Artist and activist-scholar Aqui Thami, in conversation with Comics Editor Shreyas R Krishnan. COMMUNITY Rethinking the Library with Sister Library AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Artist and activist-scholar Aqui Thami, in conversation with Comics Editor Shreyas R Krishnan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Indigeneous Spaces Feminist Spaces Decolonization Community Building Community-Owned Public Space Sister Library Sister Radio Kochi-Muziris Biennale Dharavi Bombay Underground Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneity Zines Pedagogy Public Arts Public History Archival Practice 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 Indigeneous Spaces 21st Oct 2020 I really wanted to rethink what a library could mean, and show that most libraries are funded by monies that come from the exploitation and relocation of indigenous peoples. [Sister Library] is what comes out of that. RECOMMENDED: Support Sister Library , the first ever community-owned feminist library in India, here . 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:

Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. COMMUNITY A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War Novelist Shehan Karunatilaka in conversation with Fiction Editor Kartika Budhwar. VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Sri Lanka 10th Jan 2021 Interview Sri Lanka Sri Lankan Civil War Satire Chinaman Tamil Tigers Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Enforced Disappearances Cricket Extrajudicial Killings Kumar Sangakkara Shakthika Sathkumara Sri Lankan Literary Tradition Chats with the Dead Booker Prize Buddhism Ghost Stories Theater South Asian Theater Carl Muller Anarchist Writing Writing about Recent History Discourses of War Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Marxist-Leninist Uprising JVP Worrying Humor Gallows Humor Absurdity Queerness Gananath Obeyesekere 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. The stereotypes of the commercial sphere, the smiley, happy go lucky, Sri Lankans—there is something to that stereotype. It's not a grim place, even though a lot of grim things take place here. A tragedy will happen, the jokes will start almost immediately. Maybe it's gallows humor or a coping mechanism. Whatever it is, that seems to always be there. RECOMMENDED: This interview took place prior to the publication of Shehan Karunatilaka's Booker-Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin), which he discusses in the interview as a work-in-progress. 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

“When the student at Jamia Millia Islamia University first uttered ‘Dear Shahid’ right after the film's intertitle, I felt a tightening in my chest. It reminded me of my own days in Mumbai at Prithvi Theatre, where idealism was somehow removed from politics and the marginalization that was occurring. When I first saw the film, I felt like I knew this person.” INTERACTIVE On “Letter from Your Far-Off Country” Suneil Sanzgiri · Ritesh Mehta “When the student at Jamia Millia Islamia University first uttered ‘Dear Shahid’ right after the film's intertitle, I felt a tightening in my chest. It reminded me of my own days in Mumbai at Prithvi Theatre, where idealism was somehow removed from politics and the marginalization that was occurring. When I first saw the film, I felt like I knew this person.” Letter from Your Far-Off Country , a short film by Suneil Sanzgiri, was shot on 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as Gujarat’s state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide. The film weaves through forms and footage of a dizzying variety, from epistolary family stories, Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, the Muslim women-led Shaheen Bagh movement, and more, creating a mosaic of temporalities that probe the personal and political together within the context of a fraught nation. As part of our event In Grief, In Solidarity we screened the film, which had been screened just prior at the Indian Film Festival of LA (IFFLA). Here, we show the post-screening Q&A that followed the screening, where xenior editor Vamika Sinha talked to Suneil Sanzgiri and Ritesh Mehta, senior programmer at IFFLA, about the film, how Sanzgiri pulled off his very experimental film, what motivated it, and his intellectual and aesthetic preoccupations. In particular, Sanzgiri talks at length about how the weaving of his personal history connected not just with the Shaheen Bagh movement and CAA protests broadly, but with the fact that protests in India included books by Ambedkar and Arundhati Roy alongside those of Angela Davis, while protests in the US played or sang music by Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, Iqbal Bano at Black Lives Matter protests. These evocations of a global struggle were key to his approach to filmmaking. Mehta discusses his own emotional response to the film, which was deeply connected to his own experience in theatre in Bombay, and what it felt like to process much of what India had undergone recently, as refracted through Sanzgiri's prism. Letter From Your Far-Off Country is available through the Criterion Collection. In March 2024, Sanzgiri discussed his approach to form at our launch event, “Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse.” 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 ↗ Live Los Angeles Indian Film Festival of LA Film Film-Making Gujarat Pogroms Letter From Your Far-Off Country Gujarat Riots Genocide Jamia Millia Islamia Epistolary Form Shaheen Bagh Movement CAA Protests Ambedkar Arundhati Roy Black Solidarities Internationalist Solidarity Global Agha Shahid Ali Safdar Hashmi Avant-Garde Form Avant-Garde Traditions Communist Tradition Faiz Ahmed Faiz Iqbal Bano Avant-Garde Aesthetics & Protest Farmers' Movement Diasporas Temporality Avant-Garde Film Short Film Personal History Directors Intertext Mikhail Bakhtin Black Lives Matter Prithvi Theatre Diasporic Distance Unspeakable SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulated at film festivals and institutions globally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Criterion Collection, among others. RITESH MEHTA works in film/TV development as a story consultant for production companies and mentorship labs, and as a festival programmer. He was raised in Mumbai and is based in Los Angeles. Live Los Angeles 5th Jun 2021 PRITHI KHALIQUE is a visual designer and animator based in Dhaka and Providence. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Mahrang Baloch was sixteen when her father was abducted one morning in December 2009. She soon became a leading voice amongst the students holding the state to task for enforced disappearances in Balochistan, in the tradition of women leaders of the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad. In 2017, her brother was abducted. Mahrang redoubled her efforts. FEATURES Mahrang Baloch's Struggle Against Enforced Disappearances Shah Meer Baloch Mahrang Baloch was sixteen when her father was abducted one morning in December 2009. She soon became a leading voice amongst the students holding the state to task for enforced disappearances in Balochistan, in the tradition of women leaders of the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad. In 2017, her brother was abducted. Mahrang redoubled her efforts. He slept with his eldest daughter in his arms on the night of December 11, 2009. They had spent the entire evening talking about a host of issues in Balochistan—from education to enforced disappearances. Take care of your mother and sisters, he told her. It was as if Ghaffar Baloch knew that it was his last night with his family. That year, Baloch had moved from Quetta to Karachi, a city in the province of Sindh, with his family, because his wife needed to be admitted as a patient at the Institute of Surgery and Medicine. “It has been a decade, but I still remember the color of the clothes he was wearing that night. We barely slept because we had so many things to talk about. I had a feeling that something amiss was about to happen. He passed by me with a sad smile as I stood at the door and watched him leave.” said Mahrang Baloch, the then 16-year-old daughter of Ghaffar Baloch. The following morning, Baloch was abducted on the way to the hospital by men in plainclothes. His abduction coincided with the growing momentum of the Baloch insurgency and as in the past, it accompanied a round of enforced disappearances, which have by now become the norm in Balochistan, the most troubled province of Pakistan. Baloch had joined the long list of missing persons from Balochistan. After Ghaffar Baloch’s abduction in 2009, his daughter Mahrang took to the streets holding banners and shouting slogans, a protest she continued for two years. Donning a traditional Balochi black chadar with strips of red and yellow, instead of a veil or scarf worn by women in Pakistan, Mahrang fully embraced her role as a student leader of the resistance movement. Many noticed her on social media, when she narrated the story of her father’s torturous disappearance in a video appeal that was carried by the online journal Tanqeed . “Those five years of my life were the hardest. I was the oldest amongst my sisters, so I had to be strong for everyone. I would pray that my father would come back. There was a hope that he would be back. I kept on holding onto the hope that life would be normal again,” Mahrang said. “But that never happened.” Balochistan, plagued by tribalism and patriarchy, has remained male-dominated in the political arena, with the exception of a few women politicians such as Fazila Alynani, a parliamentarian from Balochistan in the 1970s, and Zubaida Jalal, currently the federal minister for defense production. With the enforced disappearances, Baloch men are vanishing from the political scene in Balochistan, creating a vacuum of sorts. To fill this gap, Baloch women have taken the responsibility of leading the movement against enforced disappearances, political and economic injustices, military operations, and the ongoing exploitation of Balochistan. This has transformed politics in the beleaguered province. Having seen their loved ones murdered and picked up over the years, the voice of the new generation of Baloch women and girls has sparked a non-violent revolution in the face of much adversity. But at the same time, there remain feelings of alienation and distrust with the state. Much credit for the political mobilization of the Baloch women can be given, rightly, to Karima Baloch, the first chairperson of the Baloch Students Organisation-Azad (BSO-Azad). On December 22, 2020, Karima Baloch was found dead near Lake Ontario in Toronto, Canada, after being missing for a day. She is the second Baloch dissident to be found dead under suspicious circumstances in the countries they had sought exile in. Earlier in the year, the chief editor of the Balochistan Times, Sajid Hussain, was found dead in a river in Sweden, weeks after he had gone missing on March 2, 2020. Subsequently, Pakistani activists around the world demanded investigations into the suspicious circumstances surrounding both deaths. Many shared a 2017 video of former dictator Pervez Musharraf claiming in an interview that the Pakistani state would hound and capture dissidents wherever they might be. Such is the present state of the Baloch who have dared raise their voices against the injustices of the Pakistani state since the time of Partition. Karima was often singled out and criticised for her activism and political mobilization of women, particularly by online trolls, and some Baloch tribal and conservative men who told her to stay out of politics. But today, after her mysterious death, women are leading protests across the province. Among the women demanding an investigation into Karima’s death is Mahrang Baloch—who has been leading the movement against enforced disappearances and ongoing state oppression in Balochistan. As more girls came to join the Sept. 8, 2020, protest for solidarity, Mahrang Baloch, on the right and Sabiha Baloch, on the left, drag a carpet to sit on it near the Governor House, where they observed a hunger strike to demand amendments in Balochistan University of Medical and Health Services (BUMHS) act for restoration of Bolan Medical College's quota system. Photograph courtesy of Mashal Baloch. The Baloch Insurgency Ghaffar Baloch’s abduction in 2009 was the third time he had been picked up by security agencies. This era, 2009- 2013, in the troubled province of Balochistan, was marked by a state policy of ‘kill and dump.’ Alleged insurgents, nationalists, political workers, students, and activists—many of whom had been accused of “terrorism” by state agencies—were found dead after being abducted. The culprits? Most point the finger at the state. But naming them explicitly and publicly comes with a huge risk. Instead, people use euphemisms and nicknames that vaguely address the role Pakistan’s shadowy military agencies play in these disappearances. Many, with some dark humor, refer to the abductors as farishtey, or angels. Giving Balochistan’s issues a forum has had serious consequences. In late 2013 and early 2014, along with a small group of family members—mostly women—of missing persons, renowned Baloch activist 70-year-old Mama Qadeer, marched some 2,000 kilometers on foot from Quetta to Islamabad via Karachi to demand the release of missing persons. The record-breaking long march did not get the coverage it needed. With swollen feet, they reached Islamabad, but they were not heard, nor their demand of meeting with the government was fulfilled. Hamid Mir, one of the few journalists who gave the issue coverage by inviting Mama and the marchers on his talk show, later survived an attack by four gunmen in Karachi. Mir still carries two bullets from the attack in his body. In 2015, progressive human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud invited Qadeer to speak at a panel discussion at her cafe and bookstore in Karachi. Shortly after the event, as she was driving home, armed motorcyclists surrounded her car and opened fire, killing her. In 2012, the former chief justice of Pakistan outrightly accused paramilitary forces of spearheading enforced disappearances in Balochistan. Deputy Inspector-General Operations Balochistan Police, Hamid Shakeel presented CCTV footage of a private hotel, in which the Frontier Corps (FC), a paramilitary force stationed in Balochistan that is responsible for maintenance of law and order, can be seen picking up three people who went missing later. FC denied involvement in this case. In 2017, Shakeel was killed in a suicide bombing. Balochistan province, bordering Iran and Afghanistan, is not new to uprisings. The growing number of enforced disappearances can be traced to the Baloch insurgent movement that spread from the rugged mountains of the province to the coastal towns in Arabian Sea and permeated every aspect of Baloch social and political life since the earliest days of Pakistan’s existence. Soon after the inception of Pakistan in 1948, Prince Abdul Karim Khan, the brother of then ruler Khan of Kalat, took up arms against the merger of Balochistan with Pakistan. This was the start of the first round of insurgency. The movement petered out soon after but was followed by three more short-lived insurgent movements in 1958, 1962, and 1973. The insurgency is also driven by the ongoing exploitation of Balochistan’s rich natural resources. In the early 1950s, one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves was discovered in Sui, and by the mid-1950s , pipelines were laid down to supply major cities in other provinces. Since then, the central government has been accused by insurgents and local activists of taking Balochistan’s coal, gas, minerals, uranium, and utilizing them for richer provinces, particularly Punjab. The first signs of the most recent iteration of the Baloch insurgency were seen in the early 2000s, as the federal government developed a port city in the region. In May 2004, three Chinese engineers were killed in an attack in Gwadar, Balochistan’s coastal town at the mouth of Arabian Sea. Local nationalists had expressed opposition to the development of the region, saying that the benefits would bypass Balochistan and go to Punjab instead. Much of their ire was directed at the policies of the then military dictator Musharaff, who had strategically aligned Pakistan with the United States in the War on Terror, seeking to rid the Afghanistan-Pakistan region of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The United States was carrying out drone strikes in parts of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s security agencies began military operations across the country which led to numerous human rights abuses, including the arbitrary detention and arrests of suspected militants. Ghaffar Baloch was first abducted by security agencies in 2006. Four months later, on August 26, 2006, Nawab Shahbaz Akbar Khan Bugti, the former Governor and Chief Minister of Balochistan and chief of the Bugti Tribe, was killed in a military operation by Musharraf, who had once said about Bugti: “Don't push us. It is not the 1970s when you can hit and run and hide in the mountains. This time you won't even know what hit you.” These remarks were widely condemned by Baloch activists. Bugti was buried near Sui in a locked box and no one saw his body. News of his killing spread like a wildfire across the province. The towns and villages that were not part of the previous uprisings in 1948, 1958, 1962, and 1973 now actively took part in the insurgency. Residents from Pasni, the coastal region of Gwadar, and the provincial capital Quetta, blocked roads, burnt tires, and threw stones at government vehicles. Police stations, government offices, and shops were torched and damaged. Separately, students and political workers have continuously expressed their anger towards the seven decades long unjust and brutal policies of the state. A common saying in the street and classrooms was: Natural gas was discovered in Balochistan in the 1950s, Punjab consumed it in the 1960s, but to this date the people of Sui are devoid of gas. Only the provincial capital had gas. Mahrang has been speaking out against this unequal distribution of resources. She told me: “The people in the corridors of power never paid heed to the grievances of the Baloch and their national question. They always preferred the mineral resources of our land over our people.” The residents of Balochistan, particularly youth and political workers, lamented the Pakistani state’s approach towards their province and the Baloch. Many took up arms against the state and called for the independence of Balochistan from Pakistan. But not all nationalists backed the call for independence and preferred to demand provincial autonomy. The common denominator was that they were all against state oppression and the brutal rule of Musharraf. In 2008, the Baloch insurgency witnessed an upsurge, and several security personnel were targeted. Settlers in Balochistan, commonly referred to and perceived as Punjabis, were asked to leave the province, as the country’s most powerful institution, the army, was largely dominated by Punjabis. They were perceived to be colluders and enemies during the military operations to quash the insurgency in Balochistan. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, in 2006, the entire province was in a war-like state. Sui was bombed. The Baloch insurgents not only targeted the state but also waged war against political workers, who campaigned for taking part in parliamentary politics to demand the rights of the Baloch nation, and common Baloch whom they suspected of working for the security agencies. In district Nazim Kech, Moula Baksh Dashti, who advocated using parliamentary politics to resolve the human rights crisis in the province, lost his life reportedly at the hands of Baloch insurgents. The insurgents were accused of picking up and killing people and became increasingly involved in abductions for ransom. As the insurgency gained momentum, the state responded with a counter-insurgency operation. Many people, regardless of their involvement in the insurgency, were forcibly disappeared. Anyone suspected of sympathizing with the insurgents, relatives or mere acquaintances who may have studied or met someone who later became an insurgent all shared the same fate: enforced disappearance. Some were abducted to pressurize insurgents and send a message that waging a war on the state meant that their loved ones were not safe. While no proper research has thus far been conducted on the proportion of violence carried out by the state in comparison with the insurgents, the state has always been believed to be more brutal against political workers and average Baloch citizens. Counter-insurgency tactics are not new to the people of this province. They have witnessed them before: in the 1970s during the democratically elected government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Under Bhutto, the army carried out numerous disappearances. The first missing person was Asadullah Mengal, the son of former chief minister of Balochistan, Sardar Attaullah Mengal, and brother of BNP chief, Akhtar Mengal, who was allegedly killed in an encounter in Karachi. Bhutto noted in his book Rumours and Realities that he did not know about Mengal’s murder and later he was told that he was buried near Thatta, Sindh. Even the armed forces had apparently forgotten where exactly they buried him. Decades later, during another PPP government, between 2008 and 2013, Balochistan was once again engulfed by war. Then president Asif Ali Zardari (son-in-law of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and widow of Benazir Bhutto) remained silent on the military operations and enforced disappearances and announced a development package for the province to ease tensions. But these efforts were too little, too late. The present-day insurgency has evolved from its early days, with more involvement from young middle-class, educated Baloch who don't hail from the tribal belt. Two months after the killing of Nawab Bugti in 2006, Ghaffar Baloch was presented in front of the court. The case continued for three years until he was released in 2009 due to lack of evidence against him. “The happiest day of my life was when my father was released. I remember all the time I spent with him vividly.” Mahrang says. “After his release he bought bangles for me which I wore on Eid. I was so happy that he was around. But the happiness was short-lived.” On July 1, 2011, the body of Ghaffar Baloch—carrying visible signs of torture—was found on a roadside in Lasbela district, some 300 kilometers away from Karachi. Mahrang Baloch and Sabiha Baloch (sitting on the right side of Mahrang), sit on a carpet along with other girls, staging a protest in front of the Governor House, Quetta, in Balochistan, while demanding amendments in the Balochistan University of Medical and Health Services (BUMHS) Act and restoration of Bolan Medical College quota system. Students believe that the new act will hinder the progress of students from far flung areas of Balochistan to get admission at the university. Only students from Quetta (Balochistan's capital) would benefit from the admission policy without the quota system. Photograph courtesy of Mashal Baloch Dissident Voices After her father’s killing in 2011, Mahrang Baloch slowed down her campaigning for the release of missing persons. When her brother, Nasir Baloch was picked up in December 2017, Mahrang says she realized that no one was safe. It was the turning point in her life. “I was again on the roads but this time it was for my brother,” Mahrang says with a grim smile, “The deputy commissioner of Quetta told me that I had two options. Either I should sit at home silently, or spend time on roads and eventually move to Europe for my safety. I decided I will remain on the roads and protest, but I won’t flee.” “I don’t remember when I stopped becoming an ordinary Baloch woman and became a Baloch woman activist instead,” she chuckles, as she looks back and thinks about all the turns that life took, “I felt it is important to use social media if I wanted to talk about the issues concerning Balochistan. I started using Facebook and Twitter after my brother’s abduction. The first tweet I put out was about my brother’s enforced disappearance.” Mahrang’s brother was released three months and 10 days after his abduction. His release marked not the end of her activism but the beginning. She started raising her voice for other missing persons. The local Pakistani media would not give them coverage, “so social media was the only platform left for us to bring our issues forth and pressurize the government,” she said. “Initially I did not know what to write and what not to write, I worked on choosing my words carefully.” Along with organizing on the ground, she mobilized protests through social media and became a vocal voice for the Baloch missing persons on various online networks. On August 13, 2020, Hayat Baloch, a student of Karachi University, hailing from Turbat, was killed by the FC in front of his parents. This incident sparked widespread protests across Balochistan. When a picture of Hayat’s parents weeping next to his dead body began circulating online, many Baloch social media users were divided on how to interpret the incident. Some argued that it was wrong to circulate the image out of respect for the family’s privacy. Mahrang in a tweet , cited the picture that sparked the Soweto uprising in South Africa. It shows a dying student being carried in the arms of a fellow student and accompanied by his screaming sister. She said that after seeing the image, Nelson Mandela had said “Enough is enough.” When her father had gone missing, Mahrang’s uncle had advised her to speak to the media in order to plead for his return. She would desperately watch news channels to see if there was any news about her father. “At the time, Pakistani news channels gave very little coverage to the issue of missing persons,” she says, “but now, even that little coverage has vanished into thin air.” The issue of missing persons has become an eternal part of Balochistan’s politics. In the general elections of 2018, Balochistan National Party’s (BNP) chief Sardar Akthar Mengal participated in the election promising to amplify the cause of missing persons. He joined the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI)-led government at the center, under Prime Minister Imran Khan, after being promised that PTI would address Balochistan’s issue of missing persons, among others. That never happened. Mengal submitted a list of 5,128 missing persons in the National Assembly. The government was unable to fulfill their promises. Mengal finally broke his alliance with the PTI in April 2020, saying that even if the government had released 500 missing persons in the last two years, more than 1,500 others had been picked up. Mahrang Baloch talks to Mushtaq Baloch, a student at Bolan Medical College and also member of Baloch Students Action Committee (BSAC) who is observing a hunger strike on Sept. 8, 2020, near the Governor House and Chief Minister secretariat in Quetta for the amendment of Balochistan University of Medical and Health Services (BUMHS) Act. Mushtaq fell unconscious but still continued the hunger strike after having an IV drip injected into the backside of his palm. Photograph courtesy of Mashal Baloch. Students and Women’s Politics In 2019, Mahrang led protesting students of the University of Balochistan who had broken their silence on years of blackmail and threats by the university administration. Newspapers reported that for several years, officials in the university administration had been using footage from CCTV cameras installed around the university campus citing ‘security’ reasons while extorting money and sexually harassing female students. As a result of protests across the province, the university’s vice chancellor stepped down. “I realized as a woman that if they would not let us get an education then what really is left?” Mahrang asks. Further, she often found that she received little allyship in her activism from around Pakistan. “The response from feminists and women’s rights activists from other parts of Pakistan during our protests was not satisfying. Since the boots [i.e. security agencies] were involved in the scandal, perhaps that is why they did not speak up. It is rare for such mainstream groups to talk about missing persons and human rights abuses. Perhaps they do not care about what happens in Balochistan, just like most Pakistanis.” Many Pakistanis say they do not understand what’s happening in Balochistan. Just a few years ago, news rarely travelled out of Balochistan. The province is rightly called a “ blackhole for media.” But today, many, if not all incidents and news reach the people through social media. Mahrang adds “I believe they are intentionally silent, and that a fake sense of patriotism has clouded their minds, so they ignore everything, even human rights abuses.” Renowned Pakistani novelist, Muhammad Hanif, puts it in a candid way: “Balochistan is not remote just geographically but in our imagination as well.” Baloch women are often leading the movements advocating the release of their loved ones. Tribalism in Balochistan is one of the reasons women have often been confined in their activism and daily life. State institutions have supported and strengthened tribalism. The government has always preferred supporting tribal leaders because it is easy to control them in parliament. Since an entire tribe remains under the control of the leader, and the leader remains under the control of the establishment, the government is able to exert control at all levels of Baloch politics. "The Sardars [tribal leaders] and the establishment have a strong nexus. The establishment brings Sardars to the parliament and so the ongoing Sardari system remains one of the biggest impediments to the development of a middle class in Balochistan. Instead, political efforts should focus on ceding power to the local people," says Mir SherBaz Khetran, a research fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad. Yet in dominant Pakistani political discourse, particularly among so-called intellectuals in cities outside the province, the Baloch are perceived as an illiterate nation. Mahrang believes that such perceptions have caused Baloch women even more suffering. “Baloch women have always been a part of the movement for rights against state oppression. This challenges the dominant narrative, but most activists have rarely supported that.” When Mahrang’s father was briefly released in 2009, he told her that she should participate in student politics and talk about what was happening in Balochistan and that she had to continue her activism for the women and other people of Balochistan. “He said I won't give you any advice; I want you to analyze things yourself and make your own narrative.” Alongside her activism, Mahrang Baloch is a medical student. Over years of protests and activism, she has made sure that her studies are not adversely affected. “Everything related to studies would always excite me. School has always been my favorite place. I never took education as a necessity or something I had to do, but rather as something I loved doing.” The government of Balochistan has also been divided over the current quota system in educational institutions, arguing instead that merit should prevail. Mahrang, however, is firmly in favor of quotas. She led protests to restore the quota system, and ultimately succeeded in doing so at Bolan Medical College (BMC). “There should be merit, but after providing equal educational opportunities to all students,” Mahrang says. “You can’t expect a student from a government school to compete with a student from an elite private school.” Last year, during her protests for the restoration of the quota system and amendment of the BMC Act, Mahrang and other students were asked to meet with Education Minister Sardar Yar Mohammed Rind, who was also one of Balochistan’s most influential tribal chiefs. Instead of seeking consensus, Mahrang says, the minister shouted at her in front of five other ministers. “He said if you women were truly [representing] our honor, you wouldn’t be out here protesting,” she recalls smiling. Mahrang says at the time, she had two options: either to ignore what he had said or respond to the misogynistic act. She chose the second option because what the minister had said was not just about her but pertained to all women. She told him that what he had said was wrong. As an employee of the government, he was responsible for solving their issues. He had failed to do his job. A clearly flustered Rind (the Education Minister) began to misbehave and told her to leave because, as Rind said, “respectable women don’t protest.” “I went to the protest area and I was disturbed. I wondered whether to talk about this in front of the media. I decided I must so that no one else, be it an elected or a selected person, does something like this ever again. I did not expect the positive response I got from the people of Balochistan for speaking up against the tribal chief and minister,” she says. Mahrang made history as the first woman to confront one of Balochistan’s most influential chiefs and hold him accountable for his job. As a result of consistent efforts, protests and hunger strikes by Mahrang and her fellow students, the government finally announced amendments to Bolan Medical College Act. They also assured students that the quota system would remain intact. As an activist, Mahrang feels tired and frustrated at times but the work she does brings her joy. “The real happiness lies in activism and talking about the rights of your nation and its marginalized communities,” she says. She calls herself a nationalist. “I fight for the rights of the people of Balochistan; the land I belong to.” She quoted a line from Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of The Earth : “For a colonized people, the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” Mahrang Baloch was first jailed in 2006 when she was a 13-year-old, protesting for the release of her father. When her uncle arrived to bail her out, she refused and said she would not leave jail until her father was released. Spending days protesting in August, having to sleep on roads and getting dragged and thrown into a police van—none of these hindrances deterred her from her activism. “I believe jail is not something new. It has more freedom, as I can read and spend time with myself in the prison,” she chuckles. “They cannot break me by imprisoning me. They would liberate me.” ▢ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Mahrang Baloch, pictured here, was a medical student who, after the abductions of her father and brother, became an activist against enforced disappearances in Balochistan. Photography courtesy of Mashal Baloch. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Balochistan Baloch Missing Persons Media Blackout Pakistan Baloch Insurgency Enforced Disappearances State Violence Military Crackdown Displacement Longform Gender Violence Histories of Revolutionary Politics Baloch Students Organization-Azad Military Operations Pervez Musharraf Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Karima Baloch Student Movements Baloch Student Long March Student Protests Student Solidarity March Journalism Baloch Students Organisation-Azad SHAH MEER BALOCH is a journalist who covers Pakistan for The Guardian . His work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, LA Times, Dawn, among others. He was awarded the 2020 Kurt Schork Award in International Freelance Journalism. Reportage Balochistan 18th Feb 2021 MASHAL BALOCH is a documentary photographer and filmmaker from Balochistan, Pakistan. Baloch is a trainee at DAP (Documentary Association of Pakistan) for their six month documentary training program called Doc Balochistan , supported by Berlinale Talents. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, The Diplomat and Baluch Hal . She has been awarded Pakistan’s largest-ever filmmaking grant, Stories From Southern Pakistan, by Patakha Pictures. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

“If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” COMMUNITY Storytelling in Post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka “If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” VOL. 2 PANEL AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. Artwork courtesy of Hafsa Ashfaq. 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. Artwork courtesy of Hafsa Ashfaq. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Panel Colombo 27th Aug 2024 Panel Colombo Aragalaya Storytelling Citizen Journalism Social Media Fiction Media Landscape State & Media Corporate Corporate Media Sri Lanka Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day War Memorials Post-Aragalaya Moment Narratives Complicating the Unity of the Aragalaya Optimism on the Local Level Youth Media Youth Tech Remembrance Mourning State Repression Social Media Crackdown Sentencing Laws Ranil Wickremasinghe Gotagogama 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. The SAAG launch event for Vol. 2, Issue 2 in Colombo, on 7th May 2024, began with a panel introduced by Chief Editor Sabika Abbas. The panel, moderated by Andrew Fidel Fernando, discussed whether storytelling is possible in post-aragalaya Sri Lanka. How do artists and writers of all persuasions deal with the disappeared? How do we face a state that refuses to even let remembrance occur, particularly regarding the events of 18th May 2009, or Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day? How did the events of 2022, the aragalaya in all its optimism, and the sharp break that followed affect the nature of reporting, fiction, social media, and the work of youth tech organizations? The panel included: Kanya D'Almeida, an award-winning writer and podcaster Benislos Thushan, a digital storytelling enthusiast and lawyer Darshatha Gamage, a youth empowerment and development specialist Raisa Wickrematunge, Deputy Editor at Himal Southasian We can't even remember our loved ones. Even regarding May 18th, we simply don't have any war memorials for people to go and mourn, and no national initiatives. Before, people at least went to social media. now it specifically says if you use social media, if you talk against the military, guess what? You'll be put into prison for five years—or more. If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer. 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

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

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

In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Hong Kong In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. "Khai Hoa" (Bloom) by Hoai Phuong. Shifting Solidarities Building inclusive organizing networks is a fraught endeavor in Hong Kong. For the last five years , residents involved in demonstrations and community events have had to work around the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. For South Asians, the situation is more complex. In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 policies and the recent National Security Law ( NSL )—specifically implemented to intimidate dissenters—they also have to contend with the implicit racial biases of fellow organizers. It wasn’t until 2023, when people started protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, that organizing practices began shifting, with efforts to learn from South Asians’ years of work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is still plenty of room for progress, 2023 marked a promising moment of intersectional coalition building in Hong Kong’s political history. In 2019, the government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment), a bill regarding extradition that allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial to a number of countries, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Macau. In the months that followed, more than a million people took to the streets to protest , citing concerns that the bill would expose people in Hong Kong to China’s judicial system. Protestors clashed with the police, and in the aftermath , faced immense repression; hundreds of activists were exiled, unions were dismantled, and residents left the territory in mass numbers. Amidst the turmoil, citizens found solace in one another, with the term “Hong Konger” becoming a unifying marker of identity for many dissenters. Despite this burgeoning camaraderie, ethno-nationalist tendencies persisted. The newfound sense of community excluded the city’s historic South Asian citizens —a group that came to the region as early as the 1800s, when the British colonized the city. Initially arriving as soldiers in the British army, South Asians eventually became central to setting up key administrative and educational institutions within the territory. However, today, Hong Kongers of South Asian descent still face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a colonial racial hierarchy, colorism, and language segregation. Adnan Muhammad is a Pakistani-Hong Konger who founded a Palestine solidarity group called United For Palestine (UFP) in 2017. Reflecting on his experience organising around Palestine in Hong Kong, he said, “We always felt like we were operating within silos [because] most of the people who came to our events were either Pakistani or Indian, or Muslim [from diverse backgrounds].” Adnan added that during the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests , South Asians and other minority communities could not partake because of the language barrier; most protest materials were in Cantonese. If they did participate, they became “easy targets” for the police due to their ethnicity, the institution's deeply rooted racist attitudes , and, notably, discriminatory “stop and search” practices. This is an observation that Alison Tan, a food designer and organizer, made , too. The Hong Kong-based designer stated, “People have a bit of a mind-your-own-business mentality in Hong Kong, especially in public, but during the demonstrations, you could see people actively looking out for each other,” adding, “Yet, when there were instances of police aggression towards South Asians, no one seemed to step up.” The organizing networks established in 2019 largely dissipated the following year when the pandemic hit. The government imposed 6pm curfews, movement tracking mobile apps, mask mandates, and restrictions on gatherings. In public, an air of self-censorship took root. Citizens felt that they couldn’t have open conversations about the ways these laws were negatively impacting them. The NSL, passed in 2020, made dissent along with community organizing even more difficult. It allowed the Hong Kong government to prosecute individuals with crimes of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion (threatening the government’s power), terrorism (acts of violence), and collusion with foreign organizations. Each of these crimes was vaguely defined—no one really seemed to know what would count as a transgression. By instituting this law, the government was effectively cracking down on civil liberties, including the freedom of speech. Despite the intensity of censorship, Hong Kong citizens did not lose their fervor for dissent. When Israel launched a genocidal attack on Palestine following the events of October 7th, organizing networks slowly began springing back into action. Citizens still didn’t have freedom of assembly, so events started out as small-scale, community-based, and non-confrontational gatherings. Nevertheless, organizers were resolute and made an effort to be intersectional. Following the cancellation of a Palestinian film screening at a community arts studio, solidarity efforts intensified. The events that were previously semi-public went completely underground. During this time, Alison remembers seeing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities taking the lead in filling a crucial gap in people’s knowledge about Palestine. “Most Chinese Hong Kongers do not care, and do not know [about Palestine]. We just don’t have an insight into the way faith, for example, plays a role in the struggle.” For Alison and Adnan, this knowledge gap exists because there has been little exchange and solidarity between movements for Hong Kong’s liberation and those located outside the region. In the past year, however, efforts by groups like United for Palestine have converged their goals with those of other organizing collectives. Under UFP leadership, people joined messaging groups made by South Asian Muslim youth that disseminated information about teach-ins and prayers being held in mosques that helped spread awareness about the history of the Palestinian cause. There were communal events, tucked away from the public eye, where people gathered to talk about grief, frustration, and their commitment to justice. Reflecting on these shifts, Adnan felt that even though their collective began operating in Hong Kong in 2017, “It was only after October 2023 that our efforts began reaching people beyond South Asian and Muslim communities, and people from other communities began to take an interest.” Vera, a Chinese Hong-Konger whose artist studio is located in a diverse neighborhood consisting of Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Chinese residents, shared that his studio’s support for Palestine has brought him and his colleagues closer to their South Asian neighbors. “X, a Pakistani kaifong , who often plays chess with me, visited our space and saw Palestinian flags. Since then, he’s been cooking for us, saying Palestinians are like his brothers and sisters.” This again represents a rare instance of solidarity between communities who live alongside each other but don’t always have common ground to meaningfully interact with one another—a divide that's frequently reinforced by systemic factors, including language differences. At a community mutual aid event in March 2024 that raised 48,000 HKD in donations for Palestine, South Asian students put up a stall selling keffiyehs, mehndi, and other solidarity materials alongside other Hong Kongers who sold miso soup, zines, and second-hand clothing. The event also featured a halal vegan-friendly spread of foods and learning sessions about Islam’s role in the resistance and the Palestinian struggle against colonization. The fundraiser, centered around honoring and learning about Palestinian culture, ended with a moving performance of a song, “My mouth was made for speaking,” by a Hong Kong singer, drawing powerful links between the struggle for Palestine’s liberation and Hong Kong’s own struggle against imperialism. This is not to say that there has not been pushback. Events that have taken place more publicly have been shut down and censored under the pretext of ambiguous complaints. While official reasoning remains unknown, pro-Palestine organizers speculate that the government seeks to avoid friction with pro-Zionist lobbies and maintain a politically neutral—or rather, a conflict-free—environment within the city. Of course, choosing to remain indifferent to a genocide is akin to implicitly siding with the oppressor. In August 2024, after almost a year of community-based events for Palestine, some organizers were able to host a public exhibit showcasing Palestine solidarity posters at Hong Kong’s premier Art Book Fair, “BOOKED,” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. However, two days before the fair was due to begin, the exhibition was canceled without any clear explanation from the management. Pivotally, organizers remain resilient and tactful. Within two days of the exhibition at BOOKED being canceled, they secured an alternative venue and utilized solidarity networks to gather a large number of attendees. Jason, a photographer who has been running a leftist reading club in Hong Kong for the past year, believes this was only possible because efforts related to Palestine revitalized networks of organizing that had been previously quashed. “There was a lot of energy in the city that dissipated [after 2019], and now people have a reason to come together again.” Alison, who was also at the event, said, “Palestine has really brought people from all walks of life together in a really powerful way.” It is hard to say whether these efforts make a dent in the powerful apparatus of settler-colonial regimes that seek to occupy Palestine. But within their own context, these newly formed relationships are allowing communities in Hong Kong to chip away at divisions along racial and ethnic lines.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Hong Kong Civilian Solidarity Civilian Activism Activism Activist Advocacy Pakistan Free Speech Freedom Palestine Protest Mass Protests Civilian Unrest Liberation ideology Muslim Islam Organizing Ethno-nationalism Liberation Struggle Diaspora South Asia Muslim Organizing Public Space Geography Politics of Ethnic Identity Social Change Tai Kwun Contemporary National Security Law Hong Konger United For Palestine Protest Materials Cantonese Language Language Segregation China Police Action Freedom of Speech BOOKED Multi-ethnic Solidarity Networks 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. 22nd May 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

The Aahvaan Project was founded in 2016 based on the nirgun philosophy of love and the works of sufi saints such as kabir, lal ded and lalon fakir. A folk and storytelling collective, founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016, their music is avowedly political and inclusive. INTERACTIVE The Aahvaan Project · Performance AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR The Aahvaan Project was founded in 2016 based on the nirgun philosophy of love and the works of sufi saints such as kabir, lal ded and lalon fakir. A folk and storytelling collective, founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016, their music is avowedly political and inclusive. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Delhi Music Performance Folk Storytelling Narratives Nirgun Sufism Sufi Saints Kabir Lal Ded Lalon Fakir Community Building Contemporary Music Love Prahlad Tipaniya Compassion Pyaar National Institute of Design Ahmedabad Folk Music Rajasthan Kabir Yatra In Grief In Solidarity Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Live Delhi 5th Jun 2021 The Aahvaan Project was founded by Vedi Sinha in 2016 as a collective “ journey and an experience, an attempt to understand Nirgun—the mystic idea of love spoken about in various time periods by philosophers through the lived experience of saints and sufis. ” They perform across communities, educational institutions, and art spaces. For our event In Grief, In Solidarity in 2021, Vedi Sinha, who founded the folk music & storytelling collective and does not often perform alone, joined us for a beautiful performance of new songs. 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:

“Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” COMMUNITY Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India Amit Chaudhuri “Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified. RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Avant-Garde Origins Modernism Anthology Traditions Vaikom Muhammad Basheer Avant-Garde Form Auto-Fiction Wendy Doniger Multimodal Stream of Consciousness Rabindranath Tagore Tagore as First Impulse of Modernism Literary Activism Impoverished Histories Contradiction Criticism Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Performance Art Satyajit Ray Avant-Garde Beginnings in India Varavara Rao AMIT CHAUDHURI is the author of eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn . He is also an essayist, poet, musician, and composer. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Awards for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award. In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Infosys Prize in the Humanities for outstanding contribution to literary studies. His first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address , is included in Colm Toibin and Carmen Callil's The Modern Library: the 200 best novels of the last 50 years, and his second novel, Afternoon Raag , was on the novelist Anne Enright's list of 10 best short novels for the Guardian. Its 25th anniversary edition appeared last year with a new introduction by the critic James Wood. He is a highly regarded singer in the Hindustani classical tradition and has been acclaimed as a pathbreaking composer and improviser who performed, most recently, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. In 2017, the government of West Bengal awarded Chaudhuri the Sangeet Samman for his contribution to Indian classical music. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, and was University College London's Annual Visiting Fellow in 2018. That year, he was also an inaugural fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and in 2019 became an honorary fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Interview Avant-Garde Origins 4th Oct 2020 On That Note: Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy 17th DEC FLUX · A Panel on SAAG, So Far 5th DEC The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde 25th AUG

“Partly because of the lockdown, things were suddenly more visible. It was like a veil was lifted. There was a heightening of cases of domestic violence, for instance, which we knew about but had to deal with it. We know about power structures, but I wondered what I could do to help... Art, at a certain point, felt pointless, but I did begin to wonder what role I wanted to play. What service do I want to provide the world?” INTERACTIVE Protest Art & the Corporate Art World AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Partly because of the lockdown, things were suddenly more visible. It was like a veil was lifted. There was a heightening of cases of domestic violence, for instance, which we knew about but had to deal with it. We know about power structures, but I wondered what I could do to help... Art, at a certain point, felt pointless, but I did begin to wonder what role I wanted to play. What service do I want to provide the world?” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Live Kathmandu Lahore Dharamshala Panel Art Activism Art Practice Protest Art Mass Protests Feminist Art Practice Feminist In Grief In Solidarity Internationalist Perspective Aurat March Farmers' Movement People's Movement II Jana Andolan II Performance Art Monarchy 2006 Nepalese Revolution Art Institutions Museums Galleries Corporate Power Observance Grounding Corporate Interests in the Art World The Artist as Product COVID-19 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Live Kathmandu 5th Jun 2021 As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , artist-activists Ikroop Sandhu, Isma Gul Hasan, and Hit Man Gurung discussed the various contexts in which their visual and performance artistic practice evolved with their activism in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, respectively. Working as part of collective communities and in solidarity with movements was formative for each of them. With editor Kartika Budhwar, they also discussed the “moments” (or lack thereof) that made them turn to art, and how they feel about the institutional and other problematic aspects of the rarefied art world. How does their "art" feel different from journalism and other forms of expression? How has COVID-19 affected their lives and, in turn, their practice? Each of them discussed their complex feelings about the necessity of their work—and how it felt frivolous during lockdown. At the core of the discussion was an ambivalence about the centrality of visual and performance art to activism, but also the idea that art does indeed have a specific power that other ways of engaging with the world don't. 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:

During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. THE VERTICAL Sinking the Body Politic AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Dispatch Sundarbans Climate Change Satjelia Calcutta Cyclone Remal Cyclone Alia Elections 2024 Indian General Election West Bengal Refugee Crisis Refugees Climate Migrants Trinamul Congress I.N.D.I.A alliance Dams Embankments Rural Farmers Sundarban Delta Mangrove Forest Cyclone Yaas Tropical Cyclones Cyclone Amphan Agriculture Wage Labor Migration Kerala Tamil Nadu Contract Workers Bay of Bengal Bankimnagar Climate Refugees BJP Disaster Management Congress Riverbanks Erosion Manifesto Campaign Promises Electioneering Mitigation Sagar Island 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 Dispatch Sundarbans 24th Aug 2024 In Satjelia village, nearly a hundred kilometres from Kolkata, the largest city of eastern India, every family lives with memories of disaster. In the last week of May, they were again in panic with the announcement of Cyclone Remal hitting the eastern part of India. They spent sleepless nights at the makeshift relief centre fearing that their homes will again be lost, their crops will again be destroyed, and their land will turn unfit for agriculture for a long time with saline water flooding fields. “I still haven’t been able to recover fully from the losses I suffered from Cyclone Alia in 2009,” says Srimanti Sinha, who lives in a small hutment about a kilometre away from the river. Her home was swept away in the cyclone. Every time there is a storm, she is reminded of that time. “We keep praying that the water levels do not rise up enough to breach the embankment again.” This time, though, just before Cyclone Remal hit eastern India, candidates for the 2024 general elections paid the village a visit ahead of voting on 1st June. Every major party had fielded a candidate for the region with the main contestants being from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Trinamul Congress, and the I.N.D.I.A alliance. The candidates spoke about violence, religious issues, development, ending corruption, and building a strong nation. Somehow, they managed to skip over far more immediate concerns . In Satjelia, the demand is for stronger dams and embankments to protect the land from floods. The people also want support for farmers to reduce migration for work to faraway states like Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. “What [politicians] have spoken about is important for us too,” Sinha says. “But I wish they also spoke about what we need here the most.” Satjelia is situated in the middle of a ring of islands in the Sundarban delta: home to the largest mangrove forest in the world and over four million people. Like Sinha and others in Satjelia, people in several parts of the delta have suffered losses from cyclones and steadily rising water levels. In the past two decades, the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen by three centimeters a year, according to satellite imagery and media reports , which is among the fastest coastal erosion rates globally. In 2021, Cyclone Yaas destroyed over three lakh homes as seawater breached embankments in many parts of the state. Before that, tropical cyclones—whether Fani (May 2019), Bulbul (November 2019), or Amphan (May 2020)—battered this region. Each time, embankments were breached, and saline water entered agricultural land, causing immense loss of earnings and subsequent distress migration. Among these, Amphan was the most severe, killing over 100 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. After repeated losses to their land and belongings, most young people from islands like Sagar and Mousuni have migrated to the country’s southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, over a thousand kilometers away, in search of new livelihoods. They now work as daily wage labourers and contract workers at construction sites, in factories, and on large fishing vessels. Those still living close to the water in Sundarban are desperate to move away, but they receive little to no assistance from the government. After big storms, there are announcements of relocation for victims. According to people in the villages, however, not much of that is seen happening. Bapi Bor, who lives in Bankimnagar, a village on the island near the Bay of Bengal, says homes are flooded even during high tides in parts of the delta, including Sagar Island. Sagar Island is a hub of climate refugees, being one of the largest islands in the delta. People have shifted here from small neighbouring islands like Lohachora and Ghoramara, which have been sinking in the past two decades. Now, as the water levels continue rising and Sagar Island keeps sinking, these refugees are again on the verge of losing their homes. The Sundarban delta, despite being one of the most ravaged areas by climate change globally, has been met with staggering apathy from the Indian political class. Meanwhile, a tussle between the central and state government in West Bengal has further exacerbated the poor quality of life in the Sundarbans. Many small dams throughout the islands were maintained by local construction labourers, whose work was compensated with money from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005. This national program for employment security ensured 100 days of work for people in rural India. “That money has stopped coming from the central government as they have accused the state government [of West Bengal] of corruption,” says Tanmay Mandal, a member of the village council in Rangabelia village near Satjelia. He explains that this is a serious problem for the islands since much work was done under that scheme, from maintaining earthen embankments to planting mangroves. On paper, the major political parties acknowledge the climate crisis—to varying degrees, as would be expected. BJP’s manifesto mentions it briefly, focusing more on “nature-friendly, climate-resilient, remunerative agriculture” and “coastal resilience against climate change.” The manifesto of the Indian National Congress has more detailed plans with a 13-point program under the heading “Environment, Climate Change and Disaster Management.” Meanwhile, the Trinamool Congress manifesto is more specific to Bengal and includes the crisis of the Sundarban delta. They mention specifically that “TMC will implement strategies to protect the rivers of Bengal, including all the vulnerable riverbanks of the state, from erosion and to safeguard communities from floods.” And yet, as the campaigns in West Bengal became more fervent, climate change remained a curio of the manifestos. In the speeches and rallies, it was lost amidst loud rhetoric about religion and rising prices. To be sure, this indifference is not limited to the delta. As the general elections rolled on from 19th April to 1st June, several parts of India were hit by a heat wave that claimed over 56 lives, of which 33 were polling officers. That tragedy, too, had little impact on the campaigns. According to Samir Kumar Das, a professor of political science at Calcutta University, the unfortunate reality of climate change is that it is only discussed when there is controversy. In other words: when the display of apathy becomes untenable, and crises become political liabilities. “The media is usually after the spectacular stories,” says Das. “But rising water levels or distress migration happens slowly. So while we see a lot of coverage after a storm, we have no idea how many people had to migrate eventually.” Across the board, political attention remains woefully inadequate as floods, heat waves, and droughts increase with the impact of climate change. In the face of such a fragmented and superficial political response, Das proposes a larger comprehensive approach, such as a central policy for distress migration. At the same time, Das notes that the climate crisis is being discussed more as it is increasingly affecting the cities in the form of a water crisis and unbearable heat waves. “The media cannot ignore it now,” he says. Das sees a shift in people's response to the crisis in the Sundarbans. “People are more vocal about what they need,” he observes. “Alms after a storm are not enough to satisfy them.” Instead, people are asking more difficult questions about the dams and infrastructure that are indicative of the broader scope of the problem. Some, of course, are intervening themselves. “It could be the beginning,” Das suggests, “of a new kind of pressure the political organisations can feel.” Then again, who can say how long it will take for apathy to become untenable? ∎ 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: