WRITER Mimi Mondal MIMI MONDAL is a Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated author of science fiction and fantasy. Her novelette His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light was shortlisted for the Nebula Award in 2020. Her first book, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler , co-edited with Alexandra Pierce, received the Locus Award in Non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Hugo Award in Best Related Work and the British Fantasy Award in Non-fiction, among others. She is the recipient of the Immigrant Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2017, the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship for the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 2015, a Commonwealth Shared Scholarship at University of Stirling in 2013, and the Poetry with Prakriti Prize in 2010. She has written both sci-fi and fantasy, as well as columns about being a Dalit woman, Indian fantasy genres, the #MeToo movement in India, and more. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

As Sino-Indian tensions rise in the new Indian Union territory of Ladakh at the Line of Actual Control, Ladakhi craftswomen like Sonam Dolma are returning to Kashmir to sell their authentic pashmina shawls. THE VERTICAL The Artisan Labor Crisis of Ladakh As Sino-Indian tensions rise in the new Indian Union territory of Ladakh at the Line of Actual Control, Ladakhi craftswomen like Sonam Dolma are returning to Kashmir to sell their authentic pashmina shawls. VOL. 2 REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR A landscape view of Ladakh. Dolma's homeland now facing the heat of the lurking dragon. Courtesy of Masroor Khan. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 A landscape view of Ladakh. Dolma's homeland now facing the heat of the lurking dragon. Courtesy of Masroor Khan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Ladakh 3rd May 2024 Reportage Ladakh Srinagar Kashmir Sino-Indian Relations China India Geopolitics Indian Union Article 370 Line of Actual Control People’s Liberation Army Changthang Labor Craftsmanship Artisans Indigeneity Settler-Colonialism Displacement Statehood Military Operations Police Action Sonam Dolma Militarization 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. In the upscale neighborhood of Rajbagh in Srinagar, Sonam Dolma awaits a high-stakes meeting at an eatery amidst Kashmiri portraits and vintage décor. Her Ladakhi tribe’s prized Pashmina shawls made of fine Kashmiri cashmere are sought after by Kashmir’s elite who eschew mass-produced replicas for craftsmanship. In the quiet corner of the café, away from the bustling streets, Dolma prepares to showcase her wares to discerning clients—wives of bureaucrats and businessmen—who value quality and authenticity above all else. Just miles away from this serene scene lies a neighborhood scarred by floods, where Dolma’s tribe finds refuge after their daily trade expeditions. Despite this contrast, these Ladakhi women navigate Kashmir’s high society with grace, armed with exquisite products and a commitment to purity in a world of imitations. The group’s trade trips to Kashmir have become recurrent ever since Chinese troops showed up at their homeland’s hinterland in May 2020. Oblivious to the standoff at the Line of Actual Control (LAC) where Beijing has grown its military presence, the women are making their rounds of the posh localities of Srinagar with shawls in hand. This internal drive for living has come just five years after New Delhi stripped the semi-autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir. Their homeland is a new spark plug in South Asia; they live in a constant state of fear. In fact, the rise of the new front—LAC—has already proven deadly. In a military standoff, Sino-India troops have suffered casualties . But beyond these border games, Beijing has forced new orders and routines compelling the Ladakhi craftswomen to return to estranged Kashmir. These young women frequent the fraught region of the valley for sustenance. Prior to their recent visits as mobile merchants, they would mostly feel at home in Kashmir. But everything changed when New Delhi sliced Ladakh from Kashmir in a cartographic attempt to redefine the contested land in the summer of 2019. Carving a union territory out of the United Nations’ registered disputed region eventually proved costly for the government of India. It provoked China—now the ominous third party of what New Delhi calls a “bilateral issue” between India and Pakistan. However, beyond Beijing’s belligerence, the decision to make Ladakh a federal entity has far-reaching consequences for the cashmere brand and its craftspeople. With China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) occupying the winter mainstay of the Pashmina goats in Ladakh, cashmere is losing its source of thread. Ladakh’s Changthang area—the land of nomads located in the east of Leh on the Chinese border—has long been a breeding ground for the Pashmina goats. The severe temperature of the area, the experts say, makes the Pashmina thread of Changthang very thin, which in turn makes these goats the source of the finest cashmere in the world. The Chinese incursions have now made it a literal no-go zone for the nomads rearing these goats. Although China is showing no signs of retreat, the military occupation has created an existential crisis for the native animal and has raised serious concerns around the globe. The nomads are reporting increasing numbers of goat deaths. These deaths—due to the occupied winter habitat of Pashmina goats—have cast shadows on the global brand. In the main towns of Leh, the Pashmina dealers are linking the supply slump to the rise of China in Ladakh. Despite the dilemma, the cashmere craftspeople are banking on their old ties with the valley. In the larger din emanating from the LAC, their Kashmir move has become symbolic. While New Delhi has separated them from Kashmir in this territorial juggling, Beijing has reunited them . New anxieties are on the rise, however, as the processing of Pashmina may be shifted out of Kashmir to Uttar Pradesh by the Indian authorities, a move that may create an impact on the cashmere wool industry. Faced with diminishing income and mounting unpredictability, Dolma made the difficult decision to seek refuge in Kashmir. At noon when most of the citizenry works, she arrives to strike some profitable exchanges. Dolma on her way to a Srinagar neighbourhood where she sells her stuff to customers. Courtesy of Mir Seeneen. Dolma tells me how she was born into a family of weavers in a small village 260 miles from Ladakh’s capital, Leh. She learned the art of crafting Pashmina shawls from her grandmother, who in teaching her, passed down centuries-old techniques. Dolma reflects on the journey: “The foreign incursions into Ladakh forced me to confront the fragility of life, to adapt, and evolve.” But the looming specter and uncertainty brought by a massive troop build-up, cast a dark shadow over Dolma’s once-peaceful existence. “We spend months preparing the handicraft stuff before arriving in Srinagar for work," she says. For Dolma, these rendezvous in serene corners of the city held significance beyond mere transactions. She was not just selling shawls—she was preserving a legacy, a tradition that had been passed down through generations. In a market flooded with facsimiles, she was a purveyor of authenticity, valued for her discerning eye and commitment to quality. Away from Ladakh, Dolma considers Kashmir the second home for Ladakhi entrepreneurs like herself. This Himalayan region is their main economic link to the rest of the world, aside from being the preferable market for their indigenous products. During the post-Covid distressed times, they counted on Kashmir’s booming domestic tourism. “Kashmir has never disappointed us,” says Tenzin, another Pashmina seller from Ladakh. “But somewhere down the line, the region’s uncertainty reminds us of our home now. It was a peaceful land before they changed its status in the summer of 2019.” The demand for a separate entity—a union territory—was a longstanding political cry in Ladakh, mostly from the members of the ruling mainstream party. The campaign gained steam after the political party swept the regional polls. Experts feared that slicing Ladakh from Kashmir would alter the course of the disputed land. But in the run-up to August 2019, when campaigns against Article 370 became fierce, Ladakh witnessed a political wave culminating in its new territorial identity. Lately, the process in Kargil has intensified with shutdowns of demand for statehood ; even the famed climate activist Sonam Wangchuk went on a 21-day hunger strike . With the altered political reality, most of these women are now anxious about the war frenzy created by the armies in their homeland. They realize how the militarization was triggered by the summer shift—when New Delhi justified the abrogation of Article 370 as a move “to end discrimination” with Ladakh and its people. But the unilateral decision backfired when the Chinese army showed up at the LAC and clashed with Indian forces. Since then the skirmishes have stopped, but the boots remain on the ground . While the border brouhaha has given Ladakh global coverage in recent times, these girls have become weary of the hyper-media attention. Like their Kashmiri counterparts, they don’t make peace with the pugnacious news debates focusing on their homeland. The mainland television media’s so-called war bulletins have only heightened tensions. What’s further creating a false sense of alarm is New Delhi’s dithering response to the LAC situation. The region has now become a new strategic zone forcing the right-wing government to build a fair-weather highway connecting Leh with Srinagar that opened this past winter. The snowbound thoroughfare used to be cut-off for six months. But now, the Indian government’s urge to keep an unflinching eye on the PLA has put men at work during extreme conditions, including the construction of a tunnel connecting Ladakh with Kashmir. Still, these young Ladakhi women see hope in Kashmir where their products are quite popular among the urban elites. However, if the status quo isn’t restored at the LAC anytime soon, these Pashmina girls of Ladakh fear losing cashmere to Chinese aggression. In the wake of this militarized uncertainty, some of the girls believe their visits to Kashmir, this estranged part of India, might alleviate their financial situation. “Life is tough back home,” continues Tenzin, while waiting for her client inside the cafeteria, and uncertainty has only escalated after the recent border tensions between India and China. Away from Ladakh, these girls share rent, rage, and respite in Srinagar before heading back home with seasonal earnings. “Most of us belong to poor families,” Tenzin continues with a thoughtful stance. “For us, our families come first. But it’s very hard to stay focused amid the changed reality now. Be it troop build-up or frontier tensions, the sense of normalcy has taken a big hit. Regardless of everything, Kashmir is the same to us as it used to be when the people of Ladakh were part of it,” she says. “Sadly, for some of us, a sense of estrangement has come to define this relationship now. And the change is there to see.” Padma Tsering, a quintessential Ladakhi woman in her early thirties from Nyoma, has been selling Pashmina in Kashmir for the past couple of years. “We’ve cultivated our customer base in Kashmir and rely on them for our livelihood,” she says. Despite their limited political awareness, Ladakhi girls like Tsering find hope in Kashmir. “There’s a sense of security Kashmir offers despite the surrounding tensions,” says Phuntsok Wangmo, another Pashmina seller from Ladakh. “It’s our preferred market with loyal customers, even during post-Covid times.” Dolma showcases her shawls in Srinagar during a business meeting with her client. Courtesy of Mir Seeneen. Meanwhile, Dolma’s wait ends as Sadaf Khan, a young Kashmiri woman, arrives at the café. Khan expresses interest in buying shawls from the weaver. “My cousin recommended Dolma to me and vouched for the quality of the shawls,” says Khan. The café comes alive with the buzz of business, some chatter, and laughter. After bidding farewell to her client, Dolma steps out into the busy thoroughfares of the city; walking home reflectively after another successful trade. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

An ambitious collaboration between Dhivehi visual and performance artists, experimental and folk musicians, typographers, and people from the many atolls of the Maldives creating vital cultural spaces in Malé—one that sheds light on how Maldivian artists use unified and disparate aesthetics to reflect on class, space, and politics. BOOKS & ARTS A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara An ambitious collaboration between Dhivehi visual and performance artists, experimental and folk musicians, typographers, and people from the many atolls of the Maldives creating vital cultural spaces in Malé—one that sheds light on how Maldivian artists use unified and disparate aesthetics to reflect on class, space, and politics. For our event In Grief, In Solidarity on 5th June 2021, we featured the most ambitious collaboration SAAG has attempted to date, with over 20 Maldivian performance artists, visual artists, musicians, typographers, artist collectives, and poets in a wide-ranging showcase on a range of Dhivehi art. Curated by Kareen Adam and Associate Editor Nazish Chunara, the showcase was meant to glimpse the art practices in an overlooked country and demonstrate the perspectives one misses as a consequence of overlooking whole communities and peoples. It is a paradigmatic problem for the international Left: Why do we so often take borders for granted in practice, even if we fervently do not wish to in principle? The showcase also provides a counterpoint to what people often associate with Maldivian: as merely an exclusionary, elite haven for tourists. The music and poetry are intentionally not subtitled, as SAAG, the magazine, shifts into multilingual presentation. We hope to strike against the expectation that population size should dictate such expectations and consider Dhivehi aesthetics and politics on their terms. Artists and collectives featured include Afzal Shaafiu, Aishath Huda, Beatz Crew, Cartman Ayya, DIONYSIAC , Eagan Badeeu, Firushana Naseem, Little Faratas N’ Monkey, Mohamed Ikram, Mariyam Omar, Mary Halym, Meyna Hassaan, Nadee Rachey, Nashiu Zahir, Nur Danya, Raya Ali a.k.a. Echnoid, Symbolic Records , and Yazan. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Exhibition Maldives Art Practice Internationalist Perspective Art Activism Indigenous Art Practice Oceans Islands Luxury Tourism Malé Painting Dhivehi Typography Fine Art Experimental Music Folk Music Music Video Performance Art Dance Repertory Dance Troupe Art Institutions Gatekeeping In Grief In Solidarity Curation Aesthetics Missing Aesthetics Hip Hop Un’dhun Urban/Rural Fuamulah Huvadu atoll Rasmadhoo Kulhudufushi Seascapes Class Struggle Environment Atolls KAREEN ADAM is a Maldivian-Australian visual artist sharing her time between Maldives and Melbourne, Australia. The experience of living between multiple cultures, particularly negotiating between the East and the West informs her practice. Ideas about transitions, cultural identity, and the juncture between 'local' and the 'visitor' emerge in her work. Her current projects explore representations of island tourist destinations and island diaspora. Kareen explores these ideas using various mediums including printmaking, drawing, painting and digital multi-media. Kareen is the creator and maker “Kudaingili”—a range of hand-made, hand-printed products. Kareen has curated exhibitions, and exhibited her art works in Maldives, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hong Kong, and the Asia Pacific region. She has a Diploma in Visual Arts from the Southbank Institute of Technology, Brisbane and a Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology from the Queensland University of Technology. Nazish Chunara is a painter, installation artist, and aerodynamicist currently based in Los Angeles. Exhibition Maldives 5th Jun 2021 FIRUSHANA NASEEM practices abstract styles with acrylic and recycled materials, using anything that moves her. Her artistic process is mutable. She often finds the balance between thoughtful, intentional composition and the intuitive placement of color, shapes, texture, and gestural marks, conveying vibrant and uplifting abstract paintings. EAGAN BADEEU earned initial recognition in 2000, when his works were exhibited in the Funoas Art Exhibition at Esjehi Gallery in Malé. Since then, he has exhibited his works with various groups and solo exhibitions, both in Maldives and abroad. His most significant works include 18 triptychs commissioned by the National Art Gallery, which were displayed in 2008 in a solo exhibition, “Theyokulain Dhivehi Raajje.” These paintings were based on his childhood memories of life in the Maldives. MARIYAM OMAR 's work focuses on human interactions within the society, with her primary medium being painting. Her installation works are based mainly on human rights issues. Her solo exhibition Untitled Works was held at the National Art Gallery in 2011. Her installation Departure from Logic and Humanity is featured in the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac 2014 Volume. She has exhibited her work in exhibitions including XOPI Exhibition of Public Enquiry in 2012 at Malé City Hall, The Maldives Exodus Caravan Show curated by SØren Dahlgaard in Venice in 2013, Berlin’s Import Projects Gallery, the Bangladesh Biennale, the Nasandhura Palace Hotel, and the Loama Art Gallery. MOHAMED IKRAM is a music producer, engineer, and fine artist. He intuitively sketches and draws to reflect on his personal nature in Maldivian society and in a larger political context. CARTMAN AYYA , or Ali Rishwaan, is a Maldives-based artist and graphic designer. He has displayed his art in various exhibitions and venues, including Hulhumale Central Park, the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, SAARC Artists Camp 2019, His solo exhibitions have been shown at Lecute Store, Gloria Jeans Cafe, Angsana Velavaru Resort, and Sharjah Institute of Culture. He is currently Vice Chairperson at MAC. NADEE RACHEY is a mixed-media artist based in Malé, Maldives. She received a Diploma in Visual Arts and a BA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia. In Malé, she works with acrylics and watercolors, and is renowned for her wall murals of Maldivian marine life. Her murals are on display at several luxury resorts, including Cheval Blanc Randheli, Summer Island Resort, and Herathera Island Resort. MEYNA HASSAAN (or Hassaan Mohamed) is a Maldivian vocalist/composer. He released his first hit album, “Maldives Fantasy,” in 1992, followed a short time later by his second album, “Maldives Ecstasy.” His third studio album “Euphoria” was never officially released but is now available to stream. Hassaan's latest album is titled “Oevaru.” DIONYSIAC was founded by the late Nael Nasheed and Neha Noogully as a performance art and dance collective. Many of its performances center on the public and private struggle of Maldivian women. BEATZ CREW began in 2018 when a few passionate dancers joined to explore the art of dancing. Residing in Maldives, the members have been working on themselves and a crew to showcase their talent locally and internationally on all social platforms. The crew has collaborated with different artists in the industry and is well-known in the dancing community in Maldives. Current members include Salim, popularly known as Bugxy, Mauzam Riyaz, and Rafhan MARY HALYM is a self-taught botanical artist. Most recently, she was one of the organizers and featured artists of the Fabulous Art Show 2024. She works with various techniques, often using fabric, watercolor, paper, and various flora and fauna. NASHIU ZAHIR hails from Malé. He is a poet, writer, and music critic. His work has been published in the Passengers Journal and Vestal Review . NUR DANYA SHAMUN is a Maldivian abstract artist and interior designer. She is passionate about designing to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change through assimilation and the creation of climate-responsive spaces. Her art uses mixed media and unconventional techniques such as impasto, sgraffito, and block printing. RAYA ALI , a.k.a. Echnoid, is a DJ and musician from the Maldives. RAYYAN MOHAMED , known locally as Rydey, is a Maldivian music producer and lyricist, especially active in the hip-hop music scene. He joined Symbolic Records in 2016 as a music composer and became the company's senior producer and the Head of Audio Production. His lyrics pertain to social issues, mental health, and abstract contexts. Symbolic Records is the first hip-hop music label in the Maldives. SYMBOLIC RECORDS is the first hip-hop music label in the Maldives. LITTLE FARATAS N' MONKEY is an anonymous band from Maldives. Different artists collaborate on different projects. The core of the band is the sound room of a video production house. On That Note: The Lakshadweep Gambit 29th MAR Protest Art & the Corporate Art World 5th JUN Natasha Noorani's Retro Aesthetic 5th JUN

The debut essay collection "Southbound" explores evangelical Christianity's marriage with extremism & contemporary Georgia politics, published soon after the state was flipped blue by the efforts of many grassroots organizers, including the author. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 9 · On the Essay Collection “Southbound” The debut essay collection "Southbound" explores evangelical Christianity's marriage with extremism & contemporary Georgia politics, published soon after the state was flipped blue by the efforts of many grassroots organizers, including the author. VOL. 1 LIVE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Georgia 19th May 2021 Live Georgia Georgia Politics Atlanta Georgia Senate Races 2020 US Election AAPI Communities COVID-19 Debut Authors Community Building Activist Media Literary Solidarity They See Blue Raphael Warnock Immigration Cultural Narratives of Immigration Identity Inheritance Essays Public Space Michigan Geography Essay Form Authenticity Mapping Essayistic Practice Social Change Class Class Struggle Stories in Dialogue Gender Religion Writing about Recent History Borders Perspective United States Temporality Space Time & Space Coalition Building Churches Complicity White Supremacy Brownnes Evangelical Christianity Diaspora Nationalism Internationalist Solidarity Internationalist Perspective Nayomi Munaweera Sejal Shah Non-Chronological Form Anger Automotive Industry Vincent Chin Ronald Ebens US South Activism Organizing Electoral Politics Anti-Racism GOP Republicans Democratic Party SAAG Chats 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. In 2021, activist, journalist, and author Anjali Enjeti published her new essay collection Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change , as well as her debut novel The Parted Earth . In May that year, she discussed the former, and briefly the latter, with Kamil Ahsan, on Instagram Live. The twenty essays of her debut collection tackle evangelical Christian extremism, white feminism at a national feminist organization, the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the South, voter suppression, gun violence and the gun sense movement, the whitewashing of southern literature, the 1982 racialized killing of Vincent Chin, social media’s role in political accountability, and the rise of nationalism worldwide. Here, Enjeti discusses the bargain between evangelical Christianity and fascism in the United States, as well as her efforts as a grassroots organizer for They See Blue in Atlanta, Georgia. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

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 Miriyam Ilavenil is a journalist and a descendant of displaced Tamil Dalit indentured labourers who is interested in understanding the politics and histories of South and Southeast Asia. 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 Miriyam Ilavenil 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:

From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility. From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility. "A Coat of Our Arms" (2025), digital illustration, courtesy of Priyanka Kumar. Artist Assam Larayb Abrar · Anamitra Bora 24 Oct 2025 th · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Trans Counterpublics P ooja Rabha, a tribal transgender woman from the Charaideo District in Assam, trembled as she told SAAG about a haunting scene from her visit to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) office. The office was swarming with border police and old heaps of paper documents. When called to the service desk, Rabha was asked to provide all the details of her origins, including a birth certificate, land document, and bank records. She stood behind her mother, her heart racing with anxiety. “I knew they were looking at my body,” Rabha recalled. Within minutes of standing there, a border police officer approached her and mockingly asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?” She froze. The officer screamed, “Go stand in the boys’ line!” NRC inspection and verification is a lengthy process and typically incomplete without biodata, photographs, and documents proving lineage. For many transgender people in Assam, the process is especially resource-consuming due to the need for consistent documentation that reflects their current identity. Many find this difficult, particularly if estranged from their families or if their official documents still reflect their birth-assigned “dead” names. Critics also believe the NRC is effectively a xenophobic exercise to identify and deport undocumented immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh—many of whom arrived in Assam following the 1971 war of independence. In 2019, the process excluded approximately 2 million people from citizenship, creating severe consequences for Assam’s transgender population, who face disenfranchisement alongside others left off the list. In Rabha’s case, even the discrepancy between her gender presentation and the gender identity indicated on official documents is enough to arouse suspicion. Should people like Rabha fail to be verified under the NRC, they are essentially rendered stateless: at best, unable to vote in elections , and at worst, likely in danger of imprisonment at a detention center. Unfortunately, transgender marginalization for political gain is not new in modern day India and Pakistan, where many Hijra and Khwaja Sira communities —an umbrella term in Urdu for transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people—share a rich history in connection to the land. A Long-Held Colonial Legacy Pre-colonial India demonstrated openness to sexual fluidity. Themes exploring gender and sexuality can be seen in ancient texts such as the Vatsyayana Kamasutra, Jain religious writings from the 5th century, Sufi poetry from the 13th century , and erotic literature from the Mughal period in the 17th century. In fact, many researchers and historians of South Asian studies have also highlighted links between queer desire and the sacred. Shayan Rajani, for instance, delves into the documented homoerotic relationship between Madho Lal Hussain, a 16th century Sufi mystic from Lahore, and a married Brahmin man. Rajani explains that while the relationship was considered unconventional, even transgressive, it finds a home within the religious canon when seen through the lens of Sufi thinkers and practitioners. Across various written accounts, and in Persian verse, this queer relationship was understood through “Metaphorical Love”—a Sufi literary tradition in which the imagery of human love is used as a metaphor to describe love for the divine. This same elevation of queerness is seen in Vinay Lal’s explication of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana , particularly how many hijras connect to the epic through their resistance to categorization. In the story, as Rama prepares to go into exile with Sita and Lakshmana, he instructs his subjects, “Men and women, please go back and perform your duties.” Per Lal’s interpretation, hijras, identifying as neither men nor women, would have remained at the same spot of his departure, where they would greet Rama upon his return fourteen years later. For their devotion, they would be blessed by Rama. In both Rajani and Lal’s analysis, queerness is deeply woven into the fabric of the region, through spiritual, literary and cultural traditions. Their work demonstrates the relatively expansive ideas of queerness in the erstwhile Subcontinent. However, the colonization of the Indian subcontinent by the British East India Company, brought with it a steep decline of the Khwaja Siras’ cultural significance alongside a wave of discrimination through the Criminal Tribes Act (CTC). Under the Act,. Khwaja Sira were criminalized based on a strict, orthodox understanding of gender roles. Men wearing female attire and homosexuality were deemed punishable offenses. This legislation effectively enforced gender norms, while picking away at artistic traditions that embedded queerness within them. “They [the British] criminalized our bodies back in the 18th century,” Pakistani trans activist Hina Baloch explained to SAAG. “So branding us as foreign agents or ‘others’ has a very colonial politics attached to it.” Although the CTC is no longer in effect in present-day Pakistan and India following their independence, its influence persists as a key colonial legacy, shaping societal attitudes and laws. Queer Rights Amid Religious Conservatism In Pakistan On May 19, 2023, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan rendered the Transgender Persons Act of 2018 incompatible with Islamic principles. This law had allowed people to choose their gender and to have that identity recognized on official documents, including national IDs, passports, and driver’s licenses. The recognition meant that transgender people could press charges for cases of discrimination and exercise their political right to vote while showing up as their authentic selves. While activists like Baloch are currently in the process of appealing the court’s decision, the reality is that the Khwaja Sira community remained the victim of violence and dehumanization even while the bill was in effect, she said. “We never had faith in our judicial system, and to a large extent, we saw this coming.” In recent years, the Pakistani government, fueled by netizens’ religious uproar, has curtailed many forms of queer and trans expression in the country, creating a firm bedrock of support for the overturning of the Transgender Persons Act. As Hussain “Jaan-e–Haseena” Zaidi, a trans-feminine artist based in Lahore, told SAAG , “By being very public about your queer identity, you’re inviting other people to criticize and try to discipline you back into their framework of being a Pakistani.” This sentiment is echoed in the backlash against the film Joyland , which depicted a love affair between a man and a transgender woman, in November 2022. Spearheaded by prominent figures from Pakistan’s religious right, including fashion designer Maria B and religious evangelist Raja Zia Ul Haq, the mudslinging evolved into what seemed to be a broader campaign about the religious and cultural identity of Pakistan as a nation. Hashtags like #JoylandvsIslam gained traction, with critics denouncing the film as part of a foreign-funded agenda to destroy Islam. The discourse included other extreme reactions as well, such as equating transgender identity with pedophilia . [Embedded] “The filthy venture named ‘Joyland’ is in fact promoting a one-way ticket to hell. The West has shortlisted this LGBTQ+ film for the Oscars as it openly mocks the teachings of Islam. We must reverse all decisions and actions based on the Transgender Act 2018.” ( Tanzeem-e-Islami ) While Joyland was ultimately allowed limited release following significant cuts of ostensibly vulgar material, it remained banned in Punjab , Pakistan’s most populous province . In a country where any violation of the harsh blasphemy law can result in punishment by death, accusations of being “un-Islamic” or “mocking the teachings of Islam” can have dire consequences. Moreover, vigilante justice is common in blasphemy cases, which are increasingly settled with violence outside the courtroom, with mob and targeted attacks against those accused. On March 17, 2024, a violent mob of over 100 men attacked and severely wounded transgender women in Gulistan-e-Johar, Karachi. According to Shahzadi Rai , a transgender woman present at the scene who is also an elected official of the Karachi Municipal Council, the incident originated at a local marketplace. A member of the Khwaja Sira community had politely requested a shopkeeper to exchange a torn banknote. However, a nearby man responded with sexually suggestive comments, implying she engaged in sex work. “Mind your own business,” the woman retorted. The situation escalated as the man proceeded to verbally abuse and physically assault her. Within moments, said Rai, the commotion attracted a mob hurling transphobic slurs, inappropriately touching the women, attempting to tear their clothes off, and threatening them with death. The mob accused them of “ruining society, “dirtying our neighborhood” and threatened to burn them all. As of 2021, at least 89 people have been extrajudicially killed due to blasphemy accusations over Pakistan’s seven-decade history, and the numbers have further risen since. At this point, policing blasphemy is woven into the social fabric of the nation. In Haseena’s words, “There’s this normalized [policing] which can range anywhere from verbal to violent harassment. And this can be from family, people you know, or random strangers.” This normalization of vigilante-style policing coupled with dehumanizing smear campaigns on social media has resulted in what Baloch calls “a very systemic and organized transphobia.” Ultimately, trans erasure and persecution is equated with strengthening the religious morals of the nation. “The Pakistani state has failed the Khwaja Sira community on violence,” Baloch added. “There is domestic violence like honor killing and homelessness [that] we face from our birth parents. Then, there’s intimate partner violence at the hands of our boyfriends and partners. And then there’s casual everyday violence.” In India, The Trans Body in Conflict With Hindutva Logic On the other side of the border, Dominic Amonge, a 34-year-old trans woman recounted an incident during her university days when, prior to her physical transition, she was raped during her stay at a men's paying guest (PG) house in Guwahati, India. Seeking justice, she approached the Station House Officer, but according to Amonge, the officer dismissively stated, "That's because it's your fault; you are queer." "I dealt with it," she said. "I lived with the abuse." Dominic Amonge is not alone. Sumitra Ghosh, a 22 year-old non-cis passing trans woman, faced similar challenges in Guwahati. Her landlord evicted her after discovering she was undergoing hormone therapy, assuming she would engage in sex work. In reality, she was on the verge of completing her BA 3rd Semester. With few housing options, as many metro states of India still demand cisgender married couples or bachelor men, Sumitra reluctantly moved into a boys’ PG in August, 2024. Within days, however, her male roommate sexually assaulted her. Aniruddha Dutta explores the construction of an “elsewhere” within Hindutva rhetoric, highlighting how marginalized communities are framed as “foreign threats” to the dominant sociopolitical order. Dutta defines “elsewhere” as any group or identity that does not conform to the rigid boundaries of Hindu nationalism—this includes Bangladeshi immigrants, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, and certain queer and trans people who do not fit within the upper-caste Hindu framework. Specifically, Dutta examines an incident from July 2021 where a brutal video of a trans woman named Ratna Chowdhury torturing a younger hijra circulated on WhatsApp. Without excusing the violence of the incident, Dutta traces how the event became a Hindutva talking point. As the case progressed, Dutta noticed that “Chowdhury was repeatedly singled out to direct blame towards Bangladeshis and Muslims and otherize them within hijra communities”—all while packaging it under the guise of safety concerns for trans individuals. Dutta notes that Hindutva may, at times, co-opt queer politics to project Hinduism as uniquely tolerant and inclusive. However, this assimilation can be slippery and rests on exclusionary and binary thinking—logic that would otherwise flatten Dominic Amonge and Sumitra Ghosh’s experiences into mere outliers or stereotypes. Trans women from Bengali or Muslim immigrant communities in Assam, for example, face compounded challenges under the current political climate. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government perpetuates ideas of a “foreigner-free” homeland for Assamese people, banking on middle-class Assamese anxiety to push the envelope for an updated NRC. While the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act , promised legal protections such as the ability to modify names on birth certificates, bureaucratic hurdles and the preoccupation with accurate citizenship continue to block progress in Assam. Trans women must provide proof of gender affirming surgery to update their legal identity, while those identifying as "transgender" must receive approval from the District Level Screening Committee. “Government offices demand an extra level of patience to deal with,” said Sumitra Ghosh, who struggled for months to receive her TG card (identity card for trans people) in Tezpur, Assam. “These offices are overburdened with work, and the employees either work slowly or continue to postpone their tasks until they become urgent. They rejected my certificates so many times in Tezpur,” she said. Often, due to additional document requests, “pictures, biodata proofs, and affidavits.” The stories of trans women like Dominic Amonge and Sumitra Ghosh illustrate that despite legal protections and selectively inclusive talking points, these women remain vulnerable to sexual violence, eviction, and systemic neglect by government officials. Their experiences also point to how queer people can easily slip between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” depending on the interests of the state. On September 11, 2023, Assam Railway Police arrested three Muslim trans women—Kusum, Durga, and Puja—for begging for change on the Bangalore Express train. The women were subjected to degrading and illegal bodily inspections . Despite trans people’s right to self-identify per the Supreme Court of India, the police falsely declared their trans identity as “fake” due to the absence of gender-affirming surgery. The media’s portrayal of the incident exacerbated the women’s plight. They were not only deadnamed and misgendered but also labeled as “impostors,” vilifying them in the public eye. The narrative largely appealed to the importance of pure, sanitized spaces—another prominent Hindutva talking point—and framed them as deceitful individuals, who were harassing passengers and collecting money under false pretenses. “With my queerness and gender, nobody needs to worry about my body,” asserted Durga in contrast to the circulated story. “Police are always worried about what’s between my legs more than myself.” Resistance Efforts On Both Sides Of The Border Faced with national erasure, queer communities in Pakistan and Assam have created grassroots initiatives that prioritize solidarity, joy, and community-care. In Assam, prominent trans activist Rituparna Neog leads the Akam Foundation , an organization dedicated to nurturing feminist education through community-building projects. Growing up witnessing the oppression of Adivasi children in Jorhat, Neog’s activism is informed by a commitment to radical compassion. Her organization’s initiatives include establishing free libraries in remote Assamese villages to break down barriers and educate communities on gender and sexuality. The foundation’s first library project, Kitape Kotha Koi launched in August 2021 and offers a safe and accessible space for learning. The focus is on library education and ensuring reading materials are free for those who need them most. Similarly, Palash Borah, a gay activist from Assam started Snehbandhan (Bond of Love) in 2015. Originally a support-based WhatsApp group of trans and queer people in Guwahati, the group has evolved into an officially registered organization. Major initiatives include activities like meet-ups and donation drives with Kinnar Trust and Donatekart . Currently, Snehbandhan is running a project with Azim Premji Foundation called Sahas to provide necessities like hormones, laser treatments, and registration certificates to the transgender community in Assam. "At first, I was nervous about all the activist talk and labels,” shared Dominic Amonge, who works for Snehbandhan. “I'm not a so-called activist. However, how else would I learn where to get a safe doctor or a good job?" Likewise in Lahore, Haseena founded Zenaan Khana in March 2023 following a slew of anti-trans attacks and rhetoric since the heated discourse on Joyland . Drawing on the region’s deep historical ties between art and queerness, Zenaan Khana positions itself as part of a broader artistic resistance. “Art is crucial in resistance movements because art has the power of providing a visual, auditory and literary toolkit,” said Haseena. One of Zenaan Khana’s goals is to create media that depicts queer and transness specific to the context of Pakistan, exemplified in one of its first projects: a series of photoshoots highlighting trans beauty, prominently featured on the group’s Instagram page. In one striking image, a trans woman is adorned in traditional jewelry, rings and henna, paying homage to the region’s aesthetics while questioning what types of bodies get to participate in this specific visual culture. “Our idea was to get photographers, stylists, and visual artists together to showcase queerness that is specific to the Pakistani context, and even pushing back against Western notions of LGBTQ+ identity,” Haseena noted. In many ways, “Ishq,” one of Zenaan Khana’s central ethos, captures the community-care politics at the heart of queer resistance. Ishq can be translated to mean an unending love filled with infinite possibilities. By anchoring itself in Ishq , the collective not only imagines a possibility for queer liberation in the Urdu language, but also expands the definition of the word itself to encapsulate the chosen families in queer circles, community building, and love beyond the binary—an ethos applicable on either side of the border. Whether through education, art, or funding, queer activists from Karachi to Assam demonstrate a shared commitment to queer liberation in the face of state-sanctioned erasure. Haseena neatly captures this pillar of resistance: “expanding people’s imaginations of queer and trans possibilities.” ∎ 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 LARAYB ABRAR is a reluctant third-culture kid based in Toronto. She is an editorial intern at Chatelaine and her work can be found in Xtra and various NYC and UAE-based publications. She is often found at coffee shops, book stores and any place that plays live music. ANAMITRA BORA teaches feminist and queer theory as an Adjunct Faculty at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Cotton University, Assam. His research explores the sociology of gender and the intersections of queer sexuality, affect theory, and violence, with a focus on the politics of (absent) bodies and the emotional textures of queer life in South Asia. In 2024, he was awarded Best Presenter at the 7th International Conference on Gender and Sexuality in Thailand for his paper “From Sexual Shame to Sexual Pride: Extending Emotions to Homoerotic Connections.” PRIYANKA KUMAR is an illustrator, visual artist, and creative head at Anchovy Press . She makes comics, prints and murals, and teaches illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Essay Assam Kashmir 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:

What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. | · INTERACTIVE Live · Global Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. Drama Editor Neilesh Bose, also the editor of the recent volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020) discussed the genesis of the project & new ways of telling history with Kamil Ahsan on Instagram Live in May 2021. The edited volume began at a workshop at the University of Victoria. It explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s, using global history to cast many contemporary dynamics and geographies into sharper relief. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography. It includes recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, and brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Here, Bose discussed the nature of global history, the approach taken at the workshop and beyond, and the many scholarly contributions to the volume. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Global Global History The Nature of Global History Migrant Workers Temporality Imperial Labor Indigeneity Indigeneous Spaces Histories of Revolutionary Politics Politics of Indigeneity South Africa Canada Indian Migrants in Canada Settlement Guyana Assimilation Alienation Settler-Colonialism Narratives South Asian Studies Cultural Narratives of Immigration Public Space Epistemology Knowledge University of Victoria Intellectual History Himalayas Indian Ocean Ocean History Oceans as Historical Sites Gaiutra Bahadur Sunil Amrith Indo-Caribbean Research Methods Research Experimental Methods Historiography Indentured Labor Legacies of Slavery Slavery Transatlantic Slavery Diaspora Diasporas North American Diaspora Pluralism Popular Culture Histories of Migrations Nation-State Atlantic World Multimodal Archival Practice Boundary Formation Empire Nation The Local and Global Moving Beyond Boundaries Arabian Peninsula Sugar Colonies Coolies Renisa Mawani Devarakshanam Govinden Senthamani Govender Daniel Kent-Carrasco Pandurang Khankhoje Naturalizado Mexico Marina Martin Riyad Koya Ashutosh Kumar Andrea Wright Goolam Vahed Uma Dhupelia-Meshtrie Indian indenture in South Africa Legal Regimes Law International Law Internationalism Internationalist Solidarity Internationalist Perspective Legal Frameworks Capitalism Vivek Chibber Academia Affect Agrarian Economy Anti-Colonialism Apartheid Archives Archiving Big History Cartography China Class SAAG Chats 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. 4th May 2021 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:

An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. THE VERTICAL Saffronizing Bollywood An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. VOL. 2 RESEARCH AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Research Bombay 15th Apr 2024 Research Bombay BJP Bollywood Sushant Singh Rajput The Kashmir Files Films Cinema Hindutva Kashmir Shakuntala Banaji Kunal Purohit Censorship Shah Rukh Khan Rachel Dwyer Aryan Khan Samanth Subramaniam Love Jihad Box Office Commercialization Tejaswini Ganti Fascism Ethnography India Advertising Bhuj The Kerala Story Priya Joshi Article 370 Yami Gautam Ien Ang John Hartley 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. In 2022, India’s Hindi film industry was in the throes of a crisis. Bollywood, as the industry is colloquially known, was still bucking from a pandemic which had injured film industries worldwide. Multiple mainstream movies, helmed by some of the industry’s biggest stars, from Aamir Khan to Akshay Kumar to Ranveer Singh, were failing miserably at the box office. Since the tragic suicide of an actor named Sushant Singh Rajput in June 2020, a rabid social media movement in India had been calling for people to #BoycottBollywood for its alleged complicity in Rajput’s death and painted it as a hotbed of elitism, drugs, and moral bankruptcy. This was coordinated “collusive behavior”, one study suggested, to engineer a frenzy of conspiracy theories. Members affiliated with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), another study found, especially pushed the narrative of Rajput’s death being a “murder”, driving the hashtag #JusticeForSSR to receive over 65 million active interactions in just six months. Amid this political powder keg and socioeconomic crisis, one film gained unprecedented success. A film with no stars, no popular songs, and none of the typical, crowd-pleasing conventions of mainstream commercial Hindi cinema. Released on 11 March 2022, The Kashmir Files claims to depict the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) exodus, but through crucial omissions—of the Indian army’s pervasive presence, unlawful detentions, and rapes of women across religions; well-documented cases of Kashmiri Muslims risking peril to protect Hindu friends ; and the thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who also died and fled Kashmir —creates a dangerously one-sided representation of Muslim violence against Hindus. In one scene, the menacing, kohl-eyed Muslim antagonist Bitta compels a Hindu widow to eat rice soaked in her dead husband’s blood. In yet another, he shreds open a bright saffron kurta off a Hindu woman and publicly brutalises her. The film uses shock value to incite Hindus towards collective anger, humiliation, and anti-Muslim hatred. The Kashmir Files opened to a modest figure of INR 3.55 crores. The following day, however, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally met with its makers and took a picture with them that was widely circulated on social media. “More such movies should be made,” Modi publicly said three days later, praising the film for showing “the truth which has been suppressed for years”. Other BJP leaders also endorsed the film – they organised special screenings and events, while the BJP’s information and technology cell and copious sympathetic media outlets provided incessant buzz and press coverage . The film was also given the coveted tax-free status in several exclusively BJP-ruled states. Though made with a modest budget of only INR 25 crores, with a little bit of “help”, The Kashmir Files eventually collected a whopping INR 247 crores domestically. It was a certified blockbuster. The BJP and Hindutva Founded in 1980, the BJP functions as the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindutva organisation active since 1925. Hindutva—the ideology of Hindu nationalism—conceives India as a Hindu nation, relegating Muslims and other minorities to second-class status. Historically, its ideologues drew inspiration from German Nazism and Italian fascism, while its closest ideological counterpart today is Israeli Zionism . The BJP has independently governed India since it won the national elections in 2014 by interlacing Hindutva with populist rhetoric under the leadership of Modi, a former RSS worker who oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. His purported victory, according to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, ushered in a new era for the nation, characterised by weakened state institutions, a distorted electoral process, and sanctioned violence against minorities, transforming India into an authoritarian Hindu state. The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? The Modi government has particularly weaponised the media to fuel Islamophobia. It has widely spread misinformation, enabling what media scholar Shakuntala Banaji has called the “mainstreaming” of intolerance. In his new book H-Pop (2023), independent journalist Kunal Purohit examines how the wider Hindu Right has harnessed popular culture forms such as music, poetry and books to disseminate and entrench Hindutva in popular and mass imagination. In this vein, Bollywood is a crucial fourth frontier. As India’s most prolific and powerful media industry, it is a key source of soft power and plays a crucial role in defining dominant conceptions of nationhood, belonging, and culture. As anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti writes in Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (2013) , Bollywood is also “perhaps the least religiously segregated place in India today where Hindus and Muslims work together as well as inter-marry”. Some of its most successful stars, directors, and other key members are Muslim. Many of its biggest hits over the years have celebrated Indian secularism and interreligious harmony, according to film scholar Rachel Dwyer, from Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), to Veer-Zaara (2004), PK (2014), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) . Today, a slew of at least 10 brazenly Hindutva propaganda films are swamping Indian voters ahead of the upcoming national elections in May 2024. It is the outcome of many years of moulding and steadily saffronizing India’s Hindi film industry, most aggressively since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the subject of my master’s dissertation, for which I conducted three months of fieldwork in Mumbai in the Summer of 2023, and conducted several interviews with prominent writers, directors, producers, actors, and journalists of Bollywood. All names have been anonymized in this essay. The BJP has used a carrot-and-stick strategy to control and regulate Bollywood ’s influence: a combination of bullying, along with promoting films that most brazenly perpetuate their Hindutva ideology. Yet for the most part, members of Bollywood have continued to eschew political binaries between left and right, instead seeing themselves as existing outside of the realms of politics and ideology. “The only God,” a veteran film critic and journalist told me, “is the box office.” The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? Fear and Censorship Alongside its elaborate army of online trolls, the BJP has not hesitated to use its hard power on Bollywood. They have incited mobs, engineered police cases, and orchestrated arbitrary arrests. When the Amazon series Tandav released in January 2021, for example, members of grassroots Hindu nationalist organisations filed police complaints against a Muslim actor Mohammed Zeeshaan Ayyub and the showrunners in four different Indian states, alleging offence to Hindu religious sentiments. The crime? A character named Shiva, played by Ayyub, uses profanity while portraying his namesake Hindu deity in a student play. When Amazon petitioned the Supreme Court to protect the showrunners from arrest while these cases were sub judice , this was denied. In another incident on 3 October 2021, inspectors of the Narcotics Control Bureau arrested Aryan Khan, the superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s then 23-year-old son, in a Mumbai port terminal. Despite lack of evidence, the agents imprisoned him for nearly a month before granting him bail, finally dropping all charges in early 2022. “Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation?” questioned journalist Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker . “The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.” In January 2023, the mammoth success of Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan , despite widespread calls for its boycott , not only revived Bollywood’s box office slump but was also touted as a victory over the Hindu Right . The social media boycotts, many in the industry concluded, were all bark and no bite. Subsequent consecutive successes of several Hindi films in 2023— Jawan, Animal, Gadar 2— compounded upon a palpable sense of triumph, with proclamations that “ Bollywood is back ”. But beyond boycotts and the habitually extreme ebbs and flows of the box office, the BJP has remained successful in its attempts at stoking fear and a pervading atmosphere of censorship, one that has now become naturalised in the industry. “You don't just deal with these issues when your film or your show is coming out,” one writer-director-producer said to me. “You're dealing with them while you are writing. There is a psychological aspect to it.” Many key Bollywood members I interviewed shared how their creative process now includes several additional considerations, like avoiding depicting green and saffron colours and any religious symbols and erasing any critiques of the police or politicians in the narrative. This was not the case before even 2020. A screenwriter named it the “chilling effect” – a perpetual state of cowering invoked in the face of the BJP’s “bullying tactics.” “You just have to stay in line,” he reflected, “ That builds a self-censorship inside you.” The New Blockbuster While the BJP suppresses, it also amplifies. In the case of The Kashmir Files , the party’s vigorous promotion of the film created a replicable template for a new kind of unabashedly bigoted blockbuster. In 2023, it was recreated by Sudipto Sen-directed The Kerala Story . Early promotions of the film claimed to tell a “spine-chilling, never told before true story” of 32,000 girls from Kerala who’ve been converted to Islam, manipulated into joining ISIS, and “buried in the deserts of Syria and Yemen”. This claim is demonstrably false , with the makers themselves later backtracking and saying they were showing the “true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”. However, in the film, one character passionately declares to a policeman: “More than 30,000 girls are missing, sir. The unofficial number is 50,000. We all believe that, sir”. Simplistic and unsubtle, The Kerala Story cherry-picks and distorts disparate, extremely rare “true stories” and manipulates them to peddle the Hindu nationalist “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory and construct a heightened sense of fear and distrust of Muslims. In one scene, the protagonist Shalini’s (now Fatima) husband rapes her, using Islam as justification, and later slaps her for protesting as she cries. In another, a bearded Muslim man lays out the plan for love jihad: “Start giving them medicine, get close to them, make them estranged from their families, ... [and] if need be, get them pregnant”. By the end of the film, this plan results in the pregnancy, suicide, and gang rape of these Hindu girls. Like The Kashmir Files , then, The Kerala Story also uses shock value to arouse disgust and hatred towards Muslims in a Hindu audience. Similarly, the film was profusely praised by Modi and several other BJP ministers and declared tax-free in multiple states. Produced with a modest budget of INR 30 crores, it collected a whopping INR 242.2 crore in India, making it another bona fide blockbuster. Bollywood and literature scholar Priya Joshi argues in her book Bollywood’s India (2015) that since the 1950’s, blockbusters have “vitally captured dispersed anxieties and aspirations about the nation” and are a “testament to some of the public fantasies that accompanied the national project”. In essence, she writes, “Bollywood’s blockbusters have conducted a dialogue over the idea of “India””. As India’s new contemporary blockbusters, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story reflect a nation engulfed in Islamophobia and Hindutva rhetoric. “The only trend that seems to work,” a prominent writer-director-producer admitted to me, “is an anti-Muslim trend.” According to culture studies scholars John Hartley and Ien Ang, audiences for films and any large-scale culture industries are “literally unknowable”, forming what Tejaswini Ganti calls “the ultimate site of unpredictability”. To cope with the inherent uncertainty of the business, members of Bollywood use what Ganti terms “production fictions”—“fluid and flexible discourses” made mostly in hindsight to explain commercial outcomes. Production fictions, for Ganti, primarily function to rationalise inherently random, unpredictable, and inexplicable box office events. Commercial outcome, she explains, functions as a “form of imperfect communication between audiences and filmmakers”—a dialectic of sorts. Riding the Saffron Wave The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story’s unprecedented success has created new production fictions that audiences actually want to watch more anti-Muslim, Hindutva stories, that consumer demand has simply swayed in that direction, and that such films are simply more likely to do better at the box office, not least due to possible, legitimizing promotion by the BJP. Many filmmakers, my interviewees claimed, “are riding on this whole saffron wave”, and many more, they expect, will “jump on the bandwagon” in order to achieve elusive box office triumph. It may be tempting to exceptionalize these films and view them as existing out of the scope of mainstream Hindi cinema, but this is misguided. These movies are only more extreme, brazen versions of an increasingly ubiquitous trend. From historical fiction films about Islamic invaders to cop and war films about fighting Islamic terrorism and Pakistan, Hindutva themes are dominating India’s cultural production and national consciousness. This type of cinema exists on a spectrum. There are those high on testosterone and muscular nationalism, like Uri (2019), Bhuj (2021), and recently, Gadar 2 (2023) and Fighter (2024), which involve masculinized army narratives, enforcing national borders, fighting “invaders”, espionage, violence, and the like. Then there are the rarer, more nuanced films on similar topics, like the female-centred Alia Bhatt-starrer Raazi (2018). Where there are explicitly propagandist, anti-Muslim examples of cinema like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , there are also more subtly Islamophobic films peddling a quieter poison, like Sooryavanshi (2021), Mission Majnu (2022), and Indian Police Force (2023). Cumulatively, the hard ubiquity of these protecting-the-nation-state-narratives and the pervasive uber–Hindu-patriotism at their core reflects what scholars Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer refer to as the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. By making Indian-ness synonymous with Hindu-ness, they normalise Islamophobia in public discourse. The BJP has evidently harnessed the uncertainty endemic to the film industry to push it to perpetuate its Hindutva ideology. They are ultimately succeeding at saffronizing Bollywood, not by turning its largely apolitical members into Hindu nationalists, but by influencing market forces to make Hindutva stories more profitable and marginalising dissenting or “deviant” voices. This new political order is increasingly being internalised, naturalised, and taken for granted by industry members, who appear, from my research, all too willing to compromise on their ideals for commercial success. In January 2019, the year of the last Indian national election, a group of Bollywood A-listers, none of whom were Muslim, were invited to meet Modi. They then posted a selfie of all of them together, which instantly went viral on social media. Later that April, Modi sat down for a sanitised, scripted, and avowedly “apolitical” interview with Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, known for being Hindutva’s poster boy . The same year saw the release of a slew of Hindutva propaganda films, many of which were officially promoted by the BJP , from hagiographic biopics of Hindutva figures like Thackeray and PM Narendra Modi to a film denigrating the opposition Congress party like The Accidental Prime Minister , to a pro-war, ultranationalist action film like Uri . With India heading towards another round of national elections this May, there is a lineup of propaganda films that peddle Hindutva conspiracies, celebrate Hindutva figures, and glorify the BJP while vilifying all its opponents: the Congress, academic institutions, activists, and of course, Muslims. These films share similar conventions: no A-list stars, lower budgets, saffron colour text in their trailers and posters, sensationalist hashtags hinting at conspiracies, and a neo-realist style colour grade. More importantly, they all seek to recreate the template created by The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , with the BJP and Modi’s promotion, tax-free status, and if they’re lucky, virality and box office glory. The first, Article 370 , exalts the Union Government for removing the eponymous article that conferred special status on Kashmir. Like clockwork, Modi praised the film even before its release. “I have heard that perhaps a film on Article 370 is going to be released this week,” he stated while addressing a rally in Jammu on 20 February 2024. "Good, it will be useful for people to get correct information." The film’s lead actor Yami Gautam shared a video of the speech immediately. “It is an absolute honour to watch PM @narendramodi Ji talk about #Article370Movie,” she wrote on X . Eventually released on 23 February, the film has made nearly INR 80 cr in India and is declared a super hit . More carnage is to follow. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. THE VERTICAL The Ambivalent Voter Jeevan Ravindran Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Dispatch Sri Lanka Plantation Workers Tea Estates Ceylon Workers Congress Ranil Wickremasinghe UNP Central Province Malaiyaha Tamil Community Indentured Labor Agricultural Labor Agriculture Plantations Labor Wage Labor Wages Political Agendas Patronage Politics Clientelism Surplus Value Productivity Demands Production Planters’ Association Political Economy Loolecondera Kandy District Nuwara Eliya District Political Parties False Promises Effective Wage Stagnation JEEVAN RAVINDRAN is a multimedia journalist based in Jaffna and London, with bylines in VICE , Reuters , CNN, and more. She reports on human rights and politics. Dispatch Sri Lanka 20th Sep 2024 ARULRAJ ULAGANATHAN is a member of the Malaiyaga Tamil tea plantation worker community, and an artist. His work has previously been exhibited at the JDA Perera Gallery, the Kochi Muziris Student Biennale, and Colomboscope. His most recent solo exhibition, "A Life in Tea" at Barefoot Gallery Colombo, combines elements from the tea estates, such as name cards, tea pruning knives, and bruised feet. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

ASSOCIATE Vrinda Jagota VRINDA JAGOTA is a writer, union organizer, and social media manager based in Brooklyn. She currently contributes to Third Bridge Creative , organizes with Newsguild , and works with Naya Beat, previously at Pitchfork . ASSOCIATE WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Musician Ali Sethi in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan COMMUNITY Syncretism & the Contemporary Ghazal AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Musician Ali Sethi in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Music Ghazal Art History Historicity Syncretism State Repression Faiz Ahmed Faiz Khabar-e-Tahayyar-e-Ishq Siraj Aurangabadi Mah Laqa Bai Sensuality Metaphor Cultural Repression Art Practice Sound Poetic Form Performance Art Grief Raaga 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. DISPATCH Interview Music 14th Oct 2020 The Ghazal originated in Arabia in the 8th century. That's the funny stuff right? That in order to retrieve legitimate cosmopolitanism, we have to go back to a medieval multicultural moment. 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 Next Up:

Vast amounts of disinformation have emerged in Manipur amidst the current crisis. This is not solely because of the internet ban, but also its unequal use: privileging access to businesses and media close to power for nationalist ends, mostly in the valley. FEATURES Chokepoint Manipur Vast amounts of disinformation have emerged in Manipur amidst the current crisis. This is not solely because of the internet ban, but also its unequal use: privileging access to businesses and media close to power for nationalist ends, mostly in the valley. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Courtesy of Sadiq Naqvi, from Kangpokpi, Manipur. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Courtesy of Sadiq Naqvi, from Kangpokpi, Manipur. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Manipur 3rd Oct 2023 Reportage Manipur State & Media Technology & Majoritarianism Tribal Conflict Kuki-Zo Meitei Indigeneity Scheduled Tribes Politics of Ethnic Identity Constitutional Recognition Social Media Disinformation Internet Crackdowns Media Landscape Internet Blackouts Kangpokpi Unverified Information Gender Violence Newsclick The Print Imphal The Guardian Deccan Herald India Today Nikkei Asia Meitei Leepun Churachandpur RSS Viral Clips Twitter Narratives State Government Narrative Majoritarianism Indigeneous Spaces Politics of Indigeneity Ethnically Divided Politics AFSPA Sister States Modi Meitei Peoples Local vs. National Politics Caste Tribes Northeast India 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. On the morning of July 19, 2023, my phone kept alerting me to WhatsApp messages, as it had done during the previous three months following the eruption of violence along ethnic lines in India’s northeastern state of Manipur. This time was different. It was a video accompanied by the following message: “If your blood doesn’t boil seeing this barbaric and inhuman treatment of fellow human being by Meitei goons, your conscious [sic] is equally morally dead. Period.” Before I could open it, other messages started pouring in, asking if I had watched the video. Others warned against circulating it over social media and messaging apps. Meanwhile, the 26-second clip of two women being paraded naked on the streets by a mob of men—groping and molesting the two while walking through paddy fields—had already gone viral. The incident recorded in the clip, however, was over two months old. On May 3, after the state’s highest court recommended that Manipur’s dominant Meitei community be included among the country’s Scheduled Tribe—a constitutional list that guarantees affirmative action for those included—the state’s hill tribe groups carried out mass rallies in protest. The same day, an attempted arson of a Kuki war memorial and the fire set on Meitei villages by unidentified individuals led to state-wide clashes between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zo tribes. The two women, belonging to the Vaiphei community that is part of the larger umbrella of Kuki-Zo tribes of the Northeast, were assaulted by the street mob a day later. In some ways, these conflicts in Manipur demonstrate the Indian republic’s complicated politics of ethnic identity and claims for constitutional protection. Demands for affirmative action by regionally dominant groups is not unusual in India, as seen with the Pateldars in Gujarat, Marathas in Maharashtra, and, more recently, the Pahadis in Jammu and Kashmir. With regards to the Meiteis, who converted to Hinduism in the 18th century, its socially weaker sections already had access to the constitutionally defined Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Classes, and Economically Weaker Sections. These categories enable access to affirmative action as well as select government grants and scholarships. The demand to also be included among the Scheduled Tribes was initially a fringe cause within the Meiteis, with the Hindu Brahmins (the priestly caste at the top of the Hindu caste pyramid) of that community least open to the idea of being degraded to the status of a ‘Hao’ (tribal people). However, the project gained steam with the revival of the indigenous Meitei faith Sanamahism in the last few decades. The return to their indigenous roots has emboldened their belief that they were short-changed by the government, which didn’t recognize them as a ‘tribe' after Manipur was annexed by the Indian Union in 1949. The crisis has been further compounded by internet restrictions in place since May 4. Far from the state government’s stated intention to control “the spread of disinformation and false rumours through various social media platforms,” lack of access to the internet has resulted in a flood of fake news and rampant disinformation, where genuine footage documenting violence has often been depicted as ‘fake’, and where unverified rumors have been deployed to instigate sexual violence. In a civil conflict where the state government has unabashedly shown its loyalty to the majority ethnic community and the federal government has maintained the status quo, both physical carnage and the information wars are far from even-keeled. In this, Manipur has proved to be another troubling illustration of the Indian authorities’ habit of curbing internet access in regions seeing widespread conflict, where a choked information ecosystem has helped the powerful and hurt the politically weaker sections facing majoritarian violence. Background of the May violence In the months leading up to the May violence, a concerted campaign was already being led by Manipur’s Chief Minister Biren Singh, who hails from the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), against the minority Kuki-Zo tribes, who were peddled as the key culprits of the underground drug industry and portrayed as ‘illegal immigrants’ from neighboring Myanmar. Although the Kuki-Zo tribes make up only 16 percent of the population, Singh had been stoking majoritarian Meitei sentiments of the tribes’ “sudden” decadal growth, particularly in the wake of the refugee crisis from coup-hit Myanmar, with no recent census data to back it up. This is despite the neighboring state of Mizoram, where the dominant population has stronger ethnic ties to the Chin refugees, bearing a much greater brunt of the refugee population. In light of the Meitei’s dominant demographics (they are over 50 percent of Manipur’s population) compared to their relatively smaller territorial spread (they occupy roughly 10 percent of the state that is in the valley), the chief minister preyed on the community’s insecurity over limited resources and supremacist notions of cultural superiority. By all accounts, viral, unverified social media messages and rumors of Meiteis being beaten, killed and raped in the Churachandpur hill district in part triggered the attacks in the valley. Subsequently, civilians, senior government officials, politicians, and judges belonging to the Kuki-Zo tribes from the valley were targeted. This led to retaliatory attacks on the Meiteis in the hill districts, although in much smaller numbers compared to officials and families from the tribes in the valley. Internet connections across the state of Manipur were switched off a day after violence broke out, which has killed more than 180 people thus far—with casualties growing by the weeks—and displaced more than 70,000 from their homes and localities, reducing them to ghost towns. A police complaint filed on May 18 in response to the public assault against the two women furnishes some details about the incident. An armed mob of up to a thousand persons belonging to Meitei youth organizations entered the B.Phainom village in the hill tribal district of Kangpokpi, where they vandalized and looted personal property. Seeking to escape the violence of the mob, five residents of the village, including the two women, fled to the forests; they were later rescued by the state police, only to be apprehended by the same mob that snatched them from police custody. “All the three women were physically forced to remove their clothes and were stripped naked in front of the mob,” the complaint noted, adding that “the younger brother who tried to defend his sister’s modesty and life was murdered by members of the mob on the spot.” Even before the video of the attack on the two women in Kangpokpi appeared on social media, the incident had been reported by two online news portals—on June 1 by, Newsclick , and on July 12 by The Print —as part of the coverage of the sexual assaults during the Manipur violence. However, it was finally the graphic video that brought national attention to the state like it hadn’t in the last three months. Kaybie Chongloi, a Kuki journalist based in Kangpokpi District where the incident took place, told me that no one knew of the existence of the video until the previous day when a driver noticed Meitei men watching it on their phones. “He had asked them to share the video via Bluetooth, and that’s how we got to see it for the first time,” said Chongloi. By the next morning, he added, the video had been widely shared across WhatsApp and social media platforms. It also compelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi to finally break his silence on Manipur, almost three months after the violence, calling the crime “an insult to the entire country.” Skewed media landscape Since the outbreak of violence in early May, a steady stream of photo and video footage has appeared on social media, showing private residences and villages being burned down, even capturing the collusion of state police in these incidents. Meanwhile, pieces of disinformation have been shared by verified Twitter handles of socially influential figures with global platforms. This includes, for example, Licipriya Kangujam, a young climate influencer managed by her alleged ‘con man’ father , and Binalakshmi Nepram, a women’s rights activist and recent scholar-at-residence at Harvard University. On May 4, soon after the violence started, Kangujam shared the video of a burning residence saying “illegal immigrants are burning the houses of our Meitei indigenous community in Manipur”. Hours earlier, however, Tonsing S, a Kuki-Zo scholar at Michigan University, had already shared the same video, showing a Kuki-Zo residential locality in the state capital of Imphal, from where his family had recently been displaced. Kangujam has also shared videos showing disruption and mayhem, which she squarely blamed on ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘poppy cultivating’ Kukis. Meanwhile, although seen advocating for peace on national television, Nepram has also been culpable in spreading misinformation, with a clear prejudice against the Kuki-Zo tribal groups. This includes sharing fake news on landmines allegedly placed by an armed group in a Manipur village, despite the information being debunked as false (reverse-image lookup found that the photos used in the story were from Jammu and Kashmir). She has not yet removed the tweet. More generally, Meitei-owned outlets and journalists from the community, who dominate the media landscape in the state, have been accused of being compromised , heavily toeing the state line, which is against the Kuki-Zo tribes. Apart from the accounts of these well-known personalities, several blue check-marked accounts have surfaced on Twitter since May, thanks to Elon Musk’s new policy on paid accounts which abandons its previous verification process, which have furthered disinformation campaigns. Take, for instance, a right-leaning website with the twitter handle @dintentdata that shot to limelight during the Manipur violence ostensibly as a “fact checker”. Its origins and ownership are unknown but the account has toed the Manipur state government’s narrative, as illustrated in a thread that called Kukis “illegals” migrating from Myanmar who had weaponized themselves to target the Meitei community. In the initial weeks, the running narrative on illegal immigrants and the Myanmar crisis dominated the coverage of the violence in mainstream Indian media outlets like Deccan Herald and India Today as well as in international publications like The Diplomat and the Washington Post . Unequal internet ban As I reported for Nikkei Asia in July, vast amounts of disinformation have emerged from the Manipur crisis not only because of an internet ban but due to its uneven nature: it has offered privileged access to businesses and media close to power, mostly in the valley. Dedicated internet services remained selectively available to particular businesses in the valley and government offices, with the approval of the home department. Notably, in the midst of an internet ban, members of Manipur-based right-wing Meitei groups, such as Meitei Leepun and an armed militia, Arambai Tenggol, have been posting inflammatory hate speech on their social media accounts. “Refrain from creating chaos at Imphal, we can no longer attack them here,” announced Korounganba Khuman, the militant leader of Arambai Tenggol, on his Facebook account. Written in Meitei Lon, he added, “We have a plan, which you'll hear about in two days’ time. Let's work together on this. Let us fight with all our might for our land and identity.” No action from the state government has been initiated on such open invocations of violence against the Kuki-Zo communities. Meanwhile, Meitei Leepun’s founding leader Pramot Singh went on national television (in an interview with veteran journalist Karan Thapar in The Wire ), threatening to “blow away” the tribals from the hills. In the past, Singh has been associated with Akhil Bhartiya Vishwa Parishad, the student wing of the Hindu nationalist militant outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Both groups—Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun—have been openly endorsed by Chief Minister Singh and Leishemba Sanajaoba, the titular king of Manipur and a member of the upper house of the parliament. On July 25, Manipur state authorities lifted the ban on broadband services while retaining several severe restrictions. This included blocking social media websites, virtual private network (VPN) services and WiFi hotspots, while allowing for the physical monitoring of subscribers by concerned officials. Those seeking to access the internet under these conditions were required to sign an undertaking agreeing to the enforced monitoring by officials. After nearly five months of ban, mobile internet access was resumed by the state government on September 23, only to be soon suspended for the next five days amid protests after photographs showing the allegedly deceased bodies of two missing Meitei students surfaced online. The state government confirmed their death in a statement, but their bodies remain missing at the time of the publication of this story. A marketing professional from Imphal Valley, who asked not to be identified, said that in the early days of the internet ban, people were resorting to all sorts of loopholes: machine SIM cards used for digital payment (apps like Paytm and Google Pay), Vodafone VPN ports, and international E-SIMs like Airalo . “People would use SIM cards bought from other states, since Vodafone sim cards sold out in Manipur very fast at a going rate of INR 2000,” he said, speaking from an undisclosed location in the Northeast that he and his family have moved to temporarily. The IT company where his wife works had put her on leave during the shutdown weeks and was threatening layoffs to employees who wouldn’t come online. Sources from the area told me that local broadband providers in both the hills and the valley did not comply with the government order to switch off internet services. SAAG has accessed a copy of a state-government order that notes the “misuse of additional connection on whitelisted/reactivated” internet lines and reports of “accessibility of internet facility” in the Kuki-majority Churachandpur area. No such order was issued against any centers in the valley, even though the government eventually put a curb on all these loopholes. For five years, India has been leading the global record for the highest number of Internet shutdowns in the world with at least 84 cases recorded in 2022 , far higher than the war-hit Ukraine, which saw 22 shutdowns imposed by the Russian military after their invasion of the country. According to Software Freedom Law Centre ’s internet shutdown tracker , India has seen a total of 759 shutdowns since 2012, with Jammu and Kashmir experiencing the majority of the bans, and Manipur featuring fourth on the list. In June, a joint report on internet shutdowns in India, released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Internet Freedom Foundation , a digital rights advocacy group in India, found that the Indian authorities’ decisions to disrupt internet access were “often erratic and unlawful”. The report cited a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology report that concluded, “So far, there is no proof to indicate that internet shutdown [sic] has been effective in addressing public emergency and ensuring public safety.” Meenakshi Ganguly, the HRW South Asia director, told me that while authorities have the responsibility to contain the spread of incitement to hate or violence, and to combat disinformation, simply denying internet access can end up further stoking fear and divisiveness. “Without access to credible information, internet shutdowns risk the spread of rumor-based retaliatory attacks, perpetuating the cycle of violence,” she said. Missing outrage The role of fake news and disinformation in instigating violence, including sexual assaults, against tribal women in Manipur has been well-documented . However, despite videos of these incidents floating online after the breakout of the violence, neither local nor national media reported on it or verified and pursued these leads. Several weeks before the infamous Kangpokpi video of the two women being paraded naked was out, another clip of a Kuki-Zo woman begging Meitei women to let go of her was doing the rounds. Speaking in Meitei Lon, the Meitei women are seen instigating men to rape 29-year-old Nancy Chingthianniang, who was later interviewed by the UK-based Guardian , a few weeks before her video went viral again. She lost her husband and mother-in-law to the mob. Chingthianniang herself was beaten black and blue until she passed out. Seeing the video of herself instantly triggered her. “I felt scared like I was back in that moment even though I was not raped,” she told me over the phone. When asked how she felt about these videos of herself and the women paraded being circulated online, Chingthianniang said it was for the better. “Hoi ka sa, eh; I'm glad that it’s out,” she said. “Now people know what these Meira Paibis (Meitei civic activists known as ‘women torchbearers’) really did to us.” While the public responses to the viral Kangpokpi video was welcomed by the Kuki-Zo community, especially as it led to the swift arrest of at least seven of the accused, the heinous crimes against the community have not seen similar reactions. On July 2, two weeks before the Kangpokpi video was released, photos and footage of a severed head perched on a fence went viral on WhatsApp groups, shocking members of the Kuki-Zo community. The head belonged to David Thiek, a resident of Langza village in the foothills of the Churachandpur tribal hill district. He had been defending his village on the day when an armed militia from the valley attacked it. Thiek’s head was severed off and his body burned down to ashes, the remains of which were draped in the traditional shawl of the Hmar tribe that he belonged to. A few days later, Sang Tonsing, a 24-year-old social worker from the Kuki-Zo community living outside Manipur, saw the screenshot of a photo posted by a Twitter account titled ‘Nongthombam Rohen Meetei’ (now deleted) with the caption, “Killing of meetei by kuki militants [sic]”. The photo showed a man, his face digitally obscured by red brush strokes, holding a machete in one hand and a severed head in another. A copy of the photo downloaded from Twitter shows a time stamp of 5.45 p.m. on July 2, 2023. Suspecting the severed head to belong to Thiek, Tonsing and a group of other social-media savvy friends attempted to verify the photo, beginning with reverse image verification on Google and TinEye. The photo appeared original. Tonsing then began scanning the local Meitei news channels, particularly Mami and Elite TV, since these channels had extensively covered the chief minister visiting the Meitei-dominated Bishnupur district in the valley, bordering the Kuki Zo villages that were attacked. That is when he noticed the same outfit as was worn by the man in the photo: a dark-teal-colored full-sleeved t-shirt paired with brown track pants and a camouflage tactical vest. “There was no way that another person could be wearing the same exact outfit,” he said. But that wasn’t their only lead. The person seen on the news clip, whose outfit matched with that of the assailant in the photograph, was eventually tracked on Facebook. He was identified as Mairembam Romesh Mangang, the public relations officer or the security detail of S Premchandra Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Manipur’s legislative assembly who represented the Kumbi constituency. Tonsing said that they instinctively thought to check the accounts of those associated with the MLA of Kumbi, since it was close to Langza village, where David was killed. “Secondly,” he added, “Kumbi is known to be a hotspot of Meitei insurgent groups where politicians conduct their financial dealings with underground groups.” The screenshot is now part of an investigation into the incident where members of the Arambai Tenggol and Meitei Leepun are among the accused. SAAG reached out to Premchandra Singh, the MLA of Kumbi, who did not respond to the request for comment. (This piece will be updated as and when he responds.) While Tonsing and his friends may have made a plausible case of identification, what remains unexplained is why that photo was leaked online. His guess is one of three scenarios: one, someone from one of the Meitei-run WhatsApp groups carelessly uploaded it; two, there may still be whistleblowers among the Meitei groups who want the truth out; and three, which he thinks most likely, is that this was an attempt to manipulate the narrative in their favor as victims rather than perpetrators of the crime. Either way, he’s certain that more videos would surface once the internet ban is fully lifted. “Nowadays everyone’s got a smartphone and they are filming videos when they go to burn villages. Since these are mobs of 5000-odd people, they can’t control what people are shooting”, said Tonsing. Meanwhile in the valley, there have been news reports, albeit unverified, of missing Meitei individuals being tortured and killed in viral clips. In early July, hours after two cousins—27-year-old Irengbam Chinkheinganba and 31-year-old Sagolshem Ngaleiba Meitei from Kakching District—had gone missing, a video began circulating which showed two men being slapped and kicked, before being shot from behind. A BBC report noted that another video showing the shooting of a man surfaced two months later. While neither of the videos has been independently verified, the families of the missing two have identified the two men in the videos as Chinkheinganba and Ngaleibav. Similarly, the parents of a young teenager , who went missing along with her friend near the hill district, have identified their daughter in a clip that showed a girl being beheaded, allegedly by Kuki assailants. However, when SAAG checked the video, the perpetrators were speaking in the Burmese tongue, and not any of the languages or dialects native to Manipur. Videos connected to both of these disappearances surfaced only after the clip of the naked Vaipehi women made headlines. In our post-truth era, the conflict is not limited to violence in the buffer zones, but is also a war of perceptions on social media where fake news, morphed footage, and decontextualized information often seek to compound the confusion. Majoritarian manipulation Manipur is a state now divided like never before. Ethnic fault lines have always run deep, sometimes deeper and thicker than bloodlines despite enough instances of intermarriage between communities. The murder of a 7-year-old Kuki boy in early June, alongside his mother and his maternal aunt, en route to a hospital through the valley is emblematic of this. Even though the boy’s mother and maternal aunt belonged to the Meitei community, the mob made up of Meira Paibis and other Meiteis did not spare them and set the ambulance on fire after the murders. Local media operating out of Imphal and dominated by journalists from the Meitei community —or owned by politicians of the same community—did not report this incident, just as they ignored several other stories like the seven rape cases registered to date . Forget the tyranny of distance between New Delhi-based national media and Manipur, newsrooms based in the valley often don’t go and cover neighboring hill districts. In the present crisis, where Manipur’s Chief Minister Singh stands accused of orchestrating the violence against the Kuki-Zo community, with the majority-controlled media not covering the hills, and given only a partial lift on the internet blackout, the scales are tipped heavily against the minority tribes. In early September, in a report on the media coverage of the violence, the Editors’ Guild of India lamented how the Manipur media had turned into “Meitei media” and held the internet ban responsible for the media being overly reliant on the state’s narrative. Shortly after, two police complaints under sections of defamation, promoting enmity, and criminal conspiracy were filed against members of the Guild’s fact-finding committee. Meanwhile, rather than working to gain the confidence of the Kuki-Zo communities as their political representative, we instead find the chief minister getting into a late-night spat on Twitter, asking a Kuki-identifying user if they are from Manipur or Myanmar. As violence continues unabated in the “ buffer zones ” between the hills and the valley, where both communities live in relative proximity, rumors and disinformation remain rampant on both sides. In the din of contrasting narratives laying the blame exclusively on the other side, Spearcorps , an official Indian Army account on Twitter, has emerged as a neutral line for updates on the clashes. After days of speculation over the women-led civil-society group Meira Paibis aiding armed rioters to attack tribal villages by creating road blockades, the Spearcorps posted a tweet noting that “Women activists in #Manipur are deliberately blocking routes and interfering in Operations of Security Forces.” The post went on to appeal to “all sections of population to support our endeavours in restoring peace.” This new normal is especially significant in a state that has a long history of confrontation with the Indian Army, which stands accused of many human-rights excesses through the application of a special martial law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. Naturally, the dominant Meitei community, its representative media and the state government see the army as biased in favor of the tribal groups, and accuse the armed forces of assisting Kuki "militants" . When I spoke to a source in the army who has been monitoring the security situation in Manipur, he argued that the neutrality of central security forces was evident in their assistance in the speedy evacuation of Meiteis from the hill districts. The only time that the local media had ever portrayed them in a positive light, he said, was when they reported the “rescue” of five Meitei civilians from Kuki “militants” (notably, Meitei attackers are often called ‘miscreants’ in these reports). “Except that it was the Kukis who had handed over the Meitei civilians to us in good faith,” he told me. But that detail never made it in any of the Meitei-run press. With such opportunities for solidarity that could have led to a ceasefire on violence and retaliatory attacks now looking increasingly remote, we find the strengthening of the Kuki-Zo tribes’ resolve to settle for separate administration away from the Manipur government. To be sure, the disturbing video of the Vaiphei women may have led to police action after weeks of inaction, and it has alerted the country and the world to the scale of violence. But on the home front, the civil war is nowhere near an end. In turn, it only fueled the war over narratives, where Manipuri social media was suddenly filled with posts asking Meitei women to come out with stories of their defilement. On August 9, the first police complaint of a Meitei woman alleging sexual assault was filed in the valley, in which the complainant said she was assaulted by “Kuki miscreants” on May 3, when Meitei houses in Churachandpur were being burned down. “The delay in filing this complaint is due to social stigma,” the complaint said. In the midst of all the suffering and counter narratives, Prime Minister Modi only took cognizance of the video, which he called “an insult to society,” while undermining the scale and context of the conflict in Manipur by equating it to violence in states like Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Despite the terrible cost that the two tribal women had to pay with their dignity for Modi—and the rest of India—to finally take notice and speak up, he maintained his position as a BJP star campaigner rather than the leader of a democracy. Apar Gupta, an advocate who founded Internet Freedom Foundation, was apologetic in his tone as many have been while talking to me about Manipur, which happens to be my home state. Beyond the scale of violence that the viral video alone has revealed and the sore lack of access to relief and medical aid for the internally displaced, he sharply questioned whose interest the internet ban had served. “I believe beyond this individual specific instance, the internet shutdown has served the function of contouring our media national narrative,” said Gupta. “Manipur is burning, but we don't care.” ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5