Much debate has focused on the many complex causes of the famine. One of the main factors, of course, was war. Britain had declared war on Germany on behalf of its colony India—enraging many nationalist Indian leaders who had not been consulted. After the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, Britain was also at war with Japan.

For the masses of rural Bengalis who were struggling to survive in impoverished India, war had already touched their lives. Inflation had made the price of rice—Bengal’s staple food—soar. Once Burma fell to the Japanese in early 1942, Japan’s cheap rice ceased to be imported.

Even before this, the rice supply was greatly curtailed, as hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers in Calcutta (now Kolkata) made their way to and from the Asian front fighting the Japanese. They, along with  factory workers in wartime industries, needed to be fed. They had priority status because of their role in the wartime effort.  

With the fall of Burma, the Japanese were on the border of Bengal. Having seen the Japanese’s rapid advance across Southeast Asia, colonial authorities feared that if Japanese forces were to invade British India, they would commandeer local food supplies and transport to fuel their incursion. The empire needed to be defended, so drastic action was taken. Boats from thousands of villages along the Bengal Delta were confiscated or destroyed. So, too, was rice. This was called the “denial” policy: to deny the enemy access to supplies. Not surprisingly, this scorched-earth policy strained the already fragile local economy. Without their tens of thousands of vessels, fishermen could not go to sea, farmers were not able to go upstream to their plots, and artisans were unable to get their goods to market. Critically, rice could not be moved around. The price of rice thus spiraled even further, and it was hoarded, often for profit. Then in October 1942 a devastating cyclone hit one of the main rice-producing regions, and crop disease destroyed much of the rest of the supply.

A famine code was initiated by colonial authorities to prevent mass starvation, but it was wartime, and few abided by it. Famine was never officially declared in Calcutta by the regional government or colonial authorities in Delhi, which would have compelled imperial authorities to send aid to the countryside. In fact, the word “famine” was not allowed to be reported in newspapers or pamphlets because of colonial “Emergency Rules” passed during the war. Britain feared that knowledge of the extent of hunger could be used by its enemies.

However, Indian journalists, photographers, and artists defied the censor. Chittaprosad Bhattacharaya was one. He traveled around Midnapore district using ink to sketch victims of the famine. The images are detailed and harrowing, of bodies being eaten by animals, humans who no longer look like humans. But the artist affords them dignity, writing their names when he could, and giving a sense of who they were, what they did, and where in Bengal they came from. He published the pamphlet in 1943 as “Hungry Bengal: A Tour Through Midnapore District.” Nearly all 5,000 copies were immediately confiscated by the British.

It was at this time, too, that Ian Stephens, the editor of the British-owned Statesman newspaper, was in Calcutta. As head of one of the largest English-language newspapers in India, Stephens faced a supreme moral dilemma: was his job to patriotically support the colonial authority during the war and not report on the famine? Or was his duty to tell his readers the truth about the horror unfolding on Calcutta’s streets, the famine that was sweeping across Bengal?

Stephens made his decision on August 22, 1943. He used a loophole in the censorship rules and published photographs showing emaciated people, close to death, on the streets of Calcutta. Papers soon sold out. It wasn’t long before news of the catastrophe unfolding in British India reached London and Washington. The famine in Bengal was now impossible to contain.

And this is where we get to the heart of the bitter controversy about the Bengal famine: the role of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and whether, once he knew about the famine by the summer of 1943, he did all he could to alleviate it. There are questions over whether his views on Indians—documented particularly by his Secretary of State for India Leo Amery—affected his response to the disaster. Discussions center on whether Churchill and the war cabinet could have released more shipping to send food aid, in the middle of the war, when they were fighting on many fronts. It’s an incendiary debate. Google the words “Bengal famine,” and you’ll see just how divisive the subject is.  

While people argue over the causes of the famine and Churchill’s response—both of which are important and necessary to explore—it has obscured discussion of the three million people who died. Three million. Think about that number. My work has been to excavate the stories of the last remaining survivors who have rarely been asked to tell their own stories. Eighty years on, it is a race against time to record them. There are eyewitnesses, too, who recall the cry of phan dao—asking for the starch water of rice, not even rice itself. They still recall with horror the scenes they saw, their helplessness, and sometimes the guilt they felt over not being able to alleviate all the suffering.

In Britain, the Bengal famine of 1943 is little known. Nor are the other famines that took place during the hundreds of years of Britain’s presence in India. It is an ugly chapter in Britain’s colonial history, one that mars the nation’s righteous narrative of fighting Axis powers. A deeper reckoning with the country’s imperial past has begun, however. The Imperial War Museum in London recently opened new World War Two galleries, and a small corner is dedicated to the Bengal famine, framing it within the context of the war. As of yet, though, the teaching of the Bengal famine does not figure in English students’ curriculum.

In India and Bangladesh, the memory of hunger remains and is relevant in policy-making. The story of the Bengal famine is told in literature and film, sometimes by eyewitnesses, but it has seldom been told by the survivors. One man, 72-year-old Sailen Sarkar, has been trying to record testimonies, pen and paper in hand, of those who endured the worst. Yet there is no official archive in India or Bangladesh for them—as there has been for those who lived through the partition of India, which took place four years later, in 1947, an event that arguably overshadows the famine in collective memory. War and colonial authorities are to blame for the absence of any official commemoration of the famine, but while Indians starved to death on Calcutta’s streets, other Indians never wanted for food, carrying on their lives as normal. Others profited from the situation. For some, this is difficult to acknowledge, even after all this time.

It’s over 80 years on now, and the interview of eyewitnesses compiled for the podcast Three Million has started a conversation in Britain. Within families it is emerging that people were witnesses or British families had ancestors who saw those distressing scenes too. It is a shared history, albeit a difficult one. But we are just at the beginning of coming to terms with it, and seeing it as part of Britain’s imperial presence and our war story. In India and Bangladesh, the famine is remembered as a legacy of Empire, but the survivors’ stories have been almost completely overlooked.

The British left India in 1947. Today, in 2024, we are still just beginning to learn what it meant individually, generationally, and collectively, as well as why it happened, and what were the forces responsible. There is one gaping hole that is probably too late to recover meaningfully, and its absence from the archive will be forever felt: the millions who were lost and survived the famine of 1943, one of the most devastating events of the 20th century. 

Three Million can be heard on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

Niratan Bewan

Niratan was married at the age of eight or nine. She believes she was around nineteen at the time of the famine. She was living in Nadia district in a village called Durgapur. 

After the cyclone and floods (in October 1942) everyone stopped eating rice. On good days, we would get boiled red potatoes for lunch. We used to forage greens from the ponds and canal sides and from the forests nearby and eat those as well, boiled and with salt. We were at least better off than many others. We had a bigha or two of land. The men worked on that land, and sometimes on the landlord’s land too. Those were one-anna, two-anna days. Like I said, we were better off than many others. At least we had something saved up. That’s why, even without rice, we had boiled aairi, boiled musoor dal or bhura to eat. It was a kind of grass seed that we threshed until we got little balls like sago and then boiled. That’s what bhura was.

In those days, the children who were born suffered a great deal. Mothers didn’t have any breast milk. Their bodies had become all bones, no flesh. Many children died at birth, their mothers too. Even those that were born healthy died young from hunger. Lots of women committed suicide at that time. Many wives whose husbands could not feed them went back to their father’s houses. If they weren’t taken back, then they killed themselves. Some wives ran off with other men. When their husbands couldn’t feed them, they went with whichever man could. At that time people weren’t so scandalized by these things. When you have no rice in your belly, and no one who can feed you, who is going to judge you anyway?

Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen was nine in 1943, living in Santiniketan with his grandparents, 100 miles north of Calcutta. He’d been sent there from Dacca to avoid potential Japanese bombings. 

A couple of my friends and I were told that there is a man who is being teased by some nasty kids. And so, we went there and tried to intervene. He was enormously emaciated, starving for many weeks, and he arrived in search of a little food for our school. Clearly he was not in good shape, mentally. And that is often the case when there is starvation. I hadn’t seen anyone really starving like that before where I would even begin to wonder whether he might suddenly die.

Amartya wanted to do something to stop the suffering. He asked his grandmother if he could give them rice. 

I asked “how much can I give?” So she took her cigarette tin and said up to half of it you can give but if we try to share a larger amount among all the hungry people that you will see in our street, you will not be able to cope with feeding them all. I gave it to people, sometimes even violated the rule of going beyond half a tin. It was a situation of nastiness of a kind that I had never encountered before.

One of those who came to the house was a young boy — just a few years older than Amartya.

He’d walked from his village. His name was Joggeshwar, and he was given some food.

He was an enterprising young boy from a very poor family from an area called Dumkar, that’s about 40 miles. And he said that unless I escape, I’m not going to get any food. And by that time, he was totally exhausted. He sat underneath a tree, with a little utensil and some food and ate it with the greatest of relief. And then he stayed a few days. And then he stayed on. He was a very good friend of mine. Very good friend. Yeah, he lived with us to the age of 88 when he died I think.

Pamela Dowley Wise

Pamela was sixteen and a member of the British colonial class. She lived off the busy Chowringhee Road in a large white art deco building, full of Indian servants. 

The house was an English sort of house, beautifully built and everything. We entertained people there because it had a lovely veranda where we’d have lovely meals and things like that. The Victoria Memorial is where we used to go because of the grounds. We used to have evening picnics there and we would have sandwiches and all things were done very properly, you know.

She remembers Calcutta filling up with Allied soldiers. She became friendly with some of them, as her parents would have an open house for British soldiers. She often took British soldiers by rickshaw to the local market and helped them barter. 

They couldn’t speak Urdu — and I could. And so if they wanted to buy something, I would go with them and bargain for them and help them to buy things. I remember [...] American and British soldiers were in our home and they used to come have dinner with us. And afterwards, we’d play the piano and sing the old songs, and happy days they were.

During the summer of 1943, the city of her birth completely changed, though her life of picnics at the Victoria Memorial, eating in restaurants, and going to her private club was unaltered.

There was no place you could go where you didn’t see dead bodies and vultures, it was revolting, actually. Because the vultures used to come down and eat these dead bodies. No, I mean, you couldn’t say I’m not going to the Victoria Memorial because there are dead people everywhere. There were dead people all over Calcutta. And when they died, they seemed to stay there. 

It was dreadful, dreadful. Yes, poor things. There’s nothing we could do about it. Because it was so vast, you see, but that’s what happened.

The post The Unveiling of a Horror appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

The post My mother tongues appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s never entirely clear who is behind the campaigns, or if they’re actively being coordinated. But the abuse tends to flare up during moments of political scandal in India. The country’s deepening ethnic and religious divisions under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi are plain to see in the digital realm. Trolling of minorities by supporters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is commonplace. India has used diplomatic channels to brand diaspora groups as terrorists, and has used digital channels to harass and disrupt potential opponents. Singh and other prominent Sikhs in the U.K. have received messages from X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — telling them that Indian authorities have demanded their accounts be blocked.

“I think most people have got fairly thick-skinned about these threats,” said Dabinderjit Singh, a prominent British Sikh activist and advisor to the Sikh Federation U.K., a lobby group. But then the killings began, and the threats got harder to ignore. In Pakistan, two prominent Sikh separatists were gunned down, one in January, the second in May. A third, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was killed in June in Vancouver, Canada, in what the Canadian government alleges was a state-sponsored assassination. A fourth plot was allegedly foiled by the FBI in the U.S. “Perhaps the situation is somewhat different now that those threats appear to be potentially real,” Dabinderjit Singh said. 

Adding to the sense of fear is the mysterious death of Avtar Singh Khanda, a Sikh activist based in the U.K.. Khanda, who had spoken publicly about receiving threats from the Indian authorities, died after a short illness in June. His family and colleagues are convinced he was poisoned and are demanding that the British authorities investigate his death.

British Sikhs are just the latest group to raise the alarm over the import of repression into the U.K. Uyghur exiles from China and democracy advocates who have fled Hong Kong have been aggressively targeted by people they believe work for the Chinese government. Iranian exile groups and media have been hit with cyberattacks and physical threats. Opponents of the Saudi and Emirati governments have been surveilled and harassed online. The multitude of cases show how authoritarian regimes are more willing than ever to reach across borders to target opponents living in western Europe and North America — and how much easier that has become in the digital era. 

Democratic governments have struggled to deal with these abuses, but perhaps none more so than the U.K., which is diplomatically diminished post-Brexit, gripped by constant crises, and increasingly authoritarian in its own politics. While the Canadian and U.S. governments have been vocal in their criticism of India’s transnational abuses, and worked to reassure the Sikh communities in their respective countries that they will be protected, the U.K. government has been deafeningly quiet. 

“Do one or two people have to be killed in the U.K. before our government says something?” Dabinderjit Singh said.

Transnational repression on British soil appears to be rising just as the U.K. navigates a world in which its exit from the European Union has left its economic and diplomatic powers seriously diminished. The government, now stacked with Brexit hardliners, is desperately seeking new commercial and political partners to help it deliver on the promised benefits of severing ties with the world’s largest trading bloc. 

All this has led to some uncomfortable compromises. It’s difficult to stand up to superpowers (see China) or petrostates (see Saudi Arabia) when you know you may need to rely on them for investment and trade. 

The U.K.’s particular vulnerability overlaps with an uptick in transnational repression globally, partly because technology has made attacks much easier to procure and to get away with. Lives lived increasingly online leave many openings for attack. Emails, social media accounts or cloud services can be hacked. Online profiles can be cloned or impersonated. Repression can now be performed remotely and systematically in a way that wasn’t possible back when intimidating exiles meant you had to physically infiltrate their spaces. It is also a lot harder to hold perpetrators to account. Online harassment campaigns can be dismissed as the actions of the crowd, and can be hard to definitively track back to a government actor. Perpetrators of digital surveillance too can be notoriously difficult to pinpoint.

These less visible components of transnational repression work in concert with more overt actions, often using international legal mechanisms, such as arrest warrants and Interpol red notices, to put pressure on people, limiting their ability to travel or access finances. To give themselves cover, authoritarian countries have often co-opted the West’s obsession with national security, echoing the excuses made by the U.S. and U.K. to justify their own adventurism. 

“The availability of the rhetoric around extremism and terrorism, which arose as part of the War on Terror, gives countries a common language to talk about people who are dangerous or undesirable,” Yana Gorokhovskaia, a research director at NGO Freedom House, said. “It’s a way of catching someone in a web that everyone understands as bad.”

Uyghur communities in the U.K. have long complained about abuse from abroad. They say their online accounts have been hacked, they’ve received threatening messages over WhatsApp and WeChat, and their family homes back in Xinjiang have been raided by police. As revelations about the Chinese Communist Party’s massive “reeducation” camps and forced labor facilities in Xinjiang have emerged, these threats have increased. 

China’s reach into the U.K. became even more intrusive in 2021, after the CCP’s crackdown on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997. The U.K. government — which in 2015 declared a “golden era” of Sino-British relations — failed to prevent the Chinese government from unwinding the “one country, two systems” principle that gave Hong Kong its democratic freedoms. But it did offer an escape route for Hong Kongers, more than 160,000 of whom immigrated to the U.K. on special visas. Among them were many prominent democracy campaigners and activists. 

Former Hong Kong politicians and activists now living in the U.K. told me that they have had their emails and social media accounts hacked and that they have been doxxed and, they believe, followed by Chinese agents. U.K.-based activists, including the prominent labor campaigner Christopher Mung and the former protest leader Finn Lau have been put on a wanted list under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, with bounties of HK$1 million ($128,000) offered for information that leads to their arrest. 

In April, NGO Safeguard Defenders alleged that the Chinese government was running unsanctioned “police stations” in British cities. Those allegations were picked up by the influential right-wing media as violations of British sovereignty, which seemingly prompted the government to start talking in more robust terms about Chinese interference in the U.K. 

But the response — under a U.K. government scheme called the Defending Democracy Task Force — is mostly focused on tackling the obvious national security challenges presented by transnational repression.

What it doesn’t address is core human rights issues, like protecting people’s rights to free speech, free association and freedom from harassment, said Andrew Chubb, a senior lecturer in Chinese politics and international relations at Lancaster University who researches transnational repression. Security agencies don’t have a mandate to deal with human rights violations on British soil, unless they present a risk to the state — meaning that victims aren’t necessarily treated as victims, but as “potential threat vectors,” Chubb said. People facing human rights issues need to take their cases individually to court.

Framing the response in terms of sovereignty and national security means that victims of transnational repression — and whether or not their rights are protected — are subject to the U.K.’s diplomatic interests. 

“India is important to the U.K.’s future strategy in the Indo-Pacific. And Saudi Arabia is important in the Middle East and as a buyer of weapons,” Chubb said. “There's a very strong interest to overlook human rights issues where they concern these countries, which have not been deemed to pose national security threats.”

Simply put, this means that if you’re being targeted by a country that hasn’t yet crossed the boundary from trading partner to geopolitical rival, you’re largely on your own.

The concerns of the Sikh community in the U.K. wouldn’t have reached a wider audience were it not for a brazen attack in Canada. On June 18, two hooded men shot dead Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh nationalist, in a Vancouver parking lot. Nijjar had supported the establishment of a Sikh homeland called Khalistan — an idea that the Modi government aggressively opposes — and he was known to be on an Indian government wanted list. In October, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused India of masterminding Nijjar’s death. The Indian government responded forcefully, expelling Canadian diplomats and denying its involvement. But a month later, the U.S. announced that it had foiled a plot to assassinate another supporter of Khalistan independence: Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen. The murder-for-hire scheme had been directed, U.S. Federal prosecutors say, by an Indian government official.

A week before Nijjar’s murder, Avtar Singh Khanda went into the hospital in Birmingham, U.K.. feeling unwell. Khanda, like Nijjar, was a vocal supporter of Khalistan independence, and his name was reported to have been included in a dossier of supposedly high-risk individuals that was handed to then-U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron by Modi in 2015.

Two days after Khanda was admitted to hospital, he was diagnosed with leukemia, complicated by blood clots. He died two days later. The coroner didn’t record the death as suspicious, but Khanda’s family and community couldn’t help but suspect foul play — acute myeloid leukemia, the form of blood cancer he was diagnosed with, can be caused by poisoning. For Khanda’s supporters, it was hard not to think of Russians like Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated with a lethal dose of polonium in 2006, or Sergei and Yulia Skripal, who were dosed with a nerve agent in Salisbury in 2018. 

“If it was a Russian that lived in Surrey or London, then the first thing people would think about was poison,” said Michael Polak, a barrister and human rights activist who is representing Khanda’s family. 

Polak says local police didn’t investigate the circumstances around Khanda’s death, despite his family’s pleas — something some Sikh activists say shows how little attention British authorities have paid to India’s adoption of the authoritarian playbook. 

Dabinderjit Singh, the activist, said the U.K. has been too quick to entertain the Indian government’s narrative that Khalistan separatists are terrorists and extremists. After the dossier that Modi reportedly gave to Cameron, a study was commissioned into Sikh extremism for the U.K. government-funded Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats. It found that there was “no threat to the British state or to the wider British public from Sikh activism.” But the idea of Sikh extremism nevertheless began to appear in government studies and news stories. In 2018, British police raided the homes of five Sikh activists in London and the West Midlands, a county to the west of London centered around the U.K.’s second city, Birmingham. West Midlands Police said at the time, in a tweet, that the raids were part of a counter-terrorism operation, “into allegations of extremist activity in India and fraud offenses.” No one was prosecuted on terrorism charges as a result of the raids.

While Indian media and the Indian government openly amped up the supposed threat of Khalistan separatism in the diaspora, there were covert efforts to discredit the movement. In November 2021, the Centre for Information Resilience, a London-based research organization, uncovered a network of fake accounts, “the RealSikh Network,” on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (now X), which pushed out messages portraying supporters of Khalistan as extremists. The aim of the network, the center said, was to “stoke cultural tensions within India and international communities.”

These tensions are rising in the U.K. Jasveer Singh said he has tracked what he believes are other attempts to drive wedges between Sikhs and Muslims in the Indian diaspora in the U.K. — social media disinformation that plays on lurid conspiracies about Muslim men grooming Sikh girls, and vice versa.

There are also signs that Modi’s Hindu nationalism is spreading to other countries with alarming consequences. Rising support for Hindu nationalism and the online demonization of minorities has already led to violence in Australia. In September 2022, Muslims and Hindus clashed in the U.K. city of Leicester. Analysts and academics have suggested the deterioration of relations between the two communities was partly due to the growing influence of right-wing Hindutva ideologies within the diaspora. Supporters of Hindu nationalism have routinely demonized Muslims in India, and tried to portray them as not really being Indian. 

The South Asian Muslim community in Leicester is largely of Indian origin. After the clashes in the city, the Indian High Commission in London issued a statement condemning “the violence against Indian Community in Leicester and vandalization of premises and symbols of Hindu religion,” making no mention of the violence against Muslims.

With an election coming in India, these kinds of tensions are only going to grow, Jasveer Singh said. “It's only a matter of time before we see serious incidents in the U.K., unfortunately.”

Singh said he feels that the Sikh community is a “political football,” being sacrificed to allow the U.K. to pursue its geopolitical aims. “We’re well aware this is tied up in trade,” he said. “It is kind of frustrating and suspicious that the U.K. government is keeping such a distance from saying anything, especially after we've seen massive floodgates opened by Trudeau and Biden. It’s like, now or never. So I guess it’s never.”

The post On British soil, foreign autocrats target their critics with impunity appeared first on Coda Story.

Mangnale is an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global non-profit media outlet. In August, he and his co-authors Ravi Nair and NBR Arcadio published a detailed inquiry into labyrinthine offshore investment structures through which the Adani Group — an India-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in everything from ports, infrastructure and cement to green energy, cooking oil and apples — might have been manipulating its stock price. The documents were shared with both Financial Times and The Guardian, which also published lengthy stories alleging that the Adani Group appeared to be using funds from shell companies in Mauritius to break Indian stock market rules.

Mangnale’s phone was attacked with spyware just hours after reporters had submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for their investigation, according to an OCCRP press release. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

OCCRP stated in a press release that Mangnale's phone was attacked with spyware just hours after it submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for its report. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

Gautam Adani, the Adani Group’s chairman and the second richest person in India, has been close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for decades. When Modi was campaigning in the 2014 general elections, which brought him to power with a sweeping majority, he used a jet and two helicopters owned by the Adani Group to crisscross the country. Modi’s perceived bond with Adani as well as with Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man — all three come from the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat — has for years given rise to accusations of crony capitalism and suggestions that India now has its own set of Russian-style oligarchs.

The Adani Group’s supposed influence on Modi is a major campaign issue for opposition parties, many of which are coming together in a coalition to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 general election. According to Rahul Gandhi — leader of the opposition Congress party and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has provided three Indian prime ministers — the Adani Group is so close to power it is practically synonymous with the government. He said Apple’s threat notifications showed that the government was hacking the phones of politicians who sought to expose Adani and his hold over Modi. 

Mahua Moitra, a prominent opposition politician and outspoken critic of Adani, reported that she had also received the warning from Apple to her phone. She posted on X: “Adani and PMO bullies — your fear makes me pity you.” PMO stands for the prime minister’s office.   

Mangnale, referring to the opposition’s allegations, told me that there was only circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Apple notification could be tied to the Indian government. As for his own phone, a forensic analysis commissioned by OCCRP did not indicate which government or government agency was behind the attack, nor did it surface any evidence that the Adani Group was involved. But the timing raised eyebrows, as the Modi government has been accused in the past of using spyware on political opponents, critical journalists, scholars and lawyers. 

In 2019, the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Meta, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court against the Israel-based NSO Group, developers of a spyware called Pegasus, in which it was revealed that the software had been used to target Indian journalists and activists. A year later, The Pegasus Project, an international journalistic investigation, reported that the phone numbers of at least 300 Indian individuals — Rahul Gandhi among them — had been slated for targeting with the eponymous weapons-grade spyware. And last year, The New York Times reported that Pegasus spyware was included in a $2 billion defense deal that Modi signed in 2017, on the first ever visit made by an Indian prime minister to Israel. In November 2021, Apple sued NSO too, arguing that in a “free society, it is unacceptable to weaponize powerful state-sponsored spyware against those who seek to make the world a better place.” 

What is happening to Mangnale is the most recent iteration of a script that has been playing out for the last nine years. India’s democratic regression is evident in its declining scores in a variety of international indices. In the latest World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranks 161 out of 180 countries, and its score has been declining sharply since 2017. According to RSF, “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis.”  

By May next year, India will hold general elections, in which Modi is expected to win a third consecutive five-year term as prime minister and further entrench a Hindu nationalist agenda. Since 2014, as India has become a strategic potential counterweight to runaway Chinese power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region, Modi has reveled in being increasingly visible on the global stage. Abroad, he has brandished India’s credentials as a pluralist democracy. The mounting criticism in the Western media of his authoritarian tendencies and Hindu chauvinism has seemingly had little effect on India’s diplomatic standing. Meanwhile at home, Modi has arguably been using — perhaps misusing — the full authority of the prime minister’s office to stifle opposition critics. 

The morning after Apple sent out its warning, there was an outpouring of anger on social media, with leading opposition figures accusing the government of spying. Apple, as a matter of course, says it is “unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications.” The logic is that such information “may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future.” But the lack of information leaves a gap that is then filled by speculation and conspiracies. Apple’s circumspect message, containing within it the possibility that the threat notification might be false altogether, also gives governments plausible deniability.

Right on cue, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of information and technology, managed in a single statement to claim that the government was concerned about Apple’s notification and would “get to the bottom of it” while also dismissing surveillance concerns as just bellyaching. “There are many compulsive critics in our country,” Vaishnaw said about the allegations from opposition politicians. “Their only job is to criticize the government.” Lawyer Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, described Vaishnaw's statements as an attempt to “trivialize or misdirect public attention.”

Finding that his phone had been attacked by spyware was not the only example of Mangnale being targeted after OCCRP published its investigation into the Adani Group's possibly illegal stock manipulation. In October, the Gujarat police summoned Mangnale and his co-author Ravi Nair to the state capital Ahmedabad to question them about the OCCRP report. Neither journalist lives in the state, which made the police summons, based on a single complaint by an investor in Adani stocks, seem like intimidation. It took the intervention of India's Supreme Court to grant both journalists temporary protection from arrest.

Before the Supreme Court, the well-known lawyer Indira Jaising had argued that the Gujarat police had no jurisdiction to arbitrarily summon Mangnale and Nair to the state without informing them in what capacity they were being questioned. It seemed, she told the court, like a “prelude to arrest” and thus a violation of their constitutional right to personal liberty. A week later, the Supreme Court made a similar ruling to protect two Financial Times correspondents based in India from arrest. The journalists, in Mumbai and Delhi, had not even written the article based on documents shared by the OCCRP, but were still summoned by police to Gujarat. On December 1, the police are expected to explain to the Supreme Court why they are seemingly so eager to question the reporters.

While the mainstream television news networks in India frequently and loudly debate news topics on air, there is little coverage of the pressure that the Indian government puts on individuals who try to hold the government to account. Ravish Kumar, an esteemed Hindi-language journalist, told me that few people in India were aware of the threat to journalists and opposition voices in Modi's India. “When people hear allegations made by political figures such as Rahul Gandhi, they can be dismissed as politics rather than fact. There is no serious discussion of surveillance in the press,” he said. 

Kumar once had a substantial platform on NDTV, a respected news network that had built its reputation over decades. In March this year, the Adani Group completed a hostile takeover of NDTV, leading to a series of resignations by the network's most recognizable anchors and editors, including Kumar. NDTV is now yet another of India's television news networks owned by corporations that are either openly friendly to the Modi government or unwilling to jeopardize their other businesses by being duly critical. 

Nowadays, Kumar reports for his personal YouTube channel, albeit one with about 7.8 million subscribers. A documentary about his lonely fight to keep reporting from India both accurately and skeptically was screened in cinemas across the U.K. and U.S. in July. 

According to Kumar, journalists and critics are naturally fearful about the Indian government's punitive measures because some have ended up in prison on the basis of dubious evidence found on their phones and laptops. Most notoriously, a group of reputed academics, writers and human rights activists were accused of inciting riots in 2018 and plotting to assassinate the prime minister. Independent analysts hired by The Washington Post reported that the electronic evidence in the case was likely planted. 

Some of this possibly planted evidence was found on the computer of Stan Swamy, an octogenarian Jesuit priest who was charged with crimes under India’s anti-terror law and died in 2021 as he awaited trial. Swamy suffered from Parkinson's disease, which can make everyday actions like eating and drinking difficult. While in custody, he was treated so poorly by the authorities that he had to appeal for a month before he was given a straw to make it easier for him to drink.

The threat of arrest hangs like a Damoclean sword above the heads of journalists like Mangnale who dare to ask questions of power and investigate institutional corruption. Despite the interim stay on his arrest, Mangnale still faces further court proceedings and the possibility of interrogation by the Gujarat police. In the words of Drew Sullivan, OCCRP’s publisher: “The police hauling in reporters for vague reasons seems to represent state-sanctioned harassment of journalists and is a direct assault on freedom of expression in the world's largest democracy.”

The post In India, Big Brother is watching appeared first on Coda Story.

“I was very afraid,” Ashraf said. “My kids were crying.”

Since May 29, there had been unrest in Purola. The local chapter of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several other right wing Hindu nationalist groups, had staged a rally in which they demanded that local Muslims leave town before a major Hindu council meeting scheduled for June 15. On June 5, Ashraf’s clothing shop, like the shops of other Muslim traders, was covered with posters that warned “all Love Jihadis” should leave Purola or face dire consequences. They were signed by a Hindu supremacist group called the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land.

The rally in Purola was the culmination of anti-Muslim anger and agitation that had been building for a month. Earlier in May, two men, one Muslim and one Hindu, were reportedly seen leaving town with a teenage Hindu girl. Local Hindu leaders aided by the local media described it as a case of “love jihad,” a reference to the conspiracy theory popular among India’s Hindu nationalist right wing that Muslim men are seeking to marry and convert Hindu women to Islam. Public outrage began to boil over. The men were soon arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, but her uncle later stated that she had gone willingly with the men and that the charges were a fabrication.

It mattered little. Hindu organizations rallied to protest what they claimed was a spreading of love jihad in the region, whipping up the frenzy that had kept Ashraf’s family up at night, fearing for their safety.

What is happening in Uttarakhand offers a glimpse into the consequences of the systematic hate campaigns directed at Muslims in the nine years since Narendra Modi became prime minister. Hindu nationalists believe that the Hindu-first ideology of the government means they have the support necessary to make the dream of transforming India into a Hindu rather than secular nation a reality. Muslims make up about 14% of the Indian population, with another 5% of the Indian population represented by other religious minorities including Christians. In a majoritarian Hindu India, all of these minorities, well over 250 million people, would live as second-class citizens. But it is Muslims who have the most to fear.

Not long after the events in Purola, Modi would go on a highly publicized state visit to the United States. “Two great nations, two great friends and two great powers,” toasted President Joe Biden at the state dinner. The only discordant note was struck at a press conference — a rarity for Modi who has never answered a direct question at a press conference in India since he became prime minister in 2014. But in Washington, standing alongside Biden, Modi agreed to answer one question from a U.S. journalist. The Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui was picked. “What steps are you and your government willing to take,” she asked Modi, “to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?”

In his answer, Modi insisted that democracy was in the DNA of India, just as it was in the U.S. For daring to ask the question, Siddiqui was trolled for days, the victim of the sort of internet pile-on that has become a familiar tactic of the governing BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters. In the end, a White House spokesperson, John Kirby, denounced the harassment as “antithetical to the principles of democracy.”

Modi has received warm, enthusiastic welcomes everywhere from Sydney and Paris to Washington. In every country he visits, Modi talks up India as a beacon of democracy, plurality and religious tolerance. But as India prepares for elections in 2024, and Modi expects to return to office for a third consecutive five-year term, the country is teetering between its constitutional commitment to secular democracy and the BJP’s ideological commitment to its vision of India as a Hindu nation.   
In a sharply worded critique of Modi’s state visit to the U.S., author Arundhati Roy, writing in The New York Times, noted that the State Department and the White House “would have known plenty about the man for whom they were rolling out the red carpet.” They might, she wrote, “also have known that at the same time they were feting Mr. Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in northern India.”

Roy was referring to the right wing Hindu rallies in Uttarakhand. On May 29, a thousand people marched across Purola, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — a phrase once used as a greeting between observant Hindus that has in the recent past become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists. During the rally, the storefronts of Muslim-run shops were defaced and property was damaged. The police, walking alongside the mob, did nothing to stop the destruction. Several local BJP leaders and office-bearers participated in the march. A police official later told us that the rally had been permitted by the local administration and the town’s markets were officially shut down to allow for the demonstrations.

As the marchers advanced through the town’s narrow lanes, Ashraf said they intentionally passed by his home. His family, one of the oldest and most well-established Muslim families in Purola, has run a clothing shop in Purola for generations. Ashraf was born in the town and his father moved to Purola more than 40 years ago. 

“They came to my gate and hurled abuse,” he said. “Drive away the love jihadis,” the crowd screamed. “Drive away the Muslims.” 

Among the slogans was a particularly chilling one: “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye.” They wanted an Uttarakhand free of Muslims, they said in Hindi. A call, effectively, for ethnic cleansing. 

Ashraf’s three young children watched the demonstration from their window. “My 9-year-old,” he told us, “asked, ‘Papa, have you done something wrong?’”

Forty Muslim families fled Purola, a little under 10% of its population of 2,500 people. Ashraf’s was one of two families who decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where will I go?”

The campaign in Purola spread quickly to other parts of the state. On June 3, a large rally took place in Barkot, another small mountain town in Uttarakhand, about an hour’s drive from Purola. Thousands marched through the town’s streets and neighborhoods as a loudspeaker played Hindu nationalist songs. “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega” — Every House Will Fly the Hindu Flag, Lord Ram’s Kingdom Is Coming. 

Muslim shopkeepers in the town’s market, like the Hindu shopkeepers, had pulled their shutters down for the day, anticipating trouble at the rally. As the mob passed by the shops, they marked each Muslim-run shop with a large black X. The town’s Muslim residents estimate that at least 43 shops were singled out with black crosses. Videos taken at the rally, shared with us, showed the mob attacking the marked-up Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd. The police stood by and watched. 

One Muslim shopkeeper, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described arriving at his shop the next day and seeing the large black cross. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.”

We spoke to dozens of people who identify with and are members of Hindu nationalist parties, ranging from Modi’s BJP to fringe, far-right militant groups such as the Bajrang Dal, analogous in some ways to the Proud Boys. Again and again, we were told that just as “Muslims have Mecca and Christians have the Vatican,” Hindus need their own holy land. Uttarakhand, home to a number of important sites of pilgrimage, is, in this narrative, the natural home for such a project —if only, the state could rid itself of Muslims, or at the very least monitor and restrict their movement and forbid future settlement. Nearly 1.5 million Muslims currently live in Uttarakhand, about 14% of the state’s entire population, which exactly reflects the proportion nationally. 

Hindu nationalists told us how they are working to create and propagate this purely Hindu holy land. Their tactics include public rallies with open hate speech, village-level meetings and door-to-door campaigns. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are essential parts of their modus operandi. These were tools, they said, to “awaken” and “unite” Hindus. 

Their attempts to portray Muslims as outsiders in Uttarakhand dovetails with a larger national narrative that Hindus alone are the original and rightful inhabitants of India. The BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, argues that India is indisputably a “Hindu rashtra,” a Hindu nation, nevermind what the Indian constitution might say.

With a population of 11.5 million, Uttarakhand stretches across the green Himalayan foothills. It is a prime tourist destination known for its imposing mountains, cascading white rivers and stone-lined creeks. It is home to four key Hindu pilgrimage sites — the sources of two holy rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna; and Kedarnath and Badrinath, two temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu respectively. Together, these four sites, high up in rugged mountain terrain, form a religious travel circuit known as the Chota Char Dham. According to state government figures, over 4 million pilgrims visited these sites in 2022 alone. Downhill, Haridwar, a town on the banks of the Ganges, is of such spiritual significance that Hinduism’s many seers, sages and priests make it their home. For Hindus in north India, Uttarakhand is the center of 4,000 years of tradition.

The state of Uttarakhand is also one of India’s newest — formed in November 2000, carved out of Uttar Pradesh, a huge, densely populated north Indian state. Its creation was the result of a long socio-political movement demanding a separate hill state with greater autonomy and rights for its many Indigenous peoples, who form just under 3% of the state’s population and are divided into five major tribal groups. These groups are protected by the Indian constitution, and their culture and beliefs are distinct from mainstream Hindu practice. But over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to better represent its Indigenous population to one molded and marketed primarily as “Dev Bhoomi,” a sacred land for Hindus. 

Since becoming prime minister, Modi has made at least six trips to the state’s key pilgrimage sites, each time amidst much hype and publicity. In May 2019, in the final stages of the month-long general election, Modi spent a day being photographed meditating in a remote mountain cave, less than a mile from the Kedarnath shrine. Images were beamed around the country of Modi wrapped in a saffron shawl, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged atop a single wooden bed. The symbolism was not lost on Hindus — the mountains and caves of Uttarakhand are believed to be the abode of the powerful, ascetic Shiva, who is often depicted in deep meditation on a mountain peak. 

Like other Muslims in Purola, Zahid Malik, who is a BJP official, was also forced to leave his home. We met him in the plains, in the town of Vikasnagar, to where he had fled. He said Hindus had threatened to set his clothing shop on fire. “If I, the BJP’s district head, face this,” he told us, “imagine what was happening to Muslims without my connections. For Hindus, all of us are jihadis.” 

Malik emphasized that Muslims have lived for generations in the region and participated in the creation of Uttarakhand. “We have been here since before the state was made,” Malik told us. “We have protested. I myself have carried flags and my people have gone on hunger strikes demanding the creation of this state, and today we are being kicked out from here like you shoo away flies from milk.”

For Malik, the irony is that it is members of his own party who want people like him out of Uttarakhand. 

Ajendra Ajay is a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, an influential post in a state dominated by the pilgrimage economy. “In the mountain regions, locals are migrating out," he told us, "but the population of a certain community is increasing.” He means Muslims, though he offered no numbers to back his claims. Nationally, while the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of other groups, including Hindus, it is also dropping fast. But the supposed threat of Muslims trying to effect demographic change in India through population growth is a standard Hindu nationalist trope. 

“Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land, its special religious and cultural character, should be maintained," Ajay said. His solution to maintaining interreligious harmony is to draw stricter boundaries around "our religious sites" and to enforce "some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus into these areas."

On our way to Purola, the thin road snaking around sharp mountain bends, we stopped at another hill town by the Yamuna river. Naugaon is a settlement of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom are rice and potato farmers. The town’s center has a small strip of shops that sell clothes, sweets and medicines. In another era, it might have been possible to imagine a tiny, remote spot like this being disconnected from the divisive politics of the cities. But social media and smartphones mean Naugaon is no longer immune. While technology has bridged some divides, it has exacerbated others.

News of the public rallies in Purola in which Hindu supremacists demanded that Muslims either leave or be driven out spread quickly. In Naugaon, a new WhatsApp group was created. The group’s name, translated from Hindi, was “Hinduism is our identity.” By the end of June, it had 849 members. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in the Naugaon market, was among the participants. “People are becoming more radicalized,” he said approvingly, as he scrolled through posts on the group.

People we met in Naugaon told us there had already been a campaign in 2018 to drive Muslims away from this tiny rural outpost. “We chased them out of town,” they told us.

Sumit Rawat, a farmer in Nuagaon, described what happened. According to him, a young Hindu girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker and was rescued by passersby who heard her cries for help. (We were not able to independently corroborate Rawat’s claims.) He told us that Hindus marched in protest at the attempted abduction. Their numbers were so great, said Rawat, that the rally stretched a mile down the market street. With little reporting of these incidents in the national press, people in cities are largely unaware of the rage that seethes in India's rural towns and villages. "We want Muslims here to have no rights," Rawat told us. "How can we trust any of them?"

In Dehradun, the Uttarakhand capital, we met Darshan Bharti, a self-styled Hindu “saint” and founder of the "Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan," or the Movement to Protect God’s Land. He was dressed in saffron robes and a string of prayer beads. The room in which we sat had swords hung on the orange walls. His organization was behind the posters pasted on shops in Purola owned by Muslims, ordering them to leave town. 

On June 7, with the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Purola still in the news, Bharti posted a picture on his Facebook page with Kumar, the state's police chief. Even as Bharti spoke of inciting and committing violence, he dropped the names of several politicians and administrators in both the state and national governments with whom he claimed to be on friendly terms. In the room in which we met, there was a photograph of him with the current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, among a handful of figures believed to wield considerable influence over Modi. 

Bharti also claims to have met Pushkar Singh Dhami, the Uttarakhand chief minister, the highest elected official in the state, on several occasions. He has posted at least two pictures of these meetings on his social media accounts. He described Dhami as his disciple, his man. “All our demands, like dealing with love jihad and land jihad, are being met by the Uttarakhand government,” Bharti said. Land jihad is a right wing conspiracy theory that claims Muslims are illegally encroaching on Hindu land to build Muslim places of worship.  

We met Ujjwal Pandit, a former vice president of the BJP’s youth wing and now a state government functionary, at a government housing complex on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It didn't take long for him to claim that Muslims were part of a conspiracy to take over Uttarakhand through demographic force. In Uttarakhand, he said, guests were welcome but they had to know how to behave.
Pandit claimed, as have BJP leaders at state and national levels, that no Muslims had been forced to leave Purola, that those who left had fled on their own accord. As the red sun set behind us into the Ganges, he said quietly, “This is a holy land of saints. Sinners won’t survive here.”

The post The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land appeared first on Coda Story.

In a dramatic operation that began as the sun rose on Delhi on October 3, police raided the homes of journalists across the city. Police seized laptops and mobile phones, and interrogated reporters about stories they had written and any money they might have received from foreign bank accounts. The journalists targeted by the police work for NewsClick, a small but influential website founded in 2009 by Prabir Purkayastha, an engineer by training who is also a prominent advocate for left-wing causes and ideas. 

At the time of publication, Purkayastha and a senior NewsClick executive had been held in judicial custody for 10 days. The allegations they face are classified under India’s 2019 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, legislation that gives the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity. 

Purkayastha, a journalist of considerable standing, is effectively being likened to a terrorist.

The day after the raids on the more than 40 NewsClick employees and contributors, a meeting was called at the Press Club of India. Among the many writers and journalists in attendance was the internationally celebrated, Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy. A longtime critic of Indian government policies, regardless of the political party in power, Roy told me that India was in “an especially dangerous moment.” 

She argued that the Modi government was deliberately conflating terrorism and journalism, that they were cracking down on what they described as “intellectual terrorism and narrative terrorism.” It has to do, she told me, “with changing the very nature of the Indian constitution and the very understanding of checks and balances.” She said the targeting of NewsClick, which has about four million YouTube subscribers, was intended as a warning against digital publications.

The Indian government had targeted NewsClick before, investigating what it said were illegal sources of foreign funding from China. For these latest raids, the catalyst appears to have been, at least in part, an investigation published in The New York Times in August that connected NewsClick to Neville Roy Singham, an Indian-American tech billionaire who, the story alleges, has funded the spread of Chinese propaganda through a “tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies.”

In the lengthy article, The New York Times reporters made only brief mention of NewsClick, claiming that the site “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” They also quoted a phrase from a video that NewsClick published in 2019 about the 70th anniversary of the 1949 revolution which ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China: “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes.” But it appeared to be enough for the Delhi police to seize equipment from and intimidate even junior staff members, cartoonists and freelance contributors to the site. 

Angered by the unintended consequences of The New York Times report, a knot of protestors gathered outside its New York offices near Times Square a couple of days after the raids. Kavita Krishnan, an author and self-described Marxist feminist, wrote on the Indian news and commentary website Scroll that she had warned The New York Times reporters who had contacted her for comment on the Singham investigation that their glancing reference to NewsClick would give the Modi government ammunition to harass Indian journalists. 

The “NYT needs to hold its own practices up to scrutiny and ask itself if, in this case, they have allowed themselves to become a tool for authoritarian propaganda and criminalization of journalism in India,” she wrote. 

While The New York Times stood by its story, a Times spokesperson told Scroll that they “would find it deeply troubling and unacceptable if any government were to use our reporting as an excuse to silence journalists.”

On October 10, a Delhi court ordered that Purkayastha and NewsClick’s human resources head Amit Chakraborty be held in judicial custody for 10 days, even as their lawyers insisted that there was no evidence that NewsClick had “received any funding or instructions from China or Chinese entities.”

India’s difficult relationship with China is at a particularly low ebb, with tens of thousands of troops amassed along their disputed borders and diplomats and journalists on both sides frequently expelled. From a Western point of view, India is also being positioned as a strategically vital counterweight to Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific region. Though diplomatic tensions are high, India’s trade with China has — until a 0.9% drop in the first half of this year — flourished, reaching a record $136 billion last year. 

While the Indian government continues to court Chinese investment, it is suspicious of the Chinese smartphone industry — which controls about 70% of India’s smartphone market — and of any foreign stake in Indian media groups. The mainstream Indian media is increasingly controlled by corporate titans close to Modi. For instance, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, who control vast conglomerates that touch on everything from cooking oil and fashion to petroleum oil and infrastructure and who have at various points in the last year been two of the 10 richest men in the world, also own major news networks. 

By March this year, Adani completed his hostile takeover of NDTV, widely considered to have been India’s last major mainstream news network to consistently hold the Modi government to account. Independent journalists and organizations such as NewsClick that report critically on the government are now out of necessity building their own audiences on platforms such as YouTube. Cutting off these organizations’ access to funds, particularly from foreign sources, helps tighten the Modi government’s grip on India’s extensive if poorly funded media. 

Siddharth Varadarajan, a founder of the Indian news website The Wire, said that the actions taken against NewsClick are “an attack on an independent media organization at a time when many media organizations are singing the tune of the government.” It was not a surprise, he told me, that Delhi police were asking NewsClick journalists about their reporting on the farmers’ protests in India between August 2020 and December 2021. “While the government says it is investigating a crime on the level of terrorism, the main goal is to delegitimize and criminalize certain topics and lines of inquiry.”

The allegations against NewsClick’s Purkayastha and Chakraborty are classified under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, controversial legislation intended to give the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity. Under the provisions of the act, passed in 2019, the government has the power to designate individuals as terrorists before they are convicted by a court of law. It is a piece of legislation that, as United Nations special rapporteurs noted in a letter to the Indian government, undermines India’s signed commitments to uphold international human rights.

Legislative changes introduced by the Modi government include a new data protection law and a proposed Digital India Act, both of which give it untrammeled access to communications and private data. These laws also formalize its authority to demand information from multinational tech companies — India already leads the world in seeking to block verified journalists from posting content on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — and even shut down the internet, something that it has done for days and even months on end in states across the country during periods of unrest. 

India’s willingness to clamp down on freedom of information is reflected in its steep slide down the annual World Press Freedom Index. Currently ranked 161 out of 180 countries, India has slipped by 20 places since 2014 when Modi became prime minister. “The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy,’” observes Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the ranking. 

Atul Chaurasia, the managing editor at the Indian digital news platform Newslaundry, told me that “all independent and critical journalists feel genuine fear that tomorrow the government may go after them.” In the wake of the NewsClick raids, Chaurasia described the Indian government as the “father of hypocrisy,” an acerbic reference to the Modi government’s boasts about India’s democratic credentials when world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, arrived in Delhi in September for the G20 summit.

When Biden and Modi held a bilateral meeting in Delhi before the summit began, Reuters reported that “the U.S. press corps was sequestered in a van, out of eyesight of the two leaders — an unusual situation for the reporters and photographers who follow the U.S. President at home and around the world to witness and record his public appearances.” Modi himself, despite being the elected leader of a democracy for nearly 10 years, has never answered questions in a press conference in India. 

Instead, Modi addresses the nation once a month on a radio broadcast titled “Mann ki baat,” meaning “words from the heart.” And he very occasionally gives seemingly scripted interviews to friendly journalists and fawning movie stars. 

As for unfriendly journalists, Purkayastha is currently in judicial custody while a variety of Indian investigative agencies are on what Arundhati Roy called a “fishing expedition,” rooting through journalists’ phones and NewsClick’s finances and tax filings in search of evidence of wrongdoing. Varadarajan of the Wire told me that the message being sent to readers and viewers of NewsClick and other sites intent on holding the Modi government to account was clear: “Don’t trust their content and don’t even think about giving them money because they are raising money for anti-national activities.”

Since my conversation with Roy at the Press Club of India on October 4, it has been reported that she faces the possibility of arrest. 

Delhi’s lieutenant governor — an official appointed by the government and considered the constitutional, if unelected, head of the Indian capital — cleared the way for her to be prosecuted for stating in 2010 that in her opinion, Kashmir, the site of long-running territorial conflict between India and Pakistan, has “never been an integral part of India.” A police complaint was filed 13 years ago, but Indian regulations require state authorities to sign off on prosecutions involving crimes such as hate speech and sedition. Now they have.

Apar Gupta, a lawyer, writer and advocate for digital rights, describes the Modi government’s eagerness to use the law and law enforcement agencies against its critics as “creating a climate of threat and fear.” Young people especially, he told me, have to have “extremely high levels of motivation to follow their principles because practicing journalism now comes with the acute threat of prosecution, of censorship, of trolling, and of adverse reputational and social impacts.”

A young NewsClick reporter, requesting anonymity, told me that “with every knock at the door, I feel like they’ve finally come for me.” They described the paranoia that had gripped their parents: “My father now only contacts me on Signal because it’s end-to-end encrypted. I could never have imagined any of this.”

Following the NewsClick raids, Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American Hindu supremacist ideologue, appeared on a major Indian news network to openly call for the Modi government to target even more independent journalists. Malhotra singled out the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a website founded by P. Sainath, an award-winning journalist committed to foregrounding the perspectives of rural and marginalized people. 

On what grounds does Malhotra suggest that the Modi government go after Sainath and PARI? The site, Malhotra told the newscaster, who does not interrupt him, encourages young villagers, Dalits (a caste once referred to as “untouchable”), Muslims and other minorities to “tell their story of dissent and grievances against the nation state.” 

Criticism of the nation and its authorities, in other words, is akin to sowing division. Whether it’s an opinion given in 2010 or a reference to Chinese funding within an article from a newspaper loathed by supporters of Modi and his Hindu nationalist ideology, the Indian government will apparently use any excuse to silence its critics. 

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On August 21, officers from India’s Intelligence Bureau visited the campus as part of what was meant to be a routine procedure to renew Ashoka’s license to receive foreign funds. But the questions that the officers asked instead concerned an academic paper that had cast the country’s ruling party in a negative light. They also questioned the “intent” of the professor who had written the paper.

Even before the visit by officials, the professor had resigned from Ashoka. It is just the latest example of India’s shrinking space for research and criticism. 

Nandini Sundar, a writer and professor of sociology at the University of Delhi, told me that the Modi administration has censured and put pressure on academics it believes threaten its Hindu nationalist agenda. “Academic freedom in India is under attack,” she said, “and has been ever since 2014,” when Modi became prime minister. The Academic Freedom Index 2023, which assessed academic freedom in 179 countries, placed India in the bottom 30%. The report included India among 22 countries in which standards of academic freedom had fallen. 

The Index also traced the beginning of the decline in India’s academic freedom to 2009, when the now-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were not in power. But the report noted that “around 2013, all aspects of academic freedom began to decline strongly, reinforced with Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014.” It concluded that “India demonstrates the pernicious relationship between populist governments, autocratization, and constraints on academic freedom.”

Bolstered by India’s recent feats in space research – becoming on August 23 the first country to successfully land a craft in the southern polar region of the moon – Modi likes to describe his government as being devoted to science and innovation. But it has little time for the humanities, or the social sciences, or any research that does not fit its definition of “progress.” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi and prolific commentator on political and cultural affairs, told me that the “real challenge is self-censorship by academics due to legitimate fears of reprisal by university administrations and physical violence by right-wing groups.” 

He said academics rarely have the freedom to design their own curriculum, and research scholars are told to avoid certain subjects. “There has been an unprecedented ideological bias in new hirings,” he told me, meaning that the BJP has been eager to place friendly academics on faculties and in positions of power in universities across the country. Students at Indian universities have been some of the Modi administration’s most dogged and committed opponents, with even the United Nations noting the Indian government’s propensity for using violence and detention to intimidate student protestors.

On July 25, the paper in question, written by Sabyasachi Das, then an economics professor at Ashoka, was posted on the Social Science Research Network website which publishes “preprints,” that is, papers which await peer review and journal publication. Das had reportedly presented his findings at a talk in the United States. Titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” the paper claimed to document “irregular patterns in 2019 general election in India,” comprehensively won by the Modi-led BJP, and to “present evidence that is consistent with electoral manipulation in closely contested constituencies.”

According to Das, the “manipulation appears to take the form of targeted electoral discrimination against India’s largest minority group – Muslims, partly facilitated by weak monitoring by election observers.”

Once news of the still unpublished, yet-to-be reviewed paper emerged on social media, it caused a political furor. M.R Sharan, an Indian economics professor at the University of Maryland, explained on X (formerly known as Twitter) that although Das’ “astonishing” new paper showed that the BJP had perhaps gained a dozen seats through electoral manipulation, this was a negligible number in an election in which the BJP won 303 seats, 31 seats more than the number required to win an outright majority in parliament.

But the impact on the results of the election or lack thereof was beyond the point, argued prominent opposition figures such as Shashi Tharoor, once a candidate for the post of secretary- general at the U.N. Das’ conclusion, Tharoor said, “offers a hugely troubling analysis for all lovers of Indian democracy.” The “discrepancy in vote tallies,” he wrote on X, needed to be accounted for by the government or India’s Election Commission “since it can’t be wished away.”

The BJP responded to Das’ paper with fury. On X, Nishikant Dubey, a BJP member of parliament, demanded to know how Ashoka University could permit a professor, “in the name of half-baked research,” to “discredit India’s vibrant poll process?” 

Das also became a target of online trolling by Hindu nationalists and BJP supporters. Ashoka tried to distance itself from Das, claiming it had no responsibility for “social media activity or public activism by Ashoka faculty, students or staff in their individual capacity.” By the middle of August, Das had handed in his resignation. It was quickly accepted by the university administration.

On August 16, student journalists at the university’s newspaper reported that a public meeting was held in which “students, alumni and faculty expressed their escalating dismay regarding academic freedom at Ashoka.” 

In an open letter to administrators posted on X, the economics department wrote that the governing body’s interference was “likely to precipitate an exodus of faculty.” The letter also warned that if Das wasn’t given his job back and the administration continued to interfere with research, the faculty “will find themselves unable to carry forward their teaching obligations in the spirit of critical inquiry and the fearless pursuit of truth that characterize our classrooms.”

But only a couple of days later, the fledgling protest fizzled out. The promised exodus or strike never happened. Only one professor resigned. Instead, the administration told students that the economics department had “reaffirmed its commitment to holding classes, a sentiment echoed by almost all other departments.”

The episode with Das isn’t the first time that the university has been embroiled in matters of academic freedom. The tacit acceptance of Das’ departure suggests that Ashoka, set up as a U.S.-style liberal university with private donors, continues to have  little stomach for confrontation with the government. 

In 2021, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a professor and former Ashoka vice chancellor, resigned from the university. Mehta, a public intellectual steadfast in his opposition to Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, was told that his presence at Ashoka was turning into a “political liability.”  His “public writing in support of a politics that tries to honor constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, [was] perceived to carry risks for the university,” he said. 

As far back as 2016, just two years after Ashoka University was founded, the Indian magazine Caravan revealed that the administration might have forced the resignation of staff members who had signed a petition protesting state violence in the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. 

Few academics at Ashoka are now willing to speak to journalists about Das or the issues of academic freedom that have surfaced since  the BJP’s angry response to his paper. Economist Jayati Ghosh, another prominent critic of the Modi government, wrote on X that she was “truly shocked at the lack of solidarity displayed by senior faculty” at Ashoka. “They have so little to lose from defending basic academic freedom,” she added. “Silence enables injustice, and it spreads.”

A professor at Ashoka who asked to remain anonymous told me that there were “plenty of caveats in Das’ paper and it had yet to go through rigorous peer review but the outsized reaction shows that the paper hit home.” Another liberal intellectual, who also asked to speak anonymously, told me that the paper questions the “most fundamental aspect of India’s claim to being a democracy – free and fair elections.” By continuing to send a message that academic insubordination will not be tolerated, they added, “the BJP is warning universities to control areas of research.” 

Mehta, who resigned from Ashoka in 2021, was also a former president of the Center for Policy Research, a well-respected Delhi think tank. In July, The Hindu reported that the center’s tax-exempt status and license to raise foreign funds had been revoked. Nearly 75% of its funds were raised abroad. In the absence of an official reason for the decision, the media has speculated that what might have led to the crackdown were the frequently combative articles that CPR staffers publish about Modi administration policies and the independent research that the center undertakes, which  has often contradicted the official government line. 

The BJP appears determined to stamp out criticism of Modi. In January, when the BBC broadcast a documentary in the U.K. examining Modi’s actions as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 when 1,000 people, most of them Muslim, were killed in riots in the state, the Indian government banned it from being screened in India. When students tried to organize public screenings in defiance of the ban, they were allegedly detained by the police and suspended by their universities. 

Academic freedom and the need to ask questions, it appears, is less important to Indian universities than appeasing the government of the day.

The post In India, academic freedom is at stake in a row over research appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

The post Sectarian violence in Manipur is a mirror for Modi’s India appeared first on Coda Story.

“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?  

The post A law intended to unite India splits the nation appeared first on Coda Story.

On the last day of Pride Month, June 30, the court ruled to allow discrimination, under particular circumstances, against same-sex couples. By a majority of 6 to 3, the Court agreed that a web designer who opposes same-sex marriage could lawfully refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is just one in a litany of recent legislative and political assaults on LBGTQ+ rights. Conservative legislatures around the world have been targeting LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender people, by denying them access to healthcare, dictating which public facilities are available to them, preventing them from speaking about their LGBTQ+ identities and, in the most severe cases, criminalizing their very existence. Here we reflect on Coda’s latest coverage of global LGBTQ+ rights and the trends these stories illuminate.

Florida, United States

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to target transgender youth through restrictive legislation, banning access to gender-affirming care to all children under 18 and dictating which books Floridians can read and which bathrooms they can use. 

Reporting from Tallahassee, Rebekah Robinson tells the story of one family whose lives have been upended by the state’s anti-trans legislation. Milo, 16, and his family have made the difficult decision to leave their home and move 1,200 miles away, to Connecticut, to ensure that Milo can continue to access the medical care he needs. 

It’s not just limited healthcare access that has forced Milo’s family to move. With the expansion of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Bill — the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — teachers in Florida can no longer discuss gender and sexuality in the classroom. In addition, trans people in Florida are now prohibited from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Florida may be only one state out of 50, but Republican legislation hostile toward transgender youth is popping up all over the U.S and will likely be a hot button political issue right up to the 2024 presidential elections. 

Russia

While Russia has recently dominated international headlines thanks to an attempted mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian legislature has also been quietly cracking down on trans rights. A bill is making its way to President Vladimir Putin’s desk that will ban all gender-affirming care for transgender Russians. 

Tamara Evdokimova spoke with Russian psychologist Egor Burtsev to understand what effects a blanket ban on gender-affirming care would have on the trans community. If the bill passes as expected, trans people in Russia will not be able to access life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to surgeries. This will trigger a nationwide mental health crisis and likely provoke violence against transgender Russians. 

Russia’s ban on transition-related care marks the latest escalation in Putin’s war against Western values. In November 2022, he signed a law prohibiting any activities that discuss or promote LGBTQ+ relationships. As Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine and further isolates itself from the West, vulnerable communities inside the country will face ever-greater risks of discrimination, violence and erasure.

India

Mirroring Vladimir Putin’s “family values” rhetoric, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also been advocating against LGBTQ+ rights when it comes to marriage, arguing that permitting same-sex marriage would undermine Indian values. Some Indians have profited enormously by appealing to long-standing prejudice in Indian society against LGBTQ+ people, a prejudice seemingly endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the government. 

Alishan Jafri reports from northern India to tell the story of Trixie, a young transgender woman whose mother pushed her to undergo conversion therapy with a YouTube guru. Santosh Singh Bhadauria, better known as the “YouTube Baba,” specializes in conversion therapy and livestreams “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. Similar to televangelists, Bhadauria is a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has persuaded his followers that he possesses spiritual powers. 

Conversion therapy is illegal in India, and anyone subjected to it, as Trixie was, can take legal actions against the likes of YouTube Baba. The court system might offer some recourse to trans Indians, but with a federal government that advocates conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ views, homophobia and transphobia continue to prevail in many parts of the country.

Uganda

In March, Uganda virtually outlawed LGBTQ+ identity by criminalizing same-sex relationships. The 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill imposes draconian penalties for engaging in same-sex relationships, discussing one’s LGBTQ+ identity and renting or selling property to LGBTQ+ people — and institutes the death penalty for sexual assault and for having sex with people under 18.

And this is not the only law targeting gay people in Uganda, Prudence Nyamishana writes. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, first proposed in 2021, targets Ugandans seeking fertility treatment by requiring them to be legally married in order to qualify for treatments. This bill heavily constrains the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ+ people who want to have children, as Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage. 

Both bills underscore a push among Ugandan legislators to align national laws with their notions of “morality,” rooted in Christianity — or, as the legislation’s opponents suggest, Christian fundamentalism. 

The post The global rise of anti-trans legislation appeared first on Coda Story.

In response, India’s national council overseeing the curriculum claimed that the revisions were a routine exercise intended to ensure that material was introduced at the “appropriate stage.” It did not explain how the textbooks were edited or by whom.

Much of the current debate in India is similar to debates that have taken place for over a decade in the United States, over intelligent design for instance — which argues that the world was created with intent and is dubiously presented as an alternative to evolution theory — and how politicians and state legislatures shape what is taught in public schools.

In 2018, a minister in the Indian government said that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong” because “nobody, including our ancestors, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.” A year later, the same politician said that he didn’t “want to offend people who believe that we are children of monkeys but according to our culture we are children of rishis.” A rishi is a Hindu sage or saint.

Controversy over textbook revisions in India are mostly about excisions from history, political science and sociology textbooks, as political parties in power seek to influence curriculums at both state and national levels. Science textbooks, however, have generally been spared. Indeed, an amendment to the Indian Constitution made in 1976, lists among the “fundamental duties” of every Indian citizen the obligation to “develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”  

On June 15, 33 Indian political scientists who have contributed to school textbooks wrote to the director of the national education council to demand that their names be removed as authors because “this creative collective effort is in jeopardy.” The omissions and deletions, they argued, had violated the “core principles of transparency and contestation.”

They had taken their lead from Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palsikar, eminent academics — Yadav is now a politician — who had complained just days earlier that the textbooks they had worked on, “once a source of pride,” were now a “source of embarrassment.”

I spoke to Palsikar on the phone and asked him about the politicization of Indian schooling and the intent behind textbook revisions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Following the spate of recent changes to textbooks, you've withdrawn your name as an author. Why did you do that?

When the most recent round of edits began last year, I warned that students wouldn’t benefit from these sorts of selective redactions. The edits subverted what Yogendra [Yadav] and I were trying to do when we contributed to the textbooks. We had to distance ourselves from the whole exercise.

The deletions are specific and seem to fit the governing party’s agenda. Though the official reason for revising textbooks is that the Covid pandemic has forced a reassessment of course loads, would you agree that there is an ideological motivation behind the revisions?

Yes, this is what we've been saying in our public expression of protest. If you closely follow the majority of the changes being made to textbooks in sociology, history and political science, they are being made to appease a certain political mindset. The revisions are ideological and partisan. They’re intended to satisfy the agenda of the ruling party. 

We don’t know who the people are who are making the edits, even though the textbooks display the names of prominent academics as authors and editors.

Yes, you’re right. Our names are on the books although we had nothing to do with the revisions. Students who read these books will think we’ve made these changes. That’s a lack of transparency. It appears as if our names are on the books to legitimize the process. We helped prepare these books back in 2006. We faced some objections and protests for political reasons, but no changes were made to our work. Now changes are being made to suit the demands by certain groups, and the national council that produces and monitors the textbooks is not being transparent. 

Do you think that the textbooks are being edited to appease the government’s “Hindu-first” nationalism?

‘Appeased’ is a mild way to put it. The edits are increasingly aggressive. In my view, the next step will be to overhaul the syllabus completely and to rewrite these textbooks under a new education policy. 

When you helped write the textbooks, there were strong passages about anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984 and anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Studying these riots were a part of the curriculum. But the public conversation about such issues now is so polarized.

Textbook writing and curriculum formation have always been very contentious issues. What we tried to do was remain as objective and factual as possible in our treatments of controversial, hotly disputed topics, such as riots or the suspension of civil liberties. Our thinking was that these are textbooks for 12th grade students. They’re going to be voters. We wanted to introduce them to debates in Indian political history and contemporary Indian life without being partisan. We thought that a model had been created in which you appointed experts and let them treat the subject with autonomy.

In 2006, we were shielded from any direct state interference because there was a monitoring committee between us and the government. There was some discomfort in government circles, but we didn't face a backlash as long as the facts were accurate. My colleague Yogendra Yadav has written about a meeting we had with the education minister at the time. ‘You do your job,’ he told us, ‘and the government will do its job.’ Nobody asked me to change anything in the text.

Do you think you would have the same autonomy under the Modi government?

It's a hypothetical question, so my answer is presumptuous. But I would argue that these recent redactions show that the national education council has lost its autonomy. I don't have any experience of working with this present government, so I’m basing my assessment on my observations of the pressure I believe is being put on the media and on academia. This government is interfering far too much. It is trying to control culture, and I doubt if I would be allowed to work on textbooks now with the autonomy I had in 2006.

The post India is rewriting textbooks to appease Hindu nationalists appeared first on Coda Story.

“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.”

The post India and China draw a line in the snow appeared first on Coda Story.

About a mile away, as the wrestlers were being violently restrained by the police, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was opening the country’s new parliament building, estimated to have cost  $120 million, in a controversial ceremony that was boycotted by at least 19 opposition parties. The wrestlers were marching toward the building to draw attention to their cause when they were stopped. They had already been protesting for weeks at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, a site designated for protests. But permission to protest outside the new parliament building, said the police, had been denied. 

For a little over a month, the wrestlers camped out at Jantar Mantar. They have alleged that Brij Bhushan Singh, arguably the single most powerful official in Indian wrestling over the last decade, has been sexually harassing young female wrestlers for years. The protesters include some of Indian wrestling’s biggest names — Sakshi Malik,the bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Vinesh Phogat, a medalist at the World Wrestling Championship in both 2019 and 2022, and Bajrang Punia, the bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Since it became an independent nation in 1947, India has won 30 Olympic medals, seven of them in wrestling. Medal-winning athletes are celebrated with fervor largely because there are so few of them in India.  

Brij Bhushan Singh, the man the wrestlers accuse of systematic sexual abuse, is a six-time member of parliament. He is an influential figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party.. Singh has the reputation of being a strongman who wields considerable political muscle in Uttar Pradesh, a vast northern state that is electorally crucial for keeping the BJP in power. In addition to his parliamentary duties, Singh has been the president of the Wrestling Federation of India since 2011. Though he was asked to temporarily step aside from his role at the Federation after the allegations came to light, he is still listed as its president on its website.

Since April 23, Indian wrestlers, including the sport’s biggest stars, have been living in a makeshift plastic tent and sleeping on mattresses laid out on the pavement. They have called for Singh’s dismissal from the Federation and for his arrest. “We have been sitting here asking for justice,” Vinesh Phogat told me. Their supporters point to the lack of action by the police, including delays in just registering a complaint, as evidence that the BJP is shielding Singh.

He has, the wrestlers say, been harassing young athletes, including at least one minor, for over a decade with impunity. When Sakshi Malik joined a training camp in the city of Lucknow in 2012, she told me, older wrestlers warned her that Singh “was not a good man, that he sexually harassed girls.” She described his predatory behavior as an open secret in the wrestling community. “The parents, the women’s coaches, the men’s coaches, everyone knew this was happening.” But, she added, he was so powerful that “no one had the courage to speak out against him.”

Phogat also told me that Singh would “harass almost every girl.” And that if the young women wrestlers resisted, Singh “would ruin their game” and subject them to “mental torture.” Many young women, Phogat said, “have left wrestling because of him.”

Paramjeet Malik, a former official physiotherapist of the Wrestling Federation of India, said he was aware that Singh harassed women. He told me that in 2014, three young wrestlers had confided in him that they had been sexually harassed by Singh. Malik lived with the athletes at the training camp in Lucknow that year. He told me that, on several occasions, he had noticed a car that he knew belonged to Singh stop at the camp to pick up women wrestlers. “I saw them leaving the camp at night, after eleven, or sometimes at midnight,” he told me. When he asked the girls what was going on, he said, some of them broke down and told him that they were being called to Singh’s residence in the city.

If they refused to go, Malik told me, they were told that Singh “would have their names removed from the camp’s list, that they would be declared unfit, that their careers would be ruined.” Some of these girls, he said, were under 18 and came from low-income backgrounds. Sport, to them and their families, was a way out of poverty. Malik said he made a written complaint to a senior coach at the camp but no action was taken. Malik alleges that when he spoke to the media about Singh’s behavior, he was fired. According to Malik, the coach who fired him admitted that he had been receiving calls from Singh himself. The coach warned Malik that Singh was a powerful man and that Malik’s life could be in danger if he persisted. “That very night,” Malik told me, “we had to flee the camp.”

The three star wrestlers leading the current protests — Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia — said they believed they had reached a level of recognition that finally empowered them to take on Singh and stop the abuse. The trigger, Malik told me, was when she heard that 10 women had been harassed by Singh after a recent junior world championship. A few of the young women spoke directly to Malik. She said she had to speak up. “Enough was enough,” Malik told me, “we didn’t want coming generations of women to have to face the same thing.” 

On April 21, seven women wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints against Singh at a Delhi police station. Their identities have not been publicly revealed. The women listed specific incidents of harassment between 2012 and 2022 and said they occurred at Singh’s official parliamentary residence in Delhi and during tournaments in India and abroad. The Indian Express newspaper reported that, in at least two complaints, the women described in detail how Singh touched them inappropriately on the pretext of checking their breath.

However, the Delhi police did not immediately register a case against Singh. The police in the Indian capital operate under the authority of India’s Home Ministry — as part of the federal, rather than local, government. India’s current home minister is Amit Shah, and he is effectively second only to Modi in the hierarchy of both the government and the BJP. 

When the police failed to take note of their complaint, the wrestlers filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for a police probe. Only after the court intervened did the Delhi police register two complaints against Singh. One of these complaints was from a minor and filed under India’s stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act — a guilty verdict under the act results in, at minimum, a five-year sentence.

Singh denies all allegations and says he is willing “to be hanged” if found guilty. He has called the wrestlers’ protests “politically motivated.” Over the last month, several leaders from India’s opposition parties have visited the wrestlers’ sit-in to extend solidarity. Singh has since described the athletes as “toys” in the hands of opposition parties.

“Sexual harassment is not a political issue,” Phogat told me. She said it was Singh who was trying to make their complaints about politics in a bid to “save himself.” The wrestlers, Phogat said, have put their careers on the line for their cause. “We have some respect, some standing in the country,” she told me. “Something must have happened for us to be here.”

Phogat pointed to the U.S. gymnast Simone Biles, who testified against the U.S. national gymnastics team’s doctor Larry Nassar — accused of sexual abuse by more than 100 women. “When Simone Biles spoke up against sexual harassment,” Phogat said, “did they call her political?” She described Singh as India’s Larry Nassar. “There are many Larry Nassars here,” she told me, “not just one, but at least we are taking on one now.”

Kavita Krishnan, a feminist activist and writer, says that the BJP is “backing their leader” in a “brazen and shameless” way. “The ruling party has not distanced itself from this man,” she told me. “I cannot remember so blatant a case of political protection.” She said Singh’s “political power” in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Indian parliament, more than any other state, is “the basis of very cynical calculations this government is making about keeping this guy around.”

Krishnan added that in a normal, healthy democracy, the wrestlers’ complaints would have caused huge political embarrassment. One of the primary reasons for the absence of pressure on the BJP, she said, was the lack of serious and sustained mainstream media coverage of the scandal. The BJP exercises its control, she said, not only through government bodies but also through one of its “main propaganda arms” — the media. “The control of the propaganda media over public opinion,” Krishnan said, is what “the government relies on” to shape public conversation. Most mainstream media, she said, are either neglecting the story or suppressing it. “The most influential media with the greatest reach, especially in non-English Indian languages,” Krishnan told me, “are, for the large part, totally batting for the BJP and Brij Bhushan Singh.” Vinesh Phogat told me that “national TV is making Singh the hero and us the villains.”

The wrestlers first held a public protest in Delhi in January 2023. At the time, the government persuaded them to call it off by forming an oversight committee to examine the allegations and by asking Singh to “step aside” from his role at the Wrestling Federation. By late April, though, the wrestlers felt they had no choice but to resume protests after they saw no serious action being taken against Singh. The oversight committee’s report wasn’t made public, and the athletes expressed a lack of faith in its functioning. 

Sakshi Malik told me that she believed the committee had given Singh “a clean chit,” which means effectively clearing him of all charges. The wrestlers claimed that Singh had also resumed overseeing tournaments in his area and was still calling the shots in the Federation, a sign of his political power.

To further show off his political clout, Singh has called for a mass rally on June 5 in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, a place sacred to Hindus. “On the appeal of the nation’s revered saints, a grand rally for public awareness,” reads a poster for the event, complete with an image of a Hindu god. Krishnan described the rally as an attempt by a BJP politician at “invoking Hindu identity” and “Hindu supremacist politics” to imply that he is innocent and deserves the support of all Hindus. Singh has claimed that over one million Hindu seers will attend. “Under the leadership of seers, we will force the government to change the law,” he declared, referring to India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act. 

The wrestlers say that Singh has tried to intimidate the athletes who complained to the police. Malik told me that the minor in particular has been targeted. “Phone calls have been made to her parents,” Malik said. Strange cars have been spotted around her house at night.

Even as Singh has attempted grandstanding and deploying strong-arm tactics, the wrestlers have stood their ground. On May 28, the police detained the wrestlers for the day and arrested at least 700 others across the capital. With the wrestlers and their supporters held at different police stations, the authorities took the opportunity to clear their protest site and said they would no longer allow the month-long sit-in to continue. Delhi police also charged the wrestlers with “rioting” and “obstructing a public servant.” The wrestlers have since announced that they will begin an indefinite hunger strike. 

In the past few weeks, as the protests have intensified, the wrestlers have received support from student unions, women’s groups, labor unions, farmers’ collectives and even the International Olympic Committee. On the evening of May 23, nearly 500 people marched to India Gate, a war memorial in the heart of Delhi, as part of a candlelight protest in support of the wrestlers. Sakshi Malik stood on the edge of a police barricade and lit a candle, as hundreds gathered before her waving Indian flags. “This is a fight for India’s daughters,” she told the crowd. “We have to win this. And we will.”

The post Indian wrestlers say ‘me too’ but the BJP is not listening appeared first on Coda Story.

The conflict is rooted in ethnic and tribal tensions. But there is also an element of the religious division for which India, under the nearly decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become increasingly known worldwide. In India’s last population census, administered in 2011, Christians made up over 41% of Manipur residents. About half of the state’s residents are Hindus. Groups of mostly Hindu Meitei people from the valley clashed on May 3 with Christian tribal groups who live in the hills around Manipur. The Christians were holding a demonstration in defense of their tribal status, which they believed the more privileged Meteis were trying to usurp for themselves.

During the riots, public property and people’s homes and vehicles were set on fire in arson attacks reported across the state. According to church groups, about 120 churches were set on fire or otherwise destroyed.  

The 2022 edition of the annual U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, released on May 15, noted that the Indian government is among those that “freely target faith community members within their borders.” The State Department quoted the spokesman of a Christian NGO who described the situation facing all minorities as “unprecedentedly grave.” The Indian authorities have dismissed the report as “based on misinformation and flawed understanding.”

But Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition Congress party, said that “what is happening in Manipur is the result of the politics of hate.” He was speaking at a rally in the southern state of Karnataka just before state elections on May 10, 2023. “Manipur is on fire,” Gandhi said, “people are dying and the prime minister doesn’t seem to be concerned.” 

Modi has continued to remain silent throughout the weeks of violence in Manipur, even as the army has been deployed to quell unrest and an internet ban and curfew have been imposed. 

In Manipur, the largely Hindu Meitei people inhabit the valley area where Imphal, the capital city, is located. The mostly Christian tribes, like the Kukis and the Nagas, live in the hills. The people of the mainly Christian hill tribes say they can no longer live with the mainly Hindu Meitei people. 

Historically, Hindu Meiteis have dominated positions in politics and the state administration. Meitei is one of 22 official languages recognized by the Indian Constitution and the sole official language of Manipur. Two-thirds of the members of the Manipur state assembly, including the state’s chief minister, are Meitei. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, which promotes an aggressively Hindu nationalist agenda, holds power  at both state and federal levels. The BJP government in Manipur, led by chief minister Biren Singh, has been accused of favoring the Hindu Meitei majority and enacting anti-tribal policies such as converting tribal land into protected state properties. According to Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, the national affairs editor at the Indian news website The Wire, “the chief minister appears to be behaving like a spokesman of the majority Meitei community.” 

While the BJP government of Manipur has been accused of favoring the Meiteis over hill-dwelling tribals, the Meiteis have also been lobbying for tribal status. Last month, an order by the Manipur High Court gave the state government just four weeks to grant the Meiteis special tribal status. This status is necessary to access certain government-run affirmative action programs, including quotas for government jobs. Christian tribes, particularly the Kukis, have argued that the Meiteis already enjoy privileges in Manipur and that any extra privileges might hurt the tribes for whom affirmative action is necessary. 

The Meitei people have been demanding special tribal status because, they say, the hill tribes are able to buy land in the valley, while they are unable to buy land in the hills. The tribes, though, point to the greater wealth of the Meiteis, gained from living in the valley and in Imphal, Manipur’s capital. Were Meitei residents able to buy land in the hills, the tribes argue, the Kukis and the Nagas, among others, would find themselves priced out of their own lands.

In response to the court order, a tribal students’ union organized a “solidarity march” on May 3, which sparked violence, including an arson attack on a Kuki war memorial.

Hesang, a Kuki activist, told me that the memorial was an “important part of the community’s history.” He said that while the protest was peaceful, the burning down of the memorial was a “provocation that was seen as a challenge to Kuki history.” Manipur has barely been able to pause for breath since. 

On May 22, after relative calm appeared to have returned, army units had to quell violence that was reportedly directed at Meitei shopkeepers. Houses were set ablaze in the capital, Imphal, and the state was placed under curfew from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m., with the already existing ban on mobile internet services extended until May 26.

The violence in Manipur, despite all the deaths and damage, has received scant attention on India’s numerous mainstream cable news channels. But there has been plenty of debate about the situation in Manipur on social media. Inevitably, some of the online content has been misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories, which is why the Manipur government says it has banned mobile internet access. Despite the spread of fake news, a Meitei person who requested anonymity told me that “in a situation like this, when you are cut off from genuine sources of information, the imagination gives oxygen to rumors.” 

Some of these rumors have been spread by the BJP government itself. Though the recent violence began after protests against the High Court’s order to grant the Meitei people special tribal status, the government claimed it began because of its crackdown on illegal immigrants from Myanmar. These illegal immigrants, the government says, grow poppies in the hills to use in the drug trade.  

The people the BJP government refers to as “illegal immigrants” are actually refugees who fled Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. These refugees share the same ethnic background as the Kukis. Angshuman Choudhury, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told me that “there is a feeling amongst Kukis that their roots in Manipur are being questioned by both the state government and dominant civil society.” 

In March 2023, six Meitei student associations released a joint statement in which they accused “outsiders coming from the other side of Indian boundaries, especially Myanmar” of “encroaching on land which is owned by the state in the hills of Manipur.” These outsiders, the statement went on to conclude, represented a “never-ending threat to the indigenous people of Manipur.” A Metei activist, who wished to remain anonymous because they didn’t agree with some of the xenophobic rhetoric of the state government, told me that illegal immigration from Myanmar meant there had been an “unusual rise in the population of Kukis, and other communities in Manipur feel this is expansionism.” 

Kukis, the Meiteis say, fear that the BJP government will publish a National Register of Citizens in Manipur, just as it did in the bordering state of Assam in 2019. The much-criticized National Register is apparently intended to root out illegal residents from India. In Assam, though, it effectively stripped two million people of their citizenship, often on questionable grounds. 

Choudhury, of the Center for Policy Research, told me that in both Assam and Manipur,  BJP governments had introduced “a powerful regime of ethno-political protectionism based on a narrow and chauvinistic imagining of society.” He said there was a “subterranean attempt to reimagine and homogenize certain pluralistic ethnic identities, like Assamese and Meitei, as strictly Hindu.”

A member of the Indian Parliament from Manipur wrote to Modi, asking him to employ a “strong hand” to stop the threat of “Balkanization on ethnic lines” in Manipur. But it is arguably in the nature of BJP policies to exacerbate ethnic and religious divisions. Earlier this month, the writer Arundhati Roy told an audience at a literature festival in the southern state of Kerala that the BJP asking for votes was “like a lit match asking the firewood to ‘give us a chance.’”  

For three weeks, the BJP has been unable to douse the flames in Manipur. When will the prime minister take notice?

The post The BJP is failing to stop ethnic riots in northeast India appeared first on Coda Story.

On April 6, Trixie found herself standing on a stage, before the shaven-headed, heavyset Baba himself. With cameras rolling, two men held her in place while the Baba, draped in long white robes, accused her of being infected with the “disease of queerness.” By posting videos like these on social media, the Baba has made a fortune in just three years. He claims to have a “godly” cure for terminal illnesses and a variety of other personal and psychological complaints. 

He also specializes in conversion therapy — in which he claims to “pray the gay away” — and offers a special prayer package to “reconvert” transgender people and align their gender identity to the sex they were assigned at birth. Trixie’s family paid about $1,830 for her “treatment,” a sizable sum in a country in which the average monthly wage is below $500.

The Baba’s promises to banish homosexuality and to “cure” transgender people appeal to longstanding popular prejudices in Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India. Even the federal government is currently arguing in the Indian Supreme Court that gay marriage is an “urban elitist concept.” For most of the country, the government insists as it attempts to put the brakes on the Supreme Court hearings that would determine whether India should legalize same-sex marriage, the “notion of marriage itself necessarily and inevitably presupposes a union between two persons of the opposite sex.” And this notion is “deeply embedded in religious and societal norms.”

From his estate, the Baba regularly livestreams his “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. His most popular videos on YouTube, where he has a verified channel, have surpassed one million views. He also commands an impressive following on Facebook, where he maintains multiple pages. His social media pages all link to the ashram’s website, which boasts testimonials from his patients, instructions for devotees and a market for the Baba’s health products.

The Baba — aka Santosh Singh Bhadauria — is what is known in India as a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has managed to persuade people that he possesses spiritual powers. Godmen are similar to televangelists, and their followers might once have been called holy rollers. As with televangelists, godmen are frequently found to be conmen, criminals and sex offenders. Bhadauria has been in trouble with the law for decades, accused of various crimes though yet to be convicted of any.

Last month, a doctor who challenged Bhadauria by calling out his theatrics as cheap quackery was allegedly assaulted at Bhadauria’s behest. Among the types of cures Bhadauria enacts in public spectacles on his estate, attended by thousands of followers, is the ritual “murder” of “Muslim ghosts” that he claims have possessed the bodies of Hindus. The Muslim ghosts are exorcised with a toy gun.

Trixie knew little about Bhadauria’s methods before agreeing to visit his ashram. She was just trying to keep her parents happy. On reaching the estate, she found that a recording of his exhortations was being broadcast to hundreds of devotees. People were screaming and crying as if they'd been possessed by a spirit, she said.

Uncomfortable with the atmosphere, Trixie tried to walk away but says she was physically restrained by the Bhadauria's security. The next morning, Bhadauria showed up in person. He addressed Trixie’s family directly. Homosexuality, he said, was a disease, and Trixie, as someone infected by it, was “filled to the brim with filth.”

Her mother stood beside her, silently watching as Bhadauria continued to rant. That was when Trixie realized, she told us, that she had lost her mother to the propaganda, a far more cruel betrayal than Bhadauria’s crude abuse. 

“Parents can be wrong sometimes too,” she told her mother in front of Bhadauria and the audience. They were the only words she would utter during the “therapy” session. Had she tried to argue her case, she told us, she would have felt “like a dog barking without reason.” 

Bhadauria’s conversion therapy is emblematic of the transphobia and homophobia of Indian society. This prejudice is seeing a resurgence as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on the question of same-sex marriage. Despite a long history of gender fluidity in Indian theology, mythology and culture, the Hindu nationalist government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi argues that the push for LGBTQ rights is a result of increasing Western influence and the decline of so-called Indian values. 

The Indian judiciary, though, has taken a more liberal line. Consensual gay sex was decriminalized in India in 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned a colonial law. “History owes an apology to members of the community,” said one of the judges, “for the delay in ensuring their rights.” And last year, a state high court ordered the prohibition of conversion therapy, ruling that it constituted misconduct when performed by medical professionals. 

If the Supreme Court does legalize same-sex marriage, it would be yet another ruling that defies the values and beliefs of some of India’s most powerful political actors. While no judgment has yet been made, trolls have targeted the court on social media and its chief justice was attacked as “woke” even before he was appointed to the bench. Government officials and mainstream media personalities have also piled on, insisting that the judges would be undermining tradition and imposing their own values on the country. Religious representatives from all of India's major religions, in a rare show of togetherness, have teamed up to oppose the marriage equality petition before the Supreme Court.

Social activist Indrajeet, the founder of “Yes, We Exist,” a digital LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, told us in an interview that although the Indian right wing says same-sex marriage is a Western imposition, Indian conservatives are also taking their cues from the West. In the West, particularly in the United States, transphobia has become an endemic political hot-button topic and is similarly framed as an issue beloved by liberal elites rather than one of existing civil rights being unequally applied. 

The Indian government says it is for elected legislators to decide on the fate of same-sex marriage rather than for unelected judges. But the Indian constitution — as a government website helpfully points out — gives all Indians the right to equal treatment before the law.

It is to the courts that a transgender woman like Trixie has to turn to get redress for the ordeal she was forced to endure at Bhadauria’s ashram. “If you do not self-determine and do prayers to be a boy,” Bhadauria said to Trixie, “you'll become a girl and will get beaten by boys. Even if you marry a boy, he will beat you too.”

Turning to Trixie’s mother, Bhadauria said, “The only way left to cure him is by doing prayers. If he doesn't do it by himself, you should do this for him.” Bhadauria also insinuated that Trixie’s transition was sexual in nature, a perversion rather than a deeply felt identity. This vein of transphobia has been contested at length by scholarship on and by queer people. 

Pointing to the scholarship, though, is not always a helpful strategy when confronted by hate speech on social media and the socially permitted behavior of quacks like Bhadauria. Indrajeet, the founder of the LGBTQ+ awareness initiative, explained that social media sites have become key platforms for the likes of Bhadauria. Their brand of hate is easily spread on these platforms and enables them to attract new followers and expand their reach. It also allows them to monetize their polarizing content. 

Although many of these social media pages and channels are riddled with hate speech and discriminatory messages, platforms routinely fail to take action against violations of their own rules of conduct.

For instance, though Meta does not offer clear guidance about organic content promoting conversion therapy on Facebook, the company expressly prohibits advertisements offering such services. Google (YouTube’s parent company) prohibits the promotion of conversion therapy in its publisher policies. Both companies have a broad ban on the kinds of hate speech and discriminatory language that characterize Bhadauria’s content.

Bhadauria’s video of his encounter with Trixie was highly visible both on Facebook and YouTube for two weeks after their “therapy session.” It has since been removed from Facebook, but the video is still up on YouTube, where Bhadauria has 439,000 followers. Indrajeet and other activists we spoke with expressed concern that these videos, spread by spiritual leaders with significant social influence, could be used to justify physical attacks on queer people in the public eye.

Zainab Patel, a trans woman, activist and one of the petitioners in the pending marriage equality Supreme Court case, told us that Bhaduria’s attempt to “treat” Trixie is against Indian law. All forms of conversion therapy against queer people were banned in 2021 by the National Medical Commission of India which described such therapy as “professional misconduct,” following an order from the Madras high court which has jurisdiction in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. 

These therapies can take the form of pseudo-religious rituals but can also involve measures as extreme as “corrective rapes.” Independent research has proven that conversion therapy practices increase the risk of self-harm among queer people. It is why, Zainab says, it is essential that legal action is taken against self-appointed holy men like Bhadauria.

“After watching Trixie's video,” Zainab told us, “we can say that she has been subjected to humiliation, stigmatization and discrimination.” Trixie’s parents, Zainab added, “along with the spiritual person to whom she was taken, can both be punished under the Transgender Protection Act.” This also means that both Facebook and YouTube could be compelled, by a court order, to remove the material. But so far, most of the footage remains online, garnering thousands of views and untold advertising revenue.

Akkai Padmashali, a transgender rights activist, pointed out that while in other democracies the numbers of openly homosexual and bisexual legislators are growing, India’s LGBTQ community has no representation in parliament to stand up for their concerns. Instead, the court case on marriage equality has become an opportunity for politicians to grandstand on matters of religious tradition. "I believe that I am bound to follow constitutional morality,” Akkai told us, “and not any social construct, cultural or religious morality.” But, in India, that is an increasingly rare position.

For Trixie, her ordeal does have a silver lining — she has found her voice and an inner strength. She counts it as a small victory that the video of her conversion therapy is no longer on Facebook. Now, she says, she is ready to take on more transphobic propaganda on her Instagram, where she has found many new supporters and followers.

The post In India, a trans woman stands up to the ‘YouTube Baba’ appeared first on Coda Story.

The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as "deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country." Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

The post India reopens its Khalistan wounds appeared first on Coda Story.

“My heart started beating faster,” Yusuf Beg, the caretaker, told me, as he described a phone call he had received that morning. For much of the previous month, the city authorities had been asking Beg to raze parts of the shrine. On March 15, he received a letter from the Delhi Public Works Department that claimed the shrine was encroaching on the pavement. He removed some of the construction with his own hands, but it wasn’t enough. “We want the whole pavement cleared,” Beg says the public works department officials told him. On the morning of April 1, Beg received a call to inform him that the bulldozers were on their way.

Sheba Khan, a singer, was among those gathered around the debris where a prayer room once stood. “There are so many illegal constructions in the city,” she told me. Did the authorities really  have to come here? What hazard did this particular shrine represent? “It was such a peaceful place,” she said.

Beg was astonished that the bulldozers had been deployed even when he had attempted to cooperate with the authorities. “Tell me,” Beg said, welling up, “did the footpath come first or this 400-year-old shrine?”

Over the past year, the bulldozer has emerged as a symbol of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oft-invoked “New India.” The bulldozer is most closely associated not with Modi but with the promise of strong and effective governance offered by Yogi Adityanath. A hard-line Hindu monk clad in saffron robes, Adityanath is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. With 236 million people, an independent Uttar Pradesh would be about the fifth most populated country in the world. It would also be one of the poorest.

Adityanath became the chief minister of the northern Indian state in 2017 when the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, came to power in local elections with an unprecedented mandate. He led the BJP to another landslide victory last year. For many, Adityanath is the biggest star in the BJP after Modi himself. Some even argue that Adityanath is the likeliest candidate to succeed Modi as prime minister. When Adityanath campaigns in states where the BJP contests elections, he draws huge crowds.

On the campaign trail for the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2022, Adityanath held the bulldozer up as an exemplar of stern action and swift justice in the face of a slow legal system. In his stump speeches, Adityanath declared that if he were voted back into office, he would use the bulldozer against “criminals,” “mafias” and “rioters.” His government had first used a bulldozer in 2020 to knock down the house of a notorious gangster, who was alleged to have killed eight policemen. The gangster himself was later killed in a “police encounter,” an Indian euphemism for what is effectively an extrajudicial execution. 

The bulldozer was, supposedly, the evidence of Adityanath’s zero-tolerance approach to crime. It struck a chord with the people in Uttar Pradesh, and they hailed him as the “Bulldozer Baba.”  In March 2022, with the election handily won, Adityanath’s ecstatic supporters waved BJP flags as they rolled down the streets across the state in bulldozers.

But the bulldozer is not simply a neutral symbol of a strong state reclaiming land from encroachers or taking on hardened criminals. Adityanath’s election speeches were replete with anti-Muslim rhetoric, with the Muslim community associated with “rioters” and referred to as “Taliban” supporters. As the bulldozer emerged as an unofficial election mascot for BJP-style tough governance, the subtext was clear: The criminals Adityanath wanted to go after would primarily be found outside the middle-class Hindu majority.

Since Adityanath’s reelection as the Uttar Pradesh chief minister in 2022, he has deployed  bulldozers in the aftermath of protests, razing homes of those who have only been accused, not convicted, of rioting. “Mere alleged involvement in criminal activity cannot ever be grounds for demolition of property,” said AP Shah, a former chief justice of the Delhi High Court. No due process is being followed, he told me. The bulldozer has become “a symbol of repression and oppression of the poor and marginalized and has ruined entire families.” 

Critics have pointed out that Adityanath has used bulldozers disproportionately to demolish the homes of Muslims, a pattern that has been repeated in BJP-administered states such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. The pretext most often used is the clearing of illegal encroachments and construction. Aakar Patel, the chair of Amnesty International’s India board, said that home demolitions are used to “inflict punishment on the community for raising their voices.” Several human rights experts told me this amounts to an abuse of the law. The bulldozer, they say, is being used to silence, and “instill fear” in, Muslim communities following protests or communal violence in an India that has been perceived as stridently sectarian since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014. The Uttar Pradesh government denies this reading. Rakesh Tripathi, a BJP spokesman in Uttar Pradesh, told me that the government goes after all criminals and encroachments, not just Muslims.

Angshuman Choudhury, an associate fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, described Adityanath’s use of the bulldozer as a “primordial form of justice delivery.” It was, he said, a “leaf right out of the textbook of populism.” The bulldozer gives the majority a sense of safety, a belief that the government is taking quick action against purported criminals, even if that definition is extended to include anyone the state deems an enemy. “Just give the majority what it wants,” he told me, that is what Adityanath’s use of bulldozers amounted to. “And what the majority wants is quick justice.”

So popular has the bulldozer become in the growing iconography of Hindu nationalism that young men have been lining up to get bulldozers inked onto their skin. Abhinav Kumar, the owner of BlackJack Tattoo Studio in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, told me that several people had come to him asking for bulldozer tattoos during a time when the tattoo was “trending.” This was in the aftermath of Adityanath’s election victory and during periods when there were a series of high-profile demolitions in the news. Bulldozers have also featured on packets of local snacks and in several Hindu nationalist pop songs.

In Modi’s India, the bulldozer is evolving as a new cultural symbol, normalized as part of India’s political and Hindu nationalist lexicon. It is a shorthand for the Modi regime’s carefully crafted muscular identity, its suppression of minorities and its narrative of a formidable, resurgent Hindu India under his leadership. The bulldozer has transcended politics, Choudhury said, to become an “element of pop culture” that the public could consume.

The bulldozer as a calling card of a confident Hindu nationalism has made its way, inevitably, to countries with large Indian diasporas. In an Indian Independence Day parade in Edison, New Jersey in August 2022, a vehicle that resembled a bulldozer was among the floats. Sambit Patra, a BJP national spokesman in India, attended as a guest of honor. The parade was organized by a local organization of diaspora businessmen called the Indian Business Association.

“It was shocking,” Ria Chakrabarty, the policy director for Hindus for Human Rights, a progressive nonprofit in the U.S., told me about the bulldozer’s inclusion in the parade. It was well known, she said, that there was sympathy for Hindu nationalism within the Indian diaspora, “but I don’t think I expected such fervent support.” Chakraborty said Hindus for Human Rights was engaged in “educating U.S. lawmakers” on why the bulldozer “has become a harmful symbol” for Muslims in India. “We view it as a symbol of hate,” she said, adding that “all the toxicity of Indian politics was now seeping into Indian-American politics.” 

Eventually, the organizers of the parade were forced to apologize. In a letter on August 30, the Indian Business Association acknowledged that the bulldozer was a “divisive image” and that its inclusion in the parade had “offended Indian American minority groups, especially Muslims.” Shortly after, on September 2, Cory Booker and Bob Menendez, U.S. senators from New Jersey, released a joint statement describing the bulldozer as “a symbol of intimidation against Muslims and other religious minorities in India.”

Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University, told me that “Muslims are increasingly treated as second-class citizens in India's autocracy.” By “using bulldozers to illegally destroy Muslim homes,” she said, “the BJP sends a clear message to this religious minority: Be afraid.” Outside India, Truschke’s interpretation of Adityanath’s bulldozer justice is widely accepted as accurate. 

In June 2022, three United Nations special rapporteurs wrote to the Indian federal government, expressing “serious concern” about the “forced evictions and arbitrary home demolitions carried out against Muslim communities and other low-income groups in India.” The letter referred to demolitions in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Delhi as having a “distinct ‘punitive’ nature,” and said that they appeared “to have been carried out as collective punishment against the minority Muslim community.” The letter also described the act as a “violation of international human rights standards.” The language is strikingly reminiscent of language the U.N. has used to describe the “punitive demolitions” inflicted by Israeli authorities on Palestinians in the occupied territories. “In short,” a U.N. special rapporteur said back in 2014, “punitive home demolitions are an act of collective punishment that contravenes international law.”

Angshuman Choudhury, at the Center for Policy Research in Delhi, told me that there was an “uncanny similarity between the modus operandi of the Hindu nationalist Modi government and how the Israeli state has been conducting itself in Palestine.” Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, demolitions of Palestinian homes have risen sharply. Last month, the U.N. noted the demolition of nearly double the number of structures in East Jerusalem since Netanyahu returned to power in late December than during the equivalent period the previous year.     

While he notes the different political context in Israel and that state’s use of demolitions as part of a “territorial expansion,” Choudhury argues that just as Israel has used bulldozers as retribution against individual Palestinians, so India uses them to “create a chilling effect and punish Muslims who dare to protest.” 

Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist and professor of South Asian studies at Stanford University, told me that the Hindu nationalist movement “has long been admiring Israel and the Zionist movement that makes Israel into a privileged home for all Jews in the world.” He says he’s heard personally from many Hindu nationalists who “have conveyed that sense of admiration to me and have told me that they thought India should be a home to Hindus only.”

This explains the popular embrace and the cultural celebration — at least in the country’s largely Hindi-speaking heartland — of the bulldozer as a symbol of the BJP’s might and its belligerence. 

Hansen told me that the bulldozer represents “a new phase in the Hindu nationalist project.” The celebration of the bulldozer, he says, is “a form of payback, a revenge fantasy” for perceived injustices suffered by Hindus under the Muslim Mughal empire that controlled much of India for hundreds of years until the British took over in the mid-19th century. Demolitions, he argues, provide “great entertainment and collective satisfaction,” comparing it to the “jeering and cheering crowds at lynchings in the American South, or all those ordinary people who celebrated antisemitic pogroms in Europe.”

Adityanath and the BJP’s claim that the bulldozer is a means to deter criminals and reclaim government land is largely disingenuous. In June 2022, India’s Supreme Court told the Yogi Adityanath government that demolitions “cannot be retaliatory” but the judges still refused to step in and stop the use of bulldozers. To avoid serious judicial scrutiny, the government justifies the demolitions by claiming that the properties being destroyed are illegal constructions. 

Hansen, the Stanford professor, told me that the “BJP more or less exercises its power with complete impunity, that it is beyond the accountability of the law.” The “potency” of the bulldozer as a symbol, he said, lies in the fact that it supposedly upholds the law and is an “enforcement of order.” Bulldozers have traditionally been used in India in the “name of urban development and disciplining the poor.” There is “strong support for such punitive measures against the poor and social and religious minorities among the middle classes,” who enjoy the benefits of more regularized and formal housing. Given the extent of unauthorized building in Indian cities, though, a vast number of buildings are vulnerable to being declared illegal. “Nothing is easier,” Hansen told me, than to “find formal problems with most buildings if the authors so desire,” making the discretionary powers of the state “wide open to abuse and the blatant harassment of certain individuals and communities.”

Much of this abuse was evident when the Adityanath government lashed out at protesters last summer. On the morning of June 12, 2022, Afreen Fatima, a former student at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, saw her family home being torn down. “I watched it live on YouTube,” she told me. As Fatima witnessed the demolition of the home she had lived in for 20 years, her mother prayed on a mat nearby.

With police in riot gear stationed outside, three bulldozers were put to work destroying Fatima’s house. The media, present in droves, broadcast the demolition across the country. Fatima and her father had been vocal critics of the Modi government. “It was an act of vendetta,” Fatima told me about the Adityanath government’s actions. Her father had been picked out as a protest “ringleader” after two BJP members, one a party spokesperson, made offensive remarks about the Prophet Muhammad on television, leading to days of unrest in India and a sharp diplomatic backlash, especially from the Gulf countries where many Indian migrants work. The demonstrations turned violent in some places, with incidents of stone-pelting and arson. Fatima denied that her father had led the protests, but it made no difference.

Fatima believes the bulldozer sends a message to the Hindus that the BJP government is “showing Muslims their place” and a message to the Muslims to “stay in line.” She told me she believes the bulldozer demolitions have had their desired effect. “The way the Muslim community earlier asserted its presence in public spaces,” she said, “has changed. Now, it’s like let’s just survive one day at a time.”After the demolition, Fatima’s family found it hard to find a place to live. Landlords did not want to rent to them. They were afraid, Fatima said. “Our entire family was criminalized,” she told me, “to the extent that people were scared to talk to us on the phone.”

Despite criticism at home and abroad, the BJP appears to be expanding its punitive use of the bulldozer. In February, a mother and daughter were killed in a village in Uttar Pradesh during an anti-encroachment drive, the widely used term in India for clearing illegal buildings and developments. The family said that officials showed up, bulldozer in tow, and ended up setting fire to the family’s hut. The authorities claimed that the mother and daughter locked themselves in the hut and set fire to it. 

Also in February, the government launched an anti-encroachment drive in the disputed Indian state of Kashmir, a site of territorial conflict with Pakistan and a decades-long insurgency. Kashmir is currently heavily controlled, with little independent reporting permitted and with journalists and critics frequently jailed even as the BJP insists that peace has been established in the Valley. The government reclaimed 50,000 acres of land during the demolition drive before the bulldozers were temporarily called off as people in India’s only Muslim-majority state became increasingly panicked and angered. 

On April 1, in Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighborhood, after the bulldozers moved in and tore down most of the old Muslim shrine, the tombs of the saint and his family lay in the open air, covered only by a thin, lime-green sheet and surrounded by stone debris. The March 15 letter from the public works department specifically mentioned removing the encroachments as soon as possible with the upcoming G-20 summit in mind. World leaders will arrive in India’s capital in September 2023 for a meeting that will mark the end of the country’s year-long G-20 presidency. It is an opportunity, says the BJP, to showcase Indian democracy and development. To that end, a project is ongoing to “beautify” the city of Delhi. 

But on that Saturday afternoon, the street looked more disfigured than it had before the bulldozers arrived.

The post The demolition of dissent in India appeared first on Coda Story.

It was, tweeted India's minister of law and justice, a member of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, a “childish attempt to bring pressure on the appellate court.” Opponents of the BJP, though, say Gandhi was handed a practically unheard-of maximum sentence for remarks he made while campaigning in 2019 that did not meet the threshold for criminal defamation. They also point to the political expediency of the two-year sentence, the exact period of time required to ensure Gandhi was disqualified from Parliament and potentially from participating in the next general election.

Outrage over what appeared to be political chicanery spread quickly. Several opposition parties united to condemn the expulsion of Gandhi. “I strongly condemn the fascist action,” said Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, of how quickly  the BJP moved to ensure Gandhi's disqualification. “I request all Indian political parties,” he added, “to realize that the action against Rahul Gandhi is an attack on progressive democratic forces and oppose it in unison.”

On April 3, while Gandhi was in Surat, Stalin was hosting leading figures from all of India's major opposition parties as part of a social justice conference he said would help create a united front to fight "bigotry and religious hegemony," a pointed reference to the BJP's Hindu nationalist politics. Academic and political commentator Apoorvanand wrote that the opposition to the BJP was unified because it considered Gandhi's expulsion from Parliament “an audacious signal by the government that it can go to any extent to cripple political forces who challenge it democratically.”

How much of a challenge Rahul Gandhi represents to the BJP is open to debate. He has been mocked for years as an impetuous, naive and entitled politician who believes leadership to be his inheritance. The BJP's caricature of Gandhi as a princeling fawned over by acolytes in the Congress party — more loyal to a dynasty than the nation — has been incredibly effective.  Regional leaders like Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh or Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal bridled at being too closely associated with Gandhi and  at the general assumption that he would lead any opposition coalition against the BJP.

Just before Gandhi was disqualified from parliament, Banerjee reportedly told her party workers that the BJP was deliberately making Gandhi out to be the face of the opposition because he was so easy for Modi to defeat. Now, Gandhi, as opposition parties rally behind him, might appear a more formidable figure. Spokespersons for the governments of both the United States and Germany have responded to the news of Gandhi's expulsion with cautiously-phrased references to the importance of “judicial independence.” The notoriously thin-skinned BJP government was angered by these tepid comments, with Jaishankar, the foreign minister, telling a sympathetic audience that “the West has a bad habit for a long time of commenting on other people.” They think, he said, “that it’s some kind of God-given right.” The urbane Congress politician Shashi Tharoor, a former United Nations official, joked that he would “strongly urge my friend Jai to cool it a little bit.”

In a year when  the BJP hopes to use India's presidency at the G20 as evidence of its growing influence on world affairs, the treatment of Rahul Gandhi appears to confirm a growing belief that Modi and the BJP use the law — whether the courts or investigating agencies — to stifle critical voices in politics, the media or online.

The BJP seems particularly sensitive to criticism in the foreign media or on foreign soil. For weeks now, both houses of India’s Parliament have barely functioned. Proceedings are adjourned within minutes of the start. Incidentally, it costs the Indian people a little over $3,000 per minute to maintain their parliament, making any time wasted very expensive. At least part of the deadlock was caused by BJP representatives demanding an apology from Rahul Gandhi for criticizing India on a recent visit to the United Kingdom. In a talk at Cambridge University last month, Gandhi said India faced “an attack on the basic structure of democracy.” This was interpreted by the BJP as a demand for foreign interference in India's internal affairs.

It was against this backdrop that Gandhi was convicted by the court in Surat for the remarks he made in 2019. Speaking in Hindi at an election rally, Gandhi asked in a sarcastic aside why the names of prominent Indian frauds, men who’d stolen large sums of money, all happened to be Modi. He mentioned three Modis, including the prime minister, and said, roughly translated, “If you search a bit, a lot more Modis will come to light.”

This was enough for the magistrate in Surat to pronounce Gandhi guilty of defamation, an offense in India under both civil and criminal law. Indian criminal defamation law appears, in both letter and spirit, to have become only more regressive since it was first enacted in 1860. Truth is not an absolute defense. Even the relatives of a deceased person can claim defamation. Since the law criminalizes “any imputation concerning any person,” it means that even if the statement in question did not directly name the complainants, they can still initiate criminal action.

In Rahul Gandhi’s case, the complainants were not the three Modis he named but a BJP legislator from Gujarat named Purnesh Modi. He complained that Gandhi had defamed all 130 million people in India who bear the last name Modi, an apparently preposterous charge with which the Surat court agreed.

India and other major democracies have taken two different approaches in the area of defamation law. In the U.K. and U.S., defamation law has been transformed.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan transformed the law of defamation around the world, tilting the balance in favor of uninhibited, robust and wide-open speech. Justice William Brennan ruled that for free speech to survive it needed “breathing space.” Erroneous statements or even vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials were inevitable in a free debate, the court ruled.

The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were used to extend constitutional protections in favor of free speech and bar elected officials from seeking compensation, even for false comments made about their official actions unless those statements were made with “actual malice.”

A plaintiff had to demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that false or inaccurate statements were made with knowledge of their dishonesty or with a reckless disregard for the truth under the “actual malice” standard. It also shifted the burden of proof from the defendant to the plaintiff. The court rejected the common law presumption of damages and asked aggrieved public servants to prove actual damages. In the same year, in Garrison v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held that criminal defamation laws must be narrowly tailored to target only speech intending to lead to group disorder or inciting a breach of the peace. The court noted that, generally, criminal law is reserved for those crimes that threaten the security of society, and criminal sanctions cannot be justified merely because  defamation is evil or damaging to a person.

Common law criminal libel was abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 in Ashton v. Kentucky. Since then, the criminal defamation laws in 38 U.S. states and territories have either been repealed or struck down as unconstitutional. Once the Supreme Court set the precedent, other former British colonies and common law countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, followed. A consensus emerged that if speakers were threatened with criminal prosecution for speaking out on matters of public concern, it would have a chilling effect on public discourse.

In 2009, the U.K. Parliament abolished the offense of criminal defamation. The 2013 U.K. Defamation Act introduced a requirement for claimants to show that they had suffered serious harm before suing for defamation. It also introduced a defense of "responsible publication on matters of public interest” and new statutory defenses of truth and honest opinion. 

Meanwhile, even after achieving independence from British rule and adopting a republican constitution, India has continued to uphold legislation designed to protect the colonial elite. By amending the Code of Criminal Process in 1955, India also placed public officials into a separate class and established for them a special procedure involving the state machinery to sue private parties for making defamatory statements.

The Indian Constitution contains a chapter on fundamental rights, styled after the American Bill of Rights. Chief among the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms is the right to free speech and expression, subject only to limited restrictions. One of these restrictions is defamation. The key is that the restrictions have to be reasonable. But the Indian judiciary has continued to interpret and apply these restrictions narrowly. In 2016, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutionality of criminal defamation. “Criminalizing defamation,” noted one lawyer, “serves no legitimate public purpose.” And, he added, “the court's reasoning is wooly at best.”

As a result, India's influential politicians and corporations are the ones who most frequently invoke criminal defamation, typically against either political opponents or journalists. India's criminal defamation laws closely resemble 19th century libel laws in England. But there is a major difference. In England, defamatory libel always involved publication in writing. Even if they were malicious, spoken words or gestures weren't considered libel. Verbal slander, though, can result in criminal charges under India’s penal code.

Rahul Gandhi has been convicted by a court in Gujarat for spoken words. Unless his conviction is stayed by the appellate court on April 13, he will continue to be barred from parliament, from doing the job he was elected to do for his constituency. If he were living in England 170 years ago, he would not even have faced criminal proceedings, let alone the possibility of imprisonment. 

The dangers that India's criminal defamation laws pose to Indian democracy are evident in Rahul Gandhi's conviction — they appear to exist to protect the ruling class and intimidate critics into silence.

The post Why India’s defamation laws are hurting its democracy appeared first on Coda Story.

The videos were fake, said the Tamil Nadu police. A controversy had been manufactured, said the Tamil Nadu government, by politicians from India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party. “The spread of fake videos,” said the state’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, on March 10, “was initiated by BJP leaders from North India.” He accused these unnamed leaders of having an “ulterior motive,” of trying to create unrest just after he had “spoken about anti-BJP parties uniting.”

With the BJP, led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, firm favorites to win a third consecutive national election in 2024, most analysts deem the formation of an ad hoc alliance of regional parties and the fast-fading Congress — which has governed India for the vast majority of its 75 years as an independent nation — as the opposition’s only hope.

If Modi remains by far India’s most popular politician, there is little love lost for him in Tamil Nadu. For years, whenever he visited the state, he would be greeted with signs that read, “Go back Modi.” But the BJP, which has never had an electoral presence at any level in Tamil Nadu, surprised observers last year by winning several seats in municipal elections in the state. It led the party’s state chief to declare his intent to turn the BJP into a third political force in a state that has been dominated by two parties since the 1960s, both of which emerged from an equal rights movement for oppressed castes. Despite the progress made last year, the BJP is currently in disarray in Tamil Nadu, with 13 party workers quitting dramatically just last week.

Meanwhile, Bihar is currently led by an anti-BJP coalition. In August 2022, the state’s chief minister walked out on an alliance with the BJP and formed a new government with other partners including the Congress. The fake videos of Bihari laborers being attacked in Tamil Nadu were spread by BJP supporters, politicians from both states said, to drive a wedge between parties in both states that were opposed to the BJP.

Sylendra Babu, the extravagantly mustached head of the Tamil Nadu police, told me that he had to form 46 special teams to coordinate with the Bihar police to combat the viral spread of videos and social media commentary about attacks on Bihari laborers. “It was a war-like situation,” Babu said. 

Arrayed against the police in both Tamil Nadu and Bihar were right-wing influencers with followings of up to 60 million people, local BJP politicians and even some media. The Hindi-language Dainik Bhaskar newspaper — the largest circulated daily in India and by some estimates the fourth largest in the world — reported that more than 15 Bihari laborers had been murdered in Tamil Nadu. The article was based on a single phone call with a laborer and the accompanying video showing clips of unrelated violence.

Following up on the report, a BJP spokesperson tweeted that Bihari laborers were being attacked and killed for speaking Hindi in Tamil Nadu. To counter the misinformation, the Tamil Nadu police took to Twitter to threaten legal action against anyone it found to be deliberately making false posts. Babu himself posted a video on Twitter describing the claims that Bihari workers were being attacked in Tamil Nadu as “false and mischievous.” 

Bihar, linguistically and culturally, is part of India’s so-called “cow belt” — including the Hindi-speaking states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in particular. Back in the 1980s, an Indian academic coined the pejorative acronym BIMARU to refer to these states, a pun on the Hindi word “bimar,” meaning ill or sick. These states lag behind the rest of the country, particularly the south, in terms of prosperity and education.

Tamil Nadu is a southern state. Like its neighbors, it outperforms the North when it comes to providing healthcare, education and jobs to its residents. But the Hindi-speaking northern states dominate national politics, a dominance that has become even more stark since the Modi-led BJP came to power in 2014, gobbling up votes in the region at an unprecedented scale.

States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala have always been fiercely vigilant that their languages be recognized as integral to the Indian union. Many in the South prefer to communicate in English as their pan-Indian link language rather than Hindi. But Modi, critics point out, has not disguised his ambition to make Hindi the country’s national language. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, while giving Hindi and English “official” language status. English, therefore, is equal to Hindi as a language of government communication. 

By trying to further privilege Hindi, Modi and his closest political ally, Home Minister Amit Shah, have been accused of inflaming tensions with the south. Stalin, the Tamil Nadu chief minister, has himself written to Modi to demand that the latter stop his “continuous efforts to promote Hindi in the name of one nation.” Stalin described attempts to “impose” Hindi as “divisive in character” and warned against provoking another “language war.” Tamil Nadu has a long history of resisting the adoption of Hindi as the language of government.

While Hindi is by far the single most spoken language in India, there are hundreds of millions who do not speak it and who fear being at a disadvantage were learning Hindi to become compulsory. The rumors and fake videos tapped into the prejudices and resentments of both Hindi speakers and those in the south who speak entirely different languages and write with a different alphabet. The videos made national headlines because they appeared to expose yet another historical division still resonant in contemporary India.

S. Anandhi, a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, told me that the politics of the BJP is inherently opposed to the federalism that has long characterized politics in Tamil Nadu. The BJP, she said, “is against autonomy, democratization of language, and plurality of culture and religion.” 

The fomenting of social media outrage over the last couple of weeks provides an insight into what campaigning might look like over the next year as the general election approaches. The journalist Arun Sinha, author of “Battle for Bihar,” an inside look at the state’s politics, told me that the level of organization shown over the last few weeks, as fake videos were spread about anti-migrant violence in Tamil Nadu, suggests that the BJP wants to establish itself as the voice of the large population of disenfranchised Bihari migrant workers.

Spreading rumors about anti-migrant feelings in states like Tamil Nadu and maligning the non-BJP coalition government of Bihar as unresponsive, he said, “is like killing two birds with one stone.” And, as ever, the BJP’s tight control of the social media narrative in India helps it to advance its electoral goals. The question is whether the opposition can, as it tried to do in Tamil Nadu, effectively marshal social media to stop the spread of disinformation.

The post Fake videos of mob violence deepen India’s North-South divide appeared first on Coda Story.

Gurinder Dhillon still remembers the day he realized he had been tricked. It was 2009, and he had just taken out a $16,000 loan to start a new life. Originally from Punjab, India, Dhillon had met an agent in his home village who promised him the world. 

“He sold me this dream,” Dhillon, 45, said. A new life in Europe. Good money — enough to send back to his family in India. Clothes, a house, plenty of work. He’d work on a farm, picking fruits and vegetables, in a place called the Pontine Marshes, a vast area of farmland in the Lazio region, south of Rome, Italy. 

He took out a sizable loan from the Indian agents, who in return organized his visa, ticket and travel to Italy. The real cost of this is around $2,000 — the agents were making an enormous profit. 

“The thing is, when I got here, the whole situation changed. They played me,” Dhillon said. “They brought me here like a slave.”

On his first day out in the fields, Dhillon climbed into a trailer with about 60 other people and was then dropped off in his assigned hoop house. That day, he was on the detail for zucchini, tomatoes and eggplant. It was June, and under the plastic, it was infernally hot. It felt like at least 100 degrees, Dhillon remembers. He sweated so much that his socks were soaked. He had to wring them out halfway through the day and then put them back on — there was no time to change his clothes. As they worked, an Italian boss yelled at them constantly to work faster and pick more.

Within a few hours of that first shift, it dawned on Dhillon that he had been duped. “I didn’t think I had been tricked — I knew I had,” he said. This wasn’t the life or the work he had been promised. 

What he got instead was 3.40 euros (about $3.65) an hour, for a workday of up to 14 hours. The workers weren’t allowed bathroom breaks.

On these wages, he couldn’t see how he would ever repay the enormous loan he had taken out. He was working alongside some other men, also from India, who had been there for years.  ”Will it be like this forever?” he asked them. “Yes,” they said. “It will be like this forever.”

Ninety years ago, a very different harvest was taking place. Benito Mussolini was celebrating the first successful wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. It was a new tradition for the area, which for millennia had been nothing but a vast, brackish, barely-inhabited swamp.

No one managed to tame it — until Mussolini came to power and launched his “Battle for Grain.” The fascist leader had a dream for the area: It would provide food and sustenance for the whole country.

Determined to make the country self-sufficient as a food producer, Mussolini spoke of “freeing Italy from the slavery of foreign bread” and promoted the virtues of rural land workers. At the center of his policy was a plan to transform wild, uncultivated areas into farmland. He created a national project to drain Italy’s swamps. And the boggy, mosquito-infested Pontine Marshes were his highest priority. 

His regime shipped in thousands of workers from all over Italy to drain the waterlogged land by building a massive system of pumps and canals. Billions of gallons of water were dredged from the marshes, transforming them into fertile farmland.

The project bore real fruit in 1933. Thousands of black-shirted Fascists gathered to hear a brawny-armed, suntanned Mussolini mark the first wheat harvest of the Pontine Marshes. 

"The Italian people will have the necessary bread to live,” Il Duce told the crowd, declaring how Italy would never again be reliant on other countries for food. “Comrade farmers, the harvest begins.”

The Pontine Marshes are still one of the most productive areas of Italy, an agricultural powerhouse with miles of plastic-covered hoop houses, growing fruit and vegetables by the ton. They are also home to herds of buffalo that make Italy’s famous buffalo mozzarella. The area provides food not just for Italy but for Europe and beyond. Jars of artichokes packed in oil, cans of Italian plum tomatoes and plump, ripe kiwi fruits often come from this part of the world. But Mussolini’s “comrade farmers” harvesting the land’s bounty are long gone. Tending the fields today are an estimated 30,000 agricultural workers like Dhillon, most hailing from Punjab, India. For many of them — and by U.N. standards — the working conditions are akin to slave labor.

When Urmila Bhoola, the U.N. special rapporteur on contemporary slavery, visited the area, she found that many working conditions in Italy’s agricultural sector amounted to forced labor due to the amount of hours people work, the low salaries and the gangmasters, or “caporali,” who control them.

The workers here are at the mercy of the caporali, who are the intermediaries between the farm workers and the owners. Some workers are brought here with residency and permits, while others are brought fully off the books. Regardless, they report making as little as 3-4 euros an hour. Sometimes, though, they’re barely paid at all. When Samrath, 34, arrived in Italy, he was not paid for three months of work on the farms. His boss claimed his pay had gone entirely into taxes — but when he checked with the government office, he found his taxes hadn’t been paid either. 

Samrath is not the worker’s real name. Some names in this story have been changed to protect the subjects’ safety.

“I worked for him for all these months, and he didn’t pay me. Nothing. I worked for free for at least three months,” Samrath told me. “I felt so ashamed and sad. I cried so much.” He could hardly bring himself to tell his family at home what had happened.

I met Samrath and several other workers on a Sunday on the marshes. For the Indian Sikh workers from Punjab, this is usually the only day off for the week. They all gather at the temple, where they pray together and share a meal of pakoras, vegetable curry and rice. The women sit on one side, the men on the other. It’s been a long working week — for the men, out in the fields or tending the buffaloes, while the women mostly work in the enormous packing centers, boxing up fruits and vegetables to be sent out all over Europe.

Another worker, Ramneet, told me how he waited for his monthly check — usually around 1,300 euros (about $1,280) per month, for six days’ work a week at 12-14 hours per day. But when the check came, the number on it was just 125 euros (about $250). 

“We were just in shock,” Ramneet said. “We panicked — our monthly rent here is 600 euros.” His boss claimed, again, that the money had gone to taxes. It meant he had worked almost for free the entire month. Other workers explained to me that even when they did have papers, they could risk being pushed out of the system and becoming undocumented if their bosses refused to issue them payslips.

Ramneet described how Italian workers on the farms are treated differently from Indian workers. Italian workers, he said, get to take an hour for lunch. Indian workers are called back after just 20 minutes — despite having their pay cut for their lunch hour.

“When Meloni gives her speeches, she talks about getting more for the Italians,” Ramneet’s wife Ishleen said, referring to Italy’s new prime minister and her motto, “Italy and Italians first.” “She doesn’t care about us, even though we’re paying taxes. When we’re working, we can’t even take a five-minute pause, while the Italian workers can take an hour.”

Today, Italy is entering a new era — or, some people argue, returning to an old one. In September, Italians voted in a new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. As well as being the country’s first-ever female prime minister, she is also Italy’s most far-right leader since Mussolini. Her supporters — and even some leaders of her party, Brothers of Italy — show a distinct reverence for Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

In the first weeks of Meloni’s premiership, thousands of Mussolini admirers made a pilgrimage to Il Duce’s birthplace of Predappio to pay homage to the fascist leader, making the Roman salute and hailing Meloni as a leader who might resurrect the days of fascism. In Latina, the largest city in the marshes, locals interviewed by national newspapers talked of being excited about Meloni’s victory — filled with hopes that she might be true to her word and bring the area back to its glory days in the time of Benito Mussolini. One of Meloni’s undersecretaries has run a campaign calling for a park in Latina to return to its original name: Mussolini Park.

During her campaign, a video emerged of Meloni discussing Mussolini as a 19-year-old activist. “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy,” she told journalists. Meloni has since worked to distance herself from such associations with fascism. In December, she visited Rome’s Jewish ghetto as a way of acknowledging Mussolini’s crimes against humanity. “The racial laws were a disgrace,” she told the crowd.

A century on from Italy’s fascist takeover, Meloni’s victory has led to a moment of widespread collective reckoning, as a national conversation takes place about how Mussolini should be remembered and whether Meloni’s premiership means Italy is reconnecting with its fascist past.

Unlike in Germany, which tore down — and outlawed — symbols of Nazi terror, reminders of Mussolini’s rule remain all over Italy. There was no moment of national reckoning after the war ended and Mussolini was executed. Hundreds of fascist monuments and statues dot the country. Slogans left over from the dictatorship can be seen on post offices, municipal buildings and street signs. Collectively, when Italians discuss Mussolini, they do remember his legacy of terror — his alliance with Adolf Hitler, anti-Semitic race laws and the thousands of Italian Jews he sent to the death camps. But across the generations, Italians also talk about other legacies of his regime — they talk of the infrastructure and architecture built during the period and of how he drained the Pontine Marshes and rid them of malaria, making the land into an agricultural haven.

Today in the Pontine Marshes, which some see as a place brought into existence by Il Duce — and where the slogans on one town tower praise “the land that Mussolini redeemed from deadly sterility” — the past is bristling with the present.

“The legend that has come back to haunt this town, again and again, is that it’s a fascist city. Of course, it was created in the fascist era, but here we’re not fascists — we’re dismissed as fascists and politically sidelined as a result,” Emilio Andreoli, an author who was born in Latina and has written books about the city’s history, said. Politicians used to target the area as a key campaigning territory, he said, but it has since fallen off most leaders’ agendas. And indeed, in some ways, Latina is a place that feels forgotten. Although it remains a top agricultural producer, other kinds of industry and infrastructure have faltered. Factories that once bustled here lie empty. New, faster roads and railways that were promised to the city by previous governments never materialized.

Meloni did visit Latina on her campaign trail and gave speeches about reinvigorating the area with its old strength. “This is a land where you can breathe patriotism. Where you breathe the fundamental and traditional values that we continue to defend — despite being considered politically incorrect,” she told the crowd.  

But the people working this land are entirely absent from Meloni’s rhetorical vision. Marco Omizzolo, a professor of sociology at the University of Sapienza in Rome, has for years studied and engaged with the largely Sikh community of laborers from India who work on the marshes.

Omizzolo explained to me how agricultural production in Italy has systematically relied on the exploitation of migrant workers for decades.

“Many people are in this,” he told me, when we met for coffee in Rome. “The owners of companies who employ the workers. The people who run the laborers’ daily work. Local and national politicians. Several mafia clans.”

“Exploitation in the agricultural sector has been going on for centuries in Italy,” Giulia Tranchina, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focusing on migration, said. She described that the Italian peasantry was always exploited but that the system was further entrenched with the arrival of migrant workers. “The system has always treated migrants as manpower — as laborers to exploit, and never as persons carrying equal rights as Italian workers.” From where she’s sitting, Italy’s immigration laws appear to have been designed to leave migrants “dependent on the whims and the wills of their abusive employers,” Tranchina said.

The system of bringing the workers to Italy — and keeping them there — begins in Punjab, India. Omizzolo described how a group of traffickers recruits prospective workers with promises of lucrative work abroad and often helps to arrange high-interest loans like the one that Gurinder took out. Omizzolo estimates that about a fifth of the Indian workers in the Pontine Marshes come via irregular routes, with some arriving from Libya, while many others are smuggled into Italy from Serbia across land and sea, aided by traffickers. Their situation is more perilous than those who arrived with visas and work permits, as they’re forced to work under the table without contracts, benefits or employment rights.

Omizzolo knows it all firsthand. A Latina native, he grew up playing football by the vegetable and fruit fields and watching as migrant workers, first from North Africa, then from India, came to the area to work the land. He began studying the forces at play as a sociologist during his doctorate and even traveled undercover to Punjab to understand how workers are picked up and trafficked to Italy. 

As a scholar and advocate for stronger labor protections, he has drawn considerable attention to the exploitative systems that dominate the area. In 2016, he worked alongside Sikh laborers to organize a mass strike in Latina, in which 4,000 people participated. All this has made Omizzolo a target of local mafia forces, Indian traffickers and corrupt farm bosses. He has been surveilled and chased in the street and has had his car tires slashed. Death threats are nothing unusual. These days, he does not travel to Latina without police protection.

The entire system could become even further entrenched — and more dangerous for anyone speaking out about it — under Meloni’s administration. The prime minister has an aggressively anti-migrant agenda, promising to stop people arriving on Italy’s shores in small boats. Her government has sent out a new fleet of patrol boats to the Libyan Coast Guard to try to block the crossings, while making it harder for NGOs to carry out rescue operations. 

At the end of February, at least 86 migrants drowned off the coast of Calabria in a shipwreck. When Meloni visited Calabria a few weeks later, she did not go to the beach where the migrants’ bodies were found or to the funeral home that took care of their remains. Instead, she announced a new policy: scrapping special protection residency permits for migrants. 

Tranchina, from Human Rights Watch, explained that getting rid of the “special protection” permits will leave many migrant workers in Italy, including those in the Pontine Marshes, effectively undocumented. 

“The situation is worsening significantly under the current government,” she said. “An army of people, who are currently working, paying taxes, renting houses, will now be forced to accept very exploitative working conditions — at times akin to slavery — out of desperation.” 

Omizzolo agreed. Meloni’s hostile environment campaign against arriving migrants is making people in the marshes feel “more fragile and blackmailable,” he told me. 

“Meloni is entrenching the current system in place in the Pontine Marshes,” Omizzolo said. “Her policies are interested in keeping things in their current state. Because the people who exploit the workers here are among her voter base.”

And then there’s the matter of money and how people are paid. A few months into her administration, Meloni introduced a proposal to raise the ceiling for cash transactions from 2,000 euros (about $2,110) to 5,000 euros ($5,280), a move that critics saw as an attempt to better insulate black market and organized crime networks from state scrutiny.

Workers describe that they were often paid in cash and that their bosses were always looking for ways to take them off the books. “We have to push them to pay us the official way and keep our contracts,” Rajvinder, 24, said. “They prefer to give us cash.” Being taken off a contract and paid under the table is a constant source of anxiety. “If I don’t have a work contract, my papers will expire after three months,” Samrath explained, describing how he would then become undocumented in Italy.

Omizzolo says Meloni’s cash laws will continue to preserve the corruption and sustain a shadow economy that grips the workers coming to the Pontine Marshes. Even for people who once worked above the table, the new government’s laissez-faire attitude towards the shadow economy is pushing them back into obscurity. “That law is directly contributing to the black market — people who used to be on the books, and have proper contracts, are now re-entering the shadow economy,” he said.

In December, Latina celebrated its 90th anniversary — some people here call it the youngest city in Italy. Some believe that this land, with its marble towns built in the fascist rationalist style, has fascism and Mussolini to thank for its very existence. The town was founded as a kind of utopia: a vision for a fascist future.

“This place was born in 1932. You can see it everywhere, in the architecture, in the buildings. We can’t skip over fascism. We can’t tell this story from the beginning while cutting things away to suit our convenience,” Cesare Bruni, who organizes a monthly “market of memory” where people sell antiques and relics from the past, said. 

Bruni holds up an old photo from the New York Sunday News, showing a sun-dappled Mussolini visiting the newly drained marsh to help with the first harvest since the land was reclaimed, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. “Il Duce-Farmhand,” the headline reads, describing how the leader “put in three hours of hard work” out in the fields.

The idealistic image of the harvest was powerful propaganda at the time. Not shown were the workers, brought in from all over the country, who died of malaria while digging the trenches and canals to drain the marsh. It also stands in contrast to today’s reality. Workers are brought here from the other side of the world, on false pretenses, and find themselves trapped in a system with no escape from the brutal work schedule and the resulting physical and mental health risks. In October, a 24-year-old Punjabi farm worker in the town of Sabaudia killed himself. It’s not the first time a worker has died by suicide — depression and opioid addiction are common among the workforce. 

“We are all guilty, without exception. We have decided to lose this battle for democracy. Dear Jaspreet, forgive us. Or perhaps, better, haunt our consciences forever,” Omizzolo wrote on his Facebook page.

Talwinder, 28, arrived on the marsh last year. “I had no hopes in India. I had no dreams, I had nothing. It is difficult here — in India, it was difficult in a different way. But at least [in India] I was working for myself.” His busiest months of the year are coming up — he’ll work without a day off. And although the mosquitoes no longer carry malaria, they still plague the workers. “They’re fatter than the ones in India,” he laughs. “I heard it’s because this place used to be a jungle.”

Mussolini’s vision for the marsh was to turn it into an agricultural center for the whole of Italy, giving work to thousands of Italians and building up a strong working peasantry. Today, vegetables, olives and cheeses from the area are shipped to the United States and sold in upmarket stores to shoppers seeking authentic, artisan foods from the heart of the old world. But it comes at an enormous price to those who produce it. And under Meloni’s premiership, they only expect that cost to rise.

“These days, if my family ask me if they should come here, like my nephew or relatives, I tell them no,” said Samrath. “Don’t come here. Stay where you are.”

The post The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland appeared first on Coda Story.

As it turned out, it was murder. But this was no gangland killing, no drug deal gone sour or any other cinematic cliche. 

The bodies found in the car were those of two Muslim men, Nasir and Junaid, from the neighboring state of Rajasthan. Their families had reported both men as missing and, after their bodies had been found, alleged that they had been kidnapped and burned alive by activists from the militant Hindu supremacist group Bajrang Dal. One of the murdered men had been accused previously of so-called “cow smuggling.” 

In India, transporting cattle across state lines is restricted because, in several states, cattle slaughter is illegal. Many Hindus consider cows to be holy — symbolic of Mother Earth, of nature and its bounties. While cow slaughter is taboo in much of India, beef is still a part of the diet for many Indians, including Hindus. Much of this “beef” is water buffalo meat, and its export has made India one of the world’s largest beef-exporting countries alongside Brazil, Australia and the United States. 

But since Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, a cottage industry of vigilantes has mushroomed, claiming that they are protecting cows from being transported for slaughter. These vigilantes, almost always Hindu, beat up, torture and even kill men, almost always Muslim, who they claim are cattle smugglers. Sometimes they film these actions for their followers on social media.

The violence of these cow protectors, gau rakshaks as they are called in Hindi, are a bloody reminder of India’s divisions under Modi. For all his talk of a resurgent India, an India defined by its world-beating economic growth, its geopolitical maturity and its superpower ambitions, Modi’s legacy might yet be tainted by the actions of militant Hindu groups.

Several men have been identified as suspects in the kidnapping and murder of Nasir and Junaid last week, though only one has been arrested. Chief among these suspects is Monu Manesar, a man widely reported to be a local Bajrang Dal ringleader. He remains at large. And while he has yet to speak to the police, he has protested his innocence through video messages posted on social media. Manesar is so popular on social media that he has received a YouTube Creator Award, the Silver Play Button, for amassing over 100,000 followers. (At the time of writing, he has over 200,000.)

And so influential is Manesar in the state of Haryana that at a local meeting attended by hundreds of villagers and right-wing activists, the Rajasthan police were openly threatened with violence if they dared to search for Manesar or speak to his family. The leader of one right-wing Hindu group said the “inhuman” behavior of the Rajasthan police — asking questions — “would not be tolerated.” 

These groups, including the Bajrang Dal in which Manesar is prominent, are not part of some ragtag fringe. They are the footsoldiers of the “Sangh parivar,” the broad family of right-wing organizations, which includes the Bharatiya Janata Party that forms India’s federal government led by Modi. 

According to one study, 97% of attacks connected to cow smuggling between 2010 to 2017 occurred once Modi came to power in 2014, and 24 of the 28 people killed in these attacks were Muslim. Another study finds that just four cow-related hate crimes were reported by the Indian media between 2010 and 2014, compared to 71 between 2015 and 2018. 

Human Rights Watch, in April 2017, called on the Indian authorities to “promptly investigate and prosecute self-appointed ‘cow protectors.’” These vigilantes, said HRW South Asia director, Meenakshi Ganguly, “driven by irresponsible populism are killing people and terrorizing minority communities.” In the Kolkata-based Telegraph newspaper, Indian academic and writer Mukul Kesavan observed acidly that the “cow is so totemic for the BJP that the murder of human beings in this animal’s cause makes responsible leaders resort to silence, deflection, denial, defensiveness or arguments in mitigation that would shame the moral sense of a three-year-old.”  

In June 2017, a young Muslim man was beaten and stabbed to death by a mob on a train. What began as a fight over seats descended into insults about “beef-eating,” said the young man’s brother, and then violence. Modi, as if shamed by the scrutiny of cow vigilantes — scrutiny that was going global and had the potential to embarrass a prime minister not yet halfway into his first five-year term — publicly denounced cow vigilantes. “Killing in the name of a cow is unacceptable,” Modi said. “We belong to a land of non-violence.” 

Just to be sure that questions about cow vigilante violence wouldn’t continue to crop up, the BJP simply stopped tracking hate crimes after 2017. As recently as last year, the BJP informed the parliament that the data “was unreliable,” which was why they had stopped collecting it.  

While Modi has gone on the record more than once to condemn cow vigilantes, the violence itself has not stopped. In fact, it could be argued that the authorities enable the violence. In 2021, the Haryana government appointed “special cow protection task force” teams, which were staffed by several vigilantes, including Monu Manesar. 

Since Manesar was named as a suspect in the murders of Nasir and Junaid, a couple of Indian newspapers and fact checking organizations have revealed just how connected he was not just to BJP officials in Haryana but to the top brass in Delhi. 

Asaduddin Owaisi, one of India’s few Muslim members of parliament — fewer than 5% of MPs in India are Muslim, though Muslims comprise about 15% of the population — told me that Haryana’s special task force gave “arbitrary powers to vigilante groups that circumvent the police and the rule of law.” He said the BJP wants to “create an atmosphere of fear and establish Muslims as anti-Hindu and anti-national, which benefits its politics.” 

Apoorvanand, a professor at Delhi University and prolific commentator on politics and culture, says that the special task force is an exercise in “parallel policing.” He argued that Modi’s previous condemnations of vigilante violence should be taken with a large pinch of salt because the BJP has “normalized a culture of impunity in which vigilantes like Manesar thrive.” What was once a crime, he told me, “is now posted on social media and treated as if it is in service of the greater good.”     

The links between cow protection vigilantes and the Haryana authorities are so tangled that, in the course of my reporting, I discovered that the car in which the Rajasthan police said Nasir and Junaid were abducted once belonged to the Haryana government. It is a car that has appeared in at least two videos posted on social media by cow vigilantes that show them assaulting people and pointing guns at them.

As I interviewed people, I learned that Manesar and his fellow cow protectors terrorized whole neighborhoods, all the while filming their high-speed car chases, their victims with bruised and swollen faces and their guns. Owaisi said more scrutiny should be directed at social media platforms that allow such footage to be posted. In one video Manesar posted to Instagram, men can be seen beating a Muslim ragpicker with bamboo sticks. These are the men, Manesar captioned his video, “who throw stones at our soldiers and Hindutva supporters.”

Last month, Manesar was involved in another suspicious death. He posted footage of three young Muslim men with facial injuries. Off camera, a man was aggressively asking for names. One of those men, Waris Khan, died hours later in hospital. His cousin told me that he believes the violent video was shot by the same gang of cow protection vigilantes who killed Nasir and Junaid. Manesar admitted that he shot the footage to the Indian press but denied beating the men who appear in the video. He had just happened upon some men who had been in an accident. The Haryana police, too, said the men had been in an accident.    

The Indian government is notorious for the volume of its requests to take down Tweets, often by verified journalists, for resorting to internet blackouts and for seeking to ban YouTube channels. Big Tech platforms usually comply with these demands. Strangely though, the ugly, brutal videos posted by Manesar and other vigilantes are rarely taken down, even though they violate all reasonable rules of conduct.

When I put the question to Meta, owners of Facebook and Instagram, they bargained for time, claiming to be “investigating the issue” and asking for “specific links/pages that you can share with us,” though links had been shared and the videos widely reported. YouTube did not respond to my numerous questions. “How can these companies be allowed to fund violence,” Owaisi, the member of parliament, asked. “How can they be giving silver buttons to people accused of lynching and mob violence?” 

It’s a question that, more importantly, should be put to the authorities, at both state and federal levels. Why are people still being killed in the name of cow protection on your watch?

UPDATE (2/28/23): After this story was published, YouTube reached out to me to say Monu Manesar has been “indefinitely suspended” from its “YouTube Partner Program,” which means he can no longer make money from the videos he posts. YouTube has also taken down nine videos from his channel for violating “Community Guidelines” and put age restrictions on two others. 

The post India’s ‘cow protectors’ are getting away with murder appeared first on Coda Story.

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.

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The second woman, Tunisha Sharma, a 20-year-old actor, allegedly hung herself on December 24 on the set of a TV show that she was working on with her boyfriend. They had apparently broken up shortly before her death. After Sharma’s death, her boyfriend was arrested for “abetment to suicide.”

What links the otherwise unconnected deaths of these two young women is that they were Hindu and their boyfriends were Muslim. Predictably, both cases were reported in the mainstream Indian media, particularly on television, as examples of “love jihad” — a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that vulnerable Hindu women are being groomed by Muslim men and converted to Islam.   

Asif Khan, a resident of Dindori, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, married Sakshi Sahu in April. They were in their early 20s. As the news spread through their village of a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, local Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) groups mobilized to “rescue” Sakshi.

The law was on the side of the vigilantes. The police booked Asif for wrongful confinement and kidnapping, based on a complaint by Sakshi’s brother. A local BJP unit blocked a nearby highway to protest the marriage and the district administration demolished Asif’s family home and three shops they owned.

Still, the couple refused to break up, leaving their village to live a quieter married life elsewhere. But news of Walkar’s murder, and the associated national talk of love jihad, reintroduced stresses and fears into their marriage. “We have been reassuring Sakshi that she doesn’t need to be afraid,” Asif’s father, Halim Khan, told me. “But she is scared.” Asif told me that he had told Sakshi “society would never accept [their] relationship” but that she had said she would “throw herself in front of a train” if they broke up because of their religion.

But the anger evident in the media coverage of Walkar’s death shook the couple. Asif told Sakshi that “she is not a captive, that she can go back to her parents if she wants.” 

According to Charu Gupta, a history professor at Delhi University, love jihad “produces a master narrative of Muslim male aggression and Hindu woman’s seizure.” This, she wrote, is “critically linked to the fictive demographic fear of Hindus being outnumbered by others, which is central to Hindutva politics,” and makes it possible for a still overwhelming majority that controls all the levers of power to “portray itself as an ‘endangered’ minority.”

Several politicians, particularly from the BJP, the party that controls India’s federal government, have referred to the deaths of Walkar and Sharma in terms of love jihad. In Karnataka — the Indian state that contains Bengaluru, a city that is, by some estimates, second only to Silicon Valley as a global hub for tech — a BJP member of parliament began the new year by telling party workers that, when campaigning for local elections scheduled in the spring, they should not “speak about minor issues like roads and sewage.” Instead, they should impress on voters that “if you are worried about your children’s future and if you want to stop love jihad, then we need BJP… To get rid of love jihad, we need BJP.”

Just last month, Karnataka’s home minister told reporters that he had received a petition from Hindutva groups demanding that a special task force be formed to investigate love jihad. He added that in his view, the state’s anti-conversion laws were sufficient to deter and deal with cases of love jihad. Karnataka, governed by the BJP, has so far resisted joining other BJP-governed states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, in specifically legislating to make interfaith marriage more difficult. 

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with over 200 million people, the chief minister, a Hindu monk notorious for hate speech, told a crowd in a campaign speech that he would “protect the honor and dignity of women” from love jihad “at any cost.” In February 2021, Uttar Pradesh introduced a law that criminalized religious conversion “through marriage, deceit, coercion, or enticement.” Those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to a decade.

And in Madhya Pradesh, which sprawls across the center of India, the chief minister referred to Walkar’s murder in December, at an event to celebrate a local 19th-century freedom fighter. The hero was a tribal, a term used in India to refer to ethnic minorities, officially designated in the Indian constitution as Scheduled Tribes, who remain some of the most economically underprivileged people in the country. “I will not allow this game of love jihad to continue,” the chief minister said. “Someone cheats our daughters in the name of love, marries them, and cuts them into 35 pieces. Such acts will not be allowed in Madhya Pradesh.” This, even though Walkar was not murdered in the state and was not a tribal.  

Statements such as these, made by powerful politicians, have put even more pressure on the few people brave enough to enter into interfaith marriages in India. Even before the right-wing, Hindu supremacist bogeyman of love jihad became widespread, interfaith relationships in India were rare. Now they are dangerous. 

Just over 2% of marriages in India are interfaith. A Pew Research Center report in 2021 indicated that 99% of Hindus in India said they were married to someone from their own religious background, as did 98% of Muslims, 97% of Sikhs and Buddhists and 95% of Christians. These statistics underscore the ideological impetus behind the legislation in BJP-ruled states that seek to tackle religious conversion, and specifically love jihad, when the phenomenon clearly appears to be a figment of the imagination.

In Uttar Pradesh, where you can be imprisoned if the authorities deem your marriage to be one in which the primary motivation was religious conversion, Rashid Khan, a Muslim man, married Pinki, a Hindu woman. They married in 2020, the year that the state’s draconian anti-conversion law was formulated though not yet passed. Pinki told me she knew their future was fraught with danger but she went ahead and asked for Rashid’s phone number anyway. 

Both Pinki and Rashid worked in Dehradun, a city nestled in the picturesque foothills of the Himalayas, and they grew close over long conversations and stolen moments between shifts. Three years later, Rashid said he wanted to marry her, and he was willing to marry her according to Hindu custom and ritual. Pinki said she had long been drawn to Islam and wanted to have a Muslim wedding and to convert. On July 24, their marriage was solemnized in a nikah in a Dehradun mosque. Pinki changed her name to Muskan.

Initially, Muskan tried to get her family to accept their marriage, but her mother beat her and threw her out of the house. Still, the early months of their marriage were happy and soon Muskan was pregnant with their first child.

When the couple decided to get their marriage officially recorded in a court in Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh, where Rashid was from, their petition was noticed by a local unit of the Bajrang Dal — a group of Hindutva militants which is part of the broader Sangh Parivar, the Hindutva “family” that includes the BJP. The couple suspects that their lawyer tipped off the Bajrang Dal. Rashid and Muskan were attacked on their way to the courthouse.

The mob beat up Rashid and his brother and took them to the police station. Meanwhile, Muskan, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy, was severely beaten and dumped outside a government-run shelter for women and children. “I was in trauma and extreme pain. I thought I would never see Rashid again,” Muskan told me, adding that there were other women  who were romantically involved with Muslim men being held at the shelter. “We were all tortured,” she alleged. “Made to work, cooking and cleaning continuously. I spent the days crying and in pain.” 

Muskan was eventually moved to a hospital, where she says she was injected by a doctor with undisclosed medicines. Shortly after, she suffered a miscarriage and was discharged the next day.

When Rashid was brought to court, Muskan said she loved him and that she had married him of her own free will. Her testimony convinced the court to release Rashid. The couple moved back to Dehradun to restart their lives in a single room. “This is the safest place we could find,” she told me. They have had a child since the miscarriage, and Muskan is breastfeeding her on the double bed that takes up most of the space in the room. Rashid, and his sister with her husband and son, were also sitting on the same bed. In another corner, a gas stove perched on a table served as the kitchen.

Since Narendra Modi swept into office in 2014 and was reelected with an even stronger mandate in 2019, almost every Muslim action is freighted with the word “jihad.” The mainstream Indian media have used this shorthand with relish. On March 11, 2020, Sudhir Chaudhary, a prominent and popular Indian journalist, presented his viewers with a chart outlining the various kinds of jihad to which India’s Hindus were subject. He talked about “hard” jihad and “soft” jihad, about the jihad being waged by the media, about the jihad being waged on history, on land rights, on the Indian economy, on affairs of the heart. The media even attempted to pin the spread of Covid in India to a single superspreader event connected to an Islamic conclave in a Delhi neighborhood, labeling it “corona jihad.” 

Another prominent Indian television journalist described an attempt by Muslims to “infiltrate” the civil services by passing a nationwide exam as the “UPSC jihad.” Muslims are drastically underrepresented in India’s civil services, and the number is dwindling, with only 3% qualifying to join the services in 2021, even though Muslims make up an estimated 14% of the population. Meanwhile, the 2021 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report shows that Muslims comprise more than 30% of India’s prison population.

Last year, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, said during a U.S congressional briefing that Modi was an “extremist who has taken over the government.” Stanton, a credible and highly respected scholar, said: “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India.”

Aasif Mujtaba, the founder of a nonprofit organization, Miles2Smile, told me that Muslims had already been effectively demeaned in India and were now being openly persecuted. He said that the word “jihad” had been weaponized, that it had been used to create an “us versus them narrative, in which the ‘them’ are Muslims who are considered to be lesser humans.” They are trying, now, Mujtaba added, to “delegitimize Muslims as citizens of the land.”

He is, in part, referring to the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act which led to weeks of protests until Covid-related lockdowns forced protesters off the street. The United Nations described the act — which offers a path to citizenship to everyone except Muslims who fled to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh before 2014 because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs — as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.” But Mujtaba is also referring to a general atmosphere in which drastic, even illegal measures can be taken to punish Muslims for alleged crimes, including bulldozing their homes, breaking up their relationships and boycotting or shutting down their businesses. In October, Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The authorities in several Indian states are carrying out violence against Muslims as a kind of summary punishment… [they] are sending a message to the public that Muslims can be discriminated against and attacked.”

But Muskan, who told a court in Uttar Pradesh of her love for Rashid, remains defiant. “Even though they say that Muslim men manipulate Hindu girls,” she told me, “it was me who initiated our relationship. I made a choice. They might call it jihad but people like us won’t stop loving each other.”

The post When India’s right wing comes for interfaith marriage 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.

“You do not know the plight of the poor,” the girl told reporters, referring to the high priests and seers who argue that eggs violate the vegetarianism supposedly intrinsic to the practice of Hinduism. “We need eggs… who are you to tell us [what to eat]?”

In July, the howls of indignation from upper caste communities and even legislators notwithstanding, Karnataka’s department of education announced that it would provide eggs in all districts on 46 days of the 2022-23 school year.

Only half of India’s 28 states and eight union territories provide eggs as part of the midday meal scheme. And in those states that do provide eggs, the frequency ranges from daily to once a week to even once a month. These free school lunches feed well over 100 million of the poorest children in the country, ensuring they get at least one balanced, nutritious meal every day. The scheme began as an incentive for poor parents to send their children to school, if only to guarantee lunch, but is now a widely acknowledged bulwark against the persistent malnutrition that afflicts children in India.

Rates of stunting and severe stunting remain stubbornly high in India, despite decades of economic growth. The children most affected are those under five years old, but even among school-going children over 30% are underweight and undernourished.

Covid has exacerbated concerns, with government figures between 2020 and 2021 showing a sharp rise in the number of acutely malnourished children, even in prosperous states such as Maharashtra and Gujarat. According to this year’s Global Hunger Index, India ranks 107 out of 121 countries, faring worse than poorer neighbors such as Bangladesh.

Nutrient-rich eggs, packed with protein, would substantially improve India’s nutritional outcomes. In Karnataka, a study commissioned by the government showed that 13-year-old to 14-year-old girls who had access to eggs as part of a midday meal program gained 71% more weight than girls of the same age and socioeconomic background who did not get eggs.

Still, Karnataka’s apparently sensible decision to make eggs available to schoolchildren who wanted them met with disapproval in influential circles. Tejaswini Ananth Kumar, the vice president of Karnataka’s BJP chapter and widow of a former minister in the Narendra Modi government, tweeted that eggs were “not the only source of nutrition.” She added that the decision to serve eggs in school might be considered “exclusionary to many students who are vegetarians.”

The BJP is the political party in government at state-level in Karnataka and federally, with Modi arguably the most popular and powerful prime minister in decades. Its prevailing ideology is Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist movement that has disdain for India’s constitutional secularism, believing India ought to be a Hindu nation — in the same way that countries like Saudi Arabia or Pakistan are Islamic nations.

Karnataka is now one of very few BJP-ruled states that are offering eggs to schoolchildren. States such as Gujarat, where Modi comes from and where he was chief minister between 2001 and 2014 before becoming prime minister for the whole country, don’t offer eggs as part of school lunch even though large numbers of children suffer from chronic malnutrition.   

Sylvia Karpagam, a doctor and public health researcher based in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital city, told me that the “myth about India being vegetarian is strongly pushed by those with an ideological agenda. It is far from the truth. And it is reinforced by the mostly dominant caste, English-speaking, Indian-origin diaspora in the West. It feeds the stereotype that India is a largely mystical, yoga-practicing, peace-loving country.” Karpagam, who has written extensively on India’s nutrition problems and its links to caste and class inequalities, noted that this dominant class influence “manifests itself in the kind of decisions about food that are being made in the country.”

A 2020 paper published by experts whose findings were intended to help shape India’s new national education policy claimed that “animal-based foods interfere with hormonal functions in humans.” Just a few lines before this conclusion, the authors noted that “[g]iven the small body frame of Indians, any extra energy provided through cholesterol by regular consumption of egg and meat leads to lifestyle disorders.”

Widely criticized on social media, the paper was deemed further proof of an unscientific, state-sanctioned effort to portray vegetarianism as somehow more Indian than the meat-eating commonly associated with lower caste Hindus and Muslims. In its ugliest manifestation, this endorsement of vegetarianism spills out of conference rooms and academic position papers and onto the streets in the form of lynchings of mostly Muslim cattle traders.

According to Human Rights Watch, between 2015 and 2018, 44 Indians, including 36 Muslims, have been killed by cow vigilantes. In another analysis, 97% of attacks by self-styled “gau rakshaks,” literally “the providers of protection and security to cows,” between 2010 and 2017 occurred since the ascension of Modi to power in Delhi. As recently as April 2022, there were reports of a man dying after he and two other men were severely beaten by vigilantes who suspected the men of slaughtering cows.

“There is a contempt for meat,” Sylvia Karpagam, the doctor from Bangalore, told me. “And for meat eaters who are viewed and projected as more violent, as sexually aggressive, lustful and criminal.” She stressed that these behavioral associations were linked to casteist notions of “purity and pollution.” Brahmins, she said, flaunted vegetarianism as pure and meat-eating as impure. “This idea is fed early to children,” she explained. “Meat-eaters often experience shame for their food choices and tend to hide what they eat in their homes.”

In recent years, this cultural shaming has been abetted and encouraged by the government. Four years ago, India’s health ministry tweeted an image explicitly associating extra weight and lack of health with the eating of meat and eggs. A backlash led to the ministry deleting the tweet, but the mindset, Karpagam insists, remains.

Vegetarianism and veganism have become increasingly popular in the West, where these dietary choices are seen as not just beneficial for health reasons but also for the environment. But, Karpagam argues, “the vegetarianism that is being pushed here, in our context, is top-down, caste and class-based. It is totally unscientific. For example, if a woman goes to a hospital with anemia, she will be given iron tablets and told to eat vegetables. But it is unlikely she will be told that liver and red meats are good for her. This is vegetarianism by erasure. The government is not endorsing vegetarianism for ethical reasons or scientific ones. In fact, our knowledge of healthy vegetarianism is also poor.”

According to Karpagam, “enforced vegetarianism” harms the poor. “When the poor eat a cereal-heavy and nutrient-deficient diet they are more likely to suffer from malnutrition. Children are more likely to have stunting and to be undernourished,” she said. Yet most national health surveys show that up to 70% of Indians are meat-eating, that for poor people food such as the meat from water buffaloes (classified as beef by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making India ironically one of the world’s largest exporters of beef alongside the likes of Brazil and Australia) are a major part of their diets.

Dipa Sinha, an economics professor at Delhi’s Ambedkar University, said that “if meat and eggs were incorporated into public food programs then obviously supplementary nutrition would be better and that could have an effect on our malnutrition crisis.” But, she conceded, “the resistance to such a move comes largely from the upper castes. Vegetarianism is an upper caste idea and it is the dominant castes that exert the most influence on public programs.” These programs mostly help those whose diets have traditionally included meat and eggs and who are ill-served by the growing distaste with which the government views people who do not follow vegetarian diets.

The Right to Food Campaign describes itself as an “informal network of organizations and individuals” who recognize that “everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and undernutrition.” Swati Narayan, a scholar and activist who works with the Campaign, told me that while India “has achieved scale with the universalization of school meals, we’ve still not achieved nutrition, as is evident in the government data.” Eggs, she pointed out, “are nutrient dense, so why not achieve adequate nutrition by adding eggs to school meals?”

As inflation bites, poor people in India often go without, eating flatbread and pickles as a meal, or going without basic vegetables. In such circumstances, school midday meals are a lifeline.

It seems wholly unreasonable that a simple and inexpensive fix such as adding a single egg to free lunches for poverty-stricken children must meet such virulent cultural opposition that it falls upon straight-talking schoolgirls to show community leaders, priests and government ministers the error of their ways.

The post Eggs in school lunches can fix India’s malnutrition crisis appeared first on Coda Story.

Dr. Babu, an ophthalmologist by training, was horrified. “How can they treat double vision with some drops!!” he exclaimed incredulously on Twitter. Retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, has no known cure, and cataracts cannot be treated without surgery, he told me over the phone from his home in Kannur, in the south Indian state of Kerala.

“There are no clear cut studies to substantiate that advertisement,” he said, expressing concern that patients might opt for the eye drops instead of clinically proven treatments or surgeries. “People will be denied proper treatment, which will lead to blindness.”

After spotting several similar adverts from Patanjali claiming that their Ayurvedic medicines could cure, among other things, diabetes, blood pressure issues and goiter, Dr. Babu filed a legal complaint. Last month, the Central Consumer Protection Authority issued a notice to the company for misleading advertising.

Endorsing unscientific cures

In April, at a convention center in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi sat next to the World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as they celebrated the growing global impact of traditional Indian medicine.

Together they inaugurated the WHO Global Center for Traditional Medicine in Jamnagar, Gujarat — built with a $250 million investment from the Indian government as a standard bearer for the shared vision with WHO that “harnessing the potential of traditional medicine would be a game changer for health when founded on evidence, innovation and sustainability.” According to the WHO, over “40% of pharmaceutical formulations are based on natural products and landmark drugs, including aspirin and artemisinin, originated from traditional medicine,” with an estimated 88% of countries using traditional therapies, such as herbal medicines, acupuncture, yoga, and others. 

For Modi, the promotion of Indian traditional medicine is essential to both his economic and ideological agenda. The export of Indian-made herbal medicines is worth several hundred billion dollars already and the industry is growing at nearly 9% each year, with demand exploding during the Covid-19 pandemic as people sought natural remedies and “immunity boosters” for the virus.

On October 23, at an event to mark “Ayurveda Day,” the minister of state for Ayush (the traditional medicines ministry created by the Modi government in 2014 when he became prime minister) claimed that Ayurveda was now accepted as a traditional system of medicine in 30 countries and that Ayush medicines were being exported to 100 countries.

Ayurveda dates back some 4,000 years and its foundational texts emphasize ideas of balance and harmony. While the economic reasons to promote Ayurveda, like yoga, as an Indian gift to the world are apparent, it also fits with the Modi government’s Hindu supremacist agenda and with feeding a sense of grievance that India’s colonial history has meant Indian knowledge systems are frequently dismissed as inferior to Western science.

The second sentence in the Wikipedia entry for Ayurveda declares that the “theory and practice of Ayurveda is pseudoscientific.” This so incensed the Ayurvedic Medicine Manufacturers Organization of India that it complained to the Supreme Court that the entry was defamatory, prompting the bench, as it dismissed the case on October 21, to observe acerbically that “you can edit the Wikipedia article.”

Yet allegations of pseudoscience and low testing and quality control standards continue to dog Ayush medicines. Patanjali is far from the only company peddling unproven medical cures. And the nationalist agenda to promote traditional Indian medicines has prompted a slew of endorsements from prominent religious or political figures for treatments which have never been scientifically proven to work.

For instance, Ashwini Choubey, ex-Minister of State for Health, extolled the use of cow urine as a cure for cancer. The cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism, and cow urine has been used in Ayurvedic treatments for centuries. Another Union Minister of State, Shripad Naik, claimed that Ayurvedic treatments “have already reached a stage where just like chemotherapy, we can treat cancer, but without the side effects.” There is no reliable evidence to support the use of any Ayurvedic medicine as a treatment for cancer.

Choubey and Naik are among a growing number of voices on the Hindu right pushing for the integration of traditional Indian therapies with modern medicine. The Ministry of Ayush — Ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy — was set up to oversee and promote traditional Indian medicine. But the ministry has also helped promote medical cures which are not backed by evidence. In an advisory on preventative measures against Covid-19, for instance, the ministry suggested the use of Arsenicum album 30C, a homeopathic drug, as a prophylactic against the virus, alongside other measures such as inserting sesame oil in each nostril every morning.

Not only is there no evidence that these treatments can help to prevent Covid-19, but homeopathy as a whole has been widely debunked.

Critics are keen to emphasize that while not all alternative treatments are ineffective — indeed, many modern medicines drew originally on traditional medicinal knowledge — all treatments should undergo rigorous clinical trials before being promoted in the public sphere.

“It doesn't matter what form of therapy you suggest is working. It has to be grounded in evidence,” said Anant Bhan, a researcher in bioethics and health policy. “If you can't show that, then such claims should not be made, because then you're potentially putting human lives at risk.”

A violation of the right to life?

Misinformation surrounding alternative therapies in India has already proven deadly. One study from 2019 published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Hepatology, which compared patients with alcoholic hepatitis who were taking alternative medicines with a control group who received standard care, found that the patients using alternative medicines had significantly higher short-term mortality rates; only 18% survived to 6 months, compared to 52% of patients receiving standard care.

Concerns that the attempt to integrate traditional medicine with modern science may negatively impact health outcomes have also been voiced by the Association of Medical Consultants (AMC), a group of doctors in Mumbai. Earlier this year, they filed a petition against two new bills which would allow Ayurvedic doctors to practice various types of surgery. The government claims the scheme will address the country’s chronic shortage of doctors, and has set up a six-month-long bridge course which aims to train the Ayurvedic practitioners.

But the AMC contested that the new bills constitute a “violation of the right to life” as laid out by the Constitution of India. “The government steps to try and integrate the Indian system of medicine with the contemporary modern system of medicine is fraught with danger,” said Dr. Sudhir Naik, an obstetrician and past president of the AMC who was involved in filing the petition.

“We understand the government's limitations as far as the workforce is concerned. But there are no shortcuts,” he said. “You can’t give them six months training and say, okay, now go ahead, go into the field and do these procedures. That's not practical, that's highly dangerous. You can't use our rural population as guinea pigs.”

Questions remain, too, about the use of essential anesthetic drugs and post-surgery antibiotics, which fall outside the scope of Ayurvedic practice.

“If there is a claim that an Ayurvedic surgeon, for example, can do surgeries of a particular kind, then it has to be based on some kind of comparative evidence generation,” said Bhan. “Ultimately, it comes down to public health and to patient safety.”

Government-led misinformation

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a strong proponent of science, initiating reforms to promote higher education and inaugurating several new scientific research and educational institutes. Today, India has a huge tech industry, its own space program, and is the world’s largest exporter of pharmaceuticals — as well as supplying over half of the vaccines produced worldwide.

The rise of pseudoscience seems to signal a shift however in the priorities of the current leadership, rejecting scientific rigor in pursuit instead of a Hindu nationalist ideology.

Sumaiya Shaikh, a researcher studying the neurobiological underpinnings of violent extremism, has spent years advocating for evidence-based medicine and critiquing misinformation in public health policies in India. There has been a “definite increase” in unscientific claims in recent years, she said — including in the promotion of alternative medicines.

“The government has used it as a strategy to push out untested remedies,” she said. From a neuroscience perspective, misinformation which backs up a person’s existing belief system is very effective because “it's less taxing for your brain than to actually read the evidence or fact check,” she said. “The way that it captures your brain is often highly emotive.”

This means that not only do adverts like Patanjali’s appeal to people on an ideological basis — the conglomerate’s brand ambassador, Baba Ramdev, is a popular Hindu spiritual leader and vocal supporter of the BJP — but they also bank on simplicity. 

People tend to be drawn to the quick fixes, said Shaikh, “where there are bigger promises made. For example, a person who's an expert in, say, diabetes is never going to claim that we're going to completely rid you of diabetes — but somebody who is an expert in homeopathy will make that promise to you.” The result, she said, is that many end up opting for therapies which have little evidence of efficacy.

Dr. Cyriac Abby Philips is a liver specialist who actively campaigns against what he sees as a dangerous lack of regulation of alternative medicines. He believes that the current leadership is unwilling to correct misinformation, because it would directly contradict some of the core tenets of Hinduism.

For example, Tinospora cordifolia, commonly known as Giloy, is a shrub native to India which appears in ancient Hindu texts, and has been used by Ayurvedic practitioners to treat various medical ailments for centuries. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have linked its use to liver damage, however. The results of some of these studies have been strongly disputed by the Ministry of Ayush, which called one paper and the media reports which followed its publication “misleading” and questioned whether the active ingredient has been mistaken for a “similar looking herb.” The ministry did not respond to my requests for comment on this article.

Dr. Philips, who has also published a paper linking Giloy usage to liver damage, believes that the ministry’s strong rebuttal of the research is due to the “cultural, traditional and political values” attached to Ayurvedic treatments such as Giloy. “It's not so simple saying that this Ayurvedic drug or this Ayurvedic practice is wrong. if you say that, it's like you are hitting at the foundation of India,” said Philips.

Capitalizing on fear

The promotion of alternative treatments with limited evidence of efficacy increased drastically with the arrival of Covid-19 in India in early 2020. Fear of the virus, combined with a lack of consensus from the scientific community on how it was spread, resulted in a marked increase in misinformation.

“There was this sense of urgency of getting something which works. So when you get any source of information which seems credible, then of course, you would jump at it,” said Bhan.

At the peak of the pandemic in June 2020, Patanjali launched Coronil, advertising it as the “first evidence-based medicine for Covid-19” at an event also attended by India’s then Minister of Health, Harsh Vardhan. After a backlash and widespread doubt over the veracity of the data, Coronil was later downgraded to an “immunity booster,” a claim which was endorsed by the Ministry of Ayush. A lab test carried out by the University of Birmingham found that the pills offered no protection against the virus.

Despite this, Patanjali sold 2.5 million Coronil kits in the four months since its launch, grossing $30 million, according to the company. Sales of some other “immunity boosters” manufactured by Ayurvedic companies rose by as much as 700% during the first few months of the pandemic.

“There is cultural supremacy that the medicines bring, but at the same time, there's a huge financial gain here,” said Shaikh. “The alternative health industry knows that they're making a large amount of money out of this. And of course, the government knows that too — the government is equally to blame here, in not containing the misinformation, in promoting it from their own channels.”

A lack of regulation

While alternative medicine manufacturers in India must comply with the same Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) as pharmaceutical companies under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940, factory inspections are conducted by different departments for each school of medicine. As such, the production of alternative medicines is often subject to less stringent regulations, said Akash Sathyanandan, a lawyer at the High Court of Kerala, with “different yardsticks for different schools of medicine.”

With public scrutiny lower than in the pharmaceutical industry, Sathyanandan said that substandard manufacturing processes often go unnoticed and underreported. “There is a lot of data that is below sea level,” he said.

Many alternative formulations have been found to contain contaminants, some of which are harmful to human health. Several studies conducted in the U.S. for example, found that a significant percentage of imported Ayurvedic supplements contained lead and other heavy metals, at quantities which would result in intake above regulatory standards if consumed as recommended by manufacturers.

Dr. Cyriac Philips has first-hand experience of the danger this poses. At his clinic in Kerala, many of the patients have liver injuries which have been caused or exacerbated by the consumption of alternative medicines.

In one case, a 16-year-old girl who presented to the clinic in urgent need of a liver transplant was found to have spent the past three years consuming alternative medicines for a seizure disorder. When a laboratory analysis of the medicines was done, it was found that they contained high quantities of arsenic.

“She had arsenic detectable in her nails and hairs. And she also developed a very special type of liver disease due to arsenic toxicity known as non-cirrhotic portal hypertension,” said Dr. Philips. He estimates that he has conducted laboratory tests on around 250 different alternative medicines, all brought to him by his patients, and has found many of them to contain contaminants such as mercury in levels “more than 100,000 times the upper limit of what is ideally recommended.”

Tampering with the processes of good science

Dr. Philips’s work has often been seen as an attack on alternative medicines, and he has faced a heavy backlash, with his laboratory being attacked twice. On social media, he said, he regularly receives threats when he posts anything critical of Ayurveda. “They send me messages, derogatory and vulgar messages, threatening me that my life is gone,” he said.

Silencing criticism is a broader problem, said Shaikh. “If you're a non-Ayush clinician, you do not have the right to talk about Ayush,” she said. “They're actively stopping peer review.”

In the long run, she believes that this approach to scientific research will only damage the global reputation of India in the health industry.

“It's harming, what they want to do,” she says. “If you want to establish India as the main provider of service, whether it's manufacturing or health service, then you've got to have scrutiny in place for every single step, and listen to what the scientists are saying.”

Others, such as Dr. Babu, are more hopeful that regulations surrounding alternative treatments will slowly catch up with modern medicine as the industry grows. He believes that the success of his legal complaint against Patanjali’s advertisements marks a turning point in the battle against pseudoscience.

“There'll be some concrete action from [regulatory bodies] to prevent such misleading advertisements in future, I'm sure,” he says. “I am trusting the legal system of my country.”

But India’s legal system will have to contend with the determination of a powerful prime minister intent on ushering in, as he put it in April, alongside the WHO director general, “a new era of traditional medicine in the next 25 years.” And with the pop cultural appeal of figures like Baba Ramdev who has built a multi-billion-dollar yoga and Ayurveda empire with Patanjali, dubious treatments notwithstanding, at its heart. 

The post Modi wants to export traditional Indian medicine to the world, but doctors warn against pseudoscience and quack cures appeared first on Coda Story.

So incensed were the Delhi Police by this coincidence that it noted in the chargesheet that there “could not have been a greater international embarrassment for the Government of India than to have communal riots raging in the national capital while a visit by the U.S. President was underway.” The riots began because supporters of the government’s arguably Islamophobic Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) — which essentially enables a path to Indian citizenship for illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, as long as they are not Muslim — attacked protestors.

Many observers alleged that the police aided and abetted the Hindutva mob. Fifty-three people, mostly Muslim, were killed in the violence and many hundreds were injured and displaced. Weeks after the riots, bodies were still being found in open drains.   

Shahid has been home for about a year now, waiting for his trial to begin. He is one of 2,456 people who have been arrested, though nearly half have yet to be charged with any crime. 

Sitting on a mattress in his apartment (one room and a tiny kitchen), Shahid describes his time in prison as a “blur of pain and panic.” He was eventually given bail after he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Shahid was also wounded in the riots, shot in the shoulder, a wound that festered and rotted in jail.

His health has improved since he’s been home but he’s still weak and traumatized. While he talks to me, his eyes sometimes filling with tears, his children play games on their phones. The electronic bleeps from the phones, the lazy whir of the ceiling fan, and the voices in the street provide a surreal counterpoint as Shahid tells his story.

“Sochne samajhne ki taakat bilkul khatam ho gayi hai,” he says. He no longer has the will or strength to make sense of what happened to him.

Over two years after the riots, the Delhi police continue to make arrests. Just last week, police arrested a man they claim played a role in the death of a police constable during the riots. Two policemen were killed and around 50 injured. A police spokesperson told reporters that many arrests are being made through facial recognition technology used on images from over 100 closed circuit cameras in the area.

The Delhi police continues to conflate the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act with “radical” Islamist groups and ideologies. Last month, the government of India banned a Muslim group called the Popular Front of India. Delhi police argued that the national ban vindicated its claims that the PFI had funded the anti-Citizenship Act protests as part of a conspiracy to foment communal violence. But the allegations remain unfounded and appear to portray Muslims en masse as having an agenda. 

“This is about injustice,” says Shaziya, Mohammad Shahid’s wife. “We’ve been troubled ever since the day he was shot. I haven’t spent a day in peace in the last two years.” Shahid faces charges under 16 sections of the Indian Penal Code, including rioting and murder. And, his lawyers say, the police have little to go on except the surveillance technology it has used to identify people like Shahid. “Extensive use of technology in identification and arrest was the hallmark of investigation” into the riots, the Delhi Police wrote in its 2020 annual report.

Last year, the U.K.-based cybersecurity website Comparitech said Delhi was the most watched city in the world in 2021, with 1,826 CCTV cameras per square mile. Cities in China have since taken over, but Delhi remains among the ten most “surveilled” cities in the rest of the world, alongside the likes of Singapore, London, New York and Los Angeles.

This has been hailed as an achievement by authorities who have promised the installation of more cameras. And in the last few years, CCTV cameras and facial recognition technology have been used not just to police streets and public spaces but also in public school classrooms.

Experts say weak surveillance and data protection regulations mean that this emphasis on CCTV cameras is likely to cause more harm than good.

"An increase in the efficiency of policing is not always good news for all people, says Jai Vipra, a research fellow at the Center for Applied Law and Technology Research, an Indian think tank. “Because,” Vipra adds, “you have to realize how differently groups of people in India experience policing. Some groups are victimized by the police, as is evident from our very skewed prisoner statistics."

According to recent government data from the year 2020, the majority of Indians in jail are from marginalized and minority communities. Most are either illiterate or have not finished high school. In 2019, almost half of the 12,000 police personnel interviewed for a study felt that Muslims were naturally prone to committing crimes and about 60% of police felt similarly about migrants. 

Vipra found in her research that the use of facial recognition technology in Delhi was likely to disproportionately affect Muslims because of both police prejudice and the over-policing and over-surveillance of areas with a significant Muslim population. “Crime exists in our socio-political reality,” Vipra told me, “and to add technology to it can be really, really dangerous if not done with a lot of care.”

A few months after the riots in northeast Delhi, a fact-finding committee from the Delhi Minorities Commission published a report that described the police as complicit in violence targeted towards Muslims, and in at least one instance as having attacked Muslims themselves. In several court proceedings since, judges have remarked on the police’s shoddy standards of investigation and noted that police incompetence (or malevolence) has meant that several of the accused continue to languish in jails without bail or hope of a speedy trial. Human Rights Watch has said that the authorities in Delhi are pursuing a political vendetta, that they should be “impartially investigating allegations that BJP leaders incited violence,” and that they should “stop using these investigations to silence critics of the government.”

But the Delhi police deny any allegations of bias. The Delhi police commissioner at the time of the riots, SN Shrivastava said that 231 people were arrested on the basis of CCTV or video footage and that 137 of those people were identified through the use of facial recognition technology. The police had recovered and analyzed a total of 945 video recordings and “many rioters were identified on the basis of the clothes they were wearing,” he added.

In August, the Internet Freedom Foundation, an organization that advocates for digital rights, published the results of a Right to Information inquiry it filed that revealed that the “accuracy of their FRT depends on light conditions, distance, and angle of face.” According to the police, all “matches above 80% similarity are treated as positive results.” The Internet Freedom Foundation said there was no reason given for the arbitrary 80% threshold and why results under 80% were classified as “false positives” rather than as negative, suggesting that they could still be used as evidence alongside further corroboration.

“In light of this information,” the Internet Freedom Foundation tweeted, “facial recognition tech surveillance WILL lead to human rights violations.” In August 2020, just months after the northeast Delhi riots, a court in the United Kingdom recognized that using facial recognition technology in such circumstances as the peaceful attendance of a protest march is a human rights violation.

On the afternoon of February 25, 2020, Shahid stepped out of his small apartment to join his wife and children who were visiting relatives nearby. That evening, Shahid was supposed to catch a train to Amritsar in Punjab where he worked. The riots that engulfed his neighborhood had already begun two days before, though the streets around his house, Shahid said, appeared relatively peaceful. 

Just as Shahid was trying to hail a motorized rickshaw, he says, a crowd came running down the street. Some people were throwing stones at the police and the police were firing tear gas shells into the crowd. Shahid felt something hit him on the back of his right shoulder. He fell to the ground and the people around him pulled his prone body out of the way. Shahid had been shot.

Like many others injured that day, Shahid was rushed to hospital by a stranger on a motorcycle. Another young man was brought into the same hospital. Weeks later, Shahid would learn that the man’s name was Aman and that Shahid was being charged for his murder. 

In early April, when his wounds from the gunshot still required three bandage changes a day, several Delhi police officers came to Shahid’s one-room Jaffrabad dwelling. At the time, a harsh nationwide lockdown was in place to combat the coronavirus. The police shoved Shahid into one of four vehicles and took him to the station to be interrogated.

The police told Shahid they were going to be searching video footage for his face. “If I had picked up a single stone,” Shahid told me, “I might have been afraid. But I did no such thing.” He says he told the police he was blameless. “I was a casualty myself,” he recalls telling them.

Shahid says the police showed him a dozen or so pieces of footage. They asked him to identify himself and others. He said he couldn’t. “At least tell us what you were wearing,” the police reportedly said. Shahid claims he pointed to a man on the video wearing all black and said he had worn similar clothes though not the same headgear. The police, Shahid says, circled the man and zoomed in. His face could not be clearly seen, nor was the man engaging in any violence. 

The next day, though, Shahid was put in a cell. The pixelated image of a figure in black clothes was attached to Shahid’s chargesheet as evidence that he was involved in rioting.

Shahid’s lawyer, Bilal Anwar Khan, told me there was no information made available to him about the source or the authenticity of the video. No witnesses were asked to identify Shahid. “It is a very shallow piece of evidence,” Khan said, “it’s purely conjecture. That they have taken such an approach to identify him is contrary to the law.” 

But it is the kind of evidence that the Delhi police continues to use to justify the arrests of those they say were at the scene of the riots, even if not actually rioting.

Last year, the Chief Minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, announced his plans to install 140,000 more CCTV cameras across the city, including in schools and in gated neighborhoods and apartment complexes. Kejriwal’s party was only founded in November 2012, but has already been elected twice by resounding margins in Delhi. In February, the party easily won the state election in Punjab, giving it control of two states and making the party a small but significant player in national politics. Its relationship with the BJP, particularly in Delhi, is adversarial and marked by a vicious pettiness, in word and deed.

The central government, which controls the Delhi police, is also installing CCTV cameras around the city. It is using funds from the Safe City project which was launched in eight cities in 2018 and included several tech measures as “minimum desirable components” to ensure women’s safety. The government allocated a little under half a billion dollars to the project from the Nirbhaya Fund, set up in 2013 following the horrifying rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi which received worldwide attention. A 2021 report by Oxfam noted that the fund was being predominantly allocated to services that don’t specifically help women.

“The entire perspective in which CCTV cameras are the answer to women’s safety is flawed,” says Kalpana Viswanath, co-founder of Safetipin, a civil society organization focused on making public spaces safer for women. “The CCTV camera is useful for the police, plain and simple,” she told me. “We don’t need fear to drive our lives. We need freedom to drive our lives.” 

Privacy experts in India have also raised concerns about “function creep,” wherein the use of technology that is acquired for one purpose is eventually used mostly for an entirely different purpose. In 2017, a Delhi High court ordered the government and police to work together to promptly procure facial recognition technology that would help trace and rescue missing children in the city. 

A year later when the court sought to know why the technology had been used in less than one percent of cases, the police said that the technology was so poor that it was often unable to distinguish between boys and girls.

Even if the technology has been upgraded since then, there is little evidence to show that the facial recognition technology used by police in India is now particularly accurate. Anushka Jain, a lawyer at the Internet Freedom Foundation who specializes in transparency issues, told me that given how facial recognition technology is used in India, “an entire community could end up being targeted.” In the United States, for instance, the technology has been used in the wrongful arrests of several Black men.

In some estimations there are at least 125 government-authorized facial recognition systems in use in India today. “I don’t think there is any situation in which law enforcement’s use of this technology can be justified because it is always going to lead to violation of fundamental rights,” Anushka Jain told me. But if the authorities are going to insist on its use, she added, people need to have legal recourse when they are wrongly targeted and faced with criminal action.

“That surveillance falls differently on different people is a fact,” says Vidushi Marda, senior program officer at Article 19, the international human rights organization. “If you are a Dalit woman in India, for instance, the nature and extent to which you are under surveillance are far more than an upper caste Hindu man. There is a disproportionate impact on communities and groups that have been historically marginalized."

Marda conducted an ethnographic study on Delhi’s Crime Mapping and Predictive System (CMAPS) and found, for instance, that inputs fed into the system reflected institutional assumptions about poorer immigrants and those living in poorer parts of the city being “de facto criminals” and also assumptions that emergency calls made from those areas would contain exaggeration and misreporting. 

“There are so many subjective human decisions that are made before the technology even comes into play,” she says. “All of these assumptions are not written in any manual, they are imbibed into the everyday act of policing. The technology, at the very minimum, will just embed those ideas.”

A recent project report by the National Police Mission proposed predictive policing for women’s safety in urban areas across India. This, even though in the European Union, after considerable evidence that predictive policing reinforces existing discrimination against some communities, rapporteurs have recommended a ban as part of the upcoming Artificial Intelligence Act. But in India it is clear that facial recognition technology and predictive policing — introduced as a measure to protect women and children — is a useful tool for a government that brooks little political opposition and is increasingly focused on control.

In Jaffrabad, Shahid is an example of the system’s collateral damage. He tells me he is focused now on piecing the shards of his broken life back together. A life that now includes mandatory court and hospital visits. “Even if I go down the road,” he told me, “I suddenly start feeling breathless and become drenched in sweat.”

So much has changed, his wife says.  “And it’s going to be a long time before our lives get any better.”

The post Indian police use facial recognition to persecute Muslims and other marginalized communities appeared first on Coda Story.

USA

By Rebekah Robinson

Curriculum standards and content have been subject to tense debate in the U.S. for decades. These standards vary from state to state, even down to the granular level from school district to school district.

Often these debates are pedagogical. In times of change or upheaval, though, the school curriculum reflects the divisions in society and in its politics and culture.

In July, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill went into effect, limiting what teachers can say in the classroom about gender and sexual orientation all the way up to the 12th grade. Additionally, Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (ruled by a Florida judge last week to be unconstitutional) went into effect ahead of the new school year, blocking conversations around race deemed to be “critical race theory.”

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said, “This deeply disturbing legislation aims to censor educators and prevent them from valuing, affirming and supporting our students,” and that “politicians are manufacturing false narratives about young people — and then proposing unconstitutional, discriminatory and just plain harmful ‘solutions’ to nonexistent problems.”

Earlier this year, several thousand math textbooks were recalled in Florida. Not because of mathematical errors but because they had been flagged for containing material that could be considered “critical race theory.” The books were returned to the publisher to address the content contravening the restrictive legislation.

Parents also now have more control in some Florida counties to contest material they believe to be inappropriate for their children, enabling additional and arbitrary censorship of educational content. Books in Florida counties are being censored in libraries and now carry warning labels for LGBTQ content. Stories that feature characters of color are being flagged as “unsuitable for students.”

Florida’s legislative activism has catalyzed conservative lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia, among others, to also attempt to prohibit teaching “divisive topics.” The answer to alleged “cultural indoctrination,” these legislators appear to be arguing, is more indoctrination.

Hungary

By Katia Patin 

Amid the turmoil of Hungary’s Covid-19 crisis in September 2020, the government rolled out a new curriculum with a mandate for schools to stick close to the new centralized teaching recommendations. The biggest changes were made to literature and history instruction, with the updates aligning with the ruling party Fidesz’s rehabilitation of nationalist figures with anti-Semitic pasts. 

For example, assigned reading included the work of Hungarian writers such as Jozsef Nyiro and Albert Wass. In addition to his short stories and novels, Nyiro was known for being an admirer of Joseph Goebbels and in 1940 he joined parliament as a member of an ultra-right, anti-semitic party. Wass, a novelist and poet whose work was banned until the fall of communism in 1989, was a convicted war criminal. Both men have had statues and streets named after them in recent years and were introduced into curriculum at the expense of authors such as Imre Kertesz, Hungary’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature.

In history textbooks, medieval wars got more page time with critics saying myth and legends were being presented as fact and history. There is now greater emphasis placed on victories won in the 10-14th centuries and the idea that Hungarians are the descendants of Turkic speaking people, rather than the previously established consensus of Finno-Ugric roots (shared by Finns, Estonians and some indigenous groups in Russia). These new changes highlighted that the established narrative of Hungary’s ancient past taught under communism was up for reinterpretation. 

Following the changes, protesters across social media used the slogan #noNAT to organize against the teaching of fascist writers with some teachers banding together to voice their opposition to having to revise their lessons.

India

By Shougat Dasgupta

Students in Indian schools are being provided with new, slimmed down textbooks for classes such as history, political science and sociology. It is, says the government, an exercise in "rationalization." The pandemic has meant that Indian schoolchildren, like many around the world, have fallen behind. So, the government wants to lighten the load.

This means — a national newspaper revealed — removing chapters from textbooks on the Gujarat riots of 2002 in which nearly a 1,000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands displaced over three days of violence. The state authorities, led at the time by current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stood by, seemingly twiddling its thumbs. 

"The approach I gather is in conformity with the theories of Hindutva," Romila Thapar, the nonagenarian professor emeritus, and arguably the world's preeminent expert on ancient India, wrote archly to me about the proposed revisions. These include eliminating, diluting, and changing the wording of sections to do with Mughal history, caste discrimination, democratic functions and even periods of authoritarian rule in India such as Indira Gandhi’s infamous “Emergency” in the 1970s.

When governments change in India, it  is not unusual that textbooks change. But since Narendra Modi came to power eight years ago, the changes to textbooks, dozens of public intellectuals like Thapar have asserted in an open letter, reflect a "Hindu first" worldview.

Modi leads the BJP, a political party that is ideologically committed to a Hindu India — like a number of affiliated cultural and political organizations known collectively as the Sangh Parivar — rather than the secular country India chose to become in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned.

As Thapar put it in her email to me, "since the political aim of the Sangh Parivar is to establish a Hindu Rashtra (nation) then the attempt will be to project history as a support for this political change." A history that must necessarily avoid India’s complexities, its many wafer-thin layers, each bleeding into the other.

It is, wrote historian S. Irfan Habib in June, "a historical fact that India has been a palimpsest." The BJP, though, appears to want to scrawl over and obscure centuries of text with a permanent marker.

Egypt

By Masho Lomashvili

Truth in Egypt has long been under attack. Deception and manipulation have been part of Egyptian politics long before the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, organized a coup d'état and seized power eight years ago.  

But the Arab Spring in 2011 offered hope of an end to authoritarian rule, and the real possibility of democracy. El-Sisi plunged Egypt back into the strongman era it had hoped to escape. He is in the process of completing the job by reducing the Arab Spring to a footnote in revised textbooks.

Will schoolchildren in Egypt no longer be made aware that Cairo’s Tahrir Square was the iconic heart of the protests that swept through North Africa and the Arab world?

Pupils in Egyptian schools once had a full chapter in their textbooks devoted to the events of the Arab Spring. Under el-Sisi, that chapter has become a deliberately misleading, confusing paragraph.

The “Modern Egyptian and Arab history” curriculum taught to secondary level students significantly underplays the Arab Spring. It was a people’s revolution, an outpouring of anger at decades of authoritarian rule in which corruption was rife and dissent was brutally crushed.

There is no mention in these textbooks of the nearly 1,000 protestors who died in 2011 as a result of police brutality. Anwar, now 31, remembers the events of 2011 very well. “It was the first time people felt their power,” he told me. “And Sisi wants them to forget this feeling.” 

According to Anwar, the Arab Spring had set an example that revolution was possible. “During Mubarak’s time,” he says, referring to the 30 years Egypt spent under the thumb of Hosni Mubarak culminating in the events of 2011, “when people talked about protests, it wasn't really seen as a threat to the government. It was because a successful revolt hadn't happened before.” Now, though, he adds, “the government knows that the people are capable of succeeding and they're scared that it might happen again.”

Serbia

By Frankie Vetch

In July 1995, Serbian paramilitaries and Bosnian Serbs from the Army of Republika Srpska marched into the town of Srebrenica and massacred thousands of Bosnian Muslims. The event was the pinnacle of a bloody war that split apart the former Yugoslavia. 

In 2004 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that what happened in Srebernica qualified as genocide. But, as recently as in 2020, textbooks in Serbia, while containing an acknowledgement that war crimes had happened in Srebrenica, stopped short of describing the massacres as genocide and questioned the accuracy of the death toll.

According to Marko Milosavljević, Programme Coordinator at the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, “there is still a big policy of denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.” Years ago, he told me, “they used to say that Srebrenica didn’t happen at all. Now over the last decade, the authorities don’t say ‘nothing happened,’ they just deny the implications of the genocide.”

In 2017, Milorad Dodik, who was at the time the President of the Republic of Srpska, stated that no textbooks should ever teach students about the Srebrenica genocide, nor the siege of Sarajevo. Textbooks only briefly mention Srebrenica as a place where Bosnian Serbs conquered. The textbooks also only refer to Serbs and not Croats or Muslims as victims of ethnic cleansing.

Serbian textbooks have also failed to mention the state’s role in committing war crimes in the 1990s against Kosovans. Dodik, now the Serb member of the three-member Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (which serves as the collective head of state), has repeatedly called for the Republic of Srpska to secede from the rest of the country. 

With tensions rising in the region, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and with a new generation of ethnic-Serbs in Serbia and the Republic of Srpska being taught little to nothing about war crimes committed against Muslims and Kosovans in the 1990s, there is an ever-present danger of history repeating itself.

The post History, identity and politics clash in the pages of school textbooks appeared first on Coda Story.

Up here, on a hill in the Aravalli Range, mountains so ancient that they trace their origins to a Precambrian event, Pooja was finally able to get her smartphone to connect to the internet.

We are about an eight-hour drive from Delhi, in a village in Ajmer, a district in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan. Pooja is an official, or “mate,” responsible for helping to log the attendance of workers in a national employment scheme.

The rural workers who resort to this scheme — the “Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act” (MGNREGA) — are so desperate for jobs that the government guarantees them 100 days of unskilled manual labor in a year at barely subsistence wages. A day’s work, usually about four hours in a baking field, earns a worker less than three dollars.

Once keeping track of workers enrolled in this massive welfare project meant making manual entries into logbooks. Now, as with most things involving an Indian government keen to appear tech savvy, there’s an app for that.

India’s federal government announced in May that the app – with its unlovely, rather alarming name, the “National Mobile Monitoring System” (NMMS) – is mandatory. Manual logs of worker attendance will no longer be kept. If there are teething problems, government functionaries breezily asserted, they will be addressed and remedied. 

The Ministry of Rural Development has said the app — developed by the National Informatics Center, which has an annual budget of around $150 million — would lead to “more transparency and ensure proper monitoring.” With the use of “geo-tagged photographs” taken of the workers on arrival and departure, the app would apparently help “in increasing citizen oversight of the program.”

Chakradhar Buddha, a researcher at LibTech India, which advocates accountability and transparency in governance, scoffs: “If they think the app is so efficient, why don’t they put it in the public domain for everyone to see?”

Instead, he says, by being so dogmatically technocratic and centralized, the government has opted “for a top-down approach in which workers cannot hold public officials accountable.” Social audits and an engaged citizenry, he adds, are far better ways to improve transparency. 

Pooja has had to walk to the top of this hill nearly every day since the government made it mandatory to register workers in the scheme through the app, 

“If I don’t do this,” Pooja says about her daily trudge up the hill, “the workers won’t get paid.”

On the day we met, despite finally getting her phone to work, Pooja couldn’t access the app. She walked back downhill to the village council but no one could help. “Now,” said a frustrated Pooja, “the workers are going to come after me. This is the third day I have not been able to register them and they’re going to blame me for their lost wages.”

Until a month ago, she says, she’d never touched a smartphone and had barely heard of Facebook and WhatsApp.

Her area has only one mobile network tower. It belongs to Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, better known as Jio, India’s largest mobile network operator. Jio is the telecom arm of a giant conglomerate run by Mukesh Ambani, on some days Asia’s richest man (a title he swaps back and forth with an Indian rival in an ongoing battle of the billionaires).

Jio bid over $11 billion last week to dominate a 5G spectrum auction by the Indian government, enabling the company to build, it said, “the world’s most advanced 5G network.” Right now, though, despite Jio’s 426.2 million users and its pan-India coverage, it appeared India’s smartphone revolution had not reached Pooja’s village. My phone showed no bars; making a call was not an option, let alone surfing the internet.

Another MGNREGA mate, Leila Devi, told me she had spent 13,000 rupees (a little over $160) on her smartphone — the equivalent of about 55 days of earnings. The average price of a smartphone in India is 16,323 rupees (over $200), which equals 75 days of wages, or three-quarters of the entire wage guaranteed by the program in a given year.

On top of Leila’s investment in her phone, she pays about $5 every month for her data package. The government does not even partially reimburse mates for either the cost of their phones or their bills. Many mates I spoke to also pointed out that in order to run the NMMS app effectively they had to buy smartphones with specifications that add to the price. The cheapest phones available in the market will not do.

Then there’s the cost of repairs. One mate, Bina, told me she had dropped her phone and that it no longer worked as it should. “I can’t afford to get it fixed,” she says, “or get a new one because I’m still paying off this phone.” The now damaged phone cost Bina about $140, the bulk of which she still owes in monthly installments.

Bina now worries that her malfunctioning phone will mean that she loses her job.

After the pandemic wreaked havoc on construction and other labor-intensive urban jobs in India, over 150 million people have turned to MGNREGA to top up their meager incomes. India’s federal government is struggling to cope.

In June alone, more than 30 million people sought work through the scheme. The current demand for work is unprecedented in the decade and a half since MGNREGA was established in 2006. The numbers reflect an unemployment crisis in India that is belied by the country’s relatively high economic growth. A private research organization, the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, reported that in June 43.7% of young Indians from the ages of 20 to 24 were unemployed.

Millions of people in Rajasthan have little option but to do the low-paid manual labor that is typically demanded of MGNREGA workers.

The chronic underestimating of costs and the subsequent drip-feeding of funds to state governments means payments to workers are routinely delayed. This even though the actual cost of the entire program represents — as the Belgian-born economist Jean Drèze, an architect of MGNREGA, has written — less than 1% of India’s three-trillion-dollar economy, the fifth largest in the world.

Shockingly, the Indian government still owes over $1.5 billion in unpaid wages to workers who are living hand to mouth. Yet almost nothing can be done to recover lost pay.

Standing in a muddy field in rural Rajasthan watching laborers toil in the heat, it’s hard to imagine that all this work might go unpaid and unacknowledged because the government mandates the use of a glitchy app in rural areas with patchy network coverage.

By six in the morning, the workers are assembled to have their attendance recorded on the app. Pooja tries to get her phone to cooperate.

She fumbles as she takes pictures, trying two or three times before she is satisfied. This morning, she is faced with 100 workers divided into groups of five. It would normally, she says, take her about half an hour to register them manually in the “muster roll” but with the app it takes her at least an hour.

When the workers are finally able to address their tasks, the heat is already stultifying. On the day I visited the site, the workers were mostly women, dressed in traditional Rajasthani clothing — long, brightly patterned skirts and tunics and vivid veils that they wore over their heads and with which they sometimes partly covered their faces.

MGNREGA has long been a bastion for women in a culture that does not support working women. Recent data from the World Bank shows that women make up only 20.3% of the Indian workforce. But women made up 54.5% of MGNREGA workers last year.

As if to illustrate these workplace dynamics, there is a makeshift creche at the site. Under a tin roof, held up by metal poles rather than walls, were six or seven children playing with mud. The temperatures, as the day wears on, reach up to 104. In other sites I visited, there were tents for the children. Mostly, though, I saw even very small children help their mothers with their assigned tasks rather than take shelter from the heat. The children filled pans with mud that their mothers then carried away on their heads. 

Maya Ramu, a graduate student and union worker, told me that even the small sum of money the women earned doing such work was “an opportunity for economic freedom. They do not have to wait for their husbands to send money.” The husbands generally go to the cities to look for work, though this is changing in the wake of the pandemic as jobs grow scarce.

It's strange, Ramu adds, that despite progressive employment practices, including reserving a third of MGNREGA jobs for women, the authorities did not stop to consider the effect that a smartphone requirement might have on employing women as site supervisors.

A 2020 survey by a trade body of mobile network operators showed that Indian women were 28% less likely than Indian men to own any kind of mobile phone and 56% less likely to access mobile internet. In Rajasthan only 50.2% of women, revealed the comprehensive National Family Health survey, even own a phone. Inevitably, poorer women and women from traditionally marginalized castes are even less likely to own or have access to any kind of phone, let alone a smartphone.

By eleven, five hours after the workers assembled for Pooja to photograph them on her phone, they are finished and ready to leave. They have barely had a break. When the workers rest, Pooja reminds them to finish the task at hand so that their already inexcusable wage is not reduced further. At the end, she stands with a measuring tape to ensure that the day’s work is complete.

Tamanna has walked two miles to get to the site. She left at dawn, while her children were still sleeping. Two days ago, she tells me, she and 97 other women had to wait for hours after work beneath the unforgiving afternoon sun because servers were down. Yesterday, monsoon rains meant the internet was down again. 

Pooja keeps her phone wrapped in plastic during the rainy season, fishing it out only to access the app but it’s rare that her phone has any service. She must walk again to a spot where her phone actually works.

Just weeks ago, mates across Rajasthan could not access the app because internet services had been suspended. India leads the world in terms of frequency of shutdowns and disruptions. While violence in an increasingly polarized country cannot be blamed on the app, every day lost is a calamity for MGNREGA workers.

In Rajasthan, the internet shutdown in late-June lasted for four days.

One MGNREGA worker told me that by the fourth day she could no longer put food on the table, unable to buy even the “atta,” the flour with which to make rotis. “Both my sons slept on empty stomachs that night.” But, she said, “we will fight this app.”

Thousands of MGNREGA workers from 15 states gathered on August 2 in Jantar Mantar, the traditional site for protests in the Indian capital New Delhi. They will be there for three days as they give vent to a range of dissatisfactions, including unpaid wages and broad underfunding.

The app, many at the protest said, is exemplary of the government’s arrogance. “There’s no app that records attendance for ministers and officials,” a protestor remarked, “so why do they need to keep tabs on us?”

The post A mobile app is costing India’s poorest workers their wages appeared first on Coda Story.

What would happen in countries vulnerable to social unrest and communal violence if the company threw its content rules out the window and embraced an absolute commitment to free speech?

Elon Musk wants to find out. In his recent bid to buy the company, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote of his belief in Twitter’s “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe.” Musk pledged to “unlock” that potential, implying that he would ditch the company’s content rules and simply let the tweets flow.

In case you missed it: Musk bought 9% of shares in the company in mid-March, a figure that only became public last week, prompting Twitter’s leadership to offer him a seat on its board of directors. Musk entertained the offer, but then had a second thought: Why not just buy the whole company? The board opted to deploy a so-called “poison pill” strategy, effectively preventing a Musk takeover.

But there was still time to wonder what might happen if the world’s wealthiest person got his way. Academic experts cautioned that an absolute free speech policy would turn the platform into a cesspool of hate speech, spam, and porn. Veteran tech critics pointed out that Musk’s ideas about content moderation were popular in the earlier days of the internet, and that time has proven that they really don’t work at scale. Across the political spectrum in the U.S., pundits speculated on whether this would pave the way for Donald Trump to return to the platform.

What would it mean for the majority of Twitter users, who live outside the U.S.?

“That just doesn’t work in a country like India,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a tech expert and founder of Medianama, an India-focused tech policy publication based in New Delhi. India is Twitter’s third-largest market after the U.S. and Japan.

“We have real world consequences from the kind of speech that Twitter enables. Our political parties are really, really adept at understanding how the algorithms work, how to create trends, how to make something shareable,” Pahwa said. “What they excel at is essentially fueling hate.”

In recent years, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and other hardline Hindu nationalist groups have made Twitter, alongside Facebook and WhatsApp, an essential platform for promoting their agendas, sometimes inciting violence against religious minorities, Muslims in particular.

“I think we’re in a situation where we need more moderation of hateful content and not less. I don’t think Musk understands or cares for whether people are getting polarized or killed in India,” Pahwa told me.

While more than 20 million Indians use Twitter on a regular basis, others have left or avoided the platform for exactly these reasons. A female researcher I spoke with, who studies gender-based harassment online, declined to be quoted for this story, citing concern that she would be attacked as a result.

Twitter’s policies prohibit hate speech, harassment, and incitement to violence, but it has a poor track record of enforcing these rules, especially for posts that are not in English.

“Everyone thinks they know how to do content moderation until it becomes their job,” said Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a tech policy group in New Delhi.

“I am not sure how [Musk] plans to address censorship by proxy that countries like India demand,” she wrote in a message.

The Modi government is known for pressuring the company to remove certain posts and reinstate others. In 2021, officials updated India’s IT Rules and began requiring large foreign tech platforms to create locally-staffed grievance programs for content removal and related disputes. It took several months, and a police visit to Twitter’s local offices, before the company complied.

Twitter has faced similar kinds of pressure in sub-Saharan Africa, where it plays a significant role in national politics in the region’s largest markets, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

In Nigeria, Twitter in 2020 became the digital ground zero for #EndSARS, a social movement protesting police brutality that played out both online and in cities across the country.

“Twitter created a special emoji for the EndSARS protest, and also verified some major handles that promoted the protests. [Former CEO Jack Dorsey] himself raised some money for them via Bitcoin,” said Nwachukwu Egbunike, a media and communications scholar at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos. 

“The feeling around government quarters is that Twitter really sided with protesters,” he said.

Less than a year later, the government banned Twitter altogether, after moderators took down a tweet posted by President Muhammadu Buhari that contained a veiled threat against Igbos, one of the country’s largest ethnic groups.

This went on for seven months. When they lifted the ban, officials announced that they had reached an agreement with Twitter, under which the company would “act with a respectful acknowledgement of Nigerian laws and the national culture and history,” and alluded to a code of conduct meant to govern the relationship. This document has not been made public.

“One has the impression that Twitter gave in or compromised Nigerian digital rights in order to get unbanned,” said Egbunike. “If this agreement is true, and the Nigerian government has the power to pull down tweets, where does that leave Nigerians?” he asked.

Egbunike’s question would be a good one for Elon Musk. The governments of both Nigeria and India have demonstrated that if companies like Twitter want to stay accessible in their countries, they need to be prepared to comply with censorship demands and the whims of whichever party is in power. 

In theory, regular people can still say whatever they like online, but between rules like these and political parties’ online influence operations and troll armies, the costs of doing so can be pretty high. 

Victims of violence stoked on the platforms pay the highest price of all. Endalk Chala, a communications professor at Hamline University and former blogger, described the role Twitter has come to play in Ethiopia’s ongoing civil conflict. Twitter has made some efforts to curb problematic speech coming from pro-government voices, Chala explained, but different ethnic groups continue to promote violence and hate on the platform.

“On Twitter, if a person from one ethnolinguistic group makes fun of a person from another, and that speech is available for people who feel attacked and derided, [members of the target group] will be harmed,” said Chala. “People are dying every day now for things like this,” he said.

“There is really bad content, in English, Amharic and in other Ethiopian languages. The content moderation on Twitter doesn’t work really well,” he said.

What if, as Musk advocates, the company simply stopped trying to moderate speech in Ethiopia?

“I am all for free speech,” Chala said. “But if it’s this messy now, you can’t imagine what would happen without it.”

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The post Outside the US, Elon Musk’s vision of a rules-free Twitter is expected to unlock violence and civil strife appeared first on Coda Story.