India: Hindutva terrorist kills senior colleague and 3 others in train

Palghar; 2 Aug 2023 (UMMN): A Hindutva terrorist shot dead a senior colleague and three Muslim passengers on board a train, while hailing PM Modi and UP CM Yogi Adityanath. The terrorist was identified as Chetan Singh, 33, from Hathras in Uttar Pradesh state, a constable of the Railway Protection Force (RPF). In one of the videos widely shared on the social media platform, Singh, after the…

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remind me again why he has two movies (one in 2001 and one upcoming) after him. remind me again why the rss is so celebrated here.

Hello everyone, please remember to keep Indian democracy in your prayers. Tomorrow we go to vote.

it's depressing. i haven't even left my house today and its already almost 9. i will have to soon to get food and just. i'm tired. my whole neighbourhood has been yelling fascist shit. I think that was the point of effectively making a festival out of this ram mandir crap. to tell the 'undesirables' how hated they are, how vulnerable they are, how unafraid people are to support fascism, how willing people are to support your slaughter. before the pandemic if you'd asked me if most hindutvawadis were fascists, i'd have said no, there were a good amount of people who i believe were just either misguided, or just slightly indoctrinated to the propaganda, just "modi's good for economy" bs. but i don't think that anymore after today, it's so apparent, nobody yells jay shree ram because they think its good for economy, nobody yells and celebrates islamophobia because its good for economy. I'm glad i'm not the main target of this, people think i'm a hindu but whenever they yell jay shree ram to me, and i don't say it back, they just know. my silence is deafening to them. I'm not a muslim so i'm not the current scapegoat rn, but its just, other groups will be next. a time will come when they'll also throw queer people and shit under the bus. the court rejecting to allow same sex marriage not too long back is kind of foreshadowing. I'm sort of involved in 'western' leftism as evidencd by this hellhole of a blog, but i see nobody talking about it. and i wish they did. this is not just a random celebration of a temple being built. look up the history. even if the babri masjid was built on the ruins of a hindu temple breaking it after centuries was a crime, rebuilding a temple on its ruins was a crime, using it to scapegoat and slaughter muslims was a crime. putting the butcher of godhra in the position of a country's leader was a crime. and it doesn't seem it will stop anytime soon. he's more popular than ever.

Canadian news organizations and federal political leaders are having their accounts blocked by Twitter after tweeting about the Indian government’s suppression of civil liberties in Punjab.

The Indian government has taken draconian measures to suppress “anti-national sentiments” in the state of Punjab, including cutting Internet access for millions, banning group gatherings and invoking colonial-era laws that give police the power to detain people for up to 12 months without charges, as they search for Amritpal Singh, a popular but controversial Sikh activist and separatist figure.

Police in Punjab justify their self-described “mega crackdown” as a way to stop the spread of “fake news,” but critics say authorities are silencing dissent and helping the government spread disinformation.

The crackdown has also impacted the ability of Canadian journalists and politicians to provide accurate information or voice concerns. [...]

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Tagging: @politicsofcanada

thoughts on the bjp and congress manifestos? (if you read them, I didn't understand half the shit sadly)

I didn't read the entire thing but from what i know bjp is still doing the whole "one nation-one election" and uniform civil code crap which is fun (I've also heard of citi economists criticising it for lack of meaningful structural reforms - I have to look more into that)

congress is well. congress. with their whole "ending unemployment" and "giving j&k statehood" thing like in theory it sounds amazing and way better than what the bjp offers but opposition is frankly weak and pathetic they're too pussy to meaningfully oppose hindutva (they're anyways very soft hindutva)

The Hindu Right is a dense network of organizations across the globe that promote Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that advocates for an ethnonationalist Hindu identity and to transform India into a Hindu state governed by majoritarian norms.

Hindutva ideology was first articulated in India in the 1920s, and Hindu Right groups began expanding overseas in the 1940s, coming to the United States in 1970. Collectively, the Hindu Right groups that stretch across dozens of nations in the 21st century are known as the Sangh Parivar (the family of Hindutva organizations).

From within the United States, Hindu Right groups exercise power within the global Hindutva movement and place pressure on American institutions and liberal values. The major interlinked Hindu Right groups in America focus on a variety of areas, especially politics, religion, outreach, and fundraising. Among other things, they attempt to control educational materials, influence policy makers, defend caste privilege, and whitewash Hindutva violence, a critical tool for many who espouse this exclusive political ideology.

The U.S.-based Hindu Right is properly understood within both a transnational context of the global Sangh Parivar and as part of the American landscape, a fertile home for more than fifty years.

Audrey Truschke

i do not need to see "desis" who live in fucking new york city talking about how india deserves to be nuked for ISRAEL asking for basically slave labor. you couldn't name a single implemented policy that has caused the tilt towards "india-israel relations" and you could not say out loud what the country's foreign policy is and you could not explain what hindutva is outside of hand-wavy "it's bad!". it is CRAZY to say that because you are some random who happens to be ethnically indian living in the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA that 1.4 BILLION people deserve to be "carved off of asia and nuked because they're all pieces of shit". you're fucked in the head.

i hope dev patel got dhokla and rasmalai and a hug from his mom for his birthday for the literal hate crimes his country has committed against him.

'Progressive' hindu nationalists - why are they Like That?

Tomorrow is the 26th of January, the 74th Republic Day in India - the day the Indian constitution was formalized and adopted. I thought i'd mourn my fast-fading nationalism on this occasion by kinda airing out some bullshit and starting a political longpost, which is always a good idea right? right???

Since about the end of last year, I've seen some blogs on here that define themselves around hindutva - hindu nationalism, the idea that India is a hindu nation and must abandon its secular status. Any leftie/liberal with any awareness of the news will know their rhetoric is bullshit. Anyone who isn't really aware of Indian religious dynamics would know to spot their Islamophobia from a mile away, because seriously, the discourse is Ben Shapiro levels of bad.

The most egregious of these include hindulivesmatter, rhysaka, yato-dharmasto-jaya, vindhyavasini and others. Basically a small hindu nationalist clique. They're actually not that big a deal even on this hellsite, but they keep annoyingly popping up to start firebrand arguments under posts. But they're not uncommon in the real world. In fact, i think the majority of the Indian urban youth is Like That - anti-homophobia, anti-misogyny, theoretically anti-islamophobia, the same general left-leaning values associated with Gen Z; but with a weird blind spot when it comes to the fascist decline of their own country.

These users are not too different from TERFs, with their couching of hate in progressive, tumblr-social-justice language. There's been a lot of discourse around why TERFs are the way they are, why their otherwise feminist and progressive values eventually shatter in favour of their hate. I want to do something similar for hindutva tumblr, because i see in it a newer kind of hindu nationalist aggression, yet one that i am very familiar with, as an urban upper-middle-class Indian born into a Marathi Hindu family.

The main question i want to answer is this: why does someone espousing dire Islamophobic rhetoric also sincerely believe in progressive ideas? Why do they not see the contradictions? To do that, we need a little primer in post-independence Indian history.

So, it's often said that Indian democracy was not handed to us; this is not only in the sense that we had to fight for our freedom against the Brits, but also in the sense that there were long deliberations on the exact type of republic we wanted to be. The constitution was drafted, finalized and adopted a full three years after the Brits left. This framing of a philosophical struggle stayed on, throughout the tumult of the following decades.

This is how the modern Indian is taught about our history: Several riots, the Emergency in the 70s, the wars with Pakistan and China, the formation of Bangladesh, the victory at the cricket world cup, the Cold War international policy of non-alignment, the Green Revolution, all of these are presented through a frame of struggle, with the Kargil War and the 1991 liberalization being the point of stabilization. The median citizen of 1971 was politically aware and politically involved. That of 2001 was most likely not. At least, that's the narrative of capitalism in the country. This narrative of a 50-year prolonged post-independence struggle is why Indian nationalism is so potent, even outside of the newer Hindu fascist rhetoric. We've got a very intense sense of national pride. I'm guilty of it myself.

In 1991, the economy was opened up to multinational corporations and eventually led to the formation of an Indian petit bourgeois. The period from 1991 to roughly 2011 is seen as a period of idyllic peace much like the Clinton administration in the US. Culturally, this was the time of the Bollywood masala movie - light, apolitical and all about a big Hindu joint family that preaches benevolent unity of all religions. But the thing that was never mentioned in these movies was caste - an elephant in the room that i haven't addressed yet. Just like the 'default' US Culture is white suburban christian, the default culture here is upper caste middle-class hindu. The aforementioned rise of the middle class was largely along caste lines. Households in the US have microcultures along ethnic lines, and they can be similarly mapped in India through caste and religion.

The Indian equivalent of the megachurch pastor is the ruling BJP's paramilitary parent organization, the RSS, as well as others like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Karni Sena, etc - organizations that normal people largely didn't agree with but whose values and morals were ingrained in their subconscious. The apolitical Hindu in like 2004 did not believe, like the RSS does, that India should be a Hindu nation; but he (i use 'he' here because male tends to be default in this case, and that's a whole different conversation) did believe in the greatness of traditions, the Indian armed forces and in ancient Hindu scientific supremacy (which at the time was limited to Aryabhatta's zero and the actual progress in the sciences from ancients like Charaka and Sushruta to more modern ones like Ramanujan and CV Raman - it hadn't gone into cuckoo fantasy land yet, where we showhow had stem cell research and aeroplanes in ancient India and the Ramayana is apparently actual history now). To this person, Savarkar was an icon of the freedom struggle along with others like Gandhi, Bose, Ambedkar, etc, but he didn't know or care about his religio-fascist ideology. Fascist elements existed then and had their pockets of support - the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, Modi's CM-hood in Gujarat, and the first BJP national administration came up during this time. To the normal citizen, they were simply extremists with 'some good points'.

2008 was the year of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. Islamophobia didn't fully enter Indian discourse just yet, largely because of the assertion of the city's multicultural identity, but the seeds were certainly sown. In fact, blatant Islamophobia wouldn't be mainstream till 2016 or so - the BJP's 2014 election was won on middle-class concerns. The petit bourgeois finally made its voice heard politically in the 2011 anti-corruption protests spearheaded by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal, the latter of whom is the founder of the newest major political party in the country. It's typical of protests of this kind, agitating against a vague idea of corruption with not many tangible demands. It is true that by 2011, the Congress government was notoriously bloated, corrupt and ineffectual at a systemic level. The BJP gained a single-party majority on an anti-corruption and pro-welfare platform, with religion not really a factor.

The middle class celebrated this as an ultimate affirmation of their hegemony, and the RSS-derived values kicked into high gear. The celebrations have now become a gloat-fest, kinda like vindicated Marvel fans when their Disney product makes a bajillion dollars. The best example of this is the Ram Mandir inauguration earlier this week. Modi cultivated an image of a messiah figure who could do no wrong. Anyone who opposed their goals is now an anti-national and a traitor. General attitudes as a whole have grown a lot more bloodthirsty and carceral. Propaganda, degradation of public discourse, weakening of the media and public institutions, the whole gamut.

The people running the above-mentioned blogs are quite representative of this demographic. They probably fully believe what they spout. They fully believe that Hindus and Hinduism are under threat in India, that love jihad ("forced conversion") is a real thing, that Islamists are taking over their nation, and even that Hindus have been 'sleeping' and are just now being 'woken up'. At the same time, they believe in socially progressive values. The supposedly pro-LGBT+ and pro-feminist stances taken by the RSS are very much targeted at urban Hindus, not at the West as PR.

The propaganda directed at them (which includes movies, social media and tragically, many news outlets) often appeals to the traditional acceptance of queer individuals in mythological texts to get straight, cis, sheltered urban Hindus of all ages to reconcile bigotries and get on board the hate train. It is often in a comparative frame, juxtaposed with the bigotry in Islamic or Christian texts and historical persecution in the West (btw, the term acceptance is very loose here, they often equate mention of a thing with acceptance of that thing even if it's derogatory. Ancient hindu culture only 'accepted' trans women, and that was a marginalized acceptance at best).

The RSS often preaches that Hinduism is the religion of tolerance, and advocates for a twisted version of the tolerance paradox. It's reached a level where propaganda doesn't have to be deliberate - the citizens will do it for them. These blogs are true believers despite the contradictions, but their online activity is probably a deliberate form of praxis, with the co-opting of social justice vocab and appealing to white/western/Indian expat guilt etc. So yes, very much like TERFs, except that TERFs are an actual minority whereas Hindutva ideology is increasingly the default 'apolitical' belief. The reactionary internalization has been successful.

Tl;dr: people like hindulivesmatter are sincere in their bigotry towards Muslims as well as their progressive beliefs, because Indian culture as a whole oriented itself towards appealing to the urban upper caste middle class.

Narendra Modi’s electoral success in Gujarat between 2001 and 2014 and on the Indian scene since then stems from his novel blend of populism and Hindu nationalism (Hindutva). Hindutva grew out of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organization, RSS), a paramilitary-style nationalist group founded in 1925 to bulk up young Hindus both physically and morally so they could stand up to Muslims, who were depicted as a danger to the majority. Modi joined the RSS as a child and devoted his life to it, pursuing no other careers and even living apart from his wife. He rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the chief minister of Gujarat (his home state) in 2001. The following year, he oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom that left some 2,000 dead— a strategy of religious polarization that won him the December 2002 regional elections. Similar successes in 2007 and 2012 made Modi the obvious prime ministerial candidate for his Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP) in 2014. But he left behind the RSS tradition of collective decision-making, putting himself front and center and striving to connect directly with “his” people. Rather than relying on the activist network, Modi held rally after rally where he showcased his flair for speechmaking. He also founded his own television channel, worked social media, and employed a revolutionary strategy: using holograms to simultaneously lead one rally in hundreds of places. Modi even distributed masks printed with his likeness to deepen supporters’ identification with him. In short, he saturated the public arena so as to embody the masses—a task made easier by his low-caste origins, on which he has built a complete narrative. (He worked as a teaboy in his father’s shop.) However, the “masses” meant only the Hindu majority, which he was busy stirring up against one target in particular: Muslims. As in the 2014 elections, in 2019 “Moditva”—Modi’s idiosyncratic hybridization of right-wing nationalist ideology, Hindutva and a personality cult—triumphed on the strength of BJP landslides in the north and west. This success allowed him to bend to his will both the RSS and the BJP—whose MPs had ridden to victory on his coattails—fashioning a government of faithfuls and a parliament of yes-men. The other institutions soon succumbed too—even the Supreme Court, once a beacon of independence. In the summer of 2014, Modi advanced a constitutional reform that would have changed the appointment process for judges, until then picked by a collegium of peers. His co-optation, opposed by the entire political class, would have replaced the collegium with a five-member commission. The Supreme Court eventually declared the amendment unconstitutional, but Modi still got his way: Of the nominees submitted by the collegium, his government finalized appointments only for those he liked. The court thus resigned itself to proposing candidates who were apt to please him.

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"In Tacoma, Washington, dozens of asylum seekers from India jailed at the Northwest Detention Center have been on hunger strike for nearly a week demanding their release and a fair due process. Strikers are denouncing their indefinite detention and other dangerous conditions at the detention center. Many of the asylum seekers told the advocacy group La Resistencia that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had threatened them with forced-feeding unless they ended the peaceful action. Northwest is run by the for-profit prison corporation GEO Group and has seen a wave of recent hunger strikes, most recently one that lasted over 50 days."

NEW DELHI (AP) — India expelled one of Canada’s top diplomats Tuesday, ramping up a confrontation between the two countries over Canadian accusations that India may have been involved in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in suburban Vancouver.

India, which has dismissed the accusations as absurd, said the expulsion came amid “growing concern at the interference of Canadian diplomats in our internal matters and their involvement in anti-India activities,” according to a statement from its Ministry of External Affairs.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared to try to calm the diplomatic clash Tuesday, telling reporters that Canada is “not looking to provoke or escalate.”

“We are simply laying out the facts as we understand them and we want to work with the government of India to lay everything clear and to ensure there are proper processes,” he said. “India and the government of India needs to take this matter with the utmost seriousness.”

On Monday, Trudeau said there were “credible allegations” of Indian involvement in the slaying of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh leader who was killed by masked gunmen in June in Surrey, outside Vancouver. For years, India has said Nijjar, a Canadian citizen born in India, has links to terrorism. [...]

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Tagging: @politicsofcanada

Here’s an idea.

How about you don’t use solidarity or the idea thereof as a pretense to sneak bigoted views about other people and groups into the minds of others.

You know?

Let’s not use it to try indoctrinating them into believing your personal prejudices!

I’ve seen this done a thousand times in many different circumstances and it never fails to sicken me.

I saw a post on here a month or two ago about solidarity between Jews and Hindus which looked harmless at first.

But when I got to reading it, it proved to be nothing more than a delusional tract FULL of Islamophobic bigotry and Hindutva revisionist BULLSHIT!

Full of BJP-type myths and lies and it was horrible to behold!

Right down to fearmongering about demographics and all the usual Hindutva fascist bullshit.

I’m not Indian or Jewish myself but I know what that kind of stuff looks like. This particular instance was hiding under a veil of coexistence and solidarity.

And it sickened me!

Simply USING the idea of solidarity to spread some of the most vile, conspiratorial bullshit I ever did read in years.

Despite initially appearing harmless and sincere.

Rambling on about how Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to live in India and should all be expelled, bitching about leftists, something about Pakistan and Palestine having no right to exist, vague mentions of George Soros and some sort of plot, and so on. I’m surprised they didn’t invoke QAnon as well!

I noticed this crap right away and it troubled me deeply how many more people couldn’t even see it!

I saw right through that shit immediately!

I’ve seen this happen a thousand times before with other topics and it never fails to sicken me!

So kindly stop it!

Starting yesterday!

Anyone who willingly falls for that, be they a Jew or a Hindu or any other such group, is no better than the crank leftists sucking up to Hamas.

*it’s especially troubling since the Hindutva crowd is known for being friendly with actual Neo-Nazis*

They are EXACTLY the same kind of idiots!

Exactly the same!

And just as dumb!

Enough of this bullshit!

*Feel free to reblog*