#Fascist Criminal Narendra Modi

[xtruss]

World’s Most Wanted Criminal and Fascist Hindu Extremist Narendra Modi’s Illiberalism May Imperil India’s Economic Progress! Fulfilling His Great-Power Dream Requires Restraint, Not Abandon

— January 18th, 2023

“Politics And Religion Cannot Be Mixed,” ruled India’s Supreme Court in 1994 in what was then considered a decisive elucidation of the country’s secular constitution. Tell that to the millions who on January 22nd will watch Narendra Modi preside over the consecration of a controversial $220m Hindu temple, in a ceremony that marks the informal launch of his campaign for a third term as prime minister in elections to be held by May. To the alarm of India’s 200m Muslims, and many secular-minded Indians, it will mark a high point of a decades-long Hindu-nationalist project to dominate India.

Even as Mr Modi appears at the temple in Ayodhya in northern India, the other pillar of his mission continues apace: India’s extraordinary modernisation. The country is the planet’s fastest-growing major economy and now its fifth-biggest. Global investors toast its infrastructure boom and growing technological sophistication. Mr Modi wants to be India’s most consequential leader since Jawaharlal Nehru. His vision of national greatness is about wealth as well as religion. The danger is that a hubristic Hindu chauvinism undermines his economic ambitions.

To understand the strange symbolism of Ayodhya you have to travel back in time. Mr Modi’s once-fringe party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), built its name by campaigning over the status of a Mosque there from 1990. It organised a rally of Hindu activists in 1992 that led to its destruction, sparking Hindu-Muslim riots across South Asia.

The lavish Hindu temple that Mr Modi is about to open is built on the site of that destroyed mosque. For many Hindus this represents the righting of an ancient wrong: the location is also the mythical birthplace of the Hindu god Ram. Previous bjp leaders, such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, downplayed the party’s Hindu-first ideology, known as Hindutva, to win mainstream support. After ten years in power, Mr Modi, who was implicated in deadly anti-Muslim riots in 2002 when he ran Gujarat state (he was later absolved by the courts), no longer seems so restrained.

The bjp’s radicals have been empowered. There have been Mob Attacks on Muslims. Several bjp-run states have passed anti-conversion laws. Mr Modi has exacerbated Islamophobia by, among other things, promoting a citizenship law that discriminates against Muslims. His strongman style of rule has also featured harassment and attacks on the pillars of India’s old liberal order, including the press, charities, think-tanks, some courts and many opposition politicians.

Were Mr Modi and the bjp to win a third term—as seems almost certain—many worry that the Hindutva project would go further. bjp activists are agitating to replace mosques with temples at hundreds of other sites. Mr Modi wants to scrap constitutional provisions for Muslim family law. A possible redrawing of parliamentary districts could see power accrue to the populous Hindi-speaking and bjp-supporting north, at the expense of the richer industrialised south. Mr Modi, aged 73, could rule as a strongman for a further decade or more.

The whiplash-inducing reality is that this religious and political struggle is occurring alongside enormous economic optimism. Growth has exceeded 7% in recent quarters. The country now has vastly improved transport infrastructure, huge and deep equity markets, stronger banks, massive currency reserves, a less complex tax system and less corruption. India is at last becoming a single market, letting firms exploit economies of scale and promising faster business investment. While manufacturing has yet to take off, industry is starting to couple with global supply chains, from internet routers to electric two-wheelers. The giant technology-services sector hopes to make a fortune as companies around the world seek help in adopting artificial intelligence.

Image: Alicia Tatone

The economic record is still far from perfect. The rate of formal job creation is much too low—one reason Mr Modi has built up digital welfare-schemes for the poor, augmenting his image among ordinary Hindus as a leader who cares about the downtrodden. India does too little to develop human capital and its education system is terrible. Some powerful firms have too much influence. Yet it is a foundation worth building on.

The question is whether the religious agenda and rapid economic development are compatible. The answer is yes, but only up to a point. In the past ten years many of Mr Modi’s economic accomplishments have existed alongside his religious agenda. The bjp’s parliamentary strength and Mr Modi’s popularity have made it possible to push through difficult reforms, including a national sales tax. The government’s unity and clout have given investors confidence that policy is stable, even though civil liberties have been eroded.

Yet if Mr Modi in his third term were to lurch further towards Hindutva and autocratic rule, the economic calculus would change. Take the north-south divide. If India continues to grow fast, the industrialised, wealthy and technologically advanced south is likely to pull further ahead, drawing labour from the north. But Hindutva holds little appeal in the south, and by pushing it further while concentrating more power in his own hands, Mr Modi could exacerbate already rising tensions over internal migrants, tax revenues and representation.

Or consider economic stability, which depends on the management of the economy by internationally credible technocrats, not bjp ideologues. You can overdo how much store companies put by the rule of law—they invested in China for decades. But if decision-making becomes authoritarian and erratic as Mr Modi grows old and isolated, and if institutions are weakened, firms will grow warier of deploying huge sums of capital.

As he stands at the ceremony at Ayodhya before admirers and acolytes—the leaders of India’s new, brash, nationalistic elite—does Mr Modi see this danger? He has in the past: before he was prime minister he tried to rebrand himself from a Hindu zealot into a pragmatic manager of his successful home state of Gujarat. With a third term looming, he should realise that, to fulfil his dream of making India a great power, the balancing-act must continue. It requires restraint, not abandon. If Mr Modi fails, the hopes of 1.4bn people and the prospects for the brightest spot in the world economy will be dashed. ■

— This Article Appeared in the Leaders Section of the Print Edition Under the Headline "Modi’s Juggernaut"

[gazetteweekly]

Modi and co using Sanatana ploy to divert attention; will face cases legally, says Udhayanidhi

He also launched a strident attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he was "globe-trotting", afraid of facing questions over the Manipur violence.

CHENNAI: Under intense attack from the BJP over his alleged anti-Sanatana Dharma remarks, DMK leader and Tamil Nadu Minister Udhayanidhi Stalin on Thursday accused the saffron party leaders of “twisting” his statements and vowed to face all cases in this connection legally.

He also launched a strident attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he was “globe-trotting”, afraid of facing questions over the Manipur violence.

“For the last 9 years, all your (BJP) promises are empty promises. What have you exactly done for our welfare is a question currently being raised in unison by the entire country against an unarmed, fascist BJP government. It is in this background that the BJP leaders have twisted my speech at the TNPWAA conference as ‘inciting genocide’. They consider it a weapon to protect themselves,” he said.

What is surprising is that those like Union Minister Amit Shah and Chief Ministers of BJP-ruled states were demanding action against him based on “fake news,” Udhayanidhi said.

“In all fairness, I should be the one filing criminal cases and other court cases against them for spreading slander while holding respectable positions. But I am aware that this is their mode of survival. They don’t know how else to survive, so I decided not to do that,” he said.

He was one of the political heirs of Dravidian stalwart, the late CN Annadurai, the founder of the DMK.

“Everyone knows that we are not enemies of any religion.”

“I would like to quote Anna’s comment on religions which remains relevant even today. If religion leads people towards equality and teaches them fraternity, then I too am a spiritualist. If a religion divides people in the name of castes, if it teaches them untouchability and slavery, I would be the first person to oppose religion,” he said quoting Annadurai.

He said DMK respects all religions that teach all lives are born equal.

“But without an iota of understanding about any of these, Thiru Modi and Co are solely dependent on such slanders to face the Parliamentary elections. On the one hand, I can only feel sorry for them. For the last 9 years, Modi has been doing nothing. Occasionally he demonetises money, builds walls to hide huts, builds new Parliamentary building, erects a Sengol (sceptre) there, plays around by changing the name of the country, standing at the border and making the white flag work,” he lashed out.

Has there been any progressive scheme from the Union government in the last nine years like the DMK’s “Pudhumai Penn” or the Chief Minister’s breakfast scheme or the Kalaignar’s women’s rights scheme, he asked. “Have they built the AIIMS in Madurai? Did they take forward any knowledge movement like the Kalaignar Centenary Library?”

“Afraid of having to face questions about Manipur in India, he is globe-trotting along with his friend Adani. The fact is, the ignorance of the people is the capital of their theatrical politics,” he claimed.

“Thiru Modi and co are using the Sanatana ploy to divert the attention from the facts including the killing of more than 250 people in the riots incited in Manipur and the Rs 7. 5 lakh crore corruption,” he charged.

There was a lot of work for the party workers, including preparing for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, he said and asked them to focus on that. “I would like to inform that I will face the cases filed against me legally with the guidance of our party president (TN CM MK Stalin) and on the advice of our party high command,” he added.

[mzemo0]

2 Billion Muslims Must Send A Stern Warning To India’s Nazi-Like Government To Stop Its Anti-Islam Discourse

The extreme right-wing government of India, headed by Narendra Modi of the openly fascist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is carrying out a vicious campaign of persecution, vilification and terror against the country’s large Muslim minority.

The real but undeclared goal of this manifestly criminal racist policy is to bully the estimated 200-250 million Muslims of India to choose between converting to the non-monotheistic Hindu religion or putting up with mounting persecution and humiliation. Learn More

Islamophobia

[theculturedmarxist]

The decade of socialist revolution begins

       3 January 2020  

The arrival of the New Year marks the beginning of a decade of intensifying class struggle and world socialist revolution.

In the future, when learned historians write about the upheavals of the Twenty-First Century, they will enumerate all the “obvious” signs that existed, as the 2020s began, of the revolutionary storm that was soon to sweep across the globe. The scholars—with a vast array of facts, documents, charts, web site and social media postings, and other forms of valuable digitalized information at their disposal—will describe the 2010s as a period characterized by an intractable economic, social, and political crisis of the world capitalist system.

They will note that by the beginning of the third decade of the century, history had arrived at precisely the situation foreseen theoretically by Karl Marx: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.”

What, in fact, were the principal characteristics of the last ten years?

The institutionalization of unending military conflict and the growing threat of nuclear world war

There was not a single day during the last decade when the United States was not at war. Military operations not only continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. New interventions were undertaken in Syria, Libya, Yemen and Ukraine. Even as 2020 is just getting under way, the murder of Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani, ordered by President Donald Trump, threatens all-out war between the United States and Iran, with incalculable consequences. The involvement of an American president in yet another targeted killing, followed by bloodthirsty boasting, testifies to the far-advanced derangement of the entire ruling elite.

Moreover, the adoption of a new strategic doctrine in 2018 signaled a vast escalation in the military operations of the United States. In his announcement of the new strategy, then defense secretary James Mattis declared: “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” The new doctrine revealed the essential purpose of what had previously been called the “War on Terror:” the attempt to maintain the hegemonic position of American imperialism.

The United States is determined to maintain this position, whatever the financial costs and the consequences in terms of human life. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) states in its recently released Strategic Survey: “For its part, the US is not likely voluntarily, reluctantly or after some sort of battle, to pass any strategic baton to China.”

All the major imperialist powers escalated, during the past decade, their preparations for world war and nuclear conflict. The trillion-dollar military budget adopted in 2019 by the Trump administration, with the support of the Democratic Party, is a war budget. Germany, France, the UK, and all the imperialist countries are building up their armed forces. The targets of imperialism, including the ruling elites in Russia and China, alternate between threats of war and desperate efforts to forge some sort of agreement.

The institutions developed in the aftermath of World War II to prevent another global conflict are dysfunctional. The Strategic Survey writes:

The trends of 2018–19 have all confirmed the atomisation of international society. Neither ‘balance of power’ nor ‘international rules-based governance’ serve as ordering principles. International institutions have been marginalised. The diplomatic routine of meetings continues, yet the competing exertions of national efforts, too rarely coordinated with others, matter more—and most often they are erratic in both execution and consequence. 

The end of a “global rules-based order”—i.e., one dependent on the unchallengeable dominance of US imperialism—sets into motion a political logic that leads to war. As the Strategic Survey warns: “Law is made and sustained by politics. When law cannot settle disputes, they are shunted back to the political realm for resolution.” To understand the “realm” to which the IISS is referring, one must recall Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as politics by other means.

And what would a modern world war entail? The IISS calls attention to new plans for the use of nuclear weapons. “Meanwhile, the US and Russia are modernizing their arsenals and changing their doctrines in ways that facilitate their use, while the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir remains a potential flashpoint for the use of nuclear weapons.” The recklessness, bordering on insanity, that prevails among policy makers is indicated in the growing conviction that the use of tactical nuclear weapons is a feasible option. The IISS writes:

All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that a limited, regional nuclear exchange, under some circumstances, has severe global environmental effects. But under other circumstances, the effects could be minimal. [emphasis added] 

The movement toward a Third World War, which would threaten mankind with extinction, cannot be halted by humanitarian appeals. War arises out of the anarchy of capitalism and the obsolescence of the nation-state system. Therefore, it can be stopped only through the global struggle of the working class for socialism. 

The breakdown of democracy

The extreme aggravation of class tensions and the dynamic of imperialism are the real sources of the universal breakdown of democratic forms of rule. As Lenin wrote in the midst of World War I: “Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and intensification of antagonisms in this field.”

Lenin’s analysis is being substantiated in the turn of the ruling elites, during the past decade, toward authoritarian and fascistic methods of rule. The rise to power of such criminal and even psychopathic personalities as Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson in the UK is symptomatic of a systemic crisis of the entire capitalist system.

Seventy-five years after the collapse of the Third Reich, fascism is making a comeback in Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, which is a haven for neo-Nazis, emerged during the past decade as the main opposition party. Its rise was facilitated by the Grand Coalition government, a corrupt media, and reactionary academics, who whitewash with impunity the crimes of Hitler’s regime. Similar processes are at work throughout Europe, where the fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s—Petain in France, Mussolini in Italy, Horthy in Hungary and Franco in Spain—are being remembered with nostalgia.

The decade saw the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence and the cultivation of Islamophobia and other forms of national chauvinism and racism. Concentration camps were constructed on the US border with Mexico to imprison refugees fleeing from Central and South America, and in Europe and North Africa as the frontline of the anti-immigrant policy of the EU.

There is no progressive tendency to be found within the capitalist parties. Even when confronted with a fascistic president, the Democratic Party refrains from opposition based on the defense of democratic rights. Employing the methods of a palace coup, the Democrats seek Trump’s impeachment only because he, in their view, has undermined the US campaign against Russia and the proxy war in Ukraine.

The attitude of the entire bourgeois political establishment to democratic rights is summed up in the horrific treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. With the support of both the Democrats and Republicans, Assange remains confined in Belmarsh prison in London, awaiting extradition to the US. Manning has been imprisoned for nearly a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury called to indict Assange on further charges.

The persecution of Assange and Manning is aimed at criminalizing the conduct of constitutionally-protected journalistic activity. It is part of a broader suppression of dissent that includes the campaign of internet censorship and the jailing of the Maruti-Suzuki workers in India and other class-war prisoners.

The preparations for war, involving massive expenditures and requiring the accumulation of unprecedented levels of debt, snuff the air out of democracy. In the final analysis, the costs of war must be imposed upon the working people of the world. The burdens will encounter resistance by a population already incensed by decades of sacrifice. The response of the ruling elites will be the intensification of their efforts to suppress every form of popular dissent.

The degradation of the environment

The last decade was marked by the continued and increasingly rapid destruction of the environment. Scientists have issued ever more dire warnings that without urgent and far-reaching action on a global scale, the effects of global warming will be devastating and irreversible. The deadly inferno engulfing Australia, as the year ended, is only the latest horrific consequence of climate change.

In November, 11,000 scientists signed a statement published in the journal BioScience warning that “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” It noted that over the course of four decades of global climate negotiations, “with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament…

The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity…. Especially worrisome, are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable. 

Earlier in the year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that 821 million people, who were already suffering from hunger, face starvation as agricultural regions are impacted by global warming. Hundreds of millions could lose access to fresh water, while many more will be affected by increasingly severe weather patterns: flooding, drought and hurricanes.

Climate change, and other manifestations of environmental degradation, are the product of a social and economic system that is incapable of organizing global production in a rational and scientific manner, on the basis of social need—including the need for a healthy environment—rather than the endless accumulation of personal wealth.

The aftermath of the 2008 crash and the crisis of capitalism

Underlying all other aspects of the social and political situation is the malignant growth of extreme social inequality—the inevitable and intended consequence of all the measures adopted by the ruling class following the economic and financial crisis of 2008.

Following the financial crash, which occurred on the eve of the 2010s, world governments and central banks opened the spigots. In the United States, the Bush and particularly the Obama administrations engineered the $700 billion bailout of the banks, followed by trillions of dollars in “quantitative easing” measures—that is, the purchase by the Federal Reserve of the worthless assets and securities held by financial institutions.

Overnight, the federal deficit of the American government was doubled. The assets of the Federal Reserve rose from under $2 trillion in November 2008 to $4.5 trillion in October 2014, and the figure remains at more than $4 trillion today. With a new $60 billion a month asset purchase program, initiated in late 2019, the balance sheet is expected to surpass post-crash highs by the middle of this year.

This policy has continued under Trump, with his massive corporate tax cuts and demands for further reductions in interest rates. The New York Times noted, in a January 1 article (“A Simple Investment Strategy That Worked in 2019: Buy Almost Anything”) that the value of almost all investment assets jumped sharply over the past year. The Nasdaq rose by 35 percent, the S&P 500 by 29 percent, commodities by 16 percent, US corporate bonds by 15 percent, and US Treasuries by 7 percent. “It was a remarkable across-the-board rally of a scale not seen in nearly a decade. The cause? Mostly a head-spinning reversal by the Federal Reserve, which went from planning to raise interest rates to cutting them and pumping fresh money into the financial markets.”

All the major capitalist powers have pursued similar measures. The allocation of unlimited credit and money printing—and this, in the final analysis, is what quantitative easing is—intensified the underlying crisis. In trying to rescue themselves, the ruling elites enshrined parasitism and raised social inequality to a level unknown in modern history.

Benefiting from the limitless infusion of money into the market, the fortunes of the financial elite rose during the past decade to astronomical heights. The 500 richest individuals in the world (0.000006 percent of the global population) now have a collective net worth of $5.9 trillion, up $1.2 trillion over the past year alone. This increase is more than the GDP (that is, the total value of all goods and services produced) of all but 15 countries in the world. In the US, the 400 richest individuals have more wealth than the bottom 64 percent, and the top 0.1 percent of the population have a larger share than at any time since 1929, immediately preceding the Great Depression.

The social catastrophe confronting masses of workers and youth throughout the world is the direct product of the policies employed to guarantee the accumulation of wealth by the corporate and financial elite.

The decline in life expectancy among workers in the US, the mass unemployment of workers and particularly young people throughout the world, the devastating austerity measures imposed on Greece and other countries, the intensification of exploitation to boost the profits of corporations—all this is the consequence of the policy pursued by the ruling elites.

The growth of the international working class and the global class struggle

The objective conditions for socialist revolution emerge out of the global crisis. The approach of social revolution has already been foreshadowed in the mass demonstrations and strikes that swept across the globe in 2019: in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, France, Spain, Algeria, Britain, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, India and Hong Kong. The United States, where the entire political structure is directed toward the suppression of class struggle, witnessed the first national strike by auto workers in more than forty years.

But the dominant and most revolutionary feature of the class struggle is its international character, rooted in the global character of modern-day capitalism. Moreover, the movement of the working class is a movement of the younger generation and, therefore, a movement that will shape the future.

Those under 30 now comprise over half the world’s population and over 65 percent of the population in the world’s fastest growing regions—Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Each month in India, one million people turn 18. In the Middle East and North Africa, an estimated 27 million young people will enter the workforce in the next five years.

From 1980 to 2010, global industrial development added 1.2 billion people to the ranks of the working class, with hundreds of millions more in the decade since. Of this 1.2 billion, 900 million entered the working class in the developing world. Internationally, the percentage of the global labor force that can be classified as peasant declined from 44 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2018. Nearly one billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa are expected to join the working class in the coming decades. In China alone, 121 million people moved from “farm to factory” between 2000 and 2010, with millions more in the decade since.

It is not only Asia and Africa that have seen a growth in the working class population. In the advanced capitalist countries, large sections of those who would have previously considered themselves middle class have been proletarianized, while the wave of immigrants from Latin America to the United States and from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe has added millions to a highly diverse workforce.

From 2010 to 2019, the world’s urban population grew by one billion, creating a network of interconnected “megacities” that are both hives of economic productivity and social powder kegs, where inequality is a visible fact of daily life.

And these workers are connected with each other in a manner that is unprecedented in world history. The colossal advances in science, technology and communications, above all the rise of the internet and the proliferation of mobile devices, have allowed masses of people to bypass the fake news of the bourgeois media, which function as little more than mouthpieces for the state and intelligence agencies. More than half of the world’s population, 4.4 billion people, now have access to the internet. The average individual spends over two hours on social media each day, largely on handheld devices.

Workers and youth can now coordinate their protests and actions on a global scale, expressed in the international movement against climate change, the emergence of the “yellow vests” as a worldwide symbol of protest against inequality, and the solidarity of auto workers in the United States and Mexico.

These objective changes are producing major shifts in social consciousness on the central question of social inequality. The 2019 United Nations Human Development Report explains that in almost all countries, the percentage of people demanding greater equality increased from the 2000s to the 2010s by up to 50 percent. The report warned: “Surveys have revealed rising perceptions of inequality, rising preferences for greater equality and rising global inequality in subjective perceptions of well-being. All these trends should be bright red-flags.”

The role of revolutionary leadership

The growth of the working class and the emergence of class struggle on an international scale are the objective basis for revolution. However, the spontaneous struggles of workers and their instinctive striving for socialism are, by themselves, inadequate. The transformation of the class struggle into a conscious movement for socialism is a question of political leadership.

The past decade has provided a wealth of political experiences demonstrating, in the negative, the critical role of revolutionary leadership. The decade began with revolution, in the form of the monumental struggles of Egyptian workers and youth against the US-backed dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, and with the assistance of disorientation introduced by the petty-bourgeois organizations, the masses were channeled behind different factions of the ruling class, culminating in the reestablishment of direct military dictatorship under the butcher of Cairo, al-Sisi.

All the alternatives to Marxism, concocted by the representatives of the affluent middle class, have been discredited: The “apolitical” and neo-anarchist Occupy Wall Street movement in the US in 2011 was revealed to be a middle-class movement whose call for a “party of the 99 percent” sought to subordinate the interests of the working class to those of the top 10 percent.

New forms of “left populism” were promoted in Europe, including Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. Syriza came to power in 2015 and for four years implemented the dictates of the banks. Podemos is now a governing party, in coalition with the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), which is committed to a right-wing, pro-austerity program. The “Five-Star Movement,” presented as an anti-establishment insurgency, ended up in political alliance with the Italian neo-fascists. Corbynism, which peddled the illusion of a revival of the Labour Party as an instrument of anti-capitalist struggle, proved in the end to be synonymous with political cowardice and prostration before the ruling class. Were Sanders to make his way to the White House, his administration would prove no less impotent.

In Latin America, the “left” bourgeois nationalism that was part of the “Pink Tide”—Lulaism in Brazil, the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Chavez in Venezuela, and Evo Morales in Bolivia—has been shipwrecked by the crisis of world capitalism. Their own austerity and pro-corporate policies prepared the way for a sharp shift to the right, including the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the US-backed military coup against Morales in 2019.

The trade unions, which have long served as mechanisms for the suppression of the class struggle, have been exposed as agents of the corporations and the state. In the United States, the struggles of auto workers have been waged in conflict with the corrupt executives of the UAW, under indictment or investigation for taking bribes from the companies and stealing workers’ dues money. The UAW, however, is only the clearest expression of a universal process.

A vast political and social differentiation has taken place between the working class and an international tendency of politics, the pseudo-left, which is based on sections of the affluent upper middle class who purvey the politics of racial, gender and sexual identity. The politics of the upper middle class seeks access to and a redistribution of some of the wealth sloshing about within the top 1 percent. They wallow in their obsessive fixation on the individual, as a means of leveraging “identity” into positions of power and privilege, while ignoring the social interests of the vast majority.

The tasks of the International Committee of the Fourth International

[revolutionaryeye]

'The resistance is coming from all sections of society': Hindu nationalism and its opponents

Writer and activist Amrit Wilson talks to Counterfire’s Shabbir Lakha about the BJP’s violence and the growing protest movement against the Hindu supremacists

We've seen a rise in human rights abuses and ethnic violence in India in recent years. Could you give us an idea of what's happening, and why you are organising the demonstration on 15 August?

India is regarded by many people in this country as a place of peace and tranquility, and there is on the whole an unquestioning acceptance of the notion that India is quirky perhaps, but still the world's largest democracy. The reality is very different. The current BJP regime is a fascistic Hindu-supremacist government. Over the last two years there have been a series of horrific attacks on Muslims, Christians and Dalits, often under the pretext that they have consumed or stored beef, transported cows or that they are involved in inter-religious relationships (which are branded as ‘Love Jihad’) or inter-caste relationships. They have taken the form of lynching, stripping, flogging and burning to death, and they are being carried out by Hindu supremacist gangs close to the government.

These attacks are happening all over India but particularly in the states across India where the BJP is in power, in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and even in the outskirts of Delhi. Alongside this there has been a rise in rapes and violence against women, targetting of organised workers and silencing of those who dissent. There is also massive resistance and our demonstration is about showing solidarity with that resistance and also about demanding justice for those who have been killed and their bereaved families.

Many have pointed to India's Prime Minister for this. What do you think?

Narendra Modi is well known for having presided over the genocidal attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in which 2,000 were killed and over 200,000 were displaced.Modi's politics havenot changed and cannot change. He is a lifelong member of a fascist organisation the RSS, the parent body of the BJP, which is modelled on Mussolini's Black shirts and whose leaders saw Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as a model to be emulated.

The RSS now dictates policies to the central and state governments, including, as in Israel, a complete rewrite of history books to glorify Hindu nationalism and vilify all Muslims, including the Mughal emperors. RSS members are increasingly given key positions in government. Recently the BJP was boasting about the new President being a Dalit. Not only was he a token Dalit but he was a long serving member of the RSS who had never spoken out about Dalit issues.

Meanwhile the retiring Vice-President, Hamid Ansari, has been attacked in highly Islamophobic terms by Modi for daring to suggest that Muslims felt increasingly insecure in India. In Uttar Pradesh one of India's largest and most important states, the man appointed as Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath has a record of hate speech and several criminal cases pending against him. He is known to have said that he 'will not stop' till he turns 'UP and India into a Hindu state'. Since he became Chief Minister, Hindu supremacist gangs which include a violent youth   organisation founded by Yogi himself have been burning Dalit homes and attacking and killing Muslims.

All this is happening against a background of extreme inequality. Last Friday there were reports that at least 63 children had died because of a shortage of oxygen in the previous five days in the state-run hospital in Yogi Adityanath's own constituency. Children are continuing to die because of the absence of facilities in hospitals for the poor. Yogi has tried to justify the recent deaths, saying it is ‘normal’ for children to die in August. Meanwhile, the Modi government and its captive media is focussing on whether or not pupils in Muslim schools will recite Hindu nationalist slogans for Independence Day, and have outrageously called the children’s deaths a ‘distraction’ from these ‘real’ issues! The people are responding with a powerful left-led movement demanding Yogi's resignation.

What other kinds of resistance have there been to the BJP government?

The resistance is coming from all sections of society....

Read on:- http://www.counterfire.org/interview/19161-the-resistance-is-coming-from-all-sections-of-society-hindu-nationalism-and-its-opponents

[technologyinfosec]

No surprise! Modi appears among 'top ten criminals' in google search

(Web Desk) - The notorious Modi who has certainly branded himself as a refurbished prodigy of Nazism and can safely be called the fascist Hitler of the South Asian region, might have fooled his own people but the search engine ‘google’ has always showed the criminal face of the current Indian premiere. Back in 2015 Narendra Modi appeared among the ‘top ten criminal’ of the world for his infamous credentials, having been involved in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat during his CM ship way back in 2002 for which he is known as ‘The Butcher of Gujarat.’

The right winger hardliner was also barred from entering the US for his criminal involvement in the riots where scores of Muslim women were raped, murdered and burnt alive. His murder spree and blood thirst never stopped and was again implicated in the Samjhota express carnage. Having said that, this is perhaps not the only facet of his personality recognized by ‘google search,’ he has also appeared amongst ‘The most stupid Prime Minister’ in the world.

Stupid or not but the dark side of his identity has surely taken over. After the false flag Pulwama Attack in February, he has resorted to imprisoning and confining the majority Muslim populous of IOK who have been fighting a freedom struggle against the Hindu nationalists hiding behind the garb of ‘shining secular India.’ The plight of the Kashmiris is no less than what the Jews of Germany witnessed in the concentration camps, as they too are being subjugated and stripped-off their fundamental human rights by a majority Hindutva ideologues that have been voted in by the  biggest democracy  of the world. So has Modi criminalized India or has India just removed the façade of Bollywood from its face. Whichever the case may be but India in its current form has no room for minorities and Kashmir is the living proof of the plight and suffering that humanity is going through at the hands of a dictatorial, fascist, Hindu supremisct regime. Read the full article

[tumbirus]

Count..,originating in America,signalled disillusionment with market principles founded in liberalism,more recently ,the "Yellow Shirts" infrance have made President Emmanuel Moacron sweat. Access wesrwen Europe,fascistic,nativist ,nationalist and reactionary parties have pushed the"Traditional parties"-to quote the Russian leader -hard and in the US Donald Trump actually triumphed Mr:Putin referred in Osaka only to the US and Europ. But he might have added Brexit in the UK.in the 20 leading countries whose leaders gathered Brazil, Narendra Modi,s India,XI Jinpings China are outside the aliberal sphers,though they follow some variety of capitalism. Mr:Putin doesn't exacity run a democracy.But nor do the leaders of many prominent countries. So what he is saying is that it is not right for any of them sermonise him. Dear world,many world wide leaders Osaka meetings not any public life benefit,enjoy the leaders life,so Russian president many words proof to many,India,America same many burocast leaders all life leader making aime thinking to today,old king Dom style,but this fuckir mad leaders where understanding public mood,Indian government is waist in the world,proof me,cheating and waist hop one is modi government, public is mad or cheater,so choose to cheater leaders no,so modi and all word is cheating to any second,why single not came to any street ,so immidiatly indian justice Kashmir public fundamental right check to good,who is the sha,gujarth innocent Muslims life lose on,how hominister,criminal government no,so this ones shape changing time ending to India.(thanks for the report) by De and world wide secret political anlizing dears) (at Mumbai, Maharashtra) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bza66T8l5NJ/?igshid=1cdp62qpgtym0

[teachanarchy]

Augustus Invictus is a libertarian, you see — you can tell by his name.

The august and invincible politician is representing the Florida Libertarian Party in his run for Marco Rubio’s US Senate seat.

Invictus first entered the media spotlight in October 2015 when details of his hobbies came to light: The libertarian politician has been accused of supporting eugenics and of being expelled from a cult for “sadistically dismembering a goat in a ritualistic sacrifice.”

Nothing to see here, you know, just that typical libertarian drama — eugenics and animal sacrifices.

In March 2016, Canada barred Invictus from entering the country because of his ties to neo-Nazis. A 32-year-old lawyer, Invictus represented Marcus Faella, the former head of the neo-Nazi group American Front, in court on domestic terrorism charges.

“What is a libertarian doing defending a notorious neo-Nazi leader?” one might wonder. A glance at Invictus’ official campaign website might raise a few more questions:

Yes, the symbol Augustus Invictus openly uses on his site is a bird perched atop the fasces, the Imperial Roman weapon used by founder Benito Mussolini to symbolize fascism.

The world is witnessing the dangerous rise of a new — or perhaps not so new — libertarian-fascist alliance. Invictus is by no means the only example.

Case Studies

Investigative journalist Jane Mayer caused quite a stir in January 2016 when she revealed that Fred Koch, the father of libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch, helped build the third-largest oil refinery in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His project was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, and the oil refinery fueled German planes, helping the Nazis carry out a campaign of genocide and destruction across Europe.

Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right also divulges that Fred Koch was such an admirer of Nazism, he “hired a fervent Nazi as a governess for his eldest boys,” as the Washington Post puts it. The newspaper of record describes libertarian leader Charles Koch as having been “toilet trained by a Nazi.”

As I detailed in an article about the Koch-Nazi collusion, Koch senior joins a long list of US business elites and corporations — many of whom are libertarian-leaning, naturally — who have worked directly with the Nazis.

Other examples abound. In June 2014, shooters in Las Vegas shot and killed two police officers before leaving a swastika and a “Don’t tread on me” flag on their bodies. The latter is of course the infamous Gadsden flag, a prominent sign of libertarianism. The fact that the shooters willingly juxtaposed the two symbols does the work for us.

Again, this raises the question: What are libertarians doing aligning themselves with Nazism? Libertarians are — or at least purport to be — opposed to state tyranny, and fascists embrace it, the trope goes (I use the term “libertarian” here in the American sense, which is invariably right-wing, not in the ostensibly left-wing European or Latin American sense). How, then, are these views reconciled?

Part of it can be explained by reducing the alliance to realpolitik, to a congruence of right-wing interests, to the finding of a common enemy in the Left.

Another case study involving the Kochs is instructive here.

Journalist Mark Ames detailed in an investigation for Pando how, in the 1970s, the libertarian publication Reason repeatedly gave a platform to Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers. The Koch Brothers have given millions of dollars to the Reason Foundation, and David Koch sits on its board of trustees. Moreover, an article by Charles Koch appeared next to one by Holocaust denier James J. Martin in a 1976 issue of Reason, Ames revealed.

In previous reports, Ames also documented how Charles Koch funded a libertarian school called the Rampart College, where the Holocaust-denying Martin taught pseudo-history, euphemistically referred to as “historical revisionism.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website that the Koch-funded libertarian school’s publication Rampart Journal published articles “claiming that the Allies overstated the extent of Nazi atrocities in order to justify a war of aggression against the Axis powers.”

Despite its putative anti-government ideology, Reason and many in the libertarian movement have ahistorically characterized the mass-murdering Nazis as supposed victims in World War II because of their brutal defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union. For much of the war, historian Richard Vinen notes “the eastern front was the scene of almost all the serious fighting,” and, between 1941 and 1943, Soviet “troops were the only ones to fight German forces on European soil.” Vinen estimates that it was in fact the Red Army, not the U.S. or the U.K., that was responsible for approximately 75 percent of the Nazi soldiers killed, wounded or captured in World War II. Right-wing historical revisionists like Martin portray the crushing of Nazism as a crime of communism.

This phenomenon is not isolated to the US. Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom, along with the far-right Freedom Party of Austria and UK Independence Party, among others, all employ libertarian rhetoric. So too does the “alt-right” website Breitbart, and its star Milo Yiannopoulos.

More and more self-declared libertarians want their respective states to harshly crack down on (non-Western) immigration, deport “undesirables,” and systematically discriminate against Muslims — all in the name of “protecting freedom.”

Nor is the West alone. In India, one sees another prominent example of the burgeoning libertarian-fascist alliance in figures like Narendra Modi, a simultaneous diehard neoliberal and Hindu nationalist.

Yet the problem runs even deeper than this. It is not just that fascism and libertarianism share a common enemy; actually existing libertarianism ultimately strives for the same, or at least similar, social relations endorsed by fascists.

Theorization

Fascism, in a nutshell, is the wielding of the bourgeois state in order to crush the progressive elements of liberalism (e.g., capitalism’s inherent tendency toward globalization and the destruction of feudal relations), replacing liberal capitalism with an authoritarian capitalism that embraces capitalism’s most reactionary elements.

Fascists seek to return to a capitalism unblemished by liberalism, one that wholeheartedly embraces its roots in white supremacy (or, in the case of India, Hindu supremacy) and patriarchal right, in which white men can exercise their “superiority” and face no resistance from more highly skilled immigrant workers, from better educated women, from exploited laborers in the Global South who will do the same work just as well for significantly less pay.

The notion that libertarians are actually, in principle, opposed to state tyranny rests perilously on a false presumption.

In US reality, actually existing libertarianism similarly opposes the progressive elements of liberalism enforced by the bourgeois state. The hatred of both the fascists and actually existing libertarians is ultimately directed at the bourgeoisie, not the bourgeois state, because the former is the defender of liberalism.

The means by which this phenomenon works itself out differs, but produces the same results.

Fascists hate the bourgeoisie because it is imposing liberalism upon the masses, while libertarians hate the bourgeoisie simply because it is imposing something on capital — yet, at the end of the day, both hate the bourgeoisie, even if for distinct reasons.

More basically, then, from a pragmatic perspective, libertarian ideology conveniently grants the fascist just the alibi they need. A fascist can justify their desire for a segregated, white-only community with an appeal to libertarian principles (“It’s our right to do so; if you try to stop us it’s aggression, force, tyranny”).

Gun-toting white separatists can build their communes and rail against government tyranny when it tries to stop them. They can organize their “decentralized” Patriot paramilitaries (the quintessence of the libertarian-fascist alliance) to hunt down Latina/o workers who are crossing the border in search of a job, because neoliberal policies destroyed both of their respective local economies on behalf of international capital.

Murray Rothbard, the founder of so-called “anarcho-capitalism,” exemplifies how this intersection of interests and ideology works itself out.

As he worked his ideas out more and more over the years, Rothbard eventually came to identity as a “paleolibertarian” — that is to say, a libertarian who openly rejects the progressive elements of liberalism and fervently embraces the most reactionary elements of capitalism.

Rothbard idolized individualist anarchist (the uniquely American strand) Lysander Spooner, who was an abolitionist yet simultaneously insisted the revolutionary war against slavery led by Abraham Lincoln was one of “militarism, mass murder and centralized statism.” The Austrian School libertarian hero associated himself with white supremacists and fascists.

As the New York Times put it, “Rothbard applauded the ‘right-wing populism’ of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan member [and leader] who ran for governor of Louisiana, and ridiculed ‘multiculturalists,’ lesbians and ‘the entire panoply of feminism, egalitarianism.'”

In his 1992 essay “Right-Wing Populism,” libertarian founding father Rothbard spoke highly of the fascist David Duke and articulated an eight-point program. Point 4 follows:

Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not ‘white collar criminals’ or “inside traders” but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

This is actually existing libertarianism in action.

To the fascist and the libertarian, the Left is trying to combat this tyranny of capital, so the Left is the enemy.

In both fascism and actually existing libertarianism, it only capital that has rights. In Western white fascism, it is only white men who have capital; in actually existing libertarianism, it is preponderantly white men who control the vast majority of capital.

The means by which the tyranny of capital manifests itself in each system differs, in form, but the same social relations exist, in essence.

Just as capitalism degenerates into fascism in times of crisis, so too does libertarianism.

Update (March 27, 2017):

I was notified that this essay had been posted on the “anarcho-capitalism” subreddit. The thread immediately became a cesspool — and textbook example — of the libertarian-fascist alliance.

A user, aptly named “TheAwakenedSaxon,” exemplified the points I articulated above, declaring openly, “Fascism is a response to communism and as Mises (a Jew) pointed out, fascism is infinitely better from any remotely right-wing pro-property perspective than communism.”

“Why did capitalists in the Spanish Civil War side with “fascists”? Because they were opposed to communism,” the user added.

TheAwakenedSaxon, who uses the “Don’t tread on me!” slogan and snake symbol, also defended repressive state anti-Muslim policies, writing, “Yeah, protecting freedom by keeping out Muslims is such a contradiction, right? Oh, wait, no, that’s just basic logic, because when people who support Sharia law become the largest demographic in your country, little boys are going to enjoy the freedom to be molested, women are going to enjoy the freedom to be property, and fags are going to enjoy the freedom to take a one-way flight off the top of the tallest building. Such freedom, wow!”

“A Nazi is better than a leftist who is happy to allow in millions of Muslims for no other reason than ‘because diversity’ or ‘tolerance’ or some nonsense justification for dooming their entire nation to being majority Muslim in 40-100 years,” the anarcho-capitalist subreddit user continued, while riffing on the fascist’s favorite myth, that of “white genocide.”

Another user, likewise appropriately named “Pinochet-Heli-Tours,” posted a link to a lecture on “Reactionary Liberty,” by libertarian writer Robert Taylor.

Taylor, an erstwhile contributor to PolicyMic, runs a website and penned a book called “Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution.” He wrote clearly on his website that he is “thrilled by the rise of the AltRight.”

“In their root-and-branch rejection of liberalism, combined with an identitarian (rather than abstract) approach to the Right, I see them as natural allies to reactionary libertarians,” Taylor said of the so-called alt-right — a euphemism for the contemporary white supremacist, neo-fascist movement, coined by neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

“Although less popular than the AltRight, the NeoReactionary (NRx) movement has also had a tremendous influence on me, adding much-need iron to the anemic philosophy that passes for libertarianism today,” Taylor added. “A large number of those that make up these movements are former libertarians as well.”

Robert Taylor is the poster boy of the libertarian-fascist alliance. He concluded the “About” section of his website explaining, “In just over a decade, I started off as a traditionalist conservative and went from a nihilistic, atheistic libertarian to a radical reactionary who only attends the Latin Mass.”

And this brings us full circle. Augustus Invictus, that goat-sacrificing eugenicist, is back! In February, the libertarian fascist wrote on Facebook that he was reading Robert Taylor’s “Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution.”

Accompanying the Facebook status, Invictus quoted extreme-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who wrote, “To . . . call oneself ‘reactionary’ is a true test of courage.”

The name of Julius Evola, a self-declared “superfascist” with extensive links to the genocidal Nazi regime, came up in February, when The New York Times exposed that President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had cited Evola in a 2014 speech at a Christian conference at the Vatican.

As I previously wrote in an article on the far-right, white supremacist views of Steve Bannon, Trump’s right-hand man and the former head of Breitbart:

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, greatly admired Evola. The Italian leader of the extreme right-wing Traditionalist movement wrote for fascist publications and journals, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas. Evola was virulently racist and anti-Semitic and openly claimed that non-European races were inferior. He also condoned patriarchal domination of women and advocated rape.

A big fan of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, Evola spent years in Nazi Germany, where he gave lectures. He personally welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters. In a post-war trial in 1951, Evola denied being part of Mussolini’s fascist movement, which was apparently not bombastic enough for his tastes; instead, he proudly declared himself to be a “superfascist.”

There is no longer any need to dig to find libertarians’ links to fascism; libertarian leaders are making those links very clear.

[xtruss]

Kashmir, Five Years On

Fascist, Hindu Extremist, The Butcher of Gujrat And The World’s Most Wanted Criminal Modi’s Iron-Fisted Approach To The Disputed Region Has Left It More Vulnerable To Local And Geopolitical Threats.

— By Anuradha Bhasin | September 19, 2024

Indian security personnel patrol along a street in Srinagar, in Jammu and Kashmir, on August 15, 2024. Tauseef Mustafa/AFP Via Getty Images

Five years since The Fascist, Hindu Extremist, The Butcher of Gujrat and The World’s Most Wanted Criminal Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stripped Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomous status, the central government’s iron-fisted approach to the region has left it more vulnerable to regional and geopolitical threats.

While Kashmir Valley, which has withstood the brunt of armed insurgency since 1989, continues to simmer with militancy-related violence, the theater of terrorism has now extended into the otherwise peaceful province of Jammu. Since 2019, at least 262 soldiers and 171 civilians have died in more than 690 incidents, including the February 2019 Pulwama terrorist attack. The unsustainable and disproportionate loss of lives underscores the risks to both regional stability and India’s national security.

In 2019, the Modi government revoked Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir its special status, annihilating the contested region’s symbolic autonomy. Concurrently, the central government also imposed an indefinite curfew in the region and used internet shutdowns and arrests to control and suppress the local population. The result was a transformed landscape. Already scarred by militarization, Kashmir became enmeshed in barbed wire.

This undemocratic exercise, though later stamped and endorsed by India’s Supreme Court, has since spurred further legal changes. For example, the local population no longer has access to exclusive protections that previously allowed only permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir to apply for government jobs and buy property in the state.

In March 2020, the government repealed 12 and amended 14 land-related laws, introducing a clause that paved the way for a development authority to confiscate land and another that allowed high-ranking army officials to declare a local area as strategically important.

Local residents are appalled at the ease with which government agencies can now seize both residential and agricultural lands in the name of development and security—enabling mass evictions and the bulldozing of houses that are disproportionately affecting Muslim communities and small landowners.

Meanwhile, the ecological fallout from introducing massive road and railway networks, coupled with the addition of mega hydroelectricity projects, is polluting riverbeds and causing villages to sink. Since 2019, there has been a lack of local representation which could act as a buffer against massive development projects, most of which now fall under New Delhi’s governance. Meanwhile, the region’s unemployment rate, as of 2023, remains high at above 18 percent, as compared to the national average of 8 percent.

Over the last few years, the Modi government has also squashed dissent in the region by redirecting the military to maintain surveillance and control of the civilian population. According to the Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir, over 2,700 people were arrested in the region between 2020 and 2023 under India’s contentious Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Public Safety Act. Those arrested include journalists like Fahad Shah and Sajad Gul, human rights defenders like Khurram Pervez, and prominent lawyers like Mian Qayoom and Nazir Ronga.

Modi’s repressive policies have deepened the trust deficit between Kashmiris and the Indian government. The top-down administration has further sidelined local bureaucrats and police officers, further widening the gap between the central government and local ground realities.

All of this has not only pushed the local population into distress, but also jeopardized India’s already fragile relations with its two nuclear neighbors, Pakistan and China.

The Kashmir Conflict, rooted in the 1947 partition of India, has led to three major wars and several military skirmishes between India, Pakistan, and China. And though the region has always been contentious—India controls more than half of the total land, while Pakistan controls 30 percent, and China holds the remaining 15 percent in the northeast region near Ladakh—Modi’s aggressive handling has further provoked its neighbors.

Following the revocation of Article 370, the region was split into two separate union territories—Jammu and Kashmir forming one and Ladakh forming another, with both falling under the central government’s control.

This redrawing of the region’s internal borders, which signaled New Delhi’s assertions of reclaiming the Chinese-occupied territory near Ladakh—as well as India’s increasing tilt towards the United States—resulted in a deadly clash between India and China in 2020 and another one in 2022. Despite diplomatic efforts to resolve tensions over the disputed Himalayan border, New Delhi has accused Beijing of carrying out “inch by inch” land grabs in Ladakh since 2020.

Meanwhile, Pakistan-administered Kashmir has been rocked by mass protests of its own this year, owing to the country’s political and economic crisis, exacerbated in part by the abrogation of Article 370. Those living in Pakistan-administered Kashmir fear that Pakistan may similarly try to dilute the autonomy of the region.

With refugees flooding in from Afghanistan on its west amidst Imran Khan’s standoff with the Pakistani Army, Islamabad has been on edge and looking for diversionary tactics. The deepening of Pakistani-Chinese relations, including military ties, has contributed to a volatile mix.

But Kashmir’s vulnerability has worsened partly because of India’s own tactical blunders, too. The last decade witnessed a spurt in home-grown militancy, but since 2019 the landscape has been dominated by well-trained militants from across the Pakistani border who have access to sophisticated weapons and technology.

Indian security forces, including paramilitaries and the local police, have turned a blind eye to these emerging threats, especially in the twin districts of Rajouri and Poonch along the border with Pakistan. It is in this area that the impact of terror attacks has been most felt.

The region is home to the nomadic Gujjar-Bakerwal communities and the ethnolinguistic Paharis. These groups are parts of divided families straddling the India-Pakistan border, and this shared cultural linkage between the Indian and Pakistani sides has been weaponized in the past by intelligence networks of both countries.

The Indian armed forces have historically relied on the Gujjar-Bakerwal communities for intelligence gathering in part because of their nomadic lives and deep knowledge of the region’s topography. However, since 2019, the evictions of nomads from forest lands, following the amendment of several land-related laws, as well as affirmative actions for Paharis, a rival ethnic group, have led to the disenchantment of the Gujjar-Bakerwals—and an eventual loss of traditional intelligence assets for India.

Another blunder has been the redeployment of troops from Jammu to the border with China in the northeast, following China’s incursions in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley in 2020. This has left Jammu dangerously exposed to militants who have been infiltrating the region from across the line of control on the western side and carrying out their operations with a fair degree of success.

In 2024 alone, Jammu has witnessed numerous attacks which have resulted in the deaths of 16 soldiers and 12 civilians. In June, for example, the region experienced one of its deadliest attacks when militants opened fire on a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims, killing nine and injuring over 30.

Kashmir’s internal politics has the potential to spill over and push the region into disaster. While India has made some significant strides in international diplomacy under Modi, it tends to neglect the neighborhood where the risks to India’s national security remain the highest. Its diplomatic engagement with China comes in fits and starts but diplomacy with Pakistan remains nonexistent, despite the resumption of a ceasefire in 2021. And while India considers the removal of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status an internal matter, Pakistan sees it as a provocation. All in all, there is a dangerous lack of engagement between the two nuclear rivals in South Asia.

In Theory, the ongoing regional elections in Jammu and Kashmir provide a glimmer of opportunity for the people to choose their own local government for the first time in a decade. However, irrespective of who wins the elections, the local leaders will lack the power to enact meaningful change, given that the region remains under the control of New Delhi following its demotion from a state to two union territories.

For instance, Ladakh does not have a legislative assembly, and while Jammu and Kashmir have an elected assembly, the real powers are vested in the hands of a governor, who was appointed to lead the region by the Modi-led central government. As recently as July, the Indian government ruled to further expand the governor’s oversight powers, delivering a blow to local politicians and voters.

Much more needs to be done to change the status quo. Though it remains unlikely, New Delhi must consider meaningful solutions that could assuage some of the political wounds inflicted by the complete erosion of Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy, including, for example, the restoration of statehood to the region. In order to win back the trust of Kashmiris, the Indian government must reinstate civil liberties and deliver on its promise to provide economic development and jobs.

To improve the region’s safety, Indian agencies must acknowledge their security lapses and repair their broken intelligence networks. And while the Indian security forces must not lower their guard against terrorist activities, terrorism should not be proffered as an excuse when it comes to the normalization of relations in the neighborhood.

Neither Pakistan, nor India can afford the war which is looming over their heads. Diplomatic negotiations, including over Kashmir, must begin with a sense of urgency.

— Anuradha Bhasin, Managing Editor of Kashmir Times and Author of A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370. (Argument:

An Expert's Point of View on a Current Event.)

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

Nazi in a sari

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/nazi-in-a-sari/

Nazi in a sari

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Savitri Devi, a mystical admirer of Hitler and a cat-loving devotee of the Aryan myth, seem destined to fade into obscurity after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Margaronis.

In 2012, browsing the website of Greece’s Golden Dawn party for an article I was writing, I stumbled on a picture of a woman in a blue silk sari gazing at a bust of Hitler against a blazing sunset sky.

What was this apparently Hindu woman doing on the site of an openly racist party devoted to expelling all foreigners from Greece? I filed her as a curiosity at the back of my mind, until the rising tide of extreme-right politics in Europe and America threw up the name “Savitri Devi” once again.

It isn’t hard these days to find discussions of Savitri Devi’s books on neo-Nazi web forums, especially The Lightning and the Sun, which expounds the theory that Hitler was an avatar – an incarnation – of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gold in the Furnace, which urges true believers to trust that National Socialism will rise again. The American extreme-right website Counter-Currents hosts an extensive online archive of her life and work.

Her views are reaching a wider public audience, too, thanks to American alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and chair of Breitbart News, who have taken up her account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil — a theory she shared with other 20th Century mystical fascists.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Richard Spencer in Charlottesville (August 2017)

Dark metal bands and American right-wing radio stations also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, which Savitri Devi believed that Hitler was once destined to bring to an end.

Who was Savitri Devi, and why are her ideas being resurrected now? Despite the sari and the name she was a European, born Maximiani Portas to an English mother and Greek-Italian father in Lyon in 1905.

She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin, and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth

From an early age, she despised all forms of egalitarianism. “A beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl,” she told an interviewer sent by the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in 1978.

Swept up by Greek nationalism, she arrived in Athens in 1923 at the same time as thousands of refugees displaced after Greece’s disastrous military campaign in Asia Minor at the end of World War One.

She blamed the Western allies for Greece’s humiliation, and for what she saw as the unjustly punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. In Savitri’s mind, Greece and Germany were both victims, denied the legitimate aspiration of uniting all their people in one territory. That view, combined with a passionate anti-Semitism which she claimed she learned from the Bible, led her to identify herself early on as a National Socialist.

Hitler was Germany’s champion but, she said, his desire to eradicate Europe’s Jews and restore the “Aryan race” to its rightful position of power made him her “Fuhrer” too.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Listen to Savitri Devi: From the Aryans to the Alt-right on the BBC iPlayer

In common with anti-Semitic thinkers since the 18th century, Savitri blamed Judeo-Christianity for destroying the glory that was Greece and the Aryans’ mythical ancient utopia. In the early 1930s she sailed for India in search of a living version of Europe’s pagan past, convinced that the caste system, by forbidding intermarriage, had preserved pure Aryans there. (Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who visited India in the 1970s, shared her misconception.)

So unusual was the sight of a European woman travelling fourth class by train that she was placed under surveillance by the British colonial authorities. But Savitri had little to do with the British in India until World War Two, when she passed information she gleaned from them to the Japanese. She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin (whom she believed to be an Aryan like herself), and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth, in which Hitler was a “man against time” destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in a new golden age of Aryan supremacy.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Young Brahmins training to be priests in Varanasi

In Kolkata in the 1930s, Savitri worked for the Hindu Mission, now a quiet neighbourhood shrine but in those days a centre for Hindu nationalist campaigning and missionary activity. The politicisation of India’s religious communities under the British had helped to foster the growth of the Hindutva movement, which argued that the Hindus were the true heirs of the Aryans and that India was an essentially Hindu nation.

Savitri offered her services to the Mission’s director, Swami Satyananda, who (like many Indians before independence) shared her admiration for Hitler and allowed her to mix Nazi propaganda with her talks on Hindu identity. She travelled the country lecturing in Hindi and Bengali, salting her talks about Aryan values with quotations from Mein Kampf.

In 1945, devastated by the fall of the Third Reich, she returned to Europe to work for its restoration. Her arrival in England is described in her book Long-Whiskers and the Two-Legged Goddess, a children’s fable whose heroine is a cat-loving Nazi like herself.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Image caption Savitri Devi was often photographed in swastika earrings

The heroine, Heliodora, “had no ‘human feelings’ in the ordinary sense of the word,” she wrote. “She had been, from her very childhood, much too profoundly shocked at the behaviour of man towards animals… to have any sympathy for people suffering on account of their being Jews.”

Her ashes were laid to rest with full fascist honours, purportedly next to those of American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell

Savitri was always clear that she preferred animals to humans. Like Hitler, she was a lifelong vegetarian. She viewed the world as if from a great distance, caring more for what she saw as the deep patterns of nature than for human lives. Visiting Iceland, she spent two nights on the slopes of Mount Hekla as it erupted. “The original sound of creation is ‘Aum’,” she wrote. “The volcano says every two or three seconds, ‘AUM! AUM! AUM!’ And the Earth is trembling under your feet all the time.”

In 1948, Savitri managed to enter occupied Germany, where she distributed thousands of pro-Nazi leaflets, bearing the words: “One day we shall rise and triumph again! Hope and wait! Heil Hitler!”

She said years later that she was glad to be arrested by the British occupation authorities because it brought her closer to her jailed Nazi “comrades”. During her imprisonment, which was cut short by her husband’s intervention through the Indian government, she grew close to a former Belsen wardress condemned as a war criminal, “a beautiful-looking woman, a blonde of about my age.” Savitri’s sexuality has been the subject of some speculation. Her marriage to Asit Mukherjee was allegedly celibate because they were not of the same caste; the Nazi financier Francoise Dior, niece of the fashion designer, claimed to have been her lover.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Francoise Dior claimed to have been Savitri’s lover

In her later years, Savitri Devi returned to India, where she seemed to feel most at home. Living in a flat above a garage on a quiet Delhi street she devoted herself to the neighbourhood cats, going out every morning to feed them bread and milk bedecked in the gold jewellery traditionally worn by married Hindu women.

She died at a friend’s house in England in 1982. Her ashes were laid to rest with full fascist honours, purportedly next to those of American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Image copyright Savitri Devi Archive

Image caption Savitri Devi in Delhi, in 1980

Savitri Devi herself is almost forgotten in India now, but the Hindu nationalism she espoused and helped to promote is in the ascendant, much to the concern of her nephew, the veteran left-wing journalist Sumanta Banerjee.

“In her book A Warning to the Hindus, which came out in 1939, she advised the Hindus to cultivate a ‘spirit of organised resistance throughout Hindudom,'” he says. “The targets of this resistance were the Muslims, who were a threat, according to her, to the Hindus. And this is the same fear that is being echoed today.”

Hindutva is the official ideology of Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which claims that Muslims and secularists have undermined the strength of the Hindu nation. Though the party’s official spokesmen condemn violence, the riots that led to the tearing down of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 and the current waves of attacks – sometimes fatal – by vigilante groups on Muslims and dissenters tell a different story.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Hindutva is the official ideology of Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party

In the US, racism, anti-communism and Christian fundamentalist notions about the impending apocalypse have together prepared the ground for the far right’s flirtation with occult Nazism and Hindu prophecies.

And as in India, the traditional ruling majority’s fear of losing power has been an effective recruiting tool.

“Since the middle of the Obama administration the single most important factor in the minds of people who joined the Tea Party was the idea that white people were being shoved aside,” says researcher and writer Chip Berlet. “The far right and organised white supremacist groups have both been buoyed up by fear among many white citizens in the United States that they’re being displaced and humiliated.”

Savitri Devi’s work forms part of the history of both India’s Hindu nationalists and the European and American extreme right. Her flamboyant, eccentric writings contain – unvarnished and uncensored – all their key ideas: that human beings can be divided into “races” which should be kept separate; that certain groups are superior to and more entitled than others; that these groups are under threat; and that the dark times in which we live will only end when they again take power, returning us to a mythical golden age.

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“World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist Modi’s Politics” Hinder Neighborhood Ties

Recent Events in Bangladesh Show How the Hindu Nationalist Project has Harmed India’s Regional Interests.

— By Sushant Singh August 22, 2024

Indian Prime Minister and World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist Narendra Modi Takes his Oath of Office in the Presence of Indian President Droupadi Murmu and Other South Asian Leaders in New Delhi on June 9. Elke Scholiers/Getty Images

When Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister 10 years ago, those invited to his swearing-in included leaders of every South Asian country. This reflected his “Neighborhood First” foreign policy, which was intended to foster cordial relations and economic synergy with India’s smaller neighbors. The approach soon floundered due to border disputes and bilateral disagreements, India’s tardy execution of development projects, and rising Chinese influence in the region.

However, Bangladesh was seen as one of its shining successes. Bangladeshi then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who held power for 15 consecutive years before resigning under pressure this month, worked closely with Modi; their friendly relationship seemed to be a win-win situation. But in Bangladesh, Hasina transformed into an authoritarian ruler despite her democratic beginnings. Popular anger against her brewed; the final trigger came with student protests against an order for government job quotas. The demonstrations soon turned on Hasina herself, leading to nationwide unrest. She fled the country on Aug. 5 and is currently residing in India.

Despite her unpopularity, Hasina’s resignation came as a shock to the Indian political and security establishment. India fully backed Hasina during her tenure, often ignoring the concerns of other stakeholders and the people of Bangladesh. Under Modi, New Delhi has taken this approach with most of its smaller neighbors, with sometimes unfortunate consequences.

It is clear India’s policy failures in its neighborhood are not solely due to external events. They are also manifestations of India’s current domestic politics. From the securitization of diplomacy to Modi’s strongman image, New Delhi has undermined its liberal credentials among the people of South Asia. Preferential treatment for Modi’s favored corporate interests by governments such as Hasina’s—an international extension of Indian cronyism—has further raised suspicion about New Delhi’s intentions.

The adherence of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to Hindu Nationalist Ideology has played a major role in harming India’s regional interests, especially in Bangladesh. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that fast-tracked Indian citizenship for persecuted minority groups in neighboring countries while excluding Muslims fueled criticism from the Bangladeshi public. The BJP regime’s ill treatment of Muslims within India has fueled criticism of Modi abroad; his 2021 visit to Bangladesh was met with violent riots.

Hasina’s resignation provided the opportunity for a moment of introspection for the Indian government, but it seems unable to engage in policy correction. India’s tarnished image in Bangladesh is not the Modi government’s first major failure in South Asia, and it won’t be the last. Its pursuit of a de facto Hindu Rashtra (“Hindu state”) is not only damaging to India but will also have disastrous results in South Asia.

India’s Ties To Hasina run deep. After her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—Bangladesh’s founding leader—was assassinated in a 1975 military coup, Hasina and her sister took refuge in India. She returned to Bangladesh to fight for democracy, first serving as prime minister from 1996 to 2001 before returning to office in 2009. Her rule took an authoritarian turn after 2014 as she went after political opponents, journalists, and activists.

Hasina’s party, the secular Awami League, targeted radical Islamist groups; unlike her opponents, she did not did not allow anti-India militant groups to establish bases in Bangladesh. India backed Hasina to the exclusion of everyone else, with officials arguing that if she lost power, Bangladesh would become a “breeding ground for Islamist groups posing a threat to India’s national security.” This year, after Hasina won a fourth term in a criticized election, India lobbied U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to stop applying pressure to Bangladesh over democratic backsliding.

Hasina presided over soaring economic growth and controlled all state institutions, including the military; as a result, India assumed that she would continue to rule despite protests. But in a striking Indian intelligence and diplomatic failure, New Delhi was stunned when the army asked Hasina to leave the country this month. No Western government has offered her asylum, leaving her holed up in New Delhi. Indian National Security Advisor Ajit Doval greeted Hasina when she landed.

India’s over-securitized approach to neighborhood diplomacy—reflected in its unconditional support of Hasina—goes against the grain of historical, cultural, ethnic, geographic, and economic ties that India has throughout South Asia. New Delhi has missed opportunities to gain the confidence of its neighbors, in effect breeding insecurity in these countries. It has become out of touch with larger public sentiment in the region, burning bridges with the political opposition, including in conditions of democratic backsliding.

In Myanmar, India has shunned pro-democracy protesters in Myanmar in favor of the military junta that seized power in a coup in 2021. In Afghanistan, it has established friendly ties with the Taliban rulers, neglecting longstanding relationships with nationalist Afghans. In Bangladesh, the security-centric approach has manifested in policing along the countries’ border; complaints about the heavy-handed behavior of India’s Border Security Force abound.

Modi’s strongman politics have also shaped India’s regional diplomacy. While Modi maintains a silence on China’s ingress on the disputed India-China border, India’s smaller neighbors bear the brunt of his image building. India launched a cross-border raid in Myanmar in 2015 against transit camps of Indian insurgents, the same year it unleashed a trade blockade on Nepal when the latter declared itself a secular republic. Last year, Modi’s supporters launched a campaign for Indian tourists to boycott the Maldives, after a diplomatic row when some Maldivian ministers allegedly criticized Modi.

In Bangladesh, the tough approach of India’s border police added to public grievances about New Delhi’s actions on water sharing, transit facilities, and other trade-related issues that were supposedly unfair to Dhaka. In a young country with fragile nationalism, the public seemed to transfer its rage against India for violating Bangladesh’s sovereignty to Hasina.

Political opponents in India have regularly criticized Modi for his support of crony firms, especially those owned by the billionaire Gautam Adani. These ties have attracted attention in India’s neighborhood, too. Last year, Adani posted a picture with Hasina after announcing that an Adani Group power plant would supply 100 percent of its electricity to Bangladesh. It drew criticism in Bangladesh for being too expensive, too late, and too risky while lining Adani’s pockets. Experts alleged that Hasina need Modi’s associated political favor to “secure political legitimacy.”

Populism, authoritarianism, and cronyism contributed to India’s troubles in Bangladesh, but the Modi government’s pursuit of Hindu nationalist ideology has been even more damaging.

The 2019 CAA ultimately serves the goal of creating a de facto Hindu state; among the persecuted communities that it fast-tracked for Indian citizenship were Hindus in Bangladesh. (Hasina’s media advisor Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury expressed distaste at being compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan, countries rife with terrorist activity.) This fed an anti-India narrative that gained ground in Bangladesh, as did other rhetoric about Bangladeshis from top BJP leaders. Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah, Modi’s de facto no. 2, has called Bangladeshi immigrants termites, illegal infiltrators, and a threat to national security.

Before the CAA, the Indian judiciary ordered a draconian survey to document legal citizens and identify Bangladeshi immigrants in the border state of Assam—seen by critics as a way of targeting undocumented Indian Muslims. Shah vowed to implement this National Register of Citizens (NRC) nationwide, but that has not yet materialized. Although New Delhi characterized the register as a domestic issue, Bangladesh found itself at the center of India’s “illegal foreign nationals” problem. Many analysts feared the CAA and NRC could push millions of Indian Muslims into Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, Hasina’s government continued to reinforce the perception that she was taking orders from New Delhi. When a BJP spokesperson made remarks insulting the prophet Muhammad in 2022, it earned the ire of many Muslim-majority countries; Hasina’s government declared the matter an “internal issue.” The grievances began adding up in Bangladesh, and the BJP government’s escalating discrimination toward Indian Muslims has not helped. On the campaign trail this year, Modi indulged in anti-Muslim dog-whistling. Last year, he inaugurated a new parliament building that features a mural of Akhand Bharat (“Unbroken India”)—including all of India’s smaller neighbors within its borders.

In His National Address on India’s Independence Day on Aug. 15, Modi spoke about India’s 1.4 billion citizens worrying about the safety of Hindus in Bangladesh. It was a thinly veiled way of framing India as only a Hindu homeland—not the multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual country it has been for hundreds of years. It is no surprise that the BJP government refuses to censure its right-wing supporters and media that spread disinformation about killings of Hindus in Bangladesh amid the recent unrest—even after retaliatory attacks in India on the Muslim community.

Modi’s government now seems to have little capacity for self-reflection. Instead of blaming Pakistan, China, or Islamists for the events that led to Hasina’s resignation in Bangladesh, India should acknowledge that its neighboring countries’ citizens can win back their agency and exercise it against authoritarian regimes. Although India is hailed as a rising power in distant lands, it is still seen as a relatively weak power by those in its neighborhood. Geography dictates that its smaller neighbors must work with India, but it is now up to New Delhi to negotiate fresh terms of engagement.

— Sushant Singh is a Lecturer at Yale University and a Consulting Editor with India’s Caravan Magazine. He was Previously the Deputy Editor of the Indian Express and Served in the Indian Army for Two Decades.

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World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is being accused of hate speech for comments he made about Muslims at an election rally in western Rajasthan state at the weekend. World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Narendra Modi said if the opposition Congress came to power again, Muslims would have first rights to India's assets. The opposition has hit back, accusing World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Modi of trying to divert voter attention from the real issues. Nearly a billion Indians are voting in parliamentary elections. World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Hindu Fascist and Butcher of Gujrat Modi is seeking a third term.

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“World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Hindu Extremist, Butcher of Gujrat and the Rapes Capital of the World India's PM Narendra Modi” seeks a third term in the upcoming elections, yet despite the country's economic boom and diplomatic successes, the surge of Hindu nationalism raises significant concerns. Here's a look at the Modi decade in India (The Rapes Capital of the World, Rapestan):

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World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Butcher of Gujrar and Hindu Extremist Modi’s Khalistan Conundrum

— Thursday 20 June 2024

Pro-Khalistan Activists stage a demonstration demanding justice for Sikh Separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, on Sept. 29, 2023.Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images

On Monday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met with his Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, in New Delhi. The officials also led the second meeting of the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, a joint project launched in 2022 to strengthen technology collaboration to counter China. A joint fact sheet released after the meeting laid out plans for cooperation on defense innovation, space technology, and telecommunications.

While not mentioned publicly, it’s likely that Sullivan also brought up India’s transnational repression—a tension point that affects New Delhi’s relations with several key Western partners, including Washington, and could even undermine strategic tech collaboration. Navigating this issue will be a notable foreign-policy challenge for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he begins his third term.

Last Friday, Indian national Nikhil Gupta arrived in the United States after being extradited from the Czech Republic. A U.S. indictment unsealed last November accused Gupta of colluding with an Indian intelligence official in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, in New York. Pannun, a U.S. citizen, is a prime figure in the pro-Khalistan movement, which advocates for an independent Sikh state.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Monday that Gupta’s extradition shows that the United States “will not tolerate attempts to silence or harm American citizens.” The same day, Gupta appeared in a federal court in Manhattan and pleaded not guilty. His next court appearance will be on June 28.

Gupta’s arrival in the United States comes on the heels of bombshell reports alleging that India has recently targeted Sikh communities in Australia and Canada, two other key Indian partners. On Sunday, an Australian Broadcasting Corp. investigation alleged that India was spying on Indian Australians, threatening Sikh diaspora members, and engaging in political interference.

A few weeks earlier, Canada’s government issued a report laying out extensive Indian political interference in the country, calling India the second-biggest threat to Canada’s democracy after China. Last year, Canada accused India’s government of involvement in the assassination of another pro-Khalistan activist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia last June.

The Khalistan issue presents a delicate diplomatic dilemma for Modi. New Delhi insists that Western governments are ignoring individuals driving the resurgence of a serious security threat to India. (In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Khalistan movement was a full-fledged insurgency.) But both the United States and Canada insist that India has aided illegal acts on their soil against their citizens, who have not broken any local laws. Neither side is budging.

The United States, Australia, and Canada all share India’s strategic goal of countering China. Washington and Canberra are especially close friends of New Delhi. India-Canada ties are more fraught; New Delhi argues that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government goes out of its way to appease Sikh separatists. India may hope its status as a strategically significant state will prevent either the United States or Australia from responding harshly to India’s actions.

On that note, New Delhi may be right. Western governments face their own challenges balancing strategic imperatives with legal and security concerns about Indian transnational repression. However, so far they have deferred to the strategic considerations; even Canada hasn’t taken punitive steps against India and said it doesn’t want an escalation in tensions. Still, India cannot afford to be complacent, especially in the U.S. case.

With the U.S. election season kicking into high gear and five senators urging the Biden administration to hold India accountable for the plot against Pannun, Washington will face growing pressure to show New Delhi that it doesn’t provide unlimited free passes. If India doesn’t carry out a credible probe into the foiled assassination—which Washington has consistently demanded—that would further ratchet up pressure.

Given the shared strategic imperative of countering China, the trend lines of U.S.-India ties remain positive. But the fallout of the plot against Pannun could ultimately affect bilateral trust—particularly among the U.S. policymakers involved in the more sensitive components of cooperation, including tech collaborations, which are already hampered by long-standing disagreements over export controls.

The Khalistan issue is unlikely to inflict serious damage on the U.S.-India partnership itself, but it could still complicate efforts to achieve some of the strategic objects currently driving it.

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The World’s Most Wanted Criminal, Killer, Butcher of Gujrat, Hindu Extremist and Fascist Narendra Modi, The Prime Minister of the World’s Capital of Rapes, Rapestan (India).

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A Court in India Essentially Banned Islamic Schools in the Country's Most Populous State, a move that could further distance many Muslims from the World Most Wanted Criminal, Fascist, Killer and Lowlife Hindu Extremist Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu-Nationalist government ahead of national elections.