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For The Record  

FTR #990 Hindutva Fascism, Part 3: Modi Operandi

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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Con­tin­u­ing our FTR series on Hin­dut­va fas­cism (Hin­du nation­al­ist fas­cism) we high­light key fea­tures of the gov­er­nance of Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, whose BJP is a polit­i­cal front for the RSS. Formed along the lines of Mus­solin­i’s Black­shirts in 1925, the RSS was the orga­ni­za­tion that assas­si­nat­ed Mahat­ma Gand­hi. (We have dis­cussed Modi, the RSS and the BJP in numer­ous broad­casts, includ­ing FTR #‘s 795, 889, 441, 442, 445, 988 and 989.)

In past dis­cus­sions of the RSS and BJP, we have not­ed the fol­low­ing:

  1. Mod­i’s polit­i­cal for­tunes were boost­ed with sup­port and appar­ent financ­ing from Pierre Omid­yar, who also helped finance the rise of the OUN/B fas­cists in Ukraine.
  2. Modi and his BJP are viewed with great favor by Bre­it­bart king­pin, for­mer Trump cam­paign man­ag­er and advis­er Steve Ban­non. A num­ber of Trump’s busi­ness asso­ciates in India are asso­ci­at­ed with the BJP.
  3. Bernie Sanders’ prospec­tive Vice-Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Tul­si Gab­bard helped arrange the details for Mod­i’s Amer­i­can vis­it and is net­worked with the RSS.
  4. Under Modi, anti-Mus­lim vio­lence has dra­mat­i­cal­ly accel­er­at­ed, while free speech has been atten­u­at­ed. BJP mem­bers have cel­e­brat­ed Gand­hi’s mur­der.

 In this pro­gram, we flesh out our cov­er­age of Naren­dra Mod­i’s gov­er­nance of India.

Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of Mod­i’s appoint­ment of Yogi Adityanath to be the gov­er­nor of Uttar Pradesh province, Indi­a’s largest, we note:

  1. Yogi Adityanath is a mem­ber of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS).  ” . . . . Adityanath, born Ajay Singh Bisht, found his voca­tion in col­lege as an activist in the stu­dent wing of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, a right-wing Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion. . . .”
  2. Adityanath’s polit­i­cal foun­da­tion is the vir­u­lent­ly anti-Mus­lim ide­ol­o­gy of the RSS:  . . . . As leader of a tem­ple known for its mil­i­tant Hin­du suprema­cist tra­di­tion, he built an army of youths intent on aveng­ing his­toric wrongs by Mus­lims, whom he has called ‘a crop of two-legged ani­mals that has to be stopped.’ At one ral­ly he cried out, ‘We are all prepar­ing for reli­gious war!’ . . .” 
  3. Mod­i’s “pro-busi­ness,” “pro-devel­op­ment” polit­i­cal agen­da has giv­en way to what The New York Times pre­dictably labels “populist”–the Hin­dut­va, anti-Mus­lim fas­cism which has long been the  main­stay of the RSS.   “Adityanath (pro­nounced Ah-DIT-ya-nath) was an aston­ish­ing choice by Naren­dra Modi, India’s prime min­is­ter, who came into office three years ago promis­ing to ush­er India into a new age of devel­op­ment and eco­nom­ic growth, and play­ing down any far-right Hin­du agen­da. But a pop­ulist dri­ve to trans­form India into a ‘Hin­du nation’ has drowned out Mr. Modi’s devel­op­ment agen­da, shrink­ing the eco­nom­ic and social space for the country’s 170 mil­lion Mus­lims. . . .”
  4. The gov­er­nor of Uttar Pradesh is also seen as the fron­trun­ner to become Prime Min­is­ter. ” . . . . Few deci­sions in Indi­an pol­i­tics mat­ter more than the selec­tion of the chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh, because the post is seen as a spring­board for future prime min­is­ters. At the age of 45, the diminu­tive, baby-faced Adityanath is receiv­ing the kind of career-mak­ing atten­tion that projects an Indi­an politi­cian toward high­er office. . . .”
  5. Adityanath is best known for encour­ag­ing vig­i­lante death squads against Mus­lims. He also wor­shipped at the Gorakhnath Tem­ple, whose head priest was arrest­ed for encour­ag­ing Hin­du mil­i­tants to kill Gand­hi only days before he was shot. ” . . . . He was so engrossed in the [RSS] group’s work that the first two or three times he was sum­moned by a dis­tant rel­a­tive, the head priest of the Gorakhnath Tem­ple, he ‘could not find the time,’ he has said. . . . But reli­gion and pol­i­tics were fast con­verg­ing. Gorakhnath Tem­ple had a tra­di­tion of mil­i­tan­cy: Digvi­jay Nath, the head priest until 1969, was arrest­ed for exhort­ing Hin­du mil­i­tants to kill Mahat­ma Gand­hi days before he was shot. His suc­ces­sor, Mahant Avaidyanath, urged Hin­du mobs in 1992 to tear down a 16th-cen­tu­ry mosque and build a tem­ple there, set­ting off some of the blood­i­est reli­gious riots in India’s recent his­to­ry. . . .”

Modi is real­iz­ing the repres­sive fas­cist agen­da of the BJP/RSS. Cen­sor­ing the press and con­duct­ing wide­spread sur­veil­lance of crit­ics are now rou­tine. In addi­tion, there have been a num­ber of hith­er­to unsolved assas­si­na­tions of jour­nal­ists and politi­cians crit­i­cal of Modi and his agen­da.

Promi­nent Indi­an jour­nal­ist Gau­ri Lankesh was the lat­est vic­tim:

” . . . . . Gau­ri Lankesh, one of India’s most out­spo­ken jour­nal­ists, was walk­ing into her house on Tues­day night. It was around 8. The night was warm. She was alone. As she stepped through her gate, just feet from her front door, sev­er­al gun­shots rang out. She was killed instant­ly in what polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion offi­cials say appears to be yet anoth­er assas­si­na­tion of an intel­lec­tu­al who pub­licly crit­i­cized India’s gov­ern­ing par­ty and the Hin­du agen­da it has pur­sued. In recent years, at least three oth­er anti­estab­lish­ment activists have been silenced by bul­lets. . . . On Mon­day, the day before she was killed, she shared a post on her Face­book page that was writ­ten by some­one else. ‘The RSS is the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion,’ it read. . . . 

The same gun was used to kill both Gau­ri Lankesh and anoth­er promi­nent vic­tim, M M Kalbur­gi: ” . . . . . A pre­lim­i­nary foren­sic analy­sis of bul­lets and car­tridges found at the site of the Sep­tem­ber 5 shoot­ing of jour­nal­ist and activist Gau­ri Lankesh and those recov­ered from the killing of Kan­na­da research schol­ar M M Kalbur­gi two years ago has revealed that the same 7.65-mm coun­try­made pis­tol was used for the two killings. This find­ing has been com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tion Team that is prob­ing the mur­der of the 55-year-old jour­nal­ist and activist, sources involved with the two sep­a­rate inves­ti­ga­tions have told The Indi­an Express. . . . .”

There are numer­ous oth­er sim­i­lar­i­ties between the killings of Lankesh and Kalbur­gi. Note that the assas­sins rode motor­bikes with hel­mets in both crimes, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy the shoot­er. Note the motor­bikes present in the pho­to of Adiny­ath’s Hin­du Youth Brigade, vis­i­ble above.

The same weapon used to kill Gau­ri Lankesh and M M Kalbur­gi was also used to kill Govind Pansare and Naren­dra Dab­holkar! . . . . Schol­ar and ratio­nal­ist Kalbur­gi was shot dead at his home at 8.40 am by two uniden­ti­fied per­sons who drove up on a motor­cy­cle. The assailants knocked on the door of the home of the 77-year-old Sahitya Akade­mi Award win­ner and shot him on the doorstep with two bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol. Lankesh was shot dead in the front yard of her home at 8 pm on Sep­tem­ber 5 by one of two per­sons who came on a motor­cy­cle and fired four bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol while she was open­ing the gates to her home. Inves­ti­ga­tions in the Kalbur­gi mur­der case by the Kar­nata­ka Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Depart­ment had revealed that the 7.65 mm pis­tol used to kill the ratio­nal­ist was the same one that was used to mur­der 81-year-old Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist and Left­ist thinker Govind Pansare in Kol­ha­pur on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2015 by two uniden­ti­fied men. The foren­sic analy­sis had also revealed that one of the two guns used to shoot down Pansare in 2015 had also been used to kill Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, 69, in Pune on August 20, 2013 by a pair of uniden­ti­fied men. . . .”

The recent assas­si­na­tion of Indi­an jour­nal­ist-turned-activist Gau­ri Lankesh high­lights the role of the Dalit (for­mer­ly “untouch­able”) caste in the elec­toral strat­e­gy of Mod­i’s BJP (again, a polit­i­cal front for the Hin­dut­va fas­cist RSS.) ” . . . . Ms. Lankesh was also an effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­niz­er with the abil­i­ty to bring togeth­er social and polit­i­cal groups — Dal­its, indige­nous trib­als, left­ists, Mus­lims and oth­ers — opposed to the Hin­du nation­al­ist attempts to trans­form India into a coun­try pri­mar­i­ly for the Hin­dus. . . .”

An effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­niz­er who appeared to have the abil­i­ty to bridge a key divide between the Dal­its and the rest of the non-Hin­du nation­al­ist seg­ments of Indi­an society–Ms. Lankesh–gets gunned down. She was the lat­est activist who pos­sessed that abil­i­ty to bridge divides to be assas­si­nat­ed in exact­ly the same man­ner in recent years: The oth­er three were Daab­holkar, Kalbur­gi and Pansare, who were slain with the same weapon–a gun that was used to kill Lankesh as well. ” . . . . In August 2013, the activist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, who cam­paigned against reli­gious super­sti­tions, was mur­dered. In August 2015, M. M. Kalbur­gi, a schol­ar and out­spo­ken crit­ic of idol wor­ship among Hin­dus, was gunned down at his own doorstep. In Feb­ru­ary 2015, Govind Pansare, a Com­mu­nist leader, com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and colum­nist, was killed in a small town near Mum­baiMr. Dhabolkar, Mr. Kalbur­gi and Mr. Pansare were mur­dered by assas­sins on motor­bikes, who hid their faces with hel­mets and fled after the mur­der. Exact­ly as Ms. Lankesh was killed. The mur­dered intel­lec­tu­als also wrote in region­al lan­guages and worked as activists. Each of them shared the qual­i­ty of being accept­able to the left­ist groups and Dalit groups. They could bring togeth­er com­mu­ni­ties opposed to the Hin­du right. . . . ”

We note that the method­ol­o­gy of the RSS, the orga­ni­za­tion that killed Mahat­ma Gand­hi, remains in place.

We also note that, if Modi wants to not only get reelect­ed and also lead the BJP to a take over of par­lia­ment so he to ful­ly imple­ment his far-right agen­da, he’s going to have to fig­ure out how to get that Dalit vote: Ms. Lankesh and the oth­er vic­tims enu­mer­at­ed above stood in the way of that strat­e­gy: “ . . . . Caste, in short, remains per­haps the sin­gle most influ­en­tial fac­tor in Indi­an pol­i­tics despite rapid mod­ern­iza­tion of the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, as proven in the lat­est pres­i­den­tial con­test. And Naren­dra Modi, who won a land­slide vic­to­ry by widen­ing the party’s appeal beyond the ortho­dox Hin­du class, is sure to milk it for all it’s worth. . . . Even though it has cam­paigned on pre­serv­ing con­ser­v­a­tive Hin­du tra­di­tions, includ­ing sanc­ti­ty of upper-caste Brah­mins, the BJP is depen­dent on the votes of Dal­its and oth­er low­er castes to win cru­cial states. In the state of Bihar, the third most pop­u­lous state, Modi and the BJP suf­fered a demor­al­iz­ing defeat to the rival Rashtriya Jana­ta Dal par­ty in 2015 State Assem­bly elec­tions. Bihar’s low-caste com­mu­ni­ties vot­ed heav­i­ly in sup­port of RJD and its leader, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was able to strike a fruit­ful elec­toral alliance between Bihar’s Mus­lims and the state’s mar­gin­al­ized, cow-herd­ing Yadav caste . . . . In March, the right-wing Hin­du par­ty secured a major vic­to­ry in India’s most pop­u­lous state of Uttar Pradesh, win­ning over the state’s low­er-caste votes. Modi steered clear of poten­tial­ly divi­sive lan­guage in his speech­es, and the par­ty was report­ed to have induct­ed mem­bers of the low­er caste in lead­er­ship posi­tions. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Modi and the BJP are con­tin­u­ing this trend with the lat­est nom­i­na­tion of Ram Nath Kovind for pres­i­dent. . . .”

In addi­tion to polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tion and state repres­sion, it appears that Mod­i’s suc­cess may well rest, in part, on the manip­u­la­tion of elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines, some­thing that will ring famil­iar to stu­dents of Amer­i­can elec­toral pol­i­tics. ” . . . . Express­ing shock and dis­be­lief over the Uttar Pradesh Assem­bly elec­tion results, Bahu­jan Samaj Par­ty (BSP) supre­mo Mayawati today accused the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP) of tam­per­ing with elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines (EVMs). ‘How come the BJP man­aged to win in Mus­lim bas­tions in the state. [The BJP and its polit­i­cal muse the RSS are vio­lent­ly anti-Mus­lim as a mat­ter of doctrine.–D.E.] The poll results are very sur­pris­ing’, Mayawati said. Alleg­ing that there was mas­sive rig­ging of vot­ing machines in the state to favour the BJP, the BSP chief said, ‘Most votes in Mus­lim major­i­ty con­stituen­cies have gone to the BJP. This makes it clear that the vot­ing machines were manip­u­lat­ed.’ . . . . ”

Trag­i­cal­ly, the chaos envelop­ing India–the assas­si­na­tions, cen­sor­ship, cor­rup­tion and con­tin­ued grind­ing social and eco­nom­ic inequality–has fueled sen­ti­ment for a mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment, presided over by a “strong leader.” “. . . . A major­i­ty of Indi­ans, 53 per­cent, sup­port mil­i­tary rule, accord­ing to a Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey released last week. . . .  At least 55 per­cent of Indi­ans also back a gov­ern­ing sys­tem ‘in which a strong leader can make deci­sions with­out inter­fer­ence from par­lia­ment or the courts,’ the sur­vey added, not­ing that sup­port for auto­crat­ic rule is high­er in India than in any oth­er nation sur­veyed. . . .”

As Modi makes fur­ther moves to con­sol­i­date pow­er, those moves may well have strong pub­lic back­ing. Espe­cial­ly with BJP vot­ers: ” . . . . Sup­port­ers of Modi’s rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP) and urban dwellers ‘are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly’ to sup­port mil­i­tary rule than back­ers of the oppo­si­tion Con­gress par­ty and rur­al res­i­dents, the Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey showed. . . .”

The pro­gram clos­es with jux­ta­po­si­tion of two grotesque actions by Naren­dra Modi–again the Prime Min­is­ter from the BJP, a polit­i­cal front for the Hin­dut­va fas­cist RSS, the orga­ni­za­tion that mur­dered Gand­hi. (See FTR #‘s 988 and 989 for detailed analy­sis of the RSS and the killing of Gand­hi.)

In a delib­er­ate attempt to con­flate his pub­lic rela­tions image with that of Gand­hi, Modi has posed with a spin­ning wheel, which Gand­hi saw as both a vehi­cle for com­bat­ing British colo­nial tex­tile pol­i­cy and as a tool for real­iz­ing Satya­gra­ha and the per­son­al insight and dis­ci­pline required by it.

Gand­hi prac­ticed what he preached, going about attired in a loin­cloth of “home­spun” fab­ric. Modi, in con­trast, was pho­tographed in an expen­sive, pin-striped suit when enter­tain­ing the Oba­mas on a state vis­it. (The pin-stripes were actu­al­ly Naren­dra Mod­i’s name, in fine gold­en print.) Val­ued at around $16,000.00, the suit was even­tu­al­ly auc­tioned off for the sum of $695,000.00. Gand­hi’s soul must be weep­ing to see what has been done to his lega­cy. ” . . . . Indi­a’s Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi is not­ed for mak­ing bold state­ments — both in pol­i­cy and fash­ion. When Modi sport­ed a suit with pin­stripes that spelled out his name in tiny gold let­ter­ing, his crit­ics called it the height of van­i­ty. But the con­tro­ver­sial suit raised more than eye­brows: It sold at auc­tion today for near­ly $695,000. The ‘self­ie’ suit was debuted when Modi wore it to a bilat­er­al meet­ing with Pres­i­dent Oba­ma dur­ing his vis­it to India last month. . . . .”

1. Naren­dra Modi just ele­vat­ed Yogi Adityanath, a mem­ber of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS) from Uttar Prad­desh to gov­ern that largest Indi­an province. ” . . . . Adityanath, born Ajay Singh Bisht, found his voca­tion in col­lege as an activist in the stu­dent wing of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, a right-wing Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion. . . .”

The gov­er­nor of Uttar Pradesh is also seen as the fron­trun­ner to become Prime Min­is­ter. ” . . . . Few deci­sions in Indi­an pol­i­tics mat­ter more than the selec­tion of the chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh, because the post is seen as a spring­board for future prime min­is­ters. At the age of 45, the diminu­tive, baby-faced Adityanath is receiv­ing the kind of career-mak­ing atten­tion that projects an Indi­an politi­cian toward high­er office. . . .”

Adityanath is best known for encour­ag­ing vig­i­lante death squads against Mus­lims. He also wor­shipped at the Gorakhnath Tem­ple, whose head priest was arrest­ed for encour­age Hin­du mil­i­tants to kill Gand­hi only days before he was shot. ” . . . . He was so engrossed in the [RSS] group’s work that the first two or three times he was sum­moned by a dis­tant rel­a­tive, the head priest of the Gorakhnath Tem­ple, he ‘could not find the time,’ he has said. . . . But reli­gion and pol­i­tics were fast con­verg­ing. Gorakhnath Tem­ple had a tra­di­tion of mil­i­tan­cy: Digvi­jay Nath, the head priest until 1969, was arrest­ed for exhort­ing Hin­du mil­i­tants to kill Mahat­ma Gand­hi days before he was shot. His suc­ces­sor, Mahant Avaidyanath, urged Hin­du mobs in 1992 to tear down a 16th-cen­tu­ry mosque and build a tem­ple there, set­ting off some of the blood­i­est reli­gious riots in India’s recent his­to­ry. . . .”

“Fire­brand Hin­du Cler­ic Ascends India’s Polit­i­cal Lad­der” by Ellen Bar­ry and Suhasi­ni Raj; The New York Times; 07/12/2017

A Hin­du war­rior-priest has been cho­sen to rule India’s most pop­u­lous state, and the cable news chan­nels can­not get enough of him. Yogi, as every­one calls him, is so ascetic and incor­rupt­ible that he doesn’t use air-con­di­tion­ers, they say. Yogi sleeps on a hard mat­tress on the floor. Yogi some­times eats only an apple for din­ner.

But the tap­root of Yogi Adityanath’s pop­u­lar­i­ty is in a more omi­nous place. As leader of a tem­ple known for its mil­i­tant Hin­du suprema­cist tra­di­tion, he built an army of youths intent on aveng­ing his­toric wrongs by Mus­lims, whom he has called “a crop of two-legged ani­mals that has to be stopped.” At one ral­ly he cried out, “We are all prepar­ing for reli­gious war!”

Adityanath (pro­nounced Ah-DIT-ya-nath) was an aston­ish­ing choice by Naren­dra Modi, India’s prime min­is­ter, who came into office three years ago promis­ing to ush­er India into a new age of devel­op­ment and eco­nom­ic growth, and play­ing down any far-right Hin­du agen­da. But a pop­ulist dri­ve to trans­form India into a “Hin­du nation” has drowned out Mr. Modi’s devel­op­ment agen­da, shrink­ing the eco­nom­ic and social space for the country’s 170 mil­lion Mus­lims.

Few deci­sions in Indi­an pol­i­tics mat­ter more than the selec­tion of the chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh, because the post is seen as a spring­board for future prime min­is­ters. At the age of 45, the diminu­tive, baby-faced Adityanath is receiv­ing the kind of career-mak­ing atten­tion that projects an Indi­an politi­cian toward high­er office.

“He is auto­mat­i­cal­ly on anybody’s list as a poten­tial con­tender to suc­ceed Modi,” said Sadanand Dhume, an India spe­cial­ist at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute. “They have nor­mal­ized some­one who, three years ago, was con­sid­ered too extreme to be min­is­ter of state for tex­tiles. Every­thing has been nor­mal­ized so quick­ly.”

In March, when the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty won a land­slide elec­toral vic­to­ry in Uttar Pradesh, polit­i­cal prog­nos­ti­ca­tors expect­ed Mr. Modi to make a safe choice — Manoj Sin­ha, a cab­i­net min­is­ter known for his dili­gence and loy­al­ty to the par­ty. On the morn­ing of the announce­ment, an hon­or guard had been arranged out­side his vil­lage.

But by mid­morn­ing, it was clear that some­thing unusu­al was going on. A char­tered flight had been sent to pick up Adityanath and take him to Del­hi for a meet­ing with Amit Shah, the par­ty pres­i­dent. At 6 p.m. the par­ty announced it had appoint­ed him as min­is­ter, send­ing a rip­ple of shock through India’s polit­i­cal class.

They were shocked because Adityanath is a rad­i­cal, but also because he is ambi­tious, even rebel­lious. As recent­ly as Jan­u­ary, he walked out of the party’s exec­u­tive meet­ing, report­ed­ly because he was not allowed to speak. Mr. Modi is not known to have much tol­er­ance for rivals.

The appoint­ment “invests a cer­tain amount of pow­er in Yogi Adityanath that can­not be eas­i­ly tak­en away,” said Ashutosh Varsh­ney, a pro­fes­sor of polit­i­cal sci­ence and inter­na­tion­al stud­ies at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.

“Modi has been either unwill­ing to stop his rise, or unable to stop his rise,” he said.

As a young man, Adityanath’s pas­sion was pol­i­tics, not reli­gion. One of sev­en chil­dren born to a for­est ranger, Adityanath, born Ajay Singh Bisht, found his voca­tion in col­lege as an activist in the stu­dent wing of the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, a right-wing Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion.

He was so engrossed in the group’s work that the first two or three times he was sum­moned by a dis­tant rel­a­tive, the head priest of the Gorakhnath Tem­ple, he “could not find the time,” he has said.

But reli­gion and pol­i­tics were fast con­verg­ing. Gorakhnath Tem­ple had a tra­di­tion of mil­i­tan­cy: Digvi­jay Nath, the head priest until 1969, was arrest­ed for exhort­ing Hin­du mil­i­tants to kill Mahat­ma Gand­hi days before he was shot. His suc­ces­sor, Mahant Avaidyanath, urged Hin­du mobs in 1992 to tear down a 16th-cen­tu­ry mosque and build a tem­ple there, set­ting off some of the blood­i­est reli­gious riots in India’s recent his­to­ry.

Adityanath won a seat in Par­lia­ment, the first of five con­sec­u­tive terms. Among his advan­tages was a new group he had formed: the Hin­du Yuva Vahi­ni, or Hin­du Youth Brigade, a vig­i­lante orga­ni­za­tion. The vol­un­teers, now orga­nized to the vil­lage lev­el and said by lead­ers to num­ber 250,000, show up in force where Mus­lims are rumored to be both­er­ing Hin­dus.

Vijay Yadav, 21, a vol­un­teer loung­ing at Gorakhnath Tem­ple in Gorakh­pur on a recent day, said he had recent­ly mobi­lized 60 or 70 young men to beat a Mus­lim accused of cow slaugh­ter. They stopped, he said, only because the police inter­vened.

“All the Hin­dus got togeth­er and the first slap was giv­en by me,” he said proud­ly. “If they do some­thing wrong, fear is what works best. If you do some­thing wrong, we will stop you. If you talk too much, we will kill you. This is our say­ing for Mus­lims.”

Dur­ing the first five years after the vig­i­lante group was formed, 22 reli­gious clash­es broke out in the dis­tricts sur­round­ing Gorakh­pur, a city in Uttar Pradesh, in many cas­es with Adityanath’s encour­age­ment, said Manoj Singh, a jour­nal­ist. In 2007, Adityanath was arrest­ed as he led a pro­ces­sion toward neigh­bor­hoods seething with reli­gious ten­sion.

Even then, Mr. Singh recalled, the offi­cer who arrest­ed Adityanath stopped first to touch his feet as a ges­ture of rev­er­ence.

Adityanath was released after 11 days, but the arrest seemed to jolt him. He became more cau­tious, no longer direct­ly lead­ing fol­low­ers into reli­gious con­fronta­tions, Mr. Singh said.

For India’s fre­net­ic 24-hour cable tele­vi­sion world, Adityanath’s first months as chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh were a wind­fall. Arriv­ing in Luc­know, a city weary of a cor­rupt bureau­cra­cy, he pro­ject­ed a refresh­ing tough­ness and aus­ter­i­ty. He warned offi­cials that they would be expect­ed to work 18 to 20 hours a day if they were to keep their jobs, and inspec­tors and bureau­crats were said to be too afraid to ask for bribes.

His first orders were unabashed­ly pop­ulist. The police were dis­patched in “anti-Romeo squads” to detain youths sus­pect­ed of harass­ing women. Inspec­tors shut down dozens of meat-pro­cess­ing plants, a major source of rev­enue for area Mus­lims, for reg­u­la­to­ry prob­lems.

Vishal Prat­ap Singh, a Luc­know-based tele­vi­sion jour­nal­ist, not­ed that Adityanath was a “total­ly changed man on cam­era,” care­ful to avoid com­ments offen­sive to Mus­lims.

Still, Mr. Singh said, his rat­ings are sky-high, and the rea­son is obvi­ous.

“Like Modi, he speaks for the Hin­dus,” he said. “With­in his heart, he is a total­ly anti-Mus­lim per­son. That is the rea­son he is so lik­able.”

Polit­i­cal observers in Del­hi are watch­ing him as one might watch an audi­tion. Jour­nal­ists filed reports of his first 100 days last week, and some were luke­warm, not­ing his fail­ure to con­tain vio­lent crime.

Neer­ja Chowd­hury, an ana­lyst, said Adityanath has two years to estab­lish him­self as an effec­tive admin­is­tra­tor.

“Remem­ber, he is 20 years younger than Modi, and he is a known doer, so if he man­ages to deliv­er on some fronts, he would then become a pos­si­ble can­di­date” in 2024, she said.

“India is mov­ing right,” she added. “Whether India moves fur­ther right, and Modi begins to be looked upon as a mod­er­ate, I think that only time will tell.”

Adityanath may be inter­est­ed in rebrand­ing him­self a main­stream politi­cian, but his fol­low­ers in the vig­i­lante group do not all agree.

Dur­ing the days after the elec­tion, some 5,000 men came for­ward to join the orga­ni­za­tion every day, prompt­ing orga­niz­ers to stop accept­ing appli­cants, said P. K. Mall, the group’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary.

Sonu Yadav, 24, of Gorakh­pur, who has served in the group for five years, said he had been dis­ap­point­ed by Mr. Modi’s tenure.

“We vot­ed for Modi because Yogi endorsed him, but we are dis­il­lu­sioned,” he said. He went on to refer to the 2002 riots in the state Mr. Modi led, which his crit­ics say he allowed to rage for sev­er­al days, lead­ing to more than 1,000 deaths.

“All of us in our colony felt that Modi would allow us to kill Mus­lims,” he said. “Mus­lims were scared. But noth­ing hap­pened. When Yogi became chief min­is­ter, they were scared again.”

Mr. Modi has denied any wrong­do­ing, and Supreme Court pan­els have reject­ed peti­tions to pros­e­cute Mr. Modi in the riots for lack of evi­dence.

For now, as Adityanath estab­lish­es a more main­stream rep­u­ta­tion, Mr. Yadav and his friends have been told by their group’s lead­er­ship to cease all vio­lent activ­i­ties and instead per­form com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice. Vijay Yadav, Sonu’s friend, open­ly chafed at the new orders.

“This thing is going on in Yogi’s head that my shirt should not get a stain,” he said. “I couldn’t care less for his stained shirt. I can’t do good work and avoid get­ting a stain.”

He not­ed, by way of exam­ple, the recent beat­ing death of a 62-year-old Mus­lim man whom vig­i­lantes abduct­ed and inter­ro­gat­ed about a neighbor’s alleged love affair with a Hin­du girl.

Vijay Yadav’s com­ment on the man’s death was a local proverb: “Along with the wheat,” he said, “small insects will get crushed.”

———-

2. In numer­ous pro­grams (most recent­ly FTR #‘s 988 and 989) we have cov­ered the Hin­dut­va fas­cist RSS and its polit­i­cal cat’s paw the BJP. Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi is real­iz­ing the repres­sive fas­cist agen­da of the BJP/RSS. Cen­sor­ing the press and con­duct­ing wide­spread sur­veil­lance of crit­ics are now rou­tine. In addi­tion, there have been a num­ber of hith­er­to unsolved assas­si­na­tions of jour­nal­ists and politi­cians crit­i­cal of Modi and his agen­da.

“The Ques­tion More Indi­ans Ask–‘Is My Phone Tapped?’” by Mira Kam­dar; The New York Times; 10/27/2017; p. A22 [West Coast Edi­tion]

A busi­ness­man told me he had stopped going online to buy books that the gov­ern­ment might frown upon because he was afraid offi­cials would track his pur­chas­es.

There’s good rea­son for such fears, anoth­er busi­ness­man said: “You go to a par­ty where there are a dozen peo­ple you’ve known for years. Some­one says some­thing mild­ly crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment, and then you learn that per­son­’s office was paid a vis­it the next day by the income-tax author­i­ties.”

These were not reflec­tions on life in some police state. These were con­ver­sa­tions I had this month dur­ing a vis­it to India, a coun­try I’ve been vis­it­ing for near­ly 60 years.

It’s no secret that attacks on free­dom of expres­sion have accel­er­at­ed since the elec­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi in May 2014. Yet, noth­ing pre­pared me for the per­va­sive anx­i­eties I encoun­tered on this trip. While free­dom of speech has nev­er been an absolute right in India, I always thought that this rau­cous democ­ra­cy would ulti­mate­ly over­come any blan­ket effort to quash dis­sent, as it did when Prime Min­is­ter Indi­ra Gand­hi declared a state of emer­gency and clamped down on the news media in 1975.

But I was stunned when a well-known writer in New Del­hi con­fid­ed that she and oth­ers used encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tions. “We’re all on Pro­ton-Mail and Sig­nal at this point,” she said. Oth­ers said they only com­mu­ni­cat­ed on What­sApp. “All our phones are tapped,” declared a news edi­tor in Mum­bai.

As the com­ments from busi­ness­man indi­cate, the fears I heard weren’t lim­it­ed to jour­nal­ists and writ­ers dis­in­clined to sup­port Mr. Modi. Peo­ple who had appre­ci­at­ed the pro-busi­ness ele­ments of his can­di­da­cy, and who still have hope for his eco­nom­ic poli­cies expressed sim­i­lar con­cern.

Jour­nal­ists, though, have par­tic­u­lar rea­son for fear. In June, the Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion raid­ed res­i­dences and offices con­nect­ed to the founders of N.D.T.V., an influ­en­tial cable TV sta­tion and online news out­let that has had run-ins with Mr. Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment. The Edi­tors Guild of India and lead­ing media fig­ures con­demned the raid. But a mag­a­zine edi­tor con­fid­ed, “Of course we are afraid; they could go after any­one in our fam­i­ly, at any time.”

Even more dis­turb­ing have been a series of unsolved mur­ders of jour­nal­ists, and puni­tive legal actions against the news media.

The online news out­let The Wire was slapped with a crim­i­nal defama­tion suit after it pub­lished a sto­ry this month alleg­ing that Jay Shah, son of Amit Shah, the pow­er­ful head of Mr. Mod­i’s gov­ern­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, has prof­it­ed hand­some­ly under Mr. Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment. Then, last week, a court in Gujarat—where Mr. Modi was for­mer­ly chief minister—barred the news out­let from pub­lish­ing any sto­ries “direct­ly or indi­rect­ly” about Jay Shah until the suit was resolved. Defi­ant, The Wire post­ed a pho­to of the order, vow­ing “It goes with­out say­ing that this attempt to gag The Wire will not go unchal­lenged.”

On Mon­day, the B.J.P.-led gov­ern­ment in Rajasthan State intro­duced an ordi­nance in the state’s Leg­isla­tive Assem­bly that would essen­tial­ly bar report­ing of gov­ern­ment malfea­sance by requir­ing gov­ern­ment per­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate “both serv­ing and for­mer judges, mag­is­trates and pub­lic ser­vants for on-duty actions.” It would also make it ille­gal to “print or pub­lish or pub­li­cize in any man­ner the name, address, pho­to­graph, fam­i­ly details or any oth­er par­tic­u­lars which may lead to dis­clo­sure of iden­ti­ty of a judge or mag­is­trate or a pub­lic ser­vant against whom” an inves­ti­ga­tion is pend­ing.

Not all the Indi­ans I spoke with were so uneasy. Many cit­i­zens remain out­spo­ken. Coura­geous jour­nal­ists con­tin­ue to fight to do their job. But the grow­ing fear of Indi­ans to speak, to write and even to read freely pos­es a grave threat to one of the world’s great democ­ra­cies.

3a. Symp­to­matic of the polit­i­cal and jour­nal­is­tic land­scape of Mod­i’s India is the–as yet–unsolved mur­der of Gau­ri Lankesh, a coura­geous jour­nal­ist and unspar­ing crit­ic of Modi and the RSS. ” . . . . She was killed instant­ly in what polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion offi­cials say appears to be yet anoth­er assas­si­na­tion of an intel­lec­tu­al who pub­licly crit­i­cized India’s gov­ern­ing par­ty and the Hin­du agen­da it has pur­sued. In recent years, at least three oth­er anti-estab­lish­ment activists have been silenced by bul­lets. . . . ‘Any­body who speaks against the RSS/BJP is attacked & even killed,’ Rahul Gand­hi, an oppo­si­tion leader, said in a Twit­ter mes­sage. . . . ‘They want to impose only one ide­ol­o­gy which is against the nature of India.’ . . . The three oth­er activists killed in a some­what sim­i­lar man­ner in the past four years had also opposed the rise of hard-line Hin­duism. . . . On Mon­day, the day before she was killed, she shared a post on her Face­book page that was writ­ten by some­one else. ‘The RSS is the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion,’ it read. . . .

“In India, Anoth­er Gov­ern­ment Crit­ic Is Silenced by Bul­lets” by Jef­frey Get­tle­man and Hari Kumar; The New York Times; 9/6/2017.

Gau­ri Lankesh, one of India’s most out­spo­ken jour­nal­ists, was walk­ing into her house on Tues­day night. It was around 8. The night was warm. She was alone. As she stepped through her gate, just feet from her front door, sev­er­al gun­shots rang out.

She was killed instant­ly in what polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion offi­cials say appears to be yet anoth­er assas­si­na­tion of an intel­lec­tu­al who pub­licly crit­i­cized India’s gov­ern­ing par­ty and the Hin­du agen­da it has pur­sued. In recent years, at least three oth­er anti­estab­lish­ment activists have been silenced by bul­lets.

Ms. Lankesh’s death, which monop­o­lized tele­vi­sion news cov­er­age on Wednes­day, set off protests across India, a coun­try increas­ing­ly polar­ized by sup­port­ers of the Hin­du nation­al­ist gov­ern­ing par­ty and its detrac­tors. Some of Mrs. Lankesh’s friends say they have no idea who killed her. But among gov­ern­ment oppo­nents, the cir­cum­stances of the shoot­ing fueled sus­pi­cions that gov­ern­ing par­ty back­ers, embold­ened by their lead­ers to wipe out their ene­mies, were behind it.

“Any­body who speaks against the RSS/BJP is attacked & even killed,’’ Rahul Gand­hi, an oppo­si­tion leader, said in a Twit­ter mes­sage. (R.S.S. is a Hin­du orga­ni­za­tion that is close­ly con­nect­ed to India’s gov­ern­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty.) “They want to impose only one ide­ol­o­gy which is against the nature of India.” . . .

. . . . The three oth­er activists killed in a some­what sim­i­lar man­ner in the past four years had also opposed the rise of hard-line Hin­duism. . . .

. . . . Lead­ers of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty had been annoyed with Ms. Lankesh for years and sued her for defama­tion. The first court to hear the case con­vict­ed her and sen­tenced her to six months in prison last year, but she was grant­ed bail while the case was on appeal. S. N. Sin­ha, pres­i­dent of India’s 28,000-member jour­nal­ist union and a mem­ber of a news over­sight coun­cil, said the coun­cil had got­ten many com­plaints about Ms. Lankesh.

“She used to write very strong­ly,” Mr. Sin­ha said. “We warned her she has to be a lit­tle care­ful in her writ­ing. It wasn’t the con­tent; it was her lan­guage.” On Mon­day, the day before she was killed, she shared a post on her Face­book page that was writ­ten by some­one else. “The RSS is the ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion,” it read. . . .

3b. The same gun was used to kill both Gau­ri Lankesh and anoth­er promi­nent vic­tim, M M Kalbur­gi: ” . . . . . A pre­lim­i­nary foren­sic analy­sis of bul­lets and car­tridges found at the site of the Sep­tem­ber 5 shoot­ing of jour­nal­ist and activist Gau­ri Lankesh and those recov­ered from the killing of Kan­na­da research schol­ar M M Kalbur­gi two years ago has revealed that the same 7.65-mm coun­try­made pis­tol was used for the two killings. This find­ing has been com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tion Team that is prob­ing the mur­der of the 55-year-old jour­nal­ist and activist, sources involved with the two sep­a­rate inves­ti­ga­tions have told The Indi­an Express. . . . .”

“Gun Used to Kill Gau­ri Lankesh Is the Same One that Killed M M Kalbur­gi: Foren­sics” by John­son T A; Indi­an Express; 9/14/2017.

A pre­lim­i­nary foren­sic analy­sis of bul­lets and car­tridges found at the site of the Sep­tem­ber 5 shoot­ing of jour­nal­ist and activist Gau­ri Lankesh and those recov­ered from the killing of Kan­na­da research schol­ar M M Kalbur­gi two years ago has revealed that the same 7.65-mm coun­try­made pis­tol was used for the two killings.

This find­ing has been com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tion Team that is prob­ing the mur­der of the 55-year-old jour­nal­ist and activist, sources involved with the two sep­a­rate inves­ti­ga­tions have told The Indi­an Express.

On Sep­tem­ber 12, The Indi­an Express had report­ed that inves­ti­ga­tions had found clues that sug­gest­ed a link between the two mur­ders.

Lankesh was shot dead at her res­i­dence in west Ben­galu­ru by an uniden­ti­fied assailant with a 7.65-mm coun­try­made pis­tol around 8 pm while she was open­ing the gates to her home to park her car after return­ing from work. Kalbur­gi was killed at his home in the north Kar­nata­ka town of Dhar­wad at around 8.40 am on August 30, 2015 by an uniden­ti­fied gun­man who rang his door­bell.

Police recov­ered the three bul­lets that pierced Lankesh’s heart and lungs before exit­ing her body and a bul­let that missed her along with the four emp­ty car­tridges. While the four car­tridges were found at the mur­der site short­ly after the killing, the fatal bul­lets were found by a search of the crime scene with met­al detec­tors.

Inves­ti­ga­tors decid­ed to com­pare the “bal­lis­tic sig­na­ture” on the bul­lets and car­tridges in the Lankesh case with that of bul­lets and car­tridges in the Kalbur­gi case. The analy­sis has report­ed a match sug­gest­ing that one com­mon gun was used in the two killings, sources said. This also sug­gests that one com­mon out­fit or group is behind the two killings, an offi­cial said.

Guns are believed to leave unique mark­ings on car­tridges and bul­lets — when the car­tridge is struck by the fir­ing pin and the bul­let trav­els through the bar­rel — on the lines of fin­ger­prints although there are scep­tics who cau­tion against using this match­ing test for crude coun­try­made weapons.

The foren­sic find­ing from the com­par­i­son of the bal­lis­tic evi­dence from the Lankesh and Kalbur­gi cas­es when jux­ta­posed with the foren­sic analy­sis of the shoot­ing down of Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist Govind Pansare, 81, on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2015 in Kol­ha­pur, sug­gests that the same gun has been used in three dif­fer­ent killings over the last 30 months.

Fol­low­ing the mur­der of Kalbur­gi and Pansare in 2015, the Kar­nata­ka CID had attempt­ed to analyse the evi­dence in the two cas­es by com­par­ing stri­a­tions on the bul­lets and car­tridges used in the two mur­ders and had found a match.

Govind Pansare and his wife Uma Pansare were shot with five bul­lets from two 7.65-mm coun­try­made guns. Uma Pansare sur­vived the shoot­ing. The foren­sic analy­sis in the Pansare and Kalbur­gi case revealed that one of the two guns used in the Pansare case in Maha­rash­tra was the same gun used to shoot down Kalbur­gi in Kar­nata­ka.

A fur­ther com­par­i­son of the bal­lis­tic evi­dence found in the Pansare case with that of evi­dence in the shoot­ing of ratio­nal­ist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, 69, on August 20, 2013 in Pune revealed that the sec­ond gun used to shoot Pansare was the same gun that was used to kill Dab­holkar.

In the 2013 killing of Dab­holkar, the motor­cy­cle borne assailant fired four bul­lets.

Though the inves­ti­ga­tion of the Kalbur­gi killing in Kar­nata­ka by the CID has not result­ed in any head­way in find­ing the killers, the CID has been co-ordi­nat­ing with the CBI which is prob­ing the Dab­holkar mur­der and a Maha­rash­tra SIT prob­ing the Pansare mur­der.

The inves­ti­ga­tions in the Dab­holkar and Pansare cas­es by the CBI and the Maha­rash­tra SIT sug­gest­ed the involve­ment of the rad­i­cal right-wing out­fit, Sanatan Sanstha, in the two killings.

On Jan­u­ary 20 this year, the Bom­bay High Court not­ed that CBI had not been pro­vid­ed a report by the Scot­land Yard foren­sic lab on the find­ings made by the Kar­nata­ka lab in the mur­ders of the ratio­nal­ists but had accept­ed a report of the Gujarat FSL and allowed it to be used as evi­dence by the CBI in the Dab­holkar mur­der case.

“The Scot­land Yard Police have informed the CBI in writ­ing that unless and until a Mutu­al Agree­ment is arrived at, and in the absence of the clear­ance from the UK Home Depart­ment, it would not be pos­si­ble to exam­ine the mate­ri­als and ren­der any def­i­nite and con­clu­sive opin­ion,’’ the court not­ed. “At this stage, we must also note the fact that the report, now being avail­able for the CBI (the report of the Direc­tor of Foren­sic Sci­ences, Gujarat), is like­ly to be placed on the record of the crim­i­nal case, and par­tic­u­lar­ly, the Ses­sions case aris­ing out of the mur­der of Dr Naren­dra Dab­holkar.’’

Although activists of the Sanatan Sanstha have emerged as the pri­ma­ry sus­pects in the case, the Kar­nata­ka SIT is also pur­su­ing inves­ti­ga­tions on oth­er lines and on Wednes­day ques­tioned fam­i­ly mem­bers of Lankesh and some asso­ciates whom she had helped move out of the Nax­al move­ment into the main­stream.

On the basis of direc­tions issued by the Bom­bay High Court on Jan­u­ary 7, 2016, the Kar­nata­ka police shared infor­ma­tion from its foren­sic find­ings in the Kalbur­gi case with the CBI and the Maha­rash­tra SIT.

A co-ordi­na­tion meet­ing was held by offi­cers of the CBI, the SIT, Maha­rash­tra and the CID, Kar­nata­ka on Feb­ru­ary 17, 2016, to dis­cuss the inves­ti­ga­tion of the three seem­ing­ly linked mur­der cas­es. The CBI sug­gest­ed ver­i­fi­ca­tion of the bal­lis­tic find­ings of the Kar­nata­ka foren­sic lab through the Direc­torate of Foren­sic Ser­vices, at Scot­land Yard, Lon­don.

Sources said Scot­land Yard con­firmed the foren­sic find­ings in the Dab­holkar, Pansare and Kalbur­gi cas­es but did not issue a report for lack of an agree­ment. The CBI then approached the Gujarat Foren­sic Sci­ence Lab to ver­i­fy the find­ings of the Kar­nata­ka lab. The Gujarat FSL con­firmed the bal­lis­tic find­ings link­ing the three cas­es, accord­ing to sources.

3c. There are numer­ous oth­er sim­i­lar­i­ties between the killings of Lankesh and Kalbur­gi. Note that the assas­sins rode motor­bikes with hel­mets in both crimes, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy the shoot­er. Note the motor­bikes present in the pho­to of Adiny­ath’s Hin­du Youth Brigade, vis­i­ble above.

The same weapon used to kill Gau­ri Lankesh and M M Kalbur­gi was also used to kill Govind Pansare and Naren­dra Dab­holkar! . . . . Schol­ar and ratio­nal­ist Kalbur­gi was shot dead at his home at 8.40 am by two uniden­ti­fied per­sons who drove up on a motor­cy­cle. The assailants knocked on the door of the home of the 77-year-old Sahitya Akade­mi Award win­ner and shot him on the doorstep with two bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol. Lankesh was shot dead in the front yard of her home at 8 pm on Sep­tem­ber 5 by one of two per­sons who came on a motor­cy­cle and fired four bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol while she was open­ing the gates to her home. Inves­ti­ga­tions in the Kalbur­gi mur­der case by the Kar­nata­ka Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Depart­ment had revealed that the 7.65 mm pis­tol used to kill the ratio­nal­ist was the same one that was used to mur­der 81-year-old Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist and Left­ist thinker Govind Pansare in Kol­ha­pur on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2015 by two uniden­ti­fied men. The foren­sic analy­sis had also revealed that one of the two guns used to shoot down Pansare in 2015 had also been used to kill Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, 69, in Pune on August 20, 2013 by a pair of uniden­ti­fied men. . . .”

“Probe Finds Clues That Point to Link Between Gau­ri Lankesh, M M Kalbur­gi Killing” by John­son T A; Indi­an Express; 9/12/2017.

Inves­ti­ga­tions have revealed that the “mechan­ics of the crime’’ in the Sep­tem­ber 5 killing of jour­nal­ist and activist Gau­ri Lankesh, 55, by an uniden­ti­fied gun­man is iden­ti­cal to that of the August 30, 2015 mur­der of Kan­na­da lit­er­ary schol­ar M M Kalbur­gi in Dhar­wad in north Kar­nata­ka.

More than one offi­cial famil­iar with the probe into Lankesh’s killing said that although the inves­ti­ga­tion remained open in terms of track­ing down the killers — and for­mal foren­sics and bal­lis­tics reports are await­ed — there has been a “sig­nif­i­cant find­ing” that sug­gests a link between the killings of Kalbur­gi and Lankesh.

While an offi­cial declined to give details, he said that this find­ing goes beyond just the spec­u­la­tion so far that both the deaths involved a sim­i­lar type of weapon.

In fact, Kar­nata­ka Home Min­is­ter Rama­lin­ga Red­dy had said on Sat­ur­day that the SIT set up to probe the mur­der had obtained impor­tant clues. Senior police sources have, over the last cou­ple of days, said that they are “very sure” that the killings in Kar­nata­ka are linked to each oth­er along with two mur­ders in Maha­rash­tra.

Schol­ar and ratio­nal­ist Kalbur­gi was shot dead at his home at 8.40 am by two uniden­ti­fied per­sons who drove up on a motor­cy­cle. The assailants knocked on the door of the home of the 77-year-old Sahitya Akade­mi Award win­ner and shot him on the doorstep with two bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol.

Lankesh was shot dead in the front yard of her home at 8 pm on Sep­tem­ber 5 by one of two per­sons who came on a motor­cy­cle and fired four bul­lets from a 7.65 mm coun­try­made pis­tol while she was open­ing the gates to her home.

Inves­ti­ga­tions in the Kalbur­gi mur­der case by the Kar­nata­ka Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Depart­ment had revealed that the 7.65 mm pis­tol used to kill the ratio­nal­ist was the same one that was used to mur­der 81-year-old Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist and Left­ist thinker Govind Pansare in Kol­ha­pur on Feb­ru­ary 16, 2015 by two uniden­ti­fied men.

The foren­sic analy­sis had also revealed that one of the two guns used to shoot down Pansare in 2015 had also been used to kill Maha­rash­tra ratio­nal­ist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, 69, in Pune on August 20, 2013 by a pair of uniden­ti­fied men.

One part of the inves­ti­ga­tion in the mur­der of Gau­ri Lankesh over the past week has focused on the crime scene evi­dence and the mechan­ics of the crime like the bul­lets and gun used. Inves­ti­ga­tions by the CBI into the Dab­holkar case and a Maha­rash­tra SIT probe into the mur­der of Pansare found links to a rad­i­cal right wing out­fit called the Hin­du Jana­ja­gru­ti Sami­ti (HJS), affil­i­at­ed to the Sanatan Sanstha, but the actu­al shoot­ers have remained at large.

The find­ings from the Kalbur­gi and the two Maha­rash­tra cas­es sug­gest­ed that the killers were in pos­ses­sion of two guns they used to car­ry out the assas­si­na­tions.

“The key dif­fer­ence between the mur­der of Gau­ri Lankesh and the oth­er killings is the fact that she was killed at night while the oth­er mur­ders occurred in the morn­ing. This could be because Gau­ri Lankesh did not ven­ture out in the morn­ing but returned late evening,’’ sources said.

The SIT is pur­su­ing mul­ti­ple angles to zero in on the per­pe­tra­tors. Activists of the HJS and Sanatan Sanstha based in Kar­nata­ka are among those under the scan­ner along with a local unit of the out­fit. “The weapon used to com­mit the crime has been a key focus of the inves­ti­ga­tion and efforts are on to find out how and where it was pro­cured,’’ an offi­cial said.

The inves­ti­ga­tion is also look­ing at whether the killing involved hired killers or mem­bers of a group. Cell records, CCTV footage, his­to­ry of sto­ries pub­lished in the Gau­ri Lankesh Patrike, data from hotels and lodges in Ben­galu­ru in the peri­od pre­ced­ing the mur­der and infor­ma­tion from pris­ons about recent­ly released con­victs are all being probed, sources said.

4.  The fol­low­ing piece about the recent assas­si­na­tion of Indi­an jour­nal­ist-turned-activist Gau­ri Lankesh sug­gests, high­lights the role of the Dalit (for­mer­ly “untouch­able”) caste in the elec­toral strat­e­gy of Mod­i’s BJP (again, a polit­i­cal front for the Hin­dut­va fas­cist RSS.) ” . . . . Ms. Lankesh was also an effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­niz­er with the abil­i­ty to bring togeth­er social and polit­i­cal groups — Dal­its, indige­nous trib­als, left­ists, Mus­lims and oth­ers — opposed to the Hin­du nation­al­ist attempts to trans­form India into a coun­try pri­mar­i­ly for the Hin­dus. . . .”

An effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­niz­er who appeared to have the abil­i­ty to bridge a key divide between the Dal­its and the rest of the non-Hin­du nation­al­ist seg­ments of Indi­an soci­ety gets gunned down. She was just lat­est activist who pos­sessed that abil­i­ty to bridge divides to be assas­si­nat­ed in exact­ly the same man­ner in recent years: The oth­er three were Daab­holkar, Kalbur­gi and Pansare, who were slain with the same weapon–a gun that was used to kill Lankesh as well. ” . . . . In August 2013, the activist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, who cam­paigned against reli­gious super­sti­tions, was mur­dered. In August 2015, M. M. Kalbur­gi, a schol­ar and out­spo­ken crit­ic of idol wor­ship among Hin­dus, was gunned down at his own doorstep. In Feb­ru­ary 2015, Govind Pansare, a Com­mu­nist leader, com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and colum­nist, was killed in a small town near Mum­baiMr. Dhabolkar, Mr. Kalbur­gi and Mr. Pansare were mur­dered by assas­sins on motor­bikes, who hid their faces with hel­mets and fled after the mur­der. Exact­ly as Ms. Lankesh was killed. The mur­dered intel­lec­tu­als also wrote in region­al lan­guages and worked as activists. Each of them shared the qual­i­ty of being accept­able to the left­ist groups and Dalit groups. They could bring togeth­er com­mu­ni­ties opposed to the Hin­du right. . . . ”

We note that the method­ol­o­gy of the RSS, the orga­ni­za­tion that killed Mahat­ma Gand­hi, remains in place.

“Why Was Gau­ri Lankesh Killed?” by Sudip­to Mon­dal; The New York Times;
9/13/ 2017

On the evening of Sept. 5, I got a call from my wife, a fel­low jour­nal­ist. “Gau­ri Lankesh has been shot out­side her house,” she said. “She is dead.” Ms. Lankesh, 55, was the edi­tor of Gau­ri Lankesh Patrike, a week­ly news­pa­per, which she pub­lished from Ban­ga­lore, India, in the south­ern state of Kar­nata­ka.

I drove with two jour­nal­ist friends to the morgue of a hos­pi­tal where her body was. At 8 p.m., she had been enter­ing her home in the upper-class area of Ban­ga­lore when an assas­sin on a motor­bike fired at her and fled. Three bul­lets hit her, dam­ag­ing her heart and lungs, accord­ing to the post-mortem report.

I had known her for 10 years. All I ever did was argue with her. Our argu­ments had acquired an increas­ing inten­si­ty in the three years since Naren­dra Modi came to pow­er and India turned toward majori­tar­i­an­ism and intol­er­ance. An out­spo­ken crit­ic of Prime Min­is­ter Modi’s Hin­du nation­al­ist gov­ern­ment, she said in her last edi­to­r­i­al that spread­ing fake news had con­tributed to the suc­cess of Mr. Modi and his par­ty.

After Rohith Vem­u­la, a Dalit grad­u­ate stu­dent and activist at a uni­ver­si­ty in the south­ern city of Hyder­abad, killed him­self in Jan­u­ary 2016 because of intense, unceas­ing insti­tu­tion­al­ized caste dis­crim­i­na­tion, a coali­tion of Dalit (low­est caste) and left­ist stu­dent groups sought the pros­e­cu­tion of uni­ver­si­ty offi­cials and the right-wing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty politi­cians, who had pushed him to the brink. The left­ist groups dom­i­nat­ed by upper-caste Hin­dus were not will­ing to work under the lead­er­ship of Dalit activists.

I was agi­tat­ed­ly talk­ing to Ms. Lankesh about how the Indi­an left was almost entire­ly led by upper-caste Hin­dus. Ten years of report­ing on caste prej­u­dice and pol­i­tics and my per­son­al his­to­ry of grow­ing up and work­ing as a Dalit writer made me believe that even in strug­gles for civ­il and polit­i­cal rights, the Indi­an left exclud­ed the Dal­its from posi­tions of lead­er­ship. Ms. Lankesh didn’t see lead­er­ship as a big ques­tion when in the con­text of the more press­ing need to fight the rise of Hin­du nation­al­ism, which she described as “fas­cism.”

Ms. Lankesh was also an effec­tive polit­i­cal orga­niz­er with the abil­i­ty to bring togeth­er social and polit­i­cal groups — Dal­its, indige­nous trib­als, left­ists, Mus­lims and oth­ers — opposed to the Hin­du nation­al­ist attempts to trans­form India into a coun­try pri­mar­i­ly for the Hin­dus.

The priests at a tem­ple in Udupi, a south­ern Indi­an town — a strong­hold of the Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment — were seg­re­gat­ing the low­er castes, espe­cial­ly Dalit devo­tees, from the upper-caste Hin­dus. Last Sep­tem­ber, Ms. Lankesh helped per­suade numer­ous pro­gres­sive, Dalit and left­ist groups, and non­govern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions — who loathe work­ing togeth­er because of polit­i­cal dif­fer­ences — to come togeth­er in a march to protest seg­re­ga­tion at the Udupi tem­ple. The ques­tion of whether Dal­its will get to lead the strug­gle for their rights returned. Ms. Lankesh nego­ti­at­ed with every group to ensure that the upper-caste lead­ers didn’t appro­pri­ate the march.

A month ear­li­er, in July 2016, hard-line Hin­du activists had stripped and flogged four Dalit men in Gujarat, the home state of Mr. Modi, for skin­ning a cow. Thou­sands of Dal­its earn their mea­ger liveli­hood from skin­ning dead cows and buf­faloes and sell­ing their hides to leather traders. Jig­nesh Mevani, a young Dalit lawyer, orga­nized and led huge protests in Gujarat against the cow vig­i­lantes.

Ms. Lankesh set­tled the ques­tion of lead­er­ship by get­ting every­body to agree that Mr. Mevani should lead the march against seg­re­ga­tion to Udupi tem­ple. Around 10,000 peo­ple joined the march. The oppo­si­tion uni­ty made an impres­sion.

Soon after that I saw my social media time­lines filled with pho­tographs of Ms. Lankesh hug­ging Mr. Mevani and Kan­haiya Kumar, Umar Khalid andShehla Rashid, left­ist stu­dent lead­ers from a uni­ver­si­ty in New Del­hi. She called them “her chil­dren.” It was her way of cre­at­ing uni­ty among var­i­ous groups opposed to the rise of the majori­tar­i­an pol­i­tics.

On the night of her mur­der, I stood out­side her house with our com­mon friends and we won­dered why any­one would kill her. She wasn’t the only out­spo­ken crit­ic of the Hin­du right. Her news­pa­per, which was crit­i­cal of Mr. Modi’s gov­ern­ment and the Hin­du nation­al­ists, didn’t sell more than a few thou­sand copies although it was much respect­ed.

I won­dered if they killed her because she was a mem­ber of the Lin­gay­at com­mu­ni­ty in Kar­nata­ka, which wants to sep­a­rate from Brah­man­i­cal Hin­duism. In the past few months, the Lin­gay­at lead­ers had mobi­lized hun­dreds of thou­sands of sup­port­ers in pub­lic ral­lies. The mobi­liza­tion threat­ens the chances of the Hin­du nation­al­ist B.J.P. in the forth­com­ing state elec­tions in Kar­nata­ka. Although Ms. Lankesh sup­port­ed the call, the Lin­gay­at move­ment had oth­er, enor­mous­ly pow­er­ful lead­ers.

In August 2013, the activist Naren­dra Dab­holkar, who cam­paigned against reli­gious super­sti­tions, was mur­dered. In August 2015, M. M. Kalbur­gi, a schol­ar and out­spo­ken crit­ic of idol wor­ship among Hin­dus, was gunned down at his own doorstep. In Feb­ru­ary 2015, Govind Pansare, a Com­mu­nist leader, com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er and colum­nist, was killed in a small town near Mum­bai.

Mr. Dhabolkar, Mr. Kalbur­gi and Mr. Pansare were mur­dered by assas­sins on motor­bikes, who hid their faces with hel­mets and fled after the mur­der. Exact­ly as Ms. Lankesh was killed.

The mur­dered intel­lec­tu­als also wrote in region­al lan­guages and worked as activists. Each of them shared the qual­i­ty of being accept­able to the left­ist groups and Dalit groups. They could bring togeth­er com­mu­ni­ties opposed to the Hin­du right.

We don’t know yet who killed Ms. Lankesh, but var­i­ous sup­port­ers of Mr. Modi, the B.J.P. and its par­ent orga­ni­za­tion, the Hin­du nation­al­ist moth­er ship, Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, cel­e­brat­ed her mur­der on social media.

5. As Naren­dra Modi, the BJP, and Modi’s fas­cist RSS allies con­tin­ue to con­sol­i­date their grip on pow­er, the BJP elec­toral agen­da is going to require the BJP to appeal to the very poor. The very poor in this case, are the “untouch­ables,” the Dal­its, who under­stand­ably aren’t tra­di­tion­al­ly in the BJP tar­get audi­ence. And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, if Modi wants to not only get reelect­ed, but also lead the BJP to a take over of par­lia­ment so he to ful­ly imple­ment his far-right agen­da, he’s going to have to fig­ure out how to get that Dalit vote:

Caste, in short, remains per­haps the sin­gle most influ­en­tial fac­tor in Indi­an pol­i­tics despite rapid mod­ern­iza­tion of the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, as proven in the lat­est pres­i­den­tial con­test. And Naren­dra Modi, who won a land­slide vic­to­ry by widen­ing the party’s appeal beyond the ortho­dox Hin­du class, is sure to milk it for all it’s worth. . . . Even though it has cam­paigned on pre­serv­ing con­ser­v­a­tive Hin­du tra­di­tions, includ­ing sanc­ti­ty of upper-caste Brah­mins, the BJP is depen­dent on the votes of Dal­its and oth­er low­er castes to win cru­cial states. In the state of Bihar, the third most pop­u­lous state, Modi and the BJP suf­fered a demor­al­iz­ing defeat to the rival Rashtriya Jana­ta Dal par­ty in 2015 State Assem­bly elec­tions. Bihar’s low-caste com­mu­ni­ties vot­ed heav­i­ly in sup­port of RJD and its leader, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was able to strike a fruit­ful elec­toral alliance between Bihar’s Mus­lims and the state’s mar­gin­al­ized, cow-herd­ing Yadav caste . . . . In March, the right-wing Hin­du par­ty secured a major vic­to­ry in India’s most pop­u­lous state of Uttar Pradesh, win­ning over the state’s low­er-caste votes. Modi steered clear of poten­tial­ly divi­sive lan­guage in his speech­es, and the par­ty was report­ed to have induct­ed mem­bers of the low­er caste in lead­er­ship posi­tions. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Modi and the BJP are con­tin­u­ing this trend with the lat­est nom­i­na­tion of Ram Nath Kovind for pres­i­dent. . . .”

It will be inter­est­ing to see if the BJP can con­tin­ue mak­ing inroads into the Dalit elec­torate. Although one should not auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­flate the Indi­an caste-bur­dened soci­ety with the U.S., we note that Trump, the GOP, the so-called “Alt-Right” in the U.S. and cor­re­spond­ing ele­ments else­where have suc­cess­ful­ly tar­get­ed “have-nots” with var­i­ous forms of pro­pa­gan­da, from out­right lying to xeno­pho­bia to eth­nic scape­goat­ing.

“India’s Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion Proves the Val­ue of Exploit­ing Caste Pol­i­tics” by Meer­an Karim; Slate; 07/18/2017

Ram Nath Kovind, a mem­ber of India’s low­er-caste Dalit com­mu­ni­ty, is like­ly to become the country’s next pres­i­dent after the results of par­lia­men­tary polls are announced Thurs­day. Kovind’s can­di­da­cy as part of the rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty is wide­ly per­ceived to be part of a strat­e­gy of Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi and his Hin­du nation­al­ist cohort to con­sol­i­date the party’s sup­port among the country’s low­er-caste vot­ers.

Even though it has cam­paigned on pre­serv­ing con­ser­v­a­tive Hin­du tra­di­tions, includ­ing sanc­ti­ty of upper-caste Brah­mins, the BJP is depen­dent on the votes of Dal­its and oth­er low­er castes to win cru­cial states. In the state of Bihar, the third most pop­u­lous state, Modi and the BJP suf­fered a demor­al­iz­ing defeat to the rival Rashtriya Jana­ta Dal par­ty in 2015 State Assem­bly elec­tions. Bihar’s low-caste com­mu­ni­ties vot­ed heav­i­ly in sup­port of RJD and its leader, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was able to strike a fruit­ful elec­toral alliance between Bihar’s Mus­lims and the state’s mar­gin­al­ized, cow-herd­ing Yadav caste.

Dal­its, accord­ing to Hin­du tra­di­tion, are believed to lie out­side the four castes that deter­mine the lives of Hin­dus, includ­ing their occu­pa­tions and sta­tus­es in soci­ety. For much of the country’s his­to­ry, they have been con­sid­ered “impure,” suf­fer­ing decades of exclu­sion and pover­ty that affir­ma­tive action pro­grams in India have attempt­ed to redress.

Learn­ing from past mis­takes, the BJP under Modi has soft­ened its stance on caste issues. In March, the right-wing Hin­du par­ty secured a major vic­to­ry in India’s most pop­u­lous state of Uttar Pradesh, win­ning over the state’s low­er-caste votes. Modi steered clear of poten­tial­ly divi­sive lan­guage in his speech­es, and the par­ty was report­ed to have induct­ed mem­bers of the low­er caste in lead­er­ship posi­tions. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Modi and the BJP are con­tin­u­ing this trend with the lat­est nom­i­na­tion of Ram Nath Kovind for pres­i­dent.

This thin­ly veiled attempt to secure Dalit sup­port for future elec­tions hasn’t slipped the atten­tion of Indi­ans. Indi­an aca­d­e­m­ic Har­ish Wankhede remarked on the shrewd­ness of BJP and Modi for the Wire last month:

While the BJP has been try­ing to get the sup­port of Dal­its, many among the Dal­its believed that the top posts after it wins would go to the party’s upper caste cadre. Yogi Adityanath, Deven­dra Fad­navis or Manohar Khat­tar all came from the Sangh or Hin­dut­va fold and were upper caste saf­fron lead­ers. They most­ly resort­ed to polit­i­cal tokenism when it came to reward­ing Dal­its. Kovind’s can­di­da­ture is a big step for­ward.

And while the impact of Kovind’s nom­i­na­tion on low­er castes is still unclear, Modi’s gov­ern­ment still faces road­blocks in these com­mu­ni­ties. The BJP’s sup­port of cow pro­tec­tion mea­sures and Hin­du nation­al­ist cam­paigns to ban the con­sump­tion of cow meat has been indi­rect­ly linked to a recent spate of mob lynch­ings. In the Indi­an state of Gujarat, a mob of vig­i­lantes was filmed flog­ging sev­en men belong­ing to the Dalit caste after being accused of skin­ning a dead cow. This led to a a wave of protests across India con­demn­ing BJP and Modi’s silence over the vio­lence. Bans of meat insti­tut­ed by BJP-led state gov­ern­ments have also hit India’s low castes the hard­est, as thou­sands are employed in unskilled jobs in the meat and leather goods indus­tries.

Kovind’s rival for pres­i­dent also hails from India’s Dalit com­mu­ni­ty, fur­ther empha­siz­ing the impor­tance of caste in Indi­an pol­i­tics right now. Meira Kumar, a long­time mem­ber of the Indi­an Par­lia­ment, is the nom­i­nee of the Indi­an Nation­al Congress–backed Unit­ed Pro­gres­sive Alliance. Although its lead­ers have exploit­ed caste con­cerns to win votes, the Congress—in an inter­est­ing case of the pot call­ing the ket­tle black—has rou­tine­ly blamed rival­ing BJP and Modi for divid­ing the coun­try along caste and reli­gious lines. “The BJP mis­lead peo­ple and try trap­ping them,” Con­gress leader Sonia Gand­hi said at 2014 ral­ly. “They are doing caste-based pol­i­tics. They want to divide peo­ple. They have a cheap men­tal­i­ty, and their ide­ol­o­gy tries to harm the diver­si­ty of this nation.”

Caste, in short, remains per­haps the sin­gle most influ­en­tial fac­tor in Indi­an pol­i­tics despite rapid mod­ern­iza­tion of the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, as proven in the lat­est pres­i­den­tial con­test. And Naren­dra Modi, who won a land­slide vic­to­ry by widen­ing the party’s appeal beyond the ortho­dox Hin­du class, is sure to milk it for all it’s worth.

 6. Mod­i’s sur­pris­ing vic­to­ry in the March Uttar Pradesh Assem­bly elec­tion may have had more to do withy vote tam­per­ing (with the elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines) than his sup­port for (and by) the Dal­its.

The suc­cess of the BJP was quite sus­pi­cious, in that the par­ty car­ried the vote in large­ly Mus­lim districts–the RSS specif­i­cal­ly tar­gets and scape­goats Mus­lims.

We note, in this regard, that Modi was enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly wel­comed by the Sil­i­con Val­ley elite, with whom his leo-lib­er­al trade poli­cies res­onat­ed. One won­ders if they proved to be of assis­tance in the elec­tion?

“UP Elec­tion Results: BJP Tam­pered with EVMs, Could­n’t Have Won Oth­er­wise in Mus­lim Bas­tions, Says Mayawati” by Ankit Mis­ra; India Today; 3/11/2017.

Express­ing shock and dis­be­lief over the Uttar Pradesh Assem­bly elec­tion results, Bahu­jan Samaj Par­ty (BSP) supre­mo Mayawati today accused the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP) of tam­per­ing with elec­tron­ic vot­ing machines (EVMs).

“How come the BJP man­aged to win in Mus­lim bas­tions in the state. The poll results are very sur­pris­ing”, Mayawati said.

Alleg­ing that there was mas­sive rig­ging of vot­ing machines in the state to favour the BJP, the BSP chief said, “Most votes in Mus­lim major­i­ty con­stituen­cies have gone to the BJP. This makes it clear that the vot­ing machines were manip­u­lat­ed.”

Is is that the EVMs did not accept the votes cast for oth­er par­ties, Mayawati won­dered. “Mus­lims con­sti­tute 20 per cent votes in the state and the BJP did not give a sin­gle tick­et to Mus­lims. But in Mus­lim-dom­i­nat­ed seats also, the results went in the BJP’s favour and this is unpalat­able to the BSP,” Mayawati said.

BSP COMPLAINS TO POLL PANEL

In a let­ter to the Elec­tion Com­mis­sion, the BSP said that it had been informed by sev­er­al peo­ple that there had been grave manip­u­la­tion in vot­ing machines by soft­ware and tech­nol­o­gy experts hired by the BJP.  Mayawati claimed that a sim­i­lar com­plaint was made by her par­ty­men in the 2014 Lok Sab­ha polls but she had pre­ferred to stay silent, think­ing it was Modi wave and anti-Con­gress sen­ti­ment.

“They were nowhere close to win­ning at the ground lev­el dur­ing elec­tions. The BJP could not have got so many votes with­out tam­per­ing with EVMs”, a state­ment released by the BSP said.

Mayawati appealed to the Elec­tion Com­mis­sion to stop count­ing votes, with­hold results and hold fresh polls using tra­di­tion­al paper bal­lots.

The BSP supre­mo dared PM Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah to ask the poll pan­el to hold fresh elec­tions in the state “if they have an iota of moral­i­ty and hon­esty left in them”.

Issu­ing an open warn­ing to the BJP, Mayawati said they need not be hap­py that they got a major­i­ty as they have “killed democ­ra­cy and this is betray­al of democ­ra­cy”.

7. Omi­nous polit­i­cal news out of India: accord­ing to a new poll out of Indi­an vot­ers, a major­i­ty of Indi­ans sup­port now mil­i­tary rule and even more sup­port a cen­tral author­i­ty who can oper­at­ed with­out checks and bal­ances:

A major­i­ty of Indi­ans, 53 per­cent, sup­port mil­i­tary rule, accord­ing to a Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey released last week. . . .”

 Note that a major­i­ty of polled Indi­ans were back­ing an auto­crat­ic sys­tem in gen­er­al, with a sin­gle indi­vid­ual with unchecked pow­ers: ” . 
. . . . At least 55 per­cent of Indi­ans also back a gov­ern­ing sys­tem ‘in which a strong leader can make deci­sions with­out inter­fer­ence from par­lia­ment or the courts,’ the sur­vey added, not­ing that sup­port for auto­crat­ic rule is high­er in India than in any oth­er nation sur­veyed. . . .”

So as Modi makes fur­ther moves to con­sol­i­date pow­er, those moves may well have strong pub­lic back­ing. Espe­cial­ly with BJP vot­ers: ” . . . . Sup­port­ers of Modi’s rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP) and urban dwellers ‘are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly’ to sup­port mil­i­tary rule than back­ers of the oppo­si­tion Con­gress par­ty and rur­al res­i­dents, the Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey showed. . . .”

One of the fac­tors that appears to dri­ve this grow­ing embrace of author­i­tar­i­an­ism is dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the out­comes of demo­c­ra­t­ic governance—-a feel­ing like a strong-man is need­ed to ‘get things done’: ” . . . . . Giv­en India’s high lev­els of cor­rup­tion, there’s a per­cep­tion that recent tough mea­sures such as demon­e­ti­za­tion have made sense, so the pub­lic now wants a stronger hand on hot-but­ton issues such as eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty as well as law and order, explained Tony Nash, founder and CEO of data ana­lyt­ics firm Com­plete Intel­li­gence. The survey’s results weren’t sur­pris­ing, Nash said. ‘Now that we’re deep­er into the nation­al­is­tic wave that start­ed with lead­ers such as Japan­ese Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe, peo­ple are see­ing that cen­tral­ized deci­sions make progress so they’re not opposed to some­thing more dra­mat­ic.’ . . .”

So the worse India’s gov­er­nance gets, the more Indi­ans just want a dic­ta­tor to ‘fix’ things. Gee, what lessons are the oli­garchs back­ing the BJP take from polls like this?!

“Most cit­i­zens sup­port mil­i­tary rule in the world’s largest democ­ra­cy” by Nysh­ka Chan­dran; CNBC; 11/19/2017

* A major­i­ty of Indi­ans sup­port mil­i­tary rule, accord­ing to a new Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey
* Cit­i­zens want a stronger hand on the country’s long-stand­ing prob­lems of cor­rup­tion and eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty, experts explained

India, the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, is show­ing an appetite for mil­i­tary rule — a poten­tial indi­ca­tor that the country’s nation­al­ist pol­i­tics are evolv­ing.

A major­i­ty of Indi­ans, 53 per­cent, sup­port mil­i­tary rule, accord­ing to a Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey released last week. India is one of only four coun­tries that has a major­i­ty in favor of a mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment, the Amer­i­can think tank said. Viet­nam, Indone­sia, and South Africa are the oth­er three.

At least 55 per­cent of Indi­ans also back a gov­ern­ing sys­tem “in which a strong leader can make deci­sions with­out inter­fer­ence from par­lia­ment or the courts,” the sur­vey added, not­ing that sup­port for auto­crat­ic rule is high­er in India than in any oth­er nation sur­veyed.

Since its first elec­tion in 1952 fol­low­ing the end of British colo­nial rule, the South Asian nation has become a mul­ti­par­ty gov­ern­ment with a par­lia­men­tary sys­tem and a com­mit­ment to free elec­tions. But like many democ­ra­cies around the world, its cit­i­zens are increas­ing­ly lean­ing toward a leader with author­i­tar­i­an ten­den­cies.

From Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump to Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan to Philip­pine Pres­i­dent Rodri­go Duterte, the revival of the strong­man leader has been a defin­ing trend of glob­al pol­i­tics in recent years. Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, who remains immense­ly pop­u­lar at home, is no dif­fer­ent with his hard-line stance on cor­rup­tion and secu­ri­ty.

Sup­port­ers of Modi’s rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP) and urban dwellers “are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more like­ly” to sup­port mil­i­tary rule than back­ers of the oppo­si­tion Con­gress par­ty and rur­al res­i­dents, the Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey showed.

Giv­en India’s high lev­els of cor­rup­tion, there’s a per­cep­tion that recent tough mea­sures such as demon­e­ti­za­tion have made sense, so the pub­lic now wants a stronger hand on hot-but­ton issues such as eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty as well as law and order, explained Tony Nash, founder and CEO of data ana­lyt­ics firm Com­plete Intel­li­gence.

The survey’s results weren’t sur­pris­ing, Nash said. “Now that we’re deep­er into the nation­al­is­tic wave that start­ed with lead­ers such as Japan­ese Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe, peo­ple are see­ing that cen­tral­ized deci­sions make progress so they’re not opposed to some­thing more dra­mat­ic.”

Modi’s crit­ics often accuse his gov­ern­ment of auto­crat­ic rule. West Ben­gal Chief Min­is­ter Mama­ta Baner­jee, who is the founder of the All India Tri­namool Con­gress polit­i­cal par­ty, alleged last month that the BJP was hurt­ing media free­dom by harass­ing news agen­cies crit­i­cal of New Del­hi. Anoth­er com­mon com­plaint direct­ed at the BJP is its use of cen­tral agen­cies to inter­fere in provin­cial gov­ern­ments.

8a. In a grotesque pub­lic rela­tions gam­bit, Modi has posed at a spin­ning wheel. Gand­hi, mur­dered by the RSS (again, the foun­da­tion of the Mod­i’s BJP), moti­vat­ed his fol­low­ers to spin their own cloth­ing, in a suc­cess­ful boy­cott of British tex­tiles. (This was part of Gand­hi’s anti-colo­nial strat­e­gy.

“A Bizarre Spin on the Spin­ning Wheel” by Man­ash Firaq Bat­tachargee; The Wire; 1/13/2017.

The prime min­is­ter fea­tur­ing promi­nent­ly in the tra­di­tion­al spin­ning pose of Mahat­ma Gand­hi in the 2017 wall cal­en­dar and table diary pub­lished by the Kha­di Vil­lage Indus­tries Com­mis­sion is the post-truth event of the year. The image is bewil­der­ing not because of any sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons, but for his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal and eth­i­cal rea­sons asso­ci­at­ed with Gand­hi and the spin­ning wheel. It is nec­es­sary to carve out those rea­sons sharply in an era where polit­i­cal, cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic insti­tu­tions are bent upon invent­ing mean­ings that ring hol­low and lend them­selves to dan­ger­ous mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion.

“There is an art that kills and an art that gives life,” wrote Gand­hi in Young India on August 11, 1921. He was speak­ing in favour of spin­ning the wheel and pro­duc­ing kha­di. It was not just the idea of self-suf­fi­cien­cy that Gand­hi asso­ci­at­ed with the spin­ning wheel, and nor did oth­ers who asso­ci­at­ed the his­toric act with Gand­hi mere­ly read it as a sym­bol of self-suf­fi­cien­cy. The sym­bol of the spin­ning wheel meant oth­er sig­nif­i­cant things: of attend­ing to a work that appeared bor­ing with­out any sense of bore­dom, of labour­ing for a plea­sure with­out priv­i­lege, of sim­ply doing one’s work that con­sists of a sin­gle motion, of doing a work as monot­o­nous and sin­gu­lar as spin­ning. Spin­ning does not only mean an activ­i­ty but also denotes a space, where the task of rotat­ing a sim­ple machine and weav­ing cloth out of it takes place. Threads are the fruit of labour and the source of joy. One nev­er pro­duces enough thread in a day even after hours of spin­ning. There is a non-cap­i­tal­ist imbal­ance in the equa­tion between doing and pro­duc­ing, as much as between time and pro­duc­tion. Gand­hi was not mere­ly pro­duc­ing cloth to sus­tain a home-grown indus­try and the idea of self-suf­fi­cien­cy, but pro­duc­ing a spe­cif­ic rela­tion between time and work in the process.

The idea of giv­ing “life” by spin­ning cloth meant a self- regen­er­a­tive process for Gand­hi, where a cer­tain mean­ing of self-fash­ion­ing was tak­ing place. On March 28, 1945, Gand­hi wrote in Seva­gram,

“Do spin and spin after due delib­er­a­tion… ‘Due delib­er­a­tion’ means real­iza­tion that charkha or act of spin­ning is the sym­bol of non-vio­lence. Pon­der; it will be self-evi­dent.”

We can see the con­nec­tions emerg­ing from this state­ment. The act of spin­ning was an act of delib­er­a­tion, an act of the will. It was a will to be non-vio­lent. If spin­ning was an activ­i­ty of delib­er­a­tion, it was the oppo­site of the idea of provo­ca­tion. Gand­hi spun in the face of provo­ca­tions dur­ing the anti-colo­nial move­ment not sim­ply as a polit­i­cal mes­sage to his oppo­nents and to pow­er, but to cre­ate a space where the self-at-work can be sov­er­eign with­in that activ­i­ty. Spin­ning cre­at­ed a space for nego­ti­at­ing with pow­er. Gand­hi realised the only way to chal­lenge mod­ern (colo­nial) pow­er is by cre­at­ing a place where the self can announce its own sov­er­eign­ty, its own will and a strength to pro­duce for itself. Gandhi’s spin­ning of the wheel sym­bol­ised the soul of Satya­gra­ha, which was also an act of protest, against the devi­ous means of the colo­nial regime to have a claim over the coloniser’s time, will, sus­te­nance and sov­er­eign­ty.

Today, even though in con­crete terms the idea of such an indus­try does not rule over the eco­nom­ics or dis­course of pro­duc­tion, the larg­er mean­ings of Gandhi’s enter­prise are worth pon­der­ing over as ways to nego­ti­ate with the vio­lence of indus­tri­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. This vio­lence, born from the divi­sion of class inter­ests between own­ers and work­ers, con­fronts labour with the bur­den of pro­duc­tive goals that end­less­ly expand and exploit labour time. The idea of self-sov­er­eign­ty, pro­duc­ing work at one’s own pace with­out both­er­ing about a larg­er indus­tri­al log­ic of prof­it-mak­ing, is worth think­ing over in an era when cap­i­tal­ism is on a death dri­ve.

The oth­er, relat­ed aspect is the idea of slow­ness that Gand­hi asso­ci­at­ed with the idea of eth­i­cal life. “Good trav­els at a snail’s pace,” wrote Gand­hi in 1909 in Hind Swaraj. It may be inter­est­ing to com­pare Gandhi’s views on slow­ness with Milan Kundera’s obser­va­tions in his nov­el Slow­ness. Kun­dera writes, “There is a secret bond between slow­ness and mem­o­ry, between speed and for­get­ting.” For­get­ting has become an unno­tice­able mal­a­dy, a wound that peo­ple are suf­fer­ing from with­out real­is­ing it. Despite Ita­lo Calvino’s praise of speed and quick­ness as mark of human agili­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty, it is also time to pon­der over the lim­its and dev­as­ta­tions that have been caused by speed. To say like Car­lo Levi, in his intro­duc­tion to the Ital­ian edi­tion of Lawrence Sterne’s Tris­tram Shandy (quot­ed by Ita­lo Calvi­no), “Death is hid­den in the clocks”. It pre­cise­ly describes the tragedy of mod­ern tech­no­log­i­cal life, where a machine exter­nal to the work­ing of the body con­trols the lifes­pan and vital­i­ty of the body. The grad­ual dis­ap­pear­ing of mem­o­ry and the clock turn­ing larg­er than life are the lim­it sit­u­a­tions of our life-world. This mech­a­ni­sa­tion of life and the era­sure of the human would not have sur­prised Gand­hi.

But the most polit­i­cal and eth­i­cal core of the rea­son why Gand­hi is irre­place­able from the idea and the image of the spin­ning wheel is relat­ed to non-vio­lence. Dur­ing Gandhi’s sojourn in Noakhali dur­ing the com­mu­nal riots of 1946, spin­ning was an excep­tion­al act in the face of an atmos­phere com­plete­ly rid­den with vio­lence. Apart from the ele­ment of self-con­trol, the act of spin­ning also con­tributed to a calm and sooth­ing effect to peo­ple in the ashram. Since Gand­hi believed it is impos­si­ble to meet vio­lence non-vio­lent­ly with­out a cer­tain prac­tice that enun­ci­ates a peace­ful mind, spin­ning grant­ed that mode of peace­ful restrain against the news and provo­ca­tion of vio­lence in Noakhali. Gandhi’s spin­ning kha­di was not just an act of indus­try but also imbued with a respon­si­bil­i­ty and com­mit­ment to non-vio­lence.

The prime min­is­ter and his regime can make no sim­i­lar claims. No sin­cere attempt has been made to counter or dis­cour­age vio­lence against minori­ties and Dal­its. There have been relent­less moves to police and make ille­gal demo­c­ra­t­ic protest. Apart from token ges­tures made towards nation­al self-suf­fi­cien­cy, cor­po­rate hous­es and big busi­ness have been giv­en a big nod. Instead of serv­ing the truth, media hous­es defend­ing the regime have indulged in ram­pant man­u­fac­tur­ing of lies. The image of the prime min­is­ter spin­ning the charkha seems total­ly out of place. This bizarre spin on the spin­ning wheel is one more tricky deliv­ery in the play­ground of the nation’s polit­i­cal cul­ture.

8b. Com­pound­ing Mod­i’s grotesque pos­ing of him­self with a spin­ning wheel, he sport­ed an expen­sive pin-stripe suit esti­mat­ed to be worth $16,000.oo (The pin-stripes were actu­al­ly com­posed of his name when seen in a close-up.) When crit­ics scored Mod­i’s behav­ior, he put the suit up for auc­tion for $695,000.00!

“Mod­i’s Fan­cy Pin-Stripe Suit Lands $694,000 at Auc­tion” by Julie McCarthy; NPR; 2/20/2015.

Indi­a’s Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi is not­ed for mak­ing bold state­ments — both in pol­i­cy and fash­ion. When Modi sport­ed a suit with pin­stripes that spelled out his name in tiny gold let­ter­ing, his crit­ics called it the height of van­i­ty.

But the con­tro­ver­sial suit raised more than eye­brows: It sold at auc­tion today for near­ly $695,000.

The “self­ie” suit was debuted when Modi wore it to a bilat­er­al meet­ing with Pres­i­dent Oba­ma dur­ing his vis­it to India last month.

Mod­i’s eye-catch­ing wardrobe pro­vid­ed a diver­sion at times, with his pas­tel tunics, rich­ly col­ored scarves and lav­ish head­dress­es. Even Pres­i­dent Oba­ma said Modi was a fash­ion icon who could join the ranks of First Lady Michele Oba­ma.

But the suit, with pin­stripes fash­ioned from let­ters that ver­ti­cal­ly spelled out “Naren­dra Damodar­d­as Modi,” raised a rum­pus on social media. Mag­ni­fied pho­tographs of the gold pin­stripes went viral and invit­ed ridicule.

Oppo­si­tion par­ties leapt at Mod­i’s “wardrobe mal­func­tion,” say­ing the man who prid­ed him­self as a one-time hum­ble tea-sell­er was a hyp­ocrite for wear­ing an expen­sive suit that some reports claimed cost near­ly a mil­lion rupees, or $16,000. . . .

Discussion

7 comments for “FTR #990 Hindutva Fascism, Part 3: Modi Operandi”

  1. Check out the lat­est exam­ple of the influ­ence of Yogi Adityanath, the RSS fig­ure from Uttar Prad­desh who is known for encour­ag­ing vig­i­lante death squads against Mus­lims and open­ly backed by Naren­dra Modi: a week of riots between Mus­lims and far-right Hin­dus. Specif­i­cal­ly, the week of riots broke out in the city of Kas­ganj in the state of Uttar Pradesh on Jan. 26, India’s Repub­lic Day. The accounts of how exact the riots start­ed are dis­put­ed, but what is clear is that the appoint­ment of Adityanath as chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh by Mod­i’s BJP last March made the Hin­du-Mus­lim ten­sions in this city pre­dictably A LOT worse:

    The New York Times

    After Reli­gious Clash in India, Rumors Cre­ate a False ‘Mar­tyr’

    By SUHASINI RAJ and KAI SCHULTZ
    FEB. 5, 2018

    KASGANJ, India — Rahul Upad­hyay, a wiry jour­nal­ist with a shock of black hair, was at home when he received news of his death.

    Dur­ing cel­e­bra­tions on India’s Repub­lic Day, Jan. 26, a clash broke out between Hin­dus and Mus­lims in the city of Kas­ganj. Schools, shops and a mosque were dam­aged. One per­son was killed; anoth­er near­ly had his eye gouged out.

    Mr. Upad­hyay, 24, stayed away from the vio­lence, bunker­ing down inside his home in a near­by vil­lage. But the fol­low­ing evening, a friend called to share a pecu­liar bit of news: “You have been ele­vat­ed to being a mar­tyr.”

    In the span of a few hours, mes­sages on What­sApp and Face­book mourn­ing “mar­tyr Rahul,” and say­ing he had been killed in clash­es, went viral across Uttar Pradesh State, which includes Kas­ganj.

    Can­dle­light vig­ils pay­ing respect to Mr. Upad­hyay, who is Hin­du, lit up the streets of sev­en dis­tricts, some with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of local politi­cians.

    By the time Mr. Upad­hyay found out, there was lit­tle he could do: The riots had become so bad in Kas­ganj that the author­i­ties shut down the inter­net.

    “No media house or politi­cian both­ered to vis­it my place or call me first to con­firm that I was indeed dead,” he said. “The mar­ket­place of rumors had heat­ed up beyond con­trol.”

    Kas­ganj was not always like this. For much of its his­to­ry, Mus­lims and Hin­dus coex­ist­ed peace­ful­ly in this dusty city about 100 miles east of New Del­hi. As the price of land shot up in the area, the city pros­pered. Now, rows of mus­tard-col­ored crops, mark­ers of the region’s agrar­i­an roots, frame Hon­da deal­er­ships cater­ing to a pop­u­la­tion eager to trade bicy­cles for motor­bikes.

    In the years since Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi’s Hin­du nation­al­ist Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty rose to pow­er in 2014, vio­lent out­breaks between Hin­dus and Mus­lims have become more com­mon in some pock­ets of India.

    But locals said the ener­gy did not change in Kas­ganj until last year, when Yogi Adityanath, a fire­brand politi­cian with ties to far-right Hin­du nation­al­ist groups, was cho­sen as chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh, home to over 200 mil­lion peo­ple.

    The clash­es began with a flag. On Jan. 26, a group of Mus­lims gath­ered in an open square in Kas­ganj, unstack­ing rows of red plas­tic chairs and prepar­ing to hoist a flag into the air to cel­e­brate Repub­lic Day, which marks the enact­ment of India’s con­sti­tu­tion in 1950.

    Around the same time, dozens of men on motor­bikes affil­i­at­ed with a far-right Hin­du stu­dent group approached the assem­bly, ask­ing that the Mus­lims move the chairs so they could pass. Accounts of what hap­pened next vary.

    Accord­ing to a police report filed by Sushil Gup­ta, the father of Abhishek Gup­ta, the man who was actu­al­ly killed, a group of Mus­lims began taunt­ing the Hin­dus, shout­ing “Long Live Pak­istan,” and telling them that they would have to chant “Hail Pak­istan” if they want­ed to pass.

    Sham­sul Arafeen, 70, a Mus­lim tai­lor who was part of the crowd, remem­bered the encounter dif­fer­ent­ly, describ­ing a “big mob” of Hin­dus who demand­ed that the Mus­lims move the chairs before boil­ing the argu­ment down to reli­gion. Oth­ers said the Hin­dus told the Mus­lims to go back to Pak­istan.

    “They start­ed abus­ing us, say­ing, ‘If you want to live in Hin­dus­tan, you must chant ‘Hail Sita and Ram,’” Mr. Arafeen said, using anoth­er name for India and refer­ring to two Hin­du gods.

    The con­fronta­tion became phys­i­cal soon after­ward, with riot­ers from both sides throw­ing stones at each oth­er and burn­ing shops to the ground. Videos of the con­fronta­tions spread rapid­ly. The author­i­ties shut down inter­net ser­vice in the area for hours.

    By the end of the clash­es, which stretched over a week, over 100 peo­ple had been arrest­ed, both Hin­du and Mus­lim. Mohar Singh Tomar, an inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cer with Kasganj’s police force, said it was unclear who start­ed the clash­es, brush­ing aside sug­ges­tions that either reli­gious group had received unfair treat­ment.

    Pur­nen­dra Prat­ap Singh Solan­ki, the dis­trict pres­i­dent of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, took a hard­er line, char­ac­ter­iz­ing the con­fronta­tion as a “pre­planned con­spir­a­cy” by a grow­ing Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion to tar­get Hin­dus.

    “What is very prob­lem­at­ic for us is that Mus­lims are ruled by their reli­gion first,” he said. “They con­sid­er them­selves Mus­lims before Indi­ans, where­as the Hin­dus con­sid­er them­selves Indi­ans first and then Hin­dus.”

    “The solu­tion to such prob­lems is to con­trol their pop­u­la­tion,” Mr. Solan­ki added. “Their reli­gious edu­ca­tion at the madras­sas must be com­bined with nation­al­ism, pep­pered with nation­al­ism. The prob­lem is they don’t want to get edu­cat­ed at all.”

    React­ing to the vio­lence in Kas­ganj, R. V. Singh, the dis­trict mag­is­trate in Bareil­ly, also in Uttar Pradesh, described a recent episode involv­ing a Hin­du march in a vil­lage in his dis­trict.

    “A strange trend has start­ed of car­ry­ing out pro­ces­sions through Mus­lim local­i­ties and rais­ing anti-Pak­istan slo­gans,” he wrote in a Face­book post that was sub­se­quent­ly delet­ed after he faced pres­sure from the state gov­ern­ment. “Why? Are these peo­ple from Pak­istan?”

    At the same time, the always rocky rela­tion­ship between Hin­du-major­i­ty India and Mus­lim-major­i­ty Pak­istan has notably wors­ened in recent months.

    Around Kas­ganj, many peo­ple said they were ter­ri­fied to leave their homes and return to work.

    ...

    As for Mr. Upad­hyay, he still has not fig­ured out who first report­ed his death or why he had been sin­gled out. Over the last week­end in Jan­u­ary, he field­ed over 400 calls from peo­ple ask­ing if he had died. “My moth­er had to serve end­less cups of tea to vis­i­tors and con­vince them that I was alive,” he said.

    Even­tu­al­ly, Mr. Upad­hyay fig­ured that if he could not con­trol social media, he might as well par­tic­i­pate.

    “I am Rahul Upad­hyay,” he said in a record­ed mes­sage sent out into cyber­space. “I am well and I have not even received a scratch.”

    Still, he said, the dam­age was done. Hun­dreds of miles away, in the city of Gorakh­pur, posters with his pho­to­graph had already been dis­trib­uted.

    Near his face was a warn­ing: “We will take revenge for the death of mar­tyr Rahul Upad­hyay.”

    ———-

    “After Reli­gious Clash in India, Rumors Cre­ate a False ‘Mar­tyr’” by SUHASINI RAJ and KAI SCHULTZ; The New York Times; 02/05/2018

    “But locals said the ener­gy did not change in Kas­ganj until last year, when Yogi Adityanath, a fire­brand politi­cian with ties to far-right Hin­du nation­al­ist groups, was cho­sen as chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh, home to over 200 mil­lion peo­ple.”

    If you’re look­ing for a spark to inflame sec­tar­i­an ten­sions, you could hard­ly come up with a more effec­tive spark than appoint­ing some­one like Yogi Adityanath as the chief min­is­ter of a state. And yet that’s exact­ly what Mod­i’s BJP did last year. And now the city of Kas­ganj, which does­n’t have a his­to­ry of Muslim/Hindu ten­sions, just expe­ri­enced a week of riots:

    ...
    Kas­ganj was not always like this. For much of its his­to­ry, Mus­lims and Hin­dus coex­ist­ed peace­ful­ly in this dusty city about 100 miles east of New Del­hi. As the price of land shot up in the area, the city pros­pered. Now, rows of mus­tard-col­ored crops, mark­ers of the region’s agrar­i­an roots, frame Hon­da deal­er­ships cater­ing to a pop­u­la­tion eager to trade bicy­cles for motor­bikes.

    In the years since Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi’s Hin­du nation­al­ist Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty rose to pow­er in 2014, vio­lent out­breaks between Hin­dus and Mus­lims have become more com­mon in some pock­ets of India.
    ...

    And while the exact cause of the riot is in dis­pute, it sure looks like it was the far-right Hin­dus who showed up for a fight. The sto­ries are con­flict­ing, but when you read the con­flict­ing accounts and fac­tor in that the chief min­is­ter of the state is a guy who foments mob vio­lence against Mus­lims, it’s a lot eas­i­er to believe the accounts of the local Mus­lims over the gang far-right Hin­dus who sud­den­ly showed up on motor bikes right before the ini­tial fight broke out:

    ...
    The clash­es began with a flag. On Jan. 26, a group of Mus­lims gath­ered in an open square in Kas­ganj, unstack­ing rows of red plas­tic chairs and prepar­ing to hoist a flag into the air to cel­e­brate Repub­lic Day, which marks the enact­ment of India’s con­sti­tu­tion in 1950.

    Around the same time, dozens of men on motor­bikes affil­i­at­ed with a far-right Hin­du stu­dent group approached the assem­bly, ask­ing that the Mus­lims move the chairs so they could pass. Accounts of what hap­pened next vary.

    Accord­ing to a police report filed by Sushil Gup­ta, the father of Abhishek Gup­ta, the man who was actu­al­ly killed, a group of Mus­lims began taunt­ing the Hin­dus, shout­ing “Long Live Pak­istan,” and telling them that they would have to chant “Hail Pak­istan” if they want­ed to pass.

    Sham­sul Arafeen, 70, a Mus­lim tai­lor who was part of the crowd, remem­bered the encounter dif­fer­ent­ly, describ­ing a “big mob” of Hin­dus who demand­ed that the Mus­lims move the chairs before boil­ing the argu­ment down to reli­gion. Oth­ers said the Hin­dus told the Mus­lims to go back to Pak­istan.

    “They start­ed abus­ing us, say­ing, ‘If you want to live in Hin­dus­tan, you must chant ‘Hail Sita and Ram,’” Mr. Arafeen said, using anoth­er name for India and refer­ring to two Hin­du gods.

    The con­fronta­tion became phys­i­cal soon after­ward, with riot­ers from both sides throw­ing stones at each oth­er and burn­ing shops to the ground. Videos of the con­fronta­tions spread rapid­ly. The author­i­ties shut down inter­net ser­vice in the area for hours.
    ...

    So did the local Mus­lims demand that the far-right bik­er gang chant “Hail Pak­istan” (on Indi­a’s inde­pen­dence day) in order to pass through the town square or did that far-right bik­er gang show up and basi­cal­ly pick a fight with the Mus­lims who were already gath­ered there and suc­ceed in pick­ing that fight? That’s the gen­er­al ques­tion sur­round­ing how this riot broke out. And that would be more of an open ques­tion had the BJP not appoint­ed Yogi Adityanath — a guy who advo­cates mob vio­lence against Mus­lims — as chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh. But they did. And now a week of riots and vio­lence hap­pened.

    So what’s the BJP’s response to the sit­u­a­tion they appear to have cre­at­ed? Well, accord­ing to the dis­trict pres­i­dent of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, the prob­lem is that this was all a “pre­planned con­spir­a­cy” by the Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion of India and the solu­tion is to “con­trol their pop­u­la­tion” by inject­ing Indi­an nation­al­ism into the Mus­lim reli­gious edu­ca­tion from the madras­sas:

    ...
    Pur­nen­dra Prat­ap Singh Solan­ki, the dis­trict pres­i­dent of the Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty, took a hard­er line, char­ac­ter­iz­ing the con­fronta­tion as a “pre­planned con­spir­a­cy” by a grow­ing Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion to tar­get Hin­dus.

    “What is very prob­lem­at­ic for us is that Mus­lims are ruled by their reli­gion first,” he said. “They con­sid­er them­selves Mus­lims before Indi­ans, where­as the Hin­dus con­sid­er them­selves Indi­ans first and then Hin­dus.”

    “The solu­tion to such prob­lems is to con­trol their pop­u­la­tion,” Mr. Solan­ki added. “Their reli­gious edu­ca­tion at the madras­sas must be com­bined with nation­al­ism, pep­pered with nation­al­ism. The prob­lem is they don’t want to get edu­cat­ed at all.”
    ...

    ““The solu­tion to such prob­lems is to con­trol their pop­u­la­tion,” Mr. Solan­ki added. “Their reli­gious edu­ca­tion at the madras­sas must be com­bined with nation­al­ism, pep­pered with nation­al­ism. The prob­lem is they don’t want to get edu­cat­ed at all.””

    Now, there is undoubt­ed­ly going to be some very prob­lem­at­ic aspects of the edu­ca­tion Indi­a’s Mus­lims get in madras­sas, just as there is obvi­ous­ly a deep need for reform in the reli­gious edu­ca­tion giv­en to the peo­ple mak­ing up the Hin­du nation­al­ism cham­pi­oned by peo­ple like Yogi Adityanath. Ill-advised reli­gious edu­ca­tion is trag­i­cal­ly wide­spread, espe­cial­ly when it’s a deeply con­ser­v­a­tive reli­gion root­ed in far-right ideals that aban­don the Gold­en Rule. But it’s hard to imag­ine a less effec­tive means of pro­mot­ing nation­al pride in Indi­a’s Mus­lims than a BJP push to force Indi­an nation­al­ism to be taught in madras­sas. Espe­cial­ly since the BJP and its RSS allies which will undoubt­ed­ly demand that this be a Hin­du-nation­al­ist form of Indi­an nation­al­ism.

    And yet that’s the direc­tion Modi and the BJP push­ing Indi­an soci­ety: a giant HIndu/Muslim cul­ture war that’s used as a rea­son to impose Hin­du nation­al­ism as Indi­a’s ‘offi­cial’ cul­ture and ide­ol­o­gy. And big riots like what just took place are clear­ly seen as inte­gral to that cul­ture war strat­e­gy. When will the next riots flare up? Who knows, but as R. V. Singh, the dis­trict mag­is­trate in Bareil­ly, not­ed, there appears to be a trend “of car­ry­ing out pro­ces­sions through Mus­lim local­i­ties and rais­ing anti-Pak­istan slo­gans,” so it’s hard to imag­ine that the next riot is going to be too far off:

    ...
    React­ing to the vio­lence in Kas­ganj, R. V. Singh, the dis­trict mag­is­trate in Bareil­ly, also in Uttar Pradesh, described a recent episode involv­ing a Hin­du march in a vil­lage in his dis­trict.

    “A strange trend has start­ed of car­ry­ing out pro­ces­sions through Mus­lim local­i­ties and rais­ing anti-Pak­istan slo­gans,” he wrote in a Face­book post that was sub­se­quent­ly delet­ed after he faced pres­sure from the state gov­ern­ment. “Why? Are these peo­ple from Pak­istan?”
    ...

    “A strange trend has start­ed of car­ry­ing out pro­ces­sions through Mus­lim local­i­ties and rais­ing anti-Pak­istan slo­gans.”

    That sure sounds like a far-right move­ment look­ing to pick fights in order to fur­ther its far-right caus­es. Which is exact­ly what we should have expect­ed after Mod­i’s BJP appoint­ed some­one like Yogi Adityanath to be chief min­is­ter of Uttar Pradesh. Adn that’s no doubt what Mod­i’s BJP expect­ed too, which is prob­a­bly why they picked him.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 6, 2018, 10:54 pm
  2. As the say­ing goes, you can’t judge a book by its cov­er. But there are excep­tions. For instance, when a chil­dren’s book is enti­tled “Great Lead­ers” and has a pic­ture of Adolf Hitler stand­ing next to Barack Oba­ma, Mahat­ma Gand­hi, and Nel­son Man­dela, that’s the kind of book cov­er that sug­gests this is a book best worth skip­ping. Espe­cial­ly if you’re a kid look­ing for a his­to­ry edu­ca­tion.

    And, of course, that’s exact­ly the kind of book kids in India have access to now that Pega­sus, owned by India’s B. Jain Pub­lish­ing Group, pub­lished its “Great Lead­ers” chil­dren’s book. Oh, and Naren­dra Modi is on the cov­er too. Sur­prise!

    And, of course, none of this should real­ly be very sur­pris­ing for India in the era of Naren­dra’s Modi. And not only because of the gen­er­al embrace of open fas­cism we’re wit­ness­ing under the Modi gov­ern­ment. It’s also because, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle notes, Modi him­self has his own polit­i­cal his­to­ry with chil­dren’s books that pro­mote Hitler as a great leader: Back in 2004, the high-school text­books in the state of Gujarat, which was then led by Mr. Modi, report­ed­ly spoke glow­ing­ly of fas­cism and Nazism. In one sec­tion of the book called “Ide­ol­o­gy of Nazism,” the text­book said Hitler had “lent dig­ni­ty and pres­tige to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment,” “made untir­ing efforts to make Ger­many self-reliant” and “instilled the spir­it of adven­ture in the com­mon peo­ple.” It only con­tains a brief men­tion of the holo­caust.

    That was the kind of his­to­ry edu­ca­tion high­school chil­dren received back in 2004 when Modi led Gujarat. And now Modi leads India. So, sur­prise!, there’s a chil­dren’s text­book about “Great Lead­ers” with Gand­hi, Oba­ma, Modi, and Hitler on the cov­er:

    The New York Times

    Indi­an Children’s Book Lists Hitler as Leader ‘Who Will Inspire You’

    By KAI SCHULTZ
    MARCH 17, 2018

    NEW DELHI — An Indi­an pub­lish­er came under fire this week for includ­ing Hitler in a children’s book about world lead­ers who have “devot­ed their lives for the bet­ter­ment of their coun­try and peo­ple.”

    “Ded­i­cat­ed to the bet­ter­ment of coun­tries and peo­ple? Adolf Hitler? This descrip­tion would bring tears of joy to the Nazis and their racist neo-Nazi heirs,” Rab­bi Abra­ham Coop­er, asso­ciate dean of the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter, an inter­na­tion­al Jew­ish human rights orga­ni­za­tion, said in a state­ment.

    Pub­lished by the Pega­sus imprint of India’s B. Jain Pub­lish­ing Group, the book, called “Lead­ers” — but list­ed on the publisher’s web­site as “Great Lead­ers” — spot­lights 11 lead­ers “who will inspire you,” accord­ing to a prod­uct descrip­tion on the publisher’s web­site.

    On the book’s cov­er, a stony-faced Hitler is fea­tured along­side Barack Oba­ma, Mahat­ma Gand­hi, Nel­son Man­dela and India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi. Also includ­ed on the cov­er is Myanmar’s civil­ian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has recent­ly come under sharp crit­i­cism for refus­ing to acknowl­edge atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the country’s mil­i­tary against the Rohingya eth­nic group.

    Ear­li­er this week, the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter, which is based in Los Ange­les, called for the pub­lish­er to remove “Great Lead­ers” from cir­cu­la­tion and its online store, where it is sold for about $2.

    “Plac­ing Hitler along­side tru­ly great polit­i­cal and human­i­tar­i­an lead­ers is an abom­i­na­tion that is made worse as it tar­gets young peo­ple with lit­tle or no knowl­edge of world his­to­ry and ethics,” Rab­bi Coop­er said in the state­ment.

    Annshu June­ja, a pub­lish­ing man­ag­er at the imprint, said by email that Hitler was fea­tured because, like Barack Oba­ma, Nel­son Man­dela and Mahat­ma Gand­hi, “his lead­er­ship skills and speech­es influ­enced mass­es.”

    We are not talk­ing about his way of con­duct or his views or whether he was a good leader or a bad leader but sim­ply por­tray­ing how pow­er­ful he was as a leader,” he said.

    ...

    In parts of Asia, atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in Nazi Ger­many are poor­ly under­stood and Hitler is some­times glo­ri­fied as a strong, effec­tive leader.

    In 2004, reports sur­faced of high-school text­books in the state of Gujarat, which was then led by Mr. Modi, that spoke glow­ing­ly of Nazism and fas­cism.

    Accord­ing to The Times of India, in a sec­tion called “Ide­ol­o­gy of Nazism,” the text­book said Hitler had “lent dig­ni­ty and pres­tige to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment,” “made untir­ing efforts to make Ger­many self-reliant” and “instilled the spir­it of adven­ture in the com­mon peo­ple.” Only briefly does the book men­tion the exter­mi­na­tion of mil­lions of Jews and oth­ers by the end of World War II.

    Dilip D’Souza, an Indi­an jour­nal­ist, wrote in a 2012 edi­to­r­i­al that when 25 most­ly upper-mid­dle-class stu­dents taught by his wife at a pri­vate French school in Mum­bai were asked to name the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure they most admired, nine of them picked Hitler.

    “ ‘And what about the mil­lions he mur­dered?’ asked my wife. ‘Oh, yes, that was bad,’ said the kids. ‘But you know what, some of them were trai­tors.’ ”

    The state­ment from the Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter said that “Great Lead­ers” had been sold this month at the Krithi Inter­na­tion­al Book Fair in Kochi, a city with a long Jew­ish her­itage. The 48-page book was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 2016, accord­ing to the publisher’s web­site, and it was still avail­able for sale online on Sat­ur­day. It is unclear who wrote it.

    ———-

    “Indi­an Children’s Book Lists Hitler as Leader ‘Who Will Inspire You’” by KAI SCHULTZ; The New York Times; 03/17/2018

    “An Indi­an pub­lish­er came under fire this week for includ­ing Hitler in a children’s book about world lead­ers who have “devot­ed their lives for the bet­ter­ment of their coun­try and peo­ple.”

    Hitler was one of the great world lead­ers who “devot­ed their lives for the bet­ter­ment of their coun­try and peo­ple.” That’s what the chil­dren who read “Great Lead­ers will learn. In a book about 11 lead­ers who will inspire you. Lead­ers like Barack Oba­ma, Mahat­ma Gand­hi, Nel­son Man­dela. And Hitler. And Modi:

    ...
    Pub­lished by the Pega­sus imprint of India’s B. Jain Pub­lish­ing Group, the book, called “Lead­ers” — but list­ed on the publisher’s web­site as “Great Lead­ers” — spot­lights 11 lead­ers “who will inspire you,” accord­ing to a prod­uct descrip­tion on the publisher’s web­site.

    On the book’s cov­er, a stony-faced Hitler is fea­tured along­side Barack Oba­ma, Mahat­ma Gand­hi, Nel­son Man­dela and India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi. Also includ­ed on the cov­er is Myanmar’s civil­ian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has recent­ly come under sharp crit­i­cism for refus­ing to acknowl­edge atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the country’s mil­i­tary against the Rohingya eth­nic group.
    ...

    So how does the pub­lish­er defend a chil­dren’s book like this? By point­ing out that they weren’t actu­al­ly com­ment­ing on Hitler’s “way of con­duct or his views or whether he was a good leader or a bad leader but sim­ply por­tray­ing how pow­er­ful he was as a leader.” So it was a val­ue-free dec­la­ra­tion of Hitler’s great­ness. That’s, accord­ing to the pub­lish­ers, is sup­posed to be reas­sur­ing:

    ...
    Annshu June­ja, a pub­lish­ing man­ag­er at the imprint, said by email that Hitler was fea­tured because, like Barack Oba­ma, Nel­son Man­dela and Mahat­ma Gand­hi, “his lead­er­ship skills and speech­es influ­enced mass­es.”

    We are not talk­ing about his way of con­duct or his views or whether he was a good leader or a bad leader but sim­ply por­tray­ing how pow­er­ful he was as a leader,” he said.
    ...

    And this kind of sto­ry is trag­i­cal­ly not new for India. Espe­cial­ly when Modi is involved:

    ...
    In parts of Asia, atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in Nazi Ger­many are poor­ly under­stood and Hitler is some­times glo­ri­fied as a strong, effec­tive leader.

    In 2004, reports sur­faced of high-school text­books in the state of Gujarat, which was then led by Mr. Modi, that spoke glow­ing­ly of Nazism and fas­cism.

    Accord­ing to The Times of India, in a sec­tion called “Ide­ol­o­gy of Nazism,” the text­book said Hitler had “lent dig­ni­ty and pres­tige to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment,” “made untir­ing efforts to make Ger­many self-reliant” and “instilled the spir­it of adven­ture in the com­mon peo­ple.” Only briefly does the book men­tion the exter­mi­na­tion of mil­lions of Jews and oth­ers by the end of World War II.
    ...

    And then there was the 2012 edi­to­r­i­al by Dilip D’Souza, an Indi­an jour­nal­ist mar­ried to a teacher who dis­cov­ered that 9 out of 25 of her upper-mid­dle-class stu­dents at a pri­vate French school in Mum­bai named Hitler as the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure they admired most:

    ...
    Dilip D’Souza, an Indi­an jour­nal­ist, wrote in a 2012 edi­to­r­i­al that when 25 most­ly upper-mid­dle-class stu­dents taught by his wife at a pri­vate French school in Mum­bai were asked to name the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure they most admired, nine of them picked Hitler.

    “ ‘And what about the mil­lions he mur­dered?’ asked my wife. ‘Oh, yes, that was bad,’ said the kids. ‘But you know what, some of them were trai­tors.’ ”
    ...

    So as we can see, there is amaz­ing­ly a pro­found­ly mis­guid­ed and wide­spread appre­ci­a­tion for Hitler in India. And while much of that appears to be fueled by a wide­spread lack of under­stand­ing of who he was and what he stood for, it’s also undoubt­ed­ly fueled by pub­lish­ers who put out pro-Hitler chil­dren’s books.

    And as Dilip D’Souza, the author of that 2012 edi­to­r­i­al, point­ed out, that class­room of school chil­dren filled with fans of Hitler had a very dif­fer­ent sen­ti­ment about Gand­hi. “He’s a cow­ard!” That’s the obvi­ous flip side this love of Hitler in India. It’s an implic­it rejec­tion of Gand­hi.

    And as Dilip D’Souza also point­ed out, this trag­ic adu­la­tion of Hitler in India isn’t lim­it­ed to chil­dren’s books and high-school text­books. Hitler has a shock­ing­ly pop­u­lar rep­u­ta­tion in Indi­an, thanks in part to the efforts of Bal Thack­er­ay, the now deceased chief of the Shiv Sena par­ty which is a long-stand­ing ally of the BJP for the last quar­ter cen­tu­ry (although that alliance appears to be frac­tur­ing this year). So thanks to the leader of one of the BJP’s allies, Hitler’s rep­u­ta­tion has enjoyed a strange­ly pos­i­tive after­life in India:

    The Dai­ly Beast

    Hitler’s Strange After­life in India

    Hat­ed and mocked in much of the world, the Nazi leader has devel­oped a strange fol­low­ing among school­child­ren and read­ers of Mein Kampf in India. Dilip D’Souza on how polit­i­cal leader Bal Thack­er­ay influ­enced Indi­ans to admire Hitler and despise Gand­hi.

    Dilip D’Souza
    11.30.12 4:45 AM ET

    My wife teach­es French to tenth-grade stu­dents at a pri­vate school here in Mum­bai. Dur­ing one recent class, she asked these most­ly upper-mid­dle-class kids to com­plete the sen­tence “J’ad­mire …” with the name of the his­tor­i­cal fig­ure they most admired.

    To say she was dis­turbed by the results would be to under­state her reac­tion. Of 25 stu­dents in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, mak­ing him eas­i­ly the high­est vote-get­ter in this par­tic­u­lar exer­cise; a cer­tain Mohan­das Gand­hi was the choice of pre­cise­ly one stu­dent. Dis­cussing the idea of courage with oth­er stu­dents once, my wife was star­tled by the con­tempt they had for Gand­hi. “He was a cow­ard!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India report­ed a sur­vey that found that 17 per­cent of stu­dents in elite Indi­an col­leges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”

    In a place where Gand­hi becomes a cow­ard, per­haps Hitler becomes a hero.

    Still, why Hitler? “He was a fan­tas­tic ora­tor,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He loved his coun­try; he was a great patri­ot. He gave back to Ger­many a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Ver­sailles,” they said.

    “And what about the mil­lions he mur­dered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were trai­tors.”

    Admir­ing Hitler for his ora­tor­i­cal skills? Sur­re­al enough. Add to that the easy con­dem­na­tion of his mil­lions of vic­tims as trai­tors. Add to that the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of this man as a patri­ot. I mean, in a short dozen years, Hitler led Ger­many through a scarce­ly believ­able orgy of blood to utter shame and whole­sale destruc­tion. Even the mere thought of call­ing such a man a patri­ot pro­found­ly corrupts—is vio­lent­ly anti­thet­i­cal to—the idea of patri­o­tism.

    But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darn­d­est things. Except this is no eas­i­ly writ­ten-off expe­ri­ence. The evi­dence is that Hitler has plen­ty of admir­ers in India, plen­ty of whom are by no means kids.

    Con­sid­er Mein Kampf, Hitler’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indi­ans buy thou­sands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the jour­nal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indi­an pub­lish­ers who have edi­tions of the book on the mar­ket. Jaico, for exam­ple, print­ed its 55th edi­tion in 2010, claim­ing to have sold 100,000 copies in the pre­vi­ous sev­en years. (Con­trast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Road­run­ner, has sold). In a coun­try where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a best­seller, these are sig­nif­i­cant num­bers.

    And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is avail­able for sale on flipkart.com, India’s Ama­zon. As I write this, 51 cus­tomers have rat­ed the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rat­ing. What’s more, there’s a steady trick­le of reports that say it has become a must-read for busi­ness-school stu­dents; a man­age­ment guide much like Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono’s Lat­er­al Think­ing. If this undis­tin­guished artist could take an entire coun­try with him, I imag­ine the rea­son­ing goes, sure­ly his book has some lessons for future cap­tains of indus­try?

    Much of Hitler’s Indi­an after­life is the lega­cy of Bal Thack­er­ay, chief of the Shiv Sena par­ty who died on Nov. 17.

    Thack­er­ay freely, open­ly, and often admit­ted his admi­ra­tion for Hitler, his book, the Nazis, and their meth­ods. In 1993, for exam­ple, he gave an inter­view to Time mag­a­zine. “There is noth­ing wrong,” he said then, “if [Indi­an] Mus­lims are treat­ed as Jews were in Nazi Ger­many.”

    This inter­view came only months after the Decem­ber 1992 and Jan­u­ary 1993 riots in Mum­bai, which left about a thou­sand Indi­ans slaugh­tered, the major­i­ty of them Mus­lim. Thack­er­ay was active right through those weeks, writ­ing edi­to­r­i­al after edi­to­r­i­al in his par­ty mouth­piece, “Saam­na” (“Con­fronta­tion”) about how to “treat” Mus­lims.

    On Dec. 9, 1992, for exam­ple, his edi­to­r­i­al con­tained these lines: “Pak­istan need not cross the bor­ders and attack India. 250 mil­lion Mus­lims in India will stage an armed insur­rec­tion. They form one of Pakistan’s sev­en atom­ic bombs.”

    A month lat­er, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Mus­lims of Bhen­di Bazar, Null Bazar, Don­gri and Pyd­honie, the areas [of Mum­bai] we call Mini Pak­istan … must be shot on the spot.”

    There was plen­ty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupt­ed, Thack­er­ay said this about the führer’s famous auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Mus­lim, that is what I believe in.”

    With rhetoric like that, it’s no won­der the streets of my city saw the slaugh­ter of 1992–93. It’s no won­der kids come to admire a mass-mur­der­er, to ratio­nal­ize away his mas­sacres. It’s no won­der they cling to almost com­i­cal­ly super­fi­cial ideas of courage and patri­o­tism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghast­ly crime is for­got­ten so long as we can pre­tend that he “loved” his coun­try.

    In his acclaimed 1997 book Hitler’s Will­ing Exe­cu­tion­ers, Daniel Gold­ha­gen writes: “Hitler, in pos­ses­sion of great ora­tor­i­cal skills, was the [Nazi] Party’s most force­ful pub­lic speak­er. Like Hitler, the par­ty from its ear­li­est days was devot­ed to the destruc­tion of … democ­ra­cy [and to] most espe­cial­ly and relent­less­ly, anti-Semi­tism. … The Nazi Par­ty became Hitler’s Par­ty, obses­sive­ly anti-Semit­ic and apoc­a­lyp­tic in its rhetoric about its ene­mies.”

    Do some sub­sti­tu­tions in those sen­tences along the lines Thack­er­ay want­ed to do with Mein Kampf. Indeed, what you get is a more than ade­quate descrip­tion of … no sur­prise, Thack­er­ay him­self.

    ...

    ———-

    “Hitler’s Strange After­life in India” by Dilip D’Souza; The Dai­ly Beast; 11/30/2012

    “To say she was dis­turbed by the results would be to under­state her reac­tion. Of 25 stu­dents in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, mak­ing him eas­i­ly the high­est vote-get­ter in this par­tic­u­lar exer­cise; a cer­tain Mohan­das Gand­hi was the choice of pre­cise­ly one stu­dent. Dis­cussing the idea of courage with oth­er stu­dents once, my wife was star­tled by the con­tempt they had for Gand­hi. “He was a cow­ard!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India report­ed a sur­vey that found that 17 per­cent of stu­dents in elite Indi­an col­leges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.””

    Gand­hi, the guy who led a non-vio­lent resis­tance move­ment against a vio­lent oppres­sor, was a cow­ard. That’s the up-is-down les­son that was some­how taught to the chil­dren who admire Hitler. And that’s appar­ent­ly quite a few chil­dren. Who grow up to become adults who admire Hitler:

    ...
    But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darn­d­est things. Except this is no eas­i­ly writ­ten-off expe­ri­ence. The evi­dence is that Hitler has plen­ty of admir­ers in India, plen­ty of whom are by no means kids.

    Con­sid­er Mein Kampf, Hitler’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indi­ans buy thou­sands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the jour­nal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indi­an pub­lish­ers who have edi­tions of the book on the mar­ket. Jaico, for exam­ple, print­ed its 55th edi­tion in 2010, claim­ing to have sold 100,000 copies in the pre­vi­ous sev­en years. (Con­trast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Road­run­ner, has sold). In a coun­try where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a best­seller, these are sig­nif­i­cant num­bers.

    And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is avail­able for sale on flipkart.com, India’s Ama­zon. As I write this, 51 cus­tomers have rat­ed the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rat­ing. What’s more, there’s a steady trick­le of reports that say it has become a must-read for busi­ness-school stu­dents; a man­age­ment guide much like Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono’s Lat­er­al Think­ing. If this undis­tin­guished artist could take an entire coun­try with him, I imag­ine the rea­son­ing goes, sure­ly his book has some lessons for future cap­tains of indus­try?
    ...

    Mein Kampf, the must-read for busi­ness-school stu­dents. Because, hey, if this undis­tin­guished artist could take an entire coun­try with him, I imag­ine the rea­son­ing goes, sure­ly his book has some lessons for future cap­tains of indus­try? And now, thanks to Don­ald Trump — who kept a book of Hitler’s speech­es on his night­stand accord­ing to his ex-wife Ivana — one of those Hitler-lov­ing cap­tains of indus­try became the US Pres­i­dent. It’s one of the many unfor­tu­nate lessons to the world brought to us by the Trump pres­i­den­cy. But for Indi­an soci­ety, those high-pro­file Hitler-lov­ing lessons did­n’t start with Trump. And in recent decades these lessons were open­ly pro­mot­ed to Indi­a’s pub­lic by Bal Thack­er­ay, chief of the far right Hin­du nation­al­ist Shiv Sena par­ty. Lessons like how India should treat Mus­lims like how the Nazis treat­ed the Jews:

    ...
    Much of Hitler’s Indi­an after­life is the lega­cy of Bal Thack­er­ay, chief of the Shiv Sena par­ty who died on Nov. 17.

    Thack­er­ay freely, open­ly, and often admit­ted his admi­ra­tion for Hitler, his book, the Nazis, and their meth­ods. In 1993, for exam­ple, he gave an inter­view to Time mag­a­zine. “There is noth­ing wrong,” he said then, “if [Indi­an] Mus­lims are treat­ed as Jews were in Nazi Ger­many.”

    This inter­view came only months after the Decem­ber 1992 and Jan­u­ary 1993 riots in Mum­bai, which left about a thou­sand Indi­ans slaugh­tered, the major­i­ty of them Mus­lim. Thack­er­ay was active right through those weeks, writ­ing edi­to­r­i­al after edi­to­r­i­al in his par­ty mouth­piece, “Saam­na” (“Con­fronta­tion”) about how to “treat” Mus­lims.

    On Dec. 9, 1992, for exam­ple, his edi­to­r­i­al con­tained these lines: “Pak­istan need not cross the bor­ders and attack India. 250 mil­lion Mus­lims in India will stage an armed insur­rec­tion. They form one of Pakistan’s sev­en atom­ic bombs.”

    A month lat­er, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Mus­lims of Bhen­di Bazar, Null Bazar, Don­gri and Pyd­honie, the areas [of Mum­bai] we call Mini Pak­istan … must be shot on the spot.”

    There was plen­ty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupt­ed, Thack­er­ay said this about the führer’s famous auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Mus­lim, that is what I believe in.”

    With rhetoric like that, it’s no won­der the streets of my city saw the slaugh­ter of 1992–93. It’s no won­der kids come to admire a mass-mur­der­er, to ratio­nal­ize away his mas­sacres. It’s no won­der they cling to almost com­i­cal­ly super­fi­cial ideas of courage and patri­o­tism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghast­ly crime is for­got­ten so long as we can pre­tend that he “loved” his coun­try.

    ...

    Again, Thack­er­ay’s Shiv Sena par­ty is a long-stand­ing BJP ally. Which is a reminder that the BJP real­ly is a fascis­tic par­ty. That’s why it’s allied with so many oth­er fascis­tic par­ties like Shiv Sena and the RSS.

    So while Oba­ma, Gand­hi, and Man­dela are rather jar­ring fig­ures to see on a book cov­er next to Hitler, a Hitler/Modi book cov­er is prob­a­bly some­thing we should rea­son­ably expect at this point. Although hope­ful­ly not chil­dren’s book cov­ers.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 19, 2018, 9:57 pm
  3. Oh look at that: Jayant Sin­ha, the lead advi­sor for the Omid­yar Net­work in India who became Naren­dra Mod­i’s finance min­is­ter and is now a mem­ber of par­lia­ment, was just caught gar­land­ing (adorn­ing with flow­ers) eight men con­vict­ed of killing a meat trad­er last year as part of a far right Hin­du nation­al “cow vig­i­lan­tism” cam­paign. The killing was caught on video. One of the men just hap­pened to be a local BJP leader.

    The killing took place a day after Modi belat­ed­ly pro­claimed that “killing peo­ple in the name of cow pro­tec­tion unac­cept­able”, which was notable since these cow vig­i­lan­tism acts have been going on for years with a mut­ed response from Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment. Con­se­quent­ly, the eleven peo­ple involved with the killing were sent to a fast track court and giv­en life sen­tences in March, mak­ing it the FIRST suc­cess­ful con­vic­tion over an act of cow vig­i­lan­tism.

    But Sin­ha protest­ed that con­vic­tion, claim­ing that he was con­vinced that jus­tice was not done. He then demand­ed that the case be probed again but by the Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion this time. Fast for­ward to today, and eight of them were just released on bail last week while they appeal their con­vic­tion. They then trav­eled to Sin­ha’s res­i­dence where they were fet­ed:

    NDTV

    Min­is­ter Jayant Sin­ha Gar­lands 8 Men Who Killed Meat Trad­er In Jhark­hand
    The meat trad­er in Jhark­hand was dragged out of his car and beat­en to death by a mob that sus­pect­ed he was car­ry­ing beef. As Alimud­din Ansari, 55, lay dying on a road in Ram­garh town, his car was also set on fire.

    All India | Report­ed by Man­ish Kumar, Edit­ed by Aloke Tikku | Updat­ed: July 06, 2018 22:45 IST

    Haz­arib­ag, Jhark­hand:

    Jayant Sin­ha, the union min­is­ter from Jhark­hand has land­ed him­self in the mid­dle of a row after the min­is­ter felic­i­tat­ed eight men con­vict­ed for killing a meat trad­er last year.

    The con­tro­ver­sy erupt­ed after pho­tographs emerged show­ing the min­is­ter wel­com­ing them at his res­i­dence. In some, the union min­is­ter of state for civ­il avi­a­tion is also seen gar­land­ing the eight con­victs at his res­i­dence on the out­skirts of Haz­arib­agh

    “This is despi­ca­ble,” Jharkhand’s leader of oppo­si­tion Hemant Soren tweet­ed in a sting­ing swipe at the union min­is­ter, tag­ging the min­is­ter’s alma mater, the pres­ti­gious Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty of the US.

    “Your alum­nus @jayantsinha felic­i­tat­ing the accused in cow relat­ed lynch­ing death in India. Is this what @Harvard stands for?” Mr Soren tweet­ed about Mr Sin­ha, the BJP’s Lok Sab­ha mem­ber from Haz­arib­agh. Ram­garh town is also a part of his con­stituen­cy.

    A total of 11 men, includ­ing a local BJP leader, were sen­tenced to a life term for beat­ing Alimud­din to death on 30 June last year.

    The meat trad­er in Jhark­hand was dragged out of his car and beat­en to death by a mob that sus­pect­ed he was car­ry­ing beef. As Alimud­din Ansari, 55, lay dying on a road in Ram­garh town, his car was also set on fire.

    The dead­ly attack by the self-styled cow vig­i­lantes had come just a day after Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi had called “killing peo­ple in the name of cow pro­tec­tion unac­cept­able”.

    The Raghubar Das gov­ern­ment in Jhark­hand decid­ed to send a strong mes­sage, ordered the police to quick­ly probe the case and sent it to a fast track court.

    The court ver­dict came nine months lat­er, in March this year.

    They were con­vict­ed on the basis of a state­ment by Alimud­din’s wife Mari­am Kha­toon.

    The police also came across a video that it said showed Nityanand Mah­to, 45, the dis­trict BJP’s media in-charge drag­ging Alimud­din Ansari out of the car that a group of cow vig­i­lantes had forced to stop near Ranchi. The mob took over from there and mer­ci­less­ly thrashed him.

    Ajoy Kumar of the Con­gress too expressed his shock at Mr Sin­ha, who he said was con­sid­ered “among the most edu­cat­ed min­is­ter in PM Mod­i’s cab­i­net, “open­ly” sup­port­ing peo­ple con­vict­ed for killing an inno­cent. “Do they have no work to show except play­ing pol­i­tics on dead bod­ies and divid­ing soci­ety?” he said in an attack on the BJP.

    This isn’t the first time that Mr Sin­ha has been seen to be asso­ci­at­ing him­self with the accused in this case.

    After the court con­vict­ed the 11 peo­ple in March, Mr Sin­ha had demand­ed that the case be probed again. This time, by the Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.

    ...

    ———-

    “Min­is­ter Jayant Sin­ha Gar­lands 8 Men Who Killed Meat Trad­er In Jhark­hand” by Man­ish Kumar; NDTV; 07/06/2018

    The con­tro­ver­sy erupt­ed after pho­tographs emerged show­ing the min­is­ter wel­com­ing them at his res­i­dence. In some, the union min­is­ter of state for civ­il avi­a­tion is also seen gar­land­ing the eight con­victs at his res­i­dence on the out­skirts of Haz­arib­agh.”

    So eight of the the guys caught on video beat­ing a man to death after in an act of far right “cow vig­i­lan­tism” were released on bail while they appeal their life sen­tence, and what do they do while on bail? They head to Sin­ha’s res­i­dence to get fet­ed. Classy.

    And don’t for­get that one of these men was a local BJP leader, high­light­ing the fact that these cow vig­i­lantes are part of the BJP Hin­du nation­al­ist base:

    ...
    A total of 11 men, includ­ing a local BJP leader, were sen­tenced to a life term for beat­ing Alimud­din to death on 30 June last year.

    The meat trad­er in Jhark­hand was dragged out of his car and beat­en to death by a mob that sus­pect­ed he was car­ry­ing beef. As Alimud­din Ansari, 55, lay dying on a road in Ram­garh town, his car was also set on fire.
    ...

    Also note how the attack came one day after Modi had called “killing peo­ple in the name of cow pro­tec­tion unac­cept­able”. This was trag­i­cal­ly notable because of the extend­ed silence on cow vig­i­lan­tism by Modi and his BJP that pre­ced­ed Mod­i’s state­ment. So while it’s large­ly been ‘open sea­son’ for these cow vig­i­lantes, this par­tic­u­lar group had real­ly bad tim­ing lead­ing to their swift con­vic­tions life sen­tences. The fact that the local BJP leader was caught on video drag­ging the vic­tim out of his car did­n’t help with their legal defense:

    ...
    The dead­ly attack by the self-styled cow vig­i­lantes had come just a day after Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi had called “killing peo­ple in the name of cow pro­tec­tion unac­cept­able”.

    The Raghubar Das gov­ern­ment in Jhark­hand decid­ed to send a strong mes­sage, ordered the police to quick­ly probe the case and sent it to a fast track court.

    The court ver­dict came nine months lat­er, in March this year.

    They were con­vict­ed on the basis of a state­ment by Alimud­din’s wife Mari­am Kha­toon.

    The police also came across a video that it said showed Nityanand Mah­to, 45, the dis­trict BJP’s media in-charge drag­ging Alimud­din Ansari out of the car that a group of cow vig­i­lantes had forced to stop near Ranchi. The mob took over from there and mer­ci­less­ly thrashed him.
    ...

    But despite that video evi­dence, Jayant Sin­ha deter­mined that jus­tice was­n’t done and the case need­ed to be rein­ves­ti­gat­ed by the Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion:

    ...
    Ajoy Kumar of the Con­gress too expressed his shock at Mr Sin­ha, who he said was con­sid­ered “among the most edu­cat­ed min­is­ter in PM Mod­i’s cab­i­net, “open­ly” sup­port­ing peo­ple con­vict­ed for killing an inno­cent. “Do they have no work to show except play­ing pol­i­tics on dead bod­ies and divid­ing soci­ety?” he said in an attack on the BJP.

    This isn’t the first time that Mr Sin­ha has been seen to be asso­ci­at­ing him­self with the accused in this case.

    After the court con­vict­ed the 11 peo­ple in March, Mr Sin­ha had demand­ed that the case be probed again. This time, by the Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion.
    ...

    As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, Sin­ha ‘stud­ied the var­i­ous facets of the case’ and came to firm­ly believe that ‘com­plete jus­tice has not been done’. Pre­sum­ably ‘com­plete jus­tice’ involved acquit­ting the indi­vid­u­als caught on tape beat­ing a man to death. And he arrived at this con­clu­sion after tak­ing advice from the BJP.

    And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle also points out, the con­vic­tion of these 11 men was the first case in the coun­try where peo­ple accused to cow vig­i­lan­tism vio­lence were actu­al­ly con­vict­ed. So, from a sym­bol­ic stand­point, this was a high­ly sig­nif­i­cant case:

    Hin­dus­tan Times

    Jayant Sin­ha wants CBI probe in Ram­garh lynch­ing case in which 11 were con­vict­ed
    On March 21, the court had award­ed life impris­on­ment to 11 cow vig­i­lantes, includ­ing a local BJP leader, for lynch­ing 55-year old Alimud­din alias Asgar Ali for car­ry­ing what they claimed was beef in his vehi­cle last year.

    Vishal Kant
    Hin­dus­tan Times, New Del­hi
    india Updat­ed: Apr 07, 2018 23:18 IST

    Union min­is­ter Jayant Sin­ha on Sat­ur­day demand­ed a Cen­tral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion (CBI) probe into the Ram­garh lynch­ing case of a Mus­lim trad­er, rais­ing doubts over the police inves­ti­ga­tion, in which a local court con­vict­ed and award­ed life sen­tence to 11 peo­ple last month.

    On March 21, the court had award­ed life impris­on­ment to 11 cow vig­i­lantes, includ­ing a local BJP leader, for lynch­ing 55-year old Alimud­din alias Asgar Ali for car­ry­ing what they claimed was beef in his vehi­cle last year.

    ...

    “We respect the judi­cial process. But from what­ev­er I have gath­ered after con­sul­ta­tions and study­ing the var­i­ous facets (of the case), I firm­ly believe that com­plete jus­tice has not been done. I am not a police offi­cer, and I have not done a detailed inquiry, but as per my under­stand­ing, com­plete jus­tice has not been done. I con­sult­ed senior lawyers and also took advice from the par­ty (BJP) on the mat­ter. I have decid­ed to write to the (Jhark­hand) chief min­is­ter (Raghubar Das), request­ing him to rec­om­mend a CBI probe,” the min­is­ter said.

    The court of addi­tion­al dis­trict judge Om Prakash held guilty all the accused under Sec­tion 302 (mur­der) and oth­er offences of the IPC, mak­ing it the first case in the coun­try in con­nec­tion with cow vig­i­lan­tism and relat­ed vio­lence in which the accused were con­vict­ed. The BJP-ruled Jhark­hand wit­nessed a series of lynch­ing of Mus­lim cat­tle traders in the months of May and June in 2017.
    ———-

    “Jayant Sin­ha wants CBI probe in Ram­garh lynch­ing case in which 11 were con­vict­ed” by Vishal Kant; Hin­dus­tan Times; 04/07/2018

    ““We respect the judi­cial process. But from what­ev­er I have gath­ered after con­sul­ta­tions and study­ing the var­i­ous facets (of the case), I firm­ly believe that com­plete jus­tice has not been done. I am not a police offi­cer, and I have not done a detailed inquiry, but as per my under­stand­ing, com­plete jus­tice has not been done. I con­sult­ed senior lawyers and also took advice from the par­ty (BJP) on the mat­ter. I have decid­ed to write to the (Jhark­hand) chief min­is­ter (Raghubar Das), request­ing him to rec­om­mend a CBI probe,” the min­is­ter said.”

    After get­ting advice from the BJP, Sin­ha con­clud­ed that “com­plete jus­tice has not been done.”

    And this was the first case of cow vig­i­lante vio­lence result­ing in a con­vic­tion. So if they man­age to get these guys acquit­ted India will be back to have no instance of cow vig­i­lantes fac­ing pun­ish­ment:

    ...
    The court of addi­tion­al dis­trict judge Om Prakash held guilty all the accused under Sec­tion 302 (mur­der) and oth­er offences of the IPC, mak­ing it the first case in the coun­try in con­nec­tion with cow vig­i­lan­tism and relat­ed vio­lence in which the accused were con­vict­ed. The BJP-ruled Jhark­hand wit­nessed a series of lynch­ing of Mus­lim cat­tle traders in the months of May and June in 2017.
    ...

    And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, the sym­bol­ic impor­tance of cow vig­i­lan­tism isn’t sim­ply a demon­stra­tion of the BJP’s will­ing­ness to cater to whims of Hin­du nation­al­ists. The focus on cow is an part of the nar­ra­tive the BJP and its ide­o­log­i­cal RSS par­ent move­ment have been pro­mot­ing that attack mod­ernism and plu­ral­ism. The cow vig­i­lan­tism is part of a nar­ra­tive that exalts a myth­i­cal time of Bra­ham­ic puri­ty that alleged­ly exist­ed before the arrival of the British and Mus­lims on the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent. And because it’s pri­mar­i­ly Mus­lims and low­er-caste Hin­dus who con­sume beef in India, the cow vig­i­lan­tism pro­vides a con­ve­nient proxy issue to excuse attacks on those seen as an ‘oth­er’ by the Hin­du nation­al­ists. As the arti­cle puts it, a cru­cial ingre­di­ent to Mod­i’s polit­i­cal suc­cess has been tap­ping into a nos­tal­gic impulse for a pur­er past and the sacred­ness of the cow has come to sym­bol­ize that Hin­du nation­al­ist dri­ve for nation­al renew­al:

    The New Repub­lic

    How “Cow Vig­i­lantes” Launched India’s Lynch­ing Epi­dem­ic
    Naren­dra Modi is pre­sid­ing over a new, bloody pol­i­tics sur­round­ing the con­sump­tion of beef—one that could destroy the soul of Indi­an democ­ra­cy.

    By Amar Diwakar
    July 26, 2017

    India has been beset by a wave of grue­some lynch­ings. And at the epi­cen­ter of the country’s vio­lent upheaval is the indo­lent cow. Embold­ened by an ascen­dant Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, cou­pled with a con­tro­ver­sial gov­ern­ment ban on cat­tle slaugh­ter, so-called cow-vig­i­lante groups have been car­ry­ing out a ruth­less form of mob jus­tice, sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ing those sus­pect­ed of killing, trad­ing, or con­sum­ing beef. India’s embat­tled minori­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly Mus­lims, have borne the brunt of the vio­lence, con­firm­ing the worst sus­pi­cions about what Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi and his brand of Hin­du chau­vin­ism would unleash on the coun­try.

    The atroc­i­ties have steadi­ly been mount­ing. In Sep­tem­ber 2015, Moham­mad Akhlaq was hanged over rumors that he killed a cow and refrig­er­at­ed its meat. A month lat­er, 16-year-old Zahid Rasool Bhaat was slain by vig­i­lante groups. In March of this year, sus­pect­ed cat­tle traders Muhammed Majloom and Azad Khan were lynched. In April, 55-year old dairy farmer Pehlu Khan was accused of smug­gling cows and was bru­tal­ly beat­en to death. In May, traders were assault­ed for alleged beef stor­age, and Abu Han­i­fa and Riazud­din Ali were killed for pur­port­ed­ly steal­ing cat­tle. In June, Ain­ul Ansari was attacked on sus­pi­cion of trans­port­ing beef, while 15-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death by a mob after being brand­ed a beef eater.

    Since Sep­tem­ber of last year, there have been more than a dozen lynch­ings across the coun­try. Modi, who was fet­ed by Don­ald Trump at the White House in June, has been omi­nous­ly qui­et on the issue.

    Two cas­es in particular—of Pehlu Khan and Junaid Khan—offer the stark­est evi­dence to date that an indeli­ble rot is grow­ing in the Indi­an Repub­lic. Pehlu Khan’s death at the hands of cow vig­i­lantes in Rajasthan occurred with the com­plic­i­ty of the crowd, who col­lec­tive­ly bayed for his exe­cu­tion. It was also cap­tured on cam­era, and sub­se­quent­ly watched by mil­lions on social media. Just as chill­ing was the mut­ed response that fol­lowed, as Aatish Taseer argued in a col­umn for The New York Times:

    Like all forms of the­ater, a lynch­ing depends on what is left unsaid; it cre­ates a mood, an atmos­phere. The silence that set­tles in after the euphor­ic act of vio­lence, which all have wit­nessed, tells a minor­i­ty group that it has been for­sak­en. It is this ele­ment of a sug­ges­tive and creep­ing threat, in which the state appa­ra­tus and a silent major­i­ty are com­plic­it, that has the pow­er to demor­al­ize a com­mu­ni­ty as much as the phys­i­cal acts of vio­lence.

    In the case of Junaid Khan, police were unable to pro­duce a wit­ness for the grim spec­ta­cle of his stab­bing death, despite the fact that some 200 peo­ple had been assem­bled on the rail­way plat­form in Haryana where the killing took place. This kind of “unsee­ing” has become common—as Aar­ti Sethi writes, lynch­ings are a “social non-event in con­tem­po­rary India.” This is an extreme form of alien­ation, in which Hin­dus have cho­sen to dis­re­gard the dead body of a Mus­lim child. In doing so, they sym­bol­i­cal­ly with­drew Junaid’s mem­ber­ship from the socio-polit­i­cal order.

    The country’s rul­ing right-wing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP), under the stew­ard­ship of Modi and his open­ly Hin­dut­va (“Hin­du-first”) plat­form, have done lit­tle to stem the rise in com­mu­nal ten­sions. They have not denounced this bar­barism with con­vic­tion, only pay­ing reluc­tant lip ser­vice in the face of inces­sant pub­lic pres­sure.

    In fact, much of the hys­te­ria over the cow, a sacred ani­mal in Hin­duism, was shrewd­ly engi­neered. Dur­ing Modi’s elec­tion cam­paign in 2014, he railed against a “pink rev­o­lu­tion,” a euphemism for India’s $5 bil­lion-a-year meat export indus­try (the col­or pink is a ref­er­ence to the col­or of beef), which was flour­ish­ing under Con­gress Par­ty rule. The indus­try is con­cen­trat­ed in Uttar Pradesh, pro­vid­ing direct or indi­rect employ­ment to around 2.5 mil­lion peo­ple. The sec­tor is dom­i­nat­ed by Mus­lims but also pro­vides work to low-caste Hin­dus, which means the surge in cow pro­tec­tion­ism has had a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on those com­mu­ni­ties.

    “Do you want to sup­port peo­ple who want to bring about a Pink Rev­o­lu­tion?” Modi bel­lowed on the cam­paign trail.

    It should come as no sur­prise that, in the three years since the BJP took the reins of pow­er, India has wit­nessed a grow­ing cli­mate of intol­er­ance against minori­ties. Whip­ping up com­mu­nal strife is a nec­es­sary part of the Hin­du nation­al­ist play­book. But the roots of the cur­rent cri­sis, in which the life of a cow is con­sid­ered more sacred than that of a teenaged boy, go much deep­er than Modi, reach­ing into the fun­da­men­tal bat­tle for mod­ern India’s soul, between illib­er­al Hin­dut­va forces and a plu­ral­is­tic tra­di­tion that has rarely looked so vul­ner­a­ble.

    This is why Modi’s adher­ents have con­struct­ed a grand mono­lith­ic nar­ra­tive to jus­ti­fy their actions, one that pro­claims cul­tur­al con­ti­nu­ity of tra­di­tion and that piv­ots upon a ret­ro­grade Brah­man­i­cal core. The com­plex his­to­ry of the priest­ly caste is papered over with stri­dent asser­tions of Brah­man­i­cal puri­ty, of which veg­e­tar­i­an­ism and the sanc­ti­ty of the cow are indis­pens­able com­po­nents.

    Under this world­view, the gold­en age of Hin­du rule in the Vedic peri­od, sub­se­quent­ly sul­lied by for­eign pollutants—the British, yes, but the rapa­cious Mus­lim in particular—is to be chan­neled into twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry renew­al, pilot­ed by an arbi­trary set of “Hin­du val­ues.” And fore­most among these is the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty of the cow.

    How­ev­er, this schema suf­fers from a sig­nif­i­cant flaw: A pris­tine and con­tigu­ous Hin­du civ­i­liza­tion in which the cow’s sanc­ti­ty was upheld is dis­put­ed by the his­tor­i­cal record. It is lit­tle more than embell­ished myth­mak­ing. Much like oth­er appeals to a bygone era of civ­i­liza­tion­al suprema­cy and homo­gene­ity, it is thor­ough­ly a prod­uct of moder­ni­ty. The con­cept of a “Hin­du” India was large­ly shaped by nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean Indol­o­gists, and it gained trac­tion, along with com­pet­ing nation­al­ist ide­olo­gies like Mahat­ma Gandhi’s, in response to British colo­nial­ism.

    The BJP, as well as its ide­o­log­i­cal par­ent orga­ni­za­tion the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, ped­dle a ver­sion of nation­al­ism that pri­or­i­tizes exclu­siv­i­ty, in which Indi­ans are rigid­ly defined by eth­nic­i­ty and reli­gion. The trope of the cow is thus a con­ve­nient instru­ment, mea­sur­ing the alle­giance to the nation along gastronomical—and there­by spiritual—lines. Non-Hin­dus are deemed a sur­plus pop­u­la­tion, and vio­lence against them is sanc­tioned in an attempt to cleanse the true body politic.

    We have seen ver­sions of this sto­ry play out across the world, in response to the fail­ures of tech­no­crat­ic elites and the sup­posed cham­pi­ons of plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy. In India’s case, the Con­gress Par­ty became mired in cor­rup­tion scan­dals, paving the way for Modi and the BJP to present them­selves as prag­mat­ic reform­ers. And indeed, that is how Modi is gen­er­al­ly con­veyed in the inter­na­tion­al press, with a focus on his attempts to over­haul India’s scle­rot­ic tax sys­tem and to root out endem­ic cor­rup­tion.

    But the cru­cial ingre­di­ent is the way Modi has tapped into the nos­tal­gic impulse. Svet­lana Boym, a Russ­ian-Amer­i­can philol­o­gist, has described this as the “his­tor­i­cal emo­tion” of moder­ni­ty, and argued that attempts to cre­ate a “phan­tom home­land” through ahis­tor­i­cal restora­tion would only breed mon­strous con­se­quences. As she writes in The Future of Nos­tal­gia, it is a “restora­tive nos­tal­gia” that “is at the core of recent nation­al and reli­gious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to ori­gins and the con­spir­a­cy.”

    And so we inhab­it a land­scape where MAGA caps, Lit­tle Eng­land, the Hin­du Rash­tra, and the Islam­ic Caliphate have arrest­ed the imag­i­na­tion of mil­lions. These are all over­tures to an Edenic past, promis­ing an order that pre­serves tra­di­tion by puri­fy­ing soci­ety of con­ta­gion.

    Modi’s two cen­tral agendas—economic devel­op­ment and Hin­du cul­tur­al revival— com­pete with one anoth­er for head­lines. Yet his com­mit­ment to pan­der­ing to the far right has nev­er tru­ly been in ques­tion. The cre­ation of com­mu­nal dis­cord crys­tal­lizes the BJP’s ambi­tion to alter his­to­ry and hege­mo­nize “Indi­an val­ues” as exclu­sive­ly Hin­du val­ues. The par­ty has eager­ly deployed Hin­du sym­bols and myths to con­vert nos­tal­gia into elec­toral sup­port. So far this approach has been extreme­ly suc­cess­ful: Close to half of Indi­ans now dwell in BJP-con­trolled states, devoid of an effec­tive oppo­si­tion.

    ...

    ————

    “How “Cow Vig­i­lantes” Launched India’s Lynch­ing Epi­dem­ic” by Amar Diwakar; The New Repub­lic; 07/26/2017

    “India has been beset by a wave of grue­some lynch­ings. And at the epi­cen­ter of the country’s vio­lent upheaval is the indo­lent cow. Embold­ened by an ascen­dant Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, cou­pled with a con­tro­ver­sial gov­ern­ment ban on cat­tle slaugh­ter, so-called cow-vig­i­lante groups have been car­ry­ing out a ruth­less form of mob jus­tice, sum­mar­i­ly exe­cut­ing those sus­pect­ed of killing, trad­ing, or con­sum­ing beef. India’s embat­tled minori­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly Mus­lims, have borne the brunt of the vio­lence, con­firm­ing the worst sus­pi­cions about what Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi and his brand of Hin­du chau­vin­ism would unleash on the coun­try.”

    Yep, as part of the Modi gov­ern­men­t’s Hin­du nation­al­ist pro­gram the gov­ern­ment imposed a ban a cat­tle slaugh­ter (which did­n’t actu­al ban the slaugh­ter of cat­tle but made it much, much hard­er to Mus­lim meat and leather traders to do it), embold­en­ing the cow vig­i­lantes and lead­ing to a string of high pro­file attacks. Attacks that hap­pened in the mid­dle of large crowds or were filmed, and yet no wit­ness­es could be found result­ing in no con­vic­tions. In oth­er words, in some cas­es the cow vig­i­lan­tism is a com­mu­ni­ty-wide act involv­ing com­mu­ni­ty-wide silence after the attack:

    ...
    The atroc­i­ties have steadi­ly been mount­ing. In Sep­tem­ber 2015, Moham­mad Akhlaq was hanged over rumors that he killed a cow and refrig­er­at­ed its meat. A month lat­er, 16-year-old Zahid Rasool Bhaat was slain by vig­i­lante groups. In March of this year, sus­pect­ed cat­tle traders Muhammed Majloom and Azad Khan were lynched. In April, 55-year old dairy farmer Pehlu Khan was accused of smug­gling cows and was bru­tal­ly beat­en to death. In May, traders were assault­ed for alleged beef stor­age, and Abu Han­i­fa and Riazud­din Ali were killed for pur­port­ed­ly steal­ing cat­tle. In June, Ain­ul Ansari was attacked on sus­pi­cion of trans­port­ing beef, while 15-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death by a mob after being brand­ed a beef eater.

    Since Sep­tem­ber of last year, there have been more than a dozen lynch­ings across the coun­try. Modi, who was fet­ed by Don­ald Trump at the White House in June, has been omi­nous­ly qui­et on the issue.

    Two cas­es in particular—of Pehlu Khan and Junaid Khan—offer the stark­est evi­dence to date that an indeli­ble rot is grow­ing in the Indi­an Repub­lic. Pehlu Khan’s death at the hands of cow vig­i­lantes in Rajasthan occurred with the com­plic­i­ty of the crowd, who col­lec­tive­ly bayed for his exe­cu­tion. It was also cap­tured on cam­era, and sub­se­quent­ly watched by mil­lions on social media. Just as chill­ing was the mut­ed response that fol­lowed, as Aatish Taseer argued in a col­umn for The New York Times:

    Like all forms of the­ater, a lynch­ing depends on what is left unsaid; it cre­ates a mood, an atmos­phere. The silence that set­tles in after the euphor­ic act of vio­lence, which all have wit­nessed, tells a minor­i­ty group that it has been for­sak­en. It is this ele­ment of a sug­ges­tive and creep­ing threat, in which the state appa­ra­tus and a silent major­i­ty are com­plic­it, that has the pow­er to demor­al­ize a com­mu­ni­ty as much as the phys­i­cal acts of vio­lence.

    In the case of Junaid Khan, police were unable to pro­duce a wit­ness for the grim spec­ta­cle of his stab­bing death, despite the fact that some 200 peo­ple had been assem­bled on the rail­way plat­form in Haryana where the killing took place. This kind of “unsee­ing” has become common—as Aar­ti Sethi writes, lynch­ings are a “social non-event in con­tem­po­rary India.” This is an extreme form of alien­ation, in which Hin­dus have cho­sen to dis­re­gard the dead body of a Mus­lim child. In doing so, they sym­bol­i­cal­ly with­drew Junaid’s mem­ber­ship from the socio-polit­i­cal order.
    ...

    Modi him­self railed against the slaugh­ter of cows dur­ing his 2014 cam­paign and used as a proxy attack on Mus­lim and low-caste Hin­dus:

    ...
    The country’s rul­ing right-wing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP), under the stew­ard­ship of Modi and his open­ly Hin­dut­va (“Hin­du-first”) plat­form, have done lit­tle to stem the rise in com­mu­nal ten­sions. They have not denounced this bar­barism with con­vic­tion, only pay­ing reluc­tant lip ser­vice in the face of inces­sant pub­lic pres­sure.

    In fact, much of the hys­te­ria over the cow, a sacred ani­mal in Hin­duism, was shrewd­ly engi­neered. Dur­ing Modi’s elec­tion cam­paign in 2014, he railed against a “pink rev­o­lu­tion,” a euphemism for India’s $5 bil­lion-a-year meat export indus­try (the col­or pink is a ref­er­ence to the col­or of beef), which was flour­ish­ing under Con­gress Par­ty rule. The indus­try is con­cen­trat­ed in Uttar Pradesh, pro­vid­ing direct or indi­rect employ­ment to around 2.5 mil­lion peo­ple. The sec­tor is dom­i­nat­ed by Mus­lims but also pro­vides work to low-caste Hin­dus, which means the surge in cow pro­tec­tion­ism has had a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on those com­mu­ni­ties.

    “Do you want to sup­port peo­ple who want to bring about a Pink Rev­o­lu­tion?” Modi bel­lowed on the cam­paign trail.
    ...

    And this embrace of cow vig­i­lan­tism turns out to be a cru­cial ele­ment of the BJP/RSS polit­i­cal nar­ra­tive of nos­tal­gia about a non-exis­tent past of Hin­du glo­ry and puri­ty, before Mus­lims and the British arrived, that we see play out by far right move­ments around the world: sell the pub­lic on the idea that there can be a return to an Edenic past once soci­ety purges itself of these out­side con­ta­gions:

    ...
    It should come as no sur­prise that, in the three years since the BJP took the reins of pow­er, India has wit­nessed a grow­ing cli­mate of intol­er­ance against minori­ties. Whip­ping up com­mu­nal strife is a nec­es­sary part of the Hin­du nation­al­ist play­book. But the roots of the cur­rent cri­sis, in which the life of a cow is con­sid­ered more sacred than that of a teenaged boy, go much deep­er than Modi, reach­ing into the fun­da­men­tal bat­tle for mod­ern India’s soul, between illib­er­al Hin­dut­va forces and a plu­ral­is­tic tra­di­tion that has rarely looked so vul­ner­a­ble.

    This is why Modi’s adher­ents have con­struct­ed a grand mono­lith­ic nar­ra­tive to jus­ti­fy their actions, one that pro­claims cul­tur­al con­ti­nu­ity of tra­di­tion and that piv­ots upon a ret­ro­grade Brah­man­i­cal core. The com­plex his­to­ry of the priest­ly caste is papered over with stri­dent asser­tions of Brah­man­i­cal puri­ty, of which veg­e­tar­i­an­ism and the sanc­ti­ty of the cow are indis­pens­able com­po­nents.

    Under this world­view, the gold­en age of Hin­du rule in the Vedic peri­od, sub­se­quent­ly sul­lied by for­eign pollutants—the British, yes, but the rapa­cious Mus­lim in particular—is to be chan­neled into twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry renew­al, pilot­ed by an arbi­trary set of “Hin­du val­ues.” And fore­most among these is the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty of the cow.

    How­ev­er, this schema suf­fers from a sig­nif­i­cant flaw: A pris­tine and con­tigu­ous Hin­du civ­i­liza­tion in which the cow’s sanc­ti­ty was upheld is dis­put­ed by the his­tor­i­cal record. It is lit­tle more than embell­ished myth­mak­ing. Much like oth­er appeals to a bygone era of civ­i­liza­tion­al suprema­cy and homo­gene­ity, it is thor­ough­ly a prod­uct of moder­ni­ty. The con­cept of a “Hin­du” India was large­ly shaped by nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean Indol­o­gists, and it gained trac­tion, along with com­pet­ing nation­al­ist ide­olo­gies like Mahat­ma Gandhi’s, in response to British colo­nial­ism.

    The BJP, as well as its ide­o­log­i­cal par­ent orga­ni­za­tion the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh, ped­dle a ver­sion of nation­al­ism that pri­or­i­tizes exclu­siv­i­ty, in which Indi­ans are rigid­ly defined by eth­nic­i­ty and reli­gion. The trope of the cow is thus a con­ve­nient instru­ment, mea­sur­ing the alle­giance to the nation along gastronomical—and there­by spiritual—lines. Non-Hin­dus are deemed a sur­plus pop­u­la­tion, and vio­lence against them is sanc­tioned in an attempt to cleanse the true body politic.

    We have seen ver­sions of this sto­ry play out across the world, in response to the fail­ures of tech­no­crat­ic elites and the sup­posed cham­pi­ons of plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy. In India’s case, the Con­gress Par­ty became mired in cor­rup­tion scan­dals, paving the way for Modi and the BJP to present them­selves as prag­mat­ic reform­ers. And indeed, that is how Modi is gen­er­al­ly con­veyed in the inter­na­tion­al press, with a focus on his attempts to over­haul India’s scle­rot­ic tax sys­tem and to root out endem­ic cor­rup­tion.

    But the cru­cial ingre­di­ent is the way Modi has tapped into the nos­tal­gic impulse. Svet­lana Boym, a Russ­ian-Amer­i­can philol­o­gist, has described this as the “his­tor­i­cal emo­tion” of moder­ni­ty, and argued that attempts to cre­ate a “phan­tom home­land” through ahis­tor­i­cal restora­tion would only breed mon­strous con­se­quences. As she writes in The Future of Nos­tal­gia, it is a “restora­tive nos­tal­gia” that “is at the core of recent nation­al and reli­gious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to ori­gins and the con­spir­a­cy.”

    And so we inhab­it a land­scape where MAGA caps, Lit­tle Eng­land, the Hin­du Rash­tra, and the Islam­ic Caliphate have arrest­ed the imag­i­na­tion of mil­lions. These are all over­tures to an Edenic past, promis­ing an order that pre­serves tra­di­tion by puri­fy­ing soci­ety of con­ta­gion.
    ...

    “Under this world­view, the gold­en age of Hin­du rule in the Vedic peri­od, sub­se­quent­ly sul­lied by for­eign pollutants—the British, yes, but the rapa­cious Mus­lim in particular—is to be chan­neled into twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry renew­al, pilot­ed by an arbi­trary set of “Hin­du val­ues.” And fore­most among these is the invi­o­la­bil­i­ty of the cow.”

    Of course, this strat­e­gy has been trag­i­cal­ly effec­tive:

    ...
    Modi’s two cen­tral agendas—economic devel­op­ment and Hin­du cul­tur­al revival— com­pete with one anoth­er for head­lines. Yet his com­mit­ment to pan­der­ing to the far right has nev­er tru­ly been in ques­tion. The cre­ation of com­mu­nal dis­cord crys­tal­lizes the BJP’s ambi­tion to alter his­to­ry and hege­mo­nize “Indi­an val­ues” as exclu­sive­ly Hin­du val­ues. The par­ty has eager­ly deployed Hin­du sym­bols and myths to con­vert nos­tal­gia into elec­toral sup­port. So far this approach has been extreme­ly suc­cess­ful: Close to half of Indi­ans now dwell in BJP-con­trolled states, devoid of an effec­tive oppo­si­tion.
    ...

    Keep in mind that this appeal to a myth­i­cal pure past is alarm­ing­ly sim­i­lar to exact same strat­e­gy Adolf Hitler and the Nazis employed, as Peter Lev­en­da dis­cuss­es in FTR#1013. So that’s one more ele­ment of Nazism embraced by the BJP and RSS, and which is cur­rent­ly being cham­pi­oned by the Omid­yar Net­work’s Jayant Sin­ha.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | July 6, 2018, 2:30 pm
  4. The fact that Naren­dra Mod­i’s increas­ing­ly far right gov­ern­ment, which has relied more and more on minor­i­ty group scape­goat­ing and pla­cat­ing an increas­ing­ly vio­lent Hin­du nation­al­ist base, has expe­ri­ence remark­able elec­toral suc­cess is a pro­found­ly dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment for India. Hin­du chau­vin­ism is appar­ent­ly quite pop­u­lar in the con­text of Indi­a’s sec­tar­i­an ten­sions. It does­n’t bode well for India.

    But it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that Modi has­n’t just had endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty at home. From the very begin­ning of his term as prime min­is­ter, Modi has been treat­ed as some sort of reformist super star by gov­ern­ments across the West and espe­cial­ly inside Sil­i­con Val­ley and the tech sec­tor. And that inter­na­tion­al pop­u­lar­i­ty shows no sign of abat­ing, regard­less of how many sto­ries come out about Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly inflam­ing reli­gious ten­sions for polit­i­cal gain. Again, it does­n’t bode well for India, espe­cial­ly because, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, the inter­na­tion­al acco­lades for Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment have been an impor­tant part of the gov­ern­men­t’s mes­sag­ing to the Indi­an peo­ple.

    So now that Mod­i’s gov­ern­ment is engaged in some sort of open-end­ed oper­a­tion in Kash­mir that appears to be blend­ing ‘anti-ter­ror’ oper­a­tions — which are legit­i­mate con­cerns for Kash­mir — with what appears to be a kind of eth­nic cleans­ing goal for the dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry, the ques­tion of when the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty will stop singing Mod­i’s prais­es is becom­ing an increas­ing­ly poignant and depress­ing ques­tion. For exam­ple, the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion just announced it will award Modi for his gov­ern­men­t’s flag­ship “Clean India” pro­gram that aims at pro­vid­ing toi­lets and san­i­ta­tion for Indi­a’s poor. Now, pro­vid­ing san­i­ta­tion for the poor is undoubt­ed­ly an impor­tant goal and there’s no rea­son for the Gates Foun­da­tion to end its par­tic­i­pa­tion in that project over objec­tions to Mod­i’s increas­ing­ly abu­sive far right poli­cies. But is an award real­ly appro­pri­ate at this point? Espe­cial­ly just 5 weeks after the start of this new Kash­mir oper­a­tion that appears to be spi­ral­ing into a giant human rights vio­la­tion? The Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion deter­mined that, yes, this award was still appro­pri­ate despite the grow­ing human rights night­mare sit­u­a­tion that’s still unfold­ing. Because the tech sec­tor’s titans appar­ent­ly love Modi and aren’t afraid to show it. No mat­ter what he does:

    The Guardian

    Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion under fire over award for Naren­dra Modi

    Alleged human rights vio­la­tions cast a pall over recog­ni­tion of Indi­an prime minister’s flag­ship san­i­ta­tion and hygiene ini­tia­tive

    Vid­hi Doshi

    Thu 12 Sep 2019 00.00 EDT
    Last mod­i­fied on Thu 12 Sep 2019 00.02 EDT

    The Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion is fac­ing a bar­rage of crit­i­cism from promi­nent lawyers, human rights activists and phil­an­thropists after it announced that it would hon­our India’s con­tro­ver­sial Hin­du nation­al­ist prime min­is­ter with an award lat­er this month.

    The Glob­al Goal­keep­er award recog­nis­es Naren­dra Modi’s flag­ship Clean India pro­gramme, through which the gov­ern­ment has built mil­lions of toi­lets and pub­li­cised the ben­e­fits of san­i­ta­tion and hygiene.

    The award comes amid grow­ing crit­i­cism of the dis­en­fran­chise­ment, deten­tion and depor­ta­tion of Mus­lims in Assam and Kash­mir. Alleged human rights vio­la­tions in the two states under the gov­ern­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta par­ty have made front pages around the world.

    The award will be the lat­est addi­tion to Modi’s grow­ing haul of pres­ti­gious inter­na­tion­al prizes.

    Anoth­er award,another moment of pride for every Indi­an, as PM Mod­i’s dili­gent and inno­v­a­tive ini­tia­tives bring lau­rels from across the world.Sh @narendramodi to receive award from Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion for #Swach­hB­haratAb­hiyaan dur­ing his vis­it to the Unit­ed States. pic.twitter.com/QlsxOWS6jT— Dr Jiten­dra Singh (@DrJitendraSingh) Sep­tem­ber 2, 2019

    On Tues­day, a group of south Asian Amer­i­cans work­ing in phil­an­thropy wrote an open let­ter to the Gates Foun­da­tion alleg­ing that Modi had effec­tive­ly con­fined mil­lions to their com­mu­ni­ties, and urg­ing the organ­i­sa­tion to rescind the award.

    “For over a month now, PM Modi has placed 8 mil­lion peo­ple in Jam­mu and Kash­mir under house arrest, blocked com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media cov­er­age to the out­side world, detained thou­sands of peo­ple includ­ing chil­dren, and denied basic ben­e­fits. Reports of tor­ture, includ­ing beat­ings and the mur­der of a young child by Indi­an secu­ri­ty offi­cers, are emerg­ing as well,” said the let­ter.

    “The award will sig­nal the inter­na­tion­al community’s will­ing­ness to over­look, and remain silent, in the face of the Indi­an government’s brazen vio­la­tions of human rights prin­ci­ples.”

    Suchi­tra Vijayan, a lawyer and co-founder of the research and jour­nal­ism por­tal Polis Project, said phil­an­thropic organ­i­sa­tions had played a cru­cial role in “white­wash­ing and nor­mal­is­ing” Modi’s vio­la­tions of human rights and democ­ra­cy.

    Until his elec­tion to India’s high­est office in 2014, Modi had been unable to enter the US because of his role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which thou­sands of Mus­lims were slaugh­tered dur­ing his tenure as chief min­is­ter.

    “The nar­ra­tive is India being the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, India being a great place to invest, India shin­ing,” Vijayan said. “All that only counts if the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty recog­nis­es these nar­ra­tives.”

    ...

    Since Modi came to pow­er, he has received acco­lades from gov­ern­ments and organ­i­sa­tions around the world.

    The Philip Kotler pres­i­den­tial award hon­oured Modi for “giv­ing new life to democ­ra­cy and eco­nom­ic growth”, while the Seoul peace prize cred­it­ed him for reduc­ing the social and eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ty between the rich and the poor. The lat­ter award was made despite world­wide crit­i­cism of Modi’s eco­nom­ic poli­cies, includ­ing demon­eti­sa­tion, by eco­nom­ic experts.

    Last year, the UN gave Modi the Cham­pi­ons of the Earth award, in spite of objec­tions that his gov­ern­ment has not only green lit projects that threat­en to cause huge defor­esta­tion, but also allowed India’s cap­i­tal, New Del­hi, to become one of the most pol­lut­ed cities on Earth.

    The Swachh Bharat pro­gramme, for which Modi is receiv­ing his lat­est award, has come under huge scruti­ny in India.

    Modi’s gov­ern­ment has said that the scheme has pro­vid­ed 90% of Indi­ans with access to clean toi­lets. How­ev­er, press reports and a book called Where India Goes, which close­ly stud­ied the pro­gramme, sug­gest that many of the new­ly-built toi­lets remain unused because of poor access to water and caste rules that restrict many peo­ple from clean­ing them.

    India’s gov­ern­ment has employed con­tro­ver­sial tac­tics to encour­age use of the toi­lets, includ­ing “good morn­ing squads” that involve gov­ern­ment offi­cials pub­licly humil­i­at­ing those defe­cat­ing open­ly. One news chan­nel ran a nation­al “name and shame” cam­paign urg­ing cit­i­zens to “blow the whis­tle” on those defe­cat­ing open­ly.

    The Gates Foun­da­tion said in a state­ment that Modi was being recog­nised for “the progress India is mak­ing in improv­ing san­i­ta­tion, as part of its dri­ve toward achieve­ment of the UN sus­tain­able devel­op­ment goals”.

    ...

    “Before the Swachh Bharat mis­sion, over 500 mil­lion peo­ple in India did not have access to safe san­i­ta­tion, and now, the major­i­ty do. There is still a long way to go, but the impacts of access to san­i­ta­tion in India are already being realised. The Swachh Bharat mis­sion can serve as a mod­el for oth­er coun­tries around the world that urgent­ly need to improve access to san­i­ta­tion for the world’s poor­est.”

    ———-

    “Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion under fire over award for Naren­dra Modi” by Vid­hi Doshi; The Guardian; 09/12/2019

    “The award comes amid grow­ing crit­i­cism of the dis­en­fran­chise­ment, deten­tion and depor­ta­tion of Mus­lims in Assam and Kash­mir. Alleged human rights vio­la­tions in the two states under the gov­ern­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta par­ty have made front pages around the world.”

    The alle­ga­tions of human rights vio­la­tions aren’t exact­ly a secret. They’re front page news around the world. But that did­n’t pre­vent this award. An award that’s just the lat­est in a long string of pres­ti­gious inter­na­tion­al awards for Modi. And these awards aren’t just acts of kiss­ing Mod­i’s ass. They’re impor­tant for Mod­i’s gov­ern­men­t’s image to the Indi­an peo­ple. An image that presents Modi as a for­ward-think­ing reformer. In oth­er words, when you show­er a fas­cist with inter­na­tion­al awards, that does­n’t just flat­ter the fas­cist. It makes them stronger too:

    ...
    The award will be the lat­est addi­tion to Modi’s grow­ing haul of pres­ti­gious inter­na­tion­al prizes.

    Anoth­er award,another moment of pride for every Indi­an, as PM Mod­i’s dili­gent and inno­v­a­tive ini­tia­tives bring lau­rels from across the world.Sh @narendramodi to receive award from Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion for #Swach­hB­haratAb­hiyaan dur­ing his vis­it to the Unit­ed States. pic.twitter.com/QlsxOWS6jT— Dr Jiten­dra Singh (@DrJitendraSingh) Sep­tem­ber 2, 2019

    On Tues­day, a group of south Asian Amer­i­cans work­ing in phil­an­thropy wrote an open let­ter to the Gates Foun­da­tion alleg­ing that Modi had effec­tive­ly con­fined mil­lions to their com­mu­ni­ties, and urg­ing the organ­i­sa­tion to rescind the award.

    ...

    Until his elec­tion to India’s high­est office in 2014, Modi had been unable to enter the US because of his role in the 2002 Gujarat riots, in which thou­sands of Mus­lims were slaugh­tered dur­ing his tenure as chief min­is­ter.

    “The nar­ra­tive is India being the world’s largest democ­ra­cy, India being a great place to invest, India shin­ing,” Vijayan said. “All that only counts if the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty recog­nis­es these nar­ra­tives.”
    ...

    And this award is just the lat­est in a long string of inter­na­tion­al awards Modi has received in recent years. Awards that he receives even when his gov­ern­ment does­n’t actu­al­ly do the things he’s being award­ed for, like address­ing eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ty or pro­tect­ing the envi­ron­ment:

    ...
    Since Modi came to pow­er, he has received acco­lades from gov­ern­ments and organ­i­sa­tions around the world.

    The Philip Kotler pres­i­den­tial award hon­oured Modi for “giv­ing new life to democ­ra­cy and eco­nom­ic growth”, while the Seoul peace prize cred­it­ed him for reduc­ing the social and eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ty between the rich and the poor. The lat­ter award was made despite world­wide crit­i­cism of Modi’s eco­nom­ic poli­cies, includ­ing demon­eti­sa­tion, by eco­nom­ic experts.

    Last year, the UN gave Modi the Cham­pi­ons of the Earth award, in spite of objec­tions that his gov­ern­ment has not only green lit projects that threat­en to cause huge defor­esta­tion, but also allowed India’s cap­i­tal, New Del­hi, to become one of the most pol­lut­ed cities on Earth.

    The Swachh Bharat pro­gramme, for which Modi is receiv­ing his lat­est award, has come under huge scruti­ny in India.

    Modi’s gov­ern­ment has said that the scheme has pro­vid­ed 90% of Indi­ans with access to clean toi­lets. How­ev­er, press reports and a book called Where India Goes, which close­ly stud­ied the pro­gramme, sug­gest that many of the new­ly-built toi­lets remain unused because of poor access to water and caste rules that restrict many peo­ple from clean­ing them.

    India’s gov­ern­ment has employed con­tro­ver­sial tac­tics to encour­age use of the toi­lets, includ­ing “good morn­ing squads” that involve gov­ern­ment offi­cials pub­licly humil­i­at­ing those defe­cat­ing open­ly. One news chan­nel ran a nation­al “name and shame” cam­paign urg­ing cit­i­zens to “blow the whis­tle” on those defe­cat­ing open­ly.
    ...

    So let’s hope India and the Gates Foun­da­tion con­tin­ue this san­i­ta­tion pro­gram. It’s clear­ly need­ed. But let’s also hope Naren­dra Modi isn’t giv­en a new award for doing what his gov­ern­ment should have been doing any­way. After all, the only thing that award real­ly does is effec­tive­ly pro­vide cov­er for crit­i­cisms over sto­ries like this:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Kash­miris allege night ter­ror by Indi­an troops in crack­down

    By AIJAZ HUSSAIN
    Sep­tem­ber 14, 2019

    HEFF SHIRMAL, India (AP) — The Indi­an sol­diers descend­ed on Bashir Ahmed Dar’s house in south­ern Kash­mir on Aug. 10, a few days after the gov­ern­ment in New Del­hi stripped the dis­put­ed Himalayan region of its state­hood and launched a crack­down. Over the next 48 hours, the 50-year-old plumber said he suf­fered two sep­a­rate rounds of beat­ings by sol­diers.

    They demand­ed that he find his younger broth­er, who had joined rebels oppos­ing India’s pres­ence in the Mus­lim major­i­ty region, and per­suade him to sur­ren­der or else “face the music.”

    In the sec­ond beat­ing, at a mil­i­tary camp, Dar said he was struck with sticks by three sol­diers until he was uncon­scious. He woke up at home, “unable to sit on my bruised and blood­ied but­tocks and aching back,” he added.

    But it wasn’t over. On Aug. 14, sol­diers returned to his house in the vil­lage of Heff Shir­mal and destroyed his family’s sup­ply of rice and oth­er food­stuffs by mix­ing it with fer­til­iz­er and kerosene.

    Dar’s account of vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion by Indi­an sol­diers was not unusu­al. In more than 50 inter­views, res­i­dents in a dozen vil­lages in Kash­mir told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press that the mil­i­tary had raid­ed their homes since India’s gov­ern­ment imposed a secu­ri­ty crack­down in the region Aug. 5. They said the sol­diers inflict­ed beat­ings and elec­tric shocks, forced them to eat dirt or drink filthy water, poi­soned their food sup­plies or killed live­stock, and threat­ened to take away and mar­ry their female rel­a­tives. Thou­sands of young men have been arrest­ed.

    Asked by AP to respond to the recent alle­ga­tions of abuse from the North­ern Com­mand, the Indi­an army’s head­quar­ters in Jam­mu and Kash­mir. Its spokesman based in the main city of Sri­na­gar, Col. Rajesh Kalia, dis­missed the vil­lagers’ accounts as “com­plete­ly base­less and false,” and assert­ed the Indi­an army val­ues human rights.

    “There have been reports of move­ment of ter­ror­ists” in the areas AP vis­it­ed, Kalia said. “Some youth were sus­pect­ed to be involved in anti-nation­al and dis­rup­tive activ­i­ties and were hand­ed over to police as per law of the land.”

    India’s top secu­ri­ty offi­cial, Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advis­er Ajit Doval, said the army has not been involved in the oper­a­tion in Kash­mir. “There have been no atroc­i­ties,” he said.

    For years, there have been accu­sa­tions from Kash­mir res­i­dents and inter­na­tion­al human rights groups that Indi­an troops have car­ried out sys­tem­at­ic abuse and unjus­ti­fied arrests of those who oppose rule from New Del­hi in the divid­ed region that is claimed by both India and Pak­istan.

    But frus­tra­tion, anger and fear have been grow­ing in Kash­mir in the five weeks since the Hin­du nation­al­ist gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi stripped the region of most of its semi­au­tonomous sta­tus on Aug. 5 and imposed a cur­few and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions black­out. Although some restric­tions have been eased in the main city of Sri­na­gar, with stu­dents encour­aged to return to school and busi­ness­es to reopen, rur­al res­i­dents com­plain of what they per­ceive as a cam­paign of vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion that seems designed at sup­press­ing any mil­i­tan­cy, rebel­lion or dis­sent.

    The abus­es in the night­time raids by troops began in ear­ly August as New Del­hi took its action on Kash­mir, accord­ing to inter­views with at least 200 peo­ple. The change in sta­tus nul­li­fied decades-old con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­vi­sions that gave Jam­mu and Kash­mir some polit­i­cal auton­o­my and land inher­i­tance rights. It also down­grad­ed the state into two fed­er­al­ly gov­erned ter­ri­to­ries. The actions have been chal­lenged in India’s Supreme Court.

    In the vil­lage of Parigam, the fam­i­ly of bak­er Sonaullah Sofi was asleep when army troops raid­ed his home. The sol­diers took his two sons into a street, hit­ting them with gun butts, iron chains and sticks, Sofi said.

    “Help­less, I heard my sons scream as sol­diers start­ed beat­ing them up mer­ci­less­ly in the mid­dle of the road,” Sofi said.

    Soon, sol­diers brought 10 more young men to the vil­lage square, seek­ing names of anti-India pro­test­ers, said Muzaf­far Ahmed, Sofi’s 20-year-old son, recount­ing the Aug. 7 inci­dent.

    “They hit our backs and legs for three hours. They gave us elec­tric shocks,” Ahmed said, lift­ing his shirt to show his burned and bruised back. “As we cried and plead­ed (with) them to let us go, they became more relent­less and ruth­less in their beat­ing. They forced us to eat dust and drink water from a drain.”

    Since the crack­down began, at least 3,000 peo­ple, most­ly young men, have been arrest­ed, accord­ing to police offi­cials and records reviewed by the AP. About 120 of those have been slapped with the Pub­lic Safe­ty Act, a law that per­mits hold­ing peo­ple for up to two years with­out tri­al, the records showed.

    Thou­sands of oth­ers have been detained in police lock­ups to be screened for poten­tial to join protests. Some have been freed and asked to report back a few days lat­er. Some are only held in the day­time, released at night to sleep at home, while their par­ents are told to bring them back the next day.

    Ahmed, the bak­er, said the sol­diers final­ly left at dawn, leav­ing them writhing in pain. He and his elder broth­er along with at least eight oth­ers were then bun­dled into a sin­gle ambu­lance and tak­en to a hos­pi­tal in Sri­na­gar.

    The con­flict over Kash­mir has exist­ed since the late 1940s, when India and Pak­istan won inde­pen­dence from the British empire. The coun­tries have fought two of their three sub­se­quent wars over Kash­mir, and each admin­is­ters a por­tion of the region.

    New Del­hi ini­tial­ly grap­pled with large­ly peace­ful anti-India move­ments in its por­tion of Kash­mir. How­ev­er, a series of polit­i­cal blun­ders, bro­ken promis­es and a crack­down on dis­sent esca­lat­ed the con­flict into a full-blown armed rebel­lion against Indi­an con­trol in 1989 for a unit­ed Kash­mir, either under Pak­istan rule or inde­pen­dent of both. Since then, about 70,000 peo­ple have been killed in the con­flict, which India sees as a proxy war by Pak­istan.

    The region is one of the most heav­i­ly mil­i­ta­rized in the world, patrolled by sol­diers and para­mil­i­tary police. Most Kash­miris resent the Indi­an troop pres­ence and sup­port the rebels.

    Now, a new gen­er­a­tion in Kash­mir has revived the mil­i­tan­cy, chal­leng­ing New Delhi’s rule with guns and social media. In Feb­ru­ary, a Kash­miri sui­cide attack­er rammed a van full of explo­sives into an Indi­an para­mil­i­tary con­voy, killing more than 40 peo­ple and wound­ing more than two dozen. Modi said at the time that gov­ern­ment forces have been giv­en “total free­dom” to deal with mil­i­tants.

    For years, human rights groups have accused Indi­an troops of intim­i­dat­ing and con­trol­ling the pop­u­la­tion with phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse and unjus­ti­fied arrests. Indi­an gov­ern­ment offi­cials deny this, call­ing the alle­ga­tions sep­a­ratist pro­pa­gan­da.

    Abus­es alleged by rights groups since 1989 have includ­ed rape, sodomy, water­board­ing, elec­tric shocks to the gen­i­tals, burns and sleep depri­va­tion.

    The U.N. last year called for an inde­pen­dent inter­na­tion­al inves­ti­ga­tion into alle­ga­tions of rights vio­la­tions like rape, tor­ture and extra­ju­di­cial killings in Kash­mir. India reject­ed the report as “fal­la­cious.”

    Parvez Imroz, a promi­nent rights lawyer, said the new reports of abuse in the secu­ri­ty forces’ ongo­ing cam­paign were “dis­turb­ing.”

    Fear and anger are pal­pa­ble in the vil­lages that dot the vast apple orchards, espe­cial­ly after sun­down, when the sol­diers come.

    Abdul Ghani Dar, 60, said sol­diers have raid­ed his home in the vil­lage of Marhang sev­en times since ear­ly August, adding that he sends his daugh­ter to anoth­er loca­tion before they arrive.

    “They say they’ve come to check on my son but I know they come look­ing for my daugh­ter,” Dar said, his eyes welling with tears.

    Res­i­dents of three oth­er vil­lages said sol­diers had threat­ened to take girls away from their fam­i­lies for mar­riage.

    “They’re maraud­ing our homes and hearths like a vic­to­ri­ous army. They are now behav­ing as if they have a right over our lives, prop­er­ty and hon­or,” said Nazir Ahmed Bhat, who lives in Ari­hal.

    ...

    ———-

    “Kash­miris allege night ter­ror by Indi­an troops in crack­down” by AIJAZ HUSSAIN; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 09/14/2019

    “Dar’s account of vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion by Indi­an sol­diers was not unusu­al. In more than 50 inter­views, res­i­dents in a dozen vil­lages in Kash­mir told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press that the mil­i­tary had raid­ed their homes since India’s gov­ern­ment imposed a secu­ri­ty crack­down in the region Aug. 5. They said the sol­diers inflict­ed beat­ings and elec­tric shocks, forced them to eat dirt or drink filthy water, poi­soned their food sup­plies or killed live­stock, and threat­ened to take away and mar­ry their female rel­a­tives. Thou­sands of young men have been arrest­ed.”

    Beat­ings, tor­ture, poi­son­ing food sup­plies, killing live­stock, and threat­en­ing to take away and mar­ry female rel­a­tives. Those are the kinds of inci­dent that have been wide­ly report­ed in the last five weeks. Although not as wide­ly as they prob­a­bly deserve to be report­ed giv­en the com­mu­ni­ca­tions block­ade the gov­ern­ment has imposed on Kash­mir:

    ...
    For years, there have been accu­sa­tions from Kash­mir res­i­dents and inter­na­tion­al human rights groups that Indi­an troops have car­ried out sys­tem­at­ic abuse and unjus­ti­fied arrests of those who oppose rule from New Del­hi in the divid­ed region that is claimed by both India and Pak­istan.

    But frus­tra­tion, anger and fear have been grow­ing in Kash­mir in the five weeks since the Hin­du nation­al­ist gov­ern­ment of Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi stripped the region of most of its semi­au­tonomous sta­tus on Aug. 5 and imposed a cur­few and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions black­out. Although some restric­tions have been eased in the main city of Sri­na­gar, with stu­dents encour­aged to return to school and busi­ness­es to reopen, rur­al res­i­dents com­plain of what they per­ceive as a cam­paign of vio­lence and intim­i­da­tion that seems designed at sup­press­ing any mil­i­tan­cy, rebel­lion or dis­sent.

    The abus­es in the night­time raids by troops began in ear­ly August as New Del­hi took its action on Kash­mir, accord­ing to inter­views with at least 200 peo­ple. The change in sta­tus nul­li­fied decades-old con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­vi­sions that gave Jam­mu and Kash­mir some polit­i­cal auton­o­my and land inher­i­tance rights. It also down­grad­ed the state into two fed­er­al­ly gov­erned ter­ri­to­ries. The actions have been chal­lenged in India’s Supreme Court.

    ...

    Since the crack­down began, at least 3,000 peo­ple, most­ly young men, have been arrest­ed, accord­ing to police offi­cials and records reviewed by the AP. About 120 of those have been slapped with the Pub­lic Safe­ty Act, a law that per­mits hold­ing peo­ple for up to two years with­out tri­al, the records showed.

    Thou­sands of oth­ers have been detained in police lock­ups to be screened for poten­tial to join protests. Some have been freed and asked to report back a few days lat­er. Some are only held in the day­time, released at night to sleep at home, while their par­ents are told to bring them back the next day.
    ...

    And with most of the Kash­mir res­i­dent already oppos­ing the Indi­an troop pres­ence and sup­port­ing the Kash­mir rebels even before the August crack­down, the sit­u­a­tion is in place for the con­flict to get much worse on both sides:

    ...
    The con­flict over Kash­mir has exist­ed since the late 1940s, when India and Pak­istan won inde­pen­dence from the British empire. The coun­tries have fought two of their three sub­se­quent wars over Kash­mir, and each admin­is­ters a por­tion of the region.

    New Del­hi ini­tial­ly grap­pled with large­ly peace­ful anti-India move­ments in its por­tion of Kash­mir. How­ev­er, a series of polit­i­cal blun­ders, bro­ken promis­es and a crack­down on dis­sent esca­lat­ed the con­flict into a full-blown armed rebel­lion against Indi­an con­trol in 1989 for a unit­ed Kash­mir, either under Pak­istan rule or inde­pen­dent of both. Since then, about 70,000 peo­ple have been killed in the con­flict, which India sees as a proxy war by Pak­istan.

    The region is one of the most heav­i­ly mil­i­ta­rized in the world, patrolled by sol­diers and para­mil­i­tary police. Most Kash­miris resent the Indi­an troop pres­ence and sup­port the rebels.

    Now, a new gen­er­a­tion in Kash­mir has revived the mil­i­tan­cy, chal­leng­ing New Delhi’s rule with guns and social media. In Feb­ru­ary, a Kash­miri sui­cide attack­er rammed a van full of explo­sives into an Indi­an para­mil­i­tary con­voy, killing more than 40 peo­ple and wound­ing more than two dozen. Modi said at the time that gov­ern­ment forces have been giv­en “total free­dom” to deal with mil­i­tants.
    ...

    So the tales of tor­ture and mass incar­cer­a­tion that we’re hear­ing now could eas­i­ly turn into a much more vio­lent con­flict. Espe­cial­ly if the gov­ern­ment imple­ments poli­cies specif­i­cal­ly designed to flood Kash­mir with Hin­du nation­al­ists. And that’s exact­ly what is set to hap­pen. As the fol­low­ing arti­cle describes, one of the biggest poten­tial impacts of the revo­ca­tion of Arti­cles 370 and 35A is that Arti­cle 35A pre­vent­ed out­siders from buy­ing land in Kash­mir. That ban is over. And the RSS has been call­ing for years to reor­ga­nized Kash­mir into a Hin­du dom­i­nat­ed state.

    Will the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty final­ly end its love affair with Mod­i’s Hin­du nation­al­ist gov­ern­ment if we start see­ing a Hin­du far right takeover of Kash­mir? Well, as the fol­low­ing arti­cle also notes, the gov­ern­ment has already announced that it will hold an inter­na­tion­al invest­ment sum­mit in Kash­mir in Octo­ber. So the Modi gov­ern­ment is dan­gling before the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty the prospect of prof­it­ing off of the sit­u­a­tion in Kash­mir, the kind of move high­ly like­ly mute inter­na­tion­al criticism...if that crit­i­cism actu­al­ly exist­ed:

    For­eign Pol­i­cy

    New Delhi’s Demo­graph­ic Designs in Kash­mir
    Hin­du nation­al­ists have long want­ed to reshape the region. Now they are get­ting their chance.

    By Idris Bhat | August 16, 2019, 12:57 PM

    Since 1989, when an armed upris­ing against Indi­an rule began in India-admin­is­tered Kash­mir, vio­lence has killed more than 50,000 peo­ple, accord­ing to offi­cial fig­ures. Hun­dreds of mass graves have been dis­cov­ered, and the Inter­na­tion­al Cri­sis Group has esti­mat­ed that the region is home to 30,000 orphans and at least 1,000 “half-wid­ows,” a term used for Kash­miri women whose hus­bands are among the miss­ing but have not been proved dead.

    On any giv­en day over the past sev­er­al years, young boys would throw stones at gun-wield­ing Indi­an sol­diers in protest of a killing of a civil­ian or mil­i­tant. And gen­er­al feel­ings of dis­sent against Indi­an rule, which many Kash­miris see as an occu­pa­tion, were com­mon­ly expressed.

    It was against this back­ground that, on Aug. 5, New Del­hi end­ed the spe­cial sta­tus of Jam­mu and Kash­mir in the Indi­an Con­sti­tu­tion by revok­ing Arti­cles 370 and 35A. At the same time, it set up India’s only Mus­lim-major­i­ty state to be split into two union territories—one com­pris­ing the moun­tain­ous region of Ladakh and the oth­er com­bin­ing the Kash­mir Val­ley with the state’s Jam­mu region. Hours before the move, the val­ley was put under strict cur­few with inter­net, land­line, and mobile phone ser­vices and cable tele­vi­sion all blocked at once.

    Although New Del­hi had already erod­ed much of what Jam­mu and Kashmir’s spe­cial sta­tus promised over the years, it had con­tin­ued to per­form two impor­tant tasks. First, it served the sym­bol­ic func­tion of keep­ing hope alive for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with, and bet­ter treat­ment by, India. Sec­ond, and more impor­tant­ly, Arti­cle 35A pre­vent­ed any demo­graph­ic trans­for­ma­tion of Jam­mu and Kashmir—something Kash­miris have long feared—since it pre­vent­ed out­siders from pur­chas­ing land.

    With both of these ben­e­fits gone at once, the gulf between Kash­miris and the rest of India will grow wider, and although Indi­an author­i­ties have for now enforced calm, high lev­els of vio­lence could be around the cor­ner.

    It seems clear that revok­ing Arti­cle 35A will change the nature of Kash­mir. For now, it is Mus­lim majority—according to Indi­an cen­sus data from 2011, 68 per­cent of Jam­mu and Kashmir’s 12.5 mil­lion peo­ple were Mus­lims. With the local gov­ern­ment no longer able to bar out­siders from land own­er­ship, New Del­hi could pre­sum­ably encour­age the migra­tion of Hin­dus to the region in the same way Chi­na has sup­port­ed the growth of Han Chi­nese pop­u­la­tions in Tibet.

    As of 2016, accord­ing to the Econ­o­mist, Han Chi­nese made up 22 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion of the Tibetan cap­i­tal, Lhasa, com­pared with 17 per­cent in 2000. How­ev­er, the strat­e­gy of chang­ing the eth­nic mix of the pop­u­la­tion (com­bined with build­ing large-scale infra­struc­ture) has hard­ly led to its intend­ed result of enforc­ing Tibet’s inte­gra­tion and gen­er­at­ing loy­al­ty. It may have giv­en Bei­jing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exer­cise greater sur­veil­lance and con­trol, as report­ed by Free­dom House, but among Tibetans, it has led to deep­er alien­ation and resent­ment. More than 150 Tibetans have set them­selves on fire since 2011 to protest the Chi­nese rule.

    Sim­i­lar­ly, the Indi­an state’s cur­rent move, jus­ti­fied in the name of devel­op­ment, could change Kashmir’s eth­nic mix. Doing so has been a long-stand­ing demand of the mil­i­tant Hin­du nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS), which is wide­ly seen as the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of the rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP). In 2002, after decades of using the demand of end­ing Kashmir’s spe­cial sta­tus as a cen­tral slo­gan of the Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, the RSS passed a res­o­lu­tion that clear­ly laid out its vision for reor­ga­niz­ing the state in a way that would favor Hin­dus. The move was accom­pa­nied by a sim­i­lar res­o­lu­tion by the Vish­wa Hin­du Parishad, anoth­er orga­ni­za­tion in the RSS fam­i­ly, which demand­ed that the “five Hin­du-dom­i­nat­ed dis­tricts of Jam­mu should be made a sep­a­rate state, a union ter­ri­to­ry be carved out of areas north­east of the Jhelum Riv­er in the Kash­mir Val­ley for set­tling Hin­dus there and Ladakh be giv­en the sta­tus of a union ter­ri­to­ry.”

    Now such demands have been enact­ed in law. Ladakh, com­pris­ing an equal num­ber of Bud­dhists and Mus­lims, will be gov­erned by the BJP-led cen­tral gov­ern­ment. Under that admin­is­tra­tion, Mus­lims will sure­ly feel increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed just like those in oth­er parts of India. Over time, it would be easy to change the bal­ance between Bud­dhists and Mus­lims by allow­ing some Hin­dus from main­land India to buy prop­er­ty there.

    In the new union ter­ri­to­ry of Jam­mu and Kash­mir, the approx­i­mate­ly half-mil­lion Indi­an sol­diers already there may buy land and prop­er­ty imme­di­ate­ly. Change could soon come on a much larg­er scale: The gov­ern­ment has already announced that it would hold an inter­na­tion­al invest­ment sum­mit in Kash­mir in Octo­ber.

    Even if the ongo­ing polit­i­cal vio­lence dis­cour­ages ordi­nary Hin­dus from buy­ing prop­er­ty in the Kash­mir Val­ley, they could still migrate to the union territory’s Hin­du-dom­i­nat­ed area of Jam­mu. As a result, Jam­mu would out­weigh the val­ley elec­toral­ly, which would very like­ly hand the territory’s gov­ern­ment to the BJP. Fur­ther ter­ri­to­r­i­al delim­i­ta­tions, which India’s home min­is­ter has already hint­ed at, could fur­ther change the cal­cu­lus of the new leg­isla­tive assem­bly.

    In the leg­isla­tive assem­bly of the pre­vi­ous state of Jam­mu and Kash­mir, Jam­mu had 37 seats, Kash­mir 46, and Ladakh 4. With Ladakh gone, increas­ing Jammu’s seats in the new assem­bly will reduce Mus­lims to elec­toral insignif­i­cance. If their rep­re­sen­ta­tion in gov­ern­ment erodes, Kash­miri and Jam­mu Mus­lims would become even more vul­ner­a­ble than they already are. Across India, Mus­lims are lynched for eat­ing beef. They’re labeled as anti-India or pro-Pak­istan. Such nar­ra­tives serve the aim of Hin­du nation­al­ists like Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, who see India as a Hin­du coun­try and paint Mus­lims are out­siders.

    Help­ing the out­sider nar­ra­tive along is the sto­ry of the Kash­miri Pan­dits, around 100,000 high-caste Hin­dus who fled the region in the 1990s amid a surge in sep­a­ratist vio­lence. Since the 1990s, the BJP has used migra­tion of the Kash­miri Pan­dits to mobi­lize its Hin­du vot­er base, and it has rou­tine­ly promised in its elec­tion man­i­festos to reset­tle them. Modi him­self has reit­er­at­ed such plans in his elec­tion speech­es.

    Under the new arrange­ment, the gov­ern­ment could sim­ply cre­ate sep­a­rate town­ships with their own malls, schools, and hos­pi­tals inside them. New Del­hi may give those areas the sta­tus of a union ter­ri­to­ry and fur­ther divide Kash­mir. Or it may sim­ply give some seats to these sep­a­rate town­ships in the new assem­bly. Both ways, Kash­miri Mus­lims will feel threat­ened. Although local par­ties and activists have long resist­ed such designs and will con­tin­ue to do so, the BJP will be able to push them through. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, many Kash­miri Pan­dits and orga­ni­za­tions wel­comed the scrap­ping of Arti­cle 370. They expressed jubi­la­tion and saw the move as the ful­fill­ment of their desire to cre­ate a home­land in Kash­mir.

    Adding to an already com­pli­cat­ed pic­ture is Pak­istan, which has vowed to “explore all options” to help Kash­mir. That may include increas­ing its sup­port for mil­i­tants, which will turn an already tense sit­u­a­tion even more volatile. A sin­gle attack could have cat­a­stroph­ic effects for Mus­lims if it snow­balls into a mas­sive com­mu­nal riot. The par­ti­tion of British India in 1947 cre­at­ed a Mus­lim-major­i­ty Pak­istan and a Hin­du-major­i­ty India. It also led to a war over Kash­mir between them. The new par­ti­tions in Kash­mir could bring back such fight­ing, with Pak­istan open­ing its gates for the dis­placed.

    ...
    ———-

    “New Delhi’s Demo­graph­ic Designs in Kash­mir” by Idris Bhat; For­eign Pol­i­cy; 08/16/2019

    “Although New Del­hi had already erod­ed much of what Jam­mu and Kashmir’s spe­cial sta­tus promised over the years, it had con­tin­ued to per­form two impor­tant tasks. First, it served the sym­bol­ic func­tion of keep­ing hope alive for rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with, and bet­ter treat­ment by, India. Sec­ond, and more impor­tant­ly, Arti­cle 35A pre­vent­ed any demo­graph­ic trans­for­ma­tion of Jam­mu and Kashmir—something Kash­miris have long feared—since it pre­vent­ed out­siders from pur­chas­ing land.

    Big changes are in store for Kash­mir with the revo­ca­tion of Arti­cle 35A that pre­vent­ed out­sider land pur­chas­es. Like­ly the same changes the far right RSS envi­sioned years ago. And since the 1990s, the BJP has been promis­ing to reset­tle the Kash­miri Pan­dits who led dur­ing a surge of sep­a­ratist vio­lence. It’s some­thing Modi has pledged to do dur­ing elec­tion speech­es. So all the piece are in place for a mas­sive sud­den change in who lives in Kash­mir. A change that’s going to require either dis­em­pow­er­ing the local Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties or mov­ing the Mus­lims out:

    ...
    It seems clear that revok­ing Arti­cle 35A will change the nature of Kash­mir. For now, it is Mus­lim majority—according to Indi­an cen­sus data from 2011, 68 per­cent of Jam­mu and Kashmir’s 12.5 mil­lion peo­ple were Mus­lims. With the local gov­ern­ment no longer able to bar out­siders from land own­er­ship, New Del­hi could pre­sum­ably encour­age the migra­tion of Hin­dus to the region in the same way Chi­na has sup­port­ed the growth of Han Chi­nese pop­u­la­tions in Tibet.

    ...

    Sim­i­lar­ly, the Indi­an state’s cur­rent move, jus­ti­fied in the name of devel­op­ment, could change Kashmir’s eth­nic mix. Doing so has been a long-stand­ing demand of the mil­i­tant Hin­du nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh (RSS), which is wide­ly seen as the par­ent orga­ni­za­tion of the rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty (BJP). In 2002, after decades of using the demand of end­ing Kashmir’s spe­cial sta­tus as a cen­tral slo­gan of the Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment, the RSS passed a res­o­lu­tion that clear­ly laid out its vision for reor­ga­niz­ing the state in a way that would favor Hin­dus. The move was accom­pa­nied by a sim­i­lar res­o­lu­tion by the Vish­wa Hin­du Parishad, anoth­er orga­ni­za­tion in the RSS fam­i­ly, which demand­ed that the “five Hin­du-dom­i­nat­ed dis­tricts of Jam­mu should be made a sep­a­rate state, a union ter­ri­to­ry be carved out of areas north­east of the Jhelum Riv­er in the Kash­mir Val­ley for set­tling Hin­dus there and Ladakh be giv­en the sta­tus of a union ter­ri­to­ry.”

    Now such demands have been enact­ed in law. Ladakh, com­pris­ing an equal num­ber of Bud­dhists and Mus­lims, will be gov­erned by the BJP-led cen­tral gov­ern­ment. Under that admin­is­tra­tion, Mus­lims will sure­ly feel increas­ing­ly alien­at­ed just like those in oth­er parts of India. Over time, it would be easy to change the bal­ance between Bud­dhists and Mus­lims by allow­ing some Hin­dus from main­land India to buy prop­er­ty there.

    ...

    Help­ing the out­sider nar­ra­tive along is the sto­ry of the Kash­miri Pan­dits, around 100,000 high-caste Hin­dus who fled the region in the 1990s amid a surge in sep­a­ratist vio­lence. Since the 1990s, the BJP has used migra­tion of the Kash­miri Pan­dits to mobi­lize its Hin­du vot­er base, and it has rou­tine­ly promised in its elec­tion man­i­festos to reset­tle them. Modi him­self has reit­er­at­ed such plans in his elec­tion speech­es.

    Under the new arrange­ment, the gov­ern­ment could sim­ply cre­ate sep­a­rate town­ships with their own malls, schools, and hos­pi­tals inside them. New Del­hi may give those areas the sta­tus of a union ter­ri­to­ry and fur­ther divide Kash­mir. Or it may sim­ply give some seats to these sep­a­rate town­ships in the new assem­bly. Both ways, Kash­miri Mus­lims will feel threat­ened. Although local par­ties and activists have long resist­ed such designs and will con­tin­ue to do so, the BJP will be able to push them through. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, many Kash­miri Pan­dits and orga­ni­za­tions wel­comed the scrap­ping of Arti­cle 370. They expressed jubi­la­tion and saw the move as the ful­fill­ment of their desire to cre­ate a home­land in Kash­mir.
    ...

    But it won’t just be Hin­dus buy­ing up Kash­mir’s land and relo­cat­ing there. Inter­na­tion­al investors are also going to be invit­ed to invest in Kash­mir now that the state is more ‘open for busi­ness’ than before:

    ...
    In the new union ter­ri­to­ry of Jam­mu and Kash­mir, the approx­i­mate­ly half-mil­lion Indi­an sol­diers already there may buy land and prop­er­ty imme­di­ate­ly. Change could soon come on a much larg­er scale: The gov­ern­ment has already announced that it would hold an inter­na­tion­al invest­ment sum­mit in Kash­mir in Octo­ber.
    ...

    And that’s one big rea­son we prob­a­bly should­n’t expect the inter­na­tion­al love affair with Modi to die down any time soon, whether or not the sit­u­a­tion in Kash­mir ends up turn­ing into a human rights night­mare. Modi keeps giv­ing them what they want, and unfor­tu­nate­ly human rights for Indi­a’s peo­ple isn’t on the inter­na­tion­al investor wish list.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 17, 2019, 2:37 pm
  5. India just took a sig­nif­i­cant step towards a full blown Hin­dut­va fas­cist theoc­ra­cy: Both hous­es of Indi­a’s par­lia­ment just passed a law that estab­lish­es for the first time a reli­gious cri­te­ria for gain­ing Indi­an cit­i­zen­ship. The law is being por­trayed by the gov­ern­ment as a human­i­tar­i­an path to cit­i­zen­ship for a num­ber of migrants liv­ing in India. Mem­bers of the select­ed reli­gions will get eas­i­er access to cit­i­zen­ship, mak­ing the law a major rebuke to mod­ern Indi­a’s plu­ral­ism. The list of accept­ed reli­gions includes Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and sev­er­al minor reli­gions. Islam is NOT one of the accept­ed reli­gions. So the law is basi­cal­ly designed to for­mal­ly make Islam a sec­ond-class reli­gion on the coun­try and make it hard­er for Mus­lims to get cit­i­zen­ship. India has the sec­ond largest Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion in the world.

    Adding to the con­cerns over the new law is the fact that Indi­a’s cur­rent Min­is­ter of Home Affairs, Amit Shah, has repeat­ed­ly said the gov­ern­ment plans on launch­ing a nation­wide reg­istry where all Indi­ans will have to prove their cit­i­zen­ship. This plan could, in the­o­ry result in the depor­ta­tion of actu­al cit­i­zens if they can’t prove their cit­i­zen­ship. But thanks to the new law, any non-Mus­lims will have a much eas­i­er time keep­ing their cit­i­zen­ship or gain­ing cit­i­zen­ship if they can’t pro­vide ade­quate doc­u­men­ta­tion of their cit­i­zen­ship. Mus­lims, on the oth­er hand, won’t be for­mal­ly giv­en the ben­e­fit of the doubt. Shah has also repeat­ed­ly referred to migrants as “ter­mites” and “infil­tra­tors”.

    So we have a new law that makes Mus­lims less able to obtain cit­i­zen­ship and gov­ern­ment plans to con­duct a nation­wide cit­i­zen­ship reg­istry that will require every­one to prove their a cit­i­zen. And that rais­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of very dif­fer­ent treat­ment for the Indi­an cit­i­zens who lack the doc­u­men­ta­tion to prove their cit­i­zen­ship. Will Hin­dus with­out doc­u­men­ta­tion be allowed to keep their cit­i­zen­ship while Mus­lims in the same sit­u­a­tion are stripped of their cit­i­zen­ship? We’ll see, but now that Islam is offi­cial­ly a sec­ond-class reli­gion in India, we prob­a­bly should­n’t be too sur­prised if the sec­ond-class Mus­lim cit­i­zens and up becom­ing sec­ond-class Mus­lim non-cit­i­zens. And maybe deport­ed:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    India pass­es con­tro­ver­sial cit­i­zen­ship law exclud­ing Mus­lim migrants

    By Joan­na Slater and Niha Masih
    Dec. 11, 2019 at 10:39 a.m. CST

    NEW DELHI — Law­mak­ers in India enact­ed a fun­da­men­tal change to its cit­i­zen­ship law to include reli­gion as a cri­te­ri­on for nation­al­i­ty for the first time, deep­en­ing con­cerns that a coun­try found­ed on sec­u­lar ideals is becom­ing a Hin­du state that treats Mus­lims as sec­ond-class cit­i­zens.

    The new law cre­ates a path to cit­i­zen­ship for migrants who belong to sev­er­al South Asian reli­gions but point­ed­ly excludes Islam, the faith prac­ticed by 200 mil­lion Indi­an cit­i­zens.

    The mea­sure was approved by a major­i­ty of the upper house of India’s par­lia­ment in a final vote late Wednes­day. Its pas­sage marks the lat­est polit­i­cal vic­to­ry for Indi­an Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, a stri­dent nation­al­ist in the mold of oth­er right-lean­ing pop­ulist politi­cians around the globe.

    Since win­ning a land­slide reelec­tion vic­to­ry in May, Modi has moved swift­ly to imple­ment his party’s agen­da of empha­siz­ing Hin­du pri­ma­cy in India, a diverse democ­ra­cy home to more than 1.3 bil­lion peo­ple.

    Hin­du nation­al­ist ide­o­logues view India’s his­to­ry as a series of humil­i­a­tions — cen­turies of rule by Mus­lim kings fol­lowed by British colo­nial­ism — that must be redressed.

    They despise the sec­u­lar­ism embraced by India’s founders, who sought to cre­ate a coun­try where all faiths were treat­ed equal­ly. And they accuse India’s pre­vi­ous lead­ers of pan­der­ing to reli­gious minori­ties, espe­cial­ly Mus­lims, in search of votes.

    Now, in just months, Modi has achieved some of their top objec­tives. In August, he reversed sev­en decades of pol­i­cy in Kash­mir, strip­ping the Mus­lim-major­i­ty state of its auton­o­my and insti­tut­ing a crack­down that endures to this day. Last month, India’s Supreme Court green­light­ed the con­struc­tion of a grand Hin­du tem­ple at the site of a 16th cen­tu­ry mosque ille­gal­ly razed by Hin­du extrem­ists in 1992.

    The gov­ern­ment has also engaged in increas­ing­ly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. The country’s pow­er­ful inte­ri­or min­is­ter has called migrants who entered the coun­try ille­gal­ly “ter­mites” and pledged to expel them. Ear­li­er this year, Indi­an author­i­ties com­plet­ed a byzan­tine process aimed at iden­ti­fy­ing migrants in the north­east­ern state of Assam. Near­ly 1.9 mil­lion peo­ple were left off the final list of cit­i­zens, rais­ing the risk that they could be ren­dered state­less or deport­ed.

    The Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Bill, which was passed by both hous­es of par­lia­ment this week, is anoth­er pri­or­i­ty. It is effec­tive­ly an amnesty for all Hin­dus, Bud­dhists and Chris­tians (as well as adher­ents of three small­er reli­gions) who ille­gal­ly entered the coun­try before 2014 from Pak­istan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

    The cit­i­zen­ship bill is “the first legal artic­u­la­tion that India is, you might say, a home­land for Hin­dus,” said Prat­ap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s most promi­nent polit­i­cal sci­en­tists. Mehta believes the mea­sure vio­lates the Indi­an con­sti­tu­tion, which guar­an­tees equal rights before the law to all peo­ple with­in the coun­try.

    To name spe­cif­ic reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties in the law is “noth­ing else but send­ing a sig­nal,” said Mehta. “The sig­nal is that Mus­lims are not on the same foot­ing” as oth­ers in India.

    Modi and his sec­ond-in-com­mand, Home Affairs Min­is­ter Amit Shah, have said the mea­sure is nec­es­sary to offer refuge to per­se­cut­ed reli­gious minori­ties. Pro­po­nents say India owes a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty to such com­mu­ni­ties who have faced severe hard­ship and even vio­lence. But the law does not pro­vide any relief to mem­bers of oppressed reli­gious minori­ties — most­ly Mus­lims — from oth­er neigh­bor­ing coun­tries such as Chi­na and Myan­mar.

    After the mea­sure passed on Wednes­day, Modi wrote that it was a “land­mark day for India and our nation’s ethos of com­pas­sion and broth­er­hood.” He said the bill would “alle­vi­ate the suf­fer­ing of many who faced per­se­cu­tion for years.”

    How­ev­er, the Unit­ed States Com­mis­sion on Inter­na­tion­al Reli­gious Free­dom on Mon­day described the leg­is­la­tion as a “dan­ger­ous turn” that “runs counter to India’s rich his­to­ry of sec­u­lar plu­ral­ism.” It called upon Con­gress and Pres­i­dent Trump to con­sid­er sanc­tions against Shah if the mea­sure became law. India reject­ed the crit­i­cism as “nei­ther accu­rate nor war­rant­ed.”

    The heat­ed debate in Par­lia­ment over the cit­i­zen­ship mea­sure repeat­ed­ly raked up India’s orig­i­nal trau­ma, the par­ti­tion of the sub­con­ti­nent in 1947. While Pak­istan was found­ed as a home for the region’s Mus­lims, India defined itself in oppo­si­tion to the idea that reli­gion was the basis of nation­hood.

    The bill runs counter to India’s “foun­da­tion­al val­ues,” Anand Shar­ma, a leader of the oppo­si­tion Con­gress par­ty, said in Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day. “It hurts the soul of India.”

    ...

    The Modi government’s moves have inten­si­fied a sense of inse­cu­ri­ty among India’s Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty, the sec­ond-largest in the world. Modi has long been a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure among Mus­lims. In 2002, when he was chief min­is­ter of the state of Gujarat, he failed to stop the dead­liest out­break of com­mu­nal vio­lence in recent Indi­an his­to­ry. More than 1,000 peo­ple, most­ly Mus­lims, were killed over three days. A court-appoint­ed pan­el absolved Modi of involve­ment in the riots.

    Now some Mus­lims wor­ry that the cur­rent cit­i­zen­ship law is only the first step of a larg­er project. Shah, Modi’s lieu­tenant, has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that the gov­ern­ment intends to launch a nation­wide reg­istry in which all Indi­ans will be required to prove their cit­i­zen­ship, pat­terned on the exer­cise recent­ly car­ried out in Assam. The opaque and com­plex process was rid­dled with errors and forced res­i­dents to pro­vide ances­tral doc­u­ments going back decades.

    Shah’s repeat­ed ref­er­ences to migrants as “ter­mites” and “infil­tra­tors” who rep­re­sent a secu­ri­ty threat is cod­ed lan­guage to refer to Mus­lims, crit­ics say. Although Shah has said that Indi­an Mus­lims have noth­ing to fear, many wor­ry they would be the tar­get of a nation­wide cit­i­zen­ship reg­istry.

    One of the effects of Modi’s new cit­i­zen­ship mea­sure would be to help those left off the list of cit­i­zens in Assam — pro­vid­ed they are not Mus­lims. In Sep­tem­ber, Mohan Bhag­wat, the leader of a pow­er­ful Hin­du nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion that is the ide­o­log­i­cal par­ent of the rul­ing par­ty, report­ed­ly assured politi­cians that “no Hin­du” would be expelled from the coun­try.

    “We have to dis­tin­guish between the infil­tra­tors and gen­uine per­se­cut­ed refugees,” said Sud­han­shu Trive­di, a spokesman for the rul­ing Bharatiya Jana­ta Par­ty. “This is the right time for India to assert its secu­ri­ty con­cerns, because we are liv­ing with neigh­bors which are the biggest secu­ri­ty threats in the entire world.” He said the three coun­tries men­tioned in the leg­is­la­tion — Pak­istan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan — were “theo­crat­ic states.”

    As the cit­i­zen­ship leg­is­la­tion moved clos­er to a final vote, the furor around it grew. Hun­dreds of promi­nent sci­en­tists and schol­ars issued pub­lic let­ters to express their oppo­si­tion.

    In India’s north­east, vio­lent protests broke out against the mea­sure. In some areas, local author­i­ties request­ed help from the Indi­an army, shut down mobile inter­net access and imposed cur­fews. States such as Assam have long wit­nessed ten­sions sur­round­ing the arrival of Ben­gali-speak­ing migrants from neigh­bor­ing Bangladesh, who locals fear will alter their cul­ture and take away jobs. Now the cit­i­zen­ship mea­sure will help some of those migrants to become cit­i­zens, pro­vid­ed that they set­tle out­side of areas des­ig­nat­ed for indige­nous peo­ple.

    “There is a lot of anger since we have already absorbed so many peo­ple,” said Mad­hur­jya Baru­ah, 32, a lawyer in Guhawati, the cap­i­tal of Assam. “After mak­ing every­one in the state prove their cit­i­zen­ship, you are say­ing you will accept recent immi­grants. What­ev­er reli­gion they may be, we are not going to accept it.”

    Oppo­nents of the new cit­i­zen­ship law have vowed to chal­lenge its con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty. But India’s Supreme Court has demon­strat­ed that it is reluc­tant to rule in an expe­di­tious man­ner on such chal­lenges, par­tic­u­lar­ly when they involve the pol­i­cy pri­or­i­ties of the gov­ern­ment.

    ———–

    “India pass­es con­tro­ver­sial cit­i­zen­ship law exclud­ing Mus­lim migrants” by Joan­na Slater and Niha Masih; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 12/11/2019

    “The Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Bill, which was passed by both hous­es of par­lia­ment this week, is anoth­er pri­or­i­ty. It is effec­tive­ly an amnesty for all Hin­dus, Bud­dhists and Chris­tians (as well as adher­ents of three small­er reli­gions) who ille­gal­ly entered the coun­try before 2014 from Pak­istan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

    The bill is effec­tive­ly amnesty and cit­i­zen­ship for all Hin­dus, Bud­dhists and Chris­tians, and mem­bers of three small­er reli­gions who hap­pen to be in the coun­try ille­gal­ly. Mus­lims, on the oth­er hand, don’t get that kind of treat­ment:

    ...
    The cit­i­zen­ship bill is “the first legal artic­u­la­tion that India is, you might say, a home­land for Hin­dus,” said Prat­ap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s most promi­nent polit­i­cal sci­en­tists. Mehta believes the mea­sure vio­lates the Indi­an con­sti­tu­tion, which guar­an­tees equal rights before the law to all peo­ple with­in the coun­try.

    To name spe­cif­ic reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties in the law is “noth­ing else but send­ing a sig­nal,” said Mehta. “The sig­nal is that Mus­lims are not on the same foot­ing” as oth­ers in India.

    Modi and his sec­ond-in-com­mand, Home Affairs Min­is­ter Amit Shah, have said the mea­sure is nec­es­sary to offer refuge to per­se­cut­ed reli­gious minori­ties. Pro­po­nents say India owes a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty to such com­mu­ni­ties who have faced severe hard­ship and even vio­lence. But the law does not pro­vide any relief to mem­bers of oppressed reli­gious minori­ties — most­ly Mus­lims — from oth­er neigh­bor­ing coun­tries such as Chi­na and Myan­mar.
    ...

    And then there’s the grow­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty that Mus­lim cit­i­zens could be stripped of their cit­i­zen­ship and deport­ed if they can’t pro­vide the prop­er doc­u­men­ta­tion if the Modi gov­ern­ment goes ahead with the pledge to con­duct a nation­al cit­i­zen­ship reg­istry and require that all Indi­ans prove their cit­i­zen­ship. Mem­bers of oth­er reli­gions who can’t prove their cit­i­zen­ship will effec­tive­ly get amnesty thanks to the new law:

    ...
    The gov­ern­ment has also engaged in increas­ing­ly harsh anti-migrant rhetoric. The country’s pow­er­ful inte­ri­or min­is­ter has called migrants who entered the coun­try ille­gal­ly “ter­mites” and pledged to expel them. Ear­li­er this year, Indi­an author­i­ties com­plet­ed a byzan­tine process aimed at iden­ti­fy­ing migrants in the north­east­ern state of Assam. Near­ly 1.9 mil­lion peo­ple were left off the final list of cit­i­zens, rais­ing the risk that they could be ren­dered state­less or deport­ed.

    ...

    Now some Mus­lims wor­ry that the cur­rent cit­i­zen­ship law is only the first step of a larg­er project. Shah, Modi’s lieu­tenant, has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that the gov­ern­ment intends to launch a nation­wide reg­istry in which all Indi­ans will be required to prove their cit­i­zen­ship, pat­terned on the exer­cise recent­ly car­ried out in Assam. The opaque and com­plex process was rid­dled with errors and forced res­i­dents to pro­vide ances­tral doc­u­ments going back decades.

    Shah’s repeat­ed ref­er­ences to migrants as “ter­mites” and “infil­tra­tors” who rep­re­sent a secu­ri­ty threat is cod­ed lan­guage to refer to Mus­lims, crit­ics say. Although Shah has said that Indi­an Mus­lims have noth­ing to fear, many wor­ry they would be the tar­get of a nation­wide cit­i­zen­ship reg­istry.

    One of the effects of Modi’s new cit­i­zen­ship mea­sure would be to help those left off the list of cit­i­zens in Assam — pro­vid­ed they are not Mus­lims. In Sep­tem­ber, Mohan Bhag­wat, the leader of a pow­er­ful Hin­du nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion that is the ide­o­log­i­cal par­ent of the rul­ing par­ty, report­ed­ly assured politi­cians that “no Hin­du” would be expelled from the coun­try.
    ...

    Yep, as Mohan Bhag­wat, cur­rent head of the Nazi-inspired RSS, assured politi­cians back in Sep­tem­ber, “no Hin­du” would be deport­ed under these plans. It tells us both who is behind the plan (the RSS) and what the plan actu­al­ly is (mass deport­ing exclu­sive­ly Mus­lims).

    So it looks like we might be reach­ing the eth­nic cleans­ing phase of Indi­an’s descent into Hin­dut­va fas­cism.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 11, 2019, 4:36 pm
  6. Ftr. 990 Sim­i­lar­i­ties between Trump and Modi eth­nic puri­ty

    For Trump and Modi, eth­nic puri­ty is the pur­pose of pow­er, The Guardian, U.K. Feb­ru­ary 24, 2020 by Jason Stan­ley

    The two strong­men favour immi­gra­tion and cit­i­zen­ship poli­cies designed to demonise minor­i­ty groups

    Pho­to Cap­tion: ‘Trump leads an admin­is­tra­tion that seeks to return the US to the nation­al state of Hitler’s adu­la­tion. In many respects, Modi’s India is fur­ther along this path.’ Pho­to­graph: Aijaz Rahi/AP

    Mon 24 Feb 2020 11.27 EST Last mod­i­fied on Wed 6 Jan 2021 18.56 EST

    The US pres­i­dent, Don­ald Trump, has delight­ed a sta­di­um of 125,000 cheer­ing Indi­ans in Gujarat by declar­ing: “Amer­i­ca loves India. Amer­i­ca respects India. And Amer­i­ca will always be a faith­ful and loy­al friend to the Indi­an peo­ple.” It might seem a dis­cor­dant note from a pres­i­dent whose rule has been marked by a sin­gle-mind­ed obses­sion with halt­ing for­eign immi­gra­tion. But it’s an obses­sion he shares with his Indi­an coun­ter­part, prime min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, who stood on the stage along­side him.

    The pres­i­dent has pre­vi­ous­ly com­plained about immi­gra­tion from “shit­hole coun­tries” and sug­gest­ed a pol­i­cy that prefers migrants from “coun­tries such as Nor­way”. And his admin­is­tra­tion has assid­u­ous­ly pri­ori­tised changes in immi­gra­tion laws. Trump’s first attor­ney gen­er­al, Jeff Ses­sions, called for a return to some­thing like the 1924 Immi­gra­tion Act, which banned immi­gra­tion from Asia and severe­ly restrict­ed the entry of oth­er peo­ple con­sid­ered racial­ly unde­sir­able.

    Hitler was influ­enced by Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy. His Nurem­berg Laws made my father, born in Berlin, a sec­ond-class cit­i­zen

    Stephen Miller, Ses­sions’ pro­tege and Trump’s longest-serv­ing senior advis­er, was recent­ly quot­ed as describ­ing stop­ping migrants as “all I care about – this is my life”. Miller draft­ed one of the first exec­u­tive orders signed by Trump, “Pro­tect­ing the Nation from For­eign Ter­ror­ist Entry”, which banned immi­gra­tion from sev­en Mus­lim-major­i­ty coun­tries; a sub­se­quent ver­sion, altered to tone down its too-obvi­ous reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion, has been approved by a 5–4 major­i­ty in a supreme court that fea­tures two new ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Trump appointees. In Jan­u­ary six coun­tries, includ­ing four from Africa, were added to the list.

    In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the US deployed cit­i­zen­ship strate­gi­cal­ly to exclude non-whites and non-Chris­tians, which impressed Hitler. In Part II of Mein Kampf, he decries the idea of a state in which “race and nation­al­i­ty” play no role in cit­i­zen­ship, propos­ing a “nation­al state”: “Any­thing cra­zier and less thought-out than our present laws of state cit­i­zen­ship is hard­ly pos­si­ble to con­ceive. But there is at least one state in which fee­ble attempts to achieve a bet­ter arrange­ment are appar­ent: the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, where they absolute­ly for­bid [the] nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion of cer­tain defined races, and thus are mak­ing a mod­est start in the direc­tion of some­thing not unlike the con­cep­tion of the nation­al state.”

    My wife’s great-grand­fa­ther Takayu­ki Yaokawa Sato was a fish­er­man by trade. At our fam­i­ly gath­er­ings, we show an old Amer­i­can pho­to of him, with a fish­ing pole, proud­ly hold­ing a large fish. Sato, a Japan­ese immi­grant, mar­ried Grace Vir­ginia Woods, a US cit­i­zen, in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, when the coun­try was gripped by fears of a “yel­low per­il” and the supreme court declared Asians inel­i­gi­ble for nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion. In con­cert with the 1907 Expa­tri­a­tion Act, which revoked cit­i­zen­ship to Amer­i­can women who mar­ried non-cit­i­zens, this deprived Woods of her cit­i­zen­ship. She only regained it upon her husband’s death.

    US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy was a source for Hitler’s “nation­al state” vision. In Sep­tem­ber 1935, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment realised this vision with the Nurem­berg Laws, which pro­hib­it­ed non-Aryans from mar­ry­ing those of “Ger­man blood” and cre­at­ed a cat­e­go­ry of sec­ond-class cit­i­zen­ship for Jews. Here too, Hitler was influ­enced by Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy, in par­tic­u­lar the Jim Crow anti-mis­ce­gena­tion laws. At the time, my Jew­ish father was a Ger­man cit­i­zen in Berlin, where he had been born in Novem­ber 1932. On 15 Sep­tem­ber 1935, he became a sec­ond-class cit­i­zen.

    Strip­ping minor­i­ty groups of the state pro­tec­tion asso­ci­at­ed with full cit­i­zen­ship leaves them vul­ner­a­ble to bru­tal treat­ment. In Han­nah Arendt’s phrase from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, cit­i­zen­ship is “the right to have rights”. The Nurem­berg Laws coin­cid­ed with the build­ing of large deten­tion cen­tres – con­cen­tra­tion camps – for those affect­ed by them. The US Holo­caust Muse­um describes a con­cen­tra­tion camp as a zone where the legal norms of arrest and impris­on­ment do not apply.

    The Euro­pean-Amer­i­can con­cept of a nation­al state had influ­ence out­side Europe. VD Savarkar, the Indi­an polit­i­cal the­o­rist who ush­ered in Hin­du nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy, was influ­enced by Euro­pean eth­no-nation­al­ism. He took the Nazi treat­ment of Ger­man Jews to be a mod­el for even­tu­al Hin­dut­va pol­i­cy towards India’s Mus­lim res­i­dents. Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh is a Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment dat­ing back to the mid-1920s, many of whose mem­bers ven­er­at­ed Savarkar. Senior lead­ers, such as MS Gol­walkar, were influ­enced by Mus­soli­ni and Hitler. The Bharatiya Jana­ta par­ty, the polit­i­cal wing of RSS and now India’s rul­ing par­ty, has begun to imple­ment changes in cit­i­zen­ship laws that echo the Nurem­berg Laws.

    India’s new Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Act allows for a fast-track to cit­i­zen­ship for non-Mus­lim migrants, there­by dis­crim­i­nat­ing against Mus­lims. The pro­posed nation­al reg­is­ter requires res­i­dents to prove their cit­i­zen­ship with doc­u­men­ta­tion – which many in India lack. Togeth­er, these laws place Mus­lims with­out doc­u­men­ta­tion in a quandary. Large deten­tion cen­tres are being built to house India’s Mus­lim res­i­dents who are declared inel­i­gi­ble for cit­i­zen­ship. Like the US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy so admired by Hitler, these laws are a mask: they are designed to priv­i­lege Hin­dus in the cit­i­zen­ship laws of the world’s largest democ­ra­cy.

    Trump leads an admin­is­tra­tion that seeks to return the US to the nation­al state of Hitler’s adu­la­tion. In many respects, Modi’s India is con­sid­er­ably fur­ther along this path. The stu­dent has become the teacher.

    There is more to fas­cism than chang­ing cit­i­zen­ship laws. Fas­cist move­ments seek one-par­ty rule: over the courts, the police, the mil­i­tary and the press. They involve a cult of loy­al­ty to a sin­gle leader and nos­tal­gia for a myth­ic past when the nation was dom­i­nat­ed by the priv­i­leged group. But the core of fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy is realised in chang­ing cit­i­zen­ship laws to priv­i­lege a sin­gle eth­nic group. This is why we regard the Nurem­berg Laws as a defin­ing moment in Ger­man his­to­ry, and the con­cen­tra­tion camp as the defin­ing Nazi insti­tu­tion.
    His­to­ry has been right­ly hor­ri­fied by the Nurem­berg Laws and their con­se­quences. Why, then, are so many coun­tries going down this path?

    Fas­cism thrives dur­ing moments of per­ceived cri­sis, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as a zero-sum bat­tle for group sur­vival. The cli­mate cri­sis, already tak­ing the form of water wars between Indi­an states, is an exam­ple.

    The solu­tion is inter­na­tion­al agree­ments, which recog­nise that we humans share sim­i­lar fates – that our sim­i­lar­i­ties far out­weigh our dif­fer­ences. This lib­er­al­ism is denounced as “glob­al­ism” by fig­ures such as Trump, while lib­er­als and left­ists who defend India’s sec­u­lar con­sti­tu­tion are denounced as “anti-nation­al” by the BJP and its acolytes. Trump’s tri­umphant vis­it to India demon­strates just how glob­al eth­no-nation­al­ism, and its more vio­lent sib­ling, fas­cism, has become.

    Jason Stan­ley is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Yale and the author of How Fas­cism Works

    Posted by Mary Benton | December 24, 2021, 9:42 am
  7. For Trump and Modi, eth­nic puri­ty is the pur­pose of pow­er
    The Guardian, U.K. Feb­ru­ary 24, 2020 by Jason Stan­ley

    The two strong­men favour immi­gra­tion and cit­i­zen­ship poli­cies designed to demonise minor­i­ty groups

    Pho­to Cap­tion: ‘Trump leads an admin­is­tra­tion that seeks to return the US to the nation­al state of Hitler’s adu­la­tion. In many respects, Modi’s India is fur­ther along this path.’ Pho­to­graph: Aijaz Rahi/AP

    Mon 24 Feb 2020 11.27 EST Last mod­i­fied on Wed 6 Jan 2021 18.56 EST

    The US pres­i­dent, Don­ald Trump, has delight­ed a sta­di­um of 125,000 cheer­ing Indi­ans in Gujarat by declar­ing: “Amer­i­ca loves India. Amer­i­ca respects India. And Amer­i­ca will always be a faith­ful and loy­al friend to the Indi­an peo­ple.” It might seem a dis­cor­dant note from a pres­i­dent whose rule has been marked by a sin­gle-mind­ed obses­sion with halt­ing for­eign immi­gra­tion. But it’s an obses­sion he shares with his Indi­an coun­ter­part, prime min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi, who stood on the stage along­side him.

    The pres­i­dent has pre­vi­ous­ly com­plained about immi­gra­tion from “shit­hole coun­tries” and sug­gest­ed a pol­i­cy that prefers migrants from “coun­tries such as Nor­way”. And his admin­is­tra­tion has assid­u­ous­ly pri­ori­tised changes in immi­gra­tion laws. Trump’s first attor­ney gen­er­al, Jeff Ses­sions, called for a return to some­thing like the 1924 Immi­gra­tion Act, which banned immi­gra­tion from Asia and severe­ly restrict­ed the entry of oth­er peo­ple con­sid­ered racial­ly unde­sir­able.

    Hitler was influ­enced by Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy. His Nurem­berg Laws made my father, born in Berlin, a sec­ond-class cit­i­zen

    Stephen Miller, Ses­sions’ pro­tege and Trump’s longest-serv­ing senior advis­er, was recent­ly quot­ed as describ­ing stop­ping migrants as “all I care about – this is my life”. Miller draft­ed one of the first exec­u­tive orders signed by Trump, “Pro­tect­ing the Nation from For­eign Ter­ror­ist Entry”, which banned immi­gra­tion from sev­en Mus­lim-major­i­ty coun­tries; a sub­se­quent ver­sion, altered to tone down its too-obvi­ous reli­gious dis­crim­i­na­tion, has been approved by a 5–4 major­i­ty in a supreme court that fea­tures two new ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Trump appointees. In Jan­u­ary six coun­tries, includ­ing four from Africa, were added to the list.

    In the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the US deployed cit­i­zen­ship strate­gi­cal­ly to exclude non-whites and non-Chris­tians, which impressed Hitler. In Part II of Mein Kampf, he decries the idea of a state in which “race and nation­al­i­ty” play no role in cit­i­zen­ship, propos­ing a “nation­al state”: “Any­thing cra­zier and less thought-out than our present laws of state cit­i­zen­ship is hard­ly pos­si­ble to con­ceive. But there is at least one state in which fee­ble attempts to achieve a bet­ter arrange­ment are appar­ent: the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, where they absolute­ly for­bid [the] nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion of cer­tain defined races, and thus are mak­ing a mod­est start in the direc­tion of some­thing not unlike the con­cep­tion of the nation­al state.”

    My wife’s great-grand­fa­ther Takayu­ki Yaokawa Sato was a fish­er­man by trade. At our fam­i­ly gath­er­ings, we show an old Amer­i­can pho­to of him, with a fish­ing pole, proud­ly hold­ing a large fish. Sato, a Japan­ese immi­grant, mar­ried Grace Vir­ginia Woods, a US cit­i­zen, in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, when the coun­try was gripped by fears of a “yel­low per­il” and the supreme court declared Asians inel­i­gi­ble for nat­u­ral­i­sa­tion. In con­cert with the 1907 Expa­tri­a­tion Act, which revoked cit­i­zen­ship to Amer­i­can women who mar­ried non-cit­i­zens, this deprived Woods of her cit­i­zen­ship. She only regained it upon her husband’s death.

    US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy was a source for Hitler’s “nation­al state” vision. In Sep­tem­ber 1935, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment realised this vision with the Nurem­berg Laws, which pro­hib­it­ed non-Aryans from mar­ry­ing those of “Ger­man blood” and cre­at­ed a cat­e­go­ry of sec­ond-class cit­i­zen­ship for Jews. Here too, Hitler was influ­enced by Amer­i­can ide­ol­o­gy, in par­tic­u­lar the Jim Crow anti-mis­ce­gena­tion laws. At the time, my Jew­ish father was a Ger­man cit­i­zen in Berlin, where he had been born in Novem­ber 1932. On 15 Sep­tem­ber 1935, he became a sec­ond-class cit­i­zen.

    Strip­ping minor­i­ty groups of the state pro­tec­tion asso­ci­at­ed with full cit­i­zen­ship leaves them vul­ner­a­ble to bru­tal treat­ment. In Han­nah Arendt’s phrase from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, cit­i­zen­ship is “the right to have rights”. The Nurem­berg Laws coin­cid­ed with the build­ing of large deten­tion cen­tres – con­cen­tra­tion camps – for those affect­ed by them. The US Holo­caust Muse­um describes a con­cen­tra­tion camp as a zone where the legal norms of arrest and impris­on­ment do not apply.

    The Euro­pean-Amer­i­can con­cept of a nation­al state had influ­ence out­side Europe. VD Savarkar, the Indi­an polit­i­cal the­o­rist who ush­ered in Hin­du nation­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy, was influ­enced by Euro­pean eth­no-nation­al­ism. He took the Nazi treat­ment of Ger­man Jews to be a mod­el for even­tu­al Hin­dut­va pol­i­cy towards India’s Mus­lim res­i­dents. Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh is a Hin­du nation­al­ist move­ment dat­ing back to the mid-1920s, many of whose mem­bers ven­er­at­ed Savarkar. Senior lead­ers, such as MS Gol­walkar, were influ­enced by Mus­soli­ni and Hitler. The Bharatiya Jana­ta par­ty, the polit­i­cal wing of RSS and now India’s rul­ing par­ty, has begun to imple­ment changes in cit­i­zen­ship laws that echo the Nurem­berg Laws.

    India’s new Cit­i­zen­ship Amend­ment Act allows for a fast-track to cit­i­zen­ship for non-Mus­lim migrants, there­by dis­crim­i­nat­ing against Mus­lims. The pro­posed nation­al reg­is­ter requires res­i­dents to prove their cit­i­zen­ship with doc­u­men­ta­tion – which many in India lack. Togeth­er, these laws place Mus­lims with­out doc­u­men­ta­tion in a quandary. Large deten­tion cen­tres are being built to house India’s Mus­lim res­i­dents who are declared inel­i­gi­ble for cit­i­zen­ship. Like the US immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy so admired by Hitler, these laws are a mask: they are designed to priv­i­lege Hin­dus in the cit­i­zen­ship laws of the world’s largest democ­ra­cy.

    Trump leads an admin­is­tra­tion that seeks to return the US to the nation­al state of Hitler’s adu­la­tion. In many respects, Modi’s India is con­sid­er­ably fur­ther along this path. The stu­dent has become the teacher.

    There is more to fas­cism than chang­ing cit­i­zen­ship laws. Fas­cist move­ments seek one-par­ty rule: over the courts, the police, the mil­i­tary and the press. They involve a cult of loy­al­ty to a sin­gle leader and nos­tal­gia for a myth­ic past when the nation was dom­i­nat­ed by the priv­i­leged group. But the core of fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy is realised in chang­ing cit­i­zen­ship laws to priv­i­lege a sin­gle eth­nic group. This is why we regard the Nurem­berg Laws as a defin­ing moment in Ger­man his­to­ry, and the con­cen­tra­tion camp as the defin­ing Nazi insti­tu­tion.
    His­to­ry has been right­ly hor­ri­fied by the Nurem­berg Laws and their con­se­quences. Why, then, are so many coun­tries going down this path?

    Fas­cism thrives dur­ing moments of per­ceived cri­sis, which can be rep­re­sent­ed as a zero-sum bat­tle for group sur­vival. The cli­mate cri­sis, already tak­ing the form of water wars between Indi­an states, is an exam­ple.

    The solu­tion is inter­na­tion­al agree­ments, which recog­nise that we humans share sim­i­lar fates – that our sim­i­lar­i­ties far out­weigh our dif­fer­ences. This lib­er­al­ism is denounced as “glob­al­ism” by fig­ures such as Trump, while lib­er­als and left­ists who defend India’s sec­u­lar con­sti­tu­tion are denounced as “anti-nation­al” by the BJP and its acolytes. Trump’s tri­umphant vis­it to India demon­strates just how glob­al eth­no-nation­al­ism, and its more vio­lent sib­ling, fas­cism, has become.

    Jason Stan­ley is a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Yale and the author of How Fas­cism Works

    Posted by Mary Benton | December 24, 2021, 9:49 am

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