The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.

The woman’s shock registered a new reality that is coalescing in Germany. What happens when basic rights seem to conflict with Germany’s vaunted culture of “coming to terms with the past”  — often interpreted as a call for anti-antisemitism? Recent events have raised troubling questions about who is considered part of the nation and what, exactly, Germany has learned from its history.

Following the October 7 assault in which Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women, and children, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his condolences for the victims, condemned the attacks and proclaimed his solidarity with Israel. He reasserted the 2008 proclamation of his predecessor, Angela Merkel, that the protection of Israel is part of Germany’s “Staatsraison,” or part of the country’s reason for existence. The German government has remained steadfast in its support, even as Israel’s bombing campaign on Gaza has injured and killed high numbers of civilians — the latest death toll sits at 10,022 people, more than 4,000 of them children.

There has been little official sympathy for the plight of Gazans. But Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe — an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people — and people across the country have come together in solidarity with Palestine for both spontaneous and registered protests since the beginning of the conflict. In response, cities across Germany have tried to clamp down on these demonstrations, though the courts have overturned several of these attempts as illegal. In Berlin, bans have been issued against protests with titles such as  “Peace in the Middle East”; “Jewish Berliners Against Violence in the Middle East,” a rally organized by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, a Jewish organization; and “Youth Against Racism,” which was called after a high school teacher hit a student who had brought a Palestinian flag to school. Throughout, there have been shocking scenes of police brutalizing protestors.

Those who advocate for the bans point to incidents of people gathering on Sonnenallee, a central avenue in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, in support of the Hamas attack on October 7. One especially notorious event involved about 50 men who responded to the call of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network “to celebrate the victory of resistance” by sharing baklava on the street. Berlin’s police treated it as a potentially criminal matter, noting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that they would “carry out the necessary measures.” Newspapers reported that the Israeli ambassador, Ron Prosor, called the men who had gathered “barbarians.”

Beyond these incidents, German politicians have seemingly competed among themselves to see who can promote anti-antisemitism the loudest — and who can be the harshest on the Muslim minority. Nancy Faeser, a government cabinet minister, urged that the government “use all legal means to deport Hamas supporters.” The leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, Friedrich Merz declared, “Germany cannot accept any more refugees. We have enough antisemitic men in this country.” Scholz, the chancellor, piled on: “Too many are coming,” he said. “We must finally deport on a grand scale.”

These are not wholly new tendencies in Germany. Last year, authorities in Berlin banned all public commemorations of the Nakba, the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 after the founding of the state of Israel. Earlier this year, German police admitted in court that when they were enforcing the ban, they had simply targeted people who “looked Palestinian.” However, Berlin schools’ decision to forbid students from wearing the keffiyeh and other Palestinian symbols is an escalation that led even a member of Scholz’s own party to question if it could possibly be legal.

Since reunification in 1990, Germany’s national identity has been founded upon “coming to terms with the past.” That is, taking collective responsibility for the Holocaust and taking steps to ensure that it cannot happen again. Central to this protection of Jews has been the enforcement of anti-antisemitism at home, and, internationally, the support of Israel: Germany’s “Staatsraison.”

This culture of remembrance, however, holds little room for non-ethnic Germans. Coming to terms with the past requires that everyone shares the same past. The Muslim minority, for instance — most of whom arrived after 1945 — have found themselves freighted with the accusation of antisemitism for failing to identify with German guilt for the Holocaust. This is not to say that there is no antisemitism within the Muslim minority, but when the center-left Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck insisted in a recent speech that Muslims must distance themselves from antisemitism — or, in some cases, face deportation — he reinscribed the idea of the Muslim minority overall as antisemitic until proven otherwise. Muslims, and particularly Palestinians, have to prove that they deserve to be part of Germany.

The German press has inflamed the situation. Der Spiegel has peddled base stereotypes about Germany’s Muslims, and Bild has published a manifesto declaring that “we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country — against our values, democracy, and against Germany.” But it isn’t just conservative publications pushing these narratives — the left-leaning Die Zeit recently published a piece that questioned whether Muslim immigrants could ever become “civilized.” And the leftist newspaper Taz has published editorials that purport to connect Palestinians with hate and Nazism. When during a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek pleaded for the ethical imperative to think about both Israelis and Palestinians, he was accused of defending Hamas’ crimes.

Highly publicized antisemitic incidents — a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Berlin synagogue and Stars of David painted on homes — has further roiled Germany. Some Jews have said they are afraid to visit their temples. “Germany is a safe country for Jews,” Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews, recently affirmed, noting his approval of Germany’s anti-Palestinian measures. “In my eyes, the security forces are doing everything to make sure that doesn’t change. Even if the threat in Germany currently comes more from the Arabic side than from the extreme right.”

However, other Jews in Germany have argued that Schuster misrepresents the real threat. A recent open letter from more than 100 Jewish artists and intellectuals in Germany — full disclosure: I am a signatory — cited the government’s own statistics, which paint a different picture about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests: “the perceived threat of such assemblies grossly inverts the actual threat to Jewish life in Germany, where, according to the federal police, the ‘vast majority’ of anti-Semitic crimes — around 84 percent — are committed by the German far right.”

For Palestinians, cultural institutions have largely shut their doors. An award ceremony for Palestinian writer Adania Shibli at the Frankfurt Book Fair was indefinitely postponed. In Berlin, Maxim Gorki Theater called off upcoming performances of its long-running and much celebrated “The Situation,” which gave voice to the experiences of Arabs, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. A letter about the decision described how “war demands a simple division into friend and enemy.” Berlin’s Haus für Poesie canceled an upcoming launch party for “The Arabic Europe,” a collection of poetry edited by the Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun.

A Palestinian doctor and activist told me that the situation of Palestinians in Germany is one of “collective loneliness.” He asked to be called Nazir — there is a risk of professional repercussions for showing support for Palestinians. “The feeling is not only that we are losing family,” Nazir explained, “not only that a genocide is being done, not only that we have so much to fight with our own losses and pain, but we are not even allowed to mourn publicly. We are not allowed to speak up. We are not allowed to make demonstrations for the ones who are being killed in silence. And this is a whole different level of oppression, this state of oppression in Germany.”

The center of Arabic-speaking life in Berlin is Neukoelln’s Sonnenallee, sometimes known to Germans as the “Arab Street.” The district has long been demonized — along with its neighboring Kreuzberg — by the German right. Recently, some have spoken of the district as a “little Gaza.” It was in Kreuzberg where a group of men handed out pastries to celebrate the Hamas attack. And the neighborhood since has been the site of various gatherings to show support for the people of Gaza under bombardment — and several confrontations with police. On October 18, an officer in riot gear stamped out tea lights at a vigil for those killed in an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Later that night, parts of the street were on fire — in what Bild called a riot.

Since October 7, police have arrived most nights in riot gear, patrolling in force. On October 23, in just the two blocks between the restaurants Risa Chicken and Konditorei Damascus, I counted more than two dozen officers in full suits of riot armor and eight police vans. At the corner of Pannierstrasse, I spotted a group of six police who had detained eight people. “They tried to cross the street when it was red,” a man said to me, smiling in disbelief, pointing to two of the men in custody, who could be described as vaguely Middle Eastern, standing against the wall. “Can you believe it?” a woman with a gray hair covering exclaimed, nearly leaping with indignation. “How can you hold them for that?”

As a crowd gathered, a pair of teenagers walked past, one wearing a puffer jacket, the other in a Puma sweatshirt. As the signal turned green and they stepped onto the crosswalk, I heard one of them say to the other, “Artikel 8: Grundgesetz.” Article 8 of the Basic Law.

I had just heard that phrase for the first time earlier that evening. A protester in Hermannplatz, the square that lies at the mouth of Sonnenallee, had been reading out that very section of the Grundgesetz, which is the German constitution. Article 8 says, “All Germans have the right — without having to register or receive permission — to assemble peacefully, without weapons.”

The teenagers might have misread the situation. After all, the police were not detaining these men because they were protesting, but rather were arbitrarily detaining them for the minor infraction of jaywalking.

“Why is everyone speaking now about Article 8?” Clemens Arzt, a professor of constitutional and administrative law at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, repeated my question before answering. “Because every half-educated person knows that Article 8 protects the freedom of assembly.”

Germany, he explained to me, recognizes assembly and speech as two distinct rights, as opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution where they are intertwined. In Germany, Article 5 deals with freedom of speech and Article 8 with freedom of assembly. The practice of shutting down protests before they even begin really began with the pandemic, said Arzt, “when we preemptively implemented bans on gatherings at a mass scale.”

I mentioned to Arzt how I have repeatedly seen police demand that protesters put away their Palestinian flags. Is this legal? Arzt said that the police are given broad latitude to make these decisions, but only in the case of “imminent danger” to public safety — something that October’s demonstrations did not often entail. But he suggested that making these decisions on the spot can be so difficult for the police, that one reason for the bans might have been that it was simply easier for them to pull the plug completely despite questions about legality. 

The second reason for the bans, he said, has to do with Germany’s relationship with Israel. These protests are being broken up in the name of “Staatsraison.” While recognizing Germany’s important relationship with Israel, Arzt sees this current application as a problem. “It appears to me,” he said, “that, partially, the basic idea of the protection of Israel — this Staatsraison — results in taking priority over gatherings that cannot, actually, from a sober legal perspective be disbanded or forbidden.”

“If you meet 20 people or if you meet 10,000, the empowerment you feel after a big demonstration is a whole different level,” the Palestinian doctor Nazir told me with a grimace. “And Germany knows exactly that. And that is why Germany is banning the protests.”

“They fear the growing rise of solidarity happening in Berlin.”

Nazir has been in Berlin for most of his adult life, where he has cared for the sick, paid his taxes and participated in Palestine Speaks, an antiracist advocacy group dedicated to Palestinian rights. Since October 7, he has lost 19 members of his extended family to Israeli bombs. He wakes up every day, he told me, hoping that his parents and sister in Gaza remain unharmed. “This is the question with which I wake up every day,” he said, “and hope that answer is still ‘yes, they are alive.’”

“It’s one of the most schizophrenic situations I have found myself in,” he said. “I am good enough to pay taxes and to work in a hospital, to do intensive care and to hold the hand of grieving people and to give hope and optimism to parents and their children that we are going to overcome their health crises.” All of this, he said, “while you are dehumanized and while you are expecting every minute to get a note that your family does not exist.”

When we spoke, Palestine Speaks had begun to register their protests with more generic names like “Global South United”; that particular demonstration ended up drawing around 11,000 participants, one of the largest pro-Palestinian rallies in German history. Still, even when the protests happen, the police seek to disrupt them, Nazir said. He told me about a protest the previous weekend at Oranienplatz called “Decolonize. Against Oppression Globally.” There, he said the police had removed their speakers after the police translator misinterpreted a statement. Still, he said, it was a relief to feel the support of so many people during a time when the environment in Germany has become so deeply anti-Muslim.

“They are making house raids,” Nazir said of the German police, an assertion echoed by other activists with whom I spoke, who noted that referring to the events of October 7 as “resistance” online could result in a visit from the police. He emphasized how Germany’s treatment of Palestinians is only one part of the nation’s rightward shift, and how the current wave of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian discourse is a symptom of Germany’s failure to learn from its past. “The most important question is not what’s happening toward Palestinians alone.”

“Germany needs Israel as a replacement nationality,” he said, referring to the idea of German identification with Israel as a nationality that Germany can feel unrestrainedly proud of. He cautioned that Germany also needs Israel to be “rehabilitated in the international community.” “Israel is the so-called proof that Germany learned a lesson from its history and that the denazification was a successful process.”

“But let’s be honest and point out the elephant in the room,” said Nazir. “The second biggest party in Germany is the AfD.”

The Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party notorious for its Islamophobia and xenophobia, has consistently received 20% of German support in polls, second only to the right-drifting Christian Democratic Union.  

“It seems like everyone is really just trying to compete with the AfD at the moment,” said Wieland Hoban, a noted composer and chairman of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. He described the situation in Germany as having turned starkly to the right.

“The biggest warriors against antisemitism,” Hoban told me, “are conservatives and right-wingers who are doing that because they’re using antisemitism just to live out their anti-migrant racism by saying ‘OK, all these Muslims and Arabs are antisemites so let’s deport them all in order to fight antisemitism.’”

German society’s hypocrisy is exposed, suggested Hoban, in its tolerance of antisemitism among those who are already recognized as Germans. Hoban cited Hubert Aiwanger, a far-right politician and former schoolteacher in Bavaria, who was found to have distributed antisemitic and pro-Nazi pamphlets in his youth and only became more popular because of it, which he spun as a victory over “cancel culture.”

Hoban, disclosing the many instances of “police thuggery” he has witnessed while on the streets in recent weeks, argues that the presence of Palestinians is an inconvenient truth for German memory culture. “It’s just kind of obvious that any human, depending on their situation, can be a victim or a perpetrator,” said Hoban. “But it’s unbearable for some Germans, this idea that the Jews could have been their victims. But then in another context,” he said, referring to Jews, “we’re perpetrators.”

Esra Ozyurek, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge, understands the difficulty people have in dealing with the mutability of roles when it comes to the highly emotive topic of memory culture, with “coming to terms with the past.” She described how the issue of memory politics often devolves into a competition, “a little bit like supporting teams in a soccer match.”

“I was at a talk,” she told me, “and then a young woman came to me and said, ‘I read your work, but I’m on team Israel.’ I said, ‘Wow, I’m not on any team.’”

Rather than thinking tribally, the broader ethical question is, she emphasized, “how we can live in a plural society, how we can deal with difference.”

Germany, she said, is hardly alone in its marginalization and repression of its minorities — even if its pretext for doing so is unique. This is typical of “big nationalist projects,” she said. “It is always their fear that the minorities find comfort in each other, and then they unite. So this big nationalist project is always about dividing the minorities and making them enemies of each other. This is not the first time this is happening. It is just so sad that is happening in the name of fighting a form of racism.”

Ozyurek described how German society sees Muslims as the carriers of German antisemitism— a view that draws its support from German scholarship that claims antisemitism was exported to the Muslim world first by 19th-century missionaries and then by the Nazis in the 20th century. Meanwhile, Germany, by accepting its responsibility for the Holocaust, has become a modern, tolerant democratic nation. “It’s a very Christian narrative,” she said. “You start with your guilt and then you come to terms with it. You accept it, and then you’re liberated.”

Germans expect the Turkish and Arab minority to relate to the history of the Holocaust by identifying with the German majority and thus work through the guilt of what is called “the perpetrator society.” Like Germans, they are supposed to find ancestors to atone for — like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator — in order to be accepted as full members of German society.

But, of course, the Muslim minority does not follow the German script. “Everyone relates to the story from where they are standing,” said Ozyurek. “They relate to it as minorities.”

Palestinians are not only a minority in Germany, but many of them came to Germany stateless as refugees. In the eyes of mainstream Germany, however, these conditions are disregarded as “self-victimization” — which places Palestinians in competition with Jews for the status of victim. “What is interesting,” Ozyurek said, referencing how Germans for many years believed themselves to be the real victim of World War II, “is that the qualities that are attributed to them are also qualities Germans have gotten over.”

“It’s just a Catch-22 situation,” said Ozyurek. “If you don’t have the Nazi ancestors, then how are you going to apologize for their crimes?” She added, “if they cannot join the national conversation, how can they feel they belong?”

The post The crackdown on pro-Palestinian gatherings in Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

“I was very afraid,” Ashraf said. “My kids were crying.”

Since May 29, there had been unrest in Purola. The local chapter of India’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party, along with several other right wing Hindu nationalist groups, had staged a rally in which they demanded that local Muslims leave town before a major Hindu council meeting scheduled for June 15. On June 5, Ashraf’s clothing shop, like the shops of other Muslim traders, was covered with posters that warned “all Love Jihadis” should leave Purola or face dire consequences. They were signed by a Hindu supremacist group called the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land.

The rally in Purola was the culmination of anti-Muslim anger and agitation that had been building for a month. Earlier in May, two men, one Muslim and one Hindu, were reportedly seen leaving town with a teenage Hindu girl. Local Hindu leaders aided by the local media described it as a case of “love jihad,” a reference to the conspiracy theory popular among India’s Hindu nationalist right wing that Muslim men are seeking to marry and convert Hindu women to Islam. Public outrage began to boil over. The men were soon arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, but her uncle later stated that she had gone willingly with the men and that the charges were a fabrication.

It mattered little. Hindu organizations rallied to protest what they claimed was a spreading of love jihad in the region, whipping up the frenzy that had kept Ashraf’s family up at night, fearing for their safety.

What is happening in Uttarakhand offers a glimpse into the consequences of the systematic hate campaigns directed at Muslims in the nine years since Narendra Modi became prime minister. Hindu nationalists believe that the Hindu-first ideology of the government means they have the support necessary to make the dream of transforming India into a Hindu rather than secular nation a reality. Muslims make up about 14% of the Indian population, with another 5% of the Indian population represented by other religious minorities including Christians. In a majoritarian Hindu India, all of these minorities, well over 250 million people, would live as second-class citizens. But it is Muslims who have the most to fear.

Not long after the events in Purola, Modi would go on a highly publicized state visit to the United States. “Two great nations, two great friends and two great powers,” toasted President Joe Biden at the state dinner. The only discordant note was struck at a press conference — a rarity for Modi who has never answered a direct question at a press conference in India since he became prime minister in 2014. But in Washington, standing alongside Biden, Modi agreed to answer one question from a U.S. journalist. The Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui was picked. “What steps are you and your government willing to take,” she asked Modi, “to improve the rights of Muslims and other minorities in your country and to uphold free speech?”

In his answer, Modi insisted that democracy was in the DNA of India, just as it was in the U.S. For daring to ask the question, Siddiqui was trolled for days, the victim of the sort of internet pile-on that has become a familiar tactic of the governing BJP and its Hindu nationalist supporters. In the end, a White House spokesperson, John Kirby, denounced the harassment as “antithetical to the principles of democracy.”

Modi has received warm, enthusiastic welcomes everywhere from Sydney and Paris to Washington. In every country he visits, Modi talks up India as a beacon of democracy, plurality and religious tolerance. But as India prepares for elections in 2024, and Modi expects to return to office for a third consecutive five-year term, the country is teetering between its constitutional commitment to secular democracy and the BJP’s ideological commitment to its vision of India as a Hindu nation.   
In a sharply worded critique of Modi’s state visit to the U.S., author Arundhati Roy, writing in The New York Times, noted that the State Department and the White House “would have known plenty about the man for whom they were rolling out the red carpet.” They might, she wrote, “also have known that at the same time they were feting Mr. Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in northern India.”

Roy was referring to the right wing Hindu rallies in Uttarakhand. On May 29, a thousand people marched across Purola, chanting “Jai Shri Ram” — a phrase once used as a greeting between observant Hindus that has in the recent past become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists. During the rally, the storefronts of Muslim-run shops were defaced and property was damaged. The police, walking alongside the mob, did nothing to stop the destruction. Several local BJP leaders and office-bearers participated in the march. A police official later told us that the rally had been permitted by the local administration and the town’s markets were officially shut down to allow for the demonstrations.

As the marchers advanced through the town’s narrow lanes, Ashraf said they intentionally passed by his home. His family, one of the oldest and most well-established Muslim families in Purola, has run a clothing shop in Purola for generations. Ashraf was born in the town and his father moved to Purola more than 40 years ago. 

“They came to my gate and hurled abuse,” he said. “Drive away the love jihadis,” the crowd screamed. “Drive away the Muslims.” 

Among the slogans was a particularly chilling one: “Muslim mukt Uttarakhand chahiye.” They wanted an Uttarakhand free of Muslims, they said in Hindi. A call, effectively, for ethnic cleansing. 

Ashraf’s three young children watched the demonstration from their window. “My 9-year-old,” he told us, “asked, ‘Papa, have you done something wrong?’”

Forty Muslim families fled Purola, a little under 10% of its population of 2,500 people. Ashraf’s was one of two families who decided to stay. “Why should I leave?” he asked. “Everything I have is here. This is my home. Where will I go?”

The campaign in Purola spread quickly to other parts of the state. On June 3, a large rally took place in Barkot, another small mountain town in Uttarakhand, about an hour’s drive from Purola. Thousands marched through the town’s streets and neighborhoods as a loudspeaker played Hindu nationalist songs. “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega, Ram Rajya Ab Aayega” — Every House Will Fly the Hindu Flag, Lord Ram’s Kingdom Is Coming. 

Muslim shopkeepers in the town’s market, like the Hindu shopkeepers, had pulled their shutters down for the day, anticipating trouble at the rally. As the mob passed by the shops, they marked each Muslim-run shop with a large black X. The town’s Muslim residents estimate that at least 43 shops were singled out with black crosses. Videos taken at the rally, shared with us, showed the mob attacking the marked-up Muslim shops to loud cheers from the crowd. The police stood by and watched. 

One Muslim shopkeeper, speaking anonymously for fear of retribution, described arriving at his shop the next day and seeing the large black cross. “My first thought was ‘Heil Hitler,’” he said. “I have read Hitler’s history. That’s how he had marked out Jews. It is the same strategy. That’s how we are being identified.”

We spoke to dozens of people who identify with and are members of Hindu nationalist parties, ranging from Modi’s BJP to fringe, far-right militant groups such as the Bajrang Dal, analogous in some ways to the Proud Boys. Again and again, we were told that just as “Muslims have Mecca and Christians have the Vatican,” Hindus need their own holy land. Uttarakhand, home to a number of important sites of pilgrimage, is, in this narrative, the natural home for such a project —if only, the state could rid itself of Muslims, or at the very least monitor and restrict their movement and forbid future settlement. Nearly 1.5 million Muslims currently live in Uttarakhand, about 14% of the state’s entire population, which exactly reflects the proportion nationally. 

Hindu nationalists told us how they are working to create and propagate this purely Hindu holy land. Their tactics include public rallies with open hate speech, village-level meetings and door-to-door campaigns. WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube are essential parts of their modus operandi. These were tools, they said, to “awaken” and “unite” Hindus. 

Their attempts to portray Muslims as outsiders in Uttarakhand dovetails with a larger national narrative that Hindus alone are the original and rightful inhabitants of India. The BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, argues that India is indisputably a “Hindu rashtra,” a Hindu nation, nevermind what the Indian constitution might say.

With a population of 11.5 million, Uttarakhand stretches across the green Himalayan foothills. It is a prime tourist destination known for its imposing mountains, cascading white rivers and stone-lined creeks. It is home to four key Hindu pilgrimage sites — the sources of two holy rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna; and Kedarnath and Badrinath, two temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu respectively. Together, these four sites, high up in rugged mountain terrain, form a religious travel circuit known as the Chota Char Dham. According to state government figures, over 4 million pilgrims visited these sites in 2022 alone. Downhill, Haridwar, a town on the banks of the Ganges, is of such spiritual significance that Hinduism’s many seers, sages and priests make it their home. For Hindus in north India, Uttarakhand is the center of 4,000 years of tradition.

The state of Uttarakhand is also one of India’s newest — formed in November 2000, carved out of Uttar Pradesh, a huge, densely populated north Indian state. Its creation was the result of a long socio-political movement demanding a separate hill state with greater autonomy and rights for its many Indigenous peoples, who form just under 3% of the state’s population and are divided into five major tribal groups. These groups are protected by the Indian constitution, and their culture and beliefs are distinct from mainstream Hindu practice. But over the last decade, Uttarakhand has seen its identity shift from a mountain state created to better represent its Indigenous population to one molded and marketed primarily as “Dev Bhoomi,” a sacred land for Hindus. 

Since becoming prime minister, Modi has made at least six trips to the state’s key pilgrimage sites, each time amidst much hype and publicity. In May 2019, in the final stages of the month-long general election, Modi spent a day being photographed meditating in a remote mountain cave, less than a mile from the Kedarnath shrine. Images were beamed around the country of Modi wrapped in a saffron shawl, eyes closed, sitting cross-legged atop a single wooden bed. The symbolism was not lost on Hindus — the mountains and caves of Uttarakhand are believed to be the abode of the powerful, ascetic Shiva, who is often depicted in deep meditation on a mountain peak. 

Like other Muslims in Purola, Zahid Malik, who is a BJP official, was also forced to leave his home. We met him in the plains, in the town of Vikasnagar, to where he had fled. He said Hindus had threatened to set his clothing shop on fire. “If I, the BJP’s district head, face this,” he told us, “imagine what was happening to Muslims without my connections. For Hindus, all of us are jihadis.” 

Malik emphasized that Muslims have lived for generations in the region and participated in the creation of Uttarakhand. “We have been here since before the state was made,” Malik told us. “We have protested. I myself have carried flags and my people have gone on hunger strikes demanding the creation of this state, and today we are being kicked out from here like you shoo away flies from milk.”

For Malik, the irony is that it is members of his own party who want people like him out of Uttarakhand. 

Ajendra Ajay is a BJP leader and the president of the Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, an influential post in a state dominated by the pilgrimage economy. “In the mountain regions, locals are migrating out,” he told us, “but the population of a certain community is increasing.” He means Muslims, though he offered no numbers to back his claims. Nationally, while the Muslim birth rate is higher than that of other groups, including Hindus, it is also dropping fast. But the supposed threat of Muslims trying to effect demographic change in India through population growth is a standard Hindu nationalist trope. 

“Uttarakhand is very sacred for Hindus and the purity of this land, its special religious and cultural character, should be maintained,” Ajay said. His solution to maintaining interreligious harmony is to draw stricter boundaries around “our religious sites” and to enforce “some restrictions on the entry of non-Hindus into these areas.”

On our way to Purola, the thin road snaking around sharp mountain bends, we stopped at another hill town by the Yamuna river. Naugaon is a settlement of approximately 5,000 people, many of whom are rice and potato farmers. The town’s center has a small strip of shops that sell clothes, sweets and medicines. In another era, it might have been possible to imagine a tiny, remote spot like this being disconnected from the divisive politics of the cities. But social media and smartphones mean Naugaon is no longer immune. While technology has bridged some divides, it has exacerbated others.

News of the public rallies in Purola in which Hindu supremacists demanded that Muslims either leave or be driven out spread quickly. In Naugaon, a new WhatsApp group was created. The group’s name, translated from Hindi, was “Hinduism is our identity.” By the end of June, it had 849 members. Deepak Rawat, a pharmacist in the Naugaon market, was among the participants. “People are becoming more radicalized,” he said approvingly, as he scrolled through posts on the group.

People we met in Naugaon told us there had already been a campaign in 2018 to drive Muslims away from this tiny rural outpost. “We chased them out of town,” they told us.

Sumit Rawat, a farmer in Nuagaon, described what happened. According to him, a young Hindu girl had been kidnapped by a Muslim waste-picker and was rescued by passersby who heard her cries for help. (We were not able to independently corroborate Rawat’s claims.) He told us that Hindus marched in protest at the attempted abduction. Their numbers were so great, said Rawat, that the rally stretched a mile down the market street. With little reporting of these incidents in the national press, people in cities are largely unaware of the rage that seethes in India’s rural towns and villages. “We want Muslims here to have no rights,” Rawat told us. “How can we trust any of them?”

In Dehradun, the Uttarakhand capital, we met Darshan Bharti, a self-styled Hindu “saint” and founder of the “Dev Bhoomi Raksha Abhiyan,” or the Movement to Protect God’s Land. He was dressed in saffron robes and a string of prayer beads. The room in which we sat had swords hung on the orange walls. His organization was behind the posters pasted on shops in Purola owned by Muslims, ordering them to leave town. 

On June 7, with the anti-Muslim demonstrations in Purola still in the news, Bharti posted a picture on his Facebook page with Kumar, the state’s police chief. Even as Bharti spoke of inciting and committing violence, he dropped the names of several politicians and administrators in both the state and national governments with whom he claimed to be on friendly terms. In the room in which we met, there was a photograph of him with the current national security adviser, Ajit Doval, among a handful of figures believed to wield considerable influence over Modi. 

Bharti also claims to have met Pushkar Singh Dhami, the Uttarakhand chief minister, the highest elected official in the state, on several occasions. He has posted at least two pictures of these meetings on his social media accounts. He described Dhami as his disciple, his man. “All our demands, like dealing with love jihad and land jihad, are being met by the Uttarakhand government,” Bharti said. Land jihad is a right wing conspiracy theory that claims Muslims are illegally encroaching on Hindu land to build Muslim places of worship.  

We met Ujjwal Pandit, a former vice president of the BJP’s youth wing and now a state government functionary, at a government housing complex on the banks of the Ganges in Haridwar. It didn’t take long for him to claim that Muslims were part of a conspiracy to take over Uttarakhand through demographic force. In Uttarakhand, he said, guests were welcome but they had to know how to behave.
Pandit claimed, as have BJP leaders at state and national levels, that no Muslims had been forced to leave Purola, that those who left had fled on their own accord. As the red sun set behind us into the Ganges, he said quietly, “This is a holy land of saints. Sinners won’t survive here.”

The post The movement to expel Muslims and create a Hindu holy land appeared first on Coda Story.

“Why are there no Belarusian food trucks at this festival?” an attendee asked her, his voice tinged with frustration. Tsikhanouskaya had been thrust into a global spotlight after she ran for president in place of her husband — who was jailed by the Belarusian regime in May 2020. She paused before answering: It was possible to talk to the organizers.

Three years after a brutal crackdown on peaceful protests in Belarus sent a new round of exiles into neighboring countries with a wellspring of energy for changing the regime, the mood at the festival was subdued. Dissidents who not long ago were anticipating another revolution had reevaluated the situation: Nothing major could be done for now. 

Hope for political change had run aground against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and, not coincidentally, a worsening climate of repression inside Belarus. Russia’s grip on the government of “Europe’s last dictator,” Alexander Lukashenko, has only tightened, with Moscow using Belarus as a staging ground for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Days before the festival in Poland, Wagner fighters had crossed into Belarus, invited by Lukashenko after their failed armed rebellion in Russia, a move that brought the Belarusian leader even closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Tutaka Festival was billed as the “festival of the awakened.” It had two aims: to celebrate Belarusian culture and to give Belarusian dissidents scattered across Eastern Europe an opportunity to meet up. Belarusian rock bands were the headline acts, but time was also given to panels on showing solidarity with the 1,513 political prisoners in Belarus and on renewing political activism. At the festival’s opening ceremony, an announcer observed that they were so close to the Belarusian border “that even the mosquitos were from home.”

Tsikhanouskaya had traveled to Poland from her base in Vilnius, the capital of neighboring Lithuania, to update exiles on her work. Since her forced departure from Belarus in August 2020, she has hosted informal Q&As on open video calls. Among the few hundred people who attended the festival on its opening day, around 50 huddled around to hear her speak. Following the first question, about the food trucks, another attendee asked if Tsikhanouskaya had visited art galleries on her diplomatic trips around the world. One person asked, as a joke, if she had a doppelganger, while someone else wondered if sanctions placed on Belarus should be eased in return for the release of political prisoners. There were no questions about when Tsikhanouskaya thought she might return home. 

A 38-year-old festival goer who was attending with friends after two years of exile said he no longer felt optimistic at all. “I don’t see real power in them,” he told me, referring to the opposition movement as a whole. “They do a lot to support our paperwork, but I don’t see how they can change the situation in Belarus. The Belarusian regime has become too strong.”

When Lukashenko claimed victory in the August 2020 election, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Although it was not the first time that Belarusians had come out to protest election outcomes, 2020 was different. This time, many more citizens had mobilized. Factory workers went on strike, with some even heckling Lukashenko, calling for him to “go away.” The protests rippled out from Minsk, the capital, to smaller cities such as Gomel. Members of Lukashenko’s security forces left to join the protesters. Even after Tsikhanouskaya left the country, the protests continued without her. By the fall of 2020, it looked like Lukasheko’s time in office could be up. But it wasn’t to be. With the help of Russia, which promised military support, the old guard hung on.

It wasn’t long before the security services responded with excessive force. According to Human Rights Watch, almost 7,000 people were detained and held under inhumane conditions. At least two protestors were killed. Thousands fled the country fearing arrest or imprisonment. The repression of democratic voices in Belarus continued long after people were forced to leave the streets. 

Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, responded to the protests by further unraveling the country’s constitution and centralizing even more power around himself — in what political scientists call a personalized dictatorship. In a move to ensure no one ever challenged his power again, Lukashenko had Belarusians arrested for sharing pro-democracy Facebook posts or even wearing white and red, the colors of the flag that came to symbolize the 2020 protest movement. Sanctions from the EU and the U.S. did not deter the regime. Instead, it leaned more and more on Russia for economic support. 

Dissidents and exiles looked on with mounting consternation as these events unfolded. Tsikhanouskaya initially encouraged people back home to publicly protest. But as the repressions grew, and as Russia invaded neighboring Ukraine, she began to tell them to wait for the right moment to trigger the next revolution. A few Belarusians ignored her calls and formed a group known as the “Rail Partisans” to disrupt Russian military supply lines in southern Belarus near the border with Ukraine. Members of the group were arrested and later sentenced to over 20 years in prison. 

The heady days of 2020 began to fade, and exiled Belarusians questioned the optimism that had once sustained them. Tsikhanouskaya was increasingly viewed as more of a celebrity symbol rather than a viable presidential successor. Challengers to her status, such as the former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko, set up their own organizations. Other figures, such as Valery Tsepkalo, another 2020 presidential candidate who initially fled to Moscow, became outwardly hostile, accusing members of the exiled opposition of financial mismanagement. All of this signaled to dissidents that key players in the exiled opposition were focused on self-aggrandizement and petty politics rather than the democratic struggle.

I learned about the Tutaka Festival from Anatoli, a 35-year-old dissident who fled Belarus two years ago after he was prosecuted on trumped-up charges for participating in the 2020 protests. (Anatoli asked that only his first name be used for the safety of family members who are still in Belarus.) He had grown up in the eastern Gomel region dreaming of a world beyond Belarus’ borders. His family’s resistance to Lukashenko in the mid 2000s had resulted in his expulsion from a local sports team and tarnished his future prospects. Having learned English, he managed to move to the U.S. as a student in 2009. He lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and California, working in IT and running profitable side hustles. But after a motorcycle accident, he returned home in 2017.

Anatoli felt he had come back to a country he could live in. Although Belarus still relied heavily on Russia for bilateral trade and loans to the tune of billions of dollars, Lukashenko had started to improve relations with the European Union. The Belarusian government didn’t pretend to share the EU’s democratic values, but it saw an opportunity to diversify trade away from Russia. In order to keep the door with the EU open, Lukashenko allowed some democracy-promoting organizations to set up shop.

There is an unwritten rule common to many authoritarian regimes: As long as you didn’t engage in serious opposition politics, the government largely left you alone. Anatoli continued to work in IT and began an import-export business. He built friendships and volunteered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit (while Lukashenko prescribed driving tractors and drinking vodka as a cure). But the 2020 election changed Anatoli’s tolerance quotient. “I had to get involved,” he told me when we met in Vilnius on a recent summer afternoon.

Shortly after taking to the streets in August 2020, he was arrested and thrown into Minsk’s notorious Okrestina jail for three days, where he was kept in a 215-square-foot cell with 80 other people. Upon his release, he went back onto the streets and attended protests most Sundays.

Anatoli was enamored by the unity shown by Belarusians. “I had faith when I went to the protests, I believed that something could change,” he told me. But he was targeted by security forces again and, in mid-2021, he left the country. 

From the relative safety of Lithuania, Anatoli looked around at the world of the exiled opposition. What he saw were fractured and bickering groups, a situation he likened to Ivan Krylov’s fable “Swan, Pike and Crawfish,” a tale of three animals who failed to carry a loaded cart because they were each spinning “backwards,” “skywards” and “towards the sea.” Everyone wanted to do the right thing, but they were consumed by infighting and one-upmanship. It was frustrating, Anatoli said, to see the energy that swirled around Minsk in August 2020 being weakened in export.

Also in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya was setting up her office. From the outset, her young team sought diplomatic and financial support from the U.S. and the E.U. and took meetings with high-level politicians, such as the former chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. When Lukashenko ordered the grounding of a Ryanair flight traveling through Belarusian airspace that was carrying Roman Protasevich, a dissident who helped to steer the 2020 protests, Tsikhanouskaya’s office kept up the pressure for Western sanctions. Protasevich later became a Lukashenko spokesperson, after trading his freedom for a change in his public position on the regime. But there were also rumblings from exiles, like Anatoli, suspicious that members of Tsikhanouskaya’s team were ultimately concerned with future-proofing their own careers.

A conversation with exiles about Tsikhanouskaya will almost always turn to Franak Viacorka, the 35-year-old spearheading her team’s agenda. Known for his intellect and for being a demanding boss, Viacorka has been referred to as the democratic movement’s gray cardinal, the shadow power in the office. It’s a characterization he rejects. He sees himself instead as the “toxic handler,” a term he came across when reading up on business management: a person who deals with toxicity, frustration and apathy. Viacorka is a smooth communicator — having frequently engaged with the international press over the past three years and worked as a journalist himself — and he speaks in neat, quotable sentences.

Viacorka told me there was more support for Tsikhanouskaya than two years ago but recognized that there was also frustration. “What people don’t understand is that Sviatlana and the office is only as strong as the people around her, as strong as the movement,” he said. He also told me that Tsikhanouskaya fights sexist headwinds, the idea “that a woman cannot be successful on her own accord.” 

We first met at the Tutaka Festival where he had camped with a group of friends and colleagues. In Vilnius, where we sat down to talk, Viacorka was in full work mode, getting ready for an event to commemorate the anniversary of the 2020 protests. He had been with Tsikhanouskaya’s office almost from the beginning, when he fled Minsk for Kyiv and then turned his attention to Vilnius to help Tsikhanouskaya establish herself in exile. Since then, Viacorka has “connected the dots,” helping his boss understand the history of Belarus’ opposition and chart the path forward. But to many on the outside, he seems opportunistic. In Anatoli’s eyes, “he’s been raised as a politician” and should be treated with caution. Viacorka told me he harbors no political ambitions.

There is a dizzying array of organizations vying for attention in administering the Belarusian opposition in exile. They include Tsikhanouskaya’s office, the Coordination Council, the United Transitional Cabinet and the National Anti-Crisis Management organization. To Anatoli, it seemed all these groups were too busy vying for power among themselves rather than bringing about genuine change to their country.

So, instead of becoming involved with any of them, he began to help out with grassroot organizations that centered around sport. He was convinced that a revolution in Belarus was not possible while the country was still traumatized by the events of 2020. With emboldened security services, he told me, people wouldn’t risk taking to the streets unless a monumental event took place. “The person who will actually change things will be an outsider,” he said. “Look at Zelenskyy, he worked under the radar for years.”

Since early 2022, Anatoli and his friends have turned their attention to helping Ukraine in whatever way they can. They organized aid and medical supplies for both the Belarusians and Ukrainians who were fighting on the frontline and for refugees. When the invasion began, hundreds of Belarusians rushed to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian army. Their hope was that a Ukrainian victory would also herald the end of Lukashenko’s rule, but as the war dragged on, the number of Belarusian volunteers is reported to have declined.

In fact, the exiled opposition’s relationship with the Ukrainian government has been strained since the early days of the war. The Ukrainian government has been slow to oppose Lukashenko, who has not formally joined the war. Lithuania’s former foreign minister, Linas Linkevicius, told me that Tsikhanouskaya’s early position on Russia had cast doubt in the mind of Ukraine’s leaders. “Tsikhanouskaya still had the hope of talking to Moscow during the 2020 protests and that is something that hasn’t played well with Kyiv,” he told me. 

In February, Zelenskyy’s advisor Mikhail Podolyak gave a damning critique of the Belarusian opposition, telling Lithuanian media that Ukraine does “not see any reason to develop these relations, because we do not see a clear anti-war activity on the part of the opposition.” When asked about a formal meeting between Zelenskyy and Tsikhanouskaya, Podolyak said that the Ukrainian president did not see value in it.

But since the invasion, Tsikhanouskaya has been fervently anti-Russia, arguing that only a victorious Ukraine can bring a new dawn to Belarus. When I met Tsikhanouskaya briefly on the sidelines of the Tutaka Festival, I asked her about her relationship with Zelenskyy. Before answering, she took a long pause, her deep brown eyes scanning for the right words. The relationship was changing, she said: “At the beginning, they didn’t even want to communicate with us because they didn’t want to irritate Lukashenko. But now, it’s evident that Lukashenko is on the side of the Kremlin.”

I asked her about the exiles and dissidents and their allegations of ineffectiveness leveled against her team. Tsikhanouskaya said that although momentum has waxed and waned over the course of the last three years, her team was working toward that moment when the Belarusian system is suddenly disrupted and an opportunity for real change emerges. Others in exile must stay the course and not wait for everybody else to do the work, she said. 

Anatoli gave me his response when I told him what Tsikhanouskaya had said. “The longer you’re in exile, the more you need to start thinking about where else you can build your life,” he said.

The post Belarusian exiles are running out of hope appeared first on Coda Story.

In the course of a 90-minute address, laden with emotion, exhortation and self-congratulation, Modi dwelled in passing on the continuing violence in Manipur, a state in the northeast of India. The “nation stands with the people of Manipur,” he said. A resolution to the problems, he added, could only be achieved through peace, a goal toward which the federal and state governments were working.

If the sentiments seem boilerplate compared to Modi’s usual mode of rhetorical excess, it is because the Indian prime minister has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid talking about Manipur. The small state, bordering Myanmar, has been in tumult since May, with at least 200 people killed during riots, over 60,000 displaced and with houses, churches and whole villages set ablaze.

As the leaders of the world’s largest economies arrive in India on September 9 for the two-day G20 summit, the culmination of India’s presidency of the intergovernmental group, Modi is expecting to put on a show. Delhi, or at least its most prominent areas, is being given a hasty and glitzy makeover. But the gleam might be tarnished by deepening sectarian rifts Modi’s government cannot appear to get under control and might indeed have helped unleash.

Even the Indian army, sent in to quell the violence in Manipur, has struggled to cope. The fighting has taken place  between the largely Hindu Meitei people of the valley and the largely Christian Kuki tribes from the hills. It began over a high court order that granted Meitei people certain affirmative action rights, despite their existing political and financial muscle in Manipur. The complexity of the conflict is exacerbated by certain land laws intended to protect tribal lands in the hills,which the Meiteis say unfairly confine them to the valley. 

It is true that animosity between the Kuki tribes and the Meiteis in Manipur dates back over a decade, but the inability of the authorities to calm the current violence is due to the perceived biases of the Meitei-led state government of Manipur. Its chief minister, Biren Singh, a Meitei, has as recently as July 1 — nearly two months after the violence began splitting his state apart — been taunting Kukis on social media. “Are you from India or Myanmar,” he responded to a critic on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, before deleting his post. 

Meiteis allege that an influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar, mostly ethnic Kukis, are upsetting the demographic balance of Manipur and claim that the newcomers are cultivating poppy fields in the hills as part of a rampant drug trade.

During India’s recent parliamentary session, between July 20 and August 11, the opposition brought a motion of no confidence against the Modi government. It was, as expected, easily defeated. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, holds a large majority and faced down a no-confidence motion in 2021 with similar ease.

Still, the motion provided an opportunity for the opposition  to criticize the government’s lack of response to violence in Manipur and to force both the prime minister and the home minister, Amit Shah, to address the issue. Shah, who continues to back Manipur’s chief minister Singh, parroted the line that Kukis, whose ranks were allegedly being bolstered by illegal immigrants from Myanmar, were largely responsible for the clashes. 

A mainstream Kuki group described Shah’s explanation as “extremely unfortunate as it is largely speculative with no valid proof or evidence.” It went on to say that Shah, by making his “abhorrent, nonsensical and disastrous” remarks, had chosen to “sacrifice the Kukis at the altar of Biren Singh.”

Meanwhile, on August 10, Modi responded in parliament to the no-confidence motion. He spoke for over two hours. It took more than 90 minutes for him to even broach the topic of Manipur, by which time the opposition had walked out in protest.

Modi blamed the Congress party, the main opposition faction, for having mismanaged the northeastern region of India since the country’s independence from the British Empire was won in 1947. The Congress has governed for about 50 of India’s 76 years as an independent country and has been caricatured by Modi as a party grown rotten on power and assumed privilege. 

Despite being prime minister for nearly a decade, Modi scarcely speaks without blaming the Congress and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, for holding India back from its rightful status as a global superpower. In May, while Manipur quite literally burned, Modi was on a triumphant global tour, including trips to Australia and the United States where much was made of India’s emerging power status.

“Blaming the Congress for everything that is happening in Manipur,” said Kham Khan Suan Hausing, a political science professor at Hyderabad University,  “is a bit far-fetched.” The “culpability and complicity of the BJP government,” he told us, “has to be called out.” Last week, Hausing was granted protection from arrest by India’s Supreme Court on charges that he had defamed the Meitei community in an interview with the Indian news website The Wire. 

According to Hausing, Shah has revealed his “gross incompetence and apparent lack of intelligence on the ground” by blaming the Kukis alone for the riots in Manipur. And Modi, he told us, “appears more interested in media management than in the structural causes of the violence.” These forthright views have made Hausing a target of what he calls a “smear campaign by vigilante trolls,” who have questioned his legal status as an Indian. It is a typical line of attack used against Kukis like him, Hausing says, who are derided as immigrants from Myanmar. “The smears smack of how ignorant and ill-informed public discourse is about citizenship.” 

Writing in the New York Times this month, the author Debasish Roy Chowdhury argues that “it’s a signature tactic of modern day despots: tightening their grip on power by redefining who belongs to the polity and ostracizing others.” Any perceived slight against Modi is treated by his supporters, and often by Modi himself, as a slight against India. 

During his long speech decrying the no-confidence motion last week,  Modi said, in Hindi, that the motion had little to do with violence in Manipur but was instead an attempt to “defame India.” They “have no faith in the people of India,” Modi said of the opposition, “in the abilities of India. They have tried in vain to break the self-confidence of Indians with this no-confidence vote.” 

In his Independence Day address on August 15, Modi took a similarly proprietorial tone, referring to Indian voters as his family and offering personal guarantees of Indian success. It was, said the longtime Congress politician and leader Jairam Ramesh, a “crass election speech filled with distortions, lies, exaggerations and vague promises.” He added that Modi had made an annual address to the nation by its prime minister “all about himself and his image.”

Sharad Pawar, another longtime politician and major opposition figure, told the audience at a public rally on August 14 that the “Modi government has been a mute spectator to what has been happening in Manipur.” Modi was initially jolted out of that studied silence by a video that made global headlines last month of two Kuki women in Manipur being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a Meitei mob. Even then, he did not address the conflict directly, only condemning the assault as “shameful.”

The BJP then asked X to take the video down because it was fomenting further violence. In fact, the BJP-led government in Manipur has imposed a shutdown of mobile internet services in the state, which has been in effect since May 3. At the time of writing, services have still not been fully restored, causing untold economic damage with little evidence that the shutdown has served its purpose of lessening violence due to misinformation and rumor-mongering. 

If it seems surprising that the leader of a democracy can get away with saying so little about a sectarian war breaking out in a state, it is in keeping with Modi’s tried and tested strategy. Sectarian identity is increasingly contested in the BJP’s majoritarian, Hindu nationalist conception of India. While Modi talks about democracy and pluralism as formative parts of India’s identity on foreign visits, at home, nerves are fraying.

On July 31, even as the opposition was insisting that the prime minister address violence in Manipur before the parliament, sectarian riots were breaking out in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital Delhi. A procession organized by a notorious Hindu nationalist organization devolved into street fights as it passed through the district of Nuh. Just as outsiders, particularly illegal Kuki immigrants from Myanmar, were blamed by the BJP for fanning the flames in Manipur, Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar were promptly blamed for the violence in Haryana.

Modi is fond of referring to “double engine” governments — his dream of BJP governments at both federal and state levels, working together to foster more development. Both Manipur and Haryana are run by BJP governments at the state level. The double engine seems to work, then, to reinforce the BJP’s political majoritarianism, its instinctive support for Hindus in any sectarian conflict. 

Peace and resolution in Manipur can only return, says Gaurav Gogoi, a Congress member of parliament, “when you can win people’s trust.” And that trust, he told us, speaking in Hindi, “can only be won when the BJP takes responsibility.” According to Gogoi, Manipur is still a tinderbox, despite Modi’s claims that peace is returning. He alleges that “6,000 weapons have been looted from police stations and not ordinary weapons but AK47s and bombs.” Gogoi, who led the no-confidence motion in parliament, told us that it is the BJP’s politics at both state and federal levels that has “split Manipur into two.” It is a pattern of division, he notes, that is evident in communal violence across India, including most recently in Haryana.

In his August 15 address to the nation, Modi said his time as prime minister had led to a “new trust, a new hope and a new attraction” toward India around the world. But if Modi is stoking hope abroad, there is evidence enough to say that he is stoking division at home.

The post Sectarian violence in Manipur is a mirror for Modi’s India appeared first on Coda Story.

“Prime Minister Modi,” declared Albanese, “is the boss!”

In the United States in late June, Modi’s visit was afforded the highest level of ceremony, with President Joe Biden describing the relationship between the two countries as one of “two great powers that can define the course of the 21st Century.” Just last week, Modi was feted at the Bastille Day parade in Paris and was awarded France’s highest national honor. It was, Modi tweeted, evidence of the “deep affection” the French hold for India.  

Beneath the diplomatic platitudes and expressions of abiding friendship, though, were rumblings of discontent with how Western governments are choosing to ignore the facts of Modi’s divisive reign in India.

To wit, public conversation in India and most of the airtime devoted to news is currently dominated by a yet-to-be-drafted law intended to replace India’s diverse, religiously-based personal laws with a set of laws common to all Indians.

The so-called Uniform Civil Code has hung in the background of Indian democracy for decades. It is routinely trotted out, even in the country’s Constitution, as the hypothetical answer to a bedeviling question — can a country of India’s cultural and religious complexity be both pluralist and governed by personal laws applicable to everyone? Rather than trying to legislate on marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance and other matters that fall into the realm of what is sometimes described as “personal” law, British India deferred to particular communities to resolve these issues according to religious custom.

When India became an independent nation, Article 44 of the Indian Constitution expressed the hope that the “State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, brought all Hindus, and by extension Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains, under a set of common laws. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis, and tribal peoples though, continued to govern themselves by their own separate sets of personal laws. 

In the decades since, the notion of a Uniform Civil Code, albeit without specifics, has frequently been invoked by governments as an ideal, a sympathetic means of uniformly applying personal laws to all Indians. Gender equality is frequently brought up as a likely benefit of a Uniform Civil Code. It has nonetheless been resolutely opposed and little progress has been made in conceptualizing an effective common law.   

Speaking in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last month, Modi chose to reopen the civil code can of worms. He alleged that people, particularly Muslims, were being misled by opposition parties about the nature of a Uniform Civil Code. Comparing India to a family, he asked if a household could effectively be run if different rules applied to each member.

This homespun truism was taken as an endorsement of a common law act. Though the government has offered no confirmation or timeline for a proposed Uniform Civil Code, its eventual application now is being treated as an inevitability. And it is a key principle of the Hindu nationalist ideologues to whom Modi is loyal. The panicked tenor of the subsequent debate shows how skeptical minority groups are of the Modi government’s intentions.

Apoorvanand, a professor in the Department of Hindi at the University of Delhi, told us that the “Hindutva movement has never shied away from saying that the Indian way of life is Hindu and that the culture of all Indians should be Hindu culture, no matter what faith they follow.” It is, he added, natural, that “all religious minorities see it as a threat to their own traditions and customs.”

The prominent Indian Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde, famous for his strong civil rights positions, describes the Uniform Civil Code as it is currently conceived as an “imposition.” Despite the contentious debate over a common code, almost nothing is known about the possible provisions of such a code or how it might be written. “What we are saying,” Hegde told us about the position of the Uniform Civil Code’s critics, “is ‘show us a draft, show us how you would harmonize differences.’”

Hegde is alluding to the suspicion that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is gaslighting minorities. The calls for a Uniform Civil Code — “one nation, one law” as the sloganeers put it — appear reasonable, even egalitarian. But the BJP’s anti-minority rhetoric has sparked fear that this is yet another dog whistle, another round of anti-Muslim posturing disguised as progressive legislation. 

“What the idea of God is to an agnostic,” wrote the Indian scholar GN Devy in the Indian Express, “the proposal of UCC is to India. The idea in itself is absolutely superb. But as soon as one starts placing it in context, it starts looking less so.”

It is an argument that might be extended to India itself, under Modi’s rule. The idea of India, as presented by Modi to receptive leaders across the world, is superb. But in reality it is unraveling. Abroad, Modi argues before crowds of worshipful Indian expatriates and immigrants that India is a beacon of inclusive democracy. At home, his words and actions hew closely to an ideological commitment to aggressive Hindu nationalism, often at the expense of minorities and vulnerable communities, particularly Muslims.

Confronted by a reporter at the White House in June, Modi — who in nine years as prime minister has not given a single press conference in India — insisted that “democracy runs in our veins,” and that India’s democratic values meant there was “absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Shortly afterwards, the reporter was viciously trolled online by Modi supporters who seized upon her perceived ethnic and religious background. The White House condemned the threats as “antithetical to the very principles of democracy.” The Indian government said nothing.

As Modi was showcasing India’s democracy and its potential as a steadfast global power, the northeastern state of Manipur was burning in riots that have led to the deaths of at least 150 people since May and displaced over 50,000. The cause — ethnic and religious violence catalyzed at least in part by the policies of the state’s majority-BJP government.

On July 13, the day before Modi was paraded across Paris on Bastille Day, the European Parliament called on the Indian government to respond to the violence in Manipur “in line with their international human rights obligations.” But Modi has remained largely silent about the civil war-like conflict in Manipur. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing French politician who has run unsuccessfully in the last three French presidential elections, said Modi was showing disdain for the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that were celebrated on Bastille Day.

The Uniform Civil Code is being promoted as necessary to consolidate equality and fraternity in India. But with little clarity about the substance of the law, Modi’s calculated references to the code have served only to generate more anxious talk about fault lines. Hegde, the Supreme Court lawyer, says that the common law debate had so far singularly failed to address the essential question: “As a new country, as a constitutional democracy post-1950, what kind of a nation are we building?”

India, Hegde told us, could choose a more harmonious path of seeking to accommodate difference. Or it could go down the path of “forcible integration, like the Han homogenization that happened in China.” He is referring to a systematic erasure of plurality that in effect turns India into a Hindu nation, a stated aim of Modi-supporting Hindu nationalists. 

According to Aakar Patel, the former head of the Indian chapter of Amnesty International — which stopped its operations in India in 2020 because of what Amnesty described as an “incessant witch hunt” against its staff and affiliates — the “BJP itself admits it’s going to exclude large parts of the country from the Uniform Civil Code.” 

Fearing a backlash from communities with special interests, Sushil Modi, a BJP member of parliament and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Law and Justice, has said that tribal groups in the Northeast region and other areas should be exempt from any uniform code. As Patel told us though, “if there’s meant to be ‘one nation, one law’ and then you exclude the Northeast, you’re saying the Northeast is not part of the country.”

Patel insists that the Uniform Civil Code only reflects the BJP’s “negative single point agenda against minorities, particularly Muslims.” Indeed, much of the actual discussion about bringing Indians under a common law, in the absence of a draft bill, has revolved around Muslim polygamy and divorce practices. Sara Ather, a Delhi-based writer and commentator told us that the renewed interest in the Uniform Civil Code among Hindu nationalists was “yet another attempt to make the private realm of the Muslim woman a matter of never-ending public scrutiny and debate.” It has, she argues, “nothing to do with the upliftment of Muslim women but is only a tactic to establish that she needs intervention.”

The Law Commission of India has extended the deadline for public comment on the idea of a Uniform Civil Code to July 28, having already received over five million responses. In its letter to the Law Commission, a prominent Indian Muslim group wrote that the issue of a Uniform Civil Code was being used as a “lightning rod for polarization.” Some BJP governed states, particularly Uttarakhand — a small, mountainous state that is perhaps the earliest adapter of Hindu nationalist initiatives — have already announced their intent to draft a Uniform Civil Code.

It can be argued that without a national draft bill or any basis for a serious discussion in India about the shape of such a code, the polarization that its critics fear has already been achieved. And to Western leaders so eager to embrace Modi, the question will have to be put again, how long can they ignore the Hindu nationalist project to change the constitutional nature of a secular, pluralist India?  

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Three of the books, including the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Maus,” were flagged for review by the Nixa school board for potentially violating a new Missouri law that makes it illegal for school officials to provide minors with sexually explicit material. Librarians and educators who run afoul of the rule, which applies primarily to materials with strong visual components, like graphic novels and illustrated books, can face up to a year in prison and up to $2,000 in fines. The law did not apply to the other four books under consideration, which were flagged by community members for review by the board.

As I reported in April, Missouri’s law is part of a growing national movement, led by conservative parents’ rights groups, aimed at restricting access to books about gender, sexuality and race in public schools. In the first six months of the 2022-23 school year, state and local policymakers banned 874 books from classrooms and school libraries across the U.S., according to the nonprofit PEN America, which ranks Missouri as one of the nation’s top book-banning states. Since Missouri’s sexually explicit material law was enacted in August 2022, librarians fearful of criminal prosecution have removed nearly 300 titles from school library shelves.

In Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high schoolers decided to fight back against local efforts to ban books. Over the last 18 months, this student movement has led a campaign to defend books under siege by reading challenged titles, surveying students about their support for book bans and speaking up in support of contested books at school board meetings. Two of these students — Meghana Nakkanti and Glennis Woosley — attended the Nixa board’s June 20 meeting, where school officials voted on whether the Missouri law applied to three graphic novels: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir “Maus,” an illustrated adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets,” a coming-of-age autobiography by Craig Thompson. The board ultimately voted to retain “Maus” but decided to ban the other two books as well as four text-only novels that parents and community members challenged. 

What is it like to be at the frontlines of one of the nation’s most divisive culture war battles? I spoke to Nakkanti and Woosley to find out and to ask what they have learned from the rage of the book banners. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both of you attended the June 20 meeting. The board decided not to ban “Maus,” but they did choose to ban “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Blankets.” The board also banned the young adult novel “Unpregnant,” which is about pregnancy and abortion, and the children’s book “Something Happened in Our Town,” which is about police brutality. Which of these books generated the most conversation? 

Woosley: The conversation on “Unpregnant” was long. It’s the story of a girl, coming from a Christian conservative family, finding out that she is pregnant, and she’s a teenager. And so she and her friend try to get an abortion for her, and it takes place in Missouri in a very similar town as Nixa. So that’s why this book is so big and important around here. And she has to go to New Mexico to get an abortion. It’s a comedic book. And a lot of school board members were saying that they were taking the subject of abortion and making it light-hearted and normalized in ways they didn’t agree with. That was the main thing they talked about. Some of them also said that it was encouraging abortion, and they didn’t want students to be encouraged to have abortions. 

Did any students speak up? Was there space for that? 

Nakkanti: During their deliberation process, we were just flies on the wall. We weren’t allowed to say anything. But it was a very random conversation. One of the school board members took issue with the fact that Planned Parenthood is mentioned throughout the book and proceeded to describe how Planned Parenthood was created by a eugenicist. This was a fictional book, and it was like, that point has little to no pertinence to the subject matter at hand. And the same school board member took issue with the fact that there were no books about teenage girls who were pregnant and went to pregnancy centers. It was very bizarre. 

Woosley: She specifically had this mindset of, ‘there are books that are anti-police.’ So she was saying, ‘Why don’t we have books that are pro-police in our library if we have a book like that?’ 

Proponents say that the whole point of this law is to protect students from explicit sexual material. You are students. What’s your take? 

Woosley: I don’t like the law because it’s extremely vague. And because of that, what I don’t like is that some of these books that I am actually interested in reading I’m being restricted from reading. Thankfully, I come from a family that can provide me with those books. But I know a lot of my friends can’t do that. That’s why I don’t like the law, and I don’t think it’s benefiting us. It’s restricting people who want to read books from reading them. 

Nakkanti: I think the student body acknowledges that most of us don’t read. As high schoolers, we’re so busy with life and homework that we often don’t find the time to read. We say this all the time: Why do these people care so much? There are all these adults who probably have never even set foot in the high school or who have kids that are eight, who won’t be in the high school for six years, worried about this book that they think these kids are reading. It’s really not that serious.

Glennis, you will be a sophomore next year. You’re on break, you didn’t have to go to a long school board meeting over the summer. What’s motivating you to become involved in this? 

Woosley: My dad is a member of U-Turn in Education, which is one of the parent groups around here that is pro-books. And when I got into my freshman year in high school, I knew all about what was already happening. I heard about how all these students were going to meetings and speaking and keeping up with what has been happening. So I thought, I want to go and I want to try to help. Even if more books get banned, at least students are speaking out against what is happening. I think there’s real value in student voices being heard. 

Meghana, you’re going to go to college next year in another state. If you want to leave all of this behind, you probably could. I’m curious what you’re taking from this situation with you. 

I think the biggest thing that I’ve walked away with is the fact that speaking out isn’t always easy. And I know that a lot of people who live in environments where student advocacy is very welcome can’t necessarily relate to that reality. But here, some of us have to see if we’re being followed on the way home from board meetings. That’s not a reality for so many of the other school districts that we’ve been hearing about. Because they are in these urban centers that are primarily filled with groups that agree with them. 

I don’t think we’ve had a single win. We go to these meetings and we speak, and we lose every single time. But we show up anyway because we show up on principle. The school knows that there’s attention on them. Not only do we pay attention, but the country is paying attention as well.

You say you haven’t had any wins, but the board could have banned all the books.

Nakkanti: I guess they could have, but I think they’re trying to make everybody happy. Now it’s become very much like a two-party system in the worst way, where the individuals that need to be heard in my opinion — the students — are being completely disregarded because the board wants to appease these two pro- and anti-book-banning adult groups. Two groups that can vote and use their dollars to support their reelection campaigns. So it just becomes this game of politics with our library. It’s frustrating, but I guess it’s a microcosm of Washington.

At the same time, this spotlight on students can be sort of a double-edged sword. Meghana, you said some students have to worry about being followed home from school board meetings. Can you talk more about the pressures students have faced from adults because of their advocacy?

During the board’s May 2022 meeting, an adult came up to a person who was 16 at the time and told her that he could easily find her address and that she should ‘watch out.’ At this meeting, there was booing, jeering and clapping. Some of my friends weren’t sitting with students, and that’s where we heard all of this horrible commentary that these adults were making about kids who were minors at the time. I don’t think we took it too personally because they’re like 50 years old, and they’re making fun of children. So ultimately, we’re still winning. These adults can’t figure out how to process their frustration in a manner that doesn’t degrade the existence of other people.   

I think that meeting really damaged the credibility of the pro-book-banning folks because they were yelling at and threatening children. While there are some voices on the book-banning side that are loud, angry and even violent, I think there are a lot of good people who are pro-book ban but might be misguided. I think it’s made me more empathetic in many ways. I believe that the vast majority of these people are just fighting for something they believe but don’t acknowledge the harm of their actions. 

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“People here, local people, just don’t take it very seriously,” said Jambey Wangdi as he sipped on some fresh watermelon juice in a hotel in Tawang, a town in the state of Arunachal Pradesh that sits on India’s jagged eastern Himalayan border with China. He punctuated these words with a phlegmatic shrug. I had asked him how Arunachali people feel about being on the frontline of an intense, intractable and very current border dispute between two nuclear powers.

On June 21, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began a four-day “state visit” to the United States — an event that is slightly more ceremonial than an “official” visit and an honor typically reserved for close allies. High on the agenda will be both countries’ strategic need to counter China’s economic and military might and its regional assertiveness. India is being talked up by the Biden administration as the “cornerstone of a free, open Indo-Pacific.” But as the U.S. and India grow closer, the latter’s diplomatic relations with China have nosedived. “This is the worst time I’ve seen in my living memory in I-C relations,” tweeted Nirupama Menon Rao, the former Indian ambassador to both China and the United States. “And I’m not exaggerating. It’s serious.” 

On the eve of his visit to the U.S., Modi told the Wall Street Journal in a rare interview, that for “normal bilateral ties with China, peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential.”  Last month, I traveled to  Tawang, which sits 10,000 feet above sea level and about 20 miles from Bum La Pass, the border post between India and Chinese-occupied Tibet. China has long claimed Tawang, a center of Tibetan Buddhism, as rightfully Chinese. I met Wangdi at a ritzy resort on the city’s outskirts. A high-ranking functionary in the Arunachal Pradesh government, he was keen to impress upon me the patriotism of people in the state. “Physically we may look a bit different, the shape of our eyes may be different,” he told me. “But emotionally, mentally, we really consider ourselves to be true Indians.”

According to Wangdi, the Indian government’s focus on improving infrastructure in the northeast of the country means that Arunachal Pradesh and Tawang in particular are booming. As I drove up to Tawang from the plains on freshly paved roads, evidence was everywhere. Unfinished construction, scattered outcroppings of concrete mushrooms, marred the mountainscape. 

Even the hotel in which we sat was still only half-built. The yet-to-be-installed picture windows in yet-to-be-finished rooms will look out on a famous 17th century Buddhist monastery. Future guests will also see the 30-foot high gilded Buddha that towers over Tawang, a giant looking down on Lilliput.

It was an overcast day in the middle of May when we spoke, the air heavy with the promise of rain. Wangdi leaned back in his chair, every inch the local grandee, self-assured and hospitable. “As far as tourism potential goes,” he told me, “Tawang is at the very top.”

He says the speed and purpose with which Modi’s government is developing Arunachal Pradesh, gradually making the state accessible by air, rail and road, is guaranteed to create economic opportunities and to match the impressive progress on China’s side of the border. Oken Tayeng, a successful tour operator, told me that Arunachal Pradesh was now “at a crucial threshold.” The state, he said, “can still decide the kind of tourists it wants to attract.” He cites neighboring Bhutan as a model for “how to bring in high-quality tourists with little environmental impact.” 

But Tawang is not there yet. The rampant building spree appears ad hoc and unregulated amidst the coniferous hills and cascading waterfalls. Wandering through the center of Tawang — its shabby streets similar to those in dozens of other small Indian hill towns, with tourists from Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra haggling with vendors in Hindi — it is hard to understand why China believes that most of Arunachal Pradesh, and certainly all of Tawang, is theirs.

India’s traditional neighboring rival has been Pakistan. But it is India’s burgeoning rivalry with China that preoccupies security analysts, as the two Asian behemoths, particularly over the last three years, have become embroiled in a bitter, and at times violent, standoff along their 2,100-mile border. Neither country appears willing to take a step back or disengage. 

Though Tawang has been administered by independent India for 72 years now, China maintains that the town is culturally and historically a part of Tibet and therefore Chinese territory. Since 2020, China is estimated to have occupied almost 1,000 square miles of previously Indian-controlled territory in border regions. Satellite images show Chinese-built bridges, roads and watchtowers stretching several miles into what was commonly considered the Indian side of the so-called “Line of Actual Control.” 

Prime Minister Modi has vociferously denied any concession of territory to China. In June 2020, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought in the western Himalayan region of Ladakh, in the Galwan Valley. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat. They “have been martyred,” said Modi at the time. “But those who dared Bharat Mata (Mother India), they have been taught a lesson.” Such was the current strength of the Indian army, he added, that “no one can eye even one inch of territory.”

China did not officially disclose any casualties. It was the first loss of life for Indian and Chinese troops on the border since 1975. Another brawl broke out in the final weeks of 2022. On December 9, hundreds of Chinese and Indian troops faced off on the border near Tawang. Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh told the Indian Parliament that at least 300 Chinese soldiers had tried to cross over into territory held by India. The troops engaged briefly, with their fists and improvised weapons. Six Indian soldiers were reported to have been treated for minor injuries. To prevent fistfights from turning into firefights, India and China have had agreements in place for decades, committing not to use live firearms within a mile or so of the border. But both sides have now deployed arms, and as many as 60,000 troops each, to the border. The situation is “fragile and dangerous,” India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told the press.  

Ashok Kantha, a former Indian ambassador to China, says that China has been “pushing the envelope” on border issues with India for over a decade now, seeing what it can get away with. These “gray zone” maneuvers, falling just short of a declaration of war, he told me, are “typical of China’s pressure tactics and intended to make India pay a heavy price for border management.” Kantha, who now directs the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, was referring to the exorbitant costs incurred by India to keep additional troops in harsh and remote terrain all year round and the costs of building the infrastructure to prevent what he called China’s “salami-slicing” method of incrementally expanding its territorial claims.

Writing for The Caravan, an Indian English-language magazine, last October, Sushant Singh, a fellow at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, pointed out that “perceived signs of weakness vis-a-vis Pakistan and China are anathema to Modi’s strongman image.” So the Modi government, Singh added, has adopted the “undemocratic domestic strategy of keeping the Indian public in the dark” by restricting “access to journalists and blocking questions and discussions in parliament.” 

Instead, the government and the pliant mainstream media have chosen to hype Modi’s “friendship” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2014, when Modi became prime minister, the two famously sat together on a gaudy ceremonial swing in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. 

“Modi’s personalized diplomacy with Xi,” Singh wrote, “has been an abysmal failure.” Over the phone, Singh told me that despite Modi’s posturing about India’s status as a leading global power and Modi’s own status as a charismatic global statesman, the prime minister is fearful of escalating tensions with China.

It is an uncharacteristic diffidence. In February, India’s foreign minister metaphorically hoisted a white flag when questioned about border disputes with China. “As a smaller economy,” Jaishankar said, “what am I going to do, pick a fight with a bigger economy?” It was a discomfiting echo, from a key Indian cabinet minister, of the official Chinese contempt for India’s pretensions. “China,” Ashok Kantha told me, “sees its relationship with India through the prism of its larger rivalry with the United States.” 

Sushant Singh put it more bluntly. “China,” he said, “figures very highly in the Indian imagination. India hardly figures in the Chinese imagination.”

In the Chinese understanding of the global hierarchy, Singh told me, “India is too weak to be granted agency in its own right.” Instead, China thinks of its relations with India as a subplot to the main narrative: China plans to become the world’s preeminent power by 2049. As if to back up this reading, a major security conference held in Singapore in early June was dominated by talk of the rivalry between China and the United States. “A confrontation” between the two superpowers, said the Chinese defense minister, “would be an unbearable disaster for the world.” 

Talk of India, meanwhile, was relegated to a footnote. A Chinese colonel told journalists that India was “unlikely to catch up to China in the coming decades because of its weak industrial infrastructure.” In a dismissive aside, he asked: “When you look at the Indian military’s weapon systems, what types of tanks, aircraft and warships were made and developed by Indians themselves?” The answer is: none.

China’s confidence that it has the upper hand in its relationship with India is bolstered by the numbers. Its economy is nearly six times the size of India’s, and China spends about $225 billion on defense compared to India’s $72 billion.

It is India’s urgency in improving infrastructure in its border areas, in connecting once-isolated states like Arunachal Pradesh to the rest of the country, that accounts in part for China’s increased belligerence, Ashok Kantha told me. Back in Tawang, the construction equipment I saw strewn everywhere, the roads being scoured into the hills and the soldiers who outnumbered the tourists all told the story of India’s attempts to catch up to China.

Sushant Singh traces this development back to 2006, when the influential Indian foreign secretary at the time, Shyam Saran, rejected India’s prevailing strategy of treating its border areas as “buffer zones between China and the Indian heartland.” It was, Singh told me, “an ‘outpost’ outlook inherited from the British.” Instead, Saran argued that India needed to radically upgrade its capacity along the border. It needed to put down hundreds of miles of new roads, lay railway tracks and build bridges and airports. From India’s perspective, this necessary self-assertion in the border regions has revived arguments that had lain dormant for two decades.

While India and China may have been growing further apart for at least 15 years now, the deadly fight in the Galwan valley in 2020 marked the start of what Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar has said is “a very challenging and abnormal phase in our ties with China.” In 2022, China introduced a new border security law, which described the territorial sovereignty of China as “sacred and inviolable.” It also made it official state policy to continue to expand and support the construction of villages and towns along border areas.

India, again belatedly reacting to China’s initiative, announced its own “vibrant villages” scheme to build settlements in long-neglected, often poor and desolate border areas. China has reportedly already built some 600 villages in occupied Tibet. It took until 2023 for India to begin building its first “vibrant village” in Arunachal Pradesh. Home Minister Amit Shah visited the state this April to kickstart the program. “Whenever I come to Arunachal,” said Shah, “my heart is filled with patriotism because no one greets people here by saying, ‘namaste,’ they say, ‘Jai Hind’ (long live India) instead.” 

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman responded to Shah’s visit by saying it “violated China’s territorial sovereignty.” It was a reminder that China has no intention of relinquishing its claim to Arunachal Pradesh. While China claims the whole state of Arunachal Pradesh as its own, it is mostly Tawang that it prizes. “Tawang is indispensable to China,” a retired colonel in the Chinese army told the BBC in March 2023. In 2017, a former Chinese diplomat described Tawang as “inalienable from China’s Tibet in terms of cultural background and administrative jurisdiction.” He added that the “boundary question was not created by China or India, so we shouldn’t be inheriting it and letting the ghosts of colonialism continue to haunt our bilateral relations.”

It all started, as have many of the world’s present-day territorial disputes, when the British drew a line.

In 1913, negotiations began in Simla, the summer capital of British India, where administrators would retire to escape the heat of the plains. Attending this summit were representatives of British India, Tibet and the new Republic of China — founded after the revolution in 1911 that ended about 275 years of Qing dynasty rule and 1,000 years of Chinese imperial history. Tibet, much to the chagrin of the Chinese representative, was invited as a quasi-independent state. After 1911, the British considered Tibet to be under Chinese “suzerainty,” meaning that Tibet had limited self-rule.

Negotiations played out over several months. When they came to a close, the British representative, Sir Henry McMahon, had determined where the border lines should be drawn between China and Tibet and between Tibet and British India. But China and Tibet could not agree on their border, nor on the extent or nature of China’s so-called suzerainty over a Tibet chafing for independence. 

A document signed by the Tibetans and initialed by Henry McMahon set out the contours of the border line between British India and Tibet, without Chinese agreement — the Chinese delegate walked out of the conference in its final phase. China has since claimed that Tibet, as a Chinese protectorate, had no right to negotiate treaties on its own behalf. The line dividing Tibet and British India, which later became known as the McMahon Line, continues to be the basis of India’s territorial claims. 

The Simla conference ended messily in July 1914, as Europe found itself preparing for World War I. For two decades after the conference, the British authorities did nothing to enforce the McMahon Line. Tibet still saw its writ as extending through what was called the Tawang Tract.

By the mid-1930s though, wrote the journalist and historian Neville Maxwell, a British official named Olaf Caroe tried to “doctor and garble the records of the Simla Conference to make them support the assertion that India’s northeastern borderline lay legitimately just where McMahon had tried unsuccessfully to place it.” Maxwell is a controversial figure in India, largely because he blames India and its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, for forcing China into the month-long Sino-Indian war in 1962 by insisting on the legality of the McMahon Line and refusing to come to an independently negotiated border settlement. 
What Maxwell took at face value, the Indian editor Pradip Phanjoubam has written, was that “Tibet was Chinese territory all throughout history,” regardless of what the “Tibetans themselves think on the matter.”

India and China in fact did not share a border until October 1951, when the People’s Republic of China — itself only established by Mao Zedong in 1949 — officially annexed Tibet. The British, despite drawing the McMahon Line, had largely stayed out of Tawang, leaving it to be controlled by Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. But alert to the implications of Chinese aggression in Tibet, India sent an expedition to Tawang led by Major Ralengnao “Bob” Khathing who quickly and efficiently established Indian rule by February 1951. 

According to the scholar Sonia Trikha Shukla, Bob Khathing won over residents in Tawang, most of whom were part of the Monpa tribe, with his “tact, firmness and discretion.” He showed, Shukla said, the “benign, enlightened” face of the Indian administration some 37 years after Tawang was supposedly ceded to British India in Simla. China, perhaps preoccupied by the Korean War, didn’t object to India’s takeover of Tawang at the time.

But then, in 1959, there was a popular uprising in Tibet against Chinese control. Fearing arrest and possibly death, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism, escaped over the Tibetan border into Tawang. When I visited the monastery in Tawang, I saw photographs in the tiny museum of a lean, young Dalai Lama wearing a hat at a rakish angle that made him look a little like the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. 

The Dalai Lama, who has lived in India for over 60 years now, set up the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala in the western Himalayas.

“When the Dalai Lama and his followers fled to India,” wrote historian Jian Chen, an emeritus professor at Cornell University, China became hostile. Two “hitherto friendly countries,” he added, “became bitter adversaries.” According to Chen, when top Chinese leaders discussed Tibet in a Politburo meeting in 1959, Deng Xiaoping — who succeeded Mao in 1976 and transformed China’s economy — said that India was behind the Tibetan rebellion. China believed that the Indian government had allowed the CIA to train Tibetan guerillas on Indian soil, in the Himalayan town of Kalimpong. 

India, Mao argued, despite its non-aligned foreign policy, remained a slave to Western interests. “When the time comes,” Chen quotes Mao as saying, “we certainly will settle accounts with them.”

Those accounts were settled in 1962. While the rest of the world was distracted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the distinct prospect of the Cold War turning hot, a confrontation between India and China over border delimitations was becoming inevitable. Chinese forces crossed into Tawang on October 20, 1962 and overwhelmed the small number of poorly equipped Indian troops on the border. Prime Minister Nehru turned desperately to the United States and Britain for help. But before any international intervention became necessary, China called a unilateral ceasefire. 

After a month of territorial gains, China, perhaps concerned about the harsh Himalayan winter, perhaps fearful of American intervention, moved its troops back behind the McMahon Line. While China voluntarily retreated from Tawang and present-day Arunachal Pradesh, it retained control over Aksai Chin, about 15,000 square miles of barely populated, high-altitude desert, territory that India claims but that is of strategic value to China, connecting Tibet to the Uyghur Muslim heartland of Xinjiang.

During the 1962 war, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were removed from their homes and held in internment camps just because of the way they looked, much like Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II. Joy Ma was born in an internment camp in India in 1962. She wrote a book about the 3,000 Chinese-Indians imprisoned in Deoli, in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. I spoke to Ma, who now lives in California, and her co-author Dilip D’Souza on Zoom. Though the war in 1962 lasted only a month, Ma said, many “Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp.” Some died in the camp. “Some,” she wrote in her book, “were deported to China on ships — a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been.”

Ma told me that she grew up in Calcutta and had lived in India until she went to graduate school in the United States. After the war was over, her family couldn’t bring themselves to speak about what had been done to them. “The government was just so punitive,” Ma said. And, long after the war, even their neighbors would ostracize them. “People didn’t want to know us,” she told me, “didn’t want us to visit.” Ma is among a number of Chinese-Indians, most of whom have emigrated to North America, who are seeking an acknowledgement and an apology from the Indian government. 

It’s unlikely to come anytime soon. The war with China looms large in the Indian imagination — for decades after the war, the national tenor was maudlin, mournful, self-pitying but hardly introspective. India positioned itself as a victim rather than any sort of perpetrator. Apart from Ma and D’Souza’s book, there has been no public discussion of the internment of Chinese-Indians or contrition about the destruction of a once-thriving Chinese-Indian community. Only a few hundred Chinese-Indians are left in Calcutta, for instance. Yet every Chinese New Year the media descends on the city to broadcast pictures of dragon dances and celebrate the delicious, hybrid cuisine while resolutely ignoring the jailing of Chinese-Indians in 1962. Over the last three years, as India’s border quarrel with China rose in pitch and intensity, Ma told me, the small Chinese-Indian community has been reminded of its vulnerability and its perpetually provisional status in India. 

“The border,” Ma said, “is the reason for our misery.”

The aftershocks of the 1962 war continue to reverberate in India in other ways too. The abject defeat is a stick with which the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party, still beats Nehru.  The war is cited as Exhibit A in the BJP-led prosecution of Nehru’s alleged failings as prime minister. A common trope in the BJP’s narrative is that Nehru was too complacent and too weak-willed to effectively defend India’s borders against Chinese incursions. In December 2022, when Indian and Chinese soldiers brawled on the border near Tawang, the BJP chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu, offered some boastful reassurance at a private event. “It’s not 1962 anymore,” he said in Hindi. “It’s 2022 and we’re in the Narendra Modi era.” India could now be relied upon to keep China at bay. And part of how the BJP plans to boost India’s defensive capacities is to invest heavily in Northeast India.

While India prides itself on its linguistic and ethnic diversity, with its pluralism and democratic inclusiveness cited as major weapons in its competition with China, the far less palatable truth is that its union is fractious, riven with conflict and prejudice. In particular, the eight landlocked states of Northeast India, which share borders with China, Myanmar, Bhutan and Bangladesh, have been frequently at odds with the Indian mainstream.  

Modi himself tweeted, on March 26, that the “Northeast is witnessing all-round development. Once known for blockades and violence, the region is now known for its development strides.”

A little over a month later, on May 3, Manipur, one of the Northeastern states that Modi was referring to, exploded in ethnic and sectarian violence that has resulted in over 100 deaths. After weeks of silence, the Indian government moved 10,000 soldiers into Manipur to keep the peace. Still, deaths and cases of arson continue to be reported. Internet services have also been largely unavailable since the conflict began and, at the time of publication, had yet to be restored.

Manipur is a powder keg of ethnic resentment at least in part because the BJP’s Hindu-centric approach stirs up communal trouble, in this case between the largely Christian tribes in the hills and the Hindu Meitei people in the valley. In Assam, another state in the Northeast, the BJP’s flawed attempt to build a national register of citizens has left two million people, many of them Muslim, facing statelessness. 

Still, in Arunachal Pradesh, it is a common refrain that Modi’s time in power has coincided both with an acceleration in infrastructure building and a renewed commitment to the region. Modi himself has visited Northeast India about 50 times in nine years. The fruits of his personal attention are evident in the recent electoral successes the BJP has enjoyed there: Modi’s party is now the dominant political force in the region.

In the West Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh, I visited Thembang, an ancient Monpa village that is currently waiting to be awarded UNESCO World Heritage status. On the afternoon I was there, the village was deserted except for some thick-set mountain dogs and a drunk swaying precariously down some stone steps. Despite the poverty of the present-day village, the remnants of massive stone walls and gates betray a more salubrious past. For centuries, Thembang was a “dzong,” a fortified administrative and ecclesiastical hub. Dzongs have been a feature of Buddhist architecture since the 12th century, particularly in Bhutan, which also borders Arunachal Pradesh. They are places of local significance, places of business and bustle, politics and religion. 

Walking out of Thembang, I was stopped by Jambay. He only gave me his first name. Obviously prosperous and educated, he spoke fluent English and was eager for conversation with a passing stranger. His family line in Thembang, Jambay said, goes “as far back as it’s possible to go.” But, given the remoteness and relative lack of opportunity in the area, Jambay had been sent to school in Bangalore. He went on to work in the Indian civil service in Delhi. Now, Jambay told me, he had “turned full circle,” returning to his home village to work on a U.N.-sponsored conservation project. 

I steered our conversation toward his opinion, as an Arunachali in close proximity to the border, on China’s assertion that Arunachal Pradesh is Chinese territory. Younger people, Jambay said, “know only that they are Indian.” His grandfather’s generation, though, saw themselves as Monpas who were part of a sprawling Tibetan Buddhist land, their cultural totems being the Tawang monastery and the Dalai Lama’s seat in Lhasa. Until 1951, when China annexed Tibet, trade and travel between Lhasa and Tawang — thousands of miles of mountain wilderness traversed on foot and on horseback — was ceaseless, Jambay said.

In 1962, Jambay told me, Chinese troops passed through Thembang on the way to Bomdila, where they battled with the last of the crumbling Indian resistance. The war “was not much discussed” within his family, Jambay said, “because it was so short and most people escaped into Assam before the worst of the fighting.” The few who were “left behind,” Jambay told me, “lived with the Chinese soldiers.” They were “good to the locals,” Jambay said. “Maybe because they wanted to win the people’s hearts.”

But the Chinese soldiers, Jambay said, did not leave a favorable impression. “Indian nationalism flourishes in Arunachal Pradesh,” he told me, “because people resent the Chinese for how they treated the Dalai Lama and are grateful that India gave him refuge.” 

But there is, he added, also a new edge in people’s feelings about Nehru and the Congress party, which ruled India for more than 50 of the country’s 75 years as an independent nation. The Congress is now in opposition, a pastiche of the grand party it once was, pitching Nehru’s great-grandson into a losing battle against Modi, who has effectively styled himself as the destroyer of a complacent, English-speaking Indian elite, which clung fast to their inherited privileges.

Jambay says Congress was reluctant to build infrastructure in Arunachal Pradesh because it could also be used by the enemy, whether the Chinese or insurgents from within. “That,” Jambay told me, “is negative thinking, to not want to prepare yourself because you’re so worried about giving your enemy an opportunity.” Some of what Jambay refers to as “step-motherly treatment” is evident in the fact that, until 1972, Arunachal Pradesh was known as the North East Frontier Agency, an unlovely bureaucratic label that suggested that the region only mattered as a buffer between India and China. It took until 1987 for the Indian government to declare Arunachal Pradesh a fully-fledged state.

As for Nehru, Jambay says he “gave up on the Northeast in 1962 when he said, ‘My heart goes out to the people of Assam,’ after the Chinese took over Bomdila.” He is repeating, with conviction, the BJP’s main talkingpoints. The implication is that until the rise of Narendra Modi, the Northeastern states were not treated as fully Indian.

Any Indian visitor to Arunachal Pradesh will invariably remark on two things that appear to separate the state from its Northeastern neighbors. Pretty much everyone in the state speaks Hindi. And Arunachalis wear their patriotism on their sleeves.

Jambey Wangdi, the government official I met at the sparkling new hotel in Tawang, told me that people in Arunachal Pradesh are “taught Hindi right from their childhood.” The state, he said, “puts a lot of emphasis on Hindi speaking and Indianness.” Hindi has become a link language in a state with dozens of different tribes that speak in as many dialects. 

The Hindi spoken by Arunachalis, as Wangdi cheerfully admits, is not “grammatically perfect” and is spoken with a distinctive local accent. But it connects the state to the 650 million people in India who speak Hindi as either their first or second language. After the 1962 war with China, the Indian government made language integration a priority, promoting the study of Hindi in schools. Bollywood also hooked Arunachalis onto Hindi. “We love the songs,” Wangdi said, “we sing them all the time.” 

Throughout our conversation, Wangdi kept coming back to themes of Indianness and patriotism. He told me that his father was a junior officer in the intelligence bureau posted at the border in 1962. “You could make a movie about his life,” Wangdi said. Among the stories his father told about the war was one about Chinese soldiers helping farmers in Tawang to work their fields. “In the evenings,” Wangdi said, “the soldiers would gather people together and say, ‘Look at my eyes, look at your eyes. We’re the same. What do you have in common with those Indians with their big eyes, their big noses and their beards?’”

The point, for Wangdi, is that the Chinese soldiers thought external appearances were enough to engender solidarity and kinship. But they underestimated the Nehru government’s efforts to make tribal people, who were culturally Tibetan Buddhists and who were cut adrift in rough, remote terrain, see themselves as part of a vast Indian nation. 

Verrier Elwin, a British-born Indian anthropologist, advised Nehru on how to integrate the North East Frontier Agency and its unruly tribes into India. In Elwin’s slim 1957 book, “A Philosophy for NEFA,” he wrote: “Elsewhere in the world, colonists have gone into tribal areas for what they can get; the Government of India has gone into NEFA for what it can give.”

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian government, so repressive in putting down insurgencies in other parts of the country, including the Northeast, seems to have created genuine national feeling. At the monastery in Tawang one morning, its yolk-yellow roofs glinting in the sun, I watched as the young monks, straight-backed in their robes, sang the Indian national anthem. It seemed to me almost performative. But Tongam Rina, an editor at the Arunachal Times, told me that Arunachalis had been systematically and effectively “Indianized.” 

In school, she said, pupils recited the “National Pledge,” which begins: “India is my country / All Indians are my brothers and sisters / I love my country / and I am proud of its rich and varied heritage.” On WhatsApp, she forwarded me a recent tweet from the Arunachal Pradesh chief minister’s office, featuring a video of local schoolgirls singing a “soul-stirring patriotic song, filling the air with love for our motherland.” A hard-nosed journalist, Tongam told me that displays of patriotism should not mask the structural problems in Arunachal Pradesh — a lack of jobs, for instance, or the Indian government’s desire to mimic Chinese policies in Tibet by pursuing a narrow development agenda while ignoring its effects on the environment or on local people’s lives.

Nehru’s severest critics argue that it was his refusal to negotiate over the dubiously drawn borders bequeathed by the British Raj that pushed India into a disastrous war. The scars of that conflict mean that, despite the bellicose posturings of Modi and his right-hand man Amit Shah, the government has little desire to take on a militarily and economically superior China. But for at least three years now, both countries have been staring each other down. And there is little indication of when they will choose to return to the dormant, if unresolved, status that characterized their border relations for half a century after 1962.

Sanjib Baruah, a political studies professor at Bard College, told me that “relations between India and China have deteriorated during the last decade primarily because of global strategic realignments.” As it always has, China sees its relationship to India only in the context of wider Chinese geopolitical ambition. President Xi Jinping, Baruah said, has expressed his belief that the U.S. and its allies are conspiring to contain further Chinese advancement. “This is the context,” Baruah added, “in which China sees India’s growing closeness with the U.S. as a threat.” 

In February, two U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan resolution in the Senate “reaffirming the United States’ recognition of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as an integral part of the Republic of India.” The resolution noted that the U.S. “recognizes the McMahon Line as the international boundary between the People’s Republic of China and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.” China, said Baruah, the Bard professor, “probably sees the resolution as a provocation.”

The history of the McMahon Line, with the haphazard way it came to be an international border between India and China and the renewed fervor with which both nations claim Arunachal Pradesh’s status to be non-negotiable, is evocative of Benedict Anderson’s line in his seminal work, “Imagined Communities.” It is, Anderson wrote, “the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.” To see Tawang as an integral part of either India or China is a willful act of magical thinking.  

Before I left Tawang, I spoke again to Jambey Wangdi. It seemed he too had chance and destiny on his mind. “If the problem of Tibet could be solved,” he said, “whether it’s autonomy or a free Tibet…” He trailed off. Wangdi left the tantalizing prospect of a free Tibet unexplored. He didn’t speculate what that might mean for Tawang, which is closely connected to Tibet through their shared Buddhism. In 1683, the sixth Dalai Lama was born in Tawang, one of only two to have been born outside the precincts of Tibet proper. So even then Tawang’s geographical status, if not its cultural identity, was liminal — a peripheral place between other, bigger, more significant places.

It feels like a place that was designed to provoke arguments. Tawang’s value to both India and China is symbolic: It’s about geopolitics, strategy and national self-image. As a consequence, Wangdi pointed out, “the amount of money spent on the military on the border is enormous.” If you have a good neighbor, he said, “you can spend that money on health and education.” If you have a good neighbor, he laughed, “you can get some sleep at night.”

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For 40 years, Dragos Olaru has been paying his respects to the great Romanian cultural figures buried in his home city of Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine. With its decorative tombstones and earthy paths, the cemetery on Zelena Street is the resting place of ethnic Romanian artists, activists and intellectuals who defined their culture and defended it when outside powers encroached upon it. Although he met none of these figures — his “friends,” as he calls them — before they passed, Olaru feels he knows them intimately in death. He tells me that he is continuing their work.

He is also trying to protect these Romanian graves from actual destruction. Local Ukrainian authorities have decided to exhume the remains lying beneath some 200 of the tombstones on Zelena Street — which they say are unidentifiable — and then auction the plots. But Olaru sees the campaign as a way to “Ukrainize” the cemetery.

“They are doing this to remove the traces of us,” he told me, as we passed the grave of Romanian philologist and revolutionary Aron Pumnul, who advocated for the Romanian language to be written using the Latin alphabet, instead of Cyrillic, in the mid-19th century.

The fate of the Zelena Street cemetery is just one incarnation of wartime tensions between Ukrainians and ethnic Romanians, the country’s second-largest linguistic minority after Russian speakers. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, respect for the rights and interests of Western ethnic minorities waxed and waned as the new country struggled to fortify its self-image in the face of ever-present Russian influence. But the 2014 Maidan Revolution marked a turning point, providing a new impetus to protect the Ukrainian language and establish it as the country’s lingua franca. The subsequent ouster of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war between the Ukrainian government and Russian proxies in the eastern Donbas region left Ukrainians with an urgent need to define their day-to-day relationship with Russia and Russianness, and in turn, to define what it means to be Ukrainian.

The full-scale invasion in February 2022 brought a fierce embrace of Ukrainian culture and language. Yet while this hardening of Ukrainianness is clearly intended as a way to distinguish the country from its aggressor, minority communities in western Ukraine have become collateral damage. Linguistic policies aimed at strengthening Ukrainian are edging Romanian out of the public lives of many native speakers. And other moves, ranging from the exhumation of remains in the Zelena Street cemetery to political allegations against Romanian religious leaders, have left some ethnic Romanians unsure of their position in Ukrainian society.

Although Dragos Olaru was aggrieved by the events in the graveyard, which he sees as a mean-spirited move against Romanian culture, he still supports the Ukrainian state. “Putin is the biggest enemy of the world,” he said. I later learned that his nephew was serving on the front line in Bakhmut, more than 700 miles away on the other side of the country.

Ukraine has been home to ethnic Romanian, Hungarian and Polish communities since territorial lines were redrawn following World War I and World War II. Following Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, some 400,000 Romanian speakers became Ukrainian citizens, becoming a part of the nascent state’s heterogeneous social fabric. Through much of the 1990s, Ukraine was also consumed by economic turmoil, the result of hyperinflation coupled with rampant cronyism. Conversations about national identity were often relegated to the back burner as Ukrainians worked to keep bread on the table. When the economy stabilized in the early 2000s, the trickle-down effect was limited, and the country’s oligarchs continued to grow their power and wealth. Russia was ever watchful, supporting the campaigns of Russia-friendly politicians who would prevent the country from swaying too far west, toward the European Union and NATO. Whenever identity questions did arise, these lawmakers were eager to frame Ukraine in the context of Russia by highlighting the historical bond between the two countries. 

In Ukraine’s west, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian minority communities lived their lives largely in their own languages, often benefiting from the policies of Russia-backed politicians who, at Moscow’s behest, sought to protect the Russian language with moves that tended to benefit other minority languages at the same time. When pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych passed a language law in 2012 that gave minority languages, namely Russian, the status of a “regional language” in areas where 10% or more of the population did not speak Ukrainian, it was seen by opponents as an attempt to undermine Ukrainian. But the measure found support among minority language speakers in the west of the country.

Following the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s language issue took on a new urgency, and policymakers passed a series of laws to formally establish the use of the Ukrainian language in various aspects of public life, ranging from media to education to the legal system. In sum, these laws effectively dismantled Yanukovych’s 2012 language law. Its fate was finally sealed in 2018 when the Ukrainian Constitutional Court deemed the law unconstitutional. People who supported these changes argued that they would create a more cohesive Ukrainian society and lead to necessary improvements in the country’s struggling education system. 

But the wave of legislation set off alarm bells for Ukraine’s Polish, Hungarian and Romanian minorities. These communities largely understood the motivations for the changes but also saw them chipping away at their own languages and traditions and at the practical bridge that their languages offered to living and working in the EU. Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest stepped in, routinely chiding the Ukrainian government for not doing enough to protect minority rights. Supporting their pleas for a more considerate approach to the Ukrainian question was a report from the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s top advisory body on constitutional matters, that said that a 2019 language law passed in Ukraine “failed to strike a fair balance” between promoting the Ukrainian language and “safeguarding minorities.” 

Ukrainian authorities repeatedly argued that the changes were not an attempt to erode minority languages but rather an effort to buttress Ukrainian identity and introduce a sense of cohesiveness to everyday affairs across the country. And much of day-to-day life continued to play out in languages other than Ukrainian, including in Russian. Even today, while Ukrainian is the official state language according to the constitution, Russian is still the first language of approximately 20% of Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. 

But Russia’s incursions continued. In a 2021 speech that foreshadowed the invasion of Ukraine months later, Putin denounced the Ukrainian language laws and promoted the false claim that Russian proxies in the Donbas “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.” The speech highlighted the extent to which Putin sees respect for the Russian language as a key component in the bond between Ukraine and Russia — and as a pillar in Russia’s political strategy toward Ukraine.

Months after the first Russian tank crossed into Ukrainian territory in February 2022, the Kremlin used Ukraine’s language policies as part of a robust disinformation campaign to justify carrying out what has become the greatest land invasion in Europe since World War II. “The Russian language is banned in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the BBC in April 2022.

When it comes to Ukraine’s language battles, the most sensitive issue for Romanians is education. The village of Petrashivka lies an hour south of Chernivtsi, a stone’s throw from the Romanian border. There I met Gheorghe and Mihaela Lupu, a middle-aged married couple who have dedicated their careers to running the Petrashivka Secondary School. Nearly all classes for the school’s 314 students are taught in Romanian.

“We speak Romanian, but we are Ukrainian,” Gheorghe, the school’s director, told me. The presence of both languages and nations is evident at Petrashivka. As we walked through the school corridors with their lace curtains and reddish-brown wooden floors, the couple told me about Ukrainian and Romanian government support for their work. A grant from Bucharest allowed them to buy new tables for the Romanian history classroom. Next door, in the Ukrainian language classroom, a TV, chairs and other materials were brought in with support from Kyiv. When we stuck our heads into the classroom, the students greeted us eagerly. The teacher prompted a 12-year-old girl, Anastasia, to recite a poem she had written about the war. “I pray in my thoughts,” she said with zeal. “Bring peace on the earth, God! Have mercy on us, God! Save us from this war.”

Gheorghe said that parents were happy that their children could speak both languages fluently, as it opened up more opportunities for future studies in Ukraine and Romania.

This transition has been in the works since Ukraine’s 2017 adoption of an education law that set the country on a path for public secondary schooling to be conducted in Ukrainian. Heralded as a move to align Ukraine’s school system more closely with European standards, the law gives space for EU minority languages like Romanian to be taught as a second language. But for the students of the Petrashivka Secondary School, nearly all of whom speak Romanian at home, the implementation of the education law will be a significant change.

When I asked how they felt about the language change, the teachers were hesitant to share their thoughts. Gheorghe offered only this: “If the change is state law, we will do it. We live under Ukrainian law.”

Their acquaintance, Iurie Levcic, was much more forthright. Back in central Chernivtsi, sitting in the Bucovina Art Centre for the Conservation and Promotion of Romanian Traditional Culture, which the 54-year-old man runs, Levcic described what he sees as the quiet dissolution of Romanian culture in Ukraine. 

“They want to assimilate us, they try a total assimilation, starting with the schools,” he said. He excoriated the Zelenskyy government, arguing that officials were unwilling to meaningfully engage in dialogue with the Romanian community.

Levcic is not alone in his distrust of the Zelenskyy government. The current situation has also angered politicians in Romania, who feel slighted by Kyiv’s position on the minority issue despite Romania’s support for Ukraine in the ongoing war. Tempers flared in December 2022: The Ukrainian parliament adopted a law on national minorities to fulfill one of the conditions necessary to start negotiations for EU membership but did not take on board fully recommendations from the Venice Commission on the protection of minorities. Condemnation from Bucharest was swift and cemented the idea that, although Romanian speakers were not necessarily being targeted by Kyiv, they had become an afterthought in Ukraine’s corridors of power. Adding insult to injury, the move came months after Zelenskyy made a speech before the Romanian parliament, in April 2022, in which he promised to “start a dialogue” on a “new comprehensive agreement that guarantees the absolute protection and development of our national minorities” — a reference to the approximately 46,000 ethnic Ukrainians living in Romania. He reiterated this position to the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis in January 2023, after the two heads of state had a call on the issue. A read out from the call said Zelenskyy “expressed his full openness to identifying solutions, so that the Romanian community in Ukraine benefits from the same rights enjoyed by the Ukrainian community in Romania.”

Back in Chernivtsi’s City Hall, Iryna Tkachuk, the head of the city’s education department, took a more political stance. She defended the upcoming implementation of the education language law, arguing that it would ensure “minority speakers could have full access to university level education in Ukraine.”

The affinities of ethnic Romanian religious leaders have also come under scrutiny as Ukraine strives to shed its cultural ties with Russia. In Chernivtsi, many Romanians still worship in the Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Although the Church claims it broke off communications with Moscow in May 2022, months after the invasion, and denies being influenced by Russia, Ukrainian political leaders have trained their focus on church figures, keen to identify and sever any remaining ties to the Kremlin.

Sitting inside the Ascension Church on the outskirts of Chernivtsi, clad in black robes and a matching puffer coat, Father Pavel Paulencu told me he feels a crisis setting in. He worries it is only a matter of time before the authorities arrive at his door. 

“I’ve had people ask already why I’m doing a mass in Romanian in Ukraine,” he said. Ethnic Romanians make up 60% of his congregation, and Romanian is the language of priority for services. “I told them to go and read the history,” he said with a heavy sigh. “In church, it should not be politics, just God.”

Anxiety in Kyiv about ties between the Romanian religious community and Russia have been brewing for some time, but they reached a boiling point in late 2022, when Ukrainian Security Services (known as the SBU) raided the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, as part of a series of searches across the country. The SBU Telegram account reported that law enforcement officers found Russian passports and pro-Kremlin literature among the belongings of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina clergy. Soon after, citizenships of 13 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — including from the Chernivtsi-Bukovina Diocese — were suspended by presidential decree. In response, a Romanian cleric threatened to sue President Zelenskyy. The U.N.’s human rights office said that the nationwide SBU searches could “undermine the right to freedom of religion.”

In April 2023, a resident of the Chernivtsi region was arrested on suspicion of burning down a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the village of Milieve. In early May, prosecutors in Chernivtsi submitted to a court an indictment against the local Banchen Monastery, claiming that an assistant abbot helped men of draft age illegally cross the border. Ukraine’s wartime rules prohibit men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

The anxieties behind these actions by law enforcement have been exacerbated by the war. But they are not new. In 2019, politically-driven tensions within the Church led to a schism and to the establishment of the similarly-named Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which today has the full support of the Zelenskyy government. The schism was a blow for Putin, who sees the Russian Orthodox Church and its affiliates as the centerpiece of his notion of a “Russkiy mir,” or Russian world, the idea that all Russian and Russian-identifying people should be united. But for Ukraine, establishing a church independent of Moscow was seen as a move to not only distinguish the country from Russia but also to stymie the Kremlin’s ability to influence certain clergy. 

In the eyes of the Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church harbors a threat. But for the average ethnic Romanians, what’s happening to the Church is yet another way in which Kyiv is imposing upon their lives.

In a country traumatized by Russian war crimes, where people are struggling to survive each day, the space for debate on issues such as language and national identity is limited at best.

On the streets of Chernivtsi, one hears a steady mix of Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian languages, with most Russian speakers skewing older and Ukrainian ones younger. Although the war has hardened attitudes toward Russian speakers, there is no outward animosity toward the lyrical sounds of Romanian in daily life. 

And while the language issue has riled up politicians and activists, most Romanians I spoke to seemed more focused on ensuring that their families survive the war. Chernivtsi has been spared from Russian rockets, but the war remains ever-present. Ukrainian flags dot almost every door. Every morning, the city takes a brief moment of silence to honor the men and women on the frontline. And in a new graveyard on the city’s outskirts, the groundskeepers can be seen digging graves for the bodies of soldiers, returning home from the frontlines for the last time.

The post As Ukraine doubles down on its national identity, who is left behind? appeared first on Coda Story.

The conflict is rooted in ethnic and tribal tensions. But there is also an element of the religious division for which India, under the nearly decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become increasingly known worldwide. In India’s last population census, administered in 2011, Christians made up over 41% of Manipur residents. About half of the state’s residents are Hindus. Groups of mostly Hindu Meitei people from the valley clashed on May 3 with Christian tribal groups who live in the hills around Manipur. The Christians were holding a demonstration in defense of their tribal status, which they believed the more privileged Meteis were trying to usurp for themselves.

During the riots, public property and people’s homes and vehicles were set on fire in arson attacks reported across the state. According to church groups, about 120 churches were set on fire or otherwise destroyed.  

The 2022 edition of the annual U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, released on May 15, noted that the Indian government is among those that “freely target faith community members within their borders.” The State Department quoted the spokesman of a Christian NGO who described the situation facing all minorities as “unprecedentedly grave.” The Indian authorities have dismissed the report as “based on misinformation and flawed understanding.”

But Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition Congress party, said that “what is happening in Manipur is the result of the politics of hate.” He was speaking at a rally in the southern state of Karnataka just before state elections on May 10, 2023. “Manipur is on fire,” Gandhi said, “people are dying and the prime minister doesn’t seem to be concerned.” 

Modi has continued to remain silent throughout the weeks of violence in Manipur, even as the army has been deployed to quell unrest and an internet ban and curfew have been imposed. 

In Manipur, the largely Hindu Meitei people inhabit the valley area where Imphal, the capital city, is located. The mostly Christian tribes, like the Kukis and the Nagas, live in the hills. The people of the mainly Christian hill tribes say they can no longer live with the mainly Hindu Meitei people. 

Historically, Hindu Meiteis have dominated positions in politics and the state administration. Meitei is one of 22 official languages recognized by the Indian Constitution and the sole official language of Manipur. Two-thirds of the members of the Manipur state assembly, including the state’s chief minister, are Meitei. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, which promotes an aggressively Hindu nationalist agenda, holds power  at both state and federal levels. The BJP government in Manipur, led by chief minister Biren Singh, has been accused of favoring the Hindu Meitei majority and enacting anti-tribal policies such as converting tribal land into protected state properties. According to Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, the national affairs editor at the Indian news website The Wire, “the chief minister appears to be behaving like a spokesman of the majority Meitei community.” 

While the BJP government of Manipur has been accused of favoring the Meiteis over hill-dwelling tribals, the Meiteis have also been lobbying for tribal status. Last month, an order by the Manipur High Court gave the state government just four weeks to grant the Meiteis special tribal status. This status is necessary to access certain government-run affirmative action programs, including quotas for government jobs. Christian tribes, particularly the Kukis, have argued that the Meiteis already enjoy privileges in Manipur and that any extra privileges might hurt the tribes for whom affirmative action is necessary. 

The Meitei people have been demanding special tribal status because, they say, the hill tribes are able to buy land in the valley, while they are unable to buy land in the hills. The tribes, though, point to the greater wealth of the Meiteis, gained from living in the valley and in Imphal, Manipur’s capital. Were Meitei residents able to buy land in the hills, the tribes argue, the Kukis and the Nagas, among others, would find themselves priced out of their own lands.

In response to the court order, a tribal students’ union organized a “solidarity march” on May 3, which sparked violence, including an arson attack on a Kuki war memorial.

Hesang, a Kuki activist, told me that the memorial was an “important part of the community’s history.” He said that while the protest was peaceful, the burning down of the memorial was a “provocation that was seen as a challenge to Kuki history.” Manipur has barely been able to pause for breath since. 

On May 22, after relative calm appeared to have returned, army units had to quell violence that was reportedly directed at Meitei shopkeepers. Houses were set ablaze in the capital, Imphal, and the state was placed under curfew from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m., with the already existing ban on mobile internet services extended until May 26.

The violence in Manipur, despite all the deaths and damage, has received scant attention on India’s numerous mainstream cable news channels. But there has been plenty of debate about the situation in Manipur on social media. Inevitably, some of the online content has been misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories, which is why the Manipur government says it has banned mobile internet access. Despite the spread of fake news, a Meitei person who requested anonymity told me that “in a situation like this, when you are cut off from genuine sources of information, the imagination gives oxygen to rumors.” 

Some of these rumors have been spread by the BJP government itself. Though the recent violence began after protests against the High Court’s order to grant the Meitei people special tribal status, the government claimed it began because of its crackdown on illegal immigrants from Myanmar. These illegal immigrants, the government says, grow poppies in the hills to use in the drug trade.  

The people the BJP government refers to as “illegal immigrants” are actually refugees who fled Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. These refugees share the same ethnic background as the Kukis. Angshuman Choudhury, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told me that “there is a feeling amongst Kukis that their roots in Manipur are being questioned by both the state government and dominant civil society.” 

In March 2023, six Meitei student associations released a joint statement in which they accused “outsiders coming from the other side of Indian boundaries, especially Myanmar” of “encroaching on land which is owned by the state in the hills of Manipur.” These outsiders, the statement went on to conclude, represented a “never-ending threat to the indigenous people of Manipur.” A Metei activist, who wished to remain anonymous because they didn’t agree with some of the xenophobic rhetoric of the state government, told me that illegal immigration from Myanmar meant there had been an “unusual rise in the population of Kukis, and other communities in Manipur feel this is expansionism.” 

Kukis, the Meiteis say, fear that the BJP government will publish a National Register of Citizens in Manipur, just as it did in the bordering state of Assam in 2019. The much-criticized National Register is apparently intended to root out illegal residents from India. In Assam, though, it effectively stripped two million people of their citizenship, often on questionable grounds. 

Choudhury, of the Center for Policy Research, told me that in both Assam and Manipur,  BJP governments had introduced “a powerful regime of ethno-political protectionism based on a narrow and chauvinistic imagining of society.” He said there was a “subterranean attempt to reimagine and homogenize certain pluralistic ethnic identities, like Assamese and Meitei, as strictly Hindu.”

A member of the Indian Parliament from Manipur wrote to Modi, asking him to employ a “strong hand” to stop the threat of “Balkanization on ethnic lines” in Manipur. But it is arguably in the nature of BJP policies to exacerbate ethnic and religious divisions. Earlier this month, the writer Arundhati Roy told an audience at a literature festival in the southern state of Kerala that the BJP asking for votes was “like a lit match asking the firewood to ‘give us a chance.’”  

For three weeks, the BJP has been unable to douse the flames in Manipur. When will the prime minister take notice?

The post The BJP is failing to stop ethnic riots in northeast India appeared first on Coda Story.

Not long after, the armed men came to her polling booth and began ordering people to leave. Godwin, a first-time voter, was frightened and confused. A woman standing close by was in tears. She asked Godwin if she was Igbo. “They’re chasing Igbo people away,” she told Godwin. The mostly Christian Igbos comprise between 15 and 18% of the Nigerian population and are the third largest ethnic group, behind the Yoruba and the Hausa. 

Across Nigeria that day, there were many such incidents of ethnicity-based voter intimidation. The 2023 Nigerian elections were reported to have been so marred by violence and vote-rigging that both major opposition parties immediately called for the results to be overturned. Legal challenges have been filed but the disputed winner, Bola Tinubu, will be sworn in on May 29. 

The elections may now be over, barring an unlikely overturning of the result by the courts, but millions of Nigerians are still reeling from the divisive campaigning. Since Nigeria transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democracy in 1999, no Igbo has been elected president. And though there has been an informal arrangement to rotate the presidency between the Muslim north and Christian south of Nigeria in order to bring together a linguistically, religiously, ethnically and culturally diverse country, there has also been no president from the southeast, where Igbos are the dominant ethnic group. 

But by February 2023, it seemed likely that Nigeria’s new president would be Peter Obi, the former governor of Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria who is ethnically Igbo and who led most polls. Obi defeated Tinubu on his home turf in Lagos State, but Tinubu still won the election. That Obi would not be president — after all the hope and promise he represented for many Igbos — was a bitter pill to swallow. Even if the courts rule that there are no grounds to overturn the election results, the violence, the disenfranchisement of Igbos in particular and various flaws reported in the voting process are enough to conclude, as international observers did, that the “election fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations.” 

“We now understand that we are not one in Nigeria,” said Ebuka, who was forced to leave his polling unit in Surulere because he was Igbo. He later came back and voted with the help of the police. “Left to me, if the Yorubas and Hausas aren’t comfortable with the Igbos ruling them, then there should be freedom. Biafra should come, and everybody should go to their land,” he said. Ebuka is referring to the secessionist state founded by the Igbo people in 1967, the creation of which led to the Nigerian Civil War. By 1970, when the war ended with Biafra’s surrender, more than two million people had died and millions more had been displaced. 

The campaigning in the presidential election this February, and in state elections in March, showed that tribalism is resurgent in Nigeria and that ethnic prejudice and division still run deep. Tinubu, the incoming Nigerian president, will find he is in charge of a country that is once again asking itself existential questions, asking what it means to be Nigerian.

At the polling booth in Surulere on February 25, there were only two people ahead of Godwin in the queue when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Two men told her to leave the queue. “As I was leaving, the men started laughing. They said I was very stupid and that I should have gone to Nnewi to vote,” she told me. Nnewi is a commercial and industrial city in Anambra State, where Igbos are in the majority. 

Godwin looked at the electoral officials at the booth for help but they were powerless. “I walked away feeling very sad,” she told me. “I’d never felt that useless before. I had looked forward to voting.”

The ethnic profiling targeted at the Igbos living in Lagos during the elections was deliberate and amplified by social media, says Timi Olagunju, a policy consultant. It was a whipping up, he told me, of Nigeria’s “primordial public.” This is a reference to the work of Peter Palmer Ekeh, a Nigerian sociologist, known for his 1975 paper, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa.” According to Ekeh, the African experience of colonialism resulted in “the emergence of a unique historical configuration in modern postcolonial Africa: the existence of two publics instead of one public, as in the West.” Ekeh characterizes these two publics as primordial and civic. The primordial concerns private interests and attachments such as ethnicity, religion and tribalism, while the civic refers to national and civil structures, such as the military or the bureaucracy. “Many of Africa’s political problems,” Ekeh wrote, “are due to the dialectical relationships between the two publics.” 

In the heat of Nigeria’s rancorous presidential election, politically motivated tribalistic disinformation spread like wildfire across social media. Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, who is a Christian, was accused of destroying Muslim communities when he was a governor and portrayed as sympathetic to the Indigenous People of Biafra, the secessionist organization in southeastern Nigeria.

Online narratives were further spun to imply that Igbo people wanted to take over Lagos. On March 18, three weeks after the presidential elections, most of Nigeria’s 36 states went back to the polls to elect state governors. In Lagos State, WhatsApp groups lit up with messages that warned that the Labor Party gubernatorial aspirant Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour intended to empower the Indigenous People of Biafra. If Rhodes-Vivour came into power, the messages said, he’d lay off civil servants in Lagos and hire Igbos to replace them. Rhodes-Vivour is Yoruba, but his marriage to an Igbo apparently raised hackles.

Anti-Igbo messages and threats were widespread in the days before the Lagos gubernatorial election. A video went viral on social media of Musiliu Akinsanya, a well-known Lagos civil servant and political operative, telling voters to stay home if they weren’t planning on voting for the ruling APC party. 

“Tell them,” Akinsanya was filmed saying, “‘Mama Chukwudi,’ if you don’t want to vote for us, sit down at home. Sit down at home.” Mama Chukwudi is a reference to a typical Igbo name. After the video attracted outrage on social media, Akinsanya claimed it was just a friendly joke. And the Nigerian police backed him up. But during the presidential elections on February 25, Akinsanya had been caught on camera preventing Igbo voters from voting in a polling unit in Lagos. He was not even reprimanded, let alone punished.

“If Akinsanya had been arrested and questioned, even if not imprisoned,” the policy consultant Timi Olagunju told me, “it would have sent shivers through the APC camp and empowered people to come out to vote.” The violent rhetoric and bullying at the ballot box had its desired effect. The voter turnout for the presidential election was a record low of 27%, and the turnout for the gubernatorial elections just weeks later was equally disappointing.

Ugo Ude, a second-year English student at Lagos State University, showed up to vote in the presidential election at 7:05 in the morning. The booths opened at eight and within 25 minutes she had cast her vote. Not long after she voted, she says, a gang of “fierce-looking” men showed up, singled a man out from the queue and told him to leave. As he did, Ugo heard an elderly woman say, “let Igbo go to their states to vote Igbo, and let Yorubas do the same.”

For Ude, the woman’s words were an insight into the mentality of some of her compatriots. She herself was told to leave the booth. “Go away,” Ude says people, including the elderly woman, shouted at her. “You’re a stranger.” Something broke inside her that day, she told me. When she meets fellow Nigerians, she is wary: “I’m now asking myself, ‘Would you stand up for me or would you be part of the machinery that’ll be used to attack me?’” 

Ude, who runs a nonprofit organization that provides educational materials to children, says she’s “always been optimistic about Nigeria.” She acknowledged that she had been shocked by the bigotry on display during the elections but took solace in the messages she’d seen that rejected tribalism. 

“I will keep voting and I will keep doing my nonprofit work,” she told me. “Although there will be times when I’ll doubt the effectiveness of what I’m doing, I just can’t let it slide. If the kids want to grow up and become tribal bigots that’s up to them.”

The post Nigeria struggles to bridge ethnic divide after the election appeared first on Coda Story.

The month-long manhunt for Amritpal had led to an internet blackout in Punjab and protests outside Indian embassies in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. On social media in India, decades-old arguments about Sikh secessionists were being revived.

Last week, before Amritpal’s arrest, a video went viral across Indian social media. It featured a young woman, an Indian flag painted on her face, ostensibly being turned away from the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, the most important religious site for the world’s 30 million Sikhs.

Off camera, a man asks a temple guard why the girl was denied entry. The guard, carrying a steel tumbler, says something barely audible about the flag on her face. “Is this not India?” asks the man off camera. “This is Punjab,” the guard says. 

The tense 40-second exchange unleashed a social media storm. “India is seeking an explanation and action,” tweeted Rajan Tewari, the vice president of the local Delhi chapter of the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s governing party. Anshul Saxena, a self-described “news junkie” with a following of 1.1 million people, said the flag on the girl’s face was the reason she had been stopped from entering the temple.   

“Well,” he wrote in a Twitter thread, “Khalistan flags & posters of terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale are allowed inside the Golden Temple.” The video was evidence enough, apparently, of lingering pro-Khalistani sentiment in Punjab. 

Amritpal had become the face of this allegedly revived Khalistani movement. Since March 18, he had been on the run from the Punjab police. He was wanted for storming a police station with his supporters in February, leaving six officers injured. The chaotic official crackdown on Amritpal left Punjab on edge and caused a backlash from the Sikh diaspora across the world that has had diplomatic repercussions. Earlier this month, Indian officials were reported to have “disengaged” from trade talks with the United Kingdom because India wanted a stronger condemnation of “Khalistan extremism” after a demonstration outside the Indian embassy in London.

Until the February attack on the police station, few in India had heard of Amrtipal Singh. He had emerged from obscurity seemingly fully formed and ready to take on the leadership of Waris Punjab De, a fringe political organization that was founded in September 2021 by the Sikh actor Deep Sidhu to fight for the rights of Punjab’s farmers. Sidhu died in an accident in February 2022, leaving his newly formed party rudderless. Amritpal stepped into the breach, though Sidhu’s family refused to give him their backing.  

The idea for Waris Punjab De was born as Indian farmers took to the streets in huge numbers two years ago. For several months in 2020 and 2021, farmers, especially from Punjab, the bread basket of India, protested against three bills passed in the Indian parliament that they said would leave small farmers at risk of being destroyed by large corporations. The length and ferocity of the protests shook the Modi government. In January 2021, India’s attorney general claimed that “Khalistanis have infiltrated” the farmers’ protests. 

It was an attempt to link Sikh farmers to a separatist movement whose leaders the Indian government has described as terrorists. When climate change activist Greta Thunberg and the pop star Rihanna tweeted about the farmers’ protests, the Indian media, quoting “sources in the security establishment, claimed they had been paid millions of dollars by Khalistan supporters and India’s foreign minister tweeted darkly about “motivated campaigns targeting India.”  

Last month, Coda reported that the Punjab government shut down the internet across the state as it launched its search for Amritpal. The government blocked the accounts of local journalists, a local member of the legislative assembly and alleged supporters of the Khalistan movement and restricted access inside India to accounts belonging to a Canadian politician and the bestselling Canadian poet Rupi Kaur. But Amritpal continues to elude the police even as hundreds of his associates have been arrested.

I traveled through Punjab to report on the effects of the government crackdown. Parminder Singh, a retired professor in Amritsar, where the Golden Temple is located, told me that the “excessive show of strength” from the authorities had backfired. It meant, he said, that Sikhs feel as if they are being bullied and that the “scaremongering” media and the state government were succeeding only in stoking partisan passions.

Many Sikhs I spoke to, regardless of age or gender, had sympathy for Amritpal. They didn’t necessarily buy into his politics — most Sikhs are not interested in a separate state. But they believed that the authorities were overreacting and that the use of anti-terror laws, the indiscriminate arrests and the information blackouts were a throwback to the darkest days of the 1980s. 

The movement for Khalistan in Punjab, a region that stretches across the border into Pakistan, petered out in the 1990s after a period of convulsive violence. In 1984, the Indian government, led by Indira Gandhi, sent the army into the Golden Temple to root out Khalistan-supporting separatists. The battle inside the temple lasted for four days. The separatists were led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was killed during the fighting. 

While official numbers are hard to come by and disputed, the Indian government acknowledges that about 500 Sikhs were killed, including civilians. In October 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. It was, the Indian government said, revenge for what had happened at the Golden Temple in June that year. She was India’s first, and so far only, female prime minister and the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. 

After Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs were targeted by roving mobs and murdered, often in broad daylight. Over 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. Senior leaders of the Congress, the political party in power at the time, colluded with the massacre. In the elections held at the end of December, just two months after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the anti-Sikh riots, her son Rajiv swept to power with an unprecedented and still unmatched parliamentary majority.

Despite the Congress failing to properly atone for or even acknowledge its responsibility for the anti-Sikh riots, it has continued to win elections in Punjab at the state level. The Congress  governed Punjab for 10 of the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2007 and then again from 2017 to 2022. In between, the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh-centric party, ruled for a decade in partnership with the BJP. In the 2022 elections, a third political force, the Aam Aadmi Party, founded in 2012, swept to power with an emphatic majority. The Aam Aadmi Party (Hindi for “the Common Man’s Party”) also forms the local government in Delhi, where it has been a thorn in the side for the Narendra Modi-led federal government. 

It is the Aam Aadmi Party that has been in power in Punjab as the Khalistan movement has made the headlines over the last month. Ironically, the party’s political opponents have frequently accused it of being funded by Khalistan supporters living abroad. Meanwhile, India’s federal government is run by the BJP, a party that Sikhs believe has been fueling unrest in Punjab since the farmers’ protest two years ago.

A common complaint I heard from Sikh people I spoke to in Punjab was that the Indian government has failed to listen to Sikh concerns on issues ranging from farming to the water crisis to widespread drug use in Punjab. Simranpreet, a young Sikh law student in Amritsar, told me that Amritpal was popular because he “represented the community’s concerns, was preaching about the rights of Punjab.” 

In Jalandhar, an old, culturally vibrant Punjabi city, a filmmaker told me that young, charismatic men like Amritpal, Deep Sidhu and the internationally successful rapper Sidhu Moose Wala, who was murdered in May 2022, had become youth icons because they represented the Sikh desire to have their voices heard. “People are emotional about Sikh and Punjabi identity,” she said. “And if they feel someone who represents that identity has been wronged, they will stand by them.” 

Amritpal seemed particularly aware of the meaning to Sikhs of Bhindranwale, who was killed by Indian soldiers in the Golden Temple in 1984. He dressed like Bhindranwale, posed with armed men like Bhindranwale and, according to lurid rumors in the Indian press, has had plastic surgery to look more like Bhindranwale. Amritpal supposedly had this plastic surgery while he was in the Caucasus, receiving training from Pakistani intelligence services. 

Gurtej Singh, an elderly historian based in Chandigarh, the Le Corbusier-designed capital of Punjab, told me that he and Bhindranwale had been friends. His reputation as a feared terrorist in the rest of India, Singh said, was at odds with his reputation among Sikhs. “Bhindranwale is venerated as a martyr,” Singh told me, “because he died while protecting our holiest shrine.”

By straining so hard to make Amritpal seem like a national security threat, the authorities are showing their hand, he says. Chasing Amritpal, Singh argued, was less about catching Amritpal than it was about suppressing Sikh political protest by associating it with Khalistan.  

Respect for Bhindranwale, Singh says, does not indicate that Sikhs support Khalistan or want to secede from India. It means that there is a disconnect between the Sikh minority and the increasingly Hindu nationalist Indian mainstream.  

The disconnect is evident in much of the social media response to Amrtipal Singh. For many in the Hindu nationalist right wing, Sikhs needed to disavow Amritpal and Khalistan as a simple matter of patriotism. Sikhs, naturally, bristle when they are told they need to prove their loyalty and commitment to India. 

Pride in Punjab and in Sikhism are often subverted by Hindu nationalists on social media to suggest support for Khalistan. After the video of the woman being turned away from the Golden Temple went viral, an official from the committee that manages the temple was forced to defend Sikh patriotism. In a video, he said he was shocked at the allegations about support for Khalistan. “When you need people to go to the border to fight China, who do you send?” he asked. “You send Sikhs. Are they also Khalistanis?” Sikhs, who make up around 2% of India’s population make up close to 10% of its army.

An independent Khalistan is now largely symbolic for Sikhs in India, a rallying cry for Sikh and Punjabi pride rather than a realistic goal. But for the large Sikh diaspora, especially in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, Khalistan remains a powerful idea. Sikh emigration has ebbed and flowed since the 19th century, but it was the Indian government’s violent suppression of the Khalistan movement in the 1970s and 1980s that politicized the diaspora. Writing in the Guardian on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple, the journalist Sunny Handal, who has Sikh roots, observed that it was “difficult to overstate the impact that 1984 had on Sikhs and their politics, even in Britain.” It was, he wrote, described by some in the community as the “Sikhs’ Kristallnacht.”

In Canada, the Sikh diaspora enjoys considerable political clout. There are an estimated two million Canadians with Indian heritage, 34% of whom identify as Sikhs and 27% as Hindus. The unresolved trauma of the riots of 1984 sometimes spills out onto Canadian streets. Last year, in November, a Sikh separatist group, classified as a terrorist organization in India, organized a referendum in Toronto on the creation of an independent Khalistan. The Modi government described it as “deeply objectionable that politically motivated exercises by extremist elements are allowed to take place in a friendly country.” Just days before the referendum, on October 24, Diwali night, in the Canadian city of Mississauga, about 500 people were filmed brawling in a parking lot. Some were carrying yellow Khalistan flags, others the Indian tricolor. 

Inevitably, Amritpal has become a celebrated figure within the Sikh diaspora. The police manhunt led to attacks on Indian consulates in London and San Francisco and to protests in Canada and Australia. On April 18, India’s National Investigation Agency said it would be examining the attack on the Indian embassy in London for evidence of Pakistani involvement.

After some 35 days of investigations, raids and hundreds of arrests, Amritpal was finally found and has been moved to a prison cell in the eastern state of Assam where, under the provisions of India’s stringent National Security Act, he can be held for up to a year without charge. A man with a relatively meager following has been elevated to the status of a revolutionary. And the pressure ordinary Sikhs now feel to publicly embrace their Indian identity — even as Hindu nationalist politicians openly call for India to be remade as a Hindu nation — is reopening old, still festering wounds.

The post India reopens its Khalistan wounds appeared first on Coda Story.

What counts as inappropriate? An official announcement on the Department of Education’s website says that parents should report lessons that focus on “race or ethnicity, rather than individuals and merit, promoting gender ideology, social emotional learning, or inappropriate sexual content.” The hotline closely mimics a project that Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin began in January 2022 and ended about eight months later due to receiving “little or no volume” of serious accusations, according to a Youngkin spokesperson.

The program was a key campaign promise of Arizona’s newly elected superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, whose platform focused on promoting right-wing notions of patriotism and attacking critical race theory. It is hard to come by an Arizona educator who would say that the scholarly theory — that race is a social construct used to oppress people of color — is taught in Arizona’s K-12 schools. 

Horne insists otherwise and is quick to assert his dedication to studying U.S. history. “If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would have been a history teacher,” Horne told me in an interview. “I’ve been reading history every day since I was 14.” Horne, who served as the superintendent of public instruction from 2003 to 2011, was the only Republican in Arizona to win a major statewide role last November.

His campaign website could be a case study in 21st century American far-right spin. Offering only dubious citations, the homepage sets up a mock polemic between Horne and his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman, in which he trots out right-wing, fear-mongering narratives about gender, race, slavery and capitalism in America, and of course about Covid-19. He attacks Hoffman for closing Arizona schools during the pandemic, offering social support for LGBTQ+ students and encouraging teachers to assign Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project.

‘If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say?’

The hotline was billed as a solution to these so-called problems. But Arizona public school teachers — the state employees whose work most directly affects student outcomes — have largely been left out of the discussion. What will the hotline mean for their work in the classroom? Teachers I spoke with expressed confusion about the program and fears that they would be subject to investigations concerning “inappropriate lessons.”

“Teachers are on a daily basis reaching out to us as union officers and asking if it’s okay to teach things in the approved curriculum,” said Kelley Fisher, who has taught kindergarten for 24 years. “If they’re teaching about slavery, what are they supposed to say? What can and can’t they say in their classrooms? They’re scared, and that should not be what happens in a classroom. Teachers should not be afraid to teach students to think for themselves.”

Others worry that the hotline will cause parents to complain to state officials rather than addressing their concerns directly with teachers or administrators, creating a dynamic that could foster distrust and make it harder to resolve conflicts.

“There are already very well established ways for parents to bring concerns directly to teachers, or, if necessary, the school principal or administration,” said Emily Kirkland, a spokesperson for the Arizona Education Association. “The hotline goes around those existing systems entirely and leaves teachers with no due process at all. It’s really poorly thought out.”

Amber Gould, who has taught English for 12 years in the Glendale Union High School District and serves as treasurer for the Arizona Education Association, was among several educators who said they had received no guidance about what to expect from hotline reports or how to respond to investigations. In an interview, Horne confirmed that the department has not issued guidance to teachers.

Horne is primarily concerned about parents who feel they aren’t listened to, not teachers, he told me. “This has been intended to be a way for parents to communicate with us,” he said. He acknowledged concerns about bypassing existing systems, adding that parents with complaints should go to teachers and principals first. “[The hotline] wasn’t intended to do that,” he said. With regard to the process, Horne said he believes that the department would call the principal first, then the teacher, who would be asked to stop teaching whatever had triggered the call. “If they persist, theoretically we would make a discipline referral to the state board,” he said.

For Kelley Fisher, the hotline is an effort that neither helps teachers nor ensures that students are receiving the best instruction possible.

“This hotline was about appeasing the people who got [Horne] elected,” said the veteran kindergarten teacher. “It’s not about transparency in the classroom, it’s not about making sure teachers are doing a good job.”

Attacking standard K-12 teaching techniques

Perhaps most worrisome to educators is Horne’s vilification of social emotional learning, a key method used by teachers to help students learn to communicate, solve problems and act with compassion toward others. With little concrete evidence, Horne has alleged that teachers are using social emotional learning techniques to disguise their teaching of critical race theory, echoing narratives from right-wing organizations like the Center for Renewing America.

Several teachers expressed confusion about the link between critical race theory and social emotional learning, which they say are completely different. Abby Knight, a kindergarten teacher in the Kyrene School District, said the current discourse has created a deep misunderstanding about what social emotional learning is.

“There is a level of disconnect when you’re not in the classroom and you’re not doing it,” she said. “SEL is made up of really basic concepts that, if you’re not an educator, you don’t realize are crucial to teaching young kids.” 

She explained that you need to teach kids how to communicate effectively, problem solve, consider others and understand what constitutes an appropriate behavior for a given circumstance, in order to foster an effective learning environment.

“Learning really doesn’t take place unless there’s a lot of behavioral work that goes into a classroom,” Knight said. 

Empowering pranksters while leaving teachers behind

What has the hotline actually achieved since its mid-March launch? It has seen plenty of action but almost no reports of “inappropriate” lessons. Instead, its staff have been bombarded by thousands of prank calls from outside Arizona and about 1,000 calls from within the state, the vast majority of which also came from pranksters. In an email, Arizona Department of Education spokesperson Rick Medina said that as of April 10, the department had received only a handful of calls that warranted investigation.

Horne said there was one serious hotline case he was aware of: “Someone called us about [a teacher] evangelizing in the classroom. We called the principal who said he was aware of it already, so we dropped it.”

Meanwhile, Arizona educators continue to face very real pressures that the hotline isn’t going to fix. The state is facing a critical shortage of teachers — one in five positions is unfilled — and wages haven’t kept pace with economic changes. Nevertheless, state-mandated responsibilities keep rising.

“People are leaving because it’s not feasible mentally or financially,” Knight said.

“It’s about the way teachers are being treated and it’s driving them out of the classroom,” Kelley Fisher said. “There are plenty of people in this state who are certified to be teachers, but they just don’t want to be teachers right now. It’s really sad.”

Amber Gould, who began teaching at the end of Horne’s last stint as the public schools superintendent, said she felt deja vu about his return to office. “I would hope that we’re able to have conversations with [Horne], because at the end of the day I hope that he wants to do what’s best for kids and not necessarily for his political talking points.”

It remains to be seen whether the hotline will fizzle out like in Virginia or lead to actual investigations into teacher conduct.

“I honestly feel like it’s more of a publicity stunt for Superintendent Horne and his office, but when the fight comes, we’re going to be ready,” Gould said. “We know our rights and we know that in the end, we’re going to do what’s best for kids.”

The post A hotline to report teachers ratchets up tensions in US schools appeared first on Coda Story.

She looked at the uniformed man in disbelief. She was the mother of a toddler and a long-time public servant. The scene of the alleged offense was not an adult bookstore or the dark web. It was a high school library. The officer explained the situation. A parent had told the police that she was circulating pornography to students through the books in the school’s library collection. The policeman, a school resource officer employed by both the Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department, came to the library to investigate the claim. He came back again six months later, prompted by similar complaints from another parent at the school. The visit did not lead to any disciplinary action against Amy. But it left her deeply unsettled. 

“It just honestly shook me,” Amy, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym, told me. “The audacity to claim that I was making pornography available to kids, it was just devastating. Like, what is this going to do to my reputation if this is what people truly think I’m doing?”

The Wentzville School District and the O’Fallon Police Department did not respond to my requests for comment.

At the time of the officer’s visit, it was illegal under Missouri law to give pornography to minors. But what enraged a parent enough to call the police was a school library book — Amy never found out which one. At the time, library workers were trusted to choose books based on school board-approved selection criteria.

But that changed in August 2022, when the Missouri state legislature passed a law banning books that contained “explicit sexual material.” Under the new rules, police visits to libraries may become a more regular occurrence — and librarians found guilty of violating the policy could even end up behind bars. The statute, Senate Bill 775, has led to the removal of hundreds of children’s books across the state and caused library workers to aggressively self-censor under the threat of incarceration.

“This has struck fear into the work that many of our members are doing professionally,” said Tom Bober, the vice president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians, which represents hundreds of library specialists statewide. To Bober’s knowledge, no one has been criminally charged under the new rules yet — my reporting indicated the same. But the message the rules send is clear to him. 

“What we have with SB 775 is politicians saying, ‘We are going to determine what books should sit on your library shelves and be available to your students. And if you go against what we said there are criminal implications,’” Bober said.

Such a scenario would have been unthinkable for Amy when she began working in the field 15 years ago. But over the last several years, the conditions for library workers in Missouri and across the United States have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. The Missouri law is part of a much broader movement, largely driven by conservative politicians and parents’ rights groups, whose primary target is books dealing with race, gender and sexuality. PEN America found that more than 80% of the 1,648 books banned from schools in 2021 and 2022 focused on, or featured, LGBTQ+ characters and people of color, and attempts to ban or restrict access to books from school and public libraries since 2020 have shattered previous records.

The movement’s secondary target is the workers who make those books available to students. As I reported for Coda last year, librarians have been subjected to online harassment and verbal attacks, accused of grooming children and promoting pornography, inundated with hateful messages, threatened with physical violence and, increasingly, targeted with hostile laws like SB 775.

The Missouri law is among the most extreme of the state policies singling out library work, although states like Tennessee and Oklahoma have also passed new laws targeting “obscene” materials in school libraries and databases. Tacked on as an amendment to a bill aimed at combating child sexual exploitation and protecting sexual assault survivors, the Missouri law makes it a Class A misdemeanor for librarians, school officials and teachers to provide students with “explicit sexual material.” Any librarian or educator found in violation of the policy faces steep penalties: a yearlong prison sentence and up to $2,000 in fines.

State library associations and library workers I spoke with described the law’s rollout as chaotic and panic-inducing. Librarians and school officials scrambled to make sense of the sweeping language of the bill, which defined “explicit sexual material” as any visual image that showed sexual intercourse, masturbation or genitalia, except for images that appear in books on anatomy or biology. Districts’ interpretations and applications of the law varied widely. According to Bober, whose organization surveyed hundreds of librarians statewide about their experiences with the law, some librarians received lists of titles to remove from district administrators and attorneys, while others were left in the dark and instructed to interpret the statute themselves.

Statewide, nearly 300 books — a disproportionate number of which are written by or about LGBTQ+ people — have been removed from school library shelves in response to SB 775, the nonprofit PEN America found. And the lack of guidance from state officials has become visible on library shelves. Some school districts have chosen to ignore the law or remove just a handful of books, while others have interpreted it more broadly. Wentzville, where Amy works, pulled 220 books after the law went into effect — more than any other district in the state. The long list of removals included a handful of Holocaust history books, scores of graphic novels and comic books, illustrated adaptations of Homer’s “Odyssey” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and more than 70 art history books featuring works by the likes of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. PEN America has a complete list of the books banned on the basis of SB 775.

Mernie Maestas, the lead librarian for the Wentzville School District, said the district’s middle school and high school librarians were given two weeks to go through their entire collections and remove any books that could potentially violate the law or lead to prosecution. “We had one librarian who began pulling absolutely everything because the fear became so overwhelming,” she said. “Others wound up shutting down their library for periods of time just so they could ensure they had gone through everything.” 

Amy told me that she was in tears as she pored over the books in her school’s library, confused and overwhelmed about how to evaluate the material on her bookshelves. “Do I pull a picture because there are breasts on the page? Are breasts included with genitalia? Who decides?” she said. “It was just a mess because you didn’t know what you were looking for.” 

Amy decided not to ask other library staff to help make decisions about what books to keep because she didn’t want anyone else to be liable for potential criminal charges. So she went through it all by herself. She estimates she set aside about 30 books to be reviewed by the district’s legal team. The entire process “felt so wrong, like I was being used for something I did not support,” she explained. But she felt she had no other option. She had a kid. She didn’t want to end up on the wrong side of the law. “What do you do when you think you could go to jail?” she asked.

Following a public outcry, most of the Wentzville titles that were taken down — including an illustrated children’s version of the Bible — have been put back on the shelves. But 17 have been permanently banned, including the graphic memoir “Gender Queer” and illustrated adaptations of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Slaughterhouse-Five,” according to a list compiled by PEN America, which has been tracking statewide book removals. 

Wentzville librarian Maestas said the law has caused library workers to rethink which books they add to their collections. “You second-guess everything that you’re purchasing so you wind up self-censoring, even though that’s not our goal,” she said. “But you’re fearful.”

Maestas runs a reading club at the elementary school where she works. One day, a parent contacted the school to complain about a book on the group’s reading list, which explores themes related to sexual identity. The parent withdrew their child from the club and accused the district of promoting an “agenda.” 

Maestas worries about how the children in her school process that kind of language. “The kids absorb what’s happening in their home,” she explained. “And so when parents feel like the library has potential evil in it, so do the kids.”

So far, Maestas has not removed any books from her library under SB 775. I asked if she worries about the possible consequences of her decision. “Yes,” she replied. “All the time.” When she became a librarian nearly two decades ago, she added, “never would I have ever thought that the library could land me in jail. For people to think that I’m a monster and a villain, it stabs at your heart.”

For some, the pressure is too much to sustain working in the field. Amy had planned to be a librarian until she reached retirement age, but instead she is leaving the profession at the end of the 2022-2023 school year. She said the police visits, as well as SB 775, played a role in her decision to switch careers. She told me that the restrictions imposed on librarians under SB 775 left her unable to adequately carry out her job’s responsibilities, including providing students with material that could help them make sense of their identities, such as books about LGBTQ+ experiences.

But Amy also feels conflicted about the decision to leave the field: “In many ways, it feels like a cop out,” she confessed. “It is this war of, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I don’t know. It’s been very difficult in the last couple of years and I’m just choosing something different.” To be a librarian in Missouri feels like a precarious tightrope walk, where criminal prosecution is always a looming threat. Some, like Amy, are choosing to walk away.

But others are fighting to put librarians on more stable ground. Last month, the Missouri ACLU sued the state over SB 775 on behalf of the Missouri Library Association and the Missouri Association of School Librarians, arguing that the law is vague to the point of being unconstitutional and puts educators in the position of violating students’ First Amendment rights or exposing themselves to criminal prosecution. Just last week, a top Missouri Republican lawmaker responded to the lawsuit by threatening to cut the entire state budget for public libraries in his proposed state funding package. On Tuesday, the Missouri House of Representatives approved the lawmaker’s budget. If approved in the state senate, it will strip public libraries of $4.5 million in state aid that they were slated to receive in the next year. The Missouri secretary of state has also proposed a rule change that would force public libraries to adopt a variety of “age-appropriate” checkout policies for minors or lose public funding. 

Joe Kohlburn, an academic librarian at Jefferson College in Missouri, said the array of policies targeting public library employees has prompted many in the field to search for jobs out of state. He mentioned a colleague who recently fled Missouri for Florida. “It’s pretty bad when you move from Missouri to Florida,” he chuckled. “I definitely am getting the message the Missouri state government is sending, that they don’t value librarians and are antagonistic towards our foundational ethics. And who wants to work in that situation?”

At the center of all of this are the students themselves, the subjects of so many of these laws, book challenges and policies — who rarely get airtime to weigh in on what they want to read, despite their starring role in the debate. But some are speaking out. When a set of proposed book bans came to a high school in Nixa, a conservative town in southwest Missouri, a group of high school students decided to push back. In preparation for a school board vote on the books, they asked hundreds of their classmates about their position on the restrictions and discovered the vast majority of students opposed the bans. 

Then, they put themselves to work, reading each and every book on the list, like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing,” which explores the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the African diaspora. They also read Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Thomasina Brown, a high school junior, said the coming-of-age story resonated with her as an “important representation of the adolescent experience,” helping teens process themes like grief, trauma and mental health in their own lives. If the district banned the book, “I felt like maybe kids wouldn’t be exposed to things they might deal with later in life,” she told me. 

Brown’s classmates also brought their observations to the school board meeting, describing the books and characters that reflected parts of their identities and life experiences or introduced them to new perspectives. But the meeting quickly descended into chaos, with some parents booing loudly, shouting over the students and calling on the school’s librarians to resign. 

Meghana Nakkanti, a high school senior who took part in the meeting, likened the situation to a role reversal: The students were showing more maturity and capacity to deliberate on the issue than the adults in the room. But the board ultimately voted to remove several books. 

The students found the adults’ vilification of the librarians they knew especially painful. One meeting stood out to them. A parent stood up and declared that the school’s two librarians should be placed on a sex offender registry. One of the librarians, who was present in the room, burst into tears and rushed for the door. Someone had to accompany her to her car because she was so distressed, the students recalled. That’s when the severity of the situation dawned on them: These librarians were being named, confronted and run out of public meetings in tears. Not just by adults, but by parents. 

Nakkanti told me it was hard to watch the librarians smeared because “of a few people who aren’t willing to read more than a few pages of a book that someone told them they shouldn’t like.” The students in the group, she added, are “trying to make people realize that the words that people say and the implications that are surrounding this have real meaning. These are people and they deserve to be respected.” 

A classic lesson from an adult to a child — turned upside down.

The post Missouri librarians are risking jail time – for doing their jobs appeared first on Coda Story.

As a people subject to ongoing repression in China — or genocide, as a U.S. congressional committee heard in Washington, D.C. last week — it could appear the Uyghurs have found peace in Turkey, a space where they can preserve and even revive their language and literature. 

But on Tuesday, March 14, the Kutadgu Bilik bookshop was raided by the Turkish police. They dragged books out in large bags to a van parked outside.

The first time the police raided the shop in August 2022, they confiscated hundreds of books. This time, members of the Uyghur community protested. Some lay down in front of the police van to prevent it from leaving.

“This shop is a solution for us,” the owner, Abdulla Turkistanli, told me, a day after the police raid. “We can teach our next generations here, we can keep our culture alive.”

Uyghur bookstores in Istanbul play a vital role in sustaining the culture, in giving Uyghurs across generations and continents access to their language and history. Estimates of the Uyghur population in Turkey vary from over 50,000 to around 150,000, making it probably the largest community of Uyghurs outside their traditional home in Xinjiang, a vast region in northwest China that borders several Central Asian countries, Russia, Pakistan and India.

For close to a decade now, the Chinese state has been conducting a violent crackdown on its Uyghur population. This campaign, which has increased in intensity since 2017, extends far beyond China’s borders. Uyghurs in the diaspora are subject to surveillance, while their families back home are sent to re-education centers and prisons where many have been tortured and raped. Uyghur literature has also been a prime target, with dozens of renowned writers, poets, publishers and academics disappeared into the labyrinthine system of internment camps. 

This has all but destroyed the small trickle of books coming out of the region, severing a critical link between those who escaped and those still trapped inside.

Turkistanli, the bookshop owner, wears his exhaustion on his face. Years of pressure from the Chinese state have left him depleted of energy, if not of the will to keep fighting. On the night of the raid earlier this month, he was rushed to a hospital with heart problems. It has been, he told me, a chronic ailment, first sustained after he was imprisoned in Kyrgyzstan after leaving Xinjiang in 2008. He says he was tortured by Chinese officials and injected with a mysterious substance. 

Speaking on March 23 to the newly formed U.S. bipartisan committee examining the rivalry with China, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who was detained in a Chinese re-education camp for three years, said that the detainees were told they were being vaccinated when they were injected with undisclosed drugs but were actually being sterilized. 

Turkistanli was eventually able to leave Kyrgyzstan for Turkey. In 2013, he opened his first bookstore. At the time, he said, Uyghurs could travel more freely between Istanbul and Xinjiang. The Uyghur diaspora would return from each visit laden with books. In this way, hundreds, if not thousands, of books were removed to safety.

Over the years, the Uyghur diaspora community in Istanbul has added thousands of volumes to the Kutadgu Bilik collection. But the cost of reprinting these books is high. There are usually only two to four copies of any given title in Turkistanli’s shop. The Turkish police, when they raid the shop, say that Turkistanli does not have the copyrights necessary to reprint books. Acquiring the copyrights, Turkistanli told me, is impossible without the cooperation of Chinese authorities. Even contacting the authors of the books, if they are in Xinjiang, is impossible. Turkistanli estimates that around 90% of the books in his shop were written by people who have been swallowed up by the prisons and re-education camps.

He believes that the Turkish police are acting under pressure from the Chinese state when they raid Uyghur bookshops. In this environment, he told me, he does not know how much longer his shop can stay open.

It is a fate that other Uyghur booksellers in Istanbul also face.

In the district of Zeytinburnu, the once bustling heart of Uyghur life in Istanbul, Abdulhalil Abithaci told me he would soon be closing his bookshop. The pandemic, he said, and Turkey’s underperforming economy has meant that many Uyghurs — who tend to make less money than the general Turkish population — cannot afford to buy books anymore. Many, he adds, are leaving Zeytinburnu for less expensive areas, while others have left Turkey altogether to seek a better life further away from China’s reach in Europe, North America and Australia.

The first wave of Uyghurs came to Istanbul in the 1950s, escaping religious persecution under a newly formed communist regime in China. Subsequent periods of repression drove more and more Uyghurs to flee abroad. The fall of the Soviet Union brought a new era of controls, as the Chinese state increasingly sought to “Sinicize” Uyghurs by forcing them to assimilate into mainstream Chinese culture. 

For the few able to escape China’s harsher crackdowns since 2017, Turkey has been a place of refuge. As Turkic people, Uyghurs and Turks share historical, linguistic and cultural ties, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once seen as an advocate for Uyghurs. But as Ankara has sought closer ties to China, the situation for Uyghur refugees has become more precarious.

Turkey is home to the largest number of refugees in the world, with millions escaping war in Syria in particular. The Turkish government, though, is itself a notorious conductor of cross-border repression, especially targeting suspected followers of a movement led by the Muslim preacher and scholar Fethullah Gulen who has been based in the United States for over two decades. According to a report by the think tank Freedom House, Turkey was second only to China between 2014 and 2021 in perpetrating acts of “physical transnational repression.”

It is because Turkey so often acts to repress dissent beyond its borders that it acts as a willing accomplice to other repressive regimes, including China, says Howard Eissenstat, a nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute and an associate professor of history at St. Lawrence University. “It boils down to a transactionalism,” he told me, “that both China and Turkey see as part of international relations, since neither is concerned with the rule of law.”

Many Uyghurs living in Istanbul fear that the threat to their safety is growing, as Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping become closer. Seyfullah Karatug, for instance, told me he feels his life as a Uyghur refugee in Istanbul depends on the whim of an unpredictable Turkish state. The fear of arrest or deportation constantly hangs over him.

I met the 24-year-old Karatug at the Uyghur bookshop Kutadgu Bilik, the day after the police raided it. One of his eyes had been blackened during the protests from the night before. Karatug told me he visits the store almost every day. As the only Uyghur bookstore in Sefakoy, Kutadgu Bilik closing would be a personal disaster. That’s why Karatug raced to the store when he received a WhatsApp message that it was being raided by the police.

When he asked the police if they had a warrant and filmed them manhandling protestors, a policeman punched him in the face. Video footage seen by Coda Story, as well as a hospital report, corroborates Karatug’s claims. Karatug told me his father had sent him and his brother to Egypt in 2016, fearing for their future in China. The brothers have had no contact with their family since late 2017, when they believe their father was arrested. Knowing the sacrifice his father made, Karatug told me, made him determined to keep his language and cultural traditions alive, to pass them onto his younger brother. It’s why Uyghur bookshops are so important to him.

For now, though, Kutadgu Bilik at least remains open. Once Abdulhalil Abithaci’s bookshop in Zeytinburnu closes, though, there will only be two Uyghur bookshops left in Istanbul. The impact will be felt beyond the streets of the Turkish metropolis, hurting the Uyghur diaspora around the world.

“Books are very important for the survival of our culture and people,” Dilnur Reyhan, a Uyghur sociologist based in Paris, told me over the phone. “If the bookstores in Istanbul do not survive, it will be a major blow. That is why I think the Chinese state ordered this attack, and the Turkish authorities executed it.” Reyhan, who edits a Uyghur-French magazine, added that the war in Ukraine had driven up the price of paper, putting the hope of creating new Uyghur bookstores away from Turkey further out of reach.

One Uyghur software developer, Memeteli Niyaz, has built a website that has around 3,000 free ebooks on it, 600 of which were sent from within China by an anonymous source. But Niyaz has already been forced to migrate the website to a new host after the one he was using received copyright complaints. He fears his website, too, will inevitably be shut down. 

A week after the raid, I visited Abdulla Turkistanli again. He told me that some Turkish writers had come to the shop and encouraged him to carry on providing books to Istanbul’s Uyghur community. Turkistanli had just donated hundreds of books from his shop to the community, something he does every year at the start of Ramadan. This year, he was more generous than usual.

If the store is raided again, he told me, it is better that the books are already spread throughout the community, where there is at least a chance they will be read, enjoyed and protected.

The post In Istanbul, the last Uyghur bookshops struggle to survive appeared first on Coda Story.

Violent clashes in December and January, including two mass killings, left 46 people dead. But “security forces were not to blame” for these incidents, she said. Instead, it was one group of protesters that fatally attacked another, with firearms smuggled over the southeastern border from Bolivia.

At a January 24 press conference, Boluarte cited only “unofficial” sources when she told reporters that most of the people killed in a recent confrontation in Puno, a predominantly Indigenous region that borders Bolivia, died after being shot with “a homemade weapon known as dum-dum,” in an apparent reference to expanding bullets that explode inside victims’ bodies. “The police do not use this type of lethal weapon,” she said.

“This is not peaceful protest,” she continued. “It’s a violent action by a group of radicals with a political and economic agenda driven by drug trafficking, mining, and contraband.”

But there is no evidence to support this story, as Boluarte herself appeared to acknowledge in her remarks to the media.

Extensive cell phone footage from the two mass killings — one in Ayacucho that left 10 dead and the other in Puno, which killed 18 — shows the National Police of Peru and the Peruvian armed forces opening fire on civilians. In both cases, people were killed by gunfire, according to Peru’s official human rights agency.

In the week following Boluarte’s press conference, Peru’s two leading investigative journalism outlets, OjoPublico and IDLReporteros, came out with exposes clearly laying out evidence that pointed to the national police and the army. The former published details of the autopsies, which found police munitions in the bodies of many of the dead protesters. The latter painstakingly reconstructed the Ayacucho deaths to show how the military used live rounds against civilians.

A few days later, Amnesty International published its own investigation, in which it accused the national police of “unlawfully” and “indiscriminately” using lethal force against “mostly peaceful” protests. The human rights group also warned that the killings had been motivated by “systemic racism ingrained in Peruvian society.”

This is all hard to take for many Peruvians, who have endured almost continual political chaos since 2018 — with six different presidents in five years. The current unrest is the result of the ousting of Pedro Castillo, whose 17 months in power were dominated by graft scandals and infighting on the far left. Castillo was removed from office by Peru’s Congress, after he attempted to dissolve the legislative body, overhaul the courts and rule by decree, just as anti-corruption prosecutors were closing in on him. Boluarte shared a self-declared Marxist-Leninist ticket with Castillo in the 2021 elections but allied herself with the far-right majority in the Congress as soon as she was sworn in as president, possibly to head off her own ideologically-driven impeachment.

The protests, which have no clear leader, initially called for Castillo’s reinstatement. But now demonstrators are targeting Boluarte and the Congress and demanding new elections. The president’s popularity has dipped to 15% and Congress’ to just 6%, according to one poll. The same study found that three-quarters of Peruvians want Boluarte to resign.

It is no coincidence that in a society divided by race, class and geography, where half of the population is food insecure, most of those protesting are the have-nots who have been largely excluded from Peru’s economic boom of the last two decades. Southern Peru, the epicenter of the turmoil, is the country’s poorest region, where many rural families have no running water or electricity. 

Although Boluarte has claimed to want “dialogue” and to never have authorized the use of deadly force against demonstrators, she has also repeatedly defended the national police, calling their handling of the protests “immaculate.” Compounding this are racist dog whistles from the military and far-right government leaders dismissing the protestors. Boluarte’s first head of military intelligence, Juan Carlos Liendo, insists that the left has sought to use Castillo’s ouster to divide Peruvians by income and ethnicity.

But in an interview, Liendo,  now a frequent analyst on Peruvian TV, appeared to do exactly that by blaming the unrest on the “Andean man,” a reference to Peruvians from mountain communities of Indigenous origin.

“The Andean man is very prone to violence. If you look at the history of Latin America, Peru is the most violent country. The societies that are most violent are those that live in the mountains, not in the jungle, unless it is jungles with mountains, like Vietnam.”

Ultimately, Liendo’s views proved too extreme even for Boluarte, who forced him out just a week after appointing him. But her broader views do not seem to have changed.

Lawmakers, most of Peru’s heavily-concentrated media and Boluarte herself also frequently conflate the unrest, which has included vandalism and rioting, with “terrorism.”

Falsely accusing one’s political opponents of terrorism — known in Peru as “terruqueo” — has a very particular and painful meaning for Peruvians. A well-established practice of the Peruvian far right, it is a reminder of the traumas triggered by the Shining Path guerilla insurgency of the 1980s and 1990s. The armed Maoist rebels launched a conflict that, according to the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, took the lives of an estimated 69,000 Peruvians, most of them civilians.

Today, the last remnants of the Shining Path, which formally laid down its arms in 1994, have given up their revolutionary agenda and instead are providing protection to the cocaine trade in a remote, densely-forested area of the eastern Andean foothills.

On February 11, the group ambushed a police patrol deep in the cloud forest, killing seven officers. Yet no serious expert believes that the group still has the capacity to influence events beyond the immediate region, much less mobilize national anti-government protests. 

“The narrative doesn’t have to be logical. It just needs to be emotive,” said Eduardo González, a sociologist who advised the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “The government needs a monster, to create moral panic. This just shows that memory is a battle. It’s not reflexive or easy.” 

Antonio Zapata, a historian at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, pointed to the moral panic over communism in the 1930s. 

“Terruqueo is just the latest way in which the elites see the country,” said Zapata. “They always need an external agent. Now it’s Evo [Morales, the former socialist president of Bolivia], before it was Fidel and before that it was Stalin. Like all efficient lies, it has to be woven together with elements of the truth.”

This scare tactic has allowed the government to declare states of emergency in several of the protest hotspots, restricting the right to assembly and allowing warrantless searches of homes. Separately, it has introduced a bill to toughen already-steep penalties for public order offenses with fast track trials that violate basic due process norms.

Prosecutors even set up a terrorism hotline for citizens to report supposed “revolutionaries.” Chief prosecutor Patricia Benavides has converted several offices specializing in human rights abuses, including those committed by the state, into counter-terrorism units. 

At Lima’s San Marcos University, the oldest university in the Americas, riot police and anti-terrorism officers arrested 193 students and protestors, before being forced to free all but one of them for lack of evidence. The ultra-conservative mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, has also banned protests downtown in an obvious breach of the national constitution.

Meanwhile, an extreme-right group, which calls itself the Resistance and has ties to the mayor, has harassed and intimidated journalists and officials perceived to be progressive for months without prosecutors or the national police  lifting a finger. On February 21, the Resistance staged a rowdy picket outside the home of Gustavo Gorriti, a prominent journalist who heads IDL Reporteros, chanting antisemitic slogans. Police officers refused to intervene.

In many ways, Peru’s current turmoil feels like deja vu. Nearly 30% of those killed when the Shining Path was at its most powerful — some 20,000 people — died at the hands of the military and the police, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a fact that Peru’s authoritarian right still refuses to acknowledge. That grim story is laid out at the Place of Memory, a gray concrete museum overlooking the Pacific in Lima that memorializes the internal conflict. Lima’s mayor López Aliaga wants to hand over the control of the museum to the military, which would likely erase any mention of its own atrocities.

“It’s not that we don’t remember,” said Zapata, the historian. “It’s what we remember. On one side, there is this memory of being marginalized, excluded, of always being defeated. On the other, there is this memory of how to exclude and marginalize and how to defend privileges.”

That struggle for memory over the bloodletting of the 1980s and 1990s has never been far from the surface in Peru. But it has now detonated into a new, critical confrontation over Peru’s present.

The post Peru’s far right is reviving decades-old terrorism narratives to undermine protests appeared first on Coda Story.

“It is an honor to be with Obrador!” 

“Women for AMLO!” 

“AMLO: best president ever!”

Hundreds of Mexicans living in the New York metropolitan area had come together to mark a historic moment — for the first time, they could vote in a referendum that would determine the country’s future. In this case, they would help decide whether President López Obrador would end his presidential term prematurely. Leading the Obradorista effort in this part of the U.S. is Morena New York Committee 1, an organization made up of fervent supporters of the president, his party and his ideals. They adhere to a political edict of social and economic progress known as the “Fourth Transformation” that imagines a future in which government employees no longer abuse their power in order to enrich themselves and protect their allies.

That Sunday in April, as Mexicans went to the polls, Morena New York Committee 1 staged three processions in New York City to show their support for the sitting president. At a rally in Union Square, an AMLO impersonator wore a larger-than-life papier-mache replica of the president’s head, shaking hands and bowing in front of the crowd. The committees encouraged those who didn’t or couldn’t register to vote to cast “a symbolic vote” during a ceremony scored with traditional music.

Since Morena’s inception in 2011 (and with the help of the president’s party), dozens of what are known as “affinity groups” have sprung up in the United States and organized ardent popular support for the Mexican president. Today, AMLO has a loyal base among Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. Most seem to perceive López Obrador as a restorative force in Mexican democracy, one who has put the most vulnerable communities first — including Mexican immigrants living abroad. For years, these groups have tried to amplify the voices of migrants through civic organizations and to exercise their voting rights in both Mexico and the United States.

“We are not fighting for ourselves, but for the next generations. [We] want to give them a better country full of opportunities so that they do not have to emigrate, like us who come here to suffer cold, hunger, political persecution and racial discrimination,” said Jose Luis Ramírez, a long-time supporter of the president at the rally in Corona, Queens. 

While some individuals have followed AMLO throughout his political career of nearly four decades, many only became active after years of living in the U.S. Empowered by AMLO’s critiques of “neoliberalism” and the “corrupt nature” of the governing parties before him, Morena sympathizers living abroad say they feel like they finally have representation in their country of origin. 

Guillermo Lucero, who joined the Morena New York committee in 2018, put it simply, “López Obrador has given us back our identity as Mexicans.”

But AMLO is not universally loved. Since he assumed the presidency in 2018, he has been criticized for gutting public institutions, lambasting the opposition and putting democratic institutions at risk. Most recently, critics have focused on López Obrador’s proposal to defund the National Electoral Institute that was created in an effort to clean up the electoral process in Mexico, which has seen its share of fraud. 

AMLO says that he wants to avoid expenses and the duplication of functions and claims that in its first year, the proposal will save up to $271 million in government expenses. But it is also well known that in 2006, AMLO lost the presidential election by a very small margin, and has since targeted the organization, accusing it of perpetrating fraud.

Last week, this proposal — known as “Plan B” — passed by a margin of 18 votes, though it will likely face a challenge before the Mexican Supreme Court. On February 26, when hundreds of thousands of Mexicans took to the historic center of Mexico City to protest AMLO’s Plan B, members of Morena Committees staged their own counter-protests across the U.S. Waving Mexican and American flags, from Placita Olvera and Huntington Park in California to Times Square and Brooklyn in New York City, hundreds of Mexicans once again rallied to support the president. 

Plan B also purports to expand voting access to Mexicans living abroad, allowing them to vote with a passport and a consular ID, in addition to their voting card. But it also will bring big cuts to the electoral watchdog’s budget and will remove 85% of its workforce. Critics worry that the elections will no longer be as supervised or safeguarded and that even basic voting services (like staffing at polling places) will be in short supply. Some view the electoral Plan B as a blow to Mexico’s fragile democracy. 

“[Plan B] is not about access, it is a means of meddling with [the National Electoral Institute’s] powers and weakening it as an institution,” said Dr. Rafael Fernández de Castro, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego. According to Fernández de Castro, the Mexican vote abroad has never determined an election and there is reason to believe that it won’t for many years. But now, some think otherwise.

Voting for Mexico, from the US

The number of Mexican individuals who are eligible to vote in the U.S. has doubled since 2005, and it’s a community that political parties in Mexico appear eager to tap into during the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. 

“Establishing the right to vote for Mexicans who left Mexico for any reason was extremely important,” said Claudia Zavala, an electoral councilwoman for the National Electoral Institute. “As Mexicans, we do not lose these rights regardless of where we are.”

Between the 1980s and 2007, the number of Mexicans living in the U.S. increased from 2.7 to 11.9 million people, though that figure has since plateaued to a little over 10 million. Today, nearly 10% of the Mexican population lives in the United States. But for most of that period, Mexicans living abroad were sidelined from politics altogether and unable to vote in federal or local elections, until 2005.

Today, only 2% of the foreign population holds voter identification cards. Less than 1% participated in the elections of 2018, according to a recent study co-authored by political scientist and former National Electoral Institute staffer Andrés Besserer Rayas. As of 2015, Mexicans can claim voting IDs in Mexican consulates at no cost. But even as officials have removed barriers to casting a ballot, for example by expanding Mexicans’ ability to vote online and by mail, participation remains low.

“There is very little information about partisan identity in the Mexican diaspora in the United States,” Besserer said, and, among migrants, there is a general distrust of authority figures. Mexican political parties and their candidates are also prohibited, by law, from campaigning abroad.

This has not stopped individual parties or presidential hopefuls from traveling to the U.S. to meet with Mexican migrants or from bolstering the creation of political affinity groups abroad, especially when elections are on the horizon.

In the late 1980s, presidential candidate Cuahtemoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Revolutionary Party famously visited migrant communities in Los Angeles. Vicente Fox, candidate for the National Action Party whose victory ended the 80-year single-party rule in Mexico in 2000, praised migrants as the “heroes of Mexico” and promised them the vote.

Earlier this month, Ricardo Anaya, the presidential hopeful for the conservative National Action Party, visited Dallas, Texas to inaugurate his party’s first “Committee for Migrant Action,” along with the party’s president, Marko Cortés. They told a small crowd that they hoped to visit other states in the near future.

AMLO’s Morena party has proven increasingly popular among the diaspora living outside of Mexico. Voting registration figures for Mexicans abroad have almost quadrupled, from just over  40,000 voters in 2006 — when AMLO first ran for president, unsuccessfully — to over 180,000 in 2018 when he was elected. In 2006, he only won 34% of the foreign vote. In 2018, that number spiked to 64%. 

Now, there are dozens of groups sympathetic to Morena in the United States, especially in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego. But Morena New York Committee 1 tops them all, boasting the largest digital footprint with a quarter-million followers on Facebook. The committee maintains a formidable presence online and broadcasts live events on its Facebook page.

‘We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries’

Since AMLO’s presidential victory in 2018, members of Morena New York Committee 1 have met regularly across New York City boroughs to celebrate new reforms or stage pro-AMLO demonstrations in parallel to events held in Mexico. Morena committees are also conceived as organizations to further voters’ political literacy. In the past year, Morena created the National Institute for Political Formation, an in-person and virtual academy that says it aims to provide a civic education to Mexicans everywhere. Course offerings include a primer on geopolitics, neoliberalism and the limits of capitalism. The Institute has held town halls in cities such as San Diego, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

According to Alina Duarte, who leads the Institute’s efforts abroad, Mexican citizens living in the U.S. have been celebrated for their financial contributions to the country but have otherwise been politically sidelined. In 2022, Mexican migrants living in the U.S. sent back $58 million in remittances, a number that is often invoked by AMLO during his daily press briefings. 

“Our migrant communities have this double responsibility. Not only do they sustain two nations economically, but they also play a fundamental role in the politics of both,” said Carlos Castillo, a former Morena representative from Mexico City who attended a meeting of the Institute in New York City last November.

To some, there is reason to believe that Mexicans living in the U.S. can set the political agenda for two countries at once. In recent years, several non-partisan groups have formed a bridge between organizers and bi-national institutions, including Fuerza Migrante, a bi-national organization based in New York.

“We have what it takes to be able to influence the political life of both countries — it is simply a matter of organizing,” said Avelino Meza, the director of Fuerza Migrante. 

Many of these organizations have helped to enact legislation that pushes for greater representation of immigrant Mexican communities in the Mexican government. In 2021, Mexico’s electoral court introduced the migrant representative whose main function is to represent individuals from Mexico living abroad. Morena has three sitting representatives. Ironically, those living abroad were not able to vote for any of them.

Though new measures have been introduced to encourage migrant participation, such as setting up physical voting booths in places like Dallas for upcoming state elections, some claim these actions are insufficient. And with Plan B enacted, some processes intended to ensure the integrity of elections may falter or be eliminated altogether.
But Morena supporters are hopeful. A poll conducted in November 2022 reveals that the president’s party is favored to win in 2024. “There is a historical debt owed to Mexican migrants, which the electoral reform barely begins to address,” said Alina Duarte of the National Institute for Political Formation. “But there is reason to believe that the migrant vote in 2024 will be historic.”

With reporting assistance from Gustavo García.

The post Mexican expats are trumpeting the ruling party’s message and getting out the vote appeared first on Coda Story.

The second woman, Tunisha Sharma, a 20-year-old actor, allegedly hung herself on December 24 on the set of a TV show that she was working on with her boyfriend. They had apparently broken up shortly before her death. After Sharma’s death, her boyfriend was arrested for “abetment to suicide.”

What links the otherwise unconnected deaths of these two young women is that they were Hindu and their boyfriends were Muslim. Predictably, both cases were reported in the mainstream Indian media, particularly on television, as examples of “love jihad” — a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging that vulnerable Hindu women are being groomed by Muslim men and converted to Islam.   

Asif Khan, a resident of Dindori, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, married Sakshi Sahu in April. They were in their early 20s. As the news spread through their village of a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman, local Hindutva (or Hindu nationalist) groups mobilized to “rescue” Sakshi.

The law was on the side of the vigilantes. The police booked Asif for wrongful confinement and kidnapping, based on a complaint by Sakshi’s brother. A local BJP unit blocked a nearby highway to protest the marriage and the district administration demolished Asif’s family home and three shops they owned.

Still, the couple refused to break up, leaving their village to live a quieter married life elsewhere. But news of Walkar’s murder, and the associated national talk of love jihad, reintroduced stresses and fears into their marriage. “We have been reassuring Sakshi that she doesn’t need to be afraid,” Asif’s father, Halim Khan, told me. “But she is scared.” Asif told me that he had told Sakshi “society would never accept [their] relationship” but that she had said she would “throw herself in front of a train” if they broke up because of their religion.

But the anger evident in the media coverage of Walkar’s death shook the couple. Asif told Sakshi that “she is not a captive, that she can go back to her parents if she wants.” 

According to Charu Gupta, a history professor at Delhi University, love jihad “produces a master narrative of Muslim male aggression and Hindu woman’s seizure.” This, she wrote, is “critically linked to the fictive demographic fear of Hindus being outnumbered by others, which is central to Hindutva politics,” and makes it possible for a still overwhelming majority that controls all the levers of power to “portray itself as an ‘endangered’ minority.”

Several politicians, particularly from the BJP, the party that controls India’s federal government, have referred to the deaths of Walkar and Sharma in terms of love jihad. In Karnataka — the Indian state that contains Bengaluru, a city that is, by some estimates, second only to Silicon Valley as a global hub for tech — a BJP member of parliament began the new year by telling party workers that, when campaigning for local elections scheduled in the spring, they should not “speak about minor issues like roads and sewage.” Instead, they should impress on voters that “if you are worried about your children’s future and if you want to stop love jihad, then we need BJP… To get rid of love jihad, we need BJP.”

Just last month, Karnataka’s home minister told reporters that he had received a petition from Hindutva groups demanding that a special task force be formed to investigate love jihad. He added that in his view, the state’s anti-conversion laws were sufficient to deter and deal with cases of love jihad. Karnataka, governed by the BJP, has so far resisted joining other BJP-governed states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, in specifically legislating to make interfaith marriage more difficult. 

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with over 200 million people, the chief minister, a Hindu monk notorious for hate speech, told a crowd in a campaign speech that he would “protect the honor and dignity of women” from love jihad “at any cost.” In February 2021, Uttar Pradesh introduced a law that criminalized religious conversion “through marriage, deceit, coercion, or enticement.” Those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to a decade.

And in Madhya Pradesh, which sprawls across the center of India, the chief minister referred to Walkar’s murder in December, at an event to celebrate a local 19th-century freedom fighter. The hero was a tribal, a term used in India to refer to ethnic minorities, officially designated in the Indian constitution as Scheduled Tribes, who remain some of the most economically underprivileged people in the country. “I will not allow this game of love jihad to continue,” the chief minister said. “Someone cheats our daughters in the name of love, marries them, and cuts them into 35 pieces. Such acts will not be allowed in Madhya Pradesh.” This, even though Walkar was not murdered in the state and was not a tribal.  

Statements such as these, made by powerful politicians, have put even more pressure on the few people brave enough to enter into interfaith marriages in India. Even before the right-wing, Hindu supremacist bogeyman of love jihad became widespread, interfaith relationships in India were rare. Now they are dangerous. 

Just over 2% of marriages in India are interfaith. A Pew Research Center report in 2021 indicated that 99% of Hindus in India said they were married to someone from their own religious background, as did 98% of Muslims, 97% of Sikhs and Buddhists and 95% of Christians. These statistics underscore the ideological impetus behind the legislation in BJP-ruled states that seek to tackle religious conversion, and specifically love jihad, when the phenomenon clearly appears to be a figment of the imagination.

In Uttar Pradesh, where you can be imprisoned if the authorities deem your marriage to be one in which the primary motivation was religious conversion, Rashid Khan, a Muslim man, married Pinki, a Hindu woman. They married in 2020, the year that the state’s draconian anti-conversion law was formulated though not yet passed. Pinki told me she knew their future was fraught with danger but she went ahead and asked for Rashid’s phone number anyway. 

Both Pinki and Rashid worked in Dehradun, a city nestled in the picturesque foothills of the Himalayas, and they grew close over long conversations and stolen moments between shifts. Three years later, Rashid said he wanted to marry her, and he was willing to marry her according to Hindu custom and ritual. Pinki said she had long been drawn to Islam and wanted to have a Muslim wedding and to convert. On July 24, their marriage was solemnized in a nikah in a Dehradun mosque. Pinki changed her name to Muskan.

Initially, Muskan tried to get her family to accept their marriage, but her mother beat her and threw her out of the house. Still, the early months of their marriage were happy and soon Muskan was pregnant with their first child.

When the couple decided to get their marriage officially recorded in a court in Moradabad, in Uttar Pradesh, where Rashid was from, their petition was noticed by a local unit of the Bajrang Dal — a group of Hindutva militants which is part of the broader Sangh Parivar, the Hindutva “family” that includes the BJP. The couple suspects that their lawyer tipped off the Bajrang Dal. Rashid and Muskan were attacked on their way to the courthouse.

The mob beat up Rashid and his brother and took them to the police station. Meanwhile, Muskan, who was in the fourth month of her first pregnancy, was severely beaten and dumped outside a government-run shelter for women and children. “I was in trauma and extreme pain. I thought I would never see Rashid again,” Muskan told me, adding that there were other women  who were romantically involved with Muslim men being held at the shelter. “We were all tortured,” she alleged. “Made to work, cooking and cleaning continuously. I spent the days crying and in pain.” 

Muskan was eventually moved to a hospital, where she says she was injected by a doctor with undisclosed medicines. Shortly after, she suffered a miscarriage and was discharged the next day.

When Rashid was brought to court, Muskan said she loved him and that she had married him of her own free will. Her testimony convinced the court to release Rashid. The couple moved back to Dehradun to restart their lives in a single room. “This is the safest place we could find,” she told me. They have had a child since the miscarriage, and Muskan is breastfeeding her on the double bed that takes up most of the space in the room. Rashid, and his sister with her husband and son, were also sitting on the same bed. In another corner, a gas stove perched on a table served as the kitchen.

Since Narendra Modi swept into office in 2014 and was reelected with an even stronger mandate in 2019, almost every Muslim action is freighted with the word “jihad.” The mainstream Indian media have used this shorthand with relish. On March 11, 2020, Sudhir Chaudhary, a prominent and popular Indian journalist, presented his viewers with a chart outlining the various kinds of jihad to which India’s Hindus were subject. He talked about “hard” jihad and “soft” jihad, about the jihad being waged by the media, about the jihad being waged on history, on land rights, on the Indian economy, on affairs of the heart. The media even attempted to pin the spread of Covid in India to a single superspreader event connected to an Islamic conclave in a Delhi neighborhood, labeling it “corona jihad.” 

Another prominent Indian television journalist described an attempt by Muslims to “infiltrate” the civil services by passing a nationwide exam as the “UPSC jihad.” Muslims are drastically underrepresented in India’s civil services, and the number is dwindling, with only 3% qualifying to join the services in 2021, even though Muslims make up an estimated 14% of the population. Meanwhile, the 2021 National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report shows that Muslims comprise more than 30% of India’s prison population.

Last year, Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, said during a U.S congressional briefing that Modi was an “extremist who has taken over the government.” Stanton, a credible and highly respected scholar, said: “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India.”

Aasif Mujtaba, the founder of a nonprofit organization, Miles2Smile, told me that Muslims had already been effectively demeaned in India and were now being openly persecuted. He said that the word “jihad” had been weaponized, that it had been used to create an “us versus them narrative, in which the ‘them’ are Muslims who are considered to be lesser humans.” They are trying, now, Mujtaba added, to “delegitimize Muslims as citizens of the land.”

He is, in part, referring to the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act which led to weeks of protests until Covid-related lockdowns forced protesters off the street. The United Nations described the act — which offers a path to citizenship to everyone except Muslims who fled to India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh before 2014 because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs — as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.” But Mujtaba is also referring to a general atmosphere in which drastic, even illegal measures can be taken to punish Muslims for alleged crimes, including bulldozing their homes, breaking up their relationships and boycotting or shutting down their businesses. In October, Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said: “The authorities in several Indian states are carrying out violence against Muslims as a kind of summary punishment… [they] are sending a message to the public that Muslims can be discriminated against and attacked.”

But Muskan, who told a court in Uttar Pradesh of her love for Rashid, remains defiant. “Even though they say that Muslim men manipulate Hindu girls,” she told me, “it was me who initiated our relationship. I made a choice. They might call it jihad but people like us won’t stop loving each other.”

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“You need to look at this,” a friend messaged her, with a link to a Facebook post. When she clicked on it, she began shaking and gasping for breath.

“My heart was racing. My blood pressure was through the roof,” she said. “I lay in bed for two solid days and cried so much my eyes swelled shut.”

It had all started that week at a public library board meeting. The meeting’s official agenda included a vote on whether the library should restrict access to several books that dealt with themes related to gender, sexuality and LGBTQ issues. Jones, who is also the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, decided to weigh in. 

“No one on the right side of history has ever been on the side of censorship and hiding books,” she told the board. “Once you start relocating and banning one topic, it becomes a slippery slope.”

Other people spoke up and supported Jones’ opinion. The vote was taken off the table and the meeting adjourned. Jones was relieved. But then the Facebook messages started to appear.

It soon became clear that her speech at the meeting had activated the outrage machine powering the country’s nascent book-banning movement. In Jones, its cultural warriors had found a new target. A vicious trolling campaign ensued. People called her a pig, a pedophile and a groomer who needed to be “purged.” Some threatened to hurt her. Jones stopped leaving the house and started losing her hair.

What happened to Jones is not just a small-town, red-state story.

It’s a tale playing out in cities and states across the country, as a book-banning fever courses through the country’s body politic. Nationally, attempts to remove books from school and public libraries are shattering previous records. The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians who have found a rewarding culture war battle in children’s books about gender, diversity and sexuality. The majority of these groups were created during the pandemic as part of a broader “parents’ rights” movement that formed in opposition to Covid-related masking and remote learning policies in schools and that has since widened its focus to include challenging library and classroom books about race and LGBTQ issues. Some of these groups compile or circulate lists of “inappropriate” books, which can be used to agitate for book bans at schools and public libraries, using language about pedophilia, porn and grooming to gin up support for their efforts.

As various factions lobby to get those books taken off the shelves, librarians like Jones have been swept up in what veterans of the field say is an unprecedented wave of hostility.

For Jones, it played out largely on Facebook. One post included her photo, identified her by name and asked: “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kid’s section?” A different post, also featuring her name and photo, said she “advocated teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Hundreds of people in her small town liked, commented and shared the posts. Some identified Jones’ workplace. Shortly thereafter, someone submitted a public records request to her school, seeking her employment records and work emails. 

The digital harassment continued for months and began to ripple out to family and friends who were sent vitriolic messages from strangers. Her body started to react. Jones described “horrific” physical changes as the stress mounted. Her hair fell out. Her body broke out in hives. She stopped sleeping, suffered from panic attacks and lost dozens of pounds over the next two months. One day, a stranger sent her a death threat. “You can’t hide, we know where you live,” he warned. “You have a large target on your back. Click click.”

While efforts to ban books from public schools and libraries are not new, experts say the magnitude of the current campaign is unusual. 2022 will break records on book challenges, according to the data that the American Library Association began tracking more than two decades ago. As of September, there had been efforts to ban or restrict access to 1,651 different books in 2022, more than three times the number recorded in 2019. 

Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, characterized the book-banning movement as a politically motivated campaign to “disrupt education, stigmatize the voices of marginalized groups and engage in its own form of indoctrination.”

“What we have been observing is a growing effort to censor books that reflect the experiences of marginalized groups under this idea that, somehow, either that it’s morally unacceptable for any young person to know that there are gay people in the world, or that a narrative about U.S. history that illuminates systemic racism is somehow un-American and Marxist,” Caldwell-Stone told me.

The effort has been fueled by more than 50 groups that have coalesced around book restrictions and bans at every level, according to the nonprofit PEN America, which advocates for freedom of expression and has been tracking censorship attempts in schools. One of the most prominent players in this realm, the national nonprofit Moms for Liberty, has upwards of 200 chapters across the country and has backed hundreds of school board candidates nationwide, spending $50,000 on campaigns in Florida alone. The organization says it is “fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.” Its local chapters have driven book challenges in schools from Virginia to Florida.

On Facebook, Moms for Liberty’s main page features posts about cancel culture, school mask mandates and “the sexualization of children.” The New Yorker’s Paige Williams, who recently wrote a deep dive on the group, noted that “its instant absorption by the conservative mediasphere has led some critics to suspect it of being an Astroturf group—an operation secretly funded by moneyed interests.”

Lawmakers have also helped propel the broader campaign, with some introducing legislation intended to exercise more control over libraries’ selection policies. Others have demanded that schools investigate whether their collections include titles that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”

People and groups advocating for these challenges “do not all share identical aims, but they have found common cause in advancing an effort to control and limit what kinds of books are available in schools,” PEN notes. “Many of these groups use language in their mission statements about parents’ rights or religious or conservative views, some also make explicit calls for the exclusion of materials that touch on race or LGBTQ+ themes.”

The effort has resulted in a surge of censorship attempts that range from the tragic (“The Diary of Anne Frank”) to the hilarious (“Captain Underpants”). In Tennessee, a parent’s group sought to restrict access to a picture book about seahorses because it contained an illustration of the creatures mating, “twisting their tails together and twirling gently around,” while school districts in Missouri recently banned the Holocaust graphic novel “Maus” after the state passed a draconian law criminalizing anyone who provides “sexually explicit material” to students. As I wrote last spring, “Maus” has been a global hotrod for years due to its frank depiction of Holocaust history, even leading to a staged book burning in Poland.

When Missouri-based high school senior Meghana Nakkanti learned that her county’s school board was slated to debate a book ban, she and a group of peers teamed up to push back. Nakkanti hails from an area in the state she described as the heart of the Bible Belt, a community “really conducive to that type of culture war issue because it is very conservative.” Yet when she and her peers surveyed their classmates about school library books, they found little support for book bans: just 5 students out of roughly 340 said they support such restrictions. “Among the student body, there is so much opposition because we all understand that at the end of the day, no one’s forcing us to read,” Nakkanti said. “Even English teachers can’t get us to read actual textbooks.”

Nakkanti and her classmates began showing up to school board meetings to speak out in favor of library books, sometimes to the chagrin of the grown-ups in the room. She recalled one gathering in particular where the behavior of adults who opposed their efforts stood out as especially hostile. “There were these adults two, three, four times our age acting like children,” she said with a wry smile. “And our entire goal was just to remain like the rational ones. Because we are the rational ones.”

Amanda Jones is one among a growing number of librarians who have been publicly labeled as “groomers” promoting “pedophilia,” attacked on social media, harassed and threatened with violence and even criminal prosecution over these issues.

It happened to Martha Hickson too. At a school board meeting in the fall of 2021, a parent accused Hickson — a high school librarian in New Jersey — of grooming children and promoting pornography for including a handful of books in the library about LGBTQ themes. A group of parents filed a series of challenges with the school over the books, and Hickson was inundated with hate mail and attacks on social media. One afternoon, about a month after the meeting, Hickson collapsed from stress at school. 

“I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t talk full sentences. I was incoherent,” she recalled. At the instruction of her doctor, Hickson went on a brief medical leave and began to take anxiety medication. Though she’s back at work, the situation has continued to take a toll on her mental health. The morning we spoke, Hickson was reeling after experiencing another recent panic attack at work in the wake of a hostile email from a colleague. 

“I’m still going through it,” she told me. “I strive to make this library the safest place I can for kids, so that they feel that they can come here, be who they are and feel safe and valued. But I don’t feel safe here anymore. It’s like the world that you knew is shattered.”

A library employee in Missouri, who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns that he could lose his job for speaking to the media, described protestors showing up at the library to harass staff over a sexual education book on the shelves. He does not believe the library has the support of the county government, which appoints library board members and has acquiesced to patrons’ book challenges. Over the last year, stress-induced chest pains have brought him to the hospital emergency room on three separate occasions.

“I love libraries, I want to be working in them for the rest of my life,” he told me. “But if it comes down to the library or my health, I have to choose my health. And this year I have had a lot of reflection on if I’m going to continue my library career. And I feel like more often than not, that answer is no.”

PEN America documented 15 separate cases last year in which people pursued criminal complaints against librarians over “obscene” or “pornographic” materials in school and public libraries. Librarians under pressure have resigned or been fired over their book displays. Members of the extremist group Proud Boys have turned up at school board meetings and bombarded drag and pride-themed story hours at public libraries from California to North Carolina.

A smattering of new bills in state legislatures are raising the stakes even higher. EveryLibrary, the nation’s only political action committee for libraries, is tracking state legislation in Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee that is either pending or passed. In Missouri, librarians who are convicted of “providing explicit sexual material to a student” can face jail time.

Carolyn Foote, a former Texas school librarian who co-founded a support group for librarians under attack, said she knows librarians who have lost their jobs or taken leave “because they just couldn’t handle it anymore.” “It’s pretty outside the realm of what most librarians have ever had to cope with,” she told me.

More and more librarians are afraid to share their stories with news organizations or even library groups. When I spoke to the American Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone, she said she received two emails earlier in the day from librarians under duress who had gotten in touch and promptly instructed her not to respond because they were worried someone would find out they were in contact. “That’s the level of fear right now that many library workers are experiencing,” she explained. 

“This is the climate that we’re living in, in which people have tried to sow doubt in the very institutions and people who [we’re] supposed to look to as experts,” said Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at PEN America. “It’s very worrisome for democracy.”

What’s happening today is distinct, but it is not new. Adults have long tried to exercise control over what children learn in public schools, and clashes over ideas and books have been a hallmark of the country’s fractious school wars for at least a century. But a common through line over time has been the conflict between the will of parents to exercise control over what their children learn in public schools and that of the state, a tension that has manifested over the years in the language of what is known as the parents’ rights movement.

In the 1920s, the contested educational material was biology, not sexuality or history. Legislatures in nearly two dozen states proposed anti-evolution bills, including measures that would ban the teaching of Darwinism in schools. Many of these laws were motivated by parents’ concerns that public schools were usurping their authority over what their children learned, even if it conflicted with their ideological or religious beliefs. In the decades that followed, attempts to censor material in public schools took on a range of subjects, from “subversive” textbooks during McCarthyism to books that allegedly promoted atheism amid a 1980s-era moral panic over “secular humanism.” In 2001 and 2002, the most contested book in the nation was Harry Potter. The reason? “Occult” or “satanic” themes.

While it was less common in previous eras to focus attacks on individual librarians, it did happen on occasion, noted the American Library Association’s Caldwell-Stone. She pointed to the case of Ruth Brown, an Oklahoma librarian who attempted to create an interracial storytime at the local library in the 1950s and was later fired for “promoting communism.” “Underlying that was her efforts to integrate the public library,” Caldwell-Stone explained. 

What distinguishes the trend today, librarians and library groups say, is the organized effort behind the current campaign to challenge books, the volume of contested titles and the ferocity of the attacks mounted against its targets. But is it book content that’s really pushing this forward? Many experts I talked to are dubious that the legislators and groups driving these efforts are animated by a genuine concern about the material in the challenged books. Rather, they believe many of the organizers of these campaigns are motivated by political opportunism, recognizing a red meat issue for a base group of supporters that can be milked repeatedly to turn a profit and increase turnout for elections. 

“The reason that they’re creating the tension around the content of books in libraries is largely monetary gain,” said EveryLibrary’s Sweeney. According to Sweeney, mobilizing support for book challenges has been a fundraising coup for some of the groups involved in this effort.

“They’re raising millions of dollars fighting to keep these books out of libraries,” he said. “It’s very easy for an organization to find a book with a couple of pictures that they disagree with, take two pages out of context, send an email to their email list and ask everybody to donate a dollar in order to help them keep porn from the hands of children.”

Tempting as it may be to characterize this as a uniquely American story, there are echoes of it playing out around the globe. Book bans have taken root in countries that have been labeled backsliding democracies in recent years, including Brazil, Hungary and Turkey. 

The parallels to the U.S. are especially striking in Brazil, where conservative lawmakers, in a bid to rid schools of so-called “gender ideology,” have introduced more than 200 bills targeting gender and sexuality education. Like librarians in the U.S., Brazilian teachers whose lessons have addressed gender and sexuality say they have dealt with death threats, severe harassment and accusations of “indoctrinating” students from public officials. One teacher told Human Rights Watch that he was ordered to stop teaching “gender ideology” by a student’s parent who accosted him on the street. “He told me he was a member of a paramilitary group, that he was armed, and that he would shoot me,” he said.

In Turkey, more than 300,000 books have been removed from Turkish libraries and schools over the last several years for their alleged references to Fethullah Gulen, the U.S.-based cleric who the Turkish government claims masterminded a failed coup in 2016. According to Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director of PEN America, the purge also has swept up books related to Kurdish culture and history, as well as children’s books accused of containing “obscene” content. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary passed a law in 2021 banning LGBTQ characters from appearing on television or in school materials — legislation that has been compared to Russia’s infamous 2013 anti-gay propaganda law. 

It may be easy to write off those examples as unrealistic trajectories in the U.S. But PEN America, which has been tracking book bans, says there are 32 states with at least one ban in place. Johnson told me that 96% of these bans underwent “no process whatsoever.” “If we continue down this path,” she said, “we could begin to see more and more of our freedoms erode.”

As the digital storm began to die down, Jones started to register a different emotion stirring inside. Not anxiety or panic, but genuine rage.

At first, Jones didn’t fight back when angry hordes came after her on social media. She didn’t argue with the commenters calling her a groomer or defend herself from their vicious attacks. But then, something started to change. As Jones put it: “I got pissed!”

She understood that everything that had happened to her — the harassment and the pressure — had a purpose. “The bullies want me to be quiet,” she said. “And so, I decided that I will be the opposite of what they want me to be. My mother did not raise a weakling, and I’m not raising a weakling. It’s important to stand up and speak out.”

She decided it was time to bring the fight to court. “I just kept saying, ‘I’m mad, I’m mad, I’m mad,’” she told me. “I want to sue.”

With the help of a friend, Jones launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise legal fees for an attorney and filed a defamation lawsuit against two people who stated in Facebook posts that Jones shared “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” with young children and advocated “teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The posts, the lawsuit argued, accused Jones of criminal conduct and harmed her personal and professional reputation, portraying her as a “danger to children and exposing her to misplaced contempt and ridicule in the community.” 

The judge presiding over the case dismissed Jones’ lawsuit, arguing that the defendants had expressed their opinions in the posts and so their statements were not defamatory. But Jones is undeterred. She filed a motion for a new trial, which the judge denied, and intends to appeal the decision and move the lawsuit forward until her money runs out. Her motivations are two-fold: she wants to see the posters held accountable for what they said about her online, but she also wants to stand up for the profession and the librarians who don’t feel comfortable speaking up. Scores of librarians have reached out to her in the months since her case has gone public. “I’ve had about 300 emails from librarians in the past few months, and a lot of them want to stay silent,” she told me. “They’re very scared to be vocal.” 

Jones is not the only one fighting back in court. In Texas, residents of Llano County are suing local officials in federal court for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights over a series of book removals from the public library system. In Missouri, the American Civil Liberties Union recently filed a lawsuit against a school district over its book removal policy after the school board permanently banned a book with a nonbinary gender character from elementary school libraries.

Outside of legal action, various efforts are underway to support library employees under attack and to come to the defense of challenged books. The #FReadom campaign, co-founded by retired librarian Carolyn Foote, provides resources for librarians and schools facing book challenges, letter templates for community members opposing book bans to send to school board members and superintendents and advice for establishing local groups to support school board candidates. It also encourages people to share positive stories of librarians on social media. 

The National Coalition Against Censorship has compiled resources for educators dealing with removal requests and a way to report school censorship and material challenges. The American Library Association, which also has a detailed guide for reporting book challenges, recently launched a national “unite against book bans” campaign with resources and strategies for organizing against book challenges at the grassroots level, which is where many of the groups driving book challenges have gained momentum. Dozens of local groups, from Florida to Idaho, have come together to fight censorship threats in school districts and on social media. 

For Jones, the fight for now remains in court. Though she is likely to face an uphill battle with her defamation claim, she is ready to push it as far as it can go, and has few, if any, regrets about the choices that led to this moment. I asked Jones if she would have changed her decision to speak out at the library board meeting in July, given all that has happened since. 

She didn’t hesitate to answer me. “I’d still do it,” she replied, “in a heartbeat.”

The post America’s culture warriors are going after librarians appeared first on Coda Story.

Only if you’re lucky, will you catch a glimpse of him. He swoops in and then disappears, now giving his blessing to newlyweds at a sunrise shaman wedding, next whispering in the ear of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s loyal allies. Moments later, he reappears on horseback, trotting by in a procession of horsemen in medieval garb — Hungarian flag in hand, his long black hair tied in a low ponytail, — to greet high profile guests from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Andras Biro is the master of ceremonies for a biennial gathering, in Hungary, of 27 Turkic-speaking tribes called Kurultaj. It is where the right-wing government is promoting a policy of redefining itself as part of the Eastern world. Wrapped in a heavily embroidered silk robe, Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s spin on ethno-nationalism: it asserts that the nation’s true roots are not in a Christian Europe but with Turkey and among the Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, the descendants of the Huns.

Once banned under communism and pushed to the margins of the far right, this alternative history — known as Turanism — is being revived by the Hungarian government at the highest levels. Some of the central claims of Turanism have already made their way into Hungary’s national school curriculum, presenting an alternative Hungarian origin story. For Orban, Turanism has provided a convenient ideological basis for turning away from the EU and promoting closer ties with authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and with Turkey. In November, he said that “Hungarians are the only Eastern people left in Europe.”

The Kurultaj gathering is a mecca for this anti-establishment movement. The festival is financed by the government and designed for a family-friendly weekend. Kurultaj draws pilgrims from across the political spectrum to a scorching semi-desert in Hungary’s south. Right-wing historians, LARPers, horse-lovers, uniformed members of the banned Hungarian Guard, eco-activists, committed neo-Nazis, yogis and families from the suburbs mill around a vast, dusty field with hundreds of delegates from Central Asia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The centerpiece is an irrigated, verdant pitch where skilled riders re-enact Byzantine battles and compete in ethnosport. An actor playing Attila the Hun makes regular dashes across the field on horseback to cheers from the crowd in between speeches from a range of special guests — among them youngest son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with the former prime minister of Turkey, speaker of Hungary’s parliament Laszlo Kover and the president of the Organization of Turkic States. The sounds from the field are a constant echo across the festival grounds: heavy metal and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, the boom of speakers’ voices intoning the moral corruption of the West and its “woke” culture and the ever-present percussion of horse hooves.

Largely dismissed by Hungary’s liberal elite, Turanism proponents — like Biro — have reinvigorated an ideology that was popular nearly 100 years ago. The idea first appeared in Hungary in the late 19th century, during a time of political collapse, when a circle of Budapest intellectuals began to question Hungary’s fixation with catching up with the West.

Historian Balazs Ablonczy traces the emergence of the word “Turan” in Hungarian to the 1800s, to describe the territory that is divided between modern-day Iran and Central Asian states. Turanism reemerged during the 2008 economic crisis from the margins of Hungary’s ultra-right wing. Over the last decade, Turanism has evolved into an amalgam of ideas bringing together disparate and at times contradictory beliefs. 

In their weaponization of nostalgia, Orban and his political party Fidesz have shown just how well they understand what is often lost on Hungary’s, and Europe’s, left wing: the power of a good story.

“The left wing has left history to Fidesz,” said Adam Kolozsi, a Budapest-based journalist who has been attending Kurultaj for years. Since the first gathering in 2008, event organizers — who refer to themselves as “tradition keepers” — have been fusing together right-wing politics with history, entertainment and horses. 

Turanic messaging expresses a yearning for a lost national greatness and a connection to a much larger role in the world, which a pan-Turkic identity offers. “Even if we’re small at the moment, we are a great nation,” one festival attendee, Mate Herzsenath, told me while drinking a beer. Herzsenath lives in Germany, where he says he can make more money, and was one of many Hungarians I met living outside of the country who returned home for Kurultaj.

“The entire 19th century was all about westernizing Hungary — inventing Hungarians as civilized, liberal, western, constitutional individuals,” said Gergely Romsics, a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Many proponents of Turanism view those efforts as criminally wrongheaded and consider the Hungarian defeat in World War I, which brought the loss of 75% of its territory, as proof.

Hungary is not alone in its turn east. Turanism is in step with a similar movement called Eurasianism in Russia, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that argues that Russia is the heir apparent of the Mongol empire, destined to keep expanding its borders. In promoting kinship with the East and fostering a yearning for a greater past, both Putin and Orban stoke a popular mandate for embracing authoritarianism. The Huns, after all, didn’t conquer the world with democracy.

Since 2008, the crowds at Kurultaj have multiplied, and an entire academic and political apparatus has sprouted around the idea of a Turkic brotherhood.

Hungary’s pride

The day before marching out onto the main pitch at the festival in his knee-high leather boots and sparkling silver and turquoise jewelry, Biro spoke before Hungary’s parliament, in a suit, about the importance of preserving traditions. 

For the next three days in the sweltering mid-August heat, I chased the tails of Biro’s floor-length, blue-and-silver robes, hoping he could explain how he managed to bring 200,000 visitors (according to the official event count, though it appeared to be fewer than half this number to me) to a festival celebrating the genetic ties between white European Hungarians and Asian, Turkish and Middle Eastern nations. After all, this year’s Kurultaj festival followed remarks from Orban in which he asserted that Hungarians are not “a mixed race” and that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle are “no longer nations.” It made no sense.

I caught sight of Biro as he prepared the seating arrangements in the VIP section along the main parade pitch. He adjusted the angle of chairs and name tags, giving out directions to an assistant. The biggest names this year were prominent speakers from Turkey and Central Asian countries. But many festival attendees seemed wary of the politicians. The men — all of the invited speakers were men — were easy to spot as they sweated through their crumpling business suits and moved through the festival grounds with entourages and security details.

Many attendees, on the other hand, wore colorful native clothing from various continents. One couple I met had borrowed their elaborate costumes from the local theater where they worked. “It’s difficult to live in modernity,” Balazs Lengyel told me. “It’s gray and empty.” He and his wife Erika Lengyelne attend Kurultaj every year to be reborn at the gathering. Balazs seemed lost in thought as he spoke to me of his longing for a link to a shared past. Erika was more direct: “We are opposed to the EU. We have nothing to do with the West. It’s all a lie made up during communism. Fifty years of communism took away our pride.”

Katrin Kremmler has studied Kurultaj since 2014. She is now finishing her PhD on the subject at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. Kremmler and I met up in Budapest where she had traveled from Berlin to attend the festival with a Hungarian friend. Before driving over to Kurultaj, she warned the friend to tear off a LGBTQ bumper sticker, worried about the car being vandalized while parked.

As a seasoned Kurultaj attendee, Kremmler had a few other pre-Kurultaj tips. I had asked her about fitting in at the festival, and she kindly sent over a couple addresses for Kurultaj lifestyle shopping in Budapest. 

In one shop in central Budapest I found head-to-toe traditional Hungarian costumes for sale, along with the legendary Hungarian sudar: a bull whip up to eight feet in length. The end of the whip makes a sonic boom as it reaches the speed of sound. Hungarians claim that it’s the first human-made tool to cross the sound barrier, and it’s a staple at Kurultaj for both the professional horse riders and drunk attendees taking a crack.

There were also more modern clothing options: black t-shirts with a Christian cross stenciled next to “HETERÓ,” shirts with the slogan “Europe Belongs to Me” and multiple apparel options showing maps of “greater Hungary.” Orban has been spotted in a scarf that shows a map of Hungary with its imperial territories intact, which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, Austria, Serbia and other countries. At another Turanism shop, this time on the Buda side of the city, I looked through a collection of anti-Covid lockdown buttons next to more anti-LGBTQ slogans and adverts for a children’s summer camp.

“Everyone finds something that they like and tunes out what they don’t identify with,” said Kremmler, trying to explain the mish-mashing of ideologies brought together by Kurultaj and Turanism. Her PhD focuses on the contradictions within the right wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its embrace of Eurasia. She noted that Bugac, the village where the festival takes place, is about an hour’s drive from Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, a major corridor for migrants from the Middle East attempting to enter the EU. Men dressed in the all-black uniforms of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary group outlawed in 2009, patrolled the festival grounds.

Kremmler believes that for years Hungary’s liberal elite failed to understand Turanism. Today, the festival is able to attract top researchers from the Hungarian National Museum and other academic institutions. This is also the first year she’s managed to convince any of her Budapest friends or colleagues to join her at Kurultaj.

“It’s parallel realities,” said Kremmler. “Urban liberal elites think they can ignore these developments because they consider it pseudoscience. But it’s not fringe. It’s the new mainstream because the government is working hard to make this the new popular mainstream.”

Some of the claims of the Turanism movement have now entered Hungary’s schools. Curriculum updates in 2020 included an intense focus on medieval history and introduced alternatives to Hungary’s accepted consensus on its national origins. Hungarians had learned that their language is most closely related to the languages spoken by the Finno-Ugric people found in Finland and Estonia and by indigenous tribes living in Russia. 

When this was first discovered by scholars in the 18th century, it came as a bit of a shock. Surrounded by German, Slavic and Romanian speakers, some people found it “degrading,” said Gabor Egry, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. It also encouraged a sense of ethnic uniqueness. 

The new school curriculum introduces the idea that the origin of the Hungarian language is up for debate and that Hungarians may in fact be closer relatives of the Turkic-speaking tribes originating in Kazakhstan. 

Archaeogenetics, a field of research championed by Biro, is supercharging the argument that Hungarians came from Central Asia. Archaeogenetics relies on gathering a set of historic DNA samples — sometimes centuries old — that the researchers evaluate as representative of an entire population. The research requires expensive equipment that the government has helped to fund, to look at DNA samples from the 9th and 10th centuries. The field often faces criticism on how the results are interpreted. 

“It fits this broader rewriting of history: a more nationalistic, more triumphalist narrative which must emphasize Hungarian victories and greatness,” Egry said. ”Emphasizing these Eastern origins could imply that Hungary belongs to this emerging world and not the declining one.”

The new history was played on repeat at Kurultaj.

“Everything they were teaching at school is not true,” said Malinda Kovacs, who described herself as a proud Hungarian, a mother and a homemaker, is captivated by Native American traditions and had a full-back tattoo showing the busts of several Native American men.

Hungary’s school curriculum changes also included replacing the works of writer Imre Kertsz — a Hungarian Jew who is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature — with the assigned reading of Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of Joseph Goebels, and Albert Wass, a convicted war criminal. Some teachers have protested online under the hashtag #noNAT, as part of a wider movement of ongoing teacher unrest in the country. 

Memory warfare

Kremmler, the Berlin academic, has studied 21st-century Turanism and its leader, Andras Biro, who has a PhD and is affiliated with the Hungarian Museum of Natural Sciences.

“When Biro started his whole genetics project I guess this could have been contested if someone from the genetics field, in Hungary or internationally, had actually taken the time or energy to review his research,” she told me over lunch in Budapest. Instead, critics of his work came almost exclusively from among scholars in the humanities who didn’t engage with the genetic research he was touting.

“This is about a new construct of ethnicity that the government is producing,” Kremmler said. 

Kremmler, whose mother is Hungarian, first came to Hungary in the 1990s to learn the language and join the academic community. She remembers it as an exciting time, a period of critical research burgeoning in the wake of communism. She’s now watching the pendulum swing the other way.

“It’s all really fascinating, unless it’s happening in your own country,” said Margit Feischmidt, laughing when we met at the Research Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, where she is the head of sociology and anthropology. I told her about some of my Kurultaj-themed shopping earlier that day. “It’s fascinating, and at the same time catastrophic,” said Feischmidt. Over three decades, she has watched an exodus of researchers from Hungary who leave out of an unwillingness to collaborate with the government.

When I finally caught up with Biro at Kurultaj, it was in the large yurt at the festival where the guest speakers convened for meetings. He has just finished a closed session with some of the guests from Turkey and Central Asia, among them President Erdogan’s youngest son.

“There has already been cooperation in the field of science or sport and now it’s on a political level,” Biro said, smiling with his white teeth flashing.

“From several thousands kilometers away, a Kazakh or an Uzbek comes over here and they do everything as we do, they understand everything: the common legends, the names, the ceremonies, the food,” Biro said. “Besides, legends don’t come from nowhere.”

The post In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue appeared first on Coda Story.

My parents moved from Bombay to Kuwait when I was six weeks old. We moved because the money was good, the living was easy, and it had none of the grime of India, the clamorous crowds in the cities we left behind. Their kids, my parents told themselves, would have better opportunities in the Gulf. Not that any of us had it all that hard in India. But India was not Kuwait.

Then, when I was 12, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, hardened by a ruinous, nearly decade-long war with Iran, annexed Kuwait.

I slept through the invasion, waking to the sound of the news on my shortwave radio, which my father had commandeered. This radio — an industrial slate-gray Grundig Satellit 650, stolid, weighty and unglamorous, “just like German girls” as my Calcutta-born, Germany-educated father would say — was a major presence in my life. 

This radio, or rather the hours I spent with my ear soldered to it, listening to the BBC World Service, was at fault for what my mother called my “Britification.” My Anglophilia had long made me the object of family scorn. Hobson-Jobson, or Suited-Booted, my dad would call me when he was feeling affectionate, “ingrej” (meaning Englishman, albeit spat contemptuously from the side of his mouth) when less so. 

Football was where my devotion to all things English was most manifest. I lived then for Saturday evenings, coming home from school — the weekend in Kuwait was Thursday and Friday — to coax from the radio’s bleeps and crackles the poetry of the classified football results, the sounds of those long lists of British provincial centers and market towns.

For all the evocative power of England’s various Wanderers, Rovers and Rangers, it was the Scottish teams that were unmatched for euphony. Cowdenbeath, Stenhousemuir, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South and, most stirring of all to my seven-year-old ears, Heart of Midlothian. Only the Scottish league could have produced, though it never did, such a scoreline as East Fife 5 – Forfar 4. Read it out loud for yourself.

My experience of football was more vivid because it was untainted by television coverage. What mattered to me were the stories, the lore and the private pleasures of the imagination rather than the community solidarity of following one’s local football club.

“Listen,” my father said, retaining, in the midst of crisis, the paternal imperative to needle his son, “it’s your prime minister.” Margaret Thatcher was denouncing the Iraqi invasion as “absolutely unacceptable,” her peremptory tone typical of the more fearsome teachers in my British school. 

My father thought the whole thing would blow over. “Bush and Thatcher won’t allow it. Saddam will pull out within a week,” my parents told me and my sister, told their friends, told our relatives around the world, told each other. After all, the previous day’s Arab Times, the bigger of Kuwait’s two English-language dailies, had announced on its front page that the problem “between brothers” had been settled. And then the Iraqis cut the phone lines.

In 1990, globalization was an idea gaining currency in academic circles. As cosmopolitan pre-teens, defined not so much by where we came from as by what we read, watched, heard and thought, you could say my friends and I anticipated the zeitgeist. So in that tiny, undistinguished country in the Arabian Gulf, I drank the British fruit cordial Vimto and ate Hardee’s roast beef sandwiches. I spread Danish butter on my toast and only ate Granny Smith apples. I loved “The Real Genius,” starring Val Kilmer, and also loved the movies of Satyajit Ray that I watched with my parents. I supported Liverpool Football Club. I listened to New Order and The Smiths and Gang of Four and Orange Juice. On my bookshelves, Tintin and Asterix comics shared space with Archie digests and Amar Chitra Katha. 

Such scattershot particulars, such quirks of personality, I understood. “Indian,” “Bengali,” I did not. My migrant parents — though migration is surely the ultimate expression of the individual over the community, over the ties that bind — still sought succor in a collective identity, in their sense of themselves as part of a community.

When my father joked that Margaret Thatcher was my prime minister, he knew that Thatcher, the leader of a country to which I had no ties that any immigration officer would recognize, might as well have been my prime minister, just as George H.W. Bush might as well have been my president, or Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah my emir, because I did not know what it meant to have such allegiances.

What he didn’t seem to know was that my Anglophilia was a result of moving to Kuwait, of flailing for identity in a country to which I could never belong. Identity, I knew from an early age, was nebulous, its edges as unruly as an ink stain.

India offered me my external identity, Britain my interior one and Kuwait was the metaphorical suburban bedroom in which I played out my fantasies. For our family, Kuwait wasn’t as final as emigration. It elicited no real grief, no loss. Even if it lasted years, decades, it was a temporary condition. Home was elsewhere.

Before the invasion, an exasperated teacher once accused me of daydreaming with the words: “You really do live in your own utopia.”

Looking the word up in the dictionary that night, I discovered that utopia meant “no place.” It occurred to me that I might be living in Utopia, in no place, nowhere that could be recognized as somewhere. Even at 10 years old, I viscerally felt the truth onto which my teacher had stumbled.

I knew I was “Indian,” a transplanted Bengali. I had an Indian passport. I ate regionally specific Indian food, like the fish curry Bengalis called “macher jhol” and, on weekends, “luchi and begun bhaja,” fried puffy flatbread and aubergine slices. My father was one of the founders of the Bengali Cultural Society, an outlet for Bengalis in Kuwait to put on plays, sing songs and make their children recite the nonsense verse of Sukumar Ray. It gave them a space to assert their identities and retain their connections to what Indians like to call their “native place.”

My parents had no difficulty filling the blank canvas that was Kuwait with the colors of the culture they left behind. What could be easier in Kuwait than pretending you had never left India? Your social life revolved not just around other Indians but mostly around Indians just like you, in terms not just of ethnicity, region, religion and language but class, education, even profession. Kuwait dented none of their cultural confidence. Their leisure time was filled with the Bengali language and Bengali food.

For me, though, Kuwait was quite literally no place. Children like me were not like the children of immigrants to the U.S., U.K., Australia and so on — children torn between cultures, negotiating a fraught terrain between the domestic experience and the world outside. We were instead bereft of culture. Bereft of cultural context.

My claim on India was almost as tenuous as my claim to Britain. And the unstated policy of the country in which I lived was to deliberately keep at arm’s length a population of expatriate workers that outnumbered citizens. With its broad boulevards and American fast-food restaurants with cheery signage, Kuwait looked and sometimes felt like an international airport.

The Iraqi invasion had little effect on my self-absorption. I felt no fear, no swell of sympathy for my few Kuwaiti friends, mostly teammates on the school football team, all of whom were still on their summer holidays in luxury hotels and yachts across Europe. I thrilled instead to the novelty of the invasion and the promise that the school term might not begin as scheduled. The early days of the occupation passed slowly. For news, we were reliant on the elusive shortwave signal for the BBC World Service. 

The only Kuwaiti we really talked to was Asrar Al-Qabandi, a young woman my mother knew who had been educated largely in the United States. Asrar was different from other Kuwaiti women. My mother had met and befriended her when she applied for a job at the playschool my mother ran. Asrar kept her hair short and usually wore baggy trousers. Her incorrigible habit of expressing her opinion made her unpopular with her family and a frequent visitor to our apartment.

Asrar used to complain to my mother about Kuwait, the country’s conservatism, the easy money that had made its people lazy and insipid, their lack of interest in education and their prejudices. She seemed to have few friends apart from my mother. Until the invasion, I had never heard her express any affection for Kuwait. I imagined Kuwait as a scab on her knee, irritating and unsightly but comforting to pick at.

Occasionally, the invasion would make its presence felt. We heard our parents talk anxiously about a close friend, a man with a pendulous belly and spry wit, who had been arrested in Iraq for carrying counterfeit dollars. Our parents panicked about their own dollars. These were bought at five times the usual rate and were the only currency Iraqis would accept in exchange for a plane ticket to Jordan, the only country that had kept its border with Iraq open.

Our encounters with the occupying soldiers were infrequent and sometimes farcical. As Indians, we were relatively safe in occupied Kuwait. We were of no interest to Iraqi soldiers, unlike Westerners who made valuable hostages and, for obvious reasons, Kuwaitis, small bands of whom, Asrar among them, were organizing and mounting a sporadic, flickering resistance. The stories told about Iraqi soldiers among Indians were mostly of buffoonery, tales tinged with condescension for soldiers stealing computer monitors they thought were TVs, for soldiers who were not Iraqi at all but bewildered Bangladeshi gardeners or Filipino drivers forced into the army as casualties in the eight-year war with Iran mounted. It was only after we left Kuwait that I read about the rapes and torture that happened during the occupation.

In the opening pages of “The Satanic Verses,” as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha plunge towards “Proper London, capital of Vilayet,” Salman Rushdie puts the words of a famous song into Gibreel’s mouth:

O, my shoes are Japanese

These trousers English, if you please

On my head, red Russian hat

My heart’s Indian for all that

For an Indian living in India, the song is about pride, jauntily nationalistic lyrics written for a newly created nation. In contemporary India, the song is relevant and resonant as a simultaneous embrace and rejection of globalization — some things, your heart and soul, are forever local. For the immigrant Indian, the song is a defiant but futile resistance. For the Gulf-based Indian, the song is matter of fact, an accurate expression of the expat life. Of course, your heart is Indian, whatever the imported fripperies of your new, materially comfortable life. What other choice is there?

But for the Indian expat’s child, the child put into a British or American school to suit their parents’ aspirational, upwardly mobile sense of themselves, the song seemed foolish, sentimental.

How do you keep your heart free from the influence of your shoes, trousers and hat? What does it mean to have an Indian soul? For me, the idea of an authentic self was muddied, perplexing. If you come from somewhere, a particular place, and you live there all your life, an authentic self that grows organically from your sense of place is something you take for granted, so strong and defining a part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine what could diminish that land-based identity.

For us, those cosseted children of Utopia, of no place, what could fill the place-shaped hole in our identity? It’s not that the question of where you come from becomes hard to answer, it’s that it no longer has any meaning. This is distinct from the struggle of the immigrant’s child to negotiate between the place to which they now belong and their “place of origin” so inadequately represented by the short, rickety bridge of the hyphen — Vietnamese-American, say, or Afro-Caribbean British. Or from the immigrant’s division between the place remembered and the place in which you found yourself.

Part of my love for English football was for its unabashed tribalism. I remember being in my neighborhood bookshop and coming across a copy of E.P. Thompson’s canonical text “The Making of the English Working Class” and begging my bemused father to buy it. I was too young to make any sense of what I was reading but I was powerfully drawn to the idea that an entire class of people could be “made,” as if you could pull a community whole from a kiln, as if a shapeless, shifting mass of individuals could be given contours, shape and coherence.

We left Kuwait in the last week of September 1990.

My father and some of the other men staying with us had arranged for a bus and a driver to take us to the southern Iraqi city of Basra and then on to Baghdad. At dawn, we arrived in the Iraqi capital, where we stayed at a hotel for a week before we were able to board a flight to the Jordanian capital Amman.

Bengalis are, of course, India’s doughtiest tourists. For that week in Baghdad we reverted to type, eating fish and chips on the banks of the Tigris, riding the creaky rollercoaster at the empty but functioning amusement park and visiting the National Museum. Reality, the reality in which we were refugees fleeing from Kuwait, a country occupied by Iraq, the international pariah in which we were now vacationing, only occasionally intruded — in the form of empty supermarket shelves and a tour guide who begged us for our cartons of chocolate milk for her baby because the powdered variety was all that was available in Iraq.

In Amman, we slept at the airport for one night before we were able to board one of the many free flights Air India had organized to transport Indian refugees to Bombay and safety. Two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were on a plane to India. I didn’t know then, still arguing with my friends about the relative merits of Liverpool and Manchester United, AC/DC and Iron Maiden, how lucky we were.

Smothered by relatives in Bombay, in my grandmother’s apartment bursting with books, art and furniture accrued over the course of entire lives of entire generations, I began to realize how ephemeral my life in Kuwait was, how thin my connection was to that place, or this place, or any place outside my own head. I was fascinated by Bombay, by its noxious drains, its rusting red double-decker buses, its panoply of streets. But I knew I didn’t belong in the city like my mother did.

Being a perpetual migrant might have been new in 1990. Today it is unremarkable. By 2020, some 280 million people around the world were estimated to be international migrants.

In “Identity and Violence,” the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen makes a forceful argument for the essential heterogeneity of identity, the value of each of the many parts that constitute the whole:

“The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

Wonderful as this passage is, my response is an impatient “yes, but…” The global response to such blithe cosmopolitanism has been the parochialism espoused by the likes of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and recently elected right-wing governments in countries like Italy and Sweden. Months after Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, then-Prime Minister Theresa May told a Conservative Party conference that if “you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

I know what she means. I am a middle-aged Indian man. I have an Indian wife and two Indian children. We live in India. My wife and I are both Bengali and, though neither of us is even slightly religious, our surnames place us safely among the Hindu upper castes that control India.

Protected by these markers of “Indianness,” my place in Indian society is unquestioned, even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi does the bidding of his ideological masters and remakes India from a pluralistic, secular nation into an increasingly belligerent, nostalgia-fueled Hindu nation. This state that makes life so difficult for the poor, the disenfranchised, the lower caste and the Muslim looks upon us with benevolence and avuncular affection.

It’s discomfiting to have spent so much time feeling out of place, only to find that it is the external, most superficial markers of my identity that both define and legitimize me in Modi’s new India.

All I have to do is keep my mouth shut, lest I give myself away.

Ensconced in India, ostensibly an unimpeachable citizen of somewhere, I remain indelibly marked by my years in “no place.” I have spent most of my life in cities to which I have no claim other than temporary residence. My perspective has been that of the perpetual, if privileged, outsider. It’s a common enough modern condition but, as former Prime Minister May argued, still suspect.

In a speech in 1993 — ironically in defense of greater integration with Europe — another former British prime minister, John Major, offered a lyrical, classically rural vision of “timeless” Britain. “Fifty years from now,” he said, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers… Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.”

Similarly, the real India, we are always told, is to be found in its villages. Indeed, only 35% of Indians live in cities. And in many of those cities we retain a parochial suspicion and fear of outsiders, of behavior that we consider strange and do not recognize as our own. Just a few years ago, for the first time in its long history, China became a predominantly urban society, with over 50% of its people living in cities. The 2009 documentary, “Last Train Home,” showed the toll of urbanization on one poor Chinese couple who work in a factory, cut off from their village, their growing daughter, their values and everything they’ve ever known or taken for granted. The annual trip home only emphasizes their alienation.

Yet their daughter, despite her parents’ unhappiness, abandons her own education to seek work in the city, drawn by that same desire for independence, for freedom from the social bonds of village life. India is headed in this direction.

Global cities remain vast agglomerations of outsiders. It is partly why these monstrous conurbations are so reviled. Back in 1987, Hanif Kureishi offered a stirring defense of London in “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” the movie he wrote, directed by Stephen Frears. Sammy’s father, a compromised Pakistani politician, points out that London is a “cesspit.” 

What can Sammy possibly like about this city? London is beset by race riots, poverty, violence and crime. “Well,” Sammy tells his father, “on Saturdays, we like to walk on the Towpath and kiss and argue.” It’s the beginning of a short disquisition on metropolitan pleasures. “Neither of us is English,” he says of himself and Rosie, “we’re Londoners, you see.”

Community feeling can emerge even within collections of outsiders. Kureishi’s London in the 1980s — resistant to authority, carnivalesque, an ad hoc and mutable community of outsiders — is distinct from the country around it. Major’s Britain is inimical to Kureishi’s London: one “unamendable” where the other is protean, one a sun-dappled, bucolic idyll where the other is unrestrainedly rough and urban, one faithful to what has been before where the other craves the new, the mixed, the composite culture of a city marked by migratory flows.

Shortly before the Allies began Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, I began my first semester at a boarding school in the Palani Hills in Kerala. In the library at my new school, I discovered in an issue of TIME magazine that my mother’s old friend Asrar had been arrested by the Iraqis. She had been shot, I read in one account, seven times in each breast and seven times in the vagina. In another, I read she had been shot four times in the head, once between the eyes, and that the right side of her face had been cut open with an ax. The accounts of the work she did for the Kuwaiti resistance — running guns and money from Saudi Arabia, destroying Iraqi communications systems, disguising herself as a cleaner to smuggle out vital records and documents from ministries now guarded by dozens of occupying soldiers — are impossible to reconcile with the small, bespectacled woman I remember. But even back then her size belied her spirit.

Asrar was hailed in death by her family as she had never been in life, hailed as a martyr for the cause of a country she had little regard for until it was taken away. I thought of Asrar in 2019, when young people in Delhi began protesting the Modi government’s exclusive, narrow, parochial view of Indian citizenship as expressed in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Before the pandemic forced them off the streets, the protestors, many of whom would have been unaffected by amendments aimed at Muslims and minorities, were fighting for an idea of India. An India forged in the constitutional ideals of plurality and democracy. They were saying, “We are not a Hindu nation.” We will not be refashioned into a theocratic state built on principles of exclusion and prejudice. Perhaps, like Asrar, these young people were motivated to fight for an India they saw was being taken away from them, to fight for the secular ideals with which they had grown up, whatever the failings of the state to live up to those ideals. 

In Modi’s new India, words such as “secular” and “plural” were to be jettisoned as the follies of governments past. But the protests did not reflect the smug cosmopolitanism of an elite diaspora or a cosmopolitanism that offered no challenge to the prevailing order. Instead, it struck me as a revivifying commitment to community as a cobbled-together, living thing that expands rather than contracts.

It showed me a path forward, out of a complacent, calcified nostalgia for my utopian “no place.” What I thought I missed growing up in Kuwait was community. In my hermetically sealed room, in my imagination unsoured, uninflected by experience, I tried to understand what it was to be a part of something larger than yourself, to belong somewhere and to claim it as your own. 

The wrongheaded answer I came up with was to fetishize the local, to fetishize community as a club from which I was excluded when — to borrow from Woody Allen borrowing from Groucho Marx — I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.

What I didn’t know was that communities cannot be so easily confined, so neatly shaped. That outsiders, too, can form communities. That outsiders, too, can find their place.

The post When globalization was king and home was elsewhere appeared first on Coda Story.

Since 2017, China has arrested some 1.5 million Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking, majority-Muslim people, for “reeducation.” Under the auspices of counterterrorism, Beijing has unleashed a wave of repression and rage against the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang. Using a combination of demographic resettling and forced sterilization, concentration camps, a panopticon of 21st-century surveillance technology, and forced labor, the Chinese Communist Party seeks to eradicate Uyghur culture and identity. 

In 2020, Tursun was disappeared, reportedly sentenced to 16 years in prison. He is among the hundreds of Uyghur intellectuals interred by the state in its bid to erase an independent local identity. 

“I chose to translate ‘The Backstreets’ because it was a masterful work of modernist fiction,” Byler told me in an email exchange. “It also spoke to the issue I was researching as an ethnographer: how rural migrant Uyghurs live despite the forms of systematic discrimination they experience while navigating settler-colonial institutions in the city.”

A stranger in his own land, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the alienating effects of racial discrimination and the climate of fear choking Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi. In the modernist tradition, the novel follows a stream-of-consciousness journey of an unnamed labor migrant as he flees the poverty of the Uyghur countryside to take up a government post and find an apartment to live in. He wanders the streets shunned by those around him and horrified by the harsh urban landscape: “The murky condition of [Urumqi] in the fog, the murky mental condition of my brain, and the ambiguous position of my identity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region seemed to be totally of the same substance; sometimes they mirror each other, and sometimes they seep into each other.” 

Tursun captures this lonely atmosphere through his character’s fixation on discarded items such as used condoms, abandoned clothing, and garbage. Each of these items evokes a feeling of connection, meaning, or nostalgia for the unnamed narrator as he grasps for a sense of purpose in the face of the indifference of the Communist Party bureaucracy. The Party, embodied by his ever-smiling supervisor, has little interest in his culture or individuality, forcing him for instance to write in Mandarin despite his struggles with the language.

‘China’s Rushdie’

Perhat Tursun was born in 1969 in Xinjiang, across the border from today’s Republic of Kyrgyzstan at the height of Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). His father, a schoolteacher, was arrested for “counterrevolutionary activites” while Red Guards terrorized the Uyghur countryside. 

Following Mao’s death in 1976, China embarked on market and ideological reforms, offering new space for Uyghur culture to breathe. It was during these years that Tursun moved to Beijing on a government scholarship to study world literature, and quickly immersed himself in the works of Kafka, Nietzsche, and Camus. 

Tursun’s own writing echoed the existentialist themes of his heroes, earning fans and hostile critics alike. Tursun drew comparisons to the author Salman Rushdie after his 1999 novel The Art of Suicide incensed Xinjiang’s Islamic establishment and led to book burnings and death threats. The region’s publishers — which are largely state-run — refused to publish Tursun’s work for the next 16 years. 

But Tursun has never considered his work to be political. In an illuminating essay that accompanies the novel, the Uyghur author compares his writing to Communist-era Czech author Milan Kundera: “Kundera is also writing about the human experience, but because of his circumstances, his fiction gets read as somehow political. It doesn’t start from politics, it just gets pulled into it. Human relationships are the center; they just get blocked by politics. The same is true for most writers if they are really honest.”

Byler informs me that Tursun, whom he knew personally, always expressed suspicion of ideological dogma and preferred to imagine a world of diverse possibilities. “In the end,” Byler says, “state authorities came to see Uyghur freedom of thought as potentially dangerous.”

A City Torn Apart

“The Backstreets” took Tursun 15 years to write and it meticulously documents the ethnic and class tensions that led to the explosive 2009 Urumqi riots and their aftermath. Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to rent a room “the size of a grave.”

Unlike Han migrants who came to the region in search of lucrative jobs in the oil sector, Uyghurs struggled to find work. According to Byler, while some Uyghurs remained within these institutions, the hierarchies of power came to center on Han individuals and values they brought with them, rather than the region’s indigenous inhabitants.

Other forms of discrimination permeated this rapidly gentrifying city. Rental and house-ownership regulations often prevented Uyghurs from becoming permanent residents in the city, while Han migrant resettlement in Xinjiang cities was encouraged and subsidized by the government. “During my fieldwork in the region,” says Byler, “settlers ranging from taxi drivers to university teachers told me over and over again that they viewed Uyghur migrants and colleagues as ‘backward’ and uncivilized.”

In one illuminating passage, the novel’s protagonist reflects on the gaze of racist contempt all-too familiar to Uyghurs: “This wasn’t the only moment when those eyes had stared ruthlessly at me. They appeared in my heart from the first time I opened my eyes to the world, like a poisonous snake. They continually stung my heart cruelly, making me writhe with pain.” 

In addition to being ostracized, Uyghurs are forced to constantly prove their worth. Tursun explores this theme through his protagonist’s Kafkaesque job writing official letters in a language imposed upon him by a state that treats him with such scorn. Despite his education and rank in the bureaucracy, the protagonist feels like a second-class citizen. This is made evident when he encounters a Han janitor whose “kingly attitude” and decisiveness of voice in Mandarin make him feel worthless. 

The narrator fixates on the injustice around him, falling into a destructive rage. “While I wandered about without finding even a place the size of a tomb in which I could fit my body, at the same time, others lived in apartments in giant buildings, cruised the streets in fast cars, and ate piles of food in restaurants; I began to hate people. Even though I was the shyest person in the world, I wanted to destroy those fancy buildings.”

This complex interplay of racial and class tensions created the powder keg that exploded in Urumqi on July 5, 2009. That evening, following a peaceful demonstration led by Uyghur students, the city erupted into ethnic violence. For three days, groups of Han and Uyghur youth prowled the streets with spiked clubs and machetes, killing one another in fierce brawls. By the end, the streets were covered in skull fragments, broken bodies, and pools of blood. 

These grim scenes are referenced when Tursun’s protagonist walks through a rain soaked alleyway. “I heard the sloshing sound of muddy footsteps as I walked. This noise made me really sad. I didn’t know why this sound made me sad. Perhaps it was because it sounded like blood splattering on the ground.”

The ‘People’s War’

The thickening fog in “The Backstreets” acts as a metaphor for the nationalist xenophobia blanketing Xi Jinping’s China. As the protagonist wades through the fog he sees a Han Chinese man approaching, muttering to himself about his desire to eradicate the entire Uyghur population by chopping them down with an ax. The word “chop” is repeated over 200 times to indicate his obsessive fixation on violence. “Every time he said the word ‘chop,’ in his mind, a man’s head was being cut off to roll on the ground, covered with blood.” 

This mindset forms the deep rot at the heart of society, corroding everyone it touches. “It wasn’t hard to see from his face that his anger was wearing down his soul. It looked like it was a straw roof being blown by the wind, or like perhaps it was being eaten out by a worm.”

Perhat references the Holocaust as the fog begins to take the shape of a “huge communal shower room.” Gruesome images are evoked, as people fantasize about carving up one another’s naked flesh to watch the blood spurt out. In his vision, it forms the crimson colors of the Chinese flag — perhaps a metaphor for ethnonationalism as social diversity is recast as one nation by threat of force. 

In another harrowing passage, Perhat reflects on the way people are more outraged by random acts of killing than they are by industrialized slaughter. “If the massacre took place in an orderly way, it seemed like an acceptable thing to people, and they stayed silent, bowing their heads.” 

For all the novel’s dark musings on identity, the nature of existence, and political violence, there are glimmers of hope that pierce through the fog. Confronted with the open hostility of his employer, our protagonist concludes that his life must be valuable otherwise it would not evoke such visceral contempt. He finds comfort in this knowledge and concludes that his greatest power and his strongest act of defiance is simply to keep on living.

“That’s right, the greatest thing in the world is living. There is nothing greater than living!” 

The post Ethnic violence, fear and alienation in Xinjiang appeared first on Coda Story.

For Lithuanians, their country’s medieval history has been a source of pride, pageantry and identity. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multilingual state that sprawled across swathes of the Baltics and eastern Europe, including modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. 

Its heyday, historians agree, was in the late 14th century and through much of the 15th century before the Union of Lublin in 1569 formalized a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

Small as Lithuania is, compared to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it considers itself, and has broadly been considered to be the keeper of the Grand Duchy’s historical legacy. Lithuania’s coat of arms and its euro coins feature its iconic knight mounted, sword aloft, on a charging warhorse.

The Lithuanian journalist Vaidas Saldžiūnas remembers going into a souvenir shop on a trip to neighboring Belarus and seeing what looked like a Lithuanian mounted knight emblazoned across stationery, mugs and wallets. He was surprised that he felt a little indignant, as if a part of his country’s history had been appropriated.

“It’s like someone is studying the layout of your home,” says Saldžiūnas about his own response in the souvenir shop, “and nonchalantly saying, ‘here, that’s my bed, that’s my restroom, and this is where I cook.’” In other words, it was as if the Belarusians were squatting in a house long owned by Lithuanians.

He was not alone. 

In 2013, Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defense announced that the efforts to appropriate medieval monarchs as Belarusians were an example of information warfare. “The conflict with the Belarusians is pre-programmed,” said Valdas Rakutis, a Lithuanian historian who is now a ruling party politician. He was speaking to the public broadcaster and appeared to be suggesting a deeper conspiracy to foment conflict.

The Lithuanian government had initially taken a less strident tone in its response to Belarus’s growing interest in reclaiming their shared medieval history. After all, it was mainly the pro-western Belarusian opposition that used the symbols to refer to a pre-Soviet history and culture and they had Lithuania’s support.

But this tolerant attitude changed when “Lithuanian” symbols began to be used by the government of Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko. In 2012, Belarus sponsored the staging of a ballet honoring Grand Duke Vytautas, who ruled the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for close to 40 years from the late-14th century. 

Vytautas became a much romanticized figure during a 19th-century Lithuanian revivalist movement that paved the way for independence from the Russian Empire. And news of the ballet caused consternation in Lithuania.

Many Lithuanians were now resentful that Belarusians, over the last decade or so in particular, had begun to claim for themselves what Lithuanians had unquestioningly grown up to believe was their history. 

“Eventually a generation will grow up — or maybe it already has — which will think that Lithuania is a misunderstanding and that Vilnius should be annexed to Belarus,” Rakutis told Lithuanian media. 

Rūstis Kamuntavičius is an academic, an expert on the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His style is teasing and informal, often sarcastic. Kamuntavičius has little patience for the growing rancor in the competing claims and interpretations of the Grand Duchy’s history and what it means to the identity of present-day Lithuania and Belarus. 

He thinks, for instance, that the Lithuanian fear of Belarusians appropriating Lithuania’s knight is both “hysterical and ignorant.” 

“I’ve had fights with Lithuanians about it,” says Alex Smantser, a Belarusian expat in Canada, on the use of medieval symbols. “This [rift] emerges at various history gatherings — when they see the mounted knight symbol, they say, ‘he’s ours’ and I say ‘he’s ours’. And so it begins.” 

Smantser felt so drawn to the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that he started identifying as a pagan and a Litvin rather than as Belarusian — the latter, he says, doesn’t roll comfortably off his tongue. According to academics, “Litvinism” is the ideological position that Belarus is the true heir of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. 

“I can read [medieval documents] with my Belarusian language. Can they [Lithuanians]?” asks Smantser. The ruling elite of the Grand Duchy had Lithuanian names but wrote in a Slavic language historians call “Chancery Slavonic.” The large Slavic population of the Grand Duchy spoke Ruthenian, a  predecessor of modern-day Belarusian and Ukrainian.

“There used to be robbers, bandits,” Kamuntavičius says, only half-joking. “They convened into groups and went to kill and pillage neighbors. What difference does it make what language they spoke?” He adds that “there are few [primary] sources from the 13th century, so we’re mostly speaking about interpretations and re-interpretations. Historians construct the past, and these constructs then compete.” 

In the Soviet period, Belarusian schoolchildren were taught that in the Middle Ages Lithuanian and Polish nobles oppressed Belarusian and Ukrainian serfs. As a result, few Belarusians and Ukrainians felt they could identify with the Grand Duchy’s elite and take pride in its military and cultural glories.

Even the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as “essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations.” 

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the grand dukes have always been important cultural icons. Even under Soviet rule, when national identity was suppressed, over 1,500 babies born in 1958 were named after Vytautas. Off the top of my head, I can think of a political leader, an actor, and a former classmate of mine named Vytautas. 

Today, in a country of fewer than three million inhabitants, over 28,000 men owe their names to a 15th-century grand duke. Vytautas is the second most-popular name in Lithuania, after Jonas (the Lithuanian version of John).

Maryia Rohava, who researches contemporary Belarusian identity politics at the University of Oslo, says that, unlike Lithuania, Belarus has not incorporated any memorial days related to the Grand Duchy into its official calendar, and that the state tolerates rather than actively promotes identification with that period. “When I conducted my focus groups and was asking people about different periods, some did mention [the Grand Duchy] as a way of saying that we did have some proud moments, but they still didn’t know how to connect it into one coherent story,” she says.

Before 2020 — when thousands of Belarusians filled the streets to protest rigged elections — the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not seen as problematic, Rohava says. Indeed, Lukashenko was warming to medieval imagery as a means to distinguish Belarus from Russia.

Kamuntavičius traces Minsk’s efforts to claim the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s history as its own to 2005, when the Lukashenko regime started to rebuild palaces and redraw historical maps. At the time, Belarus feared being reabsorbed into Russia and also wanted to take advantage of opportunities offered by the European Union’s “neighborhood policy,” intended to foster closer economic ties in the south and the east and catalyze development. 

Born and raised in Belarus, Smantser moved to Canada to escape the country Belarus had become under Lukashenko. He argues that Lukashenko should not be allowed to hijack a discussion about history. He says Lithuania’s exclusivism and its protectiveness about its medieval history is disappointing. This history, after all, is shared across several countries in the region. 

The Grand Duchy’s history was rich in “memorable events and personalities,” write Belarusian researcher Marharyta Fabrykant and U.S. researcher Renee Buhr in the academic journal “Nations and Nationalism.” So locating and identifying with these icons helps small nations feel “destined for greatness, yet victimized by enemies on all sides.” 

Some Lithuanian historians argue that if Slavic culture and the Duchy’s cosmopolitan heritage was given short shrift in the past it was because Lithuania was seeking to forge a national identity. They say Belarusians are dealing with a similar process of national reckoning, albeit a century later. 

Fabrykant and Buhr have compared Belarus to countries like North Macedonia, with its ubiquitous statues of Alexander the Great — a historical figure claimed by the Greeks. Grand Duke Vytautas (Vitovt in Ruthenian) is also called the Great, and his baptismal name was Alexander. To celebrate him, Belarus has named its bus brand “Vitovt Electro.”

For many years, Lithuanian academics such as Kamuntavičius explored and debated these competing interpretations of histories with fellow specialists. Indeed, Kamuntavičius was better known in Belarus, where these debates had currency, than in Lithuania. But in 2013, he came to the attention of his compatriots.

That May, Kamuntavičius gave a talk to Belarusian academics in his signature playful style. Instead of glorious victories, he spoke of fear and chaos. He tried to complicate the romanticization of Vytautas, the great hero of Lithuanians. A few months later, Lithuanians became aware of the contents of Kamuntavičius’s talk. “I was called a traitor on [prime-time news],” he says. 

“This person is being used as part of information warfare, a cog. Doesn’t he understand this,” asked the news show’s host, Nemira Pumprickaitė. A well-known far-right blogger wrote about Kamuntavičius that it is “difficult to believe that this is not some Kremlin propagandist speaking.” 

He added that by employing Kamuntavičius, Vytautas Magnus University (yes, named after the grand duke) was revealing itself to be an “asylum of spiritual paupers.” The right-wing youth movement Pro Patria designated Kamuntavičius as an “anti-state actor,” who hides behind slogans of academic freedom and democracy. “Is [the university] a hotbed of anti-state activity,” the website’s editors asked. 

“It was stressful, I received a ton of emails,” Kamuntavičius remembers, “and everyone was saying, ‘you’ve sold yourself to the Russians.’ It was the first time I felt attacked for doubting.”

In 2020 Belarusians from all walks of life took to the streets to protest the allegedly rigged elections. Police violence and arrests followed, only encouraging more people to attend mass rallies. Lithuania offered support to protesters and sheltered fleeing opposition activists, including Lukashenko’s main challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Protests kept flaring up well into 2021, and repression followed.

The protests were marked by the use of the country’s “white-red-white” flag (a century-old flag adopted by the democratic opposition to Lukashenko) and a medieval knight symbol, after repressions against Belarusian Grand Duchy heritage activists became known to the protesters. 

“These symbols were familiar to people from school,” says Vilija Navickaitė, who works at the Swedish International Liberal Center, “but they were lifeless and mostly theoretical.” She adds that for “some young people both the flag and the medieval symbols were a completely new discovery. Now they signify their struggle for freedom and change.” 

“We have different languages, but a single history, and it shouldn’t be divided,” says Smantser, the Belarusian who now lives in Canada and strongly identifies with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He tells me that he empathizes with the Lithuanians’ attachment to their history more than he once did. “But the stance ‘it’s us, only us and no one else’ is a sign of weakness.” Living in Canada makes him believe that a multilingual state that is proud of its shared heritage is not a pipe dream.

Kamuntavičius says he has found there is now an appetite for his work in Lithuania. No one calls him a traitor or a cog in the Russian propaganda machine any longer. But it’s hard to tell what will become of this new-found willingness to explore their shared history if Belarus continues to grow closer to Putin’s Russia.

Media outlets in both Lithuania and Belarus reported earlier this month that statues of Vytautas and his cousin Jagiello, who became King of Poland in 1386, were removed from a national museum in Minsk. This suggests, as one opposition figure put it, that “Russification is underway in Belarus.” 

With Lukashenko moving ever closer to Putin – a closeness that grew in part as a result of Lukashenko’s post-protests paranoia and that has culminated in his steadfast support of Russian aggression in Ukraine – perhaps the time has again come for him to play down or altogether ignore Belarus’s medieval ties to both Lithuania and Poland, not to mention Ukraine.  

Will the Grand Duchy of Lithuania be a symbol of solidarity once more for only the Belarusian opposition? And will that make it easier for Lithunanians to share the symbols of a medieval history of which they believed they were the sole custodians?

Belarusians are making intriguing contemporary art, Kamuntavičius asserts, because they have learned to “live with contradictions.” 

Lithuanians too must conclude, he says, that answers that were once comforting no longer apply, that history is messy and subject to interpretation.

The post Medieval history powers a crisis of identity in Lithuania and Belarus appeared first on Coda Story.

A self-described historian of German fascism, the septuagenarian might be best known for having spotted a dilapidated 19^th century Tudor-style castle while driving through the former East German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the 1990s. Inspired by the castle’s name — Marxhagen — she decided to buy it. She moved in, decorated the place with Marxist paraphernalia and tried and failed for a quarter of a century to turn it into a Marxist think tank (one German TV report dubbed her the “Communist in the Castle” and noted that she spent more time battling building contractors than capitalism). In 2018, she sold it to a private investor.

Kaltenbacher claims to own no radio and no television and boasts that while she has seen no images of the current war in Ukraine, she has nonetheless come to the exact same conclusions as Vladimir Putin has — namely, that an attack on Ukraine was a necessary act of self-defense against the encroachments of the West.

Riding through the Tiergarten, she had to pedal slowly. Decked out in a torso-sized sandwich board quoting Hemingway praising the Red Army and clutching a bouquet of red carnations, she wobbled a little, as she came to a halt at the police barrier.

Informed that she would have to remove the placard as well as the orange-and-black St. George ribbon pinned to her chest before she would be let through, Kaltenbacher became animated. What about her right to free speech? What about the supposedly free West? “That’s not our construction site,” replied the amiable policeman — using a German idiom that means he’s just not the right guy to talk to about that.

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In Germany, Kaltenbacher is part of a minority fringe. But with the second phase of Russia’s war on Ukraine, some of those people have found themselves front and center, splashed across the pages of German newspapers, and giving interviews on TV. These fringe groups’ activities — and German officialdom’s ham-handed responses — have garnered international ire, shed light on shifting domestic faultlines and raised questions about Russian disinformation activities in the country.

Most Germans do not share the pro-Russian views espoused by Kaltenbacher and the elderly crowd of far-left peaceniks and die-hard communists into which, having shed her bicycle, sandwich board, and ribbon, but still clutching her carnations, she soon disappeared. 

In fact, a poll taken by the ZDF Politbarometer, a long-running television program, showed that Germany’s recent announcement that it would provide Ukraine with heavy weapons had been met with a robust 56% approval.

But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been tepid in his support of Ukraine (the Ukrainian ambassador, in a superb use of idiom, dubbed him a “thin-skinned liver sausage” after Scholz rejected an invitation from Zelensky to come to Kyiv), and consequently has seen approval of his handling of the Ukraine crisis fall from 72% to 49%, with 43% of respondents saying he was doing a bad job.

Meanwhile, the more hawkish, outspokenly anti-Moscow Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock won 70% approval of her handling of the war.

There is, however, one way in which the crowd at the Soviet War Memorial was representative of a trend in Germany. Namely, that the extremist landscape is changing as traditional ideological divisions blur. “There’s a lot of mishmash going on at the moment,” said Jan Rathje, a senior researcher at the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy.

The pandemic saw a diverse group of anti-establishment conspiracy ideologues (a group that goes by the name “Querdenker” in Germany) adapt the anti-vaccination movement; they also starting marching side-by-side with neo-Nazis, among others. When the war in Ukraine began, Rathje said, “the ‘Querdenker’ more or less embraced pro-Russian disinformation.”

These conspiracy narratives have spread. In one study conducted by Rathje’s group, in Germany “nearly one-fifth of respondents tend to agree with conspiracy ideological statements about the Russian war of aggression.”

“Extremism is changing — not disappearing,” agreed Martin Emmer, a political science professor at Berlin’s Free University, who noted that just because extremists no longer cleave  to traditionally left- or right-wing ideologies, that does not mean they are not still capable of disruption and even violence. “We know that influencers, particularly from Russia at the moment, take every chance to destabilize western society.”

He added, however, that Covid disinformation and Russian propaganda have not really taken hold here. “It worked better in countries like France and even the U.S.,” he said. “In the election last year, you saw more or less a decline in extremism, and growth in the centrist parties. German civil society is quite resilient compared to other countries. The support for democracy and political norms is quite high.”

Thus the tenor of the German crowd gathered in the Tiergarten, from which the cry of “Nazi” emanated now and then in the Ukrainian ambassador’s direction, was an outlier. Of the more than 3,500 demonstrations related to Russia’s war on Ukraine that took place throughout Germany from the end of February to late April, the vast majority were in support of Ukraine, according to Mediendienst Integration, which collated information from various German states’ Offices of Criminal Investigation.

Many of Germany’s three dozen or so pro-Russian demonstrations were “Autokorsos,” or car rallies. Ostensibly organized by private individuals, the first took place on April 3, the day photos of the Bucha massacre went around the world. Some 400 cars strong, it drove from one end of Berlin to the other, past the main train station, a central processing point for Ukrainian war refugees arriving in Berlin.

Despite the organizers having registered their demonstration with the police, the car rally took the city by surprise. It was, as the newspaper “Die Zeit” put it, a wake-up call of sorts: “the first sign that Russia’s attack on Ukraine would have an impact on how we live together here in Germany.”

Indeed, the made-for-TV images that emerged — seas of car-hood-sized Russian flags, Soviet flags, bellicose pro-Russian chants, honking — were troubling. For some, they were terrifying: a notice that made the rounds in Ukrainian refugee chats warned that the drivers would get out of their cars at night and look for people on the streets wearing Ukrainian symbols.

Car rally participants praised Putin, said they had no problem with him bombing apartment blocks and maternity wards, complained about discrimination against Russian-speakers here in Germany, and denied the images from Bucha were real. It raised the question of just what was going on, and how this could happen.

“For me, it looks like a provocation,” said Russian-born German author Wladimir Kaminer, in a television interview shortly afterwards. “A private person registers this demonstration, then just happens to really quickly have 900 friends, all of whom just happen to have two meter by two meter Russian flags on hand, and they drive — exactly on this day, when we see the horrible photos of civilians killed in Bucha go around the world — through the streets of Berlin?”

In the days that followed, politicians and the press condemned the Berlin car rally. Stefan Evers, Berlin’s general secretary for a center-right political party, called the images disgusting. “These fascist nutcases can keep driving straight to Moscow, and stay there,” he tweeted. Berlin politician Stephan Standfuss told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that intelligence services would need to look into the extent to which the car rallies “were being directed from Moscow.”

But the boisterous, flag-waving pro-Russian rallies continued to take place in German cities over the next weeks. These were fueled, in part, by made-up stories about violence against Russian speakers that, with the help of the Russian embassy, spread like wildfire among Russian-speaking communities.

Germany has 3.5 million Russian-speaking citizens; of these, about 2.4 million people are ethnic Germans, whose forefathers emigrated to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, these ethnic Germans were persecuted. Since the 1970s, Germany has offered this group the option to return as German citizens.

But Germany has been slow to recognize that it is, de facto, a land of immigrants, said Free University’s Martin Emmer, resulting in feelings of isolation and exclusion. Propaganda exploits these feelings. “What Putin does in his speeches is basically provide a framework for people to be friends with Russia — ‘Russia fights fascism.’ It’s amazing how flexible our brains can be.”

In addition, many Russian-speaking Germans continue to get their news and entertainment from Russian state television. Nostalgic shows and wartime dramas showing the Soviet Union freeing the world of Nazis shape people’s perceptions, says Free University researcher Anna Litvinenko. “It’s interesting how even people who escaped the Soviet Union and moved to Germany are also nostalgic,” she said. “It’s this instrumentalization of memory.”

As May 9, the date of Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, approached, the Tagesspiegel newspaper wrote that 150 riders in a large pro-Putin Russian motorcycle group called the Night Wolves were expected to take part in a Red Army memorial march. Telegram channels were reportedly mobilizing pro-Putin Russians across Germany to get in their cars that morning and head to Berlin’s Treptower Park war memorial.

The city of Berlin decided to act. Just before the weekend, Berlin’s head of police announced a two-day ban not only of Russian flags and military trappings (including the orange-and-black St. George ribbon, a Russian military symbol), but the Ukrainian flag, as well.

The move was immediately denounced. “You cannot draw an equivalence between the flag of the victims, and the flag of the Russian aggressor,” said Stefan Evers, the politician, in a phone call on Monday, after images of the Berlin police confiscating a 80-foot-long Ukrainian flag in Tiergarten went around the world. “The political signal it sends is disastrous.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, weighed in: “Berlin made a mistake by prohibiting Ukrainian symbols,” he wrote, on Twitter. “Taking a Ukrainian flag away from peaceful protestors is an attack on everyone who now defends Europe and Germany from Russian aggression with this flag in hands.”

On May 9, Putin’s speech came and went. Towards midday, at the foot of Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall once stood, a group of mostly Russian speakers gathered with black and white photos of their grandparents for a spooky “Immortal Regiment”-style parade.

Later, at Treptower Park, a giant war memorial built by the Soviets in 1945, the Night Wolves hadn’t arrived; nor was there any news of a giant car rally from all over Germany headed this way. Inside the vast memorial, many of the German peaceniks and communists (including Kaltenbacher, the former castle owner) who had attended the Ukrainian ambassador’s wreath laying the day before were here again, along with Reichbuergers (a disparate group of monarchists and antisemitic far-rightists who do not believe in the existence of the modern Germany state), and representatives of the official German Communist Party.

At one end of the vast, shallow bowl-shaped landscape stands the memorial’s main centerpiece — an enormous statue of a Soviet soldier stepping on a giant swastika, on top of a pedestal on top of a hill. At the foot of this hill, the crowd included a Swiss mathematician who said the French and Germans were to blame; a completely bald, very muscular German who said he was here to support Russia fighting Nazis in Ukraine; and a German community theater actress whose social media includes a video of herself demonstrating the use of a Hitler salute to practice Covid-distancing.

Most Ukrainians had stayed away from Treptower Park — where, ultimately, only a handful of Night Wolves and no massive car rally materialized. But Daria and Bohdan, who did not want to give their last names, decided to come. In her mid-20s and studying in Berlin, Daria said she was there to pay tribute to her grandmother, and the suffering the Second World War, which wreaked havoc on her grandmother’s childhood, had brought on her family. “A lot of Ukrainian families have this story,” she said.”It’s important to remember.”

Her boyfriend put it differently. He stood in the hot sunshine, reflecting off the giant white walkway, next to one of the memorial’s many bas relief blocks featuring gilt quotations from Joseph Stalin. “I think that Russia cannot celebrate victory over Nazis,” said Bohdan, “because it is a country of Nazis today, and they are destroying our country, right now, like the army of Hitler.

The post Pro-Russian rallies sputter, but still rattle a nervous Germany appeared first on Coda Story.

Maria Sonevytsky’s work has something to say about that. She has been studying Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s historical music for years. A professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, she is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, she spoke to me about how Ukraine’s musical inheritance can provide context and insight into Ukrainian history and national identity.

Tell me about your work in Ukrainian music and how it helps shed light on the current situation.

I decided that I wanted to divide my research between Crimea and western Ukraine.

And what I started observing was that many people had very complex feelings about whether they wanted Ukraine to go in the direction of the European Union or Russia. Everyone I spent time with was not in favor of going toward Russia, but they were also critical of the European Union. They didn’t have simple ideas that Europe was some sort of utopia. I saw this expressed constantly through music.

My project started because Ruslana, a Ukrainian pop star, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004. It was a really big deal for some people. They believed, “Uh-huh! Finally, we can show that Ukraine is part of Europe.” For others, it was very embarrassing. They said, “Eurovision is kitsch, and this is not how we want our Ukraine to be defined.” 

It became a very fascinating glimpse into just how complex it is to think about how people want to position themselves. So music became a lens through which I could view how culture was, in some ways, imagining a future for Ukraine.

Why is this important? 

I think that’s so important, especially when we’re talking about traditional music. I’m usually writing about some sort of hybrid music that uses a combination of traditional gestures with popular music forms. But even when we’re talking about just traditional music, these are all also forward-facing. They’re expressing a wish for the future — even if just a wish for the survival of a past. 

Right now, what we’re seeing is not only a denial that Ukraine has a past, but a rejection on the part of the Russians that there could be a Ukrainian future. And these musicians are saying, “No, we have a past and we are projecting it also into the future.”

It’s not a simple history. It’s a very complicated history. Ukraine has had a very complicated relationship to its project of statehood, as do many other countries around the world, including Russia. But Ukrainian history exists and we can actually hear it if we listen to the history of Ukrainian music.

Your book discusses how music got dragged into Russia’s propaganda on Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis. Could you tell me more about that?

There’s one chapter in the book about the Maidan revolution, the band called The Dakh Daughters, and their performance of a song, that they did not want to claim had politics, but they performed it during the revolution and sure enough, the Russian internet immediately started calling them neo-Nazis, neo-fascists.

This is about how Ukrainians are not allowed the possibility of existing as anything but nationalists, that Russian propaganda does not let them have any agency outside of nationalism. And the Dakh Daughters are a clear example of a group that actually wanted so much not to be pigeonholed as Ukrainian musicians. They wanted to be just musicians, they didn’t want to have to serve the state. But they did want to show their support. They ended up performing this quite apolitical song and immediately were called neo-fascists. 

If you know the Russian playbook, this is a very old strategy, it goes back to the Russian Empire and it was prevalent in the Soviet Union as well.

What has surprised you the most in your study of how Ukrainian musicians think about Ukraine’s history?

I’m writing a book on the late-Soviet Ukrainian rock scene and specifically in Kyiv. And I’m writing about the first Ukrainian punk rock band to sing in Ukrainian, Vopli Vidopliassova. 

They are all Russian-speaking, and as one of the members told me, they all grew up in the “Russkiy Mir” [Russian world]. They started singing in Ukrainian, and they claimed that at the time, it really wasn’t a political statement. They just thought it sounded cool. And they were making fun, in some ways, of the stereotypes of Ukrainians as these kind of hopeless hillbillies.

Most of the band members have now switched to speaking only in Ukrainian for different reasons. In one interview, [a band member] came to understand himself as a formerly colonized subject in a way that he did not understand himself to be in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he really just thought of himself as a punk rocker in Kyiv and wasn’t really that concerned about Ukrainian identity. But in the 1990s, when he started learning about the history of Ukrainian poets who had been repressed and reading the books that had been censored, he started understanding that some of this internalized feeling of inferiority had been part of a colonial campaign.

This has been really poignant for me, to hear these people as they learn and understand the degree to which Ukraine has been targeted by deliberate campaigns that say they have no history of their own, that they have no culture of their own.

I’ve always asked myself, is it fair to think about Ukrainians as colonized people? There’s no question they were in the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes, these were colonized peoples, but they were divided between empires. The Soviet Union is a much more complicated case. It wasn’t exactly an empire. And of course, Ukrainians were central in leading it at times.

What songs have you been thinking about as you watch the war in Ukraine?

One of the songs I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the song “1944” by Jamala, a singer with Crimean Tatar heritage and who has crossed the border with her children, but whose husband has remained behind to defend their home.

When she wrote and performed it in 2016, it was really a plea to understand the plight of Crimean Tatars after the forced occupation of Crimea. And now it’s become a plea to understand the plight of the whole of Ukraine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Taras Kompanichenko, who has been a key figure in the revival of 17th-to-19th century repertoires. He is now serving in the army and playing music to boost morale for Ukrainian soldiers.

And I’m thinking about very ordinary musicians, non-celebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war. I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they’re surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.

The post Ukraine’s music reveals the past and points to the country’s future appeared first on Coda Story.

TAULT, a non-profit literary agency and translation house, works with dozens of prominent Ukrainian authors and translators to spread Ukrainian contemporary literature in the English-speaking world. When Russia invaded last month, TAULT launched a project to publish essays and dispatches translated from Ukrainian.

I asked Kate Tsurkan, a translator, editor and the associate director at TAULT, for her recommendations of first-person accounts written by Ukrainian writers to better understand the war. Here are the five books available as English translations that she recommended.

1. “Absolute Zero” by Artem Chekh. Translated by Olena Jennings and Oksana Lutsyshyn.

Kate Tsurkan: “He is a writer but he joined the army in 2015 and this book is based off of a post that he started writing on Facebook during the war, and he transformed it into a book afterwards.

There’s a very funny episode where in his military barracks, they adopt a kitten who has cerebral palsy and they fight over who will cuddle with the cat until he starts pissing in all of their sleeping bags and causing havoc for them. But he also has horrible stories like one when a husband tells his wife the things that they see on the front lines and she dies from a heart attack. It’s filled with very interesting standalone anecdotes that portray the banality and the grotesque horror of war and how it affects not only soldiers, but people who are trying to get updates from back home. Chekh actually went back. He enlisted. He is on the frontlines again right now, unfortunately.”

2. “Mondegreen” by Volodymyr Rafeenko. Translated by Mark Andryczyk.

“When we are talking about first-person perspectives or memoir, I think we have to expand our perception and understanding of that because a lot of writers use their personal experiences to explore the world through fiction, for example. Volodymyr Rafeenko is from Donetsk. He was an internally displaced person when the war started.

It’s very autobiographical, or an autofiction, we could say, because this is a book about a man from Donetsk who gets displaced because of the war and ends up in Kyiv, much like Rafeenko himself. The text is very visceral. It’s interwoven with not only his memories of Donetsk before the war, but of his ancestors who had to deal with Russian aggression. And it deals on a large level with language, because this is the first novel that Volodymyr Rafeenko wrote in Ukrainian. Prior to that, he wrote several novels in Russian. He starts to explore not only the isolation that one feels when you are forced to flee your home, but also the isolation one feels when you start to switch from one language to another. And along with that from one culture, one mentality, to another.” 

3. “Apricots of Donbas” by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Translated by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky & Svetlana Lavochkina.

“I think poetry can also be very autobiographical, in a sense. Yakimchuk is from Luhansk, and she became very famous for this poetry collection. It was released by Lost Horse Press to great acclaim. Yakimchuk’s poetry is very interesting because it deals with a very heavy topic about military combat, about death, war, violence, but she uses very feminine language, sometimes even rather childlike language, to offer this visceral look into war. She’s absolutely one of the greatest poets, I think, in Ukraine today.”

4. “The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear” by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky.

“This is a poetry selection that Ilya Kaminsky, the famous poet, edited and the Khersonsky couple really explore the ideas of propaganda, of relations between Ukraine and Russia, of this historical roots of the conflict and how the trauma from decades, even centuries ago still influences relations between Ukraine and Russia today. This is also an example where the autobiographical makes its way into poetry.” 

5. “A New Orthography: Poems” by Serhiy Zhadan. Translated by John Hennessy & Ostap Kin.

“It’s from several of Zhadan’s recent collections, from several of his recent collections from Ukrainian. He’s exploring not just soldiers’ perspectives of the war, but that of grave diggers, priests. He has a really empathetic way of looking at the situation because he is from Luhansk himself.”

The post How Ukrainian writers have experienced the war in Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

The eight-year conflict in eastern Ukraine has often been drowned in disinformation and tainted political narratives. Belorusets set out to correct this. I spoke with her about the importance of telling unheard stories, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

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Your book shows what everyday life has been like for eastern Ukrainian factory workers, florists, manicurists, cosmetologists since 2014. Why did you decide that these fragmentary stories had to be told?

In this tragic situation in eastern Ukraine, violence emerges as an unnatural reality imposed from outside. Discussions usually center around big politics and trying to stop the aggressor. And that’s normal. But my work allows me to look at the situation in more detail, to go deeper to the level where the interpersonal is more important than big politics.

I wanted to make this part of reality more visible and reaffirm its right to exist. A right that is very easily overlooked during radical military violence and in international discourse that acts not on behalf of a person, but a continent, country or region.

In one of the stories, “The Stars,” women sheltering in basements decide when it’s safe to go outside based on horoscopes. They don’t know if they are being shelled by Russian-backed militants or the Ukrainian troops and some of them even believe it’s Canada bombing to get the town’s coal. Was the story meant to illustrate the dizzying effect of a constant information war?

In 2014/2015 the Ukrainian media did not know what to do with this catastrophe. The inhabitants of these towns found themselves under attack. And, if before, every single killing of this kind without a trial would have been a crime requiring press and investigation, the new situation was different. People were dying in the streets from shelling, and the media said nothing about these victims, neither Ukrainian nor Russian. Moreover, Russian media began their toxic work of completely distorting the reality, creating numerous contradictory, inconsistent interpretations of events. 

The sharp devaluation of one’s own life and these media mirages, media hallucinations, led to all kinds of rumors being spread among the residents of many small towns in Donbas. But most fundamentally, you wished to trust yourself more than any external sources of information. But how do you find your own credibility when there’s fire under your feet? This is what my story is about.

Why are most of the protagonists in stories women? 

I didn’t want to bring everything to women’s bodies or women’s voices. But it turned out that the majority of people, whose experience stuck with me or seemed to me important, were women.

Many women were very honest with me exactly because they thought their experience wasn’t as important as that of men and hence so insignificant that talking about it wasn’t even dangerous. The conflict between self-negation and self-expression of those women — these elements seemed very valuable to me while writing.

Yet for me it’s very important to bring this not exclusively to women’s experiences but rather to the experiences that are most often seen among women, the experiences of living through those events as if from the second row of history.

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What do people get wrong about how war affects people?

Sometimes, especially in the cities on the frontline, the collateral damage is coming from the Ukrainian side, not only from the Russian side. People live with the constant feeling of danger and incredible unfairness. 

Often people from Kyiv go to these places, like international journalists or people trying to help, and they ask these people what they think about politics. Sometimes they say, “We hate the Russians and the Ukrainians, leave us alone.” And these very honest words are often used against them, that they are not patriotic enough, or they’re not pro-Ukrainian enough. Maybe they don’t understand what the political stakes are, but in my view, it’s a very Soviet attitude towards people whose situation is so far from any kind of normalcy that you cannot force them to have some kind of “right” view. 

I think these people are heroes because they are trying to go on with their everyday peaceful life in a war zone. And maybe they can show us all how you can remain a person in a conflict, in the situation telling you, “You are not a human now, you can die every day just because you are crossing the street.”

There’s a recurring character in your stories — Andrea. At times she gets very excited about the future but at other times she is very pessimistic about her own life as well as Ukraine’s future, and her presence is always fleeting. What is her role in your book?

The character of Andrea is all about love, about infatuation and connection between two women. She sounds negative and is complaining but complaining is the start of becoming a revolutionary. She is about the relations among different realities in Ukraine, about their capacity to simultaneously hate and love one another. Because in the contexts of such diversity, even mutual dislike can be productive, becoming the part of the exchange, which can be a stage to growth and development.

The post Exploring the everyday lives of the people in eastern Ukraine appeared first on Coda Story.

But St. Julian-Varnon says history told from only one perspective is no history at all. So when she returned to Slavic studies in 2020 to start a PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania, just as protests over the murder of George Floyd were sweeping across the country, she also committed to making the field a place where more people “look like” her. 

I spoke to her about her research on Black Americans in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and about what systemic racism has to do with Russia today.  

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did you first become interested in Slavic studies?

I’m from rural Southeast Texas and I grew up on a farm. I always had perfect attendance, but one year I got sick and I couldn’t go to school. So I had to stay in the house and I watched this eight hour mini-series called “Russia Land of the Tsars” on the History Channel and I was obsessed. I think in sixth grade, I was the only student who did a book report project that wasn’t on an American. I did Josef Stalin.

What does it mean to be a Black academic in Slavic Studies in the United States, and also doing field research? 

I think it’s the isolation. I was doing my master’s at Harvard when I attended the The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies conference in New Orleans. Someone came up to me to ask me to clean up a spill. Essentially, I was thought of as part of the janitorial staff until I put my nametag on. 

Another part is you don’t have a community that understands the specific challenges of working in the field, including the dangers of doing research in Eastern Europe. You have the Friday night historians group in Moscow, for instance. Everyone goes out on Fridays to decompress late at night. And I just can’t participate in that because it’s not necessarily safe for me to go all across Moscow at night or Kyiv at night, especially by myself. But when you have a community of scholars of color who know the anxieties and the fears, who can help you prepare to go to the region, it’s really important. 

What gets lost in the academic coverage of the former Soviet Union or other academic topics by not having more diversity in the field?

There are so many brilliant people of color who have PhDs in Slavic studies, Russian history, who aren’t participating in academic work anymore and it’s to everyone’s detriment. It’s also because of the research, the questions that I ask and that I’m interested in. When I was in downtown Kyiv and I saw this Black girl, she saw me and we just hugged each other. And my research is to some extent trying to explain how that happened. 

During the Cold War, the civil rights struggles of Black Americans were used as sort of a cudgel by the Soviet Union, and it was quite effective, at least in part because the outrages around civil rights in the United States were very real. But the discussion frequently focuses on African Americans being used as propaganda tools. Your research, though, looks at the actual African American experience in the Soviet Union. Should what you’ve found change the focus of the conversation?

I love that you point out that people portray African Americans in the Soviet Union like they’re dupes of the Soviet Union. And when I’ve given talks about this, people have said, “Well, weren’t they all Communists?” And it’s so annoying because I specifically work on African American visitors to the Soviet Union in the twenties and thirties and largely they were not communists. They had no interest in communism. They were responding to the joint catastrophes of Jim Crow and the Great Depression. At the same time you have the Soviet Union, which is going through the first five year plan under Stalin, and they have this incredible need for skilled labor — they are sending recruiters to the United States.

When you look at a lot of these visitors and these workers who go to the Soviet Union, one, it’s about economic opportunities when there are none in the United States, but two, it’s also the fact that you’re going to a country which positions itself as anti-racist and to be able to exist as a Black person without the constant fear of physical and emotional violence against your person. The majority of the African Americans who aren’t artists, who aren’t part of the Harlem Renaissance, who aren’t academics, are there to make money and they’re there to build a nest egg to send back home, and most of them don’t stay permanently in the Soviet Union. 

Why do they leave? 

I think a big reason is by 1937, Stalin’s Great Terror is ravaging the Soviet Union and foreigners are given a choice: You can either become a Soviet citizen or you have to go home. By the late 1930s, the Soviets were not really interested in anti-racism. It’s anti-Nazism. And then when Stalin dies, we have Khrushchev, who’s more focused on decolonization and the Third World.

So how does the so-called “anti-racism” policy of the Soviet Union become the racism one might find in Russia or in other former Soviet states today? 

One of the key things, I would argue, is the way Africans and Black people are presented in Soviet popular culture and in Soviet ideology. Africa is always shown as this developing continent. They need to be taught communism. It’s very much like the white man’s burden narratives — in the case of Africa it’s just more like the Soviet comrade’s burden. 

I just finished an article manuscript looking at Soviet children’s books from the twenties and thirties. Here, blackness is shown as something that’s dangerous, something that’s foreign, something that’s backwards and something that can change, but it can only be changed through contact with the Soviet Union or through communism. 

What’s interesting is the use of language in some of these books. They actually call them “piccaninnies.” And then, you get to the 70s and in the 80s, you have Chunga-Chonga, this incredibly racist, very popular cartoon where these African kids are literal depictions of pickaninnies. So you have this long standing thread from the 20s through the 80s: This depiction of blackness as other, as dangerous, non-civilized. 

And I think that’s one of the important aspects of understanding what we see now – this collapse of the facade of anti-racism. In many ways, Russia is replicating a lot of the racist mythos that we saw from the United States. 

You’ve written that systemic racism presents a national security problem for the United States. What do you mean by that?

It comes from my study of Soviet history. Look at the 1960s and into the 1970s, when the United States and Soviet Union are vying for support in the developing world. All the Soviet Union has to do is show the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, to Africans and say, “Do you want to be aligned with this country? Look at how they look at you, look at how they think of you.”

And I think if we look at it now, it’s Putin’s reaction to BLM and what he’s pretty much saying is, oh, that kind of chaos happens in America, we won’t stand for it here. Racism and white supremacy is a global ideology, and is destabilizing democracies across the United States, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe.

The reaction of some Russian liberals to the BLM protests in 2020 seemed to catch people off guard. Given the violence of police towards protesters in Russia, you might have expected some sort of solidarity with BLM, but many in the opposition dismissed them as dangerous rioters. 

Being anti-Putin and being pro-democracy in Russia does not mean you are not racist. It doesn’t mean you don’t hate immigrants. These are conversations some of the black specialists in the field have talked about — what liberal means in the United States does not translate into Russia, and we still need to be able to talk about these issues.

The post A historian of the Soviet Union locates a rich and complicated Black experience appeared first on Coda Story.

On Monday, Oktay Candemir, a Kurdish journalist in the city of Van in eastern Turkey, was detained by local police for “insulting the memory of a dead person” — the supposedly wronged party being a 13th-century Ottoman sultan.

The charges stemmed from a tweet posted by Candemir on September 3, in which he made light of an upcoming series produced by the Turkish state broadcaster TRT. The show, which will dramatize the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia, is part of a trend of new programming glorifying Turkey’s past. Candemir’s tweet mockingly suggested prominent Ottoman sultans as characters for similar shows.

Authorities didn’t find it funny and Candemir now faces up to two years in prison. He was briefly placed under house arrest and, while his case is pending, remains subject to a foreign travel ban. According to U.S.-based organization the Committee to Protect Journalists, his computer was confiscated by police. 

“This is a clear abuse of power,” said Erol Onderoglu of Reporters Without Borders, adding that Candemir’s arrest reflects “the sensitivity of local authorities” around historical figures now being appropriated by the country’s nationalist movement.

The growing tendency towards the glorification of Turkey’s past, largely promoted by allies of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party, is sometimes referred to as Neo-Ottomanism. In an online conversation with me, Candemir described the ideology as being in sharp contrast to the longtime national veneration of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

While the nation has faced increasing crackdowns on press freedom since an attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016, the charge of insulting the memory of a deceased individual is unusual. His lawyer told Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National that the law under which Candemir was arrested requires a living relative to make a complaint, and that this was not done in his case.

“This is not a charge that we usually see used against Turkish journalists,” said Ozgur Ogret, the Turkish representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Turkey has been consistently among the worst jailers of journalists over the past years, and it’s very easy to end up in jail or prison in Turkey due to journalistic work. Therefore a brand new version of a charge is worrisome.”

Candemir — a writer for the pro-Kurdish publication Nupel — is no stranger to intimidation. “I was detained three times in the last three years and 40 lawsuits were filed against me,” he told me. Speaking of the adversarial attitude of the Turkish government toward the country’s Kurdish minority, he added, “The ruling circles see us as potential terrorists.”

Candemir’s case also underscores the potential dangers of a controversial new law passed in July regulating social media. The legislation requires large online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to remove content at the behest of the government and to store Turkish user data locally, leading to fears of censorship and privacy violations.

While the law is not yet in effect, Onderoglu said it could curtail “the right of journalists to promote their story on social media, or to react on social media on a major case.”

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She was especially keen on the advice columns, even though the questions — “Does he love me?”, “How do I get him to notice me?” — were pretty much the same in every magazine she read. She liked the idea that people could confess their secrets, and that others would listen and respond. 

In East Berlin, Klier had, like many other teenagers, grown up reading Neues Leben (New Living), the only mainstream monthly teen magazine published in the German Democratic Republic. While Western publications were banned from the country, Neues Leben was published by the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official youth organization of the Communist Party, which set out to instill the values of the state in young people. 

The magazine, which ran from 1953 to 1992, was modeled on West Germany’s trashy teen title, Bravo. However, it was also under strict instructions to make state youth projects look appealing to teens. So while it featured articles about sex, relationship advice columns and profiles of pop stars, it also included glowing reports of young workers who gave up their weekends to participate in FDJ initiatives, such as volunteer home-building and recycling projects.

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In January this year, I visited Ingeborg Dittmann, the former editor of Neues Leben, in her house in the outskirts of Berlin. Dittmann worked at the magazine from 1973 to 1992, and now publishes a monthly newspaper about arts and politics for her neighborhood. We sat in her living room, while she smoked cigarettes and went through old copies of the magazine.

“This was our most popular column”, she said, flicking to the back of an issue and pointing to a headline, “schreibst Du mir, schreib ich Dir” (Write to me, I’ll write to you). This personal ads page was where East Germans under the age of 26 advertised for pen pals. Young people from other communist countries, including the USSR, Hungary, Romania and Cuba could send in their details, too. 

“It was for young people who couldn’t get out,” Dittmann explained, referring to the heavily guarded border that prevented citizens from leaving the country. “Between the ages of 15 and 18, I had up to 15 pen pals.” 

Old editions of Neues Leben feature posters of The Beatles, fashion advice and reports about FDJ art competitions and festivals. Many of its stories were written by Dittmann’s old friend Eckhard Mieder, during his time as features editor between 1980 and 1984. 

“The point of Neues Leben was to make politics entertaining for the youth.” Mieder told me. “We had a mission to educate our readers according to socialist principles. But I don’t think it worked. I spent half a year at Neues Leben replying to letters from readers, which were all about problems with parents and sexuality.”

The young people shown in the magazine “were supposed to function as role models,” Mieder said. For example, in 1983, then 20-year-old Falk Schade and his girlfriend Kerstin were featured in a photo story that showed them attending the annual communist youth festival in the eastern town of Memleben. They married shortly after.

In the story, Falk and Kerstin are wearing blue communist youth uniforms. 

Kerstin pins a badge of a white dove onto Falk’s stiff blue shirt. Her own badge reads “Gegen Nato Waffen, Frieden Schaffen” (“Create peace against NATO weapons”). 

At the time, the global nuclear disarmament movement was in full swing and demonstrators tried to join the FDJ festival. The editorial in Neues Leben makes no mention of their presence. Instead, another picture shows Falk and Kerstin visiting a shooting gallery. In a photo caption, Falk says: “I don’t understand that some of our people believe that if you tell everyone to leave weapons alone, there won’t be any more war.” 

When I called Falk Schade, who recently separated from Kerstin, he said that a Neues Leben reporter had followed them around the festival, and later showed them a version of their dialogue to approve. He added that Neues Leben’s staff used the story to show the FDJ in the best possible light.

“They interpreted a lot into what we were saying,” said Falk. 

State censorship

Back in the 1980s, Dittmann wanted to write about music. In her apartment today, she still has a collection of ceramic vases that the magazine gave out as awards to readers’ favorite East German pop stars. Some of the musicians, such as the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, later fled to the West while on tour and were banned from the magazine’s pages. 

As editor, Dittmann was allowed to publish two articles about Western musicians, actors and authors in each issue. Their work was often not available in the east, so she relied on friends in West Germany to send cassettes and books to the office. She was always worried her work would incur the wrath of authorities. 

“I wrote with a stomach ache, because I never knew, did I get it right?” she said. 

One day, after a friend from Hamburg sent her a book about rock music, she was called to the publisher’s security department and questioned by the secret police.

Although it enjoyed a long existence, Neues Leben’s print run was always limited. The magazine had a circulation of 500,000, but issues were widely shared and monthly readership was estimated to be two million. At monthly editorial conferences, editors pitched ideas, but there was never any doubt about who was really in charge. 

The FDJ Zentralrat (or central council), which was responsible for executing the Communist party’s youth policies, was located on one of the main streets in East Berlin, close to Neues Leben’s offices. When Dittmann became deputy editor-in-chief, she says, officials told her that “mechanical engineering” would be an important topic to cover for young people. 

“We were all socialists, completely in accord with the politics,” said Mieder. 

But the conversations between editors about what could and couldn’t be said often turned farcical. Once, Mieder profiled a young pig farmer from the northeastern city of Neubrandenburg and began with the sentence: “She organizes our Sunday pork cutlets.” His editor at the time promptly told him to change his intro, owing to there being a shortage of pork in East Germany. 

The fall of the wall

In 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FDJ central council announced a national campaign — “Max Braucht Schrott” (Max needs scrap metal) — in which young workers would volunteer their spare time to participate in collections for a steel plant in the state of Thuringia. 

A 23-year-old man named Carsten Seeger, who organized recreational activities for young workers, was interviewed by Neues Leben, after his district in the northern state of Mecklenburg came third in the country for the amount of metal gathered. 

Today, Seeger is a social worker in the lakeside city of Neubrandenburg. He told me that the campaign was like a kind of weekend camp, with drinks, music and bonfires in the evening. It was also closely followed by the authorities, who wanted to meet collection targets.

“We wanted to prove ourselves, to show that we were capable of shaping the future. We didn’t want to embarrass ourselves by failing,” he said.

By November 1989, the volunteers in Seeger’s town had gathered all the metal they could and, as a reward, were sent on a group holiday to Saxony. Owing to the government’s heavy censorship, they had not heard about growing protests across the country, which were about to topple the East German regime. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the former GDR’s economy was plunged into bankruptcy. In the years following German reunification in 1990, over 14,000 East German companies were privatized and as many as four million East German workers lost their jobs.

In 1990, a publishing company in Hamburg bought Neues Leben, hiked up the price and urged Dittmann and her team to run stories about sex and crime. In Dittmann’s view, this was Neues Leben’s lowest point. By 1992, the magazine had lost a large section of its readership. 

Dittmann has mostly fond memories of editing the magazine under the watchful eyes of the FDJ. “We didn’t just have to print the party’s speeches, we could go into schools and talk to young people. Working at Neues Leben was the best job in the business,” she said.

Still, she acknowledges, “it got boring, interviewing one youth brigade after the other.”

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Last week, Russian prosecutors demanded a 15-year prison sentence for Dmitriev. The case centers around naked photos Dmitriev took of his then pre-teen daughter which were seized after an anonymous tip to local police in Petrozavodsk, a city in northwestern Russia. Dmitriev says he took the photos for doctors taking care of his daughter. The photos were also the subject of a previous child pornography case against Dmitriev which was thrown out in 2018.

The announcement from the prosecution on July 7 is the latest episode in a four-year-long courtroom saga.

“The charges are distressing and needless to say, sound horrible, and I think that this is a specific strategy because the goal wasn’t to just neutralize an undesirable person,” said Irina Galkova, director of Memorial International’s museum in Moscow. Most of the court proceedings were held behind closed doors and few details can ever be released about the case, said Galkova. “Even if he is acquitted, the strategy would have accomplished its goal.”

While Dmitriev was held in pre-trial detention, a group of Kremlin-backed historians have worked to rewrite the history of one of the largest sites the historian uncovered, Sandarmokh, where 9,000 victims of Stalin’s Great Terror are buried. The new narrative casts the site as a World War II-era burial ground and dilutes Sandarmokh’s association with Stalin. “This is happening across the board,” Galkova said. “We see how convenient it is to switch over attention from the collective memory of the repressions to the Great Patriotic War [WWII].”

Head of a local branch of Memorial, an NGO focusing on political repressions, Dmitriev has uncovered and documented mass grave sites since the late 1980s, well ahead of other memorialization efforts. He is responsible for recording thousands of names of those killed during the Great Terror and his name appears in the pages of Anne Applebaum’s Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Gulag, in Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman’s 2018 book “Never Remember” and in scores of other books.

Applebaum, who met with Dmitriev while researching her book, called his arrest “appalling” and a “profound reversal” in attitudes towards Gulag history when I spoke with her earlier this year for Coda’s documentary series, Generation Gulag. “This is somebody who should be a local community hero,” she told me.

The unusual nature of the charges against Dmitriev have brought the case international attention. Russian state television channels have hounded the historian, accusing him of attempting to escape abroad and other charges.

You can watch Coda Story’s Generation Gulag series about the Kremlin’s campaign to rewrite Soviet history here.

Photo by Igor Podgorny\TASS via Getty Images

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