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Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
The story of a simple guy, who loved his country, wasn’t even religious, but felt deeply about the day to day injustices happening around him. His parents were former activists. He loved his country so much that he never even got a passport; he knew he would always live in India. But his name was Muslim, even if he didn’t believe. And his actions put him in the crosshairs of supremacists and a media grown on hate and the othering of marginalized groups. It was media that actually created his public rise in fame.. after an incident at the university, he showed up on the news only to be berated by the editor, called an anti-nationalist.. and that was that. They soon hunted him down, arrested him, and when he was release a month later, he was emboldened and had a following. It reads as if he turned from student to political leader powered by his love of his home. And his rise grew thru his speeches at locations all over the place, especially in response to continued harassment and laws targeting the Muslim population.
Highlights
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Two decades-old laws have been Modi’s favorites for suppressing dissent and removing his critics from public life: the colonial-era sedition law and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a so-called anti-terror law.
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Between 2014 and 2020, more than 7,000 people were charged with sedition, according to a database published by Indian news site Article 14. The UAPA accounted for more than 8,000 arrests between 2015 and 2020, according to a study by the Indian human rights nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties. “These laws were already on the books — what we are seeing now is malice,” said journalist Aakar Patel. “This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”
✏️ The ability to use the “laws” to curb dissent. 🔗 View Highlight
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The friction around the acceptance of Muslims as Indian can be traced back to the Partition of 1947 and the division of British India along religious lines: Hindu- and Sikh-majority regions remained inside independent India, while Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims. Though 35 million Muslims chose to stay in India, the Hindu supremacist groups that mushroomed in the run-up to Partition — namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideology’s mothership and the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary force, which Modi joined as a child — viewed them as an even greater threat after the subcontinent was split.
✏️ The inception point of Muslim, Indian, Pakistani relations and conflict 🔗 View Highlight
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The most notorious episode of Hindu terror in India’s recent history occurred under Modi’s watch in 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat. After a train full of Hindu pilgrims caught fire, killing 59 people, Modi declared the incident a “terrorist attack” and had the charred bodies put on display at the state capital. According to Human Rights Watch, Hindu mobs immediately responded to the dog whistle with a frenzy of bloodletting that lasted three days and left at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead as police either stood by or participated in the violence. Despite accusations of complicity from several domestic and international human rights groups, Modi was reelected in a landslide victory later that year and became Gujarat’s longest-serving chief minister.
✏️ Here we have a situation of one group being ostracized and terrorized for their beliefs, so much so that when an accident happens, the ruling person of the area can throw out a specious claim, stir the mobs, then stand back while they violently kill people of the marginalized group (mobs and police alike contributing to the murders). Then, after all that, the leader is popularly reelected in a landside. I’m not sure how to word my disdain at how often this happens and how one would address this. This is democracy on paper, but authoritarian regime in reality. 🔗 View Highlight
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As India’s top elected official, Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors. The Modi government has empowered local right-wing officials and Hindu vigilantes to make life for many Indian Muslims not just difficult, but unbearable. Muslims have faced economic boycotts of their businesses and bulldozers destroying their homes after officials arbitrarily deem them illegal constructions. Several states have adopted laws that target Muslims, including criminalizing the slaughter of cows, possession of beef, and interfaith marriage. Few Hindu vigilantes who have lynched dozens of Muslims have been arrested — even though many of these crimes were committed in public, captured on video, and shared online.
✏️ A system of oppression that’s encouraged by the top and enforced at the bottom. 🔗 View Highlight
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“Towards what end?” said Patel, the journalist. “Exclusion. Apartheid. To say, ‘We don’t want you.’ This is ideological. [Hindu supremacists] genuinely hate these people.”
✏️ The purpose of the oppression 🔗 View Highlight
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When it was first passed in 1967, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was only applicable to organizations; the Islamic State and Al Qaeda were later banned under the law. When Modi came to power, his government amended the UAPA so individuals could be accused of terrorism and detained for up to six months without formal charges.
✏️ Going back to the “laws” in place, here you can see they start off (as usual) in a limited format and for specific purpose of actually trying to protect people. Then you get political actors with their own agendas that can twist things all the while claiming the same “greater good” mantra… even when it deliberately revokes people’s basic rights to fairness and justice. Then again, as we’ve seen globally, who gets to decide what our basic rights are? Moreso, who gets to enforce those are protected? 🔗 View Highlight
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Modi’s critics have also been charged under an anti-sedition law introduced during British rule to imprison freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi. According to Article 14’s database, from 2010 to 2021, 149 people were charged with sedition for making “critical and/or derogatory” remarks against Modi; the maximum penalty is life in prison. Notably, young people are the most vulnerable to sedition charges. From 2015 to 2020, most of the people arrested for violating this law were under the age of 30.
✏️ More about the second law, the anti-sedition one that India has adopted from their former British colonizers to attack their own people. 🔗 View Highlight
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Last year, in response to nine petitions challenging its constitutionality, the Supreme Court suspended the law, asking the government to stop issuing sedition charges or punishing those already charged while the terms of the law are reassessed. The Law Commission of India, which is under the government’s purview, has argued not only that the sedition law should be reinstated, but also that the punishment should be more severe.
✏️ Even though the Supreme Court of the land suspended the law and asked the govt to stop issuing charges and punishing people, there’s the Law Commission of India (legal advisory body for the executive govt branch) arguing the law should stay and punishment should be more severe. 🔗 View Highlight
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“They are persuaded by the idea of scapegoats, and they are willing to accept anything — hunger, joblessness, even bodies decimated by Covid floating down the Ganges — because they are preoccupied by something else: hatred.”
✏️ The power of fomenting hate as a way to distract people from the things that are affecting them 🔗 View Highlight
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“We were, like, very hot-headed radicals and all that,” Lahiri told me with a laugh. “Politics was and continues to be the cornerstone of our relationship.”
✏️ Something about this quote is just very evocative and authentic and loving. 🔗 View Highlight
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The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, would make it nearly impossible for Muslim migrants to become citizens in India. The law was twinned with a planned nationwide campaign to force people already living in India to prove they belonged there.
✏️ A citizenship law that targets a group. Muslim migrants will find it impossible to become citizens, and current Muslim citizens will need to prove they belonged in the country. 🔗 View Highlight
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As a part of the citizenship drive there, the state’s 33 million residents, many of whom are poor, illiterate, or itinerant, had to produce documents certifying their date and place of birth. The cruelty of this laboratory experiment became clear when 2 million people, including many Muslims, were struck off the citizenship rolls. Declared “foreigners,” many were sent to detention camps within existing jails. In January 2023, news reports said that detainees would be transferred to India’s first immigration detention center as more such camps sprouted, creating the fearsome specter of a country where Muslims are kept in cages.
✏️ Best way to start any despicable law is to hit a location that has the most of the group you’re targeting, and the poorest of them around. Hence the state of Assam. 🔗 View Highlight
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the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, became their anthem:
Underneath our feet — we the governed. The ground will echo like a thumping heartbeat And the sky over the heads of the rulers Will echo with the sound of thunder.
✏️ What an incredible and evocative poem. 🔗 View Highlight
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“Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal?” he asked at a gathering of BJP supporters. “We will have to teach them a lesson.”
✏️ Such a succinct statement (by Kapil Mishra, a Delhi BJP leader) that holds so much hate, and then to incite mob rule so pointedly. This is the power of leadership right here and how deadly it can be. 🔗 View Highlight
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The next day, Mishra’s followers started attacking protesters with guns, swords, spears, and stones. The violence quickly expanded to target any Muslim regardless of their involvement in the demonstrations, as the mob destroyed cars and threw petrol bombs at shops, homes, mosques, and madrasas.
✏️ The outcome of that statement. 53 people were killed and more than 500 injured, by mob and police alike. 🔗 View Highlight
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Nearly 2,500 people were arrested, including 17 high-profile activists who had galvanized the anti-CAA protests as organizers and speakers. Modi had described the protests as a “conspiracy against the country,” and the activists were charged with conspiracy, as well as sedition and murder.
✏️ As always, the justice come swiftly for the victims of the massacre, because they were protesters and Muslim. Naturally, the claim was that the violence was a conspiracy by the left and Muslim activists to create an insurrection to force regime change. And even though the BJP leader was the one whipping up the attack, police placed the blame firmly on Khalid. 🔗 View Highlight
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I should be consoling him,” she told me later, “not the other way around. But he does more of the consoling.”
✏️ Again, the love in the relationship between Khalid and Lahiri is just very simple and real. 🔗 View Highlight