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bfpnola · 8 months

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definitely a longer piece so these excerpts are far from showcasing everything this piece has to offer! read the whole thing on your own time, and in general, just check out jewish currents, an educational, leftist, anti-zionist jewish magazine!

Every August, the township of Edison, New Jersey—where one in five residents is of Indian origin—holds a parade to celebrate India’s Independence Day. In 2022, a long line of floats rolled through the streets, decked out in images of Hindu deities and colorful advertisements for local businesses. People cheered from the sidelines or joined the cavalcade, dancing to pulsing Bollywood music. In the middle of the procession came another kind of vehicle: A wheel loader, which looks like a small bulldozer, rumbled along the route bearing an image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi aloft in its bucket. For South Asian Muslims, the meaning of the addition was hard to miss. A few months earlier, during the month of Ramadan, Indian government officials had sent bulldozers into Delhi’s Muslim neighborhoods, where they damaged a mosque and leveled homes and storefronts. The Washington Post called the bulldozer “a polarizing symbol of state power under Narendra Modi,” whose ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is increasingly enacting a program of Hindu supremacy and Muslim subjugation. In the weeks after the parade, one Muslim resident of Edison, who is of Indian origin, told The New York Times that he understood the bulldozer much as Jews would a swastika or Black Americans would a Klansman’s hood. Its inclusion underscored the parade’s other nods to the ideology known as Hindutva, which seeks to transform India into an ethnonationalist Hindu state. The event’s grand marshal was the BJP’s national spokesperson, Sambit Patra, who flew in from India. Other invitees were affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international arm of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary force Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Modi is a longtime member.

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On December 6th, 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindus, many of whom were affiliated with the paramilitary group the RSS, gathered at the Babri Masjid, a centuries-old mosque that is one of the most contested sacred sites in the world. Over the preceding century, far-right Hindus had claimed that the mosque, located in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, was built not only upon the site where the Hindu deity Ram was born but atop the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. The RSS and its affiliates had been campaigning to, in the words of a BJP minister, correct the “historical mistake” of the mosque’s existence, a task the mob completed that December afternoon. “They climbed on top of the domes and tombs,” one witness told NPR. “They were carrying hammers and these three-pronged spears from Hindu scripture. They started hacking at the mosque. By night, it was destroyed.” The demolition sparked riots that lasted months and killed an estimated 2,000 people across the country.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was arguably Hindu nationalism’s greatest triumph to date. Since its establishment in 1925, the RSS—whose founders sought what one of them called a “military regeneration of the Hindus,” inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride”—had been a marginal presence in India: Its members held no elected office, and it was temporarily designated a terrorist organization after one of its affiliates shot and killed Mohandas Gandhi in 1948. But the leveling of the Babri Masjid activated a virulently ethnonationalist base and paved the way for three decades of Hindutva ascendance. In 1998, the BJP formed a government for the first time; in 2014, it returned to power, winning a staggering 282 out of 543 seats in parliament and propelling Modi into India’s highest office. Since then, journalist Samanth Subramanian notes, all of the country’s governmental and civil society institutions “have been pressured to fall in line” with a Hindutva agenda—a phenomenon on full display in 2019, when the Supreme Court of India awarded the land where the Babri Masjid once stood to a government run by the very Hindu nationalists who illegally destroyed it. (Modi has since laid a foundation stone for a new Ram temple in Ayodhya, an event that a prominent RSS activist celebrated with a billboard in Times Square.) The Ayodhya verdict came in the same year that Modi stripped constitutional protections from residents of the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir and passed a law that creates a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants, laying the groundwork for a religious test for Indian nationality. Under Modi, “the Hinduization of India is almost complete,” as journalist Yasmeen Serhan has written in The Atlantic.

To achieve its goals, the RSS has worked via a dense network of organizations that call themselves the “Sangh Parivar” (“joint family”) of Hindu nationalism. The BJP, which holds more seats in the Indian parliament than every other party combined, is the Sangh’s electoral face. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the movement’s cultural wing, responsible for “Hinduizing” Indian society at the grassroots level. The Bajrang Dal is the project’s militant arm, which enforces Hindu supremacy through violence. Dozens of other organizations contribute money and platforms to the Sangh. The sheer number of groups affords the Sangh what human rights activist Pranay Somayajula has referred to as a “tactical politics of plausible deniability,” in which the many degrees of separation between the governing elements and their vigilante partners shields the former from backlash. This explains how, until 2018, the CIA could describe the VHP and Bajrang Dal as “militant religious organizations”—a designation that applies to non-electoral groups exerting political pressure—even as successive US governments have maintained a warm relationship with their parliamentary counterpart, the BJP.

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The most extreme figures in the Hindu nationalist and Zionist movements were especially frank about the nature of their partnership: “Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans, or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam,” Bajrang Dal affiliate Rohit Vyasmaan told The New York Times of his friendly relationship with Mike Guzofsky, a member of a violent militant group connected to the infamous Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane’s Kach Party.

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In 2003, Gary Ackerman—a Jewish former congressman who was awarded India’s third-highest civilian honor for helping to found the Congressional Caucus on India—told a gathering of AJC and AIPAC representatives and their Indian counterparts that “Israel [is] surrounded by 120 million Muslims,” while “India has 120 million [within].” Tom Lantos, another Jewish member of the caucus, likewise enjoined the two communities to collaborate: “We are drawn together by mindless, vicious, fanatic, Islamic terrorism.”

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timetravellingkitty · 7 months

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Indians, you cannot support Palestine without supporting Kashmir. Hindu nationalism and Zionism go hand in hand

Israel is the global right's darling because they see it as a model for the ideal ethnocracy they want to establish. So many antisemites are Zionists. The founders of the RSS (a Hindu nationalist org) fucking admired Hitler for doing whatever it took to "maintain the purity of the Aryan race" and look, their political wing the BJP (the ruling party here in India) supports Israel. Hindu nationalism is just recycled European fascism. India, under Modi, wants to do to Kashmir what Israel is doing to Palestine. The BJP appeals to the Kashmiri Pandit population, claiming that the Pandits will be able to return to their homeland to justify this occupation. Kashmir is literally the world's most militarised zone. The violence of occupation knows no bounds

#palestine #free palestine #kashmir #reva speaks #tune queue kiya

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andmaybegayer · 5 days

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/29/india-assassination-raw-sikhs-modi/

cool cool cool

(full text below the cut)

An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

Greg Miller, Gerry Shih, Ellen Nakashima

The White House went to extraordinary lengths last year to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a state visit meant to bolster ties with an ascendant power and potential partner against China.

Tables on the South Lawn were decorated with lotus blooms, the symbol of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. A chef was flown in from California to preside over a vegetarian menu. President Biden extolled the shared values of a relationship “built on mutual trust, candor and respect.”

But even as the Indian leader was basking in U.S. adulation on June 22, an officer in India’s intelligence service was relaying final instructions to a hired hit team to kill one of Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States.

The assassination is a “priority now,” wrote Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, according to current and former U.S. and Indian security officials.

Yadav forwarded details about the target, Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, including his New York address, according to the officials and a U.S. indictment. As soon as the would-be assassins could confirm that Pannun, a U.S. citizen, was home, “it will be a go ahead from us.”

Yadav’s identity and affiliation, which have not previously been reported, provide the most explicit evidence to date that the assassination plan — ultimately thwarted by U.S. authorities — was directed from within the Indian spy service. Higher-ranking RAW officials have also been implicated, according to current and former Western security officials, as part of a sprawling investigation by the CIA, FBI and other agencies that has mapped potential links to Modi’s inner circle.

In reports that have been closely held within the American government, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that the operation targeting Pannun was approved by the RAW chief at the time, Samant Goel. That finding is consistent with accounts provided to The Washington Post by former senior Indian security officials who had knowledge of the operation and said Goel was under extreme pressure to eliminate the alleged threat of Sikh extremists overseas. U.S. spy agencies have more tentatively assessed that Modi’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, was probably aware of RAW’s plans to kill Sikh activists, but officials emphasized that no smoking gun proof has emerged.

Neither Doval nor Goel responded to calls and text messages seeking comment.

This examination of Indian assassination plots in North America, and RAW’s increasingly aggressive global posture, is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former senior officials in the United States, India, Canada, Britain, Germany and Australia. Citing security concerns and the sensitivity of the subject, most spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That India would pursue lethal operations in North America has stunned Western security officials. In some ways, however, it reflects a profound shift in geopolitics. After years of being treated as a second-tier player, India sees itself as a rising force in a new era of global competition, one that even the United States cannot afford to alienate.

Asked why India would risk attempting an assassination on U.S. soil, a Western security official said: “Because they knew they could get away with it.”

The foiled assassination was part of an escalating campaign of aggression by RAW against the Indian diaspora in Asia, Europe and North America, officials said. The plot in the United States coincided with the June 18 shooting death of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C., near Vancouver — an operation also linked to Yadav, according to Western officials. Both plots took place amid a wave of violence in Pakistan, where at least 11 Sikh or Kashmiri separatists living in exile and labeled terrorists by the Modi government have been killed over the past two years.

The Indian intelligence service has ramped up its surveillance and harassment of Sikhs and other groups overseas perceived as disloyal to the Modi government, officials said. RAW officers and agents have faced arrest, expulsion and reprimand in countries including Australia, Germany and Britain, according to officials who provided details to The Post that have not previously been made public.

The revelations have added to Western concerns about Modi, whose tenure has been marked by economic growth and rising global stature for India, but also deepening authoritarianism. A recent report by Freedom House, a human rights organization, listed India among the world’s practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for governments’ use of intimidation or violence against their own citizens — dissidents, activists, journalists — in others’ sovereign territory.

India is part of an expanding roster of countries employing tactics previously associated with China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes. It is a trend fueled by factors ranging from surging strains of nationalism and authoritarianism to the spread of social media and spyware that both empower and endanger dissident groups.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to respond to detailed questions submitted by The Post or provide comment for this article. Responding to questions raised by a Post reporter at a news briefing last week, spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said that India was still investigating the allegations and that the Pannun case “equally impacts our national security.”

Jaiswal referred reporters to previous ministry statements that targeted killings are “not our policy.”

For the Biden administration, which has spent three years cultivating closer ties with India, the assassination plots have pitted professed values against strategic interests.

Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.

Even the U.S. criminal case reflects this restraint. Senior officials at the Justice Department and FBI had pushed to prosecute Yadav, officials said, a step that would have implicated RAW in a murder-for-hire conspiracy. But while a U.S. indictment unsealed in November contained the bombshell allegation that the plot was directed by an Indian official, it referred to Yadav as only an unnamed co-conspirator, “CC-1,” and made no mention of the Indian spy agency.

Justice Department officials who took part in the White House deliberations sided against those urging criminal charges against Yadav. Administration officials denied any undue influence. “Charging decisions are the prerogative of law enforcement alone,” said National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, “and the Biden NSC has rigorously respected that independence.”

The only U.S. charges made public to date are against an alleged middleman, Nikhil Gupta, who is described in the indictment as an Indian drug and weapons trafficker enlisted to hire a contract killer. Gupta, an Indian national who has denied the charges, was arrested in Prague on June 30 and remains in prison. He is awaiting a Czech court ruling on a U.S. request for his extradition.

Even in recent days, the Biden administration has taken steps to contain the fallout from the assassination plot. White House officials warned the Modi government this month that The Post was close to publishing an investigation that would reveal new details about the case. It did so without notifying The Post.

Laying a trap

For decades, RAW was regarded as a regional player, preoccupied by proxy wars with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Under Modi, however, RAW has been wielded as a weapon against dissidents in India’s vast global diaspora, according to current and former U.S. and Indian officials.

The U.S. operation shows how RAW tried to export tactics it has used for years in countries neighboring India, officials said, including the use of criminal syndicates for operations it doesn’t want traced to New Delhi. It also exposed what former Indian security officials described as disturbing lapses in judgment and tradecraft.

After the plot against Pannun failed, the decision to entrust Yadav with the high-risk mission sparked recriminations within the agency, former officials said. Rather than joining RAW as a junior officer, Yadav had been brought in midcareer from India’s less prestigious Central Reserve Police Force, said one former official. As a result, the official said, Yadav lacked training and skills needed for an operation that meant going up against sophisticated U.S. counterintelligence capabilities.

Attempts by The Post to locate or contact Yadav were unsuccessful. A former Indian security official said he was transferred back to the Central Reserve Police Force after the Pannun plot unraveled.

The U.S. affidavit describes Yadav as an “associate” of Gupta who procured the alleged drug trafficker’s help by arranging for the dismissal of criminal charges he faced in India. Gupta had a history of collaborating with India’s security services on operations in Afghanistan and other countries, according to a person with knowledge of his background, but he had never been used for jobs in the West.

Petr Slepicka, a lawyer in Prague who represents Gupta, declined to comment on the case except to say that his client denies the charges against him. In court filings in India, Gupta’s family members described him as an innocent “middle-class businessman” whose arrest was a case of mistaken identity. They said he traveled to Prague “for tourism” and to explore new markets for a “handicraft” business, according to the court filings.

Yadav and Gupta spent weeks trading encrypted texts about the plot to kill Pannun, according to a U.S. affidavit filed in support of the request for Gupta’s extradition. To find a willing assassin, Gupta reached out to someone he had been in touch with for at least eight years and understood to be a drug and weapons dealer. In reality, according to the affidavit, the supposed dealer was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The two were discussing “another potential firearms and narcotics transaction,” according to the affidavit when, on May 30, Gupta abruptly asked “about the possibility of hiring someone to murder a lawyer living in New York.”

From that moment, U.S. agents had an inside but incomplete view of the unfolding conspiracy. They orchestrated Gupta’s introduction to a supposed assassin who was actually an undercover agent, according to court filings. They captured images of cash changing hands in a car in New York City — a $15,000 down payment on a job that was to cost $100,000 when completed.

At one point, the indictment said, U.S. agents even got footage of Gupta turning his camera toward three men “dressed in business attire, sitting around a conference room,” an apparent reference to Indian operatives overseeing the mission. “We are all counting on you,” Gupta told the purported assassin on the video call, according to the indictment.

Yadav indicated that there would be more jobs after Pannun, including one “big target” in Canada. But a separate hit team got to that assignment first, according to the U.S. indictment, suggesting that RAW was working with multiple criminal elements.

Hours after Nijjar was gunned down in his car on June 18 outside the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple in Surrey, Yadav sent a video clip to Gupta “showing Nijjar’s bloody body slumped in his vehicle,” according to the indictment.

The message arrived as U.S. authorities were laying a trap for Gupta. Seeking to draw him out of India and into a friendly jurisdiction, U.S. agents used their DEA informant to persuade Gupta to travel to the Czech Republic for what he was led to believe would be a clandestine meeting with his American contact, according to officials familiar with the operation.

Gupta arrived in Prague on June 30 — 11 days after Czech authorities, acting at the behest of U.S. officials, had secretly issued an arrest warrant for him.

As he exited Vaclav Havel Airport, Gupta was intercepted by Czech police, who ushered him into a vehicle in which two U.S. federal agents were waiting, according to court filings submitted by Gupta’s family in India. He was questioned for hours while the car meandered around the city. His laptop was seized and his phone held to his face to unlock it, according to the family petition.

Gupta was eventually deposited in Prague’s Pankrac Prison, where he remains awaiting possible extradition. Seeking help, Gupta’s family tried to reach Yadav last year but could find no trace of him, according to a person familiar with the matter. After months of near-constant contact with Gupta, the person said, CC-1 had “disappeared.”

Engaging with the underworld

Though Yadav served as RAW’s point man, current and former officials said the operation involved higher-ranking officials with ties to Modi’s inner circle. Among those suspected of involvement or awareness are Goel and Doval, though U.S. officials said there is no direct evidence so far of their complicity.

As RAW chief at the time, Goel was “under pressure” to neutralize the alleged threat posed by Sikh extremists overseas, said a former Indian security official. Goel reported to Doval, and had ties to the hard-line national security adviser going back decades.

Both had built their reputations in the 1980s, when the country’s security services battled Sikh separatists and Muslim militants. They were part of a generation of security professionals shaped by those conflicts much the way their U.S. counterparts came to be defined by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Doval, 79, has claimed roles in undercover missions from the jungles of Myanmar to the back alleys of Lahore, Pakistan — tales that contributed to his frequent depiction in the press as the “James Bond of India.”

He also exhibited a willingness to engage with the criminal underworld. In 2005, after retiring as head of India’s domestic intelligence service, he was inadvertently detained by Mumbai police while meeting with a reputed gangster. Doval was seeking to enlist one crime boss to assassinate another, according to media reports later confirmed by senior Indian officials.

Before being tapped as national security adviser by Modi in 2014, Doval publicly called for India’s security apparatus to shift from “defense” to “defensive offense” against groups threatening India from other countries, especially Pakistan.

Goel, who was then rising into the senior ranks at RAW, shared Doval’s instincts. Police forces under Goel’s command in the early 1990s were tied to more than 120 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances or torture, according to a database maintained by Ensaaf, an Indian human rights group based in the United States. Goel was so closely associated with the brutal crackdown that he became an assassination target, according to associates who said he took to traveling in a bulletproof vehicle.

Former Indian officials who know both men said Goel would not have proceeded with assassination plots in North America without the approval of his superior and protector.

“We always had to go to the NSA for clearance for any operations,” said A.S. Dulat, who served as RAW chief in the early 2000s, referring to the national security adviser. Dulat emphasized in an interview with The Post that he did not have inside knowledge of the alleged operations, and that assassinations were not part of RAW’s repertoire during his tenure.

U.S. intelligence agencies have reached a similar conclusion. Given Doval’s reputation and the hierarchical nature of the Indian system, CIA analysts have assessed that Doval probably knew of or approved RAW’s plans to kill Sikhs his government considered terrorists, U.S. officials said.

A fierce crackdown

India’s shift to “defensive offense” was followed by a series of clashes between RAW and Western domestic security services.

In Australia, two RAW officers were expelled in 2020 after authorities broke up what Mike Burgess, head of the Australian intelligence service, described as a “nest of spies.”

Foreign officers were caught monitoring “their country’s diaspora community,” trying to penetrate local police departments and stealing information about sensitive security systems at Australian airports, Burgess said in a 2021 speech. He didn’t name the service, but Australian officials confirmed to The Post that it was RAW.

In Germany, federal police have made arrests in recent years to root out agents RAW had recruited within Sikh communities. Among them, German officials said, were a husband and wife who operated a website purportedly covering local Sikh events but who were secretly on RAW’s payroll.

In Britain, RAW’s surveillance and harassment of the Sikh population — especially a large concentration near Birmingham — became so egregious in 2014 and 2015 that MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, delivered warnings to Goel, who was then serving as RAW’s station chief in London.

When confronted, Goel scoffed at his counterparts and accused them of coddling Sikh activists he said should be considered terrorists, according to current and former British officials. After further run-ins, British authorities threatened to expel him, officials said. Instead, Goel returned to New Delhi and continued to climb RAW’s ranks until, in 2019, he was given the agency’s top job.

RAW’s record of aggressive activity in Britain has fanned suspicion that the agency was involved in the death of Sikh activist Avtar Singh Khanda, who died in Birmingham last year, three days before Nijjar was killed in Canada. British officials have said Khanda suffered from leukemia and died of natural causes, though his family and supporters have continued to press for further investigation.

A U.S. State Department human rights report released this month catalogued India’s alleged engagement in transnational repression. It cited credible accounts of “extraterritorial killing, kidnapping, forced returns or other violence,” as well as “threats, harassment, arbitrary surveillance and coercion” of overseas dissidents and journalists.

RAW’s operations in Western countries during Modi’s tenure have been overwhelmingly aimed at followers of the Sikh religion, especially a minority faction seeking to revive the largely dormant cause of creating a separate state called “Khalistan.”

That movement had peaked in the 1980s, when thousands were killed in violent skirmishes between the Indian government and Sikh insurgents. One brutal sequence beginning in 1984 included an Indian assault on the Sikh religion’s holiest site, the Golden Temple; the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikhs in her security detail; and the bombing of an Air India flight widely attributed to Sikh extremists. A fierce crackdown quashed the insurgency, prompting an exodus of Sikhs to diaspora communities in Canada, the United States and Britain.

As Sikhs settled into their new lives abroad, the Khalistani cause went quiet until a new generation of activists — whose leaders included Pannun and Nijjar — sought to rekindle the movement with unofficial referendums on Sikh statehood and with protests that at times have seemed to glorify violence. A parade in Canada last year included a float depicting Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and Khalistan supporters have stormed and defaced Indian diplomatic facilities in Western cities.

The effort has seemed to gain little traction beyond a minority within the diaspora communit

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metamatar · 7 months

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(btw NYT's anti china hysteria is getting journalists in india arrested)

In August 2023, The New York Times published a story “A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul”. The story investigated whether Chinese funding was being funnelled to advocacy and media organisations across the world to defend the internal authoritarianism of the Chinese state. One of the countries included was India, with a fleeting reference to an Indian digital news organisation NewsClick, which the report said “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points”.

The report did not suggest that the organisation had committed any crime – let alone sedition or terrorism against the Indian state. But on October 3, the police in Delhi swooped down on the homes of 46 people connected to NewsClick – journalists, staffers, contributors, including academics, historians, satirists – seizing their phones and laptops, subjecting them to hours of questioning, largely about their coverage of protests by farmers and by Muslim women. NewsClick’s founder and editor-in-chief Prabir Purakayastha and the head of the human resources department Amit Chakraborty were arrested under the draconian anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

When asked about the police action, anonymous government officials invoked the New York Times article. Indian TV channels – nearly all of which are propaganda channels for the Modi regime – used the NYT story to frame the issue as a question of whether “press freedom” should be respected at the cost of “national sovereignty”.

[...] The NYT story has become a pretext to escalate an ongoing campaign to persecute and imprison some of India’s most courageous journalists, academics and activists on baseless charges of abetting “Maoist terrorism”. [...] NYT’s failure to separate specific issues of financial impropriety, propaganda, and political opinion from each other, I feared, would endanger the courageous work of journalists associated with NewsClick: for example, investigations into the financial scandals involving Gautam Adani, the tycoon who is known to be a close associate of the Indian Prime Minister. [...] The story had mentioned several media platforms (a YouTube channel in the US for instance) without identifying these by name, but had chosen to name NewsClick. It had cherry-picked an inoffensive and rather lame line from a NewsClick video and presented this as evidence of pro-China propaganda: “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes.” I pointed out that this is a simple statement of opinion, and cannot be construed as Chinese government propaganda.

Left-wing softness on China or Russia might harm Uyghurs or Ukrainians, and the political health of the Left itself, but this was hardly a problem for the Modi regime.

#india

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homosexuhauls · 11 months

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By Vidya Krishnan

GOA, India — My niece was just 4 years old when she turned to my sister-in-law in a packed movie theater in Mumbai and asked about gang rape for the first time.

We were watching the latest Bollywood blockbuster about vigilante justice, nationalistic fervor and, of course, gang rape. Four male characters seized the hero’s sister and dragged her away. “Where are they taking Didi?” my niece asked, using the Hindi word for “elder sister.” It was dark, but I could still make out her tiny forehead, furrowed with concern.

Didi’s gang rape took place offscreen, but it didn’t need to be shown. As instinctively as a newborn fawn senses the mortal danger posed by a fox, little girls in India sense what men are capable of.

You may wonder, “Why take a 4-year-old to such a movie?” But there is no escaping India’s rape culture; sexual terrorism is treated as the norm. Society and government institutions often excuse and protect men from the consequences of their sexual violence. Women are blamed for being assaulted and are expected to sacrifice freedom and opportunity in exchange for personal safety. This culture contaminates public life — in movies and television; in bedrooms, where female sexual consent is unknown; in the locker room talk from which young boys learn the language of rape. India’s favorite profanities are about having sex with women without their consent.

It is the specific horror of gang rape that weighs most heavily on Indian women that I know. You may have heard of the many gruesome cases of women being gang-raped, disemboweled and left for dead. When an incident rises to national attention, the kettle of outrage boils over, and women sometimes stage protests, but it passes quickly. All Indian women are victims, each one traumatized, angry, betrayed, exhausted. Many of us think about gang rape more than we care to admit.

In 2011 a woman was raped every 20 minutes in India, according to government data. The pace quickened to about every 16 minutes by 2021, when more than 31,000 rapes were reported, a 20 percent increase from the previous year. In 2021, 2,200 gang rapes were reported to authorities.

But those grotesque numbers tell only part of the story: 77 percent of Indian women who have experienced physical or sexual violence never tell anyone, according to one study. Prosecutions are rare.

Indian men may face persecution because they are Muslims, Dalits (untouchables) or ethnic minorities or for daring to challenge the corrupt powers that be. Indian women suffer because they are women. Soldiers need to believe that war won’t kill them, that only bad luck will; Indian women need to believe the same about rape, to trust that we will come back to the barracks safe each night, to be able to function at all.

Reports of violence against women in India have risen steadily over the decades, with some researchers citing a growing willingness by victims to come forward. Each rape desensitizes and prepares society to accept the next one, the evil becoming banal.

Gang rape is used as a weapon, particularly against lower castes and Muslims. The first instance that women my age remember was in 1980, when Phoolan Devi, a lower-caste teenager who had fallen in with a criminal gang, said she was abducted and repeatedly raped by a group of upper-caste attackers. She later came back with members of her gang and they killed 22 mostly upper-caste men. It was a rare instance of a brutalized woman extracting revenge. Her rape might never have made headlines without that bloody retribution.

Ms. Devi threw a spotlight on caste apartheid. The suffering of Bilkis Bano — the defining gang rape survivor of my generation — highlighted the boiling hatred that Indian institutions under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, have for Muslim women.

In 2002 brutal violence between Hindus and Muslims swept through Gujarat State. Ms. Bano, then 19 and pregnant, was gang raped by an angry Hindu mob, which also killed 14 of her relatives, including her 3-year-old daughter. Critics accuse Mr. Modi — Gujarat’s top official at the time — of turning a blind eye to the riots. He has not lost an election since.

Ms. Bano’s life took a different trajectory. She repeatedly moved houses after the assault, for her family’s safety. Last August, 11 men who were sentenced to life in prison for raping her were released — on the recommendation of a review committee stacked with members of Mr. Modi’s ruling party. After they were freed, they were greeted with flower garlands by Hindu right-wingers.

The timing was suspicious: Gujarat was to hold important elections a few months later, and Mr. Modi’s party needed votes. A member of his party explained that the accused, as upper-caste Brahmins, had “good” values and did not belong in prison. Men know these rules. They wrote the rule book. What’s most terrifying is that releasing rapists could very well be a vote-getter.

After Ms. Bano, there was the young physiotherapy student who in 2012 was beaten and raped on a moving bus and penetrated with a metal rod that perforated her colon before her naked body was dumped on a busy road in New Delhi. She died of her injuries. Women protested for days, and even men took part, facing water cannons and tear gas. New anti-rape laws were framed. This time was different, we naïvely believed.

It wasn’t. In 2018 an 8-year-old Muslim girl was drugged and gang raped in a Hindu temple for days and then murdered. In 2020 a 19-year-old Dalit girl was gang-raped and later died of her injuries, her spinal cord broken.

The fear, particularly of gang rape, never fully leaves us. We go out in groups, cover ourselves, carry pepper spray and GPS tracking devices, avoid public spaces after sunset and remind ourselves to yell “fire,” not “help” if attacked. But we know that no amount of precaution will guarantee our safety.

I don’t understand gang rape. Is it some medieval desire to dominate and humiliate? Do these men, with little power over others, feeling inadequate and ordinary, need a rush of power for a few minutes?

What I do know is that other men share the blame, the countless brothers, fathers, sons, friends, neighbors and colleagues who have collectively created and sustain a system that exploits women. If women are afraid, it is because of these men. It is a protection racket of epic proportions.

I’m not asking merely for equality. I want retribution. Recompense. I want young girls to be taught about Ms. Bano and Ms. Devi. I want monuments built for them. But men just want us to forget. The release of Ms. Bano’s rapists was about male refusal to commemorate our trauma.

So we build monuments with words and our memories. We talk to one another about gang rape, keeping it at the center of our lives. We try to explain to our youngest, to start protecting them.

This is how the history of the defeated is recorded. That’s what it all boils down to: a fight between forgetting and remembering.

#rape culture #radical feminism #indian feminism #vidya krishnan #misogyny

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ltstrikesback · 18 days

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TLDR: Monkey Man was so beautiful and so much more than meets the eye.

Spoilers below/me being mildly pretentious:

As someone who has not gone to the movies to see anything other than queer films lately, my girlfriend got us tickets to Monkey Man. She practices jujutsu and likes John Wick and thought this movie would be similar.

I am a huge Dev Patel fan, though, when I saw the trailer before a viewing of Love Lies Bleeding, I figured I might not actually end up seeing it. I didn’t think I was the target audience. I also don’t love action heavy, guns blasting movies in theaters themselves because it’s a bit sensory overload for me. I felt myself make a mental note to watch it on streaming and already forgetting to do so. Flash forward to me and my partner in the theater and I was in awe.

This movie is about a small village who is violently forced off their land so the elite can build a factory. Dev Patel’s character—Kid—is a child the day the village is expelled. He witnesses his mother’s murder and years later seeks revenge on the man who killed her. When he fails to enact his revenge, he finds himself in a city wide man hunt, ending with him falling into a river, drowning. But he is saved! By a small community of hijra—trans women—who live in a temple nearby.

Walking into this movie I didn’t expect social commentary or politics. I anticipated a Rocky type movie, contained to the story of one individual’s hero’s journey. (People keep mentioning John Wick as a comparison. I just mentioned it in this very post but I haven’t actually seen it for the record.) Monkey Man is specifically not about one individual or one individual’s revenge. This was my takeaway. The message we see over and over is that there are things in this life bigger than ourselves. It is literally impossible to save yourself by yourself—you need community.

I’ll take a step back now to acknowledge that I am not sure how familiar everyone is with current politics in India. I myself have limited insight but have friends who are personally affected by the current climate. There is a strong wave towards Hindu nationalism under PM Modi. It’s yet another instance of what feels like the whole world turning to fascism. The movie uses real clips from real instances of social clashes to paint the landscape of this fictional city. Also, I was reading into the backstory and potential censorship of this film and learned the villain’s colors were originally orange, not red. A clear parallel to the current Hindu nationalism at hand. There are clips of crowds attacking trans people. There are boos at the mention of Muslims and Christians. There are scapegoats in this film that are intentionally pulled from real life.

Now to jump back in—I have to say I was completely moved by the entire sequence at the temple. The temple is dedicated to Ardhanarishvara—a god who is part woman and part man. The hijra community has found a home here, albeit on the outskirts of society. The leader tells Kid, “no one will come looking for you here.” Their status in society protects him in a serendipitous way. They are also the ones that nourish him and help him train for his next mission. Not only that, but we see this community smile, laugh, flirt, and fight. I loved the scene with Kid and the drummer, with the girls cat calling him from afar (same). It was so tender to see trans joy, even in mundanity, amidst persecution.

When Kid has self-actualized and essentially is Hanuman, the part monkey God the movie is named after, he takes on the political elites. There is a moment he is surrounded by bodyguards in this hotel sequence. He’s outnumbered and out comes our hijra fam to the rescue. They take down these men. And it is so fucking amazing. I mean, really, it’s so fucking amazing to see them fight for themselves, for each other and be the hero.

To wrap up, I also wanted to touch on the fight sequences’ production. I mentioned I don’t really like fight scenes because I get sensory overload but the music in this film resolved this issue for me. It wasn’t pure screams or gunshots. There was a really fun soundtrack that added a great twist to the film. Kind of reminds me when they break out electric guitars in Chinese historical dramas. Just another thing about this movie that really worked. At least for me personally.

Last thought—my take away is not necessarily to say “put Dev Patel in everything” which is happening in the online discourse. (There’s a weird opposite-of-cancel-culture thing that happens sometimes where audiences obsess and then forget about actors or artists. Idk.) Rather: let this man do whatever he wants. Give him your funding, give him your resources! He should not have to kill himself to tell his stories!

*Sigh* my heart has been so full since watch this. A huge shout out to Dev and his team.

#monkey man #dev patel #I could go on #but this is tumblr mobile

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year

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The section of the BBC film that the government of India has acted most outraged about was the revelation of an internal report commissioned by the British Foreign Office in April 2002, so far unseen by the public. The fact-finding report estimated that “at least 2,000” people had been murdered. It called the massacre a preplanned pogrom that bore “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”. It said reliable contacts had informed them that the police had been ordered to stand down. The report laid the blame squarely at Modi’s door. It was chilling to see the former, but obviously still cautious, British diplomat who was one of the investigators on the fact-finding mission choosing to remain anonymous, with his back to the camera.

[...]

Though The Modi Question was broadcast exclusively for a British audience, and limited to the UK, it was uploaded by viewers on YouTube and links were posted on Twitter. It lit up the internet. In India, students received warnings not to download and watch it. When they announced collective screenings in some university campuses, the electricity was switched off. In others, police arrived in riot gear to stop them watching. The government instructed YouTube and Twitter to delete all links and uploads. Those sterling defenders of free speech hurried to comply. Some of my Muslim friends were baffled. “Why does he want to ban it? The Gujarat massacre has always helped him. And we’re in an election year.”

#india #narendra modi #BJP #Hindutva #Gujarat massacre #The Modi Question

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bharatlivenewsmedia · 2 years

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I will work as small soldier under leadership of PM Modi, says Hardik Patel

I will work as small soldier under leadership of PM Modi, says Hardik Patel Gujarat Patidar leader Hardik Patel, who recently quit Congress, is all set to join the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday and said he will work as a “small soldier” to serve the nation under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “With the feelings of national interest, state interest, public interest and…

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#hardik #india #leadership #modi #news #patel #says #small #soldier #under #will #work

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mariacallous · 3 months

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In April 2018, I was invited by the American ambassador to a meeting at the embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The ambassador had assembled a group of nongovernmental organization (NGO) leaders in the field of disinformation to meet with a senior Trump administration official from the State Department. He asked us to describe the main narratives of Kremlin disinformation. As the director of a large international democracy organization, I highlighted Russia’s manipulation of gender and LGBTQ issues to sway Georgians away from the perceived “cultural decadence” of the European Union. The official’s frustration was palpable. His response, tinged with irritation, was telling: “Is that all you people can talk about? The gays?”

A year before, several international organizations partnered with Georgian parliamentarians on a gender equality assessment, supported by several government donors. This collaboration led to an internal conflict. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) wanted to scrub the original report, as it covered abortion, notably legal in Georgia, while the Swedish government and other stakeholders wanted the complete assessment. As a result, at the time of its release, two distinct reports had to be printed, one with references to abortion and one without.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump emerged victorious from last week’s New Hampshire primary and is likely to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. His closing statement in New Hampshire praised Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who embraces the oxymoronic term “illiberal democracy” while suppressing independent media, civil society, and courts. He has repeatedly emphasized the glory of strongmen like Orban. His foreign policy has been clear: stopping support for Ukraine, NATO, and our European allies.

But while there has been plenty of analysis of Trump’s America First impact on foreign policy and security, less covered is how it will also completely redefine foreign aid as well as the liberal democracy agenda. My experience with the first Trump administration as a senior leader in democracy organizations receiving funding from USAID provides some insight into the foreign-aid agenda of a second, but likely only scratches the surface of what is to come.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, established in 2022, offers a detailed roadmap for revamping USAID under Trump—one that will undermine, eliminate, and censor the critical work of thousands of people and organizations committed to building more just societies. The Heritage Foundation has been staffing and providing a pipeline of ideas to Republican administrations since President Ronald Reagan. Project 2025 is a plan to shape the next Republican administration, and its funders have close ties to Trump. The project’s objective is to replace “deep state” employees with conservative thought leaders to carry out an executive-driven agenda.

In the overview, the project articulates its goal to end what it calls USAID’s “divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.” A key component of the illiberal playbook is to attack gender and marginalized communities, an early warning sign of democratic backsliding. Illiberal strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, exploit traditional hierarchies to divide society and create pecking orders of power. Russia refused to sign, and Turkey withdrew from, the Istanbul Convention, a commitment to protect women from domestic violence. The Narendra Modi administration in India filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court against criminalizing marital rape, arguing it would destabilize marriage. Hungary and Poland lobbied to ban the term “gender equality” in international agreements and implemented anti-LGBTQ policies, including local municipalities adopting “LGBT-free” zones as part of a government-supported “Family Charter” in Poland.

As a first step, Trump’s USAID will “dismantle” all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which Project 2025 calls “discriminatory.” This mandate includes firing the chief diversity officer and all advisors and committees. In 2016, the Obama administration issued a DEI presidential memorandum to ensure USAID, among other agencies, had a diverse and representative workforce. Trump scaled back these efforts. On Jan. 20, 2021, Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that demanded that government agencies devise strategies to tackle DEI issues. Pursuant to this, USAID Administrator Samantha Power signed USAID’s DEI strategy on her first day in May 2021. Project 2025 would reverse this strategy, requiring USAID to “cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” which entails support for organizations overseas that work on these issues.

According to Project 2025, Trump’s new USAID will also eliminate the word “gender” full stop, arguing that “Democrat Administrations have nearly erased what females are.” This is bizarre, as I have decades of experience receiving USAID funding for numerous programs to advance women in political life and support women’s organizations. Working for democracy organizations across Asia and the former Soviet Union, I saw USAID provide critical support to expand women’s wings of political parties; recruit women election officials, observers, and administrators; train women’s advocacy and rights organizations; and build women’s committees in parliaments.

The Heritage Foundation report also accuses USAID of “outright bias against men,” an equally strange claim; in fact, gender realignment was needed and implemented. A Trump USAID will fire more than 180 gender advisors and points of contact, who work alongside USAID colleagues “to integrate gender and advance gender equality objectives in USAID’s work worldwide,” and scrub the words “gender,” “gender equality,” and “gender equity” from all documents. This would require a massive purge of decades of USAID materials and websites.

USAID has spent years incorporating gender into all aspects of its programming to ensure the agency addresses the needs of women, including unique development obstacles they face. Removing a gender lens would take us back in time to programming that often harmed women, inadvertently, by failing to analyze the varying effects of programming based on gender and power dynamics in different environments. To erase all of USAID’s tools, learning, and research on how to ensure best practice would have dangerous consequences. For example, when I worked for USAID in Cambodia in the 1990s, the agency supported micro-lending for small community projects, in which most of the loans went to women. This resulted in increased domestic violence, as men were angry about the financial imbalance in the home. Today, USAID has gender analysis and research on risk factors to mitigate against such outcomes.

Relatedly, a Trump USAID will make anti-choice “core” to its mission, removing all “references to ‘abortion,’ ‘reproductive health,’ and ‘sexual and reproductive rights.’” Project 2025’s blueprint singles out specific organizations and U.N. agencies to target and defund. Further, the president himself would have the ability to oversee programming directly: “Current law in the Foreign Assistance Act gives the President broad authority to set ‘such terms and conditions as he may determine’ on foreign assistance, which legally empowers the next conservative President to expand this pro-life policy.” Previous administrations have restricted funding to organizations that provide abortions (the “Mexico City Policy”), which resulted in an increase in maternal and child mortality and unsafe abortions—exactly what the policy claimed to want to prevent. In sub-Saharan Africa, data shows the policy increased abortions by defunding clinics that provided family-planning services. The first Trump administration expanded restrictions further, impacting speech and service delivery around the world.

A Trump USAID would not only stop funding local partner organizations that support gender, LGBTQ, and rights agendas but redirect that money to religious organizations. In fact, it would mandate training and indoctrination for all USAID staff on the link between religion and development. USAID would also ensure conservative oversight of all grantmaking to ensure against “progressive policies” and a “radical agenda.” USAID already engages with faith-based partnerships, alongside secular NGOs, but Project 2025 would like to shift the balance, creating a “New Partnership Initiative” that would help prioritize religious groups.

A stated “key outcome of the transformation of USAID” under Trump will be a complete revamp of the Bureau for Democracy, Development, and Innovation, shifting its focus to trade, the private sector, and religious communities, and purging staff. Importantly, all directors of each center—not just the assistant administrator—will have political leadership, not career experts. In addition, Trump’s USAID will rewrite all policy “as soon as possible” to ensure a conservative agenda.

During the first Trump administration, I felt the impact in my work overseas. I worked closely with the LGBTQ community in Georgia, which faced horrific obstacles—ostracization, violence, homelessness—and which was targeted relentlessly by Kremlin information operations. USAID has long been a defender of human rights and funded projects on these issues. There was a shift under Trump, though I applaud individual USAID employees for creatively trying to find workarounds and continue support—like slight renaming of initiatives or cleverly filing them under more favorable, broader categories like “human rights.” They no doubt prevented damaging cuts to our important work.

I am far more worried about the impact of a second administration. Back then, there was no concrete, detailed roadmap like Project 2025 and no massive replacement of foreign aid professionals with conservative political operatives. Under a second administration, under Schedule F, Trump has planned a sweeping political takeover of our civil service, stripping civil servants of protection, forcing them to implement his political policy agenda, and giving the president unilateral power to fire employees at will.

The organization I now work for, the German Marshall Fund, supports hundreds of civil society organizations across the Balkans, Black Sea region, Ukraine, and Central Europe—thanks to more than a decade of USAID support. USAID has encouraged our goals of promoting democracy; bolstering the rights of women, LGBTQ, and other marginalized communities; and deterring illiberalism through independent media, watchdog organizations, and information integrity efforts. We do this through grantmaking, capacity-building and technical assistance, leadership programs, and policy dialogues.

With democracy in global decline and illiberal strongmen on the rise, we need these efforts more than ever. Backsliding elsewhere affects democracy everywhere. America benefits from strong, free, liberal societies—it is in our national interest and key to our global security and order. While few voters go to the polls with foreign aid on their minds, the consequences for millions of people worldwide are on the ballot this November.

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ultfreakme · 3 months

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Freeing Palestine is India's fight

I've seen lots of posts about how Western countries and their populations should be concerned for stopping the genocide in Palestine but Indians are involved in this as well.

India has a HUGE Islamophobia problem, from the day India became what it is, this country exists the way it does through conflict regarding religious majorities and it is a problem we must acknowledge.

Collective punishment has often been carried out indiscriminately against Muslims in India- Muslim people's houses in Madhya Pradesh have been demolished without warning. This has also happened in Uttar Pradesh and in 2023, Haryana(300 businesses and homes). These were all normal innocent civilians who had proper legal paperwork showing their purchase and ownership of their home and land, but the police did not care. In many of these instances the police stood by and were involved in demolition and all of these were under BJP-majority and ruled areas. The recent Ram Mandir was built on the demolished land of Babri Masjid(it was built in the 14th century before India as it was even a THING, its destruction & demolition on the claim that it was Ram's birth place is unfair). Hate crimes against Muslims run amok and there are multiple cases of violence against Muslims in India.

PM Modi of the BJP party has been consistent in maintaining positive relations with Benjamin Netanyahu and the occupying force of Israel. A majority of the military equipment for India comes from Israel, and India has constantly been neutral in UN council meetings when decisions regarding Israel are brought up. A spyware called Pegasus, developed by the occupying force of Israel was used to surveil politicians, journalists, activists etc severely breaching right to privacy and threatening freedom of speech.

Worse; India has been using the Israeli strategy of colonizing Palestine with Kashmir. Jammu & Kashmir is a union territory which basically means they are allowed to function independently on most fronts but India has been seeking to integrate J&K into itself and has been extremely hostile to its Muslim citizens and are currently intensifying their occupation efforts. There have been consistent internet and communication blackouts since 2018 and it is STILL ongoing.

India invited Israeli officials to Kashmir to open 'Centers of Excellence' which are supposedly for agricultural innovation but everyone in J&K are concerned and see it as India taking an opportunity to intensify its occupation with Israeli help.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, several Kashmiris told Middle East Eye the Israeli agriculture hubs would deepen India's occupation in the region and accelerate its settler-colonial project. "Earlier, we would draw the parallels between Kashmir and Palestine or India's intimate alliance with Israel. But now they are bringing Israel to the Valley in the form of these institutions - which will be "agro-oriented" in name - but we all know that Israel will physically help India in Kashmir to turn it into a proper Palestine," a Kashmiri academic based in Istanbul told Middle East Eye.

In 2016 Coalition of Civil Society said there are more than 8000 'disappearances' of people in J&K. There are mass graves with over 2000 bodies being found with these unlawful activities being attributed to the Indian Security Forces. That's just scratching the surface of decades of violence and human rights violations enacted by India.

BJP is not shy about its ties to the RSS and promotes Hindutva(I've seen people citing the literal meaning of the word as evidence that it is harmless but the word is a label given to an embraced by extreme right-wing groups who are open about their Islamaphobia. Meaning of the word becomes pointless when actions speak otherwise).

India is an occupying force on J&K, it's suppressing Muslims, demonizing them and further marginalizing them in the name of 'Hinduism'. It buys from Israel and endorses them. As Indians, it is key that we do whatever we can to stop the genocide because we are unwittingly being used to fuel this and are being radicalized to hate on our neighbors, the people we share our land and history with.

Even outside of the ways in which the current government is shamelessly supporting Israel, India's history is rife with colonization. The British had occupied us, forced us into fighting each other, into prioritizing meaningless differences to suppress each other. We were once starved by occupying forces, violated, killed. Our land is also covered in blood shed by colonization.

What are we doing if we don't speak up? If we don't stop this? Do not follow the propaganda conflating extreme right-wing ideologies with the identity of being Indian. Don't buy into the idea that India is "for Hindus", we are so ridiculously diverse, there are 100s of languages and religions in this country.

Free Jammu & Kashmir, free Palestine, stop Islamophobia.

#palestine #free gaza #desiblr #desi tumblr #gaza strip #free palestine #islamphobia #I have no special patriotism for my country but if that's the identity i'm forced into i'm going to stand up for Palestine #I am aware that Kashmiri Hindus have also experienced multiple hate crimes and were forced out and it had been classified as ethnic cleansi #but the fact that happened should only fuel you more to STOP the occupation & violence against muslims in J&K #absolutely nothing justifies genocide- nothing

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