In Mexico, over 116,000 people are registered as missing, many due to violence linked to the war on drugs. In the absence of timely support from the authorities, relatives of the missing are forced to create their own missing person posters, which serve as vital tools to mobilize local communities and gain leads, though they come with risks, such as extortion by criminals. With thousands of disappearances unresolved, unofficial, family-led searches for missing individuals continue, highlighting a broken system and the desperate need for more effective responses to the crisis. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Mexico In Mexico, over 116,000 people are registered as missing, many due to violence linked to the war on drugs. In the absence of timely support from the authorities, relatives of the missing are forced to create their own missing person posters, which serve as vital tools to mobilize local communities and gain leads, though they come with risks, such as extortion by criminals. With thousands of disappearances unresolved, unofficial, family-led searches for missing individuals continue, highlighting a broken system and the desperate need for more effective responses to the crisis. Soumya Dhulekar, Untitled (2024). Digital collage. The Faces of Mexico's Disappeared On the afternoon of July 19, 2023, Abraham Flores and his wife, Beatriz Cárdenas, celebrated their daughter’s first birthday with a rainbow cake and a small family gathering at Flores’s parents’ house in northern Mexico. Around 10:30 pm, Flores dropped Cárdenas and their child off at their home. Flores, a 32-year-old ride-hailing driver, then went to pick up a passenger outside of the application. He assured his family he would be back soon. At 12:30 am, Cárdenas, 28 years old, warned her husband via WhatsApp about a shooting that had occurred a few blocks from their home in the municipality of Santa Catarina, Nuevo León. Flores didn’t respond. She messaged him an hour later and then fell asleep. Early in the morning, she tried to contact him once more and saw that his last connection was at 4:15 am. Since then, Cárdenas has been searching for him. “Hours passed. It was 5 p.m. and I couldn’t take it anymore. I went straight to my in-laws, and they said, ‘Maybe he went out with friends.’ But I knew it wasn’t normal,” Cárdenas asserted. “He could go out drinking or with friends, but he would always come back. I mean, he always came back. And now, he hasn’t.” Across Mexico, there are over 116,000 people officially registered as missing or disappeared, primarily since 2006 when the government launched the “war on drugs” and began militarizing the streets as part of its strategy. Families of the disappeared have united in search collectives , often risking their safety and facing numerous obstacles such as a lack of resources and information, physical threats, and a slow, negligent response from authorities. The missing person poster has emerged as a vital and accessible tool during the crucial early days of a disappearance, though it has its limitations. All images courtesy of the author (2024). Since the General Law on the Forced Disappearance of Persons was approved in 2017–following the intensive work and advocacy of families of the disappeared–the National Search Commission, the General Prosecutor’s Office, and their state counterparts have been responsible for investigating disappearances. However, the implementation of the law has been hampered by a lack of political will from authorities and insufficient human and material resources. The law mandates immediate searches, but authorities often refuse to file reports in the initial hours, despite the increased likelihood of finding a person alive during this critical period. Without a filed report, the official missing person poster, known as “ficha de búsqueda” (search form), cannot be issued. May-ek Querales, an anthropologist with the Social and Forensic Anthropology Research Group (GIASF) , explained that issuing a missing person poster also means that an investigation is officially opened. "Therefore it [authorities] will always have it on its agenda and will not stop looking for your loved one, in theory. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case,” Querales added. Despite official protocols, authorities told Cárdenas that they needed to wait at least 24 hours before filing a disappearance report. Many families are forced to create their own posters and distribute them through personal networks, such as WhatsApp chats, Facebook neighborhood groups, and word-of-mouth, in order to initiate the search for their missing loved ones. María de la Luz López Castruita, who has been searching for her daughter Irma Claribel since 2008 in the northern state of Coahuila, highlights the importance of the poster as an accessible search tool for families, but also as a communication tool to engage with society and ask for help. “It's a huge support for us because we think if more people spread it, the more likely it is that it will reach people who have seen our loved ones,” she said. Despite the limitations that the poster may encounter in its circulation, it can also become a valuable emotional object for families experiencing the pain and uncertainty of a disappearance for the first time. Faced with the overwhelming prospect of beginning the search for a loved one in a country with thousands upon thousands of missing people, the poster can be the first step that a family member takes to proactively search without depending on the authorities. “It also has a symbolic function so that people do not go crazy in the process of not having an answer from their loved one,” Querales said. In the initial hours after her husband’s disappearance, Cárdenas felt she couldn’t wait any longer. She created a missing person poster in Word, using a photo from their daughter’s birthday celebration. “It was literally the photo we had taken of him that night,” explained Cárdenas. “It was that photo, with red letters saying ‘MISSING,’ a description of what he looked like, what he was wearing…exactly as he appears in the photo is what he was wearing [at the time he disappeared].” The lack of immediate institutional support often makes families more vulnerable. Cárdenas used her personal phone number in that initial poster she created herself, a common practice among families hoping that a relative’s number will ensure more attention to any leads via incoming calls. Querales warned that this can put families at risk of extortion by organized crime , who are always looking for opportunities to profit. Cárdenas and her in-laws were extorted for about $600 dollars. “In their desperation, when someone tells them that they have information about their loved one, families are often overwhelmed and begin to share personal information that can include transferring money,” Querales said. “The non-institutional missing person poster has that risk because you do not have a phone, separate from your personal ties, that can provide you with protection.” Disappearances in Mexico are perpetrated by various actors with diverse motivations. Mónica Meltis, founder of Data Cívica , an organization using data to support victims of human rights violations, explained that Mexico had a history of enforced disappearances from the 1960s to the 1980s —a period known as the ‘Dirty War’ — primarily used to target political dissidents . While enforced disappearances perpetrated by state agents have not ceased, various actors, mainly linked to organized crime , now carry out disappearances, often with the complicity of, or permission from, state agents. “Forced disappearance continues to exist, although in reality it is now more complex because there is not only disappearance by the State, but now something called ‘disappearance by individuals’,” Meltis added. Starting the Search It was not until three days after Flores’s disappearance that the official missing person poster began to circulate. Despite how recently the photograph used in the poster was taken, the Nuevo León Search Commission made two mistakes in the details. They incorrectly stated that Flores was wearing a white hat (it was black) and black pants (they were blue jeans). To date, the commission has only corrected the color of the pants. Often, families do not have a recent or updated photo, and sometimes the shock of the events they are experiencing causes memory lapses. It becomes difficult to remember the physical features of their loved one, their particularities, or the details of the clothes they were wearing. This cannot only take a great emotional toll on them, but can also make the search much harder. López, who also leads “ Voz que Claman Justicia ,” one of hundreds of search collectives led by families of the disappeared, said she has seen this frustration in family members who are unable to remember. That’s why she often suggests being accompanied by someone close when filing the report. “We often make the mistake of giving incorrect information because of the pain that it brings. It is a lot of pain,” she said. In many of these cases, having a distinctive feature that truly differentiates the person can be a significant advantage when filing a report. López explains how tattoos, for example, can help to further individualize the person, or even make visual identification easier if a body is found. “When there are scars or tattoos, it’s easier. [Previously] I used to be critical when someone got a tattoo, but now I say how important it is to have one. That way, when bodies are found, they can identify them easily. Or, not only bodies, but homeless people too,” López said. “When I see my compañeras immediately looking for the tattoo, it leaves me feeling helpless because my [missing] daughter didn’t have any.” Families, mostly mothers, lead local search groups and offer guidance about the steps to follow after a disappearance as institutions often don’t provide necessary information, or fail to coordinate or collaborate with other authorities. “If someone disappears, the recommendation is to look for the collectives. They are the ones who will truly help you search, not the State,” said Meltis. Séverine Durin, an anthropologist and researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) , explained that families often find a lack of coordination among the institutions officially responsible for supporting them, which can be confusing and make the search process much more exhausting. If there is evidence that the person could have disappeared in a different state than the one in which they reside, it can be even more complicated. Frustrated by the inefficiency of the authorities and their slow response, Cárdenas decided to join a collective of families of the disappeared in Nuevo León a month after her husband went missing. “To see the inefficiency of the authorities, and then experience the advice, support, or guidance [the families] give you,” Cárdenas said. “It's such a different experience to be with them.” After a disappearance, most families go from government institution to government institution without finding any answers, impacting their job security or livelihood. Beyond sharing the pain of not knowing the whereabouts of a loved one, Durin explained that collectives of families offer mutual support, and are able to exert stronger pressure on authorities than a single person. “Definitely, they [collectives] will support you and you are going to be able to put pressure on the institutions to fulfill their duty of searching,” Durin added. "They can create search plans and agreements and obtain resources and security [for the searches].” Victims’ families primarily conduct two types of searches. One, where the search efforts are focused on finding their loved ones alive, involves roaming the streets, hospitals, prisons, and other such locations where someone under peril may find themselves. Although authorities must always act under the principle of presumption of life as mandated by the general law on disappearances, in practice authorities often suggest that the person might be dead, directing relatives to the Forensic Medical Service. This often revictimizes family members already contending with the trauma of losing a loved one in this manner. On the other hand, visits to the Forensic Medical Service have become increasingly important due to the country’s backlog of unidentified remains. "When the report is filed, the institutions immediately orient the search toward death,” explained Querales. “In other words, they talk about a field search, but in reality, it is already assumed that the person who disappeared has lost their life… the authorities themselves thus rule out the activation of immediate search protocols.” The other type of search involves hundreds of victims’ collectives combing through fields, hills, deserts, and vacant lots across the country to search for human remains, often in clandestine graves. According to local prosecutors, between 2006 and June 2023, 4,565 clandestine graves were identified, as reported by the Citizen Platform for Graves, a database created by Data Cívica and other organizations. At least 6,253 human bodies and 4,662 fragments were found during this period. Family members of the disappeared have learned about forensics to identify soil types, smells, and the proper care of human remains. They mobilize to obtain more detailed information for the missing person poster, and then circulate it to receive tips. They then start their own investigations, following the trail, and often putting their well-being at risk, to find any indication of clandestine burials. “They search in the mountains, or in other areas where they have information that there could be missing people,” explained Durin. “It’s difficult to understand for relatives of missing people, but it is important to find them, regardless of whether they are alive or not.” López, who focuses on both types of searches, emphasized the importance of sustaining searches under the presumption of life. While the official discourse often links disappearances to organized crime, the vast majority of cases suggest a complex web of factors, including militarization, corruption, impunity, and other forms of violence that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. The search brigades that López carries out along with other families have found people who were reported as missing, incarcerated under a different name, or on the streets dealing with substance abuse. “We know that the searches of clandestine graves are there, and we cannot keep piling up so many remains and so many bodies. We know that there are many missing persons alive who want to be found, but nobody looks for them alive,” said López. “If we have seen that kind of search yields results, why not do it?” Information gap and Added Pressure on Families More than a year after her husband’s disappearance, Cárdenas still has no answers. At one point, authorities told her they had already identified two suspects but lacked enough evidence for an arrest. While balancing work and being a single parent to her now two-year-old daughter, Cárdenas also makes frequent efforts to review her case. Although the investigation is the duty of the prosecutors, families are often obliged to find the information on their own and deliver it to authorities in charge of the case. In most cases, if families do not provide the information, the authorities neglect the case. Being part of a collective helps, as there’s constant collective pressure to review the cases of all group members or pursue search actions. Additionally, authorities often warn families against making their case public, claiming it could jeopardize the investigation. However, in effect, this is likely to prevent any progress in the investigation. In fact, this tactic incites even more fear in families. Authorities also often suggest not publishing the search form or discussing the cases on social media or in the media. This is not in fact meant to aid the victim, but a method of subterfuge to downplay the growing numbers of disappearances. Although Cárdenas saw the poster she created immediately being shared on social media and in her group chats, she said that one of the challenges she encountered was social indifference. “The truth is, myself included, we don't really pay attention to other people's faces, you know? That's why I don't see much of a case for making a poster. In other words, people don’t take the time to observe the people around them,” Cárdenas said. While many families mobilize across Mexico and put up posters in public spaces, over 116,000 people remain missing. Querales explained that the collectives organize awareness brigades in different parts of the country, filling the streets or central plazas with missing person posters. However, the sheer number of posters can be overwhelming for people transiting through these public spaces. “Confronted with so many faces, how many people really stop to pay attention to those individualizing features?” Querales asked. “How are they to determine that perhaps that young boy in a street situation that they saw on the corner, or that person they crossed paths with on the metro, or someone who they ran into on any street, could be a face on a search poster?” Every day, new search posters are added to those already circulating in public and digital spaces as resistance against the state’s insistence on silence. The faces of Mexico’s disappeared are exposed over and over again in every place [that] families can access, defying government efforts to downplay the crisis. Families struggling in the wake of disappearances use the posters not only to mobilize the search, but also as daily reminders that their struggle will continue until all their loved ones are found. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Mexico Missing Person Disappearance Extortion Criminality Government Safety War on drugs Militarism Negligence General Law on the Forced Disappearances of Persons Forced Disappearance National Search Commission Political Will Search and Rescue Emergency Response Human Security Anthropology Social and Forensic Anthropology Research Group GIASF Missing Person Poster Social Media WhatsApp Facebook Community Collective Accessibility Vulnerable Populations Protection Data Civica Dirty War Political Dissidents Organized Crime Disappeared by individuals Nuevo Leon Search Commission Misinformation Missing Information Voz que Claman Justicia Memory Local search groups Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology CIESAS Institutional Forgetfulness Citizen Platform for Graves Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 31st Jan 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Israeli aggression in Gaza has led to a ripple effect on Iraqi politics. The past year’s growth in proxy aggression between Iran and the US has unearthed sentiments in Iraq critical of both powers. Amidst the increasing influence of Iran-backed political and military forces in the region, citizens express heightened aversion to American policies. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Iraq Israeli aggression in Gaza has led to a ripple effect on Iraqi politics. The past year’s growth in proxy aggression between Iran and the US has unearthed sentiments in Iraq critical of both powers. Amidst the increasing influence of Iran-backed political and military forces in the region, citizens express heightened aversion to American policies. Dia al-Azzawi Jenin (2002) Acrylic on paper Occupation and Osmosis In May 2024, a homemade bomb was lobbed into a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant in Baghdad. The next day, masked men stormed another KFC, trashing the American fast-food chain due to its perceived support for Israel. For months before this, mortars targeted the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, and American troops in the region faced over 160 attacks following October 7, 2023. And since that same date, over hundreds of miles of Iraqi roadways, enormous billboards have been erected featuring U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu splattered with blood. They are captioned: “Desecrators of Allah’s People.” In Iraq, disdain for anything associated with the U.S. is not new. But from recent attacks on Baghdad’s KFCs to the U.S. embassy, a new motivating factor seems to have emerged: the situation in the Gaza Strip , which has exacerbated tensions and changed regional dynamics. Gaza is hundreds of miles from Baghdad, but thanks to the war’s atrocities made visible by the internet, many Iraqis are outraged ; at the Israeli government for committing them, but also at the U.S. government for arming and funding them. “The Gaza war is having a significant impact on Iraqi politics,” says Lahib Higel, the Crisis Group’s Senior Analyst for Iraq. Higel notes that before Israel's war on Gaza, there had been a year-long truce during which Iran-backed militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), agreed to stop attacking U.S. bases in Iraq to support the stabilization of the newly established Iraqi government. However, the truce was broken because of America's unconditional support for Israel, which led to a series of militia attacks against the U.S. military across Iraq. “The Gaza war was the ignition [of the attacks]. But these Iran-backed groups also used the escalation to revive the pressure on the Iraqi government to expedite a withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.” Experts like Higel argue that the tiny Gaza Strip has become geopolitical tannerite. After a rocket attack against the American embassy earlier this year, a PMF leader issued a statement claiming that his militias wouldn’t stop as long as “Zionist crimes continue in Gaza and the American occupation continues in Iraq.” “My grandfather hated Iran. My father hates America. I hate them both,” says Ali, our 21-year-old Iraqi taxi driver, as he races down Route Irish at breakneck speed. Route Irish is the notorious road connecting Baghdad International Airport with the city, a route once laced with crude explosives and infested with heavily-armed insurgents waiting to ambush coalition forces. But today it’s mostly quiet—except for Ali’s rickety cab, which blares Iraqi rap while he scrolls through TikTok. “There’s a lot of talk these days about Iran or America and which country Iraq will align itself with,” he explains. “I really don’t want either. America wants our oil and resources, and Iran just wants us as a puppet. I say fuck them both. We Iraqis want to build this country for us . Not for the Iranians or the Americans. But then again, if I had to choose, I would choose Iran. The Americans destroyed my country, and now they’re helping Netanyahu destroy Palestine.” It is dusk, and the sun slips away beneath the murky brown haze hanging over downtown Baghdad. “See those? Get used to them. They’re everywhere,” Ali points out the dozens of murals and billboards along Route Irish depicting solemn portraits of Iranian military officer Qasem Soleimani, assassinated right there on Route Irish by a 2020 Donald Trump-issued drone strike, captioned, “The Blood of Our Martyrs Will Not Be Forgotten.” “Iran and America both want control over my country,” Ali glances at another Soleimani mural outside the cab, “but Iran already has it.” The most obvious example of Iranian influence are the many armed Shia militias, backed by Tehran, which roam Iraq under the umbrella of PMF. Furious over U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, the PMF has responded with a litany of attacks against the Americans. However, when Iran ordered the PMF to disengage, the militias obeyed. According to Slovenian International Relations expert Dr. Primož Šterbenc, this is largely because Iran isn’t interested in a wider war with Israel and the U.S., thus explaining why it ordered the PMF to stand down—for now. Nonetheless, despite hesitation on the part of the Biden administration amidst hawkish cries for retaliation against Iran, the U.S. Navy is deploying warships to deter Iran in case of war. Šterbenc argues that, when it comes to the scenario of wider conflict between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, “the Iraqi Shia militias themselves are aware…they would end up being militarily greatly weakened. However, the situation will still remain unstable as long as Israel's ultra-brutal military operation against Gaza continues, because the Iraqi militias will want to show their solidarity with Gaza through military actions.” Earlier this month Iran fired 200 ballistic missiles toward Israel. And since then, Iran-linked militias in Iraq have been ramping up action against Israel as well, springing roughly 40 attacks — consisting of an assortment of missiles, drones and rockets — in the past two weeks. Iran's influence, Šterbenc explains, has been very visible in recent months through Tehran’s ability to curb attacks by Shia militias on American targets in Iraq. On January 28 this year, when a Kata’ib Hezbollah drone—a militia part of the PMF— killed three American soldiers at the Tower 22 base in Jordan, Ismail Al Kani, the commander of Iran's Al Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, quickly arrived in Baghdad and pressured Kataib Hezbollah to announce a suspension of its attacks on American targets. The PMF didn’t officially exist before 2014, back when it was nothing more than a ragtag umbrella group of various Shia militias. It was not particularly organized, nor very influential. Then came the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which began seizing huge chunks of land it was declaring as part of its new Islamic caliphate. The Obama administration was reluctant to get tangled up in Iraq so soon after it had withdrawn all American troops in 2011. As officials deliberated in Washington, and after ISIS seized the city of Mosul, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa , calling for Iraqis to join together, take up arms and fight ISIS to save their country. Shia militias united to wage war against the Sunni jihadists, and thus, the PMF was formed. “I thought ISIS would take Baghdad,” says Sawada al-Nassif, a Baghdad resident and mother of four. “I was telling my husband we should leave the country, go to Jordan. But then the PMF started fighting ISIS and won back our country.” From The Land of [Sad] Oranges, 1973, by Dia al-Azzawi, inspired by the works of Ghassan Kanafani Today, the PMF is an auxiliary to the official Iraqi military; its fighters are paid equal salaries and benefits to military personnel and it is widely considered Iraq’s second army. Now, the PMF is also a leading political force after winning 101 out of 285 provincial seats in Iraq’s December 2023 elections. Because Sunnis are minorities in Iraq, and as the predominantly Shia PMF gain a stronger foothold in Iraqi politics, some Sunnis aren’t too happy. “Under Saddam (Hussein), we Sunnis at least held more political power than (Shias),” said Omar al-Dulaimi, a Sunni resident of Fallujah. “Now we are losing influence in government while still being the minority. I don’t like it.” With ISIS now driven into dormancy, the PMF is focused on its political aspirations. Among those is to see the expulsion of U.S. troops from Iraq. The American military has lingered in Iraq since ISIS roared back to life in 2014—and it remains at the invitation of the government in Baghdad. Higel states that the Gaza war has not developed in Washington's favor in Iraq, however, putting tremendous pressure on the government from the PMF to end the American presence in Baghdad. Experts, including Higel, agree that the PMF operates as an extension of the Iraqi state. In 2016, the government designated the PMF as an ‘independent military formation' within the Iraqi armed forces. For Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, it's a political tightrope act: balancing his government's relations with the United States, and the PMF, some of whose militias have been designated as terrorist groups by the U.S.A. “You’re American,” says Ahmed, an Iraqi friend of mine, as we sipped tea on Baghdad’s crowded Mutanabbi Street. “I know you’re American. You know you’re American. Nobody else should know you’re American.” Ahmed quietly advised me to keep my nationality under wraps. But why? Because of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003? Ahmed said no. “Your country has kept Israel’s genocide alive,” he said. “Normal people here won’t hold that against you specifically. But the militias outside Baghdad, well, it’s possible they might.” Ahmed also reminded me that ISIS had launched several small attacks in the last week, and outside Baghdad, I may be at a higher risk. But when myself and my European colleague, at a PMF-run checkpoint outside Baghdad, encounter one of these militias ourselves, things go differently than how Ahmed had prophesied. “You are American?” asks a bearded PMF militant with an assault rifle, as he studies the passport I hand him through a cab window. I nod and admit that I am. He looks me up and down, before asking if I work for the government. No, I answer. “Good,” he nods. “I don’t like your government.” In the Iraqi city of Najaf, a local scholar, Rajab al-Hasen, stands on the side of the road and explains the recently-erected signage. One image features an expressionless face of President Biden, flecked with fake blood, peering down at rubble-strewn Gaza. About twenty meters down the road from that sign is another one, featuring not Biden, but Netanyahu. “This sort of imagery and messaging is all over Iraq, from north to south,” al-Hasen explains. “None of it was here before Israel began its genocide in Gaza. That war has really changed things around here.” Even at the height of Iraq’s civil war and its bloody sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis over a decade ago, a shared disdain for Israeli politics remained a uniting belief. “We are familiar with war and occupation,” says activist Naseera el-Sham. “Iraqis can empathize with Syrians, Yemenis, Afghans, but most of all Palestinians.” Iraqi society’s aversion to Israel is not a belief inherited from Iran. In 1948, 1967 and again in 1973, Iraq partook in wars against Israel. Even after the 2003 regime change which ousted Saddam Hussein from power, Iraq’s official position on the state of Israel didn’t change. Natalia Reinharz, an Israeli lecturer on foreign policy based in Jerusalem, says that Gaza hasn’t shifted what has been Iraq’s mainstream position on Israel. What it has done, she argues, has given Iran an in. “The United States has stubbornly stood by Netanyahu’s side for a year of barbaric war,” Reinharz says. “Not only will the war hurt Israel in the long term, but it's a critical foreign policy mistake from the Biden administration.” “If Washington wanted to retain influence not just in Iraq, but within the Arab and Muslim states, it would have reined Netanyahu in by now. But they haven’t, and that has made Arab states more open to exploring alliances to nations other than the U.S.” Meanwhile, the U.S. presidential election casts a long shadow. Iranian historian Kazem Ershadi echoes Reinharz’ sentiment, and adds that “a lot will depend on whether the U.S. and Iran will continue to negotiate behind the scenes with the help of Oman. Iran would need to agree to limiting its uranium enrichment, and the U.S. would need to relax economic sanctions against Iran. In other words, it may be possible for the U.S. and Iran to find a balance in Iraq, but not very likely against the backdrop of Gaza.” From The Land of [Sad] Oranges, 1973, by Dia al-Azzawi, inspired by the works of Ghassan Kanafani But common ground between the U.S. and Iran seems like a pipe dream, especially now. Gaza has been a rubble-strewn warzone for over a year, Israel has invaded Lebanon, and tension with Iran has, again, crescendoed so much that whispers of an all-out regional war permeate every conversation regarding the Middle East. Israel keeps on erasing previous red lines, barreling closer to a reality that consists of bombs raining down in Tehran, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to pour billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry into Israel. Netanyahu – Israel’s longest-serving prime minister – is well-aware that U.S. support won’t wane, and so he keeps his foot on the gas. He also understands that the U.S., while busy with an election, will not resort to any measure drastic enough to force his hand. (Israel attacked Lebanon, and it did so without first getting approval from the country that underwrites most of its national security, the United States). “The timing of Israel invading Lebanon is, at the very least, curious,” Reinharz says. “Biden is clearly an ultra-Zionist who will not, no matter what, rein Israel in. But I still think that, despite this, Netanyahu and his far-right government would prefer Donald Trump in the Oval Office. I think he timed this escalation with the U.S. election for a reason.” Reinharz argues that a Trump administration would greenlight virtually any course of action Netanyahu wants to take, however radical, including the official annexation of the West Bank. “Trump’s campaign is partially bankrolled by (Miriam) Adelson, a Zionist billionaire who has donated millions to Trump. She’s helping Trump fund his campaign because she wants Israel to have the West Bank, without a Palestinian Authority or any peace accords. And she knows Trump would let that happen.” Reinharz and I first met in Jordan. We were sipping tea on a rooftop in Amman, listening to the day’s final call to prayer echo through the city. She took a long, slow drag of her cigarette, then predicted, with unnerving accuracy, what is happening now. “You watch,” she told me, her voice dripping with cynicism. “Netanyahu would rather have Trump than Biden. I bet he will escalate the war in the fall, when the polls are tight. Netanyahu will make it messy, and he will make sure the average American voter knows it's messy over here. That way blame is cast on Biden, and Trump can position himself as the anti-war, solution-bearing candidate. It’s what Netanyahu wants—Trump. Watch. You’ll see.” Dr. Šterbenc added that a Trump victory in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections could “change everything.” That’s because Trump would likely govern in the interests of Israel, like Biden does now and like Trump did as president, while pressuring Iran even more. After May 2018, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA—also known as the Iran nuclear deal—and began his “maximum pressure” policy towards Iran. Trump crippled the Iranian economy after slapping over 1,500 sanctions on banking, oil exports and shipping, and assassinated Soleimani in 2020, who was in Baghdad fighting ISIS at the time. “Trump could greatly increase tensions and consequently convince the Iranian authorities that they must develop nuclear weapons,” Šterbenc said. “Trump ripped up Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, so this is more possible than ever. This would then be exploited by Israel with accusations against Iran, escalating the possibility of full-blown regional war.” Mustafa al-Tamimi sits on a blanket with his wife, Fatima, and their three children on the banks of the Tigris. It is a warm, breezy Friday evening in May, and the young family is one of many who have gathered along the river for a communal celebration. I ask Mustafa what they are celebrating. “We are celebrating life,” he says as though it were obvious. “In Iraq, we know death, and so we appreciate life while it's still here.” Mustafa and his family aren’t particularly religious, but still identify with Islam’s core tenants. “Islam teaches us to love people, whoever they are. So, for me, I love the Palestinians. I also love the Israelis, the Americans, and, of course,” he smiles at his wife, “I love Iraqis.” Mustafa’s opinion is in the minority, he thinks. “The world doesn’t think the way I do. Look at Palestine. Look at Gaza. Let me ask this: if Gaza were in France, the U.S. or Israel, and instead of Palestinians in Gaza, it were French, Americans or Israelis, then do you think the bombs would still be falling? Would children be starving to death? No. The war would be over.” He tears up, though only momentarily, while we discuss Gaza. “They are saying Iran is gaining strong influence over Iraq, much more influence than the Americans,” he said. “I think this is true. It seems like the reality I am seeing every day. And so what if it is? At least Iran isn’t in on the genocide.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Iraq Baghdad Iran Palestine Gaza Warfare Human Rights Violations Shia Popular Mobilization Forces Zionist Zionism Israel USA Martyr Imperialism Militias Sunni Shia/Sunni Conflict Occupation Military Occupation Neo-colonialism War on Terror Axis of Resistance Najaf Religious Conflict Necropolitics Colonization New Middle East Middle East Middle East Geopolitics Globalization Colonialism Conflict Complicity Islamism Modernization Postcolonialism War On Iraq Militarism Collaborationism Discourses of War War Crimes Islamophobia Geopolitics US Imperialism United States Iran Nuclear Deal Soleimani PMF ISIS Obama Administration Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani Jordan JCPOA Genocide Foreign Policy Settler Colonialism Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 26th Oct 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Today's youngest Kenyans helmed the country's recent anti-tax protests: from creating a Finance Bill GPT, to organizing on X Space, to turning smartphones back into walkie talkies, their technology savvy helped facilitate a mass mobilization with a strength that President Ruto could demonize, but not deny. · THE VERTICAL Dispatch · Nairobi Today's youngest Kenyans helmed the country's recent anti-tax protests: from creating a Finance Bill GPT, to organizing on X Space, to turning smartphones back into walkie talkies, their technology savvy helped facilitate a mass mobilization with a strength that President Ruto could demonize, but not deny. Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga, Macakaya – Lamentations (2013-16). Painting on work-hardened builder's paper, sheet metal. Revolution X In June 2024, a video of Shadrack Kiprono getting forcefully pushed inside a white car outside an establishment in South B, Nairobi caused an uproar on the Kenyan internet. It was the first time people had visual evidence that vocal people in the #RejectFinanceBill anti-tax protests were being abducted. The abduction happened moments after Austin Omondi, a medic and a vocal X user who had been abducted at a makeshift medical space that catered to injuries from the protests, was released. These two activists were not the first to go missing. On June 22nd, an X (formerly Twitter) Space titled “Good Morning Kenya: Where is Crazy Nairobian?” ran for more than 7 hours and garnered more than 1.2 million listeners. It was held to find another outspoken protestor popular on the social media platform, Billy Simani , who had been abducted from his house in the dead of the night. It was becoming a common occurrence for young Kenyans to tweet “They have come for me,” their abductions a clear fear tactic wielded by the state to tame the burgeoning anti-tax protests. It was only midmorning on the 25th of June, but the sun was already unforgiving in Nakuru, a metropolitan city northwest of Nairobi, Kenya. However, the heat did not seem to deter the thousands of protesters who were marching along the main street, bearing placards, twigs, whistles, vuvuzelas - virtually anything that would amplify their core message: #RejectFinanceBill2024. These protests, mostly made up of people under the age of 35, were being replicated across almost all major cities in the country. The movement had snowballed to such a degree that it was being labeled "The Mother of All Protests", and it was being helped by Kenyan Gen-Z. Shikoh Kihika is the Executive Director at Tribeless Youth, a local organization that works with creatives and young activists to imagine a better future for Kenya. She notes that these protests have been different from those held in the past. “The protests are not led by any civil society [organization], political party, or [established] activist. They are people-led, they are impromptu and they happen everywhere.” These protests did not mark the first time the Kenyans have marched against harsh economic policies. A year ago in 2023, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga led anti-government protests against the 2023 Finance Bill . This year though, the movement took an interesting turn. The Root of the Protests Beginning online, in late February 2024, on platforms such as X, TikTok, and Instagram, there was a public outcry in reaction to the 2024 Finance Bill . This bill was supposed to be the first in a series of tax reforms aimed at improving the economic state of the nation. The now scrapped bill included several items, including: Introducing the Eco Levy, a tax measure that would affect a selection of imported goods that could potentially harm the environment. This included a wide range of products, from sanitary goods and diapers, to electronic devices and much more An increase in the road maintenance levy from Ksh 18 to KSh 25 per liter of fuel An introduction of a 5% or 15% withholding tax on infrastructure bonds and sales made from digital marketplaces Scrapping of the minimum Ksh 24,000 threshold for services rendered by a resident, which would mean taxing minimum wage Introducing a 16% VAT on basic goods such as cooking oil and bread Amendment of the Data Act to allow the Kenya Revenue Authority to access the financial information of any Kenyan national without a court order The goal of the bill was to increase the tax-to-GDP ratio from the current 13.5% to 20% by 2025. Aware that achieving this increased target was going to be a hard strain on their lives, citizens escalated their outcry from digital spaces to the streets. Courtesy of Gregory Ochieng. A Technolution Technology has been the heartbeat of this revolution, evident in the way social media and artificial intelligence have been used on different fronts. The first and most powerful tool has been the use of social media. Spaces and conference call features on X have been vital in mobilizing people for town hall discussions around civic education and dialogue. On this platform, the movement drew participants on a scale unlike anything seen before. Citizen-run X spaces amassed well over a million listeners. People urged President Ruto to engage with them in this digital space. When he finally hosted space , it had over 6.7 million listeners. On these X Spaces, citizens asked their leaders tough and bold questions regarding the economic state of the country, extrajudicial killings, abductions, and other issues ailing the nation. Instagrammers used graphics to spread the word about protests. TikTok users conducted their own citizen journalism to cover the nationwide protests, giving the world a first-class seat to Kenya’s impassioned streets. Once discussions filtered downstream to counties, towns, and smaller communities, WhatsApp took center stage as the preferred method of communication. Through groups and communities, people were able to organize meeting points, map out marching routes, organize water and medical supplies, and provide updates. Enter the AI Cavalry Artificial Intelligence, specifically Open AI's ChatGPT software was used by ordinary people to create the Finance Bill GPT , a resource tool that broke down the finance bill and its implications. Another GPT on tracking corruption helped Kenyans track accountability for the people in or about to be elected to power. Using the Chatbot, people could get highly technical information broken down into understandable bite-size pieces. One of the most disruptive digital tools was a communication app, Zello , that turned phones into walkie-talkies. Zello was also used to give live updates on the protests. By turning a phone into a walkie-talkie, the protesters were able to keep up live communications without the hassle of getting personal numbers, texting, or having to log in to an app. According to Patrick Kinyua, founder of Nakuru TV and an avid user of the app, within two days of its mention on X, the app saw a surge of new users tallying in the thousands. “Through Zello, people would tune in to get updates on road closures, sightings of anti-riot police, police bowsers, and to talk about their experiences.” During the second reading of the finance bill, Kenyans took to openly doxxing their respective members of parliament in a bid to get them to vote no on the bill. In a move they cheekily termed ‘salimia’ (greeting), constituents sent thousands of calls and texts to the cell phone numbers of members of parliament, urging them to ‘greet’ them. The MPs acknowledged that they were receiving these calls and texts and pleaded with the public that they had heard their concerns. However, a few days later, the bill sailed through. The situation became dire after the bill passed. Protestors hit the streets, breaching the parliament, and setting part of it ablaze. At the county level, protestors attempted to enter local state houses and county assemblies. Events turned deadly as at least 23 people across the country lost their lives. The president could not ignore the problem and was forced to act by declining to sign the bill into law. However, this was not before he issued a statement terming the protests as "treasonous events" orchestrated by "dangerous criminals." This only served to fuel the public’s anger, who had taken to the streets to demand accountability from their leaders. Leveraging technology did not stop with the street protests alone. In the aftermath, crowdfunding using a platform known as M-Changa raised over Ksh 30 million. The money was used to assist in the burials of those who had died and help those who had been injured during the protests. In addition, an online database was set up to keep track of all persons missing since the beginning of the protests. Courtesy of Gregory Ochieng. A Middle Ground? Since the June 25th protests, President Ruto has attempted to address the concerns raised during that time in various ways. Apart from not signing the bill, he held a roundtable where journalists Linus Kaikai, Erick Latiff, and Joe Ageyo had a conversation on the state of the nation with regard to the Finance Bill. However, this event became a PR crisis, as the president made several problematic statements, including doubling down on his previous claim that the protestors were treasonous. "They went straight for the armory and mausoleum, indicating they were organized criminals," Ruto said. He also attempted to do a virtual town hall on X , but Kenyans asked tough questions on abductions and extrajudicial killings that he was unable to answer satisfactorily. The grim discovery of bodies in Kware following the anti-tax protests in Kenya has intensified concerns about the use of force during demonstrations. It has sparked outrage among citizens and human rights organizations, who have been calling for thorough investigations into the circumstances surrounding the deaths. The discovery has further fueled tensions between protesters and law enforcement, raising serious questions about crowd control tactics and the protection of civil liberties during periods of civil unrest. There have been growing demands for accountability and urgent calls for a re-evaluation of how authorities respond to public demonstrations. The fervor in the streets is yet to subside, and the underlying issues that sparked the unrest remain largely unresolved. The Kenyan government faces the challenge of addressing citizens' concerns about the high cost of living and alleged corruption while also maintaining stability. The resilience and democratic spirit of the Kenyan people has been on full display, and all eyes are now on the nation's leaders and how they will respond to this clear call for change. The coming months will be crucial in determining whether the Gen Z-led revolution will result in any meaningful reforms or if the cycle of discontent will continue. One thing stands out: digital tools and technology have emerged as powerful tools for democracy, shaping Kenya’s political landscape in unexpected and deeply impactful ways. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Dispatch Nairobi Kenya X Social Media Artificial Intelligence AI Finance Bill Chat GPT Zello Protest Twitter Salimia M-Changa Gen-Z Tribeless Youth 2024 Finance Bill Eco Levy RejectFinanceBill2024 Police Brutality Youth Protest Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 15th Oct 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In 2020, New Delhi’s National Museum Institute was relocated to NOIDA’s industrial outskirts and renamed the Indian Institute of Heritage. Once ideal for the study of history amidst the city’s rich heritage, this institutional shift reflects a larger trend since the rise of the Modi government in 2014, where historical studies have been politicised, censored, and shaped by majoritarian ideologies. As textbooks are altered and dissent silenced, the institute’s move from heritage-rich Delhi to a modern, industrial zone exemplifies how urban development and academia are increasingly intertwined with political agendas, raising questions about the future of historical study. · FEATURES Essay · Delhi In 2020, New Delhi’s National Museum Institute was relocated to NOIDA’s industrial outskirts and renamed the Indian Institute of Heritage. Once ideal for the study of history amidst the city’s rich heritage, this institutional shift reflects a larger trend since the rise of the Modi government in 2014, where historical studies have been politicised, censored, and shaped by majoritarian ideologies. As textbooks are altered and dissent silenced, the institute’s move from heritage-rich Delhi to a modern, industrial zone exemplifies how urban development and academia are increasingly intertwined with political agendas, raising questions about the future of historical study. Prithi Khalique, Corroded Chromas (2025). 3d rendering and collage, 720 x 1080px. The Changing Landscape of Heritage I’m on the outskirts of NOIDA, a planned city in New Delhi’s National Capital Region, and I’m lost. The uncharacteristically bright April sun is beating down on me, Google maps keeps rerouting, and it looks like I chose the wrong day to wear heels. Around me are wide, solitary roads, farmland, roaming cattle, and jarring glass office buildings that appear out of place in this landscape. After half an hour's worth of directions from the Noida Electronic City metro station , I finally reach the Indian Institute of Heritage. A majestic stone structure, this arts building is a welcome sight in the midst of engineering colleges, multinational corporations’ headquarters, and bank offices. The institute’s relocation is proof that New Delhi’s culture has trickled outwards to NOIDA. Proof that even as new urban spaces are produced, they will eventually house at least one arts campus. The journey all the way from New Delhi, however, has been a slog. Till a few years ago, the campus was more centrally located in Janpath, a neighbourhood in Lutyens’ Delhi, making it much more accessible for city folk. Named after British architect Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944), this geographical area boasts a concentration of India’s political elite: it comprises the 1927 Rashtrapati Bhawan, government offices, dignitaries’ residences, and even India’s National Museum. Outside the museum’s gates lie the National Archives, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and the old & new Parliament Houses—to name a few. Altogether, these institutions are arguably the most venerated cultural institutions in the country and have greatly influenced the study and practice of Indian history. Until 2021, the Indian Institute of Heritage (IIH) was housed right inside the National Museum . Originally called the National Museum Institute, it was an ideal place for the study of history because of its location in the heart of the historically significant capital; it cultivated rich, lifelong careers in history since its inception in 1989 . An entire ecosystem of archival studies was nurtured because of its accessible address. Theorists could connect with real life historians and conservation students learnt from the museum’s technical staff. Students were by default the first visitors to museum exhibitions: they had to walk through its galleries every day to get to class. This daily interaction with objects of historical import made their educational experience unique and holistic, enhancing the quality of the technical courses taught there. All of this changed in 2021, when the institute was separated from the National Museum and moved to Sector 62, NOIDA. Earlier, the students at the IIH lived in Delhi, an ancient, storied city whose earliest recorded histories date back to the 8th century AD. In comparison, NOIDA is practically infantile. Short for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority , the city came into administrative existence on 17 April 1976 in the National Capital Region (NCR) . This took place during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency term—a state of governance that authorised the prime minister to rule by decree. During this twenty-one-month period, all civil liberties were halted, elections were paused, Gandhi’s opponents were imprisoned, and the press was censored. In the midst of this political turmoil and inter-communal tension, NOIDA was established in the mythologically-rich region of Braj in Uttar Pradesh. Built primarily for industrial growth, infrastructural development in NOIDA began in 1976, while citizens in the rest of the country were victim to mass-sterilisation, censorship, judicial control, and deteriorating constitutional rights. Over the next fifty years, the city kept growing. Today, it houses frontrunners in tech, pharma, finance, and, most recently, full-fledged universities. Studying history is often an afterthought to the people developing modern Indian urban landscapes. NOIDA is no exception. Cities are first built on capital and industry, followed by hospitals and residences, schools and banks, and then gradually, they house libraries, archives, and museums. While NOIDA is a new city and home to many polluting industries, it also has a budding arts education ecosystem with colleges like Shiv Nadar University , Galgotias University , and Gautam Buddha University . The brand-new Indian Institute of Heritage is an addition to NOIDA’s growing miscellany of urban institutions, many of which are an afterthought in this primarily industrial land. As I walk through the expansive lands of NOIDA, I am forced to question why the National Museum Institute was moved out here? Does “place” matter for the study of history? National Museum in Janpath (2024). Image courtesy of the author. Relocation & Rebranding Today, the National Museum Institute has officially become the Indian Institute of Heritage. Sudeshna Guha , Faculty at Shiv Nadar University’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences, spoke to me about the relocation of the campus, and the role of the politics of space and place in India’s long relationship with its National Museum. She posited that while the initial move, with its merging of the Archaeological Survey of India and the National Museum of India, was about space, the two institutions’ combined clout has now allowed the government to peddle a very specific version of Indian history. “Politics comes in when the ASI and NMI join hands, and decide to teach the kind of Indian history they do. Earlier, the Institute of Archaeology would regularly get professors from Deccan College, Pune, and MSU , Baroda, to teach specialised courses in archaeology which the latter has developed. But now the focus is on heritage studies, and they are establishing through the courses Hindutva histories—the innately Hindu heritage of pre-colonial India.” For decades, the National Museum Institute was connected to New Delhi’s progressive academic ecosystem, its student resistance movements, and the city’s active participation in national social issues. Moving NMI to Delhi’s outskirts happened at the same time as the renaming, as well as the altering of the types of history taught there. Creating a new university outside of New Delhi’s congestion may have been an inevitable symptom of urban development. It's hard to ignore, however, the ways the IIH’s relocation has created hindrances in students' access to educational resources. While students still venture beyond the campus on field trips and guest lecturers are invited to the new campus, the question remains: what happens to the study of the old when it’s forced into a place so sterile, so clinically new? Relocation is not the only change that has taken place since 2021. Rebranding is an extensive process, and the National Museum Institute has been rechristened as the nebulous “Indian Institute of Heritage.” As Dr Guha pointed out: “What they teach are technical courses. But what the heck will a heritage school do? Heritage doesn’t exist out there; it’s something that is created.” Wouldn’t it be better, she asked, if the institution could reflect on the practice of heritage-making? “The National Museum has shut its doors to researchers and the [IIH] students are not taught the importance of both historiography and materiality, which inform the many histories of a particular phenomenon, and of the many histories of a collection and an object. So how can they advance knowledge about the collections of the Museum or enhance collections management protocols? Besides, the curatorial lapses in the Museum are glaring to the visitors. Look at the displays. The object labels show the lack of research catalogues and databases.” Guha’s questions are fundamental; after all, if a technical school does not question historicity, then it will have detrimental effects on maintaining collections, databases, research catalogues, and deciding displays. Contentment and Complacency in the National Museum’s Institutions Seeking answers to the changes that the school has undergone, I met with administrative and faculty members of the National Museum & Indian Institute of Heritage. BR Mani, the Museum’s director general and vice chancellor of the Indian Institute of Heritage, welcomed me to an online and in-person interview. He spoke with me at length about the campus relocation, saying, “Anyone would admire the new campus as it provides better infrastructure and study facilities.” IIH is now giving out diplomas through the Institute of Archaeology and Bhopal’s Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya museum. Apart from this, the university has also co-opted programs with the IGNCA and National Archives, among others, and is planning to connect the academic wings of various institutions to the IIH. Development is what the museum’s admin wants to focus on, and not the imminent possibility of demolition. When asked about the National Museum’s rumoured demolition , BR Mani spoke about the upcoming Yug Yugeen Bharat Museum . “The Yug Yugeen Bharat museum is bound to be the biggest one in Asia yet, ” he said. “With 950 rooms, all of the best artefacts from this building will be shifted there. There is work undertaken to build a North Block and South Block for the National Museum, and this present building might continue to remain if not demolished.” With all of these positive changes, I asked him why the institution needed rebranding. “IIH is one overarching umbrella. Courses should be regulated by one authority. It is possible that in the future, with some act of parliament, it could be a full-fledged university. Professionally, I feel happy in finding better space and infrastructure at NOIDA, which was not there in the National Museum.” Manvi Seth echoed a similar sentiment during my interview with her. Dr Seth has been affiliated with the institute, as both a student and a faculty member, since 1997. She is currently the head of the Department of Museology at the Indian Institute of Heritage. When I asked her why the word “heritage” was chosen to represent the institution, she said “...it is all encompassing. For instance, when you say culture, you mean only natural heritage. Heritage is the only all-encompassing word.” Being “all-encompassing” also gives the IIH power over an “all-encompassing” national history. When I visited the Noida campus, I met with some numismatics & conservation students. One art history student candidly told me, “Noida is disgusting, and there are only some other institutes and office buildings around. It’s completely deserted. There’s no reason to leave the campus because, well, there’s nothing here. Also, the National Museum library is better than the one here, but we have to travel one and a half hours just to borrow a book.” Other students focus on the positives: larger conservation labs, exciting heritage field trips, and the school’s reputed name. Some even go as far as likening the IIH to the IITs and IIMs of India. One student told me, “We talk about how the Indian Institute of Heritage will keep growing, and hopefully become like the IITs and IIMs of India.” The Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management are galaxies of their own, orbiting modern India’s dreams of national progress and development. Highly coveted by most of India’s population, these competitive technical schools have campuses all over the country, offering students an incomparable asset: respect. Attempting to create a similar ethos for the IIH, however, is jarring. It seems as though students and administration alike are prioritising optics first and education second. Perhaps that is why questioning historicity becomes secondary to being part of a consolidated, proud, national endeavour. The latter is a pressing priority and very often controls the kind of history we study and the narratives we wish to follow. This student’s ambitious hope mirrored Dr BR Mani’s response to my question regarding the institute’s relocation, “There were positives and negatives to the situation as the Institute was not getting expanded and remained in a confined location” they said. “Now, it has its own infrastructure and entity to expand and coordinate with other departments of the Ministry of Culture.” It’s ironic that connection and expansion is reliant on a place surrounded by barren land, bank headquarters, and only one metro station in sight. All other departments of the Ministry of Culture are still in Lutyens Delhi. Controversies around History, Culture, Heritage, and Urban Development Lutyens Delhi, where the National Museum resides, is where the heart of India’s cultural pulse thrives. Studying there is ideal for students of art, history, heritage, and culture—unlike the corporate glass and concrete buildings that are peppered around NOIDA. One alum of the erstwhile NMI, art historian and scholar Gaurav Kumar told me, “The location of the National Museum Institute within the National Museum itself and amidst the vibrant art scene of Janpath was highly impactful during my time as a student. As an art student, it provided easy access to numerous important institutions such as the Triveni Kala Sangam cultural centre , AIFACS Gallery ( All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society ), National Gallery of Modern Art , and more, enriching my learning experience through exposure to diverse artistic expressions.” He went on, “Additionally, being near cultural landmarks, like the 100-year old India Gate, 16th century Purana Qila, and Lodhi Gardens, further enhanced the immersive environment for exploration and study.” Analysing the Indian Institute of Heritage’s displacement and development is an indication of how selective a national history can be. It’s important to recognise that this has occurred against the larger, terrifying backdrop of Hindutva nationalism —a political ideology that prides in Hindu histories while erasing other religious narratives. Union Culture Minister G Kishan Reddy wrote in parliament that “the [IIH] will be a “world-class university” that will focus on the conservation and research in India's rich tangible heritage, while offering research, development and dissemination of knowledge, excellence in the education of its students and activities associated with heritage that contribute to the cultural, scientific, and economic life of India.” But what about our shameful past and present, and all that is not tangible and glorious? According to historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, “heritage means acknowledging both our ‘successes’ and our ‘failures.’” This acknowledgement is lacking in Minister Reddy’s statement. Any acknowledgement of “failures” in our history is being shunned, as the Indian government increases their monopoly over historical records. In 2015, the Murty Classical Library, which features English translations of some of the greatest works of Indian literature, was the victim of Hindutva censorship . American scholar Sheldon Pollock was forcefully ousted from the MCL after he signed two statements condemning government action against Delhi University’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, and senior editorial members were dismissed as well. Elsewhere in the country, Amritsar’s Jallianwalla Bagh was entirely remodelled . In 1919, British General Dwyer mercilessly massacred 1,000 Indians there, and since then, it has stood as a symbol of India’s independence struggle. Recently, however, the government covered up century-old bullet holes and injected the site with cosmetic changes, turning it into a tasteless exhibition of honour. Its walls have been replaced with scriptures and the “martyr’s well” has been enclosed with a glass shield. What was once a chilling experience of walking through those narrow, bullet-ridden corridors, has now been replaced with an amusement park-like journey that tells you a history instead of allowing you to experience it for yourself. Back in New Delhi, it seems like the BJP-run government is rushing to rewrite India’s story with the Central Vista redevelopment project . Launched in 2019, the project is well underway. The government is revamping the Central Vista, India's central administrative area located near Raisina Hill, New Delhi. Their reason is “ to house all facilities needed for efficient functioning of the Government ”. This project involves hollowing out or demolishing the current National Museum and moving its collections to the Rashtrapati Bhavan’s North and South Blocks. The upcoming Yug Yugeen Bharat will be the “largest museum in Asia,” as Prime Minister Modi declared during the G20 event in New Delhi. Astha Rajvanshi wrote for TIME Magazine about the new parliament, “the whole project—which began in the middle of a brutal second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021—has been met with widespread criticism for its cost, environmental damage, and disregard for heritage buildings.” Prem Chandavarkar addressed the effects of these changes for The Wire , “The redevelopment removes public institutions that sustain culture and heritage from the Central Vista, replacing them with government offices and facilities… Many citizens have expressed anguish over how the spatial heart of our democracy is being transformed from a public landscape energised by cultural institutions to become a space dominated by the visual spectacle of governmental bureaucracy.” Even the National Archives was to be demolished until a furore erupted against breaking down Grade-I heritage structures. Now the plan has been modified to break down only the annexe, with no clear reason as to why. Chandavarkar explained concerns regarding having the old parliament’s North and South Blocks co-opt the current National Museum. First, official records state that these plots of land are still termed as “Government Use”, while they need to be deemed as “Public/Semi-Public”—the basic requirement for a citizen’s museum. Second, no feasibility study was conducted to figure out whether the two blocks are workable sites for a national museum. Third, this location’s proximity to the Prime Minister’s Office and the Vice-President’s Residence implies that security audits are needed, especially if it will be open to the public. No such study has surfaced to date. Rashtrapati Bhavan’s North & South Blocks. Source: A Pravin, Wikimedia Commons. The IIH has been displaced to the city's outskirts, away from the country's social and political milieu, amidst a time of unprecedented censorship and a wilful subversion of history and heritage. While the Indian Institute of Heritage’s faculty members assured me that they have never faced pressure from the Ministry of Culture or any member of parliament to teach a particular history, throughout the country, history is being weaponised to bring another term of Hindutva regime to power. How can a historical institution not address this development? Given the current cultural milieu, any museum that does not explicitly reject the ongoing oppression of minorities, is implicitly adding to it. The Trickle Down Effect Inside the National Museum, displays of ancient sculptures are poorly exhibited, insufficiently labelled, and even found in the building’s basement and parking lot areas—unlikely spaces of conservation. While the National Museum suffers, Modi’s Hindutva-led government has promised to create an “ international museum ” at the newly consecrated Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. This will include “new-age technology like kinetic art, holograms, animatronics, and augmented artificial reality to provide a live experience of the Ramayana and the Ram Temple movement,” Sreeparna Chakrabarty told The Hindu . The Ram Mandir Museum project reinforces the right-wing, Hindutva narrative that we all come from one singular religion and history. Built on the desecrated Babri Masjid, the Ram Mandir site has been long contested between Hindus and Muslims . Faded labelling in the National Museum (2024). Image courtesy of the author. Other historical suppressions have been witnessed around the country as well. When an ancient civilisation (dating back to the 6th century BCE) called Keezhadi was discovered in Tamil Nadu, it was covered widely in the press. Ten years on, news of that archaeological site is missing from mainstream media. Sowmiya Ashok believes this to be a consequence of the fact that the Keezhadi discovery disproves the right-wing, nationalist notion that Vedic culture is fundamental to the origins of Indian civilisation. Keezhadi’s excavations point to early signs of language and the possibility of a Dravidian origin story for Indians. Ashok notes that “in popular media, the findings are likely to be reduced to the question of whether the Keeladi people were more like Aryans, the protagonists of Vedic civilisation, or Dravidians, the forebears of Tamil culture.” Last year, news broke that the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbooks have now erased all traces of Mughal history in India. Even though Mughal histories are now obliterated, subaltern and Dalit histories have never even been part of the discourse. Vidhi Doshi explains how Indian Dalits are sidelined from academia, and have resorted to archiving their own community’s history, “[Vijay Surwade’s] collection includes everything from documents and photos to Ambedkar's broken spectacles and dentures, all housed in shoe boxes and concertina files in Surwade's apartment in the western city of Kalyan, about 45 km northeast of Mumbai. It is among a number of informal archives collected by ordinary Dalit people who say their stories otherwise risk being lost, undermining their cultures and the fight against caste-based discrimination.” Grand buildings and palaces are being turned into proud markers of our heritage; light and sound shows will create carnivals out of them. There are other ways, however, in which we honour our living history. A derivative of heritage is inheritance—passed down generation after generation. Preserving History, Defining Heritage I think about the histories I have inherited on my walk back to the metro station from the IIH Noida campus at 2 pm. I cannot wait to curl up in an air-conditioned train back to New Delhi and stroll around Janpath. My patience is rewarded. In Lutyens Delhi, I am surrounded by overwhelming history—stone structures, Mughal architecture, multiple languages, with gardens everywhere. Inside the National Museum, an open verandah and cafe become a picnic spot for families, couples, and even stray dogs. Today is Eid, and people have come in their best attire, sharing meals and spending the day together. We bask in this glorious heritage until the time we will all return to our decidedly less glorious lives once these gates close. If heritage comprises parts of the past that continue to live on to this day, then my heritage is everything that I experience once I am outside these institutions. The miserable heat, the stares from men, the station-side chole bhature , the broken, Brahmin Tamil I speak with my family, and the accented Hindi I employ in North India. All that seems intangible yet integrated into everyday life: food, language, patriarchy, and casteism. It is a messy, flawed heritage, one that stands proof of violence and oppression. It is also the heritage that we do not see inside these institutions. It is not covered at the Indian Institute of Heritage. As I step into the older, less affluent neighbourhoods of Chandni Chowk and Nizamuddin Dargah, I see people in ancient, crumbling buildings, eating and working and praying in structures that are on the verge of collapse. My immediate thought is an urban, privileged one: why can’t these buildings be cosmetically preserved? Of course, the fear of turning into what Jallianwalla Bagh’s remodelling became—a tasteless performance of honour more concerned with vanity than the Indian freedom struggle—is always lurking at the horizon of heritage conservation projects. But these buildings do not carry the traumatic weight that Jalliwanwalla Bagh does; they could be architectural representations of our everyday heritage. Dr Mrinalini Saha reminds me, however, that “one person’s heritage is another person’s livelihood. Delhi is littered with ancient monuments. Preserving them, sprucing them up is one thing, but it also means dislocating the people who live there.” Tangible history is complicated, maybe just existing amidst ruins is a sufficient act of conservation. I meander between New Delhi’s Outer Ring Road and Inner Ring Road in a crackling autorickshaw, passing through parts of the Red Fort that was built by Shah Jahan in 1639. Living heritage. When I met Dr Manvi Seth, she gave me a handful of books and pamphlets published by the Indian Institute of Heritage. A teacher’s handbook to History, Museum Goes to Hospital , Gandhi Hai Sabke Liye ( Gandhi is for Everyone ), Museum Safari for Lucknow’s State Museum etc. The institution’s efforts to spread historical awareness are impressive, yet, I cannot help but see this for the sanitised narrative that it is. Where are the Dalit histories, the tribal histories, the feminist histories? And what about the academic strain that argues that Gandhi is in fact not for everybody? Books and pamphlets published by the Indian Institute of Heritage (2024). Image courtesy of the author. In Old Delhi, I travel past dug-up roads and sewage, a reminder of how caste is ubiquitous even in big cities. Most manual scavengers and construction workers come from disenfranchised castes and communities and make up a major part of India’s migrant workers. Later in the evening, I go through Vasant Vihar in South Delhi which houses the infamous “Coolie Camp” slum, which was hidden behind giant green curtains while India hosted the G20 . Is this failure of our nation-state not part of our heritage? Dr Chakrabarty said it perfectly, “It is when you feel insecure about your past that you produce a one-sided version of it. To present the past as a site of disputation takes a greater sense of security about one’s own collective sense of self. But if you think this representation will threaten the sovereignty of the nation, then representing the past becomes a matter of either/or choices. It’s either Shivaji or Aurangzeb, Ram Mandir or Babri Masjid.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Delhi India Heritage Culture History Disappearance Nationalism Hindu Extremism Displacement Education Erasure Infrastructure Isolation Edwin Lutyens State Government Narrative National Archives Museum India National Museum Institutional Forgetfulness Indian Institute of Heritage National Museum Institute Archive Archival Studies NOIDA Ancient History Mughal Dalit Tamil Dravidian Indira Gandhi Uttar Pradesh Interethnic Conflict Internally Displaced Persons Intercommunal tension Industrial Deterioration Censorship Constitution Urban Development Urbanization Development Shiv Nadar University Galgotias University Gautam Buddha University Relocation Rebranding Branding Sudeshna Guha Archaeological Survey of India Archaeology Hindutva Pre-colonial Resistance Movement Visitor Researcher Idolatry 11th century BR Mani Demolition temple demolition Asia South Asia Manvi Seth Department of Museology Numismatics Conservation Preservation Gaurav Kumar Art Historian Art History Janpath AIFACS Gallery India Gate 16th Century Lodhi Gardens Union Culture G Kishan Reddy Parliament Murty Classical Library Sheldon Pollock Jawaharlal Nehru University Amritsar Jallianwalla Bagh General Dwyer 20th Century Massacre Independence Martyr Martyrdom Central Vista Raisina Hall Rashtrapati Bhavan North and South Yug Yugeen Bharat G20 Astha Rajvanshi TIME Magazine COVID-19 Pandemic environmental hazard Prem Chandavarkar The Wire Democracy Bureaucracy Government Use Public Space Outskirts Ram Temple Ram Mandir Museum Sreeparna Chakrabarty The Hindu Babri Masjid 6th Century BCE Keezhadi Tamil Nadu Sowmiya Ashok Right Wing Vedic Aryans Vidhi Doshi Vijay Surwade Kalyan Mumbai Anti-Caste Caste-based inheritance Chandni Chowk Nizamuddin Dargah Mrinalini Saha Outer Ring Road Inner Ring Road Red Fort Shah Jahan 17th Century Disenfranchisement Migrant Laborers Vasant Vihar Coolie Camp Sovereignty Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 13th Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Zara’s poem moves through the swagger, danger, and bruised glamour of urban Pakistan to show that being both woman and legend can make you a spectacle, a liability, and a survivor all at once. · BOOKS & ARTS Poetry · Lahore Zara’s poem moves through the swagger, danger, and bruised glamour of urban Pakistan to show that being both woman and legend can make you a spectacle, a liability, and a survivor all at once. Untitled (2025), digital illustration, courtesy of Mahnoor Azeem. To be Woman and Hip in Dunya I learned how to be hip from girls who sat at dhabas – It was 2018; I was nothing and no one, And shudh desi leftism was still a dream the kids had. I waded through the decay of urban Pakistan - The waterless boat basin - In my white platform boots. I was not the only girl who figured out life so. This is the manifesto of hip woman Who ate the apple, and risked jihad Baadalon se giri, bijli ki tarhan Bazaar-e-aam main — afwah uthi Ye kesi mystical saazish hai! Issey dewaar main chunwa diya jaye Jahanpana! Shehenshah: My only weapon is my poetry. When your soldiers visit the marketplace Encroachment notice and batons in hand I see them at the gate, While in the midst of my dance — I am not a dancer so I entertain children. Meanwhile, jesters, poets, and ustads Grace the King’s colony! For my own safety, I am not invited. Hip woman is: She’s got the law cowered Her gait relaxed, magnificent night suit chic Fists up, she raises a new independence slogan: Yeh jo dehshatgardi hai, Isske peeche wardi hai. How everything is metaphor! Last Friday, when I dressed up as girl I bruised myself to win a race Now, it hurts to be teased and caressed Waisay masoom banti hun magar pata hai mujhey — Hot boys are dangerous to me This is not the first time I have hurt myself so. To be woman and hip: Is to be okay not being woman at all, To be unafraid of androgyny Allow yourself all the ugly of humanity I am maila like my city. Meri shalwar key paainchon per Meri mitti ka daagh hai: The beggar’s pleading, My daddy’s corruption Let the truth slap the princess out of me For to not be woman and hip Is to be dream deferred, girl interrupted. Aik naya pollution metric propose karti hun: Khwabon ki kirchian kitnay gigaton carbon emit karti hain? When they make a liar out of a girl, I want you to kill me as tribute. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Lahore Karachi Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 24th Oct 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. For decades, rural Peru has relied on journalists, human rights advocates, and indigenous organizers for protection from crossfire between state and vigilante militants that has weakened the region and enabled the growth of illicit trade activity. As indigenous Peruvians defend their land from exploitation and chemical damage in the service of the coca leaf industry, the government’s neglect of these native leaders’ efforts has led to their systemic and routine killing. Photograph courtesy of Tania Wamani. Police repression against Andean Indigenous Quechua-speaking women from Puno occurred in the capital city, Lima, during the demonstration for justice for the civilian victims killed by the police during the protests in Puno in January 2023. Artist Peru AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 18 Nov 2024 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Lima's Forsaken For 24 days , Mariano Isacama was missing. Calls to the indigenous leader’s phone suddenly stopped going through on June 21, following threats he had been receiving through WhatsApp messages. The 35-year-old was a spokesperson for the Puerto Azul community, which is part of the broader Kakataibo indigenous group in Peru’s Ucayali province. He worked with the Kakataibo federation, FENACOKA, one of many indigenous-led organizations across Peru that aims to provide self-governance for communities. Coworkers quickly filed complaints with the police and human rights prosecutors against people they suspected of involvement and launched search parties. Isacama, like many leaders in Peru’s native communities, was not facing abstract threats. In the past nine years, 35 indigenous leaders have been killed in the country amid threats from various organized criminal groups. Leaders face near constant harassment for their public positions defending the environment. Illicit trades have grown around these native communities, so leaders are routinely threatened to either turn a blind eye or participate. Almost none of the murder cases have led to arrests or support for impacted families and communities. What happened to Mariano Isacama “They had time to find him alive,” said Herlin Odicio, a Kakataibo leader who helped search for Isacama, incessantly filing complaints with the state for weeks. “Unfortunately the justice officials did nothing in that respect.” Odicio had been working with Isacama for a while. The two would attend conferences and workshops together, or if one couldn’t go, the other would represent the Kakataibo community. Isacama’s deep involvement with the work made him a target. On July 10, more than two weeks after his disappearance, 40 members of La Guardia Indígena’s Kakataibo division arrived to search. As an autonomous, fluid structure that has gained support among Latin America’s indigenous communities in the past two decades, La Guardia Indígena attempts to train communities to protect themselves in ways the governments won’t. They carry out patrols and build strategies to confront armed violence through collective and grassroots action. The volunteer program is neither a political body nor an armed resistance organization, but rather a loose mechanism that’s been adapted and replicated within communities across Latin America. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. In Ucayali, they put together teams to head into the woods to look for Isacama. While they were searching, threats to the search party themselves were reported from nearby non-native settlers. Isacama’s body was found on July 14, hidden away in the wilderness. “We’ve already identified suspects,” Odicio said, “We hope the justice system will do its duty, which we’ve pushed for. If they don’t, and they do the opposite, the justice system we have as indigenous people is going to be something very different.” Odicio himself has been facing threats for years, and lives on the run as a result. In 2020, he was approached by cocaine producers and asked to ignore planeloads of the drugs flown off makeshift runways on his community’s land. He rejected the money, making him a target. His continued advocacy work and public profile as an environmental defender further puts him at risk. He reports having to change his location constantly, moving his family between cities and homes, and routinely receiving threatening messages—even from other members of the community. “Emotionally, I’m not doing well,” he said, after four years of living under threat and reflecting on Isacama’s murder, “It’s complicated, you know? But what else can I do? Keep working, that’s it.” How militarism gave way to cartels In recent years, lethal threats facing Peru’s indigenous leaders have grown into a crisis as various illicit trades in the Amazon and Andean regions flourish under state negligence. Indigenous leaders, local journalists, and human rights researchers have all documented growing cases of cultivation and transportation of cocaine, illegal logging and mining , construction of unplanned roads that facilitate these extractive programs, and the violence and corruption necessary to keep these operations functional. These problems started several decades ago in the wake of a shifting political and economic reality within the country. Peru’s government spent decades centralizing its population and economic policies around the capital of Lima. Rural areas struggle under neglect across the country, but in the particularly remote indigenous communities in the country, this has evolved into a crisis. Ángel Pedro Valerio, president of the indigenous organization Central Ashaninka of Río Ene (CARE), noted that the problem has grown over the past 40 years. Valerio’s Ashaninka community is located in VRAEM, a region that’s become defined by cocaine production, poverty, and the presence of the Shining Path militant group. “Inside our communities, since the ‘80s and ‘90s and 2000s, the Ashaninka people and the entire central region of the rainforest have suffered from terrorism,” Valerio said. “Many of us have had family members disappeared or killed. This political and social problem hasn’t gone away.” During an era of violence between the Shining Path and the central government, areas like Valle de los Rios Apurimac, Ene y Mantaro (VRAEM) were particularly hard hit. They were caught in the crossfire between a communist group accused of brutal attacks on civilians (including children) and a military run by dictator Alberto Fujimori, who was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights violations. Fujimori died on September 11, 2024, several months after being released from prison for medical reasons. In the 1980s and 1990s, Lima’s population exploded as the armed conflict drove people away from Peru’s provincial areas. According to official state inquiries , Fujimori’s government was responsible for hundreds of forced disappearances and executions, including the killing of journalists and children , all under the guise of fighting terrorism. Civilians in rural areas were the most at risk, so many fled to the capital . In 1993, Lima had six million residents. In 2024, the city’s population is about 11 million –nearly one-third of all Peruvians live there. In the aftermath, rural areas were broadly left without infrastructure or police presence, as all modernization efforts focused on the capital. While skyscrapers fill the wealthier neighborhoods of Lima, infrastructural basics characterize much of the rest of the country. A 2023 United Nations report highlighted how hundreds of thousands in Peru live without basic nutrition, education, and healthcare. Earlier this year, a report in Infobae showed that 92% of the country’s high schools lack basic resources. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. VRAEM, though, has become defined by poverty and neglect. It’s known to be the home of what’s left of the Shining Path. “In recent years, the presence of illegal coca leaf growers has grown exponentially,” Valerio said of VRAEM. “They’re coming to invade the territory of native communities and those of us who live there can’t do anything about it. They’re opening large farms and deforesting the area, contaminating the water and the environment, degrading the soil. These coca leaves take a lot of chemicals to grow.” He pointed out that each time his organization files a complaint about threats from narcotraffickers, the state refuses to take action. He adds that state inaction puts them at greater risk. “Many of our brothers mention that they can’t file complaints because if they do, the first thing that happens is more threats,” Valerio said. “They brand us snitches and send us a warning.” A prosecutor’s vision In Lima, the central prosecutor’s office attempted to address this problem after years of neglect. In late 2023, they announced funding secured through the European Union to launch three task forces or workshops which would oversee environmental crime, human trafficking, and assassinations of indigenous leaders. “These problems have certainly grown because of a lack of attention from the central government,” said Jorge Chavez Cotrina, who oversees the attorney general’s division on organized crime. “Because the problem isn’t just to fight organized crime through police and prosecutors and the courts, but also has to be addressed by the executive branch. That is to say, before taking corrective actions we also have to take administrative actions—as in, prevention is key.” Cotrina said the three teams are mainly focused on partnering with indigenous leaders and working on building trust in the state by sending more officers into the field, participating in training programs, and sponsoring events. He said they’ve dismantled organized crime networks and opened investigations into murder cases of indigenous people. He argued, however, that this work is complicated by the lack of funds the central government provides them, pointing out that of the $3 billion budget his office was officially granted, they’ve only been disbursed $80 million. As a result, he said, they lack staff, forensic equipment, judges, and the ability to reach native communities that are the most remote. On top of that, Cintora points out that the problems can’t simply be addressed through arrests, and that prevention must consider economic development and increased governmental presence in the area. The centralized perspective of the government can exacerbate the problem by creating easier conditions for organized crime to flourish. Late last year, Peru passed a so-called “anti-forest law” swiftly denounced by activists, indigenous organizations, and leading environmental groups. The SPDA, a Peruvian legal watchdog and environmental NGO, declared that the law would openly promote and legalize deforestation in the Amazon, while putting local agriculture and communities at risk. Their legal opinion showed that the country would be violating its own laws by allowing this through and ensuring Peru's failure to meet international commitments regarding climate protection. Courtesy of Tania Wamani. “The legislature definitely has put in place a series of regulations without knowing the reality,” Cintora said. “When someone writes a regulation from their desk without knowing the reality, these are normally well-intentioned. But when you explain to them the reality, it’s counterproductive. And that’s what’s happening with issues like deforestation, illegal mining and the environment…The idea instead should be to call upon the rural communities that can give their opinion on regulations that would affect their territories.” A balance in trust Leaders like Odicio and Valerio remain skeptical of the state. Cintora’s vision is to work alongside communities, so they begin to trust police and prosecutors with time. “Our job is to gain their trust,” Cintora said, “and through these task forces, we’re having many meetings with different communities in the Peruvian Amazon, and we are on the right track.” One case took prosecutors and police a decade to resolve . In 2014, in the small town of Saweto, four indigenous leaders were killed. The case didn’t go to trial until 2022, when the state eventually won convictions against four men they accused of being involved. In 2023, those cases were declared null by a regional judge. For many in Peru’s activist communities, this signaled an important lesson: even in the rare case that the state seeks a conviction in these murders, the courts can’t be trusted. Only in April 2024, did the case finally go to the Superior Court of Ucayali and the sentences were restored. Cintora saw the case as a win, as it affirms faith in the prosecutor’s office for native communities. Despite funding problems, he hopes that this kind of work can make a difference in restoring collaboration with these communities. “With the small amount of resources we have, we do what we can,” Cintora said, “because we can’t sit around crying that there’s no money.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Peru Lima Indigenous self-governance Ucayali Rural strategic underdevelopment VRAEM Valle de los Rios Apurimac Ene y Mantaro Shining Path Central Ashaninka of Río Ene Kakataibo Militarism Cartel Drugs Cocoa Plant Amazon Rainforest Andres Mountains Trade Route Illicit Trading Forced Disappearance Free Speech Militant Anti-Forest Law Journalism Execution Underdevelopment Development Filmmaking Photography Human Rights Activism NGO Agriculture Climate Change Deforestation Community Security Climate Security European Union Human Trafficking Assassination Whatsapp Puerto Azul Conflict Justice La Guardia Indigena Volunteer Program Latin America South America Protest Search Party Aviation Transportation Logging Mining Construction Violence Corruption Politics Economy Poverty Terrorism Disappearance State Sanctioned Violence Policing Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. · FEATURES Features · West Malaysia Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. OCTO, BLUES OF MALAYA (2024). 23.5” x 35.5”. Struggling for Self Respect To counter the growing influence of Hindu extremism within the West Malaysian Tamil Hindu diaspora, Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai ( Black Shirt Youth Movement ), a new Periyarist coalition in the country, organised the International Youth Rational Forum . It was meant to educate the public on the anti-fascist and rationalist principles of Periyar’s Dravidian ideology. The forum held on December 24, 2023 , welcomed several prominent Periyarist speakers including Tamil Nadu’s SM Mathivathani and Sri Lanka's Sathees Selvaraj. It was initially scheduled to be held at the MySkills Campus in Kalumpang, Selangor, but on December 18, 2023, the director, Pasupathi Sithamparam, received harassing phone calls from Hindu extremists. Fearing backlash from donors he revoked permission forcing the organisers to find a new venue within a week. The following day, 27 Hindu organizations urged the Malaysian Home Ministry to stop the forum alleging it went against Kepercayaan Kepada Tuhan (Belief in God), the first clause of the Rukun Negara (Malaysian National Principles). The clause states that citizens must submit to the power of God. While the Malaysian state claims that the Rukun Negara, constructed in 1970, was a way to reconcile with the aftermath of the 1969 race riots, prominent Malay-Chinese intellectual and former political prisoner Kua Kia Soong counters this narrative. He argues that the “race riots” were exploited by the emerging Malay capitalist class to gain political authority over the then-ruling aristocracy. According to Kua, the principles were designed to control the masses and prevent challenges to Ketuanan Melayu (Malay Supremacy), embedded in the national constitution. This is also evident in the second and third clauses, which reify citizens’ unquestioning allegiance to Malay royalty, the country, and the constitution. On December 21, 2023 , Karunchattai held a press conference refuting the allegations from the NGOs. He stated that the principles are not against the nation’s political foundations of race, religion, and royalty (the "3Rs") and Hindu extremists are targeting them for their Periyarist identity. Despite obstacles, the forum's programming was effectively executed. Photo courtesy of the author. Following the press meet—while organisers were picking up the international speakers from the airport—they were informed that the permission to host their forum at the Wisma Tun Sambanthan hall was revoked after the venue received complaints. Fortunately, that very same night, members of Karunchattai met with the management of the KL & Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall who granted them permission and declared solidarity. The next day, Nagenteran Sandrasigran, the founder of Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai, was called into the Dang Wangi police station following additional complaints. The police interrogated Nagenteran about the nature of his organisation, the forum, and Periyarism, but he was released the same day without further action. The Malaysian Immigration Department (MID) also intervened, informing the organisers that their international guest speakers had travelled under the wrong visa and needed a special one to participate in the forum. MID restricted the live streaming of the event and also implemented orders to stop and interrogate the participants as they travelled to the region. "There have been many Dravidian forums in Malaysia before, where overseas speakers were invited, but nothing this severe has ever happened before,” Nagenteran observed. Harassment and deliberate sabotage were inflicted on both organisers and speakers. On the day of the event, while the speakers were in their hotels, they received suspicious calls from people pretending to be the organisers, asking them to come down to the lobby. “I told them to stay in their rooms until I called them and not to pick up calls from unknown numbers,” Nagenteran said. The entire forum took place under the vigilant presence of the Malaysian police and immigration department. Seven police officers, including the Dang Wangi Special Branch, Bukit Aman Special Branch, and the Kuala Lumpur Contingent Headquarters, along with nine immigration officers, surveyed the forum. There were several other events organised after the main event with constant police presence throughout the day. In addition, about ten representatives from various Hindu NGOs attended the event. One representative, Rishikumar Vadivelu, vice president of the NGO Hindhudharma Maamandram , refused to stand up for the Malaysian Tamil Thai Vaazhtu (Tamil Anthem), penned by Malaysian Tamil writer Seeni Naina Mohamed . Secretary Ponvaasagam of Malaysia Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) and several other MDK members noted his behaviour and approached Rishi to firmly advise him to stand up, but he refused. Later, when a photo of Rishi’s antics went viral on social media, he declared that he didn't want to, nor should he have to, stand for a Tamil anthem written by a Muslim. He insinuated that the Tamil literary icon Seeni Naina Mohamed was a “Muslim missionary” trying to proselytise Tamil-Hindus for Islam. Hindhudharma Maamandram's President, Radhakrishnan Alagamalai, sent a letter to Deputy National Unity Minister SaraswathyKandasami reiterating that the forum was in direct opposition to the Malaysian national ideology. Saraswathy, an opportunistic caste-Hindu politician with strong ties to caste-Hindu associations, sent a letter to the home ministry emphasising the much speculated threat of atheism. She also mentioned that one of the speakers had a speech titled “Periyar from a Marxist Perspective,” fueling the anti-communist sentiment already present in the state. The ministry advised Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports Adam Adli , who previously contributed to the cause and accepted the invitation to inaugurate the forum, against following through on his plans. Just a day before the event, Adli’s assistant, Mr. Amar, informed Nagenteran that the Deputy Minister would not be attending. Nagenteran expressed his disappointment, stating that moral support from the governing party could have been significant in legitimising their cause. The influence of Periyar in West Malaysia dates back to the 1930s, driven by the Tamil diaspora. During this time, Periyarists established their own Dravidian organisations in erstwhile-Malaya that engaged with the political realities of Peninsula Malaysia, alongside the self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu. Malaya’s Tamil Reform Association (TRA), founded in 1932, published Tamil Murasu , a newspaper dedicated to cultivating Dravidian ideology. The paper covered various topics, including: Tamil social reforms, Indian nationalism, Dravidian nationalism, and the conditions of indentured workers from Burma to Ceylon. Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Above is a special edition of the newspaper Tamil Murasu in celebration of ponggal, which the Dravidian movement celebrated as Tamilar Thirunaal (Day of the Tamils), celebrating the secular roots of tamil society. Many successful reforms were also introduced by the MTRA revolving around marriage, specifically widow remarriages, self-respect weddings, and the endorsement of the Sharada Child Marriage Restraint Act. However, this momentum drastically diminished in postcolonial Malaysia. Nagenteran detailed how, until the late 1980s, the Malaysian Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) had been a strong community ally of MIC. During the internal power struggle for party leadership between Samy Vellu and Dr. Subramaniam Sinniah , however, MDK’s then-president KR Ramasamy threatened to contest the elections if MIC didn’t change its opportunistic ways. Samy Vellu, aiming to extinguish political rivalry and appease the opposition, lured MDK members into joining MIC, rewarding those who did exceptional work for the party. “Then, the splinter between Pandithan and Samy Vellu happened,” said Nagenteran, citing how caste politics within the party caused MG Pandithan, who belonged to the Paraiyar caste, to split from Samy Vellu, a Thevar. The former formed a new political party called the All Malaysia Indian Progressive Front ( IPF ). Paraiyars and other caste-oppressed individuals from MIC and MDK left their respective organisations to join the IPF. Due to these deviations, the influence that MDK and Dravidian ideology once had on the Tamil population greatly disintegrated. “In the 90s, we could speak about Periyar to our families, but now it has become a taboo subject,” lamented Nagenteran, describing how the political situation shifted drastically within a single generation. Wider Malaysian politics also faced the decline of progressive elements with the rise of Malay Muslim ethno-religious supremacy, who demanded that the Malaysian people come together to form a united front. “We have to embrace multicultural politics,” asserted Gausalyah Arumugam, the secretary of Karunchattai, while also criticising the existing caste pride within the Malaysian Tamil-Hindu community. “When caste prevents them from viewing members of their own ethnic group as equals, how can they form genuine political solidarity with other ethnicities?” Tamils in Malaysia In the early 19th century, European imperialism forcefully displaced many dalit and lower shudra Tamil peasantry as indentured labourers to colonial West Malaysian plantations. While the migration of the Tamil workers was controlled by debt-bondage, free Tamil merchants were able to move with ease. The hellscape system of the plantation was shaped both by European imperialism and brahminical hierarchy. By the 1940s, Tamil workers led labour unions and contributed to the anti-imperialist armed struggle of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Britain's counterinsurgency across Southeast Asia, however, made progressive movements a weak entity in Malaysia, paving the way for the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) to be endorsed as a communal party that could de-radicalize Tamil workers. Nevertheless, Nagenteran notes that since 2008 MIC’s hold on the Tamil workers has drastically deteriorated. The weakening of MIC is attributed in part to the 2000s Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) movement, inspired by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), an international branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS). MIC's continued incompetence in fighting for Indian/Tamil minority rights led to a loss of support among Tamils and relegated it to the sidelines under then Prime Minister Najib Razak. Nagenteran explained that although Najib was a corrupt criminal, he successfully established strong bonds with working-class Tamils through opportunistic concessions. Instead of using MIC as a communication channel, Najib reached out directly to meet with Indian and Tamil communities, Hindu NGOs, and caste associations to protect his vote bank. He visited the Batu Caves Murugan Temple for Thaipusam , provided a grant of RM1 million for the development of the Sri Murugan Tuition Centre, and offered Indians and Tamils the opportunity to invest in the Amanah Saham unit trust funds. In post-Najib Malaysia—with the chaos of COVID-19 still fresh—leadership changes further degraded the hopes of working-class Tamils. The current government is no different in exhibiting a lack of interest in the Tamil population. “Anwar has missed two Thaipusam festivals. There are no Tamils in the cabinet. They even complained that no diaspora ministers were invited to the inauguration of the King!” exclaimed Nagenteran, who detailed the disregard faced by working-class Tamils from political parties, further contributing to their political demoralisation. Hindu Extremism and Casteist Violence in Malaysia Some Hindu temples, like the Batu Caves Murugan temple, are advertised as emblems of religious harmony in Peninsular Malaysia, while others are sites of contention. The Seafield Mariamman Temple is one such example. It was the site of a major dispute between its property owner and the public, revealing the sinister truth undergirding the dysfunctionality embedded within Malaysian society—resulting in a riot in 2018 that made national news. The recurring demolitions of Hindu temples find their roots in the destruction of the rubber plantations and subsequent displacement of Tamil workers, directly influenced by Razak’s New Economic Policy of the 70s, and then cemented by Mahathir's industrialisation throughout the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s, this complex crisis evolved into fertile ground for the emergence of a reactionary Hindu rights advocacy, which uprooted the crisis of the temple from the historical caste-labour politics of the plantation, indentureship, and caste-feudalism. Folk deity temples are among those most often demolished. They are part of Tamil Hindu heritage and are maintained by workers who are descendants of Dalit and Shudra villagers. The villagers used to worship folk deities rather than more Brahminized deities, however, Gausalyah states that, through the influence of Hindu extremism, Malaysian Tamil Hindus are abandoning their folk practices in favour of Vedic traditions. This shift in religious practices is endorsed by temple management in the nation, which is typically governed by members of a specific caste. “Casteists and Hindu extremists work in parallel to each other,” noted Gausalyah, discussing how these spaces are weaponized to assert brahminical hegemony. This, in turn, cultivates extremism under the guise of cultural preservation. Malaysia Dravidar Kalagam Ticket, Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Just like the temples, Tamil government schools are disempowered, receiving very little financial or moral support, making them susceptible to political extremism. Despite schools being secular educational spaces for multi-religious Tamil children, extremism is gradually transforming them into Hindu education camps, with some schools receiving religious textbooks published by the Hindhudharma Maamandram. “It's so easy for Hindu NGOs to work with schools, but they won't let us (Periyarists) in,” stated Nagenteran. Hindu and caste dominance is propagated to children by school management, teachers, and staff of particular castes. Gausalyah notes that the hiring is predominantly caste-based to maintain control over the education system. This influence of Hindutva-led caste segregation is reaching far beyond grade school and into university clubs as well. Gausalyah speculates that extremism has been growing for the past six years, tracing the birth of the movement to a trip Rangaraj Pandey took to Malaysia. “Hindu extremism did not grow this strongly in Malaysia without receiving financial support,” she stated. Although they do not have concrete evidence of where this funding may have originated, Karunchattai is certain that a financial network has been established between groups in Malaysia and stronger Hindu extremist bodies like the RSS. Considering the rate at which Hindu extremism has developed—mirroring the RSS's fascistic language, educational and cultural programs, and political influence in Malaysian governance—the movement cannot sustain itself without substantial financial support. Karunchattai hosts reading groups and classes to support grassroots political work against Hindutva-backed caste extremism. They hope to introduce Periyar into Tamil schools and envision connecting with anti-caste organisations worldwide, fostering a strong internationalist anti-caste vanguard that can support one another in defeating the rise of Hindu fascism. As the politics of Malaysia differ greatly from those of Tamil Nadu, propagating Periyar to the Malaysian masses is a significant task set before Karunchattai, to which Nagenteran responds with determination: “Win or lose, we want to see how far we can go.”∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features West Malaysia Malaysia Malaya Fascism Hindu Fascism Hindutva Black Shirt Youth Movement Periyar Periyarism Tamil Tamil-Nadu Tamil Diaspora Dravidian Tamil Dravidian Activism Alienation Self-Respect Movement Tamil Reform Association TRA Tamil Labor Unions Malayan Communist Party MCP Malaysian Indian Congress MIC radicalization de-radicalization Hindu Rights Action Force HINDRAF Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS HSS Corruption Anti-Caste COVID-19 Hindu Extremism temple demolition attacks on folk deities Tamil Murasu Singapore Colonialism Hindutva-based Caste extremism Caste extremism Civil Society Organizing Liberation ideology Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 20th Dec 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. · FEATURES Essay · Kandahar In this cogent meditation on the histories and psychologies of conflict that have etched survival into the essence of Afghan identity—both at home and in exile—Mahfouz reflects on family, repression, and the unseen burden of history. Spanning generations and regimes, this is a story of inheritance and idealism, where the quiet conviction of its actors gradually challenges the silence imposed by empires built on endless war. "Self-Portrait" (2016), digital print, courtesy of Latifa Zafar Attaii. The Captive Mind Our two-story house in Kandahar stood inside a compound with a garden of colors where roses of many kinds lived, competing in fragrance with the chambeli , the jasmine plant. On summer nights, the garden also brimmed with the laughter of us, the children, on bicycles, playing hide and seek beneath the stars. When winter came, the rhythm shifted. Evenings began after supper, the electricity generator shut off and the lantern lit for warmth and light. The flickering flame would stretch the shadow of the past across the wall of the present, as my siblings and I gathered by the adults. The stories shared around that lantern were not fairy tales, but inheritance. Adults spoke of many things. How someone escaped a raid. How another someone never came back. How the sound of a car slowing outside meant the worst—being killed. For them, perhaps, it was their way of reckoning, with a war they had carried into peace, and with a peace still trembling on the edge of war. I had been listening to these stories since turning six, or maybe even earlier. In 2002, however, when Afghanistan was promised a new beginning, only to end up in rubble, I began listening more closely. Something in me had opened—the way it does when your own life begins to echo the stories you've always heard. The American invasion in 2001 became my reference point for war’s meaning. Sometimes it began with something small, a radio playing an old song, or someone quietly saying how lucky we were to have this house. From there, the memories would awaken: my grandmother’s story passed to my father, his to my mother, and then to my siblings. How they had escaped from Kabul while the rockets were falling. How they had not known if we would survive the road. How a family we would have never met took us in and gave us warm food. We would watch our elders’s faces in the lantern light, tensing as the stories reached that sharp point of unknowing. Our own bodies would stiffen with theirs; vessels holding fear. But then, as their faces would soften towards the end—the ending where they didn’t die—we would relax too, sometimes getting on our knees as if leaning into relief. We clung to the parts where our families had made it through. It was because of these moments that we wanted to hear those stories again and again. Sometimes, one of us would interrupt. “Tell the funny part,” we’d say, already giggling. The one about Ana Bibi. My grandmother, asking, “ Is this rocket coming from the right side or the wrong side? ” This would make everyone laugh. Among the many stories one returned often, even more so after my grandfather died in 2007, when I was ten. In its telling and retelling, that story became more than true—it gave continuity to life, underscoring how the past is remembered, the present felt, and the future anticipated. My mother told it with quiet reverence. My grandfather had been a leftist writer, among the first to embrace modernity in the 1950s. He supported the communist project in its early promise, reforms, and a vision for a better future. But after the bloody coup and Hafizullah Amin ’s rise, that promise curdled. Friends disappeared. Dissent became dangerous. He had written against the regime, and one day, word came. His name was on Amin’s list. In the weeks that followed, each time a car edged too close to their gate, my grandfather retreated into his study, crouching beneath the desk, lantern in hand. Descriptions of the heavy velvet curtain and the earthy smell gave my mother’s story an almost magical aura. That image, though never photographed, imprinted itself on me. A dark room. A burning light. The slow terror of footsteps. I do not know if it happened exactly that way. But memory in Afghanistan is not evidence. It is transmission. In Afghanistan, each poet gives his pain to the land, or lets the land’s pain speak through him. My grandfather was one of them. He wrote during the early days of Afghanistan’s turbulent history, a time when fear came not just from war, but from the silence it demanded. Years later, when he was already living in exile in Denmark, his words still echoed in Kandahar. My mother remembered them. At one point in the story my mother liked slowing down, and from those lived experiences that she carried in memory alone, she would emerge laughing and crying with the verses from my grandfather’s most well-known poem: Caged in the dark night I was, A victim of the chains pulled tight, I was. Hands bound, lips sewn, in waves of torture, Stuck in a hellish oven of harassment and abuse. Cold sighs rose, defiant, to the skies; My patience is like a shooting star towards the galaxy. My grief went violent, beyond what my worn heart could endure. In my chest, rebellious dreams could no longer fit, Wild cries like groans set off. That poem, she’d say, was written in the days when Hafizullah Amin Taraki's communist party had taken control—a time of extreme fear. At the time people were being whisked away from classrooms, in the middle of a lecture. One of my mother’s teachers was thrown from a helicopter, a warning to anyone with a mind too sharp, a voice too loud. Those who remained were not in chains, but restrained by fear. The regime went after the intellectuals, the mullahs, anyone they thought could become a rallying point, a nucleus around which resistance might form. And then a glimmer of hope, or so they thought, and my grandfather continued his poem. I don’t know whether someone heard my secret plea, Or judged my groans as immodest cries of ungratefulness. Clamor rose on the podium of the universe. An adventure rose to heaven’s home; With red monsters, black too, that flowed. At every step they roared with anger. I knew not then who stepped near– To rescue me, or strike me with pretenses of giving Everyone that came crushed the bones of my helpless body, But at the same time, they broke the chains that snaked around me. And so, at the breaking of the chains, I laugh, But for each bone breaking, I cry. The Soviets invaded , and they began breaking old chains, but they also broke bones. My grandfather went on breathing, but in the mirror of history the jail cell he had marginally avoided never closed. It passed down, unlatched, via my aunts, my older siblings, and now it takes the shape of my silence, a silence that pulses like our family’s death drive. After my grandfather, no one believed in idealism. In Afghanistan, survival builds its house atop the buried bones of idealism. Literally. I used to think that was just a metaphor, until I read an old article from 1997. A boy named Faizdeen, only 14, had said: “I used to dig for scrap iron…but the Taliban banned us from exporting it to Pakistan when they captured Kabul. So now I dig for bones. There is no other work, and we need the money for food.” My father used to joke with my grandmother, nudging her to eat more yogurt and milk, “If you don’t keep your bones strong, they won’t sell well later.” I always thought he was being dark for the sake of humor. Only now do I realize his joke had roots. The absurdity was just a disguise. He wasn’t joking. He was remembering—the past bleeding into the present through the cracks in his humor. We inherit many things: land, names, trauma. But I also inherited my grandfather’s dreams. Whatever intellect I carry, it’s a small fire lit by the same lantern whose light he read under. In 2007, I saw my grandfather for the first time in a coffin. But I don’t remember mourning his death, I remember feeling pride. He was given a national burial. The governor came. Many of Afghanistan’s renowned poets gathered to recite verses. His funeral was not a mourning of his death but a celebration of his voice. They said he was a man a hundred years ahead of his time, a father who educated every one of his daughters. They told stories of his poverty, how he couldn’t afford even a single sheet of clean white paper. How he walked the streets and upon finding a blank piece in the trash he picked it up and wrote on it. These stories brought him back to life, each retelling pulling him from the past, giving him breath and flesh. But even then, no one spoke of him in his entirety. His idealism was buried with him for the family's safety. And after him, idealism no longer lived with my family. The war stripped it away, leaving only the habits of survival. In rebelling, I search for his image. I was forced to quit school at eleven, not that I ever loved it, but by fourteen I began to question everything. Life. War. The meaning of it all. Fear was everywhere, seeping through the walls, hovering over us every night. Airstrikes, suicide bombings, the air and land on fire. I did feel in my own way: Caged in the dark night I was . And my chains were not that of being just Afghan but of a woman too. And then I thought of my grandfather, how he was self-taught, how he created a path for himself. Suddenly, that became a path for me too. This paid off. I became a full-time self-taught student, and in search for the meaning of life, in 2016, I went on to study physics at Arizona State University, eventually becoming a quantum computing researcher at Tufts University. I had made a promise to myself that leaving Afghanistan would mark the end of that chapter. The war and its memories would dissolve with distance. War had never made sense to me; it was arbitrary, brutal, and incoherent. The clean logic of math and science felt appealing precisely because I could grasp it. I believed that science would help me build a new symbolic order , what Lacan might call the framework through which meaning is stabilized. A clean logic to overwrite the chaos. Even as I dove into quantum theory, however, Afghanistan kept rippling back, like an unresolved equation buried in the wavefunction. At the lunch table among friends and colleagues, my jokes were always about war—the trademark Afghan dark humor that circles back on itself, where the punchline is a silence that swallows the room. I would laugh alone. While others laughed at their own easy jokes, I didn’t. Easy laughter didn’t come very easily to me. While others read fantasy to escape reality, I, driven by a neurotic curiosity, reached for Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Freud—to probe it. Surprisingly, the time away from Afghanistan didn’t take Afghanistan away from me. Instead, it made me see my country in everything I read. Partly, because in the US, Afghanistan is spoken about through the vocabulary of world power, war, strategy, collapse, and rarely, if ever, through the intimate lens of the human. I didn’t notice it at first, but the more I talked to people, the more I began to feel something unsettling inside me. Literature shaped by exile, grief, and repression mirrored a part of me that was still hovering outside language, unclaimed by words. The Afghan experience, I realized, was not just history, it was psychic. Complex, fractured, buried. In Afghanistan, I never had to ask what it meant to be Afghan. The question itself didn’t arise. But in the US, I found myself caught in a mirror stage of sorts, not of my own making, but shaped by how Afghanistan was talked about all around me. I was reacting to a reflection I didn’t recognize. And in that reaction, I began to split. A part of me wanted to disappear. Another part wanted to speak, not about policy, but about how Afghanistan felt . How it smelled at dawn after the Azan was called, when my mother added cardamom to the morning tea and my brother brought fresh doodi bread from the bakery. How it danced in the upbeat songs my father played. How it mourned in my grandfather’s poetry. How it lived in a child’s fear. How it died in a suicide bomb. And how, even then, when a bomb exploded nearby, Afghans knew to open the glass windows quickly -- so the second blast, which often came, wouldn’t shatter them over us. I began to see Afghanistan not as a place left behind, but as something returning, over and over. It returns in dreams, in the pauses between sentences. My memories speak Pashto, but my thoughts answer in English. In this process, I feel that my spoken English is shaped in such a way that lived experience arrives uncannily, half-recognizable, crossing a border just to reach me. So, I went deeper in search for voices that echoed the Afghan experience, voices shaped by rupture that spoke in fear, in silences that felt familiar. I became obsessively drawn to narratives haunted by erasure, burial, and longing—that reflected the essential and the unsayable parts of Afghanistan, helping me understand the genre-defying tragedy of a people compelled to sell the remains of humans just to survive. There is a tragedy and a contradiction in being Afghan: despite having so much history, culture, pride and poetry, our immediate past opens the door to an incomprehensible reality, where some must sell the bones of the dead just to buy bread. It’s a truth hard to hold, an irreconcilable dialectical condition. And sometimes I wonder, what if those bones belonged to the very intellectuals who once dreamed of a better future? Perhaps they were the remains of those killed by the communists for their idealism, or later by the mujahideen for the same reason. In 2019, I read Miłosz’s The Captive Mind . He wrote it in postwar Paris, after defecting from Communist Poland. The book felt so connected to my life—its psychic resonances were so familiar—I wondered if it had been written by an Afghan. Suddenly, I realized something that had never found its signifier: in Afghanistan, our minds were also captive. From the communist regime to the post-2001 government, fear didn’t disappear, it adapted. The instructions were the same, only told by new faces: don’t speak of politics, don’t say what your family thinks, don’t mention the Taliban on the phone, or the Americans either. When our experiences are not mirrored back, when no one names them, when no one writes them down, they begin to dissolve and disappear. We start to question not just the experience, but in time, we begin to distrust our own interiority. As if the silence around us means the feeling itself is wrong. Reading that book, among many, I felt the Afghan experience was not just real but legible. Not just tragic but thinkable. Afghanistan could be shown as it lives in the ruined houses of Afghan hearts, with all its beauty and contradictions. Miłosz describes the Murti-Bing pill, a tranquilizer of the mind, swallowed for peace with contradiction. He wrote of people who surrendered to ideology to survive. I recognized that surrender. My own grandfather’s writings sit in a Moscow basement, unpublished. My family warns me not to bring attention to them. “Do you want the Taliban to destroy his grave?” they ask. Against the silence, I think of my grandfather who said, “An Afghan writer shouldn’t look for applause. He must write his books, buy his own books, read his own books.” My grandfather chose to write regardless of whether he would be read or not. Untitled , Latifa Zafar Attaii (2016). Thread on Digital Print. When I left for the United States in 2016, I thought I had made my choice to live for ideas. But history is not a linear march towards freedom. One's choices are never final, they are tested at every twist and turn. In 2025, at Tufts, where I worked as a researcher, a student was taken in for writing just an op-ed for Palestine. I have this habit when I become overwhelmed, when emotions press too hard against the inside of my chest: I write poems. That night, as I felt the space around my own mind begin to enclose, I wrote one—raw and reactive. I hovered over the “publish” button on Substack, to click or not click. I found myself navigating not survival, but a negotiation between idealism and silence, safety and speech. Not only did I not publish the poem, but instead I deleted my X/Twitter and Instagram accounts because I didn’t want any likes, shares, or posts to be used in any way. And in that moment, I turned away from the person I had worked hard to become. The old instincts returned. I started watching what I said again. At home, we were taught to stay quiet. Never talk about politics. Never say what your family thinks. Live like two people, one inside the home, another outside it. There’s a name for that kind of split. In The Captive Mind , Czesław Miłosz calls it ketman : a practiced split between thought and speech that fractures the self, creating a kind of psychological contradictory duality. Under ketman , one performs the lie of the state for so long that they lose touch with their own inner truth. What starts as concealment from others becomes concealment from the self. Over time, even the desire to resist dies. Whenever we went to the house we learnt the Quran in, or when friends visited, my mother would lean in close, her voice a hush, “Remember, even the walls have ears. Not everything needs to be said.” Back in Afghanistan, fear had a shape: the sound of a suicide bomber, the rumble of a tank passing, the sudden shadow of a plane above, the silence after a kidnapping. Here in the United States, it’s different but no less present. It's a quiet kind of fear you have to learn all over again, the kind that follows you into your inbox, your social feed, your decision to speak or not. “Does the past have an expiration date…?” Georgi Gospodinov asks through a character in Time Shelter. For Afghans, it doesn’t. The past doesn't reverberate through memory and inherited fear, but comes alive in the headlines. In Pakistan, Afghan families who have lived for decades are being deported overnight. In the US, too, there's talk that Afghans under temporary protected status may soon be deported. Anger stirs inside me. Afghans are constantly at the mercy of the world. No matter the country, no matter the context, we are always waiting, waiting to be allowed to stay, to speak, to live. I hate this. I hate seeing my people cast again and again as the world’s burden. I want to write about this, about how these two acts of deportation, one in Pakistan, the other in the US, are not separate, but part of the same story. Take my cousin, for example. She came to the US on a P1 visa after the fall of Kabul in 2021, but now she’s stuck in legal limbo, uncertain if she’ll be allowed to stay. Her own family, who fled to Pakistan during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s, have lived there ever since, still undocumented, still afraid. When she calls me, she tells me she can’t even talk about her situation. “How can I add to their worry,” she says, “when they’re barely holding on themselves?' To this eerie synchronicity in the news, with two borders and one destination, Afghanistan, I want to add a truth. The continuity is not just between the displaced, but in the war itself. One refugee was driven out by the conflict that began in the 1970s. The other fled the aftermath of the US withdrawal in 2021 . But these are not separate wars. They are different phases of the same long undoing. The world, including both the U.S. and Pakistan, helped train, fund, and arm the mujahideen. The fire they lit has never gone out. Its shape has changed, but it continues to burn through Afghan lives. One of the most heartbreaking reels I saw was of an Afghan man in Pakistan. His shop was being looted, crates overturned, and a box of oranges was thrown to the ground. He ran helplessly toward it, trying to salvage what he could. I watched it and cried. Watching his face once again broke something inside me—a psychic déjà vu. I saw my parents’ past. And suddenly, memories of family came back, memories I thought I had learned to forget. One of the stories my father often tells from the time of the Civil War is of a room full of large bags of rice. In Afghanistan, they say old rice tastes better. Leaving Kabul while rockets were falling, on an empty stomach, perhaps that’s one of the reasons that memory has stayed so vividly alive to this day. One thing this perpetual war in Afghanistan has done well is strip people of their humanity, reducing their unique stories to mere headlines of victimhood. I want to tell the stories that don’t make it into the headlines, the small ones, the family ones, the ones that carry the weight of a war without saying it outright. I open a draft. I start to write about the US betrayal of Afghanistan, the foreign policies that spiraled everything that came after the Cold War. But then I stop. I read it over, hesitate, and delete it. It’s unsettling how the same instinct that made my grandfather crouch under his desk with a lantern now lives in me—surfacing as I quietly prepare to pack my bags, without knowing why. I find myself looking over the books I’ve collected. Physics textbooks, poetry, novels, and essays. Some from home, some bought here. I always thought I would build a library. It felt like a small claim on a life shaped by ideas. Now I’m giving many of them away. Not because I want to, but because something in me is telling me to prepare. It’s a quiet instinct, like the ones my family lived by for decades. You don’t wait to be told. You leave before you’re asked to. You stay quiet even before the silence is forced on you. No one has threatened me. Nothing has happened. But still I hesitate. I start writing and then stop. I delete what I mean to say. I try to explain this to myself, maybe it’s fear, maybe caution, or maybe it’s secondhand, something I inherited in those moments when voices lowered during storytelling or before we left the house, receiving instructions on what to say and what not to say. A habit passed down that became part of everyday living. A silence practiced long before it was needed. But again, as I speak to my family, it feels absurd to them. “Your grandfather was much higher than just intellect,” they say. “He didn’t publish, so you can keep quiet too.” My grandfather didn’t publish because our family was still living in Kandahar. But now we’re out. He, however, still remains in Kandahar. I'm concerned about free speech. I hate how war has reduced our ambitions to mere survival. As long as no bombs are raining down, you’re supposed to be fine. Growing up and searching for Afghan intellectuals in the books I read, I always hated that I couldn’t find them in English, in dialogue with the world. Looking back, I realize it could never have been possible—for in a country constantly at war, neither poetry nor intellect could flourish, and hope could not survive. Survival has always been more important than idealism, and you can’t live for idealism without putting your skin in the game. But survival made sense to those who came before me. Their silence kept them alive. Can I live differently? Is it possible? Every time I see an Afghan face, it is waiting at a checkpoint, a consulate, or a deportation line. But for every sad Afghan story, there’s a punchline. In my family, even the darkest recollection ended with something absurd—a sort of internal smuggler’s trade—emotion disguised in irony so the censors of sanity would let it pass, and in return, a small, uncanny, crooked laugh meant to keep the world from collapsing. Among us Afghans there is an almost tacit agreement: to live against despair, one has to laugh louder than his wounds. Humor becomes a stubborn way to insist on life’s beauty. But this isn’t your usual “hahaha” humor. It’s the kind that goes deeper than the suffering. A kind of philosophy that doesn’t deny pain, but rather makes space for it. I do this in my own way. In my stand-up comedy class, which I take just for fun , I end with the punchline: In one dream, I’m running from a bomb, afraid of being sent to heaven. In another, I’m running from ICE, afraid of being sent to the Hindu Kush mountains. My trauma has grown legs. And it keeps running. Watch out, it might kick you. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Kandahar Afghanistan Storytelling Family invasion Kabul Communist Era Hafizullah Amin Taraki's Communist Party idealism poetry trauma exile diaspora Afghan diaspora education language ketman dark humor Discourses of War War War on Terror Colonialism US Imperialism Imperialism Decolonization Colonial Oppression Colonization Memory Dossiers of memory Islam United States Pakistan Pashto Absurdity Dehumanization Human Rights Violations US withdrawal 2021 Mujahideen Literary Literary Activism Literature & Liberation Afghan literature Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 26th Jun 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

In 'Daha Rupaychi Note', Hamid Dalwai tells the story of Kareem, a poor clerk journeying from Mumbai to his Konkan village for Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. Amidst nostalgia and hardship, Kareem witnesses his village’s stark poverty, confronting the harsh realities of his people’s suffering. Through his act of charity and the symbolism of the titular ten-rupee note, Dalwai blends personal, literary, and political ideologies, exploring themes of communal harmony, economic reform, and the complex interplay of religion and identity within the socio-political landscape of post-independence India. In 'Daha Rupaychi Note', Hamid Dalwai tells the story of Kareem, a poor clerk journeying from Mumbai to his Konkan village for Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. Amidst nostalgia and hardship, Kareem witnesses his village’s stark poverty, confronting the harsh realities of his people’s suffering. Through his act of charity and the symbolism of the titular ten-rupee note, Dalwai blends personal, literary, and political ideologies, exploring themes of communal harmony, economic reform, and the complex interplay of religion and identity within the socio-political landscape of post-independence India. Vinay Ghodgeri, The Two Pontificators (2022). Ink, digital painting. Artist Maharashtra AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 17 Feb 2025 th · FICTION & POETRY REPORTAGE · LOCATION Ten Rupee Note The story begins and ends with a bus ride. Kareem, an impoverished clerk living in Mumbai, decides to visit his village in the Konkan to celebrate both Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi. While his journey there is filled with both nostalgia and anticipation, his return is marked by a different set of emotions. As his aunt remarks, “everything is upside down in the village,” where everyone is impoverished and unemployed, and the starving can do nothing “except sit and wait hopefully for next year’s harvest.” Confronted with this catastrophic state of affairs, he gives away his scant savings in a “pathetic charity session” until he is left only with the titular ten rupee note. “Daha Rupaychi Note” was my first encounter with the Marathi Muslim journalist, writer, and reformer Hamid Dalwai . Written when Dalwai was just twenty years old and printed in the Marathi-language “Dhanurdhara” magazine on November 8, 1952, the story was his first published work. In a recent documentary directed by Jyoti Subhash and featuring Naseeruddin Shah, Husain Dalwai—Hamid’s brother and Congress politician—reminisced on its publication, recalling that the entire family had gathered under the dim light of a streetlamp to read it together. Despite his young age, his earliest work rings with the earnest idealism, unambiguous moral clarity, and straightforward, laconic prose that would characterize much of his later writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. Brusque and unambiguous in its endorsement of communal harmony, economic reform, and village uplift, “Daha Rupaychi Note” reads propagandistically at times, blurring the borders between literature, praxis, and even autobiography. Through this hybrid form, the interplay between Dalwai’s personal life, creative instinct, and political commitments is laid bare. Like his protagonist, Dalwai was born and raised in a working-class Ratnagiri family before moving to Mumbai in search of work. This migration story is a familiar one: my grandfather, also a Kokani Muslim, came to Mumbai in the 1940s as an officer in the merchant navy. Like Dalwai, he was of a literary bent, writing and translating between Marathi, Urdu, and English. He, too, was charming and mercurial, his disarmingly light eyes quick to anger and quicker to laughter and brandished his acerbic wit with a typical Konkan sting. If they ever met, I imagine Dalwai would have quickly adapted my grandfather’s sardonic catchphrase, “ naseebach gandu tar konashi bhandu. ” But whereas my grandfather spent those heady decades of independence hopping between port cities in Japan, Thailand, and the Soviet Union, Dalwai hopped between political organizations, from the Rashtra Seva Dal to the Samyukta Socialist Party. Frustrated by their timid stances on communalism, he eventually carved out his own political spaces by establishing the Indian Secular Society (1968) and the Muslim Satyashodak Samaj (1970); the latter modeled after Jyotirao Phule’s anti-caste reform society. Through his organizing and writing, his ultimate goal was to modernize Indian Muslim society by, in his own words, “creating a small class…of liberal and secular Muslims.” Dalwai is difficult to categorize and perhaps for that reason, he has been largely forgotten by historians, literary critics, and the public. On the one hand, he was, indisputably, a Marathi thinker. The landscape and rituals of the Konkan coast—its “distant green hillocks” and its “auspicious sounds of cymbals and mridanga”—were firmly imprinted in his literary and political consciousness. Influenced by his Marathi-medium education in Chiplun, he wrote exclusively in Marathi and encouraged Indian Muslims to embrace their regional languages rather than chasing after Urdu, Persian, or Arabic; when interrogated about his linguistic preferences, he quipped that his own Marathi-inflected Urdu, adulterated by Mumbai slang, would cause a “proper” Urdu speaker from Lucknow to collapse on the spot. His Maharashtrian contemporaries, from the humorist and performer P.L. Deshpande to the playwright Vijay Tendulkar, praised his tenacity and courage, with the former naming Dalwai as “one of the greatest enlighteners in that series from Jyotirao Phule to B.R. Ambedkar,” and, with characteristic fulsomeness, remarking that “when I say that Hamid was my friend, I feel it might come across as self-promotion: that was the extent of his greatness.” Yet, Dalwai is near impossible to locate in contemporary histories of Maharashtra, which, depending on their ideological predilections, have long sought to portray the state as the great bastion of resistance to Islamic rule, the progenitor of polemical politicians from Tilak to Ambedkar, or the financial center of independent India. In a historiography dominated by analyses of Marathas, Hindutva, and, increasingly, at long last, anti-caste mobilization, the history of Maharashtra's Muslims remains peripheral. On the other hand, Dalwai both identified with and critiqued a different lineage: that of Muslim reformers from Sir Syed Ahmed Khan to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In Muslim Politics in Secular India , a collection of his essays translated by Dilip Chitre in 1968, Dalwai compared the trajectory of Hinduism and Islam. Whereas the trajectory of Hindu modernism, he argued, progressed from Raja Rammohan Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru, the “process of Muslim modernization was arrested” when Iqbal and Jinnah’s embrace of “Islamism ultimately led to anti-Hinduism.” For Dalwai, these reformers fell short on several counts: they promoted an “obsession with [the Muslim community’s] minority status,” encouraged a “tribal…collectivist loyalty,” and ignored the unique plight of Muslim women. Indeed, Dalwai is perhaps most well-known for his attempts to remedy this third issue; on April 18, 1966, he led a group of seven women in India’s first march against triple talaq and polygamy, and in favor of a uniform civil code (UCC). Here, we may note that nearly sixty years after his march, from the controversial Shah Bano case to the BJP’s inclusion of a UCC in its 2024 manifesto, many of these issues remain deeply contested. Yet, unlike Sir Syed, Iqbal, or Jinnah, Dalwai’s idea of modernization demanded militant and uncompromising secularization. Clean-shaven on principle—at a speech in Solapur, he joked, “if I were in power, I would compel all Muslims to shave off their beards”—and adamant that he be cremated rather than buried, Dalwai was branded a kafir by his orthodox contemporaries. His dedication to Muslim reform was borne more from an accident of birth rather than any deep religious commitment: “I don’t pray, neither do I fast. I believe the Quran was not made by God, but rather by Muhammad,” he declared in an interview. “I am a Muslim by birth and a Hindu by tradition.” In “Daha Rupaychi Note,” we catch an early glimpse of this iconoclastic brand of Islamic secularism. The twin celebrations of Ganesh Chaturthi and Eid dictate the story’s pacing: they precipitate Kareem’s arrival in the village; they prompt his existential reckoning, and they frame the central tension of the narrative. Dalwai’s reclamation of Hindu tradition is also, perhaps, revealed through Kareem’s references to the Ramayana. By drawing parallels between Sriram, his closest friend who “embodied Gandhi’s call to ‘go to the village’,” and the Rama of legend, Dalwai intimates familiarity with Hindu mythology and suggests at least some amount of faith in its teachings. Here, we must underscore the complex, multivalent nature of Dalwai’s religious and regional identities: as a Marathi Muslim, his perspectives on secularism, socialism, and language politics were shaped by his negotiation of the two strands of thought I have traced above. His marginalization, then, constitutes multiple, overlapping disappearances: of Muslim thought from Maharashtrian history, of Marathi thought from Indian Muslim history, and of the Islamic secular from discourses of religion, nationalism, and modernity. As Kareem sets off from Chiplun, he is overwhelmed by emotions, his heart “darkened with despair.” Caught between the financial allure of Mumbai and the moral imperative to remain in the village, negotiating between the festivals of his birth and his tradition, he chooses to remain hopeful for the future of the Konkan. How many times did Dalwai make this same journey, his thoughts consumed by these same anxieties? How many times did my grandfather? I’ve never set foot on the red soil of his native land, never peered out into the Arabian Sea from that lush coastline dotted with jackfruit and cashew trees and since his passing more than two decades ago, any tether binding me to the region has unraveled. In any case, the Konkan of his—and Dalwai’s—time is long gone. Perhaps it is a fitting tribute to both men that his son, in the spirit of “Daha Rupaychi Note,” would go on to marry a Hindu woman and raise a family where, like Kareem and Sriram, we celebrate both Ganesh Chaturthi and Eid. Ten Rupee Note by Hamid Dalwai Translated by Ria Modak After spending a year in the noisy chaos of Mumbai, my mind drifts to my village in the Konkan. I remember the uninhibited, idyllic days of my childhood, and feel the temptation to meet old friends and relatives. Every summer, I take a week or two off to visit the village, setting foot on the boat from Ferry Wharf to Dabhol. This year, however, I was too consumed by work to make the journey. A few months later, though, I managed to negotiate a vacation; my aunt had sent a message telling me to come home for Eid. Besides, it had been many years since I’d been back to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi. I decided that I would go, and booked an S.T. bus. At the Chiplun motor stand, a couple hours from Ratnagiri, some friends came to greet me. We traveled the rest of the way together, cracking jokes and chatting about nothing in particular to pass the time. Once we arrived at the village, they drank their tea and dispersed, promising to come see me again. I made my way to my aunt’s house. She lived alone, and we were very close. Since I was a child, my visits would incite a flurry of overexcitement: what shall I cook? What shall we do? Where shall we go? Even now, nothing has changed: how long will you stay? What shall we plan for Eid? Eventually, tired of her chattering, I interrupted: “Chachi, why haven’t I seen Sriram anywhere? He didn’t even come to meet me at Chiplun.” “Arrey ho! Did I forget to tell you? He’s lost everything. The farm, the land, everything has been auctioned off. But what’s to be done?” she said. “But why doesn’t he come to Mumbai then? Why is he wasting his time in this village? ‘Social work… social work…’” Kareem scoffed. “We might die of starvation, but we must still commit ourselves to social work. I don’t understand.” She let out a sigh. “I’ve told him so many times, but he always repeats the same thing: ‘we shouldn’t only look out for ourselves, kaki.’” Tears shone in her eyes. I was taken aback. I’d run into so many acquaintances from the village in Mumbai, but none of them had told me about Sriram’s condition. It’s true that we’d stopped writing letters to each other as the months passed. As I became increasingly caught up with work, I suppose I’d taken Sriram’s situation for granted. “Look, this is everyone’s story in the village. Everything is upside down. You lot who’ve gone and built a life in Mumbai, why will you remember your home in the village? You don’t even know who’s alive and who’s dead here. You haven’t sent a penny in four months. At least you haven’t settled down yet—there are some people who haven’t returned in five or ten years. Who will take care of their houses?” the old lady went on. Staying in Mumbai, my mind had become an emotionless machine. How could it be that I’d never once thought about the economic state of my village? Today my aunt had opened my eyes, and I turned inwards. The thick fog shrouding my mind evaporated. I let go of the day-to-day tedium of my clerical life, and the formality of my city sensibilities melted away. But what good could come from thinking? I’d renounced any golden dreams of idealism and ambition and was wandering in the lonely desert of pragmatism. For 120 rupees a month, I scribbled nonsense and passed it off as clerical work. I lived with a friend and ate my meals at a cheap mess. I couldn’t imagine ever having enough money to get married. The next day, I was awakened by a pair of raucous voices. At first, I didn’t pay attention, but once I heard my name, I perked up. An old woman said, “He hasn’t remembered me once in so many days. Has he returned from Africa with bags of cash or what?” Quickly, I got up and left. I didn’t see who had come. Only after my aunt explained did I begin to understand that the woman was having money problems for Eid. I felt terrible, but then my aunt prodded me: “Why are you feeling bad? This is everyone’s reality. How many people can you possibly help?” Then she took 100 rupees from me, buying what she needed for the house and paying back her debts with the rest. I felt as though she was getting even with me for not having sent money these past few months. From that day onwards, there was a line out the door. At any given moment, someone or the other came complaining of financial distress, expecting money. My tongue sat heavy and numb in my mouth. They came reluctantly, nursing their shame and hesitation, losing their courage as they asked favors. I’d only come with 200 rupees: of that, 100 had gone to my aunt. Of the rest, 90 were given here and there. Finally, I put an end to this pathetic charity session. I wanted to return to Mumbai, after all, and needed to set aside money for the return fare. Everyone I’d given money to had done me a favor at some point or the other. I was satisfied that, at the very least, those debts were paid. But my satisfaction didn’t last long. Ganesh Chaturthi came at last. In the old days, the village would ring with the auspicious sounds of cymbals and mridanga. But today, I heard nothing. Confused, I asked my aunt, who replied: “Arrey baba, how can people celebrate with nothing in their belly? The old days are gone. Two days before the Gauri Visarjan, there’ll be some dancing and that’s it, the festival will be over.” I felt like I’d been stabbed in the stomach with a sharp knife. Poverty hadn’t just made our daily life miserable: it had cast a dark shadow on our celebrations, our happiness, and our enthusiasm. I had no doubt that Eid, too, would be similarly dark. Eight days passed, but Sriram, my closest friend, still hadn’t come to see me. If anyone embodied Gandhi’s call to ‘go to the village,’ it was Sriram. Though he’d once settled in Mumbai, he had kicked aside his lucrative job in the city and instead devoted himself to uplifting the village. Finally, I went to see him the day before Gauri Visarjan. Standing in the corridor, his face lit up with joy when he saw me. At once, he enveloped me in a tight hug and cried out to his wife, “Hey, look who has come!” Coming out with a handful of ash from cleaning up, she said, “O Chakarmani! When did you come? Yesterday or what? Made it a point to come see us as early as you could manage, hm?” Ignoring the sarcasm dripping from her voice, I said, sagely: “If the mountain doesn’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.” “Enough is enough! Please don’t bore us with the same old phrases. I’ve been telling him, ‘that friend of yours has come, go and see him,’ but he always repeats the same thing…” Catching a glimpse of her husband, she fell silent. I couldn’t wrap my head around the situation, but Sriram explained. “Don’t be flustered, my friend. I told her that Kareem has come from Mumbai. His pockets are overflowing, everyone must want a piece of him. The poor must be going to see him again and again. How could I go at such a time? He’d think that I’m just after his money, too.” Sriram laughed loudly. His laughter pierced my heart. The poverty of the village, the sheer decline of the Kokan was all revealed to me through that laugh. I said, casually: “Listen, if you’d come to ask, would it really have been so terrible?” “That’s what I told him,” his wife jumped in excitedly. “There’s always some problem in the house. I told Sriram, ‘go to Kareem bhai and bring back 10 rupees.’ At least let the kids enjoy the festival. But he refuses. ‘Forget the money,’ he says. ‘I won’t go see him until Eid is over.’” “Kay re, when I came last year the situation didn’t seem so bad,” I said. “True, for two reasons. Firstly, you used to come in the summer. Even though the harvest wasn’t so bountiful, at least people had some grain in their hands. Besides, farm work was in full swing. There might not have been much money, but people could at least find some seasonal work. Now there’s no grain and no labor, either. What else can the starving do except sit and wait hopefully for next year’s harvest? And the other reason is that this poverty has been slowly getting worse over time. Today, you’re witnessing it, all at once, in its barest form. Planting his eyes on a distant green hillock, he said in a subdued and determined voice, “All this must change Kareem. It must be changed . We must give up our narrow, selfish attitudes. Capitalism is the culmination of our social structure and the naked form of our reality; it is our legacy. This situation isn’t any one person’s fault, but at the same time, it’s not any one person’s responsibility. We must reject this futile idea that we alone can enact meaningful change. We must work for everyone, for society at large. Last year I’d said, ‘let’s store some grain from the harvest for communal use.’ Nobody listened to me. Someone would’ve benefitted by now, wouldn’t they? But nobody has any sense of community wellbeing!” And he stopped for a while. I too was eager to give him an earful. Taking his silence as my cue, I said, “Really, Sriram. Why do you insist on working in this village? Haven’t you seen what kind of people live here? Why bother struggling for them in vain?” “Nahi re!” Placing his hand on my shoulder, he continued. “This work will bear fruit one day. I have faith in it. And consider for a moment if I decided to leave everything behind. What would happen to the work I’ve started, to the hope that’s been built up? I can’t turn back now.” Then, squeezing both my hands lovingly, he asked me, “Is everything okay with you? When are you going to get married?” I replied with a wry smile, “I’m okay. I’ve been eating at a mess and sleeping at a friend’s place, but he just got married, so I’ve had to move out. An acquaintance of mine knows someone who owns a building, so with his permission I’ve been sleeping in a room under the staircase. Where could I possibly fit a wife?” Then I asked him gently, “Do you really need money?” “If you put it like that, well then yes. But why should I make your life difficult?” Taking out the last ten rupee note from my pocket, I forced it into his hands. I drank my tea, bade farewell to his wife and child, and returned home. Eid and Ganesh Chaturthi came and went, and the day of my return to Mumbai drew closer. Both festivals had fallen short of my expectations. There was no warmth in people’s celebrations. They were just going through the motions, performing rituals with an emotionless formality. I couldn’t bear to see any more, and decided to return to Mumbai as soon as possible. Suddenly, I remembered I had no money. I needed ten rupees to return to the city, but couldn’t understand how to get them. Finally, I brought up the subject with my aunt. Angered by my ill-timed munificence and diminishing funds, she said, coldly: “Where will the money come from now? You’ll have to borrow from someone and just pay them back when you return to Mumbai.” The idea didn’t sit well with me, and I gave no answer. The next morning, while I mulled over the situation, confused, Sriram came and, to my surprise, placed a ten rupee note in my hand. Without letting me say anything, he explained, “If you were in trouble, why didn’t you just tell me, baba? Yesterday, kaki came to me and everything became clear. Aren’t you leaving tomorrow?” I took the note from his hand and looked closer. It was the very note that I’d given him! There was an unmistakable stain near the watermark where I’d spilled some ink earlier. “But this money was for your celebrations! Isn’t it the same note that I’d given you?” “That’s true enough. But on the very evening you’d come to see me, I got the money I needed from someone who owed me, and I was set. What business is it of yours?” The next day when the S.T. bus to Mumbai set off from the Chiplun motor stand, my heart was darkened with despair. I couldn’t stop thinking about the grim future of my village. I thought to myself, “won’t this situation ever change?” But then again, why not? Against the depressing backdrop of poverty, hunger, and unemployment emerged Sriram’s strength, patience, and courage. Why not, indeed! Just as Sri Ram released Ahalya from her curse, transforming her from hexed stone back into a beautiful woman with a brush of his foot, this Sriram too will surely rescue our Konkan. My mind filled with happiness and hope, I landed in Mumbai that evening.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Translation Maharashtra Hamid Dalwai Muslim Marathi India Fiction Journalism Writer Reform Economy Borders Community Literature Working Class Migration Family Urdu English Political Will Anti-Caste Organizing Liberalism Secularism History Literary Criticism Regional Languages Linguistic Marathas Hindutva Maharashtra Muslim Modernization Civil Society Militant Disappearance Religion Nationalism Ten Rupee Note Mumbai Konkon Village Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. · FEATURES Features · Mumbai India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. Thomash Changmai An indescribable journey of survival (2022) CGI (blender 3d) X Marks The Ghost The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India was reported on 11th March , 2020. Thirteen days later, a nationwide lockdown was announced – bringing India to a grinding halt. Except that is not what actually happened. Those who could afford it shielded themselves within their homes, rations packed to the rafters and N-95 masks stockpiled. For the over 600 million internal migrants in India –those whose homes are in villages but who work in informal labor markets in the city–the lockdown announcement triggered a mass exodus. Droves of people fled the cities they worked in to return to their rural communities, largely on foot. With their wages coming to an abrupt standstill, they left deeply fearful of what lay ahead. Much has been written about the lack of statistics regarding this exodus. Many lives were lost to hunger, fatigue, heatstroke and, of course, disease. Yet “ there are no numbers ,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, then Indian Minister for Labour and Employment, stated the same year when asked to enumerate the tragedy’s scale at a national level. Migrant workers have already long been considered “fringe figures” within the Indian urban social network. With the rupture caused by the pandemic, their existences have only been further invisibilized. The initial guidance provided by India’s central government was to ensure that migrants did not leave the cities. However, given the sheer volume of panicked people desperate to rush back home, this guidance was impossible to actually implement. When the stay-where-you-are orders failed, the center tried creating quarantine camps at state borders .This, too, did not prove successful. Attempts to build a database of the departing migrants were also abandoned halfway. The pandemic was already seen as an arithmetic problem : a problem of numbers where a solution could purportedly be reached by just pinning down the right formula. This notion was only compounded upon by the use of terms such as “rate of infection” and “doubling time” in the media, which made the actual lack of data and data collection efforts regarding migrant workers result in a particular kind of disenfranchisement. Despite the magnitude of the exodus, India’s national mood was to dismiss the migrants’ long march as simply an aberration. Since the event was caused by the deep distrust that migrants displayed in the state’s ability to provide them with safety nets, any acknowledgment of the tragedy’s nuances would misalign with the government’s narrative of complete control over the crisis. A Vocabulary of Ghostliness In retrospect, the lack of numbers eventually became an object of interrogation. A particular trope came into play within the media discourse surrounding the migrant exodus: a vocabulary of ghostliness. Words used to describe the state of the migrants essentialized their identities to solely their forced absence from the labor market. News reports in publications like the BBC and God Save the Points , spoke of “ghost workers” and “ ghost towns .” In a Telegraph India essay written shortly after the first lockdown, academic Manas Ray describes the migrant workers trekking to their native villages as “ghost mutineers stalking the country in search of a home.” “These lives are, of course, not entitled to the city's culture and taste, to its intellect and leisure; these are gross lives,” Ray writes further. The word “gross,” a mathematical term for excess, is specifically used here to capture the unnumbered migrants’ lives. “What seems like a relatively stable social order is constantly being modified, added, subtracted, maintained, and cleaned by the invisible labor force mostly made of migrants,” Ray continues. While terming the migrants as ghosts evokes a certain poignancy, it also dehumanizes and homogenizes a diverse, marginalized group of people. Although the tragic scale of the exodus could not accurately be enumerated at the time, it is now possible to retrospectively analyze Indian media archives and give an approximate number to the verbiage that was in play. As an intervention into this archive of absence, I formulated a dataset containing newspaper (e-paper) stories that appeared when I ran a Google Search with the following phrases as keywords: Migrant Haunting Mumbai Migrant Ghost Mumbai Covid Haunting Mumbai Covid Ghost Mumbai I delimited the database both spatially and temporally. The city of Mumbai became a stand-in for the urban, chosen for being the country’s financial capital. Temporally, I limited the selected articles to those published between 15th March, 2020 and 10th August, 2021. I downloaded the text from these news articles from relevant pages of search results as raw TXT data and eliminated the duplicate results, making sure that each webpage was represented only once in the TXT data file. This data was subsequently input into a Word document where, using the “Find” feature, I located the words “haunt” and “ghost,” highlighting the sections they appeared in. I further transferred these sections to columns to see the frequency of the words and the contexts they were phrased within. Finally, I color-coded repeated phrases, numbering each occurrence. My goal through this exercise was to locate patterns within this particular media discourse which evoked a metaphoric vocabulary of ghostliness. The data I analyzed for these patterns encompassed roughly 106,000 words in total, including headlines, by-lines, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions over the four keyword searches. It is important for me to say that by no means did I conduct a perfect academic study which incorporated all the work that has been produced relating to the migrant exodus. The formulation of the data set was restricted by resources, paywalls, and availability of time so it is meant to be indicative rather than declarative. Therefore, this is not a quantitative analysis, but a qualitative exploration of the use of a specific vocabulary and its implications for understanding a certain media archive. Why is it necessary to think about the vocabulary used to describe this, or any, tragedy? First, without numbers, we have no other way to understand the scale of the lives lost and destroyed. Secondly, understanding language allows us to understand who is permitted to be forgotten or remembered, and who media discourse renders invisible. The absence of numbers of lives can then be understood by investigating who is made a ghost–who is seen to haunt rather than live as a full human being–and how. When we cannot account, we must articulate. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of using the vocabulary of ghostliness and hauntings to explain societal relations. In a 1919 essay titled The Uncanny , Sigmund Freud describes how any change in the way society functions bring with it a sense of deep unsettlement. Karl Marx takes this even further at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto , where he terms communism itself as a specter haunting Europe, invoking ghosts to signify societal churn. More recent scholarship in anthropology has built on tradition, hypothesizing how societies often tell ghost stories as a way of integrating uncomfortable memories into the cultural fabric. In scenarios with no actual historical record or archive, hauntings and ghosts become a means to combat “ institutional forgetfulness. ” With the COVID-19 pandemic and migrant crisis in India, we can see deliberate institutional forgetfulness in action. Here, the vocabulary of ghostliness becomes a tool to grasp public sentiment. Even three years removed from the worst of the pandemic, which disproportionately ravaged the Global South , understanding its impact on human lives is to grapple with ambiguity–intellectual, pragmatic, and experiential. It is to be faced with something that is not quite historical, not quite normal, and not quite visible. It is to engage with a ghost. Gloomy Sunday, 2023, courtesy of Thomash Changmai. In the depths of the night, a lonely soul weeps, Tangled in shadows, where despair seeps. A heart, heavy with the weight of solitude's sting, A melody of sorrow, a dirge I sing. (Inspired by the song Gloomy Sunday composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.) Accounting, Articulating Within my data set, the word “haunt” in various conjugations (haunted, haunting, et cetera) occurred 29 times. The term was used most often to describe images of the migrant exodus and how the city folk were haunted by the visuals of it. To ascribe a numeric value: out of the 29 references, 11 referred either to “haunting images” or “haunting visuals.” As anthropologists Benjamin Smith and Richard Vokes write in their 2008 article “ Haunting Images ,” the photograph and the ghost “are never far apart.” The two can be interchangeable in their function, “standing in for relationships that cannot or can no longer be performed directly,” and share the similarity of embodying present absences . They further activate an “emotive force through their representation of absent objects, kin and places.” Images from the pandemic are rife with this emotive force as they represent moments of death and tangible devastation, evoking significant grief, and by extension of the vocabulary of haunting, horror. Through images, citizens of the city are forced to reckon with the structural collapse of urban labor networks. In my study, a second pattern emerged: the use of the word “haunting” to describe memory and recollection. There were four references to being “haunted by memories.” Comparing it to the previous pattern, where photographs produced ghosts, memory here is where the lost “normal life, or the remembrance of normality,” resides. During the pandemic, the phrase “new normal” was commonplace. In such an unprecedented time, recent memories felt historical, and indeed haunting given the sense of loss they invoked. The word “ghost” itself appeared in my study 28 times. 21 of these occurrences concerned a place, with 11 referring to “ghost towns,” nine to “ghost villages,” and one to the ghostly nature of abandoned roads. In media discourse during COVID19, the term ghost town was clearly used to describe the emptied urban centers, while ghost villages referred to the rural settings where the population had previously been sparse due to internal migration. During the pandemic, these became the sites of return for the working class who were seeking safety and familiarity. In five instances across the data set, “ghost” was an epithet transferred to the laborers themselves leaving the cityscape. Coupled with migrants already being othered and alienated, this deployment of the language of haunting only served to further exacerbate their marginalization and cement their erasure. A 2022 report from the World Health Organisation suggested that India’s real COVID toll may never be known. According to the report, more than 4.7 million people – a nearly ten times higher statistic than estimates by Indian officials – might have died from COVID-19 infection between 1st January, 2020 and 31st December, 2021. It is not a stretch to postulate that the missing numbers from India’s state statistics might be deaths that occurred in villages or at the homes of those who could not afford medical treatment. Data paucity within India is not a new phenomenon, and it is well-documented that the ones left out are often from marginalized communities . A poem written by Indian filmmaker Kireet Khurana during the lockdown turns attention to the migrant crisis with the following stanza: “Hum to pravasi hain, kya is desh ke vaasi hain? Agar nahi hain insaan to maar do abhi, de do farmaan” (We are migrants, are we (not) residents of this country? If we are not human, kill us now, Give the command) The stanza juxtaposes “ pravasi” (migrant/traveler) with “ desh ke vasi ” (residents of the country). The value of this wordplay comes from the etymology of the terms and their meanings. The root word for both pravasi and vasi is the same–“vas” meaning abode. Therefore, a vasi is one who is of the abode, so its negative suffix pra(vasi) implies one who is separate or othered from their place of abode. However, the term desh ke vasi (residents of the country) often signifies being a citizen. Citizenship and residency are therefore interchangeable in this context. The poem questions the disenfranchisement of migrants by declaring “if we are not human, kill us now,” criticizing the political leadership's unwillingness to provide migrant laborers with humane means of returning to their native communities. In his celebrated essay collection Politics of the Governed , historian Partha Chatterjee categorizes individuals afflicted by infrastructural disenfranchisement as occupying a fringe space. In this fringe or margin, they reside within the city but cannot rely on it for social safeguards. Thus, they are rendered beyond the comfort of being a vasi . This only became more explicit in India through the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite numerous assurances by the government that migrant workers would be safe within the cities , a precedent of haplessness and lost livelihoods led to large masses attempting to leave cities. For most migrant workers, the uncertainty of a treacherous journey back home was preferable to relying on the state for sustenance. The distrust created by constant erasure simply could not be erased by politicians’ promises and press broadcasts. Specters and those who witness David Torri , an anthropologist of shamanism, describes the ghost as first and foremost a story: it “needs listeners more than it needs witnesses.” As researchers charged institutionally with the creation of knowledge, the onus is upon us to bear witness to the lacunae within archives and acknowledge our failures in listening to those who fall through the chasms of documentation. India’s COVID-19 migrant exodus was a humanitarian crisis born out of rightful mistrust held by laborer populations towards urban administration. The ghosts resulting from this exodus, and further exacerbated through media discourse, are not new, but have always existed – the pandemic simply made visible the cracks within India’s neoliberal urban apparatus. Indian cities have continued to grapple with their failure to integrate migrant laborers into their social and cultural fabric in the three years since the pandemic. Despite the significant cost to human life, there has been no socio-political change aimed at remedying the gap between those seen as citizens of the city, and those essentialized as mere bodies for labor. “I felt betrayed twice: by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state,” a construction worker from Kanpur, Ram Yadav, said in a 2022 documentary made by The Guardian . At the time of the lockdown, he vowed never to return to the city he’d left. A few months later, however, he had no choice but to head back to Delhi. By November 2020, large sections of migrant workers , much like Yadav, had returned to the cities they had left. There was no newfound love for the urban–just desperation in the face of limited job opportunities within rural communities. The disenfranchisement they continue to face is deeply institutionalized. Within most archives their experiences are secondary. The fact that there are no numbers is potent; the state does not account for the working class body, neither in life nor death. In life, they have no stability or voice in the functioning of the very urban centers that rely on their migrant labor; in death, they are merely erased. This erasure reaffirms migrant workers as Chatterjee’s term of fringe figures, or outsiders to the city’s social and cultural fabric. Devoid of agency, the migrant becomes the object of urban anxieties, rather than a subject experiencing them. The city is thus simultaneously run by migrants yet haunted by their absence, with the urban populace haunted in particular, albeit at a comfortable distance, by migrants’ trauma. In other words, the laborer is subject to the whims of the megacity and those who administer it. They become the “other,” pitied by middle-class citizenry, yet still not seen by them as human or equal. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Specters of Marx (1994), disjunctures in society, like pandemics, make apparent the anxieties of a place, and the “ghosts” that emerge here are testimonies to alienated labor. By reconciling these specters through scholarship, at the least, we can move forward towards marking the absences within existing records. It is an attempt to integrate significant institutional failure into cultural memory. The production of knowledge is never perfect, but the use of alternative vocabularies as interventions allows us to pinpoint deliberate erasures. Fully understanding the effect of a crisis, of course, does not encompass just metrics, even if imprecise, for its impact. Yet, it is an honest start. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Mumbai State Government Narrative Internal Migrants Migrant Laborers Ghost Workers State Erasure Vocabulary of Ghostliness Data Paucity Shamanism Complicity Cosmopolitanism Displacement Alienation Institutional Forgetfulness Precarity Refugees State Modernization Narratives Archive Pandemic Kireet Khurana Migrant Traveler Health Epidemic Town and Gown Rural Urban Media Discourse India COVID-19 Archive of Absence Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 15th Nov 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

The Awami League’s think tank, the Center for Research Information, had a “flagship publication”: WhiteBoard magazine. Projecting a modern, Anglophone, elite identity, WhiteBoard was part of a small media ecosystem that helped to whitewash a despotic power, with youthful figures deploying their credentials in international academic and publishing circles. What to make of WhiteBoard’s advisory board members who distance themselves from the Awami League now? The Awami League’s think tank, the Center for Research Information, had a “flagship publication”: WhiteBoard magazine. Projecting a modern, Anglophone, elite identity, WhiteBoard was part of a small media ecosystem that helped to whitewash a despotic power, with youthful figures deploying their credentials in international academic and publishing circles. What to make of WhiteBoard’s advisory board members who distance themselves from the Awami League now? Kamil Ahsan, Untitled (2024). Digital collage. Artist Dhaka Mahmud Rahman 20 Oct 2024 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION The WhiteBoard Board It’s been three weeks since the mass uprising in Bangladesh ousted the Awami League regime of Sheikh Hasina, and I remain glued to social media. Morning, noon, and night. One morning, eyes barely open, I wake up to several Facebook posts up in arms over an article in the Dhaka newspaper Bonik Barta, titled “CRI and WhiteBoard: Radwan Mujib Siddiq Bobby and his advisory board.” I see a screenshot from Bonik Barta with the faces of ten people. I recognize five. A few of them I have called my friends in the past, although distance crept in during the final years of the Hasina regime. Two have now shared Facebook posts denying they were ever a part of the advisory board of the Center for Research and Information (CRI). They say they had only been members of the editorial advisory board for CRI’s magazine, WhiteBoard, and had no association with CRI. Radwan Mujib Siddiq is the Editor-in-Chief of WhiteBoard and a trustee of CRI. He happens to be Sheikh Hasina’s nephew, the son of Sheikh Rehana, sometimes mentioned as Hasina’s successor. The CRI was the Awami League ’s think tank, the creator of projects such as the Sheikh Mujib comic book series, a volume of quotations from Sheikh Mujib , and, of course, WhiteBoard magazine. Earlier this year, the CRI came under scrutiny when news reports published some alarming information about the organization's activities. Meta had just published, in its Adversarial Threat Report for the first quarter of 2024, a section on Bangladesh that mentioned they had removed 50 Facebook accounts and 98 pages related to the Awami League (AL) and the CRI for “violating our policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior”: specifically the use of fake pages masquerading as real news outlets that spread pro-government propaganda. I am not surprised by the board members’ objections and disavowals. We are prone to compiling lists of “traitors” to be shunned and there’s a whiff of guilt by association. But the defensive explanations hardly seem adequate either. The websites for the CRI and WhiteBoard are no longer available. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I’m able to read archived articles. I find some old press coverage of their activities from Netra News . It’s plainly stated that the CRI was considered the “research wing” of the AL, and WhiteBoard proudly declared itself as the CRI’s “flagship publication.” From the names of the editorial advisory board and other contributors, it’s clear they tried to rope in academic and civil society personalities. They also claim that WhiteBoard was “the first policy magazine in Bangladesh.” I doubt that. The AL has long tended to deny achievements in Bangladesh’s history not directly spearheaded by them. I read some of WhiteBoard ’'s old articles. They generally avoided issues of power and politics. I find two notable exceptions, however, that sing the glories of BaKSAL , the Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League, the “one” party spearheaded by Sheikh Mujib when he established a one-party state in 1974, banning all opposition, and silencing all but four newspapers . One of the articles by Syed Badrul Ahsan, a well-known apologist for the AL, contains this delightful sentence: “When BaKSAL came in, the government approved four newspapers, two Bengali and two English. It would be simplistic to suggest that this was a measure to curb dissent. No, I would say it was a measure to bring about discipline in journalism.” Remember that the next time someone bans freedom of expression. It’s not meant to silence speech. Just to bring about some discipline . Of course, BaKSAL has long had a sordid reputation in Bangladesh, but during its latest rule, the AL—in creating the second edition of its authoritarian rule—was eager to rehabilitate its legacy, and WhiteBoard was eager to join in. Indeed, during the last fifteen years, the Awami League became well-known for crude remarks from its ministers and party leaders and the thuggery of its student and youth wings in the media. This was often embarrassing to the more suave apologists of the regime. I get the impression that WhiteBoard was aimed at projecting a smart, youthful, modern, and Westernized look for the AL regime. It was published in English. The board’s membership, dominated by people from the English-fluent posh neighborhoods of Dhaka, seemed geared towards gathering goodwill from the West and courting a younger elite within Bangladesh. The board includes figures involved in the corporate and tech sectors, private universities, the biggest NGO in the country, and the English-oriented literary and publishing spheres. The CRI was only one arm of the regime’s soft power projection. It also used other platforms managed by WhiteBoard advisors. The board member Kazi Anis Ahmed wears multiple hats, diverting “thousands of dollars…into a years-long covert lobbying effort in Washington DC” on behalf of AL, according to a recent report, which details Ahmed’s shadowy dealings with groups that lobbied for Tulsi Gabbard and conservative think tanks. Ahmed directs a family corporate group, publishes the Dhaka Tribune and Bangla Tribune newspapers, heads up a major private university, and runs the Dhaka Litfest . Through the festival, he cultivated connections in global literary and media circles that helped create goodwill towards the Hasina regime. He also penned op-eds locally and in the foreign press defending stolen elections. Unlike the Awami League’s central command, which claims that there was no rigging, Ahmed’s editorials took a different line—one for a “sophisticated” global audience. One example : “While their elections have been heavily questioned for their credibility, election interference is hardly unique to the Awami League.” He hammered home the regime’s appeal to India and the West–Hasina was the last line of defense against an Islamist takeover of Bangladesh. Some on the editorial advisory board are known AL supporters; others don’t have such clear affiliations. The upper class in Bangladesh is entangled in multiple webs of family and social ties. Some on the board joined because of such social connections, others perhaps because after a decade of entrenched power, the idea was simply: “the Awami League regime is the only game going, and if I want to get access to realize my policy ideas, how else do I get that?” Yet others signed up to get their photos and names in a slick-looking publication with clout. But when you put it all together, you can’t avoid the conclusion that no matter why each person joined—their intentions really don’t matter—they became part of a machine to promote the Hasina regime and bolster her cult of personality, as well as that of her father. After all, this was a regime that passed legislation outlawing any criticism of Mujib. The CRI and WhiteBoard helped provide an intellectual veneer to the Awami League’s rule. They deployed resources to boost Mujib and Hasina’s “thought” in recent years. WhiteBoard articles continually hammered in the theme of “development through political stability,” but they kept silent about the other side of the coin: the regime’s terror-fascistic methods of ruling, the disappearances, torture, extra-judicial executions, secret jails, and censorship. And in perfect nepotistic tradition, the CRI and the WhiteBoard ’s leadership teams included four members of the first family. The Awami League rigged three elections and dreamed of ruling forever. They truly believed that, by birthright, as the party that led the movement for independence, they had the sole right to rule. A regime like Hasina's rested on many legs. You cannot build an authoritarian regime with bullets, digital surveillance, security forces, and goondafied youth alone. You need compliant media and other ways to build up soft power. Whenever protests emerged on the streets, the youth squads were sent out to pummel and even shoot protesters. These squads wearing motorcycle helmets became popularly known as the Helmet League. Those intellectuals who supported or justified the AL’s power might claim that their role was different. But then, I recall a distasteful conversation in 2008 with a university professor in Dhaka lecturing me on the importance of a party having peshi shakti, muscle power. For many intellectuals, the lure of closeness to power and the rewards were seductive. And even for those journalists, NGO wallahs, and academics who wanted to preserve some independence but avoid marginalization, it wasn’t easy. I bet each editor, professor, reporter, talk show host, or NGO director who agreed to join the conveyor belts of the ruling power has a story to tell. Most won’t. But might some? Like those who wrote the Facebook posts claiming distance from the CRI and WhiteBoard ? Bring out the details, I say. At a time when much is being revealed about how this regime functioned, I wish some would be brave enough to spell out how the daily cultural and academic life worked under the now-departed regime. It would be far more enlightening than weak justifications about why we only did this much and not more. Open air, too, can be a robust disinfectant. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Mahmud Rahman is the author of the story collection Killing the Water , and translator of Mahmadul Haque’s Black Ice . He is based in Philadelphia. KAMIL AHSAN is an environmental historian at Yale, a Franke Fellow in Science and the Humanities, and the founder of SAAG. He is an essayist and critic currently based in New Haven, Lahore, and New York. Opinion Dhaka Bangladesh Awami League WhiteBoard CRI Sheikh Hasina Bonik Bharta Center for Research and Information Association Complicity Radwan Mujib Siddiq Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Student Protests Fascism Police Action Police Brutality Mass Protests Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Despotism Clientelism Chhatra League Dissent Bengali Nationalism Adversarial Threat Report Think Tank Meta Flagship Publication State & Media Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League BaKSAL Media Crackdown Newspapers Board of Directors Free Speech Censorship One-Party State Authoritarianism Postcolonialism Postcolonial State 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh State Modernization Narratives Corporate Power Corporate Media Kazi Anis Ahmed Bengali Dhaka Tribune Bangla Tribune Dhaka Litfest Bonik Barta Netra News Modernization Islamism Cult of Personality Dynastic Politics Career Politicians Cosmopolitanism Electioneering Rigging Elections Secret Prisons Surveillance Nepotism NGOs Literary Activism Literary Spheres Publishing Literary Complicity NY Times Peshi Shakti Youth Squads Movements The Guise of Democracy BSF Surveillance Regimes Quota Movement Student-People's Uprising July Revolution Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future. · FEATURES Opinion · Madhya Pradesh Since his electoral victory in 2014, Narendra Modi’s Hindutva brigade has attempted to render Muslims invisible through hypervisibility. Mob-lynchings "don’t just happen” to Muslims. Thook Jihad is to be expected. By applying microscopic, misinformative attention to Muslim businesses, homes, and livelihoods throughout the country, the BJP has forced Indian Muslims to constantly create hideouts for their humanity. However, as Modi’s monumental loss in the recent Lok Sabha polls indicates, Muslims refusing to accept the social and psychological invisibilization are already leading the charge for a brighter electoral future. Saara Nahar Play (2023) Watercolour on Paper 22 x 30 inches Bulldozing Democracy When I was a child I was fascinated by the bulldozer that visited my street everyday and picked up trash from a nearby dumpyard. Bulldozers served as a good spectacle for us kids. We were intrigued by its ability to pick tonnes of trash in a matter of minutes. If you look up the term, “JCB ki khudai” (Bulldozer digging) on YouTube , you'll find dozens of innocuous videos with millions of views. In recent years, however, that imagery has changed. Today, these bulldozers produce the most horrid spectacle for kids and adults alike. Many Indian Muslims see the bulldozer as akin to an armoured tank, a tool of terror, seeking to uproot what holds their families together and stores their tangible memories and artefacts—their home. In recent years, the bulldozer has transformed from a harmless machine to a super villain serving extrajudicial punishment to its victims without trial. What stands in the way of its unrelenting arm is “enemy” territory, and the bulldozer shows no mercy. A few months ago, a dozen Muslim homes were bulldozed in Madhya Pradesh for allegedly storing beef, and men were jailed under the NSA (National Security Act) in what many Muslims widely perceived as vengeful action by the state government. In July , a Muslim man committed suicide after his home was demolished in an anti-encroachment drive in Lucknow city in Uttar Pradesh, in which hundreds of homes were demolished in a Muslim majority neighborhood. The Indian state suggested that displaced people buy alternative housing, similar to their statements on resettlements in 2015 . Other adjoining posh neighbourhoods were also meant to be demolished but were spared after an intervention by leaders of the ruling BJP and protests by the locals. In August, a sprawling 20,000 square feet bungalow—that belonged to Haji Shahzad Ali, a Muslim and former leader of the Congress party in MP—was bulldozed after he was accused of violence. A 2024 estimate by the Housing and Land Rights Network ( HLRN ) shows that government at the local, state, and federal levels demolished 153,820 homes in 2022 and 2023, resulting in the forcible eviction of more than 738,438 people from rural and urban areas across the country. Muslims were among the worst victims of these bulldozer drives. Illegal housing is a prominent issue in India. Ghettoisation, socioeconomic inequality, and mass migration to metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai adds to the problem of illegal housing. News outlets have reported between 55,000 and 65,000 illegal housing developments in India between 2016 and 2024. The issue becomes uniquely problematic when homes of Muslims are selectively targeted and are considered a fight against “ Land Jihad. ” Every now and then, there's news of a major demolition drive against the so-called “illegal homes” belonging to Muslims. Similar to the Haji Shahzad Ali case, the demolition is alleged to happen as a response to crime. Later, however, the public is informed that the demolition and the crime are unrelated, although the way it plays out is as explicit revenge. The mainstream media hails it as quick justice, all while the underlying principles of natural justice are openly violated. In November 2024, the Supreme Court of India finally passed a strong verdict against these arbitrary bulldozer drives putting an end to the retributive demolition drives, but by now much damage has already been wrought. What about those who’ve already fallen victims to this “lawlessness?” After every forced demolition and eviction, I used to wonder where these people are meant to disappear off to? They can't bury themselves underground or dive into the sea, but we hardly hear of them once the dust of the bulldozer's destruction settles. As much as this violence instils fear, it can never successfully lead to the psychological and physical retreat of an entire community. This may make you wonder—what is the best way to invisibilize over 200 million people? Bulldozing is only a symptom of the malaise that plagues India today—a cog in the larger machinery of violence. You cannot press a big red button and expect them to immediately disappear for once and all. You can’t erase them through force and violence. So, what do you do then? A real life solution to this rather troubling rhetorical question has been developed by the Hindutva nationalist forces, who relentlessly target Muslims throughout India. All while, encouraging non-Muslim citizens to distance themselves from the Muslims for their own safety. Let me demonstrate this with a recent example of the insidious way in which, through hypervisibility and violence, Muslims are forced to disappear from public life. A recent 'directive’ in the state of Uttar Pradesh asked eateries that were situated along the path of a Hindu pilgrimage to display their names. A move intended to make the “Muslim” identities of the servers, cooks, and owners clear to the buyers and discourage commerce. It started after an anti-Muslim boycott was called by a far-right Hindutva cleric, who accused Muslims of mixing meat in vegetarian food and thook jiha d —a conspiracy that Muslims spit in the food of Hindus to wage a holy war. Despite the dehumanising, absurd, and defamatory nature of this message, the state did nothing to counter the request and instead mandated shopkeepers to prominently display their names on their shops. Consequently, many Muslims were forced to shut down their shops to avoid conflict, police harassment, and mob attacks. Many faced economic losses. Some were fired by their employers after allegedly being pressured by the police. It's important to note that Uttar Pradesh is opposed to Halal food certification, which is limited to the nature of food (vegetarian or non-vegetarian) and not the identity of the person cooking, serving, or selling it. The government knows that most things that are Halal for Muslims are permissible for Hindus as well, and nobody can stop Hindus from selling them. Here, however, the state was adamant that merely displaying the religious identity of vendors and cooks can ensure the purity of food and protect the religious rights of Hindu devotees. The process is simple. First, a campaign is initiated to make Muslims seem impure, unhygienic, and Thook jihadists. Naturally, Muslims are compelled to refute these false narratives. Due to the meat sales facing on and off bans, many Muslim businesses already suffer without any compensation. To rub salt in the wound, Muslims who run vegetarian eateries get accused of mixing meat in the food. Subsequently, a demand for segregation is imposed, and Muslim businesses are singled out, marked as targets by the state—by the very state that falsely claims to be against mixing the rules of food with the rules of religion. Where's the escape from all this? It's a heads-you-lose and tails-I-win dynamic. If you’re a Muslim, you can't cook meat on holy days for Hindus. If you do then you are probably mocking someone. If you don't, then you are conspiring to pollute vegetarians. You’ll be targeted either way. While the order has faced backlash, and has now been stayed by the Supreme court, it's not a one-off instance. In the last decade, we have witnessed this strategy play out in real time with the spread of an all pervasive vitriol that targets every aspect of Muslim life in India—from the God they pray to, to the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the language they speak, and now their homes, jobs, and families. What is supposed to be an innocuous and essential activity for others becomes a malicious conspiracy for Muslims. Undoubtedly, this humiliation has been sustained through violence and victim blaming. In one month since the election results were declared on June 4 , at least 12 Muslim men were brutally lynched across India. Perhaps, even most Muslims with no knowledge of English now know the meaning of the rather complex English word ‘lynching’. It's something that worries all of them and yet it has gradually become so mundane that it outrages only a few of them. After the recent wave of attacks, many Muslims questioned the silence of a now significantly stronger opposition party and even forced them to raise their voice in Parliament. For the opposition parties, however, this silence was a matter of convenience. In the past, they sought Muslim votes by acknowledging the threat of Hindutva, but continued to do nothing. They gaslit Muslims into not saying a word. For their voices to be heard, Muslims need to make their votes count and use every platform to organise, speak, and negotiate. Modi's reduced numbers in the parliament in 2024 has already proven this. The growing menace that systematically works to erase Muslim voices from the national discourse through various forms of terror is comprehensive. Sometimes it is done through withholding online content and other times through threats and legal cases. This is what happened with the fact checker, Mohammad Zubair , who was arrested in six consecutive trumped up cases. He was recently booked under sedition for exposing a hate speech. Note here that the severity of action against the hatemonger is nothing compared to the charges against Zubair. In August 2024, two Muslim migrant workers from West Bengal were attacked by a mob of cow vigilantes in Haryana. One of them succumbed to his injuries. The other , however, managed to escape. Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini said that "It is not right to call it mob lynching,” because beef is illegal in Haryana. We don't know how the CM assumed that the two men had consumed beef. Around the same time, an elderly man was assaulted in a moving train by a mob on accusations of eating beef. On July 6 2024, the police in Uttar Pradesh booked two Muslim journalists for calling the murder of a Muslim man a ‘mob-lynching’. They were charged for creating communal unrest through malicious misreportage. All they did was report the family's version of the event. This is not an isolated incident in which those reporting on violence against Muslims have been targeted. On one hand, the Indian government has stopped publishing data on lynchings after calling its own methodology unreliable and on the other it attacks and tries to discredit every voice that investigates it. The few voices reporting on the lynchings are facing threats and censorship, gradually forcing them into silence. Indian Muslims see meanings twisted out of context everyday. For instance, a lynching is not reported as a lynching. Instead, it’s reported as the response to or punishment for a “robbery,” “child kidnapping”, or something similar. At the same time, a group of prominent right-wing clerics openly calling for genocide is dismissed and those calling them out might be booked under criminal charges. Reporting on this type of speech is considered “disturbing the peace.” The mainstream media has also shown little interest in these cases. The last decade saw a wave of hateful attacks through the news, social media, films, poetry, and music, to further invisibilise Muslims. Hate speeches are not confined to obscure corners, they dominate public discourse and are amplified by TV anchors and prominent social media influencers. A recent Human Rights Watch report pointed out that 110 out of 173 poll speeches by PM Modi contained Islamophobic remarks. Modi referred to Muslims as infiltrators and people producing more children. He even alleged that if the opposition won power, they'll give away the gold of Hindu women including their Mangalsutras to Muslims. Throughout the polls, BJP constantly published cartoons depicting Muslims as evil people eyeing the resources that belonged to Hindus. The PM’s message trickled down into the abyss of the bottomless cesspit, leading to more unhinged commentary by other leaders. This kind of hate mongering during elections is a first for India. It's a culmination of years of propaganda by WhatsApp troll armies and TV anchors like Suresh Chavhanke who dehumanise Muslims on live TV, and clerics like Yati Narsinghanand Giri who openly support the idea of a genocide of Muslims. The combination of these tactics seeks to marginalise Muslims and to systematically erase their presence in public life. The burden of proof and the onus to act in an "acceptable" way disproportionately falls on the Muslims. If they protest or turn bitter, that would reinforce negative stereotypes. Muslims must stay aware of these traps and not become silent. Be it the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests or the biggest political upset of Mr Modi's career in the recent Lok Sabha polls–in which he lost the majority in the parliament–Muslims have played a great role in these pushbacks. They have displayed resilience and resistance on many occasions which proves that they haven't given up on their citizenship. So, silence should not be an option. As a strategy, it is suicidal. Instead, they need to make their presence felt and reclaim public space. They must seek accountability from both the ruling party, as well as the opposition they voted for in large numbers. It's hard to predict how Muslims can break this cycle of violence and propaganda but what is clear is that they'll have to firmly stand up for themselves first if they want others to join them. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Madhya Pradesh Demolition Uttar Pradesh Hindu Extremism Hindu Fascism Hindutva Thook Jihad Halal Muslim invisibility hypervisibility Invisibilizing Muslims Citizenship Amendment Act mob-lynching Dehumanization Land jihad bulldozing bulldozers Ghettoisation Ghettoization illegal homes BJP National Security Act Religious Conflict religious divide Lok Sabha Archive of Absence Career Politicians Modi Civil Society Displacement Economy Vendors Construction Despotism Disappearance Dissent Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Execution Forced Disappearance Ghost Workers Human Rights Violations India democratic backsliding nationalism democracy housing urban development Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 10th Jan 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note: