notes”. 

It is true that fact- checking organizations have long been working against impossible odds, swimming against a tidal wave of digital sewage. Meta’s third party fact-checking system was akin, in the words of one content moderator, to “putting a beach shack in the way of a massive tsunami and expecting it to be a barrier.”  But the system's destruction still signifies a refusal to take even token responsibility for how social media platforms are used. Where once misinformation was a problem to be solved, it is now the primary mechanism of cultural exchange and political discourse.

“I don’t think Meta’s fact-checking program was particularly good; it certainly didn’t seem very successful.” says Bobbie Johnson, media strategist and former editor with MIT Technology Review. “BUT the speed at which Zuckerberg has publicly bent the knee to the incoming regime is still remarkable.”While, as Johnson points out, Big Tech is only too happy to bow down before Trump, it appears the incoming president is in turn putting the interests of Big Tech at the heart of his second term. Ironically, some of the pushback, at least in the case of “first buddy” Elon Musk, may come from within Trump’s MAGA movement. Musk was recently called out for his support of the H1B visa for skilled immigrants, which many of Trump’s base have described as a program that takes American jobs and suppresses American wages. Musk’s response was to deride his critics as “hateful racists.” For Musk, a committed race-baiter, spreading racist tropes is only a problem when it interferes with business.

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Now the United States could become the latest nation to pass an anti-terror law that will effectively stifle dissent.

Undeterred by a failed attempt earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives tried again last week to pass H.R. 9495, a bill that gives the treasury secretary the authority to designate non-profits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” This time, with Donald Trump poised to take office and retribution on his mind, the bill passed. It gives, noted Human Rights Watch, “the executive branch broad and easily abused authority.” 

Gravely titled the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support. No one objects to the parts of the bill that seek to alleviate tax burdens and deadlines on “U.S. nationals who are unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad or held hostage abroad and their spouses.” Or the “refund and abatement of tax penalties and fines paid by hostages, detained individuals, and their spouses or dependents.”

But, bundled together with its uncontroversial sections, the bill also announces its intent to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” How such organizations are designated appears to be entirely up to the treasury secretary who is appointed by the president. According to Human Rights Watch, the bill does not “clearly define” criteria by which organizations can be deemed to be enabling terrorists, nor does it “require the government to provide evidence to support such a decision.” Instead, it requires the nonprofit to prove to the government that it does not support terrorism.

In a letter to the House of Representatives, civil society groups asked why such legislation was necessary when it is already a federal crime for nonprofits to provide “material support to terrorist organizations.” Such a law, the letter argued, would hand the U.S. executive “a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.”

Shoved off the news agenda by the intense speculation and reporting over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks, the bill has received scanty mainstream media coverage. Its impact, however, could be outsized, particularly on free speech. “A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional,” said the Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin as the bill was debated on the House floor. It is, he said, “a werewolf in sheep’s clothing” giving the American president “Orwellian powers and the American not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”    

Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the bill was “part of a broader assault on our civil liberties.” Introduced in the wake of protests on American campuses over the war in Gaza, the bill, Tlaib warned, is not “just about Palestinian human rights advocacy organizations, this is about the NAACP, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.” It criminalizes social justice organizations, she added, the “folks that have been trying to make it safe for our kids to go to school away from gun crisis and violence.” 

Less than 10 days before the House passed the bill on November 21, it had been voted down, failing to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. Earlier this year in April, a version of the bill gained overwhelming support in the House only to be stalled in the Senate. Now in its third iteration, the bill may yet languish in the upper house of Congress, though most analysts expect it to be brought before Congress again next year if necessary when the Republicans will have a majority in both houses.

Across the globe, legislation aimed at the funding of civil society has had an inevitable chilling effect on dissent. “The misuse of anti-terrorism legislation,” observed the European commissioner for human rights in April, “has become one of the most widespread threats to freedom of expression, including media freedom, in Europe.” Why would the United States, even with its much vaunted protection of free speech, be any different?

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Swapan became an economic migrant in the early 1970s—first traveling from Calcutta to Hamburg, then on to the oil fields of Kuwait. It’s too late now, but I never asked my father how he made it from India to Germany, how, coming from an average, that is to say relatively impoverished, background, he could afford the plane fare. But by 1975, he was in Kuwait, where he met my mother’s older sister, and through her met my mother, then 24 and a graduate student in Bombay. It was in dull, frictionless Kuwait, with its multinational oil corporations, its American fast food chains and improbably vast supermarkets that my father found the work, the tax-free income and stability, he wanted for his growing family.  

In Kuwait, my parents, now financially comfortable, built a rich cultural life, staging Bengali poetry readings, putting on plays, marking religious festivals. For them, their escape from India could only ever be partial—the grip exercised by language, culture, people, and nostalgia was too strong. (I couldn’t have realized it as a child, but the Bengali world in which they immersed themselves was a fantasy. Decades later, when I watched Satyajit Ray’s coruscating Calcutta trilogy, I began to understand what life before migration must have been like for my father: a sclerotic city, the frustrations of young jobless men, the smug Indian elite in colonial-era clubs aping the mannerisms of their British “betters.”) My parents were beholden to their history, but for their children, my sister and me, they chose a course unimpeded by history, by context. The perhaps unintended effect of their design, their choice to send us to a British rather than Indian school, was our near total detachment from Bengali and their linguistic world. They were fixated on the idea that the Anglophone West was where their children would make their futures. What that meant in practice was that while we were witnesses to their culture, we weren’t participants.

I didn’t know it then but my parents, perhaps without consciously knowing it themselves, were reading from a colonial script. They sang songs written by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali renaissance man—artist, poet, scholar, and Nobel Prize-winning icon of the Indian independence movement—but enrolled me in piano lessons. My mother was trained in Bharatnatyam, an Indian classical dance form, but my sister learned ballet. It wasn’t until I read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind that I recognized their behavior, understood the choices they had made. The effect of imperialism, he wrote, is to make the colonized “see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves.” If my parents could not entirely distance themselves from India, they could certainly create that space for me. But what kind of space was it? After all, we lived in Kuwait, not in Britain. While my education may have distanced me from India, it hadn’t brought me any closer to England. Instead, I was marooned in no-man’s land. I may have been born 30 years after the British left India, I may have lived on the other side of the Arabian Sea from India, my parents may have wanted me to make my life in the West, but I was still bound to India and its colonial past. I wear that history like a birthmark, like a livid stain on my calf. 

Mother tongues

Growing up in Kuwait, I learned two things about India that seemed essential: one must be able to identify one’s “native place” and one’s “mother tongue.” My native place certainly wasn’t Kuwait—as the child of expatriates, Kuwait was merely purgatorial, a place to endure before I moved on—while Bombay, where I was born, felt intimidating, removed. I left the city before I was two months old, experiencing it only in vivid bursts during school holidays—experiencing it, in other words, as a gawping outsider, a stranger with privileged access. Somewhere between them, my native place was an imaginary homeland, a ramshackle, cobbled-together country that had no room for any other citizen. 

A stranger with privileged access… that was also how I felt about my relationship with Bengali. It was my mother tongue, I suppose, though I never learned to read nor write it—that we did in English. Instead, I learned Bengali by osmosis, by hearing it around me. And in time I could speak it myself, after a fashion, holding conversations that, while fluent enough, immediately marked me out as a foreigner. My mother, as a result of being a native of polyglot Bombay, spoke other Indian languages—Gujarati and Marathi in particular. Both are languages that I could literally describe as my mother tongues and both are languages that I do not speak; I understand more or less everything that is said but cannot respond in kind, at once an insider and also irredeemably an outsider.

For my parents and their friends, English served a professional function and their relationship with it was suitably unemotional, uninvolved, disinterested. The meaningful parts of their lives were conducted in Bengali, the language in which they dreamed, they sang, they quarreled, and, as Bengalis will, in which they talked and talked and talked … and talked. Except with us, their children, with whom they sometimes switched to a stiff English, like they might do to be polite when a foreigner crashes their party. Growing up, Bengali’s rhythms, its soft, rotund soundscape were intimately familiar, yet out of reach. 

It’s a peculiar condition to have to explain this failure to belong to a place, to a tongue. Thiong’o, writing about his life in Kenya, makes the distinction between the Gĩkũyũ he spoke as a child and the English that was thrust upon him at his colonial school. “The language of my education,” he writes, “was no longer the language of my culture.” If the “bullet was the means of the physical subjugation,” Thiong’o recognized, language “was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” 

African writers, Thiong’o argued, were making a choice when they wrote in the colonizer’s language. They chose to enrich English, say, or French, at the expense of their mother tongues, effectively shrinking their own mental universe while expanding colonial dominance. The masters my parents were serving when they chose to effectively disinherit me from my linguistic birthright were not literally the British, but the colonial legacy was present in global systems of capital and trade. India may have become independent, but Indians like my parents remained convinced that achieving fluency in the colonizers’ ways was the surest path to worldly success.

And they were right. My itinerancy, more optimistically described as my cosmopolitanism, has helped secure a place among the global bourgeoisie, that spectral class that moves ceaselessly from city to city, living more or less the same way in each, a comfortable income a buffer against any discomfiting encounters with geographic and cultural specificities. Life as a blur of iPhones, Netflix subscriptions, and Boba tea orders.  

English, of course, is the common language of this globalized class. In India, where I have lived with my wife and children for about a dozen years, speaking English as my first language makes me a member of a tiny elite—about 300,000 people in a country of 1.4 billion, according to the last census (2011). Over 120 million Indians speak English as either a second or third language. English, even now in India, is the preserve of the educated, the urban, the middle class and upper caste; and the more easily, idiomatically, and naturally you speak English, the more privileged you likely are. It’s an uncomfortable truth in postcolonial India that the speakers of the colonizer’s language have clung so fast to the trappings of power and continue to wield influence out of all proportion to their actual number. But it’s an equally uncomfortable truth, as I’ll discuss later, that in today’s Hindu nationalist India, English is a vital bulwark, a defense of pluralism against the imposition of a single Indian language on a country with dozens of mother tongues.

English arrives in India

Eight decades after independence, is English still freighted with colonial baggage? Admittedly, it’s a load that sometimes seems impossible to fully shrug off. For an entire century before the British assumed direct control of India in 1858, large swathes were controlled by the East India Company, a private corporation backed by the British authorities. The East India company colonized large parts of southeast Asia, including Hong Kong, and had its own gigantic armed forces, largely made up of Indian footsoldiers. By the early 19th century the East India Company was essentially a proxy for Britain’s control over India, moving beyond commercial opportunities and into civic responsibility, including the religious and scientific education of Indians. 

In his notorious “Minute on Education, 1835,” Thomas Babington Macaulay, a Whig politician and historian, a believer in historical progressivism, who admitted to having “no knowledge of either Sanscrit [sic] or Arabic,” laid out this educational program. Balancing his lack of knowledge with a surfeit of arrogance, Macaulay argued that his inquiries had satisfied him that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Fully shouldering the white man’s burden, Macaulay wrote that it was necessary for the British parliament to “educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue.” That said, given the size of India’s population and the impossibility, Macaulay admitted, “with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people,” he recommended the creation of brown sahibs, a set of FrankenIndians—“interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern… Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” It was to this grotesquely manufactured class that Macaulay proposed it be left to “refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

From Macaulay’s “Minute” in 1835, to my bedroom in Kuwait 150 years later, time appeared to have both sped by with all the clamor, chaos, and event of a runaway train—and stood utterly unmoving. My parents, or rather their parents and grandparents, were not among “Macaulay’s bastards,” as that class of English-speaking Indians came to be (no doubt affectionately) known. But it is thanks to Macaulay’s bastards and their descendants, fattened on colonial privilege, that my parents imbibed the worldview that English was the path to prestige and success. And it is because of Macaulay’s bastards that the miasma of Macaulayan privilege, a fetid cloud of wealth and presumed cultural supremacy, still hangs around English speakers in India. So here I was, a nominally Indian child in 1980s Kuwait, an Indian child whose Indianness was taken for granted, but whose self was almost entirely shaped by the English language. Of course, that “almost” is key. As English-speaking subalterns around the world have learned time and again, the particularities of individual backgrounds and the shibboleths of an “international” education mean less than skin color, names and the other external facts of identity.

But for me then, my path had been set. A path that began all the way back with Macaulay’s bastards and left me feeling alienated and disoriented, sensing that, appropriately, I had no mother tongue and no motherland. 

Establishing national languages (or not)

From its very conception, India made for an incoherent nation state. Nations are a European notion, in which communities can be imagined and unified around a shared language, culture, and “national” ethos. It was India’s very incoherence—its multiplicity of languages, stories, religious values, and customs—that the makers of the Indian Constitution understood as symbolic of the new nation. It made sense then, that India has no “national” language, no single tongue that unites the whole country. Instead, the Indian Constitution recognizes 22 “scheduled” languages, including the likes of Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam; the last census calculated there are over 100 non-scheduled languages and many hundreds of dialects. Both Hindi and English were classified by the Indian Constitution as “official” languages, as in the languages through which the federal government communicates. 

In the early days of independence, English was an administrative language for India, a link between its many regional languages. Despite the makers of the constitution acknowledging India’s linguistic variety, they believed that universal literacy in a standardized national language brought people together in common cause. Plans were made to move the nation toward Hindi. The Constitution hedged its bets, indicating the possibility of English being phased out after 15 years and Hindi being promoted as India’s link language. India’s Constitution was adopted in 1950; by 1965, Hindi could theoretically have become the national tongue. 

Different leaders pushed for different alternatives. Mahatma Gandhi wanted an amalgamated version of Hindi and Urdu, called Hindustani, to be the national language, but he was essentially in agreement on Hindi’s claim to be the lingua franca of a newly independent India. Meanwhile, the Sanskritized Hindi that became, in the Constitution’s fence-sitting term, an “official” language of India, raised hackles. Tamil is an older language than Sanskrit and continues to be spoken in India, while Sanskrit ceased to be anything but an ecclesiastical language over 2,500 years ago. Why, Tamil speakers reasonably asked, should Hindi be the language of new India and why should south Indians be expected to learn it? The focus on Sanskritization—Sanskrit largely being the language of priests and scholars—also suggested a notion of India as essentially a Brahminical project, a new country that would reinforce old Hindu hierarchies of caste. 

Tensions flared as the 1965 date approached. There were protests nationwide. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, where the majority speak Tamil, anger over “Hindi imposition” devolved into violence and rioting. And so parliament, cognizant of the strength of feeling, continued to use English as an official language alongside Hindi, enabling swathes of India to opt out of using Hindi altogether. With English established, in any case, as the de facto global language of science and commerce, the utilitarian argument for preferring the use of English over Hindi in non-Hindi-speaking parts of India was strong and the language debates were largely shelved. The nationalist desire to turn away from English, the language of the colonizer, was blunted by the polyglot reality of the new nation.

Besides, the experience of India’s neighbors provided sufficient evidence of the dangers of language chauvinism. In Pakistan, which Britain carved out of India in 1947, the attempt to make Urdu the national language led to war. Pakistan was intended as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslim population who, advocates argued, might be suppressed in Hindu-dominated India. But the eastern and western parts of the new country spoke different languages. West Pakistan spoke Urdu—Hindi is essentially the same language as Urdu, except that Islamic Persian and Arabic influences have been “cleansed” from the former and Hindu Sanskrit influences emphasized—but in the east, they spoke Bengali, a language with its own formidable history and literature. As Pakistan sought to impose Urdu as the sole federal language (as part of a process of Islamization), the eastern half of the country agitated. After eight years the government relented and in 1956 gave Bengali equal status. Still, it was the language movement that catalyzed East Pakistan’s eventual separation from West Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.

As Pakistani authorities were trying to contain rising tension in the east by recognizing Bengali as an official language, the independent government in Ceylon, a teardrop-shaped island deep in the south of the Indian subcontinent, introduced the so-called Sinhala Only Act of 1956—a purportedly anticolonial piece of legislation that replaced English with the language spoken by the country’s Buddhist majority. Except that the act deliberately left out Tamil, the language spoken by a minority that played a significant role in the administrative and cultural life of Ceylon (which became Sri Lanka in 1972). The Tamil-speaking minority became rapidly disenfranchised. Resentment festered, and by 1983, the Tamils and Sinhalese had embarked on a debilitating, decades-long civil war, a bloody conflict made more dreadful by state-sponsored massacres, suicide bombings, sexual violence, and the recruitment of child combatants.

English's next challenge and challengers

From the moment India became an independent country, the strongest challenge to the stubborn primacy of English came from Hindi. That argument has only grown louder. Compared to the less than 300,000 people who, according to the 2011 census, speak English as their first language, some 528 million Indians speak Hindi as their first language (though this subsumes several regional languages across north India). 

Leading this charge in the current generation is Narendra Modi, India’s current populist, authoritarian, and sectarian prime minister, who believes, in a decolonized India, English should have long made way for a single, authentically Indian national tongue. Modi, famously, is the son of a chaiwala, a curbside tea-seller, and has narrativized his rise to the very top of Indian society as a rebuke of the stranglehold on power of the English-speaking elite. He frequently describes the prizing of the English language in India as a colonial hangover, the product of a “slave mentality” and, more sinisterly, as a deliberate attempt by the Indian elite to keep less-privileged Indians in their place. (His argument does not recognize that the English-speaking elite have largely lost their political power; though their presence remains in the bureaucracy, civil society, the judiciary, and the media.) 

Modi owes his ideological underpinnings to VD Savarkar, the foundational Hindu nationalist thinker. Savarkar saw Hindi as an extension of Hindu India, a language that should be shorn of Persian and Arabic influence, while reemphasizing and extending its Sanskrit roots. From his teachings, a voluntary Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization emerged, modeled on European fascists. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, spread across the country, from tiny rural hamlets to teeming metropolises. Opposed to Gandhi’s syncretic, pluralist vision of India, the RSS believed India was and should be a Hindu nation, a mirror image of Pakistan, conceived as a Muslim nation. Today the RSS presides over the Sangh Parivar, a “family” of right wing Hindu nationalist organizations, which includes Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

Not unlike in America with its red states and blue, in present-day India, there is a regional divide. While Modi has no serious electoral challenger, his popularity is concentrated in India’s so-called Hindi belt. The southern states are far better developed than the larger, more populous Hindi-speaking states in the north and center of the country, but it is the Hindi heartland that controls electoral politics. That enables Modi’s BJP to obtain huge parliamentary majorities even while it receives scant support in other states. 

With electoral mathematics against them, southern states cling fiercely to regional political parties to defend their interests and to maintain cultural independence from the north. Modi’s talk of slavery and decolonization cuts little ice in the south, where submitting to Hindi’s national aspirations would feel more like a colonial imposition than the use of English as a pan-Indian link language. For many in this region, adopting Hindi does not match the pragmatic value of learning English as a means to better-paid employment and access to international markets. Instead, it is the repeated assertions of Hindi’s claim to be India’s national language that are rebuffed as “imperialism.” In these contexts, English, as used in India today, is cast as an anticolonial choice, a means of keeping Hindi at bay.

A global context to anti-globalism

A common polemic heard everywhere from Putin’s Russia to Erdoğan’s Turkey and Modi’s India is that Western “values” undermine and subvert the values, particularly family values, of more traditional societies. The effete, self-hating English-speaking elite, in the eyes of Modi supporters, have done just that in India—undermined patriotic pride in being Indian, and treated Indian values as unsophisticated and embarrassing. The argument goes that the cringing of Westernized elites at the self-assertion of Hindu nationalists is a result of elites having forsaken their mother tongues for the language of neoliberalism.

I admit to being at least partially guilty of the charge. I am undeniably the misshapen, misbegotten product of colonialism and globalization, educated and prepared for a world in which a certain group was free to flit across boundaries of country and class as the blissfully ignorant servants of late capitalism. And I now equally undeniably find myself adrift in a world that has withdrawn, settling behind those once permeable boundaries, a world that is suspicious of unfettered movement, where a British prime minister with no sense of either irony or self-awareness can say, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” 

This parochial contempt is not just reserved for the cosmopolitan, globalized elite—it is even more evident in the virulent disgust reserved for migrants. Donald Trump says he wants immigrants from “nice” countries like Switzerland, not “shithole” countries; Britain wants to send asylum seekers to Rwanda; Giorgia Meloni once wrote that Italy should seek immigrants as “compatible as possible with our own national community”; Amit Shah, Modi’s henchman and arguably the second most powerful man in India, called Muslim illegal immigrants “termites.” Shah, in his capacity as India’s Minister of Home Affairs, has also promised a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan… as long as they are not Muslim.

What are the values expressed in these comments and attitudes? What is it that Modi stands for that distinguishes him from the Westernized elites he scorns as un-Indian? Chief among these elites is the long dead Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and the father and grandfather of two more Indian prime ministers. Nehru was India’s postcolonial poster boy, gloriously articulate in the colonizer’s language yet with an implacable belief in what independent India had to offer to the world. In his afterlife he has become the bête noire of India’s Hindu nationalists, who hold him and his devoutly secular worldview responsible for all the ills that have afflicted independent India. One of my favorite book titles by a Hindu nationalist is Nehru’s 97 Major Blunders. It is a mark of the author’s even-handedness that he chose not to find three more major blunders to pad the list out to an even 100. 

For Nehru, India’s emergence from the darkness of colonial rule was an opportunity to offer an alternative to the European model of the rapacious nation-state. If nations by their very nature are exclusive, drawing up borders and carefully tending to a sense of their own exceptionalism, India was intended to be a radical experiment in inclusivity. Indians could be bound together by difference rather than sameness. 

By contrast, the Hindu nationalist idea of India is ungenerous, seeking to replace unruly diversity with brute majoritarianism. Hindu nationalism itself, rather than being of the soil, is entirely beholden to European bigotry. Nehru, unable to mitigate the pervasive influence of religion in India and prevent religious violence, may have failed to deliver on his secular ideals. But, alarmingly for some of us, the sectarian Modi and his BJP are making good on theirs.

Lingua franca, lingua future

For years, I used a sense of my lack of a mother tongue and, as a consequence, my lack of a motherland as a self-pitying crutch. I was estranged from India by English, by my confident idiomatic use of a language that shouldn’t have been my idiom.

Living in Modi’s India now, though, with children who, like me, are English-speaking, I’ve never been more determined to insist on my language as intrinsic to my Indianness. Why can’t my Indian children, born in India, claim English as their mother tongue? Why should their mother tongue being English mark them out as still colonized, though we are long post our colonial era? Contrary to Groucho Marx, I long to belong to a club that would have someone like me as its member. And India’s constitutional promise, that strong nations can accommodate all manner of difference, seems like an invitation to the club. Modi wants to shake those convictions, upset those constitutional foundations. When he talks of decolonising India, he really means to straitjacket it. His Hindu nationalism, with its stifling uniformity, is colonialism by another name.

Modi has worked hard to push through his narrow, sectarian agenda, he has attempted to manifest the nationalist slogan “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. For a decade, Modi has had little opposition as he has set about remaking a polyglot, pluralist India into a restrictive religious state. The thing is, India was not intended to be a “homeland” for Hindus, as conceived of by the RSS. It was intended to be a model of how a nation could be founded on diversity, on shared values of plurality and making allowances for cultural, linguistic and religious differences. For me, despite India’s glaring flaws, its ideological commitment to difference is inspiring. And it’s exactly that commitment that Modi wants to undo. 

Perhaps language will be the rock on which his Hindu nationalist project will finally founder. Maybe English, once the calling card of the postcolonial Indian elite and a marker of status, will not be so weighed down by cultural privilege as tens of millions of Indians turn to English as the language of global commerce. Maybe English will become a practical means to preserve as many Indian languages as possible, so that one Indian language cannot assert supremacy over others, so that one way of being Indian is not legitimized over others. For me, English once signified my alienation from India, my inability to be authentically Indian. Now that attitude strikes me as profoundly misguided. There are innumerable ways to be authentically Indian, including claiming English as your mother tongue, and to say otherwise is to betray India’s most foundational postcolonial promise—to unite over difference, not be divided.

Postscript: While exit polls suggested Narendra Modi’s BJP would sweep the Indian elections, when results were announced on June 4, the party had failed for the first time in a decade to secure a parliamentary majority. Modi was forced to rely on coalition partners to become prime minister for a third consecutive five-year term, albeit with a much weakened mandate and ‘allies’ who had previously criticised his aggressive Hindu nationalist politics. The BJP’s most startling defeat came in the vast north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh -- a sign perhaps that even in the Hindutva heartland, voters are tiring of Modi’s divisive rhetoric.

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In the course of a 90-minute address, laden with emotion, exhortation and self-congratulation, Modi dwelled in passing on the continuing violence in Manipur, a state in the northeast of India. The “nation stands with the people of Manipur,” he said. A resolution to the problems, he added, could only be achieved through peace, a goal toward which the federal and state governments were working.

If the sentiments seem boilerplate compared to Modi’s usual mode of rhetorical excess, it is because the Indian prime minister has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking about Manipur. The small state, bordering Myanmar, has been in tumult since May, with at least 200 people killed during riots, over 60,000 displaced and with houses, churches and whole villages set ablaze.

As the leaders of the world’s largest economies arrive in India on September 9 for the two-day G20 summit, the culmination of India's presidency of the intergovernmental group, Modi is expecting to put on a show. Delhi, or at least its most prominent areas, is being given a hasty and glitzy makeover. But the gleam might be tarnished by deepening sectarian rifts Modi’s government cannot appear to get under control and might indeed have helped unleash.

Even the Indian army, sent in to quell the violence in Manipur, has struggled to cope. The fighting has taken place  between the largely Hindu Meitei people of the valley and the largely Christian Kuki tribes from the hills. It began over a high court order that granted Meitei people certain affirmative action rights, despite their existing political and financial muscle in Manipur. The complexity of the conflict is exacerbated by certain land laws intended to protect tribal lands in the hills,which the Meiteis say unfairly confine them to the valley. 

It is true that animosity between the Kuki tribes and the Meiteis in Manipur dates back over a decade, but the inability of the authorities to calm the current violence is due to the perceived biases of the Meitei-led state government of Manipur. Its chief minister, Biren Singh, a Meitei, has as recently as July 1 — nearly two months after the violence began splitting his state apart — been taunting Kukis on social media. “Are you from India or Myanmar,” he responded to a critic on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, before deleting his post. 

Meiteis allege that an influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar, mostly ethnic Kukis, are upsetting the demographic balance of Manipur and claim that the newcomers are cultivating poppy fields in the hills as part of a rampant drug trade.

During India’s recent parliamentary session, between July 20 and August 11, the opposition brought a motion of no confidence against the Modi government. It was, as expected, easily defeated. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a large majority and faced down a no-confidence motion in 2021 with similar ease.

Still, the motion provided an opportunity for the opposition  to criticize the government’s lack of response to violence in Manipur and to force both the prime minister and the home minister, Amit Shah, to address the issue. Shah, who continues to back Manipur’s chief minister Singh, parroted the line that Kukis, whose ranks were allegedly being bolstered by illegal immigrants from Myanmar, were largely responsible for the clashes. 

A mainstream Kuki group described Shah's explanation as “extremely unfortunate as it is largely speculative with no valid proof or evidence.” It went on to say that Shah, by making his "abhorrent, nonsensical and disastrous" remarks, had chosen to “sacrifice the Kukis at the altar of Biren Singh.”

Meanwhile, on August 10, Modi responded in parliament to the no-confidence motion. He spoke for over two hours. It took more than 90 minutes for him to even broach the topic of Manipur, by which time the opposition had walked out in protest.

Modi blamed the Congress party, the main opposition faction, for having mismanaged the northeastern region of India since the country’s independence from the British Empire was won in 1947. The Congress has governed for about 50 of India’s 76 years as an independent country and has been caricatured by Modi as a party grown rotten on power and assumed privilege. 

Despite being prime minister for nearly a decade, Modi scarcely speaks without blaming the Congress and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, for holding India back from its rightful status as a global superpower. In May, while Manipur quite literally burned, Modi was on a triumphant global tour, including trips to Australia and the United States where much was made of India's emerging power status.

“Blaming the Congress for everything that is happening in Manipur,” said Kham Khan Suan Hausing, a political science professor at Hyderabad University,  “is a bit far-fetched.” The “culpability and complicity of the BJP government,” he told us, “has to be called out.” Last week, Hausing was granted protection from arrest by India’s Supreme Court on charges that he had defamed the Meitei community in an interview with the Indian news website The Wire. 

According to Hausing, Shah has revealed his “gross incompetence and apparent lack of intelligence on the ground” by blaming the Kukis alone for the riots in Manipur. And Modi, he told us, “appears more interested in media management than in the structural causes of the violence.” These forthright views have made Hausing a target of what he calls a “smear campaign by vigilante trolls,” who have questioned his legal status as an Indian. It is a typical line of attack used against Kukis like him, Hausing says, who are derided as immigrants from Myanmar. “The smears smack of how ignorant and ill-informed public discourse is about citizenship.” 

Writing in the New York Times this month, the author Debasish Roy Chowdhury argues that “it’s a signature tactic of modern day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity and ostracizing others.” Any perceived slight against Modi is treated by his supporters, and often by Modi himself, as a slight against India. 

During his long speech decrying the no-confidence motion last week,  Modi said, in Hindi, that the motion had little to do with violence in Manipur but was instead an attempt to “defame India.” They “have no faith in the people of India,” Modi said of the opposition, “in the abilities of India. They have tried in vain to break the self-confidence of Indians with this no-confidence vote.” 

In his Independence Day address on August 15, Modi took a similarly proprietorial tone, referring to Indian voters as his family and offering personal guarantees of Indian success. It was, said the longtime Congress politician and leader Jairam Ramesh, a “crass election speech filled with distortions, lies, exaggerations and vague promises.” He added that Modi had made an annual address to the nation by its prime minister “all about himself and his image.”

Sharad Pawar, another longtime politician and major opposition figure, told the audience at a public rally on August 14 that the “Modi government has been a mute spectator to what has been happening in Manipur.” Modi was initially jolted out of that studied silence by a video that made global headlines last month of two Kuki women in Manipur being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a Meitei mob. Even then, he did not address the conflict directly, only condemning the assault as “shameful.”

The BJP then asked X to take the video down because it was fomenting further violence. In fact, the BJP-led government in Manipur has imposed a shutdown of mobile internet services in the state, which has been in effect since May 3. At the time of writing, services have still not been fully restored, causing untold economic damage with little evidence that the shutdown has served its purpose of lessening violence due to misinformation and rumor-mongering. 

If it seems surprising that the leader of a democracy can get away with saying so little about a sectarian war breaking out in a state, it is in keeping with Modi’s tried and tested strategy. Sectarian identity is increasingly contested in the BJP’s majoritarian, Hindu nationalist conception of India. While Modi talks about democracy and pluralism as formative parts of India’s identity on foreign visits, at home, nerves are fraying.

On July 31, even as the opposition was insisting that the prime minister address violence in Manipur before the parliament, sectarian riots were breaking out in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital Delhi. A procession organized by a notorious Hindu nationalist organization devolved into street fights as it passed through the district of Nuh. Just as outsiders, particularly illegal Kuki immigrants from Myanmar, were blamed by the BJP for fanning the flames in Manipur, Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were promptly blamed for the violence in Haryana.

Modi is fond of referring to “double engine” governments — his dream of BJP governments at both federal and state levels, working together to foster more development. Both Manipur and Haryana are run by BJP governments at the state level. The double engine seems to work, then, to reinforce the BJP’s political majoritarianism, its instinctive support for Hindus in any sectarian conflict. 

Peace and resolution in Manipur can only return, says Gaurav Gogoi, a Congress member of parliament, “when you can win people’s trust.” And that trust, he told us, speaking in Hindi, “can only be won when the BJP takes responsibility.” According to Gogoi, Manipur is still a tinderbox, despite Modi’s claims that peace is returning. He alleges that “6,000 weapons have been looted from police stations and not ordinary weapons but AK47s and bombs.” Gogoi, who led the no-confidence motion in parliament, told us that it is the BJP’s politics at both state and federal levels that has “split Manipur into two.” It is a pattern of division, he notes, that is evident in communal violence across India, including most recently in Haryana.

In his August 15 address to the nation, Modi said his time as prime minister had led to a “new trust, a new hope and a new attraction” toward India around the world. But if Modi is stoking hope abroad, there is evidence enough to say that he is stoking division at home.

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“Prime Minister Modi," declared Albanese, “is the boss!”

In the United States in late June, Modi's visit was afforded the highest level of ceremony, with President Joe Biden describing the relationship between the two countries as one of “two great powers that can define the course of the 21st Century.” Just last week, Modi was feted at the Bastille Day parade in Paris and was awarded France's highest national honor. It was, Modi tweeted, evidence of the “deep affection” the French hold for India.  

Beneath the diplomatic platitudes and expressions of abiding friendship, though, were rumblings of discontent with how Western governments are choosing to ignore the facts of Modi's divisive reign in India.

To wit, public conversation in India and most of the airtime devoted to news is currently dominated by a yet-to-be-drafted law intended to replace India’s diverse, religiously-based personal laws with a set of laws common to all Indians.

The so-called Uniform Civil Code has hung in the background of Indian democracy for decades. It is routinely trotted out, even in the country's Constitution, as the hypothetical answer to a bedeviling question — can a country of India's cultural and religious complexity be both pluralist and governed by personal laws applicable to everyone? Rather than trying to legislate on marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance and other matters that fall into the realm of what is sometimes described as “personal” law, British India deferred to particular communities to resolve these issues according to religious custom.

When India became an independent nation, Article 44 of the Indian Constitution expressed the hope that the “State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, brought all Hindus, and by extension Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, under a set of common laws. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis, and tribal peoples though, continued to govern themselves by their own separate sets of personal laws. 

In the decades since, the notion of a Uniform Civil Code, albeit without specifics, has frequently been invoked by governments as an ideal, a sympathetic means of uniformly applying personal laws to all Indians. Gender equality is frequently brought up as a likely benefit of a Uniform Civil Code. It has nonetheless been resolutely opposed and little progress has been made in conceptualizing an effective common law.   

Speaking in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last month, Modi chose to reopen the civil code can of worms. He alleged that people, particularly Muslims, were being misled by opposition parties about the nature of a Uniform Civil Code. Comparing India to a family, he asked if a household could effectively be run if different rules applied to each member.

This homespun truism was taken as an endorsement of a common law act. Though the government has offered no confirmation or timeline for a proposed Uniform Civil Code, its eventual application now is being treated as an inevitability. And it is a key principle of the Hindu nationalist ideologues to whom Modi is loyal. The panicked tenor of the subsequent debate shows how skeptical minority groups are of the Modi government's intentions.

Apoorvanand, a professor in the Department of Hindi at the University of Delhi, told us that the “Hindutva movement has never shied away from saying that the Indian way of life is Hindu and that the culture of all Indians should be Hindu culture, no matter what faith they follow.” It is, he added, natural, that “all religious minorities see it as a threat to their own traditions and customs.”

The prominent Indian Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde, famous for his strong civil rights positions, describes the Uniform Civil Code as it is currently conceived as an “imposition.” Despite the contentious debate over a common code, almost nothing is known about the possible provisions of such a code or how it might be written. “What we are saying,” Hegde told us about the position of the Uniform Civil Code’s critics, “is ‘show us a draft, show us how you would harmonize differences.’”

Hegde is alluding to the suspicion that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is gaslighting minorities. The calls for a Uniform Civil Code — “one nation, one law” as the sloganeers put it — appear reasonable, even egalitarian. But the BJP’s anti-minority rhetoric has sparked fear that this is yet another dog whistle, another round of anti-Muslim posturing disguised as progressive legislation. 

“What the idea of God is to an agnostic,” wrote the Indian scholar GN Devy in the Indian Express, “the proposal of UCC is to India. The idea in itself is absolutely superb. But as soon as one starts placing it in context, it starts looking less so.”

It is an argument that might be extended to India itself, under Modi’s rule. The idea of India, as presented by Modi to receptive leaders across the world, is superb. But in reality it is unraveling. Abroad, Modi argues before crowds of worshipful Indian expatriates and immigrants that India is a beacon of inclusive democracy. At home, his words and actions hew closely to an ideological commitment to aggressive Hindu nationalism, often at the expense of minorities and vulnerable communities, particularly Muslims.

Confronted by a reporter at the White House in June, Modi — who in nine years as prime minister has not given a single press conference in India — insisted that “democracy runs in our veins,” and that India's democratic values meant there was “absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Shortly afterwards, the reporter was viciously trolled online by Modi supporters who seized upon her perceived ethnic and religious background. The White House condemned the threats as “antithetical to the very principles of democracy.” The Indian government said nothing.

As Modi was showcasing India’s democracy and its potential as a steadfast global power, the northeastern state of Manipur was burning in riots that have led to the deaths of at least 150 people since May and displaced over 50,000. The cause — ethnic and religious violence catalyzed at least in part by the policies of the state’s majority-BJP government.

On July 13, the day before Modi was paraded across Paris on Bastille Day, the European Parliament called on the Indian government to respond to the violence in Manipur “in line with their international human rights obligations.” But Modi has remained largely silent about the civil war-like conflict in Manipur. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing French politician who has run unsuccessfully in the last three French presidential elections, said Modi was showing disdain for the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that were celebrated on Bastille Day.

The Uniform Civil Code is being promoted as necessary to consolidate equality and fraternity in India. But with little clarity about the substance of the law, Modi’s calculated references to the code have served only to generate more anxious talk about fault lines. Hegde, the Supreme Court lawyer, says that the common law debate had so far singularly failed to address the essential question: “As a new country, as a constitutional democracy post-1950, what kind of a nation are we building?”

India, Hegde told us, could choose a more harmonious path of seeking to accommodate difference. Or it could go down the path of “forcible integration, like the Han homogenization that happened in China.” He is referring to a systematic erasure of plurality that in effect turns India into a Hindu nation, a stated aim of Modi-supporting Hindu nationalists. 

According to Aakar Patel, the former head of the Indian chapter of Amnesty International — which stopped its operations in India in 2020 because of what Amnesty described as an “incessant witch hunt” against its staff and affiliates — the “BJP itself admits it's going to exclude large parts of the country from the Uniform Civil Code.” 

Fearing a backlash from communities with special interests, Sushil Modi, a BJP member of parliament and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Law and Justice, has said that tribal groups in the Northeast region and other areas should be exempt from any uniform code. As Patel told us though, “if there’s meant to be ‘one nation, one law’ and then you exclude the Northeast, you’re saying the Northeast is not part of the country.”

Patel insists that the Uniform Civil Code only reflects the BJP’s “negative single point agenda against minorities, particularly Muslims.” Indeed, much of the actual discussion about bringing Indians under a common law, in the absence of a draft bill, has revolved around Muslim polygamy and divorce practices. Sara Ather, a Delhi-based writer and commentator told us that the renewed interest in the Uniform Civil Code among Hindu nationalists was “yet another attempt to make the private realm of the Muslim woman a matter of never-ending public scrutiny and debate.” It has, she argues, “nothing to do with the upliftment of Muslim women but is only a tactic to establish that she needs intervention.”

The Law Commission of India has extended the deadline for public comment on the idea of a Uniform Civil Code to July 28, having already received over five million responses. In its letter to the Law Commission, a prominent Indian Muslim group wrote that the issue of a Uniform Civil Code was being used as a “lightning rod for polarization.” Some BJP governed states, particularly Uttarakhand — a small, mountainous state that is perhaps the earliest adapter of Hindu nationalist initiatives — have already announced their intent to draft a Uniform Civil Code.

It can be argued that without a national draft bill or any basis for a serious discussion in India about the shape of such a code, the polarization that its critics fear has already been achieved. And to Western leaders so eager to embrace Modi, the question will have to be put again, how long can they ignore the Hindu nationalist project to change the constitutional nature of a secular, pluralist India?  

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“People here, local people, just don't take it very seriously,” said Jambey Wangdi as he sipped on some fresh watermelon juice in a hotel in Tawang, a town in the state of Arunachal Pradesh that sits on India’s jagged eastern Himalayan border with China. He punctuated these words with a phlegmatic shrug. I had asked him how Arunachali people feel about being on the frontline of an intense, intractable and very current border dispute between two nuclear powers.

On June 21, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day “state visit” to the United States — an event that is slightly more ceremonial than an “official” visit and an honor typically reserved for close allies. High on the agenda will be both countries’ strategic need to counter China’s economic and military might and its regional assertiveness. India is being talked up by the Biden administration as the “cornerstone of a free, open Indo-Pacific.” But as the U.S. and India grow closer, the latter’s diplomatic relations with China have nosedived. “This is the worst time I’ve seen in my living memory in I-C relations,” tweeted Nirupama Menon Rao, the former Indian ambassador to both China and the United States. “And I’m not exaggerating. It’s serious.” 

On the eve of his visit to the U.S., Modi told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview, that for “normal bilateral ties with China, peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential.”  Last month, I traveled to  Tawang, which sits 10,000 feet above sea level and about 20 miles from Bum La Pass, the border post between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. China has long claimed Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism, as rightfully Chinese. I met Wangdi at a ritzy resort on the city’s outskirts. A high-ranking functionary in the Arunachal Pradesh government, he was keen to impress upon me the patriotism of people in the state. “Physically we may look a bit different, the shape of our eyes may be different,” he told me. “But emotionally, mentally, we really consider ourselves to be true Indians.”

According to Wangdi, the Indian government’s focus on improving infrastructure in the northeast of the country means that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang in particular are booming. As I drove up to Tawang from the plains on freshly paved roads, evidence was everywhere. Unfinished construction, scattered outcroppings of concrete mushrooms, marred the mountainscape. 

Even the hotel in which we sat was still only half-built. The yet-to-be-installed picture windows in yet-to-be-finished rooms will look out on a famous 17th century Buddhist monastery. Future guests will also see the 30-foot high gilded Buddha that towers over Tawang, a giant looking down on Lilliput.

It was an overcast day in the middle of May when we spoke, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Wangdi leaned back in his chair, every inch the local grandee, self-assured and hospitable. “As far as tourism potential goes,” he told me, “Tawang is at the very top.”

He says the speed and purpose with which Modi’s government is developing Arunachal Pradesh, gradually making the state accessible by air, rail and road, is guaranteed to create economic opportunities and to match the impressive progress on China’s side of the border. Oken Tayeng, a successful tour operator, told me that Arunachal Pradesh was now “at a crucial threshold.” The state, he said, “can still decide the kind of tourists it wants to attract.” He cites neighboring Bhutan as a model for “how to bring in high-quality tourists with little environmental impact.” 

But Tawang is not there yet. The rampant building spree appears ad hoc and unregulated amidst the coniferous hills and cascading waterfalls. Wandering through the center of Tawang — its shabby streets similar to those in dozens of other small Indian hill towns, with tourists from Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra haggling with vendors in Hindi — it is hard to understand why China believes that most of Arunachal Pradesh, and certainly all of Tawang, is theirs.

India’s traditional neighboring rival has been Pakistan. But it is India’s burgeoning rivalry with China that preoccupies security analysts, as the two Asian behemoths, particularly over the last three years, have become embroiled in a bitter, and at times violent, standoff along their 2,100-mile border. Neither country appears willing to take a step back or disengage. 

Though Tawang has been administered by independent India for 72 years now, China maintains that the town is culturally and historically a part of Tibet and therefore Chinese territory. Since 2020, China is estimated to have occupied almost 1,000 square miles of previously Indian-controlled territory in border regions. Satellite images show Chinese-built bridges, roads and watchtowers stretching several miles into what was commonly considered the Indian side of the so-called “Line of Actual Control.” 

Prime Minister Modi has vociferously denied any concession of territory to China. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat. They “have been martyred,” said Modi at the time. “But those who dared Bharat Mata (Mother India), they have been taught a lesson.” Such was the current strength of the Indian army, he added, that “no one can eye even one inch of territory.”

China did not officially disclose any casualties. It was the first loss of life for Indian and Chinese troops on the border since 1975. Another brawl broke out in the final weeks of 2022. On December 9, hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops faced off on the border near Tawang. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told the Indian Parliament that at least 300 Chinese soldiers had tried to cross over into territory held by India. The troops engaged briefly, with their fists and improvised weapons. Six Indian soldiers were reported to have been treated for minor injuries. To prevent fistfights from turning into firefights, India and China have had agreements in place for decades, committing not to use live firearms within a mile or so of the border. But both sides have now deployed arms, and as many as 60,000 troops each, to the border. The situation is “fragile and dangerous,” India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the press.  

Ashok Kantha, a former Indian ambassador to China, says that China has been “pushing the envelope” on border issues with India for over a decade now, seeing what it can get away with. These “gray zone” maneuvers, falling just short of a declaration of war, he told me, are “typical of China’s pressure tactics and intended to make India pay a heavy price for border management.” Kantha, who now directs the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, was referring to the exorbitant costs incurred by India to keep additional troops in harsh and remote terrain all year round and the costs of building the infrastructure to prevent what he called China’s “salami-slicing” method of incrementally expanding its territorial claims.

Writing for The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine, last October, Sushant Singh, a fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, pointed out that “perceived signs of weakness vis-a-vis Pakistan and China are anathema to Modi’s strongman image.” So the Modi government, Singh added, has adopted the “undemocratic domestic strategy of keeping the Indian public in the dark” by restricting “access to journalists and blocking questions and discussions in parliament.” 

Instead, the government and the pliant mainstream media have chosen to hype Modi’s “friendship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, the two famously sat together on a gaudy ceremonial swing in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. 

“Modi’s personalized diplomacy with Xi,” Singh wrote, “has been an abysmal failure.” Over the phone, Singh told me that despite Modi’s posturing about India’s status as a leading global power and Modi’s own status as a charismatic global statesman, the prime minister is fearful of escalating tensions with China.

It is an uncharacteristic diffidence. In February, India’s foreign minister metaphorically hoisted a white flag when questioned about border disputes with China. “As a smaller economy,” Jaishankar said, “what am I going to do, pick a fight with a bigger economy?” It was a discomfiting echo, from a key Indian cabinet minister, of the official Chinese contempt for India’s pretensions. “China,” Ashok Kantha told me, “sees its relationship with India through the prism of its larger rivalry with the United States.” 

Sushant Singh put it more bluntly. “China,” he said, “figures very highly in the Indian imagination. India hardly figures in the Chinese imagination.”

In the Chinese understanding of the global hierarchy, Singh told me, “India is too weak to be granted agency in its own right.” Instead, China thinks of its relations with India as a subplot to the main narrative: China plans to become the world’s preeminent power by 2049. As if to back up this reading, a major security conference held in Singapore in early June was dominated by talk of the rivalry between China and the United States. “A confrontation” between the two superpowers, said the Chinese defense minister, “would be an unbearable disaster for the world.” 

Talk of India, meanwhile, was relegated to a footnote. A Chinese colonel told journalists that India was “unlikely to catch up to China in the coming decades because of its weak industrial infrastructure.” In a dismissive aside, he asked: “When you look at the Indian military’s weapon systems, what types of tanks, aircraft and warships were made and developed by Indians themselves?” The answer is: none.

China’s confidence that it has the upper hand in its relationship with India is bolstered by the numbers. Its economy is nearly six times the size of India’s, and China spends about $225 billion on defense compared to India’s $72 billion.

It is India’s urgency in improving infrastructure in its border areas, in connecting once-isolated states like Arunachal Pradesh to the rest of the country, that accounts in part for China’s increased belligerence, Ashok Kantha told me. Back in Tawang, the construction equipment I saw strewn everywhere, the roads being scoured into the hills and the soldiers who outnumbered the tourists all told the story of India’s attempts to catch up to China.

Sushant Singh traces this development back to 2006, when the influential Indian foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, rejected India’s prevailing strategy of treating its border areas as “buffer zones between China and the Indian heartland.” It was, Singh told me, “an ‘outpost’ outlook inherited from the British.” Instead, Saran argued that India needed to radically upgrade its capacity along the border. It needed to put down hundreds of miles of new roads, lay railway tracks and build bridges and airports. From India’s perspective, this necessary self-assertion in the border regions has revived arguments that had lain dormant for two decades.

While India and China may have been growing further apart for at least 15 years now, the deadly fight in the Galwan valley in 2020 marked the start of what Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar has said is “a very challenging and abnormal phase in our ties with China.” In 2022, China introduced a new border security law, which described the territorial sovereignty of China as “sacred and inviolable.” It also made it official state policy to continue to expand and support the construction of villages and towns along border areas.

India, again belatedly reacting to China’s initiative, announced its own “vibrant villages” scheme to build settlements in long-neglected, often poor and desolate border areas. China has reportedly already built some 600 villages in occupied Tibet. It took until 2023 for India to begin building its first “vibrant village” in Arunachal Pradesh. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state this April to kickstart the program. “Whenever I come to Arunachal,” said Shah, “my heart is filled with patriotism because no one greets people here by saying, ‘namaste,’ they say, ‘Jai Hind’ (long live India) instead.” 

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded to Shah’s visit by saying it “violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” It was a reminder that China has no intention of relinquishing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh. While China claims the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh as its own, it is mostly Tawang that it prizes. “Tawang is indispensable to China,” a retired colonel in the Chinese army told the BBC in March 2023. In 2017, a former Chinese diplomat described Tawang as “inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” He added that the “boundary question was not created by China or India, so we shouldn’t be inheriting it and letting the ghosts of colonialism continue to haunt our bilateral relations.”

It all started, as have many of the world’s present-day territorial disputes, when the British drew a line.

In 1913, negotiations began in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where administrators would retire to escape the heat of the plains. Attending this summit were representatives of British India, Tibet and the new Republic of China — founded after the revolution in 1911 that ended about 275 years of Qing dynasty rule and 1,000 years of Chinese imperial history. Tibet, much to the chagrin of the Chinese representative, was invited as a quasi-independent state. After 1911, the British considered Tibet to be under Chinese “suzerainty,” meaning that Tibet had limited self-rule.

Negotiations played out over several months. When they came to a close, the British representative, Sir Henry McMahon, had determined where the border lines should be drawn between China and Tibet and between Tibet and British India. But China and Tibet could not agree on their border, nor on the extent or nature of China’s so-called suzerainty over a Tibet chafing for independence. 

A document signed by the Tibetans and initialed by Henry McMahon set out the contours of the border line between British India and Tibet, without Chinese agreement — the Chinese delegate walked out of the conference in its final phase. China has since claimed that Tibet, as a Chinese protectorate, had no right to negotiate treaties on its own behalf. The line dividing Tibet and British India, which later became known as the McMahon Line, continues to be the basis of India’s territorial claims. 

The Simla conference ended messily in July 1914, as Europe found itself preparing for World War I. For two decades after the conference, the British authorities did nothing to enforce the McMahon Line. Tibet still saw its writ as extending through what was called the Tawang Tract.

By the mid-1930s though, wrote the journalist and historian Neville Maxwell, a British official named Olaf Caroe tried to “doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference to make them support the assertion that India’s northeastern borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it.” Maxwell is a controversial figure in India, largely because he blames India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, for forcing China into the month-long Sino-Indian war in 1962 by insisting on the legality of the McMahon Line and refusing to come to an independently negotiated border settlement. 
What Maxwell took at face value, the Indian editor Pradip Phanjoubam has written, was that “Tibet was Chinese territory all throughout history,” regardless of what the “Tibetans themselves think on the matter.”

India and China in fact did not share a border until October 1951, when the People’s Republic of China — itself only established by Mao Zedong in 1949 — officially annexed Tibet. The British, despite drawing the McMahon Line, had largely stayed out of Tawang, leaving it to be controlled by Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But alert to the implications of Chinese aggression in Tibet, India sent an expedition to Tawang led by Major Ralengnao “Bob” Khathing who quickly and efficiently established Indian rule by February 1951. 

According to the scholar Sonia Trikha Shukla, Bob Khathing won over residents in Tawang, most of whom were part of the Monpa tribe, with his “tact, firmness and discretion.” He showed, Shukla said, the “benign, enlightened” face of the Indian administration some 37 years after Tawang was supposedly ceded to British India in Simla. China, perhaps preoccupied by the Korean War, didn’t object to India’s takeover of Tawang at the time.

But then, in 1959, there was a popular uprising in Tibet against Chinese control. Fearing arrest and possibly death, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, escaped over the Tibetan border into Tawang. When I visited the monastery in Tawang, I saw photographs in the tiny museum of a lean, young Dalai Lama wearing a hat at a rakish angle that made him look a little like the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in India for over 60 years now, set up the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the western Himalayas.

“When the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India,” wrote historian Jian Chen, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, China became hostile. Two “hitherto friendly countries,” he added, “became bitter adversaries.” According to Chen, when top Chinese leaders discussed Tibet in a Politburo meeting in 1959, Deng Xiaoping — who succeeded Mao in 1976 and transformed China’s economy — said that India was behind the Tibetan rebellion. China believed that the Indian government had allowed the CIA to train Tibetan guerillas on Indian soil, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. 

India, Mao argued, despite its non-aligned foreign policy, remained a slave to Western interests. “When the time comes,” Chen quotes Mao as saying, “we certainly will settle accounts with them.”

Those accounts were settled in 1962. While the rest of the world was distracted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the distinct prospect of the Cold War turning hot, a confrontation between India and China over border delimitations was becoming inevitable. Chinese forces crossed into Tawang on October 20, 1962 and overwhelmed the small number of poorly equipped Indian troops on the border. Prime Minister Nehru turned desperately to the United States and Britain for help. But before any international intervention became necessary, China called a unilateral ceasefire. 

After a month of territorial gains, China, perhaps concerned about the harsh Himalayan winter, perhaps fearful of American intervention, moved its troops back behind the McMahon Line. While China voluntarily retreated from Tawang and present-day Arunachal Pradesh, it retained control over Aksai Chin, about 15,000 square miles of barely populated, high-altitude desert, territory that India claims but that is of strategic value to China, connecting Tibet to the Uyghur Muslim heartland of Xinjiang.

During the 1962 war, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were removed from their homes and held in internment camps just because of the way they looked, much like Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Joy Ma was born in an internment camp in India in 1962. She wrote a book about the 3,000 Chinese-Indians imprisoned in Deoli, in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. I spoke to Ma, who now lives in California, and her co-author Dilip D’Souza on Zoom. Though the war in 1962 lasted only a month, Ma said, many “Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp.” Some died in the camp. “Some,” she wrote in her book, “were deported to China on ships — a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been.”

Ma told me that she grew up in Calcutta and had lived in India until she went to graduate school in the United States. After the war was over, her family couldn’t bring themselves to speak about what had been done to them. “The government was just so punitive,” Ma said. And, long after the war, even their neighbors would ostracize them. “People didn’t want to know us,” she told me, “didn’t want us to visit.” Ma is among a number of Chinese-Indians, most of whom have emigrated to North America, who are seeking an acknowledgement and an apology from the Indian government. 

It’s unlikely to come anytime soon. The war with China looms large in the Indian imagination — for decades after the war, the national tenor was maudlin, mournful, self-pitying but hardly introspective. India positioned itself as a victim rather than any sort of perpetrator. Apart from Ma and D’Souza’s book, there has been no public discussion of the internment of Chinese-Indians or contrition about the destruction of a once-thriving Chinese-Indian community. Only a few hundred Chinese-Indians are left in Calcutta, for instance. Yet every Chinese New Year the media descends on the city to broadcast pictures of dragon dances and celebrate the delicious, hybrid cuisine while resolutely ignoring the jailing of Chinese-Indians in 1962. Over the last three years, as India’s border quarrel with China rose in pitch and intensity, Ma told me, the small Chinese-Indian community has been reminded of its vulnerability and its perpetually provisional status in India. 

“The border,” Ma said, “is the reason for our misery.”

The aftershocks of the 1962 war continue to reverberate in India in other ways too. The abject defeat is a stick with which the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, still beats Nehru.  The war is cited as Exhibit A in the BJP-led prosecution of Nehru’s alleged failings as prime minister. A common trope in the BJP’s narrative is that Nehru was too complacent and too weak-willed to effectively defend India’s borders against Chinese incursions. In December 2022, when Indian and Chinese soldiers brawled on the border near Tawang, the BJP chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, offered some boastful reassurance at a private event. “It’s not 1962 anymore,” he said in Hindi. “It’s 2022 and we’re in the Narendra Modi era.” India could now be relied upon to keep China at bay. And part of how the BJP plans to boost India’s defensive capacities is to invest heavily in Northeast India.

While India prides itself on its linguistic and ethnic diversity, with its pluralism and democratic inclusiveness cited as major weapons in its competition with China, the far less palatable truth is that its union is fractious, riven with conflict and prejudice. In particular, the eight landlocked states of Northeast India, which share borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, have been frequently at odds with the Indian mainstream.  

Modi himself tweeted, on March 26, that the “Northeast is witnessing all-round development. Once known for blockades and violence, the region is now known for its development strides.”

A little over a month later, on May 3, Manipur, one of the Northeastern states that Modi was referring to, exploded in ethnic and sectarian violence that has resulted in over 100 deaths. After weeks of silence, the Indian government moved 10,000 soldiers into Manipur to keep the peace. Still, deaths and cases of arson continue to be reported. Internet services have also been largely unavailable since the conflict began and, at the time of publication, had yet to be restored.

Manipur is a powder keg of ethnic resentment at least in part because the BJP’s Hindu-centric approach stirs up communal trouble, in this case between the largely Christian tribes in the hills and the Hindu Meitei people in the valley. In Assam, another state in the Northeast, the BJP’s flawed attempt to build a national register of citizens has left two million people, many of them Muslim, facing statelessness. 

Still, in Arunachal Pradesh, it is a common refrain that Modi’s time in power has coincided both with an acceleration in infrastructure building and a renewed commitment to the region. Modi himself has visited Northeast India about 50 times in nine years. The fruits of his personal attention are evident in the recent electoral successes the BJP has enjoyed there: Modi’s party is now the dominant political force in the region.

In the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, I visited Thembang, an ancient Monpa village that is currently waiting to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. On the afternoon I was there, the village was deserted except for some thick-set mountain dogs and a drunk swaying precariously down some stone steps. Despite the poverty of the present-day village, the remnants of massive stone walls and gates betray a more salubrious past. For centuries, Thembang was a “dzong,” a fortified administrative and ecclesiastical hub. Dzongs have been a feature of Buddhist architecture since the 12th century, particularly in Bhutan, which also borders Arunachal Pradesh. They are places of local significance, places of business and bustle, politics and religion. 

Walking out of Thembang, I was stopped by Jambay. He only gave me his first name. Obviously prosperous and educated, he spoke fluent English and was eager for conversation with a passing stranger. His family line in Thembang, Jambay said, goes “as far back as it’s possible to go.” But, given the remoteness and relative lack of opportunity in the area, Jambay had been sent to school in Bangalore. He went on to work in the Indian civil service in Delhi. Now, Jambay told me, he had “turned full circle,” returning to his home village to work on a U.N.-sponsored conservation project. 

I steered our conversation toward his opinion, as an Arunachali in close proximity to the border, on China’s assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. Younger people, Jambay said, “know only that they are Indian.” His grandfather’s generation, though, saw themselves as Monpas who were part of a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist land, their cultural totems being the Tawang monastery and the Dalai Lama’s seat in Lhasa. Until 1951, when China annexed Tibet, trade and travel between Lhasa and Tawang — thousands of miles of mountain wilderness traversed on foot and on horseback — was ceaseless, Jambay said.

In 1962, Jambay told me, Chinese troops passed through Thembang on the way to Bomdila, where they battled with the last of the crumbling Indian resistance. The war “was not much discussed” within his family, Jambay said, “because it was so short and most people escaped into Assam before the worst of the fighting.” The few who were “left behind,” Jambay told me, “lived with the Chinese soldiers.” They were “good to the locals,” Jambay said. “Maybe because they wanted to win the people’s hearts.”

But the Chinese soldiers, Jambay said, did not leave a favorable impression. “Indian nationalism flourishes in Arunachal Pradesh,” he told me, “because people resent the Chinese for how they treated the Dalai Lama and are grateful that India gave him refuge.” 

But there is, he added, also a new edge in people’s feelings about Nehru and the Congress party, which ruled India for more than 50 of the country’s 75 years as an independent nation. The Congress is now in opposition, a pastiche of the grand party it once was, pitching Nehru’s great-grandson into a losing battle against Modi, who has effectively styled himself as the destroyer of a complacent, English-speaking Indian elite, which clung fast to their inherited privileges.

Jambay says Congress was reluctant to build infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh because it could also be used by the enemy, whether the Chinese or insurgents from within. “That,” Jambay told me, “is negative thinking, to not want to prepare yourself because you’re so worried about giving your enemy an opportunity.” Some of what Jambay refers to as “step-motherly treatment” is evident in the fact that, until 1972, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North East Frontier Agency, an unlovely bureaucratic label that suggested that the region only mattered as a buffer between India and China. It took until 1987 for the Indian government to declare Arunachal Pradesh a fully-fledged state.

As for Nehru, Jambay says he “gave up on the Northeast in 1962 when he said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam,’ after the Chinese took over Bomdila.” He is repeating, with conviction, the BJP’s main talkingpoints. The implication is that until the rise of Narendra Modi, the Northeastern states were not treated as fully Indian.

Any Indian visitor to Arunachal Pradesh will invariably remark on two things that appear to separate the state from its Northeastern neighbors. Pretty much everyone in the state speaks Hindi. And Arunachalis wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

Jambey Wangdi, the government official I met at the sparkling new hotel in Tawang, told me that people in Arunachal Pradesh are “taught Hindi right from their childhood.” The state, he said, “puts a lot of emphasis on Hindi speaking and Indianness.” Hindi has become a link language in a state with dozens of different tribes that speak in as many dialects. 

The Hindi spoken by Arunachalis, as Wangdi cheerfully admits, is not “grammatically perfect” and is spoken with a distinctive local accent. But it connects the state to the 650 million people in India who speak Hindi as either their first or second language. After the 1962 war with China, the Indian government made language integration a priority, promoting the study of Hindi in schools. Bollywood also hooked Arunachalis onto Hindi. “We love the songs,” Wangdi said, “we sing them all the time.” 

Throughout our conversation, Wangdi kept coming back to themes of Indianness and patriotism. He told me that his father was a junior officer in the intelligence bureau posted at the border in 1962. “You could make a movie about his life,” Wangdi said. Among the stories his father told about the war was one about Chinese soldiers helping farmers in Tawang to work their fields. “In the evenings,” Wangdi said, “the soldiers would gather people together and say, ‘Look at my eyes, look at your eyes. We’re the same. What do you have in common with those Indians with their big eyes, their big noses and their beards?’”

The point, for Wangdi, is that the Chinese soldiers thought external appearances were enough to engender solidarity and kinship. But they underestimated the Nehru government’s efforts to make tribal people, who were culturally Tibetan Buddhists and who were cut adrift in rough, remote terrain, see themselves as part of a vast Indian nation. 

Verrier Elwin, a British-born Indian anthropologist, advised Nehru on how to integrate the North East Frontier Agency and its unruly tribes into India. In Elwin’s slim 1957 book, “A Philosophy for NEFA,” he wrote: “Elsewhere in the world, colonists have gone into tribal areas for what they can get; the Government of India has gone into NEFA for what it can give.”

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government, so repressive in putting down insurgencies in other parts of the country, including the Northeast, seems to have created genuine national feeling. At the monastery in Tawang one morning, its yolk-yellow roofs glinting in the sun, I watched as the young monks, straight-backed in their robes, sang the Indian national anthem. It seemed to me almost performative. But Tongam Rina, an editor at the Arunachal Times, told me that Arunachalis had been systematically and effectively “Indianized.” 

In school, she said, pupils recited the “National Pledge,” which begins: “India is my country / All Indians are my brothers and sisters / I love my country / and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.” On WhatsApp, she forwarded me a recent tweet from the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister’s office, featuring a video of local schoolgirls singing a “soul-stirring patriotic song, filling the air with love for our motherland.” A hard-nosed journalist, Tongam told me that displays of patriotism should not mask the structural problems in Arunachal Pradesh — a lack of jobs, for instance, or the Indian government’s desire to mimic Chinese policies in Tibet by pursuing a narrow development agenda while ignoring its effects on the environment or on local people’s lives.

Nehru’s severest critics argue that it was his refusal to negotiate over the dubiously drawn borders bequeathed by the British Raj that pushed India into a disastrous war. The scars of that conflict mean that, despite the bellicose posturings of Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the government has little desire to take on a militarily and economically superior China. But for at least three years now, both countries have been staring each other down. And there is little indication of when they will choose to return to the dormant, if unresolved, status that characterized their border relations for half a century after 1962.

Sanjib Baruah, a political studies professor at Bard College, told me that “relations between India and China have deteriorated during the last decade primarily because of global strategic realignments.” As it always has, China sees its relationship to India only in the context of wider Chinese geopolitical ambition. President Xi Jinping, Baruah said, has expressed his belief that the U.S. and its allies are conspiring to contain further Chinese advancement. “This is the context,” Baruah added, “in which China sees India’s growing closeness with the U.S. as a threat.” 

In February, two U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Senate “reaffirming the United States’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of the Republic of India.” The resolution noted that the U.S. “recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.” China, said Baruah, the Bard professor, “probably sees the resolution as a provocation.”

The history of the McMahon Line, with the haphazard way it came to be an international border between India and China and the renewed fervor with which both nations claim Arunachal Pradesh’s status to be non-negotiable, is evocative of Benedict Anderson’s line in his seminal work, “Imagined Communities.” It is, Anderson wrote, “the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” To see Tawang as an integral part of either India or China is a willful act of magical thinking.  

Before I left Tawang, I spoke again to Jambey Wangdi. It seemed he too had chance and destiny on his mind. “If the problem of Tibet could be solved,” he said, “whether it’s autonomy or a free Tibet…” He trailed off. Wangdi left the tantalizing prospect of a free Tibet unexplored. He didn’t speculate what that might mean for Tawang, which is closely connected to Tibet through their shared Buddhism. In 1683, the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, one of only two to have been born outside the precincts of Tibet proper. So even then Tawang’s geographical status, if not its cultural identity, was liminal — a peripheral place between other, bigger, more significant places.

It feels like a place that was designed to provoke arguments. Tawang’s value to both India and China is symbolic: It’s about geopolitics, strategy and national self-image. As a consequence, Wangdi pointed out, “the amount of money spent on the military on the border is enormous.” If you have a good neighbor, he said, “you can spend that money on health and education.” If you have a good neighbor, he laughed, “you can get some sleep at night.”

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The undiplomatic language from an experienced diplomat was striking because he was referring to a BBC documentary about events from decades ago in one of India’s 28 states, albeit events that leave a deep, abiding and likely indelible stain on the reputation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Part One of the documentary — “India: The Modi Question” — was broadcast in the U.K. on January 17, and Part Two was broadcast a week later. Neither part has been screened in India.

Invoking “emergency” powers, India has blocked even the sharing of links to clips from the documentary on social media. On January 21, before Part 2 had been screened in the U.K., Kanchan Gupta, a former journalist and the senior advisor to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, described the documentary in a tweet as “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” as he announced the decision to block tweets and links “under India’s sovereign laws and rules.”

What so incensed the Indian establishment was the documentary’s revelations that a British government inquiry into communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 held Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, “directly responsible” for enabling three days of horrifying violence. The riots resulted in the deaths of a thousand people — nearly 800 of them Muslim, according to official figures. 

Modi was alleged to have told the police to stand down because Hindus needed to respond to the burning of a train by a Muslim mob (though the specifics of how the train caught fire continue to be disputed) that resulted in the deaths of 59 Hindu pilgrims and activists, including many women and children. They were returning from a religious ceremony in Ayodhya, the presumed birthplace of the Hindu god Ram and site of a disputed mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists a decade earlier. The veteran and respected Indian journalist and commentator Saeed Naqvi wrote in his 2016 book, “Being the Other: The Muslim in India,” that for “Indian Muslims, their place in Indian society changed radically after the Babri Masjid demolition.”

It was then, he argues, that the “whole charade” of Indian secularism was exposed and that prejudice against Muslims became easier to express, a process that some might argue reached its apogee when Modi was elected prime minister in 2014.

Modi has been prime minister of India for almost nine years. He is very likely to be elected for a third consecutive five-year term in 2024. He might have been forgiven for thinking the Gujarat riots were behind him.

In the aftermath of the riots, Modi was an international pariah. He was denied a visa to the United States in 2005 on the grounds that he was guilty of “severe violations of religious freedom.” Only when Modi became prime minister in 2014 was he able to return to the U.S. because, as a head of state, he was immune from prosecution. Modi’s immunity was cited when U.S. President Joe Biden made the controversial decision last November to grant immunity from prosecution to Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

As the prime minister of India, Modi has received rapturous welcomes in stadiums and convention centers in both the U.S. and the U.K., where a member of the House of Lords admiringly referred to him, in the wake of the controversy over the BBC documentary, as “one of the most powerful persons on the planet.” It’s the kind of image Modi likes to project. He is, he frequently says, the leader of a new, more assertive India, an India that is on the cusp of superpowerdom and unignorable wealth.

Protecting this image of himself and India might explain why the government reacted so sharply to a documentary about events that occurred long before Modi became prime minister. It is an indication that by describing the documentary as anti-India (though it is about riots in Gujarat), the entire apparatus of the government appears to be dedicated to spreading the message that Modi is India and India is Modi.

Hartosh Singh Bal, the political editor of the Caravan magazine, told me the BBC documentary was “journalistically sound.” (The Caravan and Coda have embarked on a publishing partnership over the next nine months.) Bal appears as a commentator in long stretches of the documentary and said that the response of India’s Ministry of External Affairs was “particularly stupid.” He added that the irony of Bagchi’s criticism of the BBC’s supposedly “colonial mindset” is that it reveals “how in thrall the government remains to Western media” and how “hypersensitive it is to criticism from the English-language international press.” 

If these criticisms had appeared in the Caravan, Bal argues, the blowback would have been less anguished, less wounded. As if to underline his point, a significantly more polemical and damning Indian documentary pointedly called “Final Solution” is available for Indians to watch on YouTube. It was made in 2004 and was initially banned. It has never been screened on Indian television, but, unlike the BBC film, it’s accessible without a VPN.  

Writing in the Indian Express, Vivek Katju, a former diplomat, deplored the government’s “paroxysms of pique” but largely endorsed a widespread Indian view that the documentary was mean-spirited and gratuitous, that it had “not taken into account that the Indian judicial process has fully exonerated Modi.” 

In fact, the BBC documentary does place on record, several times, that India’s Supreme Court has found that Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat, does not bear responsibility for the riots and, as recently as last June, reiterated that the failures of individual officials does not rise to criminal conspiracy. But a lack of clinching evidence does not mean Modi bears no moral responsibility for what happened.

And what is an observer of Indian politics meant to conclude when Modi’s closest ally, Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, tells a crowd in November, in their shared home state of Gujarat, that perpetrators of violence “were taught a lesson in 2002”? During campaigning for local elections in Gujarat, held in early December, Shah told a rally in Gujarati that under the rule of the opposing political party, certain people were used to getting away with violence but that Modi established permanent peace in the state. 

After the riots, judges in Gujarat mostly closed cases and acquitted those accused of killing Muslims. It was only after India’s Supreme Court intervened in 2004, describing the Gujarat government led by Modi as “modern-day Neros” who looked the other way while Gujarat burned, that the police were ordered to investigate cases.

Modi has never expressed remorse for the riots that happened under his watch. In a revealing scene in the BBC documentary, he tells a BBC correspondent that the only mistake he made was in failing to handle the media. 

India currently holds the presidency of the G20. Modi hopes to use it to showcase India’s growing importance on the world stage. The G20 presidency, he told the Indian Parliament at the start of its winter session in December, was an opportunity for the world to know India as “the mother of democracy, with its diversity and courage.”

Instead, the world is garnering a different impression of India, one in which journalists and free expression are increasingly imperiled. Reporters Without Borders now ranks India 150 out of 180 countries in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, down eight places from the previous year. Several people who refused to be interviewed by the BBC for its documentary, despite contributing significant reporting and research, told me anonymously that they feared the response of a vindictive government. 

And some who did participate told me they no longer wanted to speak about the documentary because they were being threatened with violence on social media. As Rana Ayyub, a journalist who has felt, and continues to feel, the wrath of the Modi government and its supporters for her outspoken views, tweeted: “This is not a good look for India.” For a government so concerned with its international image, it has succeeded only in bringing more attention to a BBC documentary that uncovers little that is new, little that Indian journalists have not already reported.

The post Modi does not want India to watch this documentary appeared first on Coda Story.

My parents moved from Bombay to Kuwait when I was six weeks old. We moved because the money was good, the living was easy, and it had none of the grime of India, the clamorous crowds in the cities we left behind. Their kids, my parents told themselves, would have better opportunities in the Gulf. Not that any of us had it all that hard in India. But India was not Kuwait.

Then, when I was 12, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, hardened by a ruinous, nearly decade-long war with Iran, annexed Kuwait.

I slept through the invasion, waking to the sound of the news on my shortwave radio, which my father had commandeered. This radio — an industrial slate-gray Grundig Satellit 650, stolid, weighty and unglamorous, “just like German girls” as my Calcutta-born, Germany-educated father would say — was a major presence in my life. 

This radio, or rather the hours I spent with my ear soldered to it, listening to the BBC World Service, was at fault for what my mother called my “Britification.” My Anglophilia had long made me the object of family scorn. Hobson-Jobson, or Suited-Booted, my dad would call me when he was feeling affectionate, “ingrej” (meaning Englishman, albeit spat contemptuously from the side of his mouth) when less so. 

Football was where my devotion to all things English was most manifest. I lived then for Saturday evenings, coming home from school — the weekend in Kuwait was Thursday and Friday — to coax from the radio’s bleeps and crackles the poetry of the classified football results, the sounds of those long lists of British provincial centers and market towns.

For all the evocative power of England’s various Wanderers, Rovers and Rangers, it was the Scottish teams that were unmatched for euphony. Cowdenbeath, Stenhousemuir, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South and, most stirring of all to my seven-year-old ears, Heart of Midlothian. Only the Scottish league could have produced, though it never did, such a scoreline as East Fife 5 - Forfar 4. Read it out loud for yourself.

My experience of football was more vivid because it was untainted by television coverage. What mattered to me were the stories, the lore and the private pleasures of the imagination rather than the community solidarity of following one’s local football club.

“Listen,” my father said, retaining, in the midst of crisis, the paternal imperative to needle his son, “it’s your prime minister.” Margaret Thatcher was denouncing the Iraqi invasion as “absolutely unacceptable,” her peremptory tone typical of the more fearsome teachers in my British school. 

My father thought the whole thing would blow over. “Bush and Thatcher won’t allow it. Saddam will pull out within a week,” my parents told me and my sister, told their friends, told our relatives around the world, told each other. After all, the previous day’s Arab Times, the bigger of Kuwait’s two English-language dailies, had announced on its front page that the problem “between brothers” had been settled. And then the Iraqis cut the phone lines.

In 1990, globalization was an idea gaining currency in academic circles. As cosmopolitan pre-teens, defined not so much by where we came from as by what we read, watched, heard and thought, you could say my friends and I anticipated the zeitgeist. So in that tiny, undistinguished country in the Arabian Gulf, I drank the British fruit cordial Vimto and ate Hardee’s roast beef sandwiches. I spread Danish butter on my toast and only ate Granny Smith apples. I loved “The Real Genius,” starring Val Kilmer, and also loved the movies of Satyajit Ray that I watched with my parents. I supported Liverpool Football Club. I listened to New Order and The Smiths and Gang of Four and Orange Juice. On my bookshelves, Tintin and Asterix comics shared space with Archie digests and Amar Chitra Katha. 

Such scattershot particulars, such quirks of personality, I understood. “Indian,” “Bengali,” I did not. My migrant parents — though migration is surely the ultimate expression of the individual over the community, over the ties that bind — still sought succor in a collective identity, in their sense of themselves as part of a community.

When my father joked that Margaret Thatcher was my prime minister, he knew that Thatcher, the leader of a country to which I had no ties that any immigration officer would recognize, might as well have been my prime minister, just as George H.W. Bush might as well have been my president, or Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah my emir, because I did not know what it meant to have such allegiances.

What he didn’t seem to know was that my Anglophilia was a result of moving to Kuwait, of flailing for identity in a country to which I could never belong. Identity, I knew from an early age, was nebulous, its edges as unruly as an ink stain.

India offered me my external identity, Britain my interior one and Kuwait was the metaphorical suburban bedroom in which I played out my fantasies. For our family, Kuwait wasn’t as final as emigration. It elicited no real grief, no loss. Even if it lasted years, decades, it was a temporary condition. Home was elsewhere.

Before the invasion, an exasperated teacher once accused me of daydreaming with the words: “You really do live in your own utopia.”

Looking the word up in the dictionary that night, I discovered that utopia meant “no place.” It occurred to me that I might be living in Utopia, in no place, nowhere that could be recognized as somewhere. Even at 10 years old, I viscerally felt the truth onto which my teacher had stumbled.

I knew I was “Indian,” a transplanted Bengali. I had an Indian passport. I ate regionally specific Indian food, like the fish curry Bengalis called “macher jhol” and, on weekends, “luchi and begun bhaja,” fried puffy flatbread and aubergine slices. My father was one of the founders of the Bengali Cultural Society, an outlet for Bengalis in Kuwait to put on plays, sing songs and make their children recite the nonsense verse of Sukumar Ray. It gave them a space to assert their identities and retain their connections to what Indians like to call their “native place.”

My parents had no difficulty filling the blank canvas that was Kuwait with the colors of the culture they left behind. What could be easier in Kuwait than pretending you had never left India? Your social life revolved not just around other Indians but mostly around Indians just like you, in terms not just of ethnicity, region, religion and language but class, education, even profession. Kuwait dented none of their cultural confidence. Their leisure time was filled with the Bengali language and Bengali food.

For me, though, Kuwait was quite literally no place. Children like me were not like the children of immigrants to the U.S., U.K., Australia and so on — children torn between cultures, negotiating a fraught terrain between the domestic experience and the world outside. We were instead bereft of culture. Bereft of cultural context.

My claim on India was almost as tenuous as my claim to Britain. And the unstated policy of the country in which I lived was to deliberately keep at arm’s length a population of expatriate workers that outnumbered citizens. With its broad boulevards and American fast-food restaurants with cheery signage, Kuwait looked and sometimes felt like an international airport.

The Iraqi invasion had little effect on my self-absorption. I felt no fear, no swell of sympathy for my few Kuwaiti friends, mostly teammates on the school football team, all of whom were still on their summer holidays in luxury hotels and yachts across Europe. I thrilled instead to the novelty of the invasion and the promise that the school term might not begin as scheduled. The early days of the occupation passed slowly. For news, we were reliant on the elusive shortwave signal for the BBC World Service. 

The only Kuwaiti we really talked to was Asrar Al-Qabandi, a young woman my mother knew who had been educated largely in the United States. Asrar was different from other Kuwaiti women. My mother had met and befriended her when she applied for a job at the playschool my mother ran. Asrar kept her hair short and usually wore baggy trousers. Her incorrigible habit of expressing her opinion made her unpopular with her family and a frequent visitor to our apartment.

Asrar used to complain to my mother about Kuwait, the country’s conservatism, the easy money that had made its people lazy and insipid, their lack of interest in education and their prejudices. She seemed to have few friends apart from my mother. Until the invasion, I had never heard her express any affection for Kuwait. I imagined Kuwait as a scab on her knee, irritating and unsightly but comforting to pick at.

Occasionally, the invasion would make its presence felt. We heard our parents talk anxiously about a close friend, a man with a pendulous belly and spry wit, who had been arrested in Iraq for carrying counterfeit dollars. Our parents panicked about their own dollars. These were bought at five times the usual rate and were the only currency Iraqis would accept in exchange for a plane ticket to Jordan, the only country that had kept its border with Iraq open.

Our encounters with the occupying soldiers were infrequent and sometimes farcical. As Indians, we were relatively safe in occupied Kuwait. We were of no interest to Iraqi soldiers, unlike Westerners who made valuable hostages and, for obvious reasons, Kuwaitis, small bands of whom, Asrar among them, were organizing and mounting a sporadic, flickering resistance. The stories told about Iraqi soldiers among Indians were mostly of buffoonery, tales tinged with condescension for soldiers stealing computer monitors they thought were TVs, for soldiers who were not Iraqi at all but bewildered Bangladeshi gardeners or Filipino drivers forced into the army as casualties in the eight-year war with Iran mounted. It was only after we left Kuwait that I read about the rapes and torture that happened during the occupation.

In the opening pages of “The Satanic Verses,” as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha plunge towards “Proper London, capital of Vilayet,” Salman Rushdie puts the words of a famous song into Gibreel's mouth:

O, my shoes are Japanese

These trousers English, if you please

On my head, red Russian hat

My heart's Indian for all that

For an Indian living in India, the song is about pride, jauntily nationalistic lyrics written for a newly created nation. In contemporary India, the song is relevant and resonant as a simultaneous embrace and rejection of globalization — some things, your heart and soul, are forever local. For the immigrant Indian, the song is a defiant but futile resistance. For the Gulf-based Indian, the song is matter of fact, an accurate expression of the expat life. Of course, your heart is Indian, whatever the imported fripperies of your new, materially comfortable life. What other choice is there?

But for the Indian expat’s child, the child put into a British or American school to suit their parents’ aspirational, upwardly mobile sense of themselves, the song seemed foolish, sentimental.

How do you keep your heart free from the influence of your shoes, trousers and hat? What does it mean to have an Indian soul? For me, the idea of an authentic self was muddied, perplexing. If you come from somewhere, a particular place, and you live there all your life, an authentic self that grows organically from your sense of place is something you take for granted, so strong and defining a part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine what could diminish that land-based identity.

For us, those cosseted children of Utopia, of no place, what could fill the place-shaped hole in our identity? It’s not that the question of where you come from becomes hard to answer, it’s that it no longer has any meaning. This is distinct from the struggle of the immigrant’s child to negotiate between the place to which they now belong and their “place of origin” so inadequately represented by the short, rickety bridge of the hyphen — Vietnamese-American, say, or Afro-Caribbean British. Or from the immigrant’s division between the place remembered and the place in which you found yourself.

Part of my love for English football was for its unabashed tribalism. I remember being in my neighborhood bookshop and coming across a copy of E.P. Thompson’s canonical text “The Making of the English Working Class” and begging my bemused father to buy it. I was too young to make any sense of what I was reading but I was powerfully drawn to the idea that an entire class of people could be “made,” as if you could pull a community whole from a kiln, as if a shapeless, shifting mass of individuals could be given contours, shape and coherence.

We left Kuwait in the last week of September 1990.

My father and some of the other men staying with us had arranged for a bus and a driver to take us to the southern Iraqi city of Basra and then on to Baghdad. At dawn, we arrived in the Iraqi capital, where we stayed at a hotel for a week before we were able to board a flight to the Jordanian capital Amman.

Bengalis are, of course, India’s doughtiest tourists. For that week in Baghdad we reverted to type, eating fish and chips on the banks of the Tigris, riding the creaky rollercoaster at the empty but functioning amusement park and visiting the National Museum. Reality, the reality in which we were refugees fleeing from Kuwait, a country occupied by Iraq, the international pariah in which we were now vacationing, only occasionally intruded — in the form of empty supermarket shelves and a tour guide who begged us for our cartons of chocolate milk for her baby because the powdered variety was all that was available in Iraq.

In Amman, we slept at the airport for one night before we were able to board one of the many free flights Air India had organized to transport Indian refugees to Bombay and safety. Two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were on a plane to India. I didn’t know then, still arguing with my friends about the relative merits of Liverpool and Manchester United, AC/DC and Iron Maiden, how lucky we were.

Smothered by relatives in Bombay, in my grandmother’s apartment bursting with books, art and furniture accrued over the course of entire lives of entire generations, I began to realize how ephemeral my life in Kuwait was, how thin my connection was to that place, or this place, or any place outside my own head. I was fascinated by Bombay, by its noxious drains, its rusting red double-decker buses, its panoply of streets. But I knew I didn’t belong in the city like my mother did.

Being a perpetual migrant might have been new in 1990. Today it is unremarkable. By 2020, some 280 million people around the world were estimated to be international migrants.

In “Identity and Violence,” the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen makes a forceful argument for the essential heterogeneity of identity, the value of each of the many parts that constitute the whole:

“The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

Wonderful as this passage is, my response is an impatient “yes, but…” The global response to such blithe cosmopolitanism has been the parochialism espoused by the likes of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and recently elected right-wing governments in countries like Italy and Sweden. Months after Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, then-Prime Minister Theresa May told a Conservative Party conference that if “you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

I know what she means. I am a middle-aged Indian man. I have an Indian wife and two Indian children. We live in India. My wife and I are both Bengali and, though neither of us is even slightly religious, our surnames place us safely among the Hindu upper castes that control India.

Protected by these markers of “Indianness,” my place in Indian society is unquestioned, even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi does the bidding of his ideological masters and remakes India from a pluralistic, secular nation into an increasingly belligerent, nostalgia-fueled Hindu nation. This state that makes life so difficult for the poor, the disenfranchised, the lower caste and the Muslim looks upon us with benevolence and avuncular affection.

It’s discomfiting to have spent so much time feeling out of place, only to find that it is the external, most superficial markers of my identity that both define and legitimize me in Modi’s new India.

All I have to do is keep my mouth shut, lest I give myself away.

Ensconced in India, ostensibly an unimpeachable citizen of somewhere, I remain indelibly marked by my years in “no place.” I have spent most of my life in cities to which I have no claim other than temporary residence. My perspective has been that of the perpetual, if privileged, outsider. It’s a common enough modern condition but, as former Prime Minister May argued, still suspect.

In a speech in 1993 — ironically in defense of greater integration with Europe — another former British prime minister, John Major, offered a lyrical, classically rural vision of “timeless” Britain. “Fifty years from now,” he said, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers... Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.”

Similarly, the real India, we are always told, is to be found in its villages. Indeed, only 35% of Indians live in cities. And in many of those cities we retain a parochial suspicion and fear of outsiders, of behavior that we consider strange and do not recognize as our own. Just a few years ago, for the first time in its long history, China became a predominantly urban society, with over 50% of its people living in cities. The 2009 documentary, “Last Train Home,” showed the toll of urbanization on one poor Chinese couple who work in a factory, cut off from their village, their growing daughter, their values and everything they’ve ever known or taken for granted. The annual trip home only emphasizes their alienation.

Yet their daughter, despite her parents’ unhappiness, abandons her own education to seek work in the city, drawn by that same desire for independence, for freedom from the social bonds of village life. India is headed in this direction.

Global cities remain vast agglomerations of outsiders. It is partly why these monstrous conurbations are so reviled. Back in 1987, Hanif Kureishi offered a stirring defense of London in “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” the movie he wrote, directed by Stephen Frears. Sammy’s father, a compromised Pakistani politician, points out that London is a “cesspit.” 

What can Sammy possibly like about this city? London is beset by race riots, poverty, violence and crime. “Well,” Sammy tells his father, “on Saturdays, we like to walk on the Towpath and kiss and argue.” It’s the beginning of a short disquisition on metropolitan pleasures. “Neither of us is English,” he says of himself and Rosie, “we’re Londoners, you see.”

Community feeling can emerge even within collections of outsiders. Kureishi’s London in the 1980s — resistant to authority, carnivalesque, an ad hoc and mutable community of outsiders — is distinct from the country around it. Major’s Britain is inimical to Kureishi’s London: one “unamendable” where the other is protean, one a sun-dappled, bucolic idyll where the other is unrestrainedly rough and urban, one faithful to what has been before where the other craves the new, the mixed, the composite culture of a city marked by migratory flows.

Shortly before the Allies began Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, I began my first semester at a boarding school in the Palani Hills in Kerala. In the library at my new school, I discovered in an issue of TIME magazine that my mother’s old friend Asrar had been arrested by the Iraqis. She had been shot, I read in one account, seven times in each breast and seven times in the vagina. In another, I read she had been shot four times in the head, once between the eyes, and that the right side of her face had been cut open with an ax. The accounts of the work she did for the Kuwaiti resistance — running guns and money from Saudi Arabia, destroying Iraqi communications systems, disguising herself as a cleaner to smuggle out vital records and documents from ministries now guarded by dozens of occupying soldiers — are impossible to reconcile with the small, bespectacled woman I remember. But even back then her size belied her spirit.

Asrar was hailed in death by her family as she had never been in life, hailed as a martyr for the cause of a country she had little regard for until it was taken away. I thought of Asrar in 2019, when young people in Delhi began protesting the Modi government’s exclusive, narrow, parochial view of Indian citizenship as expressed in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Before the pandemic forced them off the streets, the protestors, many of whom would have been unaffected by amendments aimed at Muslims and minorities, were fighting for an idea of India. An India forged in the constitutional ideals of plurality and democracy. They were saying, “We are not a Hindu nation.” We will not be refashioned into a theocratic state built on principles of exclusion and prejudice. Perhaps, like Asrar, these young people were motivated to fight for an India they saw was being taken away from them, to fight for the secular ideals with which they had grown up, whatever the failings of the state to live up to those ideals. 

In Modi’s new India, words such as “secular” and “plural” were to be jettisoned as the follies of governments past. But the protests did not reflect the smug cosmopolitanism of an elite diaspora or a cosmopolitanism that offered no challenge to the prevailing order. Instead, it struck me as a revivifying commitment to community as a cobbled-together, living thing that expands rather than contracts.

It showed me a path forward, out of a complacent, calcified nostalgia for my utopian “no place.” What I thought I missed growing up in Kuwait was community. In my hermetically sealed room, in my imagination unsoured, uninflected by experience, I tried to understand what it was to be a part of something larger than yourself, to belong somewhere and to claim it as your own. 

The wrongheaded answer I came up with was to fetishize the local, to fetishize community as a club from which I was excluded when — to borrow from Woody Allen borrowing from Groucho Marx — I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.

What I didn’t know was that communities cannot be so easily confined, so neatly shaped. That outsiders, too, can form communities. That outsiders, too, can find their place.

The post When globalization was king and home was elsewhere appeared first on Coda Story.

Argentina's gloriously gifted footballers in their famous sky blue and white stripes pumped the ball desperately into Saudi Arabia’s penalty area, hoping to tie the score. It was an astonishing upset against a soccer superpower. And for one moment, in the 12 years of arguments and bitter criticism since Qatar won the right to hold the FIFA 2022 World Cup, talk about the tournament was about soccer. 

It was how the organizers of this World Cup must have dreamed it would play out. A full and raucous stadium. Compelling action on the grass. Pan-Arab euphoria. An underdog victory that would clinch the argument that FIFA was right in 2010 to award the World Cup to a tiny petrostate with no meaningful football history, no suitable stadiums and not enough hotel rooms, and with labor practices so exploitative and grim that to discuss them you have to reach for terms like "human trafficking" and "slavery." 

The most vocal opponents of Qatar 2022 are human rights organizations that have documented the Emirate’s brutal repression of LGBTQ people, deadly exploitation of migrant workers and use of slaves. 

Qatar has erected a communications strategy to fight back against the mountains of evidence that it engages in precisely these practices by invoking the values its critics claim to value most: anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Last month, Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told a meeting of Qatari legislators that the country had been subjected to an "unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced." It has been rife with "fabrication and double standards," he added, and has "reached a level of ferocity" that has raised suspicions about the "real reasons and motives behind this campaign." 

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, in an unhinged hour-long address to the media, went further. "I think," he said, "for what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years, around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people." Infantino also accused Qatar's, and FIFA's, critics of "pure racism." 

Qatar’s public relations strategists and state-sponsored publications have aggressively promoted the idea that criticism of Qatar amounts to Islamophobia and racism against the Arab world. Writing in the Middle East Eye, Feras Abu Helal pointed out a British government press release celebrating nearly $2 billion in contracts secured by British firms to help with everything “from building new stadiums to cutting the grass and providing pitch-side security guards.” British expats, and Westerners generally, Abu Helal added, “are among the biggest beneficiaries of the unfair and unjust wage distribution in Gulf states, including Qatar.”

The global media spotlight was part of the reason Qatar wanted to host the World Cup. Football is a key component of the sportswashing efforts of Gulf countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Their investments in a handful of European clubs, with the full backing of European governments and football associations, have helped distort the game so profoundly that these superclubs no longer want the hassle of competing with the lesser lights in their countries as they have for over a century, yearning instead to reap billions from supranational quasi-exhibition games held in elephantine stadiums from Almaty to Zhengzhou.

It's not media attention that bothers Qatar, it’s losing control of the narrative.

Qatar has spent an astonishing amount of money to host the World Cup. First to ensure it was awarded the tournament and then to build the infrastructure necessary to host it — including a metro service, expanded airport and, to the north of the capital Doha, a brand new city in the desert that will eventually be home to 200,000 people. The organizers have spent an estimated $300 billion since 2010 to show Qatar off to the world. According to the discredited and corrupt former president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, Qatar even bought fighter jets from France so that French football officials would feel pressure to vote for Qatar's World Cup bid.

In exchange for its huge financial outlay, Qatar had expectations. Instead came the onslaught of criticism. A young Qatari woman we spoke to said that "specifically Westerners, like Americans and British people, have been milking the shit out of human rights violations." She was expressing the deep resentment many in Qatar feel at criticism they believe is “fueled by racism and hatred.”

“The West has a way of critiquing the Arab world and the Middle East whenever they have the opportunity, like there’s a target on our back,” a young Lebanese man who has lived in Qatar all his life told us.

Outside of Europe, many share the belief that Qatar is being singled out as much because of Eurocentrism and Orientalism as concern for labor rights. Gary Lineker, the former England striker and top scorer in the 1986 World Cup, opened the BBC's coverage of Qatar 2022 by describing it as "the most controversial World Cup in history."

The World Cup has been held in Mussolini's Italy, Videla's Argentina and, last time around, in Putin's Russia. 

In India, the Telegraph newspaper's editorial board responded with a sternly-worded rebuke to Western critics: "Qatar must be held accountable. But by holding it to standards no previous host has been held to, the West is revealing more about its biases than about authorities in Doha." On the Al Jazeera website, Tafi Mhaka, a Johannesburg-based columnist, wrote that "most Africans will stand with Qatar as it hosts the World Cup." Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari state. 

And U.S. anchor Ayman Mohyeldin on the left-wing network MSNBC criticized the "bombastic accusations" and "hyperbolic headlines," writing that "people have rightfully grown increasingly frustrated by Western moral arrogance and self-righteousness."

Happy to bask in paid-for praise from the likes of David Beckham, Qatari authorities become belligerent when asked uncomfortable questions. "Culture" and "custom" are wielded as weapons with which to silence dissent, as if to criticize homophobia or the treatment of women is the same as criticizing Arab or Muslim values, to criticize the authorities is to criticize the people and to criticize the lack of labor rights is to hypocritically ignore all rights violations in all other countries.

"Personally," says Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University who has written extensively on labor issues in the Gulf, “I don’t know anyone who's worked on these issues who isn't also critical of labor and human rights violations in the U.S.” Ross is barred from entering the UAE, where NYU has a campus, because of his work on the treatment of migrant labor.

The uncomfortable fact for the Qatari authorities is that the country's ability to host the World Cup at all is owed to the work of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers, largely from South Asia. These workers, as has been exhaustively documented, have been treated as indentured slaves. They're lied to, their passports are taken from them, they live in squalid conditions, they're underpaid and underfed, and they work in unsafe conditions both in terms of extreme weather and inadequate safety gear and protocols.

In response, Qatar has pointed to reforms it has made in consultation with the International Labor Organization since 2018, eight years after it was awarded the World Cup. Among its reforms was the institution last year of a minimum wage for workers of about $275 a month, or less than $3,500 a year in a country where the estimated per capita GDP is about $82,000. Quibbling over the exact numbers of worker deaths or "misleading" statistics seems like a tactic of distraction when you consider how awful conditions are in general.

Nonetheless, Amnesty International is attempting to persuade the Qatar government to pay up to $440 million in compensation to workers' families. Freedom United, which describes itself as "the world's largest community dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern slavery," commissioned a film by the Belgian-based Fledge as a call to action to back the movement to provide monetary compensation to families.

Diederik Jeangout, who made the minute-long film, told me that it "shows that every time a footballer falls during the tournament is an invitation to us to commemorate the workers who fell during the construction of the tournament's infrastructure." The players' faces in the film are pixelated to draw attention to the anonymity of the workers who died, to the absence of any record.

The Amnesty campaign, social media assets like Jeangout's film and other messaging infuriate the Qatari authorities. The country's labor minister has dismissed World Cup human rights campaigns. Describing "every death as a tragedy," the minister went on to ask reporters: "Where are the victims, do you have the names of the victims, how can you get these numbers?" He told the AFP news agency that Qatar's critics "know very well about the reforms that have been made, but they don't acknowledge it because they have racist motivations."

But labor reforms and regulations, argues NYU professor Ross, “are only good insofar as they are implemented.” There has to be a monitoring system, he told us, “because a lot of these declarations are lip service and rhetoric.” 

The deployment of racism as a counter to Western criticism of Qatar's labor practices is "breathtakingly cynical," Mukul Kesavan, a writer and columnist in New Delhi, said, "when you consider the racism so endemic to Qatar's labor practices." But Kesavan also argues that the "outrage of Western commentators shows a complete lack of self-awareness." Part of the reason Gulf states including Qatar "are so despised," he said, is because "they unmask the ease with which currency and respectability can be bought in the West." 

As Ross bluntly puts it: “They’re very, very rich and people want their money.” 

Western critics who "feel the need to periodically pay obeisance to their better selves," Kesavan told us, "ought to acknowledge that they are part of a sporting ecology that courts this money."He describes the nation-states of the Gulf as "imposters of modernity." With the World Cup, like the gleaming cityscapes designed by name-brand architects, the overseas campuses of prestigious American universities and the restaurants opened by celebrity chefs, "the Gulf is holding a mirror to the developed West and it doesn't like what it sees.”

Many who deplore the bias of Western coverage of the Qatar World Cup ask if the plight of laborers, not to mention domestic workers, will be of any interest to the West once the tournament is over. Will the rights of women and gay people in Qatar and the region matter any more? 

But the same question can be turned back onto Qatar. Will the World Cup only be remembered for that November 22 game in the sunshine at the Lusail stadium — around which a whole city of new buildings is being attached like barnacles on a whale — when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina and most every Arab, maybe even most every Muslim, felt a surge of pride? Or will the criticism, racist or not, prompt some self-reflection?

Right now, though, it seems everyone’s checking off their talking points but no one’s doing much listening. 

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