India: A Rogue State Ruled By Gangsters?
The United States and Canadian governments are alleging that Indian government agents plotted assassinations of Sikh dissidents on their soils. Their investigations paint a shocking picture of how recklessly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government operates.
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| Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) and Home Minister Amit Shah |
The criminal charges announced by Washington and Ottawa are backed by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the remaining three countries that make up the 5-nation intelligence sharing alliance known as the Five Eyes. Revelations made by the US Justice Department and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) indicate that the authorization for Sikh assassinations came directly from the top Indian government officials, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-hand man Amit Shah. International criminal gang leader Lawrence Bishnoi is listed among the people tasked with carrying out the murders. These allegations are based on intelligence gathered from multiple communication intercepts among Indian government officials in New Delhi and Indian diplomats posted in Canada.
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| Sikh Leaders Targeted in Assassinations Campaign by Modi Government |
RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme has warned of widespread violence, homicides and a public security threat linked to agents of the Indian government. Duheme said the RCMP has charged “a significant number” of people with direct involvement in homicides, extortions and other criminal acts of violence over the past few years and is aware of more than a dozen threats to members of the south Asian community and the pro-Khalistan movement, according to the Canadian news media.
Meanwhile, the United States Justice Department (US DOJ) has charged a former Indian intelligence agent Vikash Yadav for allegedly orchestrating a foiled plot to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen living in New York City. Last year, the DOJ first announced charges in the case, indicting an Indian national and alleged drug and weapons trafficker, Nikhil Gupta. That indictment also referred to an unnamed Indian government official whom prosecutors said directed the scheme.
New Delhi is responding very differently to almost identical allegations made by the US and Canadian governments. While the Canadians are treated with total disdain, the Americans are being taken very seriously. The behavior of the Modi officials toward Canada is just as hostile as it has been toward Pakistan which has also documented a campaign of assassinations of Sikhs and Kashmiris orchestrated by Indian agents on its soil.
Reacting to the report of Canadian allegations against the Indian government, Pakistan Foreign Secretary Syrus Qazi said: “We are aware of the nature of our eastern neighbor, we know what they are capable of … so it is not a surprise for us. “We caught [one of their] serving naval intelligence officers on our soil. He (Kulbhushan Jadhav) is in our custody and admitted that he came here to create instability and spread evil,” he added.
Last year, Pakistan foreign office spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said her country remained a “target of a series of targeted killings and espionage by (Indian Intelligence Agency) RAW". “In December last year, Pakistan released a comprehensive dossier providing concrete and irrefutable evidence of India’s involvement in the Lahore attack of June 2021. The attack was planned and executed by Indian intelligence,” she said, adding that in 2016, a high-ranking Indian military officer Kulbhushan Jadhav confessed to his involvement in directing, financing and executing terror and sabotage in Pakistan.
The US government has openly bracketed Mr. Modi with several murderous dictators. Speaking about the US decision to grant immunity to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in 2022, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that it was “not the first time” that the US government has designated immunity to foreign leaders and listed four cases. “Some examples: President Aristide in Haiti in 1993; President Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2001; Prime Minister Modi in India in 2014; and President Kabila in the DRC in 2018. This is a consistent practice that we have afforded to heads of state, heads of government, and foreign ministers,” he said.
Modi has a long history of murdering minorities in his country. After the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002, Narendra Modi made the cover of India Today magazine with the caption "Hero of Hatred". Modi was denied a visa to visit the United States. The US visa ban on Modi was lifted in 2014 after he became prime minister. Since then, Narendra Modi's image has been rehabilitated by the West as the US and Western Europe seek allies in Asia to counter the rise of China. However, Modi's actions on the ground in India confirm that he remains "Hero of Hatred" and "Divider In Chief" at his core. A two-part BBC documentary explains this reality in significant detail. The first part focuses on the 2002 events in Gujarat when Modi as the state chief minister ordered the police to not stop the Hindu mobs murdering Muslims and burning their homes and businesses. The second part looks at Modi government's anti-Muslim policies, including the revocation of Kashmir's autonomy (article 370) and a new citizenship law (CAA 2019) that discriminates against Muslims. It shows the violent response by security forces to peaceful protests against the new laws, and interviews the family members of people who were killed in the 2020 Delhi riots orchestrated by Modi's allies.
Here's Indian National Security Advisor on how to use Taliban to attack Pakistan:
https://youtu.be/eYRuk8H5M9E?si=ZB1c7Dd8ntQdKeFi
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
Karan Thapar Dismantles Official Indian Narrative on Kulbhushan Jadhav
How Long Can Modi Escape Accountability For Murder?
Indian Agent Kubhushan Yadav's Confession
US Government Brackets Modi With Murderous Dictators
Ex India Spy Documents Successful RAW Ops in Pakistan
London Police Document Confirms MQM-RAW Connection Testimony
India's Ex Spooks Blame Kulbhushan Jadhav For Getting Caught
Ajit Doval Lecture on "How to Tackle Pakistan"
Mohan Lal Bhaskar: An Indian Raw Agent in Pakistan
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https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/india/young-indians-chase-american-dream-intl-hnk-dst/index.html?cid=ios_app
In just four years, the number of Indian citizens illegally entering the US has surged dramatically — from 8,027 in the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year to 96,917 during 2022 to 2023 period, government data showed.
https://www.financialexpress.com/business/industry-shrinking-middle-class-hitting-fmcg-firms-nestle-india-3646982/
The FMCG sector is facing sluggish demand as it is becoming polarised with the middle class shrinking but simultaneously there being high demand for premium products, Nestle India chairman and managing director Suresh Narayanan said on Tuesday. He added that in bigger cities, a channel shift is also being noticed with people preferring e-commerce and quick commerce.
Speaking to a select group of reporters at the company’s Samalkha facility, Narayanan said, “there used to be a middle segment which used to be the segment most of us FMCG companies used to operate in, which is the middle class of the country. That seems to be shrinking. And there is a completely, purely price-quality-be-damned-led segment, which also seems to be doing reasonably well”. As a result, companies offering fair to reasonable value in the middle segment are finding their fortunes temporarily shrinking, he added.
Nestle’s demand pattern also reflects this. Narayanan said that the company’s chocolate business was among the worst hit due to the slowdown. Yet, its premium chocolates were among the best performers in terms of growth.
He said that earlier this situation used to last for a quarter and then bounce back, but now it has lasted for two-three quarters.
Last week, Nestle India, reported its slowest quarterly growth in eight years. The company said it was primarily due to weak demand and high raw material costs.
“The pressure points are coming from mega cities and metros,” Narayanan said. “It is almost like we operating in two Indias,” he added.
The categories that have taken the biggest hit are milks & nutrition, and chocolate and confectionery. However, its core products like Maggi, KitKat and Milkmaid continue to grow at double digits.
https://theprint.in/economy/not-sure-how-gdp-numbers-coming-asian-paints-ceo-points-to-disconnect-with-sectoral-performance/2086445/
He went on to question whether the GDP data correlated with the “actual GDP” being produced by the underlying sectors of the economy.
“So, even if you look at the core sectors, whether it is steel, cement, so on and so forth, no where it is correlating with the kind of possibly overall GDP growth in terms of what we are kind of talking of,” he said.
“So, we are also looking at ways and means in terms of finding out what is the real GDP,” Syngle added.
His comments come at a time when India’s FMCG sector spent the financial year 2023-24 struggling to increase sales. Asian Paints saw its revenue grow 2.6 percent in the financial year 2023-24, significantly slower than the 19.4 percent revenue growth it saw in the previous financial year.
Hindustan Unilever, India’s largest FMCG company by market capitalisation, reported an anaemic 2 percent growth in revenue in 2023-24. This is down from a 15.5 percent revenue growth in 2021-22.
ITC, too, saw only a 2 percent growth in its revenues in the third quarter of FY24, the latest period for which it has declared results.
Simultaneously, the government is estimating that India’s GDP would have grown 8 percent over the course of 2023-24.
This number doesn’t really represent the growth in India when looking at particular regions or sectors of the country, according to Syngle.
“The correct GDP in terms of what would really be applied to a certain sector is something which I think we need to work and find out,” he said. “Because the GDP is also varying from region to region. If you look at possibly certain regions in the country, some regions are growing faster, some regions are growing slower, but when you get the GDP number overall, that’s a conglomeration of a full number.”
As the dispute over assassination plots lingers, the Modi government rebuffs U.S. attempts to woo India
Evan Dyer · CBC News · Posted: Oct 25, 2024 1:00 AM PDT | Last Updated: October 25
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/india-china-canada-u-s-nijjar-pannun-1.7362222
A meeting Wednesday between India's Narendra Modi and China's Xi Jinping in Kazan, Russia, was the first in five years, and will likely be viewed with dismay in Washington, Ottawa and other Western capitals.
While it probably doesn't mark the beginning of a new Beijing-New Delhi axis, it does seem to signal that India is not about to sign on to an anti-Beijing Western alliance either, despite the best efforts of the U.S. and some other countries to persuade it to do so.
"Would the U.S. be disappointed? I imagine," said Sanjay Ruparelia, a close observer of the Modi government who teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University. "I don't think publicly they would express it, but privately."
Ruparelia said U.S. relations with India have always been complicated, and that complexity has always required the U.S. to split the relationship into silos.
"On the one hand, ties have grown despite many disagreements, and quite serious ones. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, most importantly," he said.
"But you know, we've seen in the last year a new agreement on critical emerging technologies. You've seen growing defence and security partnerships. [U.S.] President Biden was reportedly the third leader in history to have his Indian counterpart at his own private residence. And that was this year — after the FBI foiled the plot to allegedly kill Mr. (Gurpatwant Singh) Pannun."
Most recently, the U.S. signed a deal to sell India Predator drones, the primary weapons used by the U.S. in its own campaigns of extraterritorial killing targeting such groups as al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
"And I'm not surprised by that," said Ruparelia. "I mean, the U.S. is the great power and they practice realpolitik more than any other power in the world."
Ruparelia said that while he takes the RCMP's statement that they have evidence linking agents of the Indian government to homicides and other acts of violence in Canada "seriously," the U.S. government clearly has "compartmentalized the issue" in order to continue working with India.
Murder claims may take a back seat to larger issues
There are multiple factors at work in Modi's decision to seek rapprochement with China. But the tensions with the West over India's alleged program of assassinating dissidents in Canada and the U.S. could not have helped to sell him on the idea of ditching India's traditional non-alignment and jumping into an alliance with the countries that have accused him.
At the same time, the geopolitical stakes between nations as large and powerful as the U.S., India, China and Russia all but ensure that the assassination allegations will end up taking a back seat to other, bigger considerations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, host of this year's BRICS summit, will be delighted with the meeting between Xi and Modi in Russia and may seek to take some of the credit.
Putin was careful to seat himself between the Indian and Chinese leaders, offering a visual symbol of his role as facilitator of their coming-together, said Prof. Ho-fung Hung of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"This kind of photo-op meeting, in which Putin is showing up side by side with all these world leaders, is a win for Putin because it's a kind of defiance of the U.S. attempt to isolate Russia," he said. "Putin can show to people back home that actually [he has] friends, and Russia has friends, despite all these U.S. efforts. So the U.S. is failing in isolating Russia."
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-sends-back-illegal-indian-immigrants-on-chartered-flight-ahead-of-polls-6877764
Washington:
The US hired a chartered flight to deport Indian nationals who were staying in the country illegally, the Department of Homeland Security has said, noting that this has been done in cooperation with the Indian government.
The charter flight was sent to India on October 22, the department said on Friday. "Indian nationals without a legal basis to remain in the United States are subject to swift removal, and intending migrants should not fall for the lies of smugglers who proclaim otherwise," said Kristie A. Canegallo, a senior official performing the duties of Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.
The statement said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to enforce US immigration laws and deliver tough consequences for those who enter unlawfully and encourages the use of lawful pathways.
Since June 2024, when the Securing the Border Presidential Proclamation and accompanying Interim Final Rule went into effect, encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border of the US have decreased by 55 per cent.
In fiscal year 2024, the DHS removed or returned over 160,000 individuals and operated more than 495 international repatriation flights to more than 145 countries, including India, the statement said.
It said the department regularly engaged with foreign governments throughout the hemisphere and around the world to accept repatriations of their nationals without a legal basis to remain in the US.
This was one tool among many that the US used to reduce irregular migration, promote the use of safe, lawful and orderly pathways, and hold transnational criminal networks accountable for smuggling and exploitation of vulnerable people, it said.
Over the last year, DHS has removed individuals from a range of countries worldwide, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Egypt, Mauritania, Senegal, Uzbekistan, China, and India.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/26/world/asia/india-temple-laddu.html
It was a sensational charge in a country where food is yet another marker of political, religious and caste divides.
But the politicization of food has become more pervasive with the rise of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Vegetarianism and cow protection are now a staple of the political discourse. Mere accusations of eating or transporting beef — mostly against Muslims — can result in lynchings by cow-protection vigilantes and right-wing organizations.
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It was a sensational charge in a country where food is yet another marker of political, religious and caste divides.
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For centuries, the Tirupati temple in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh has given laddu, a ball-shaped sweet, to devotees. The temple is the richest Hindu holy site in the world, with revenues each year of hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is spending about a million dollars a month just on ghee to fry the laddu in, according to M.K. Jagadish, an official at a state-owned dairy.
Last month, the state’s newly elected chief minister, a Hindu named N. Chandrababu Naidu, accused his Christian predecessor of allowing the temple’s laddu to be made in ghee, a clarified butter, that was adulterated with other animal fats. A majority of the temple’s devotees are vegetarian; Mr. Naidu’s allegation called into question the sanctity of the temple itself.
The case of the temple sweet shows how India’s food cultures have become increasingly politicized. In a nation where cows are viewed as sacred by most Hindus, many states have banned the slaughter of cows and made the transportation of beef a punishable offense. In some, even the cooking of eggs has drawn official condemnation. Restaurants are closely monitored for any mixing of vegetarian and nonvegetarian food. Some states have ordered the owners of food stalls to display their names clearly so consumers are aware of their religious and caste identity.
Cultural sensitivities surrounding food are not new in India. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British was ignited by allegations that rifle cartridges, which had to be manually loaded by biting off the end, were greased in beef tallow and pig fat, antagonizing both Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the British Army.
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Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has traditionally drawn support from upper castes, has presented the notion of “pure vegetarianism” as a nationalist ideology since it took power in 2014. That push is intended to shape a monolithic Hindu identity that paints over caste divisions, analysts say.
Increasingly, those who do not conform to these ideas of food purity or who question them — including religious minorities like Muslims, lower-caste communities and political activists — have come under attack. Some are trolled and shamed online. Others have had their homes bulldozed or even been lynched.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/03/india-undocumented-immigrants/
JALANDHAR, India — Billboards crowd the small lanes of this northern Indian city, calling out to those who dream of a different future. A sign in the Punjabi language beckons: “Let’s go to America.”
An immigration agent, driving on an overpass amid the sea of billboards, reflected on the city’s brisk migration business. “Most of these agents would have tried sending clients through an illegal route to the U.S.,” said the Punjabi agent, adding that he himself had sent 60 such clients along routes that hopscotch through various countries before arriving in Mexico or Canada, where the migrants walk across the U.S. border.
Indians have come to make up the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2021 estimates, which put the number of such Indians at 725,000. India is the only country in the top five outside Latin America, and since 2011, the number of undocumented Indians in the United States has grown by 70 percent, the fastest growth of all nationalities. Figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that the number of undocumented Indian immigrants increased the fastest between 2020 and 2023.
The immigrants are often from middle-class families. They frequently sell their land to pay for the journey — which families say can run $40,000 to $100,000 per person — hoping that working in America will triple their wages, produce a secure future for their children and yield a higher value in the marriage market for their sons.
These migrants are “not the desperately poor” and often come from the most prosperous states in India, said Devesh Kapur, a South Asian studies professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on the Indian diaspora. But faced with a shortage of attractive jobs and a struggling agricultural sector, they find that the wealth they have in India is not enough to transform their lives, and this creates “a culture of migration,” he said.
The migrants pass along a chain of countries chosen because of easy visa requirements, according to interviews with more than a dozen families and their agents in three states in western India. In each place, agents provide the migrants with their next plane ticket as they move closer and closer to Latin America or Canada. From there, depending on how much they pay, they walk or are transported to the U.S. border. If asked questions, they are told to say they don’t feel safe in India.
The trek — along what’s called the “donkey route,” after the Punjabi idiom “dunki,” which refers to hopping — can involve up to a dozen countries and take over a year.
“The danger of the route is not worth it,” said L.K. Yadav, a senior police official in Punjab who set up a team to investigate donkey cases. The country’s youth, he said, have been “misguided with distorted facts” about the journey.
Gursewak Singh, 28, said he spent nine months last year waiting in a New Delhi hotel, then one month in a Dubai hotel and, finally, one month in the Istanbul airport, with hundreds of other Indians waiting for their agents’ directions. “We were like birds in a cage. The airport lobby area became like a village meeting place,” he said. Then, Gursewak recounted, his bag, with his passport, was stolen in the airport.
It was a costly setback. To pay for the journey, he said, he had sold an acre of land for $30,000 and raised $6,000 more by mortgaging two other acres and borrowing money from relatives.
On a recent day back home in India’s Haryana state, he opened Snapchat on his phone. It was filled with images of friends who have reached the United States, dancing at the Mexican border while their families back home set off fireworks and cut a cake in the shape of an American flag. “I feel, let me go, too,” he said.
Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah authorized a wave of violence across Canada that included extortion and homicides, said a senior Canadian government official. David Morrison, Canada’s deputy foreign minister, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that he had confirmed the identity of Shah in a newspaper report earlier this month.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-29/top-modi-minister-authorized-crimes-in-canada-official-alleges
Arjun Sethi
@arjunsethi81
Confirmation from Canada today:
Amit Shah, Modi’s second in command, authorized the assassination program targeting Sikhs in North America.
India is a serial human rights abuser run by authoritarian strongmen who are exporting violence across the world.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-29/top-modi-minister-authorized-crimes-in-canada-official-alleges?sref=boLeWatK
https://x.com/arjunsethi81/status/1851554632583053816
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Bloomberg Economics
@economics
Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah authorized a wave of violence across Canada that included extortion and homicides, said a senior Canadian government official
https://x.com/arjunsethi81/status/1851554632583053816
Indian Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah authorized a wave of violence across Canada that included extortion and homicides, said a senior Canadian government official. David Morrison, Canada’s deputy foreign minister, told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that he had confirmed the identity of Shah in a newspaper report earlier this month.
KJ
@Kabal_Jee
India is emerging as a cyber threat to Canada 🇨🇦.
From the time when PM stood in the house of commons, there was mis/disinformation coming from ppl who works for India 🇮🇳
https://x.com/Kabal_Jee/status/1851856825257189831
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Canada-India tensions could escalate cyber threats, hinder immigration | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/canada-india-tensions-could-escalate-cyber-threats-hinder-immigration-2024-10-30/
Canada accuses Indian Minister Amit Shah of masterminding violence against Sikhs
Cyber espionage by India against Canada likely to increase, says Canadian intelligence
Trade relations between Canada and India remain unaffected despite diplomatic tensions
The Canadian signals intelligence agency that monitors foreign-based cyber threats said New Delhi was most likely already conducting threatening cyber activity against Canadian networks for spying purposes.
"As Canada and India potentially may have some tensions, it is possible that we may see India want to flex those cyber threat actions against Canadians," Caroline Xavier, head of the agency, known as Communications Security Establishment Canada, told a Wednesday press conference. The agency has previously described India as an emerging threat.
@ashoswai
Canada deputy foreign minister confirms Modi’s henchman cum home minister Amit Shah has ordered the killing of Sikh activists in Canada. Shah does all the dirty jobs for Modi, so Modi is the prime culprit and both of them will be dragged to ICC soon.
https://x.com/ashoswai/status/1851705273175478595
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/11/15/india-canada-tensions-spill-onto-students-education-consultancies
The United States has 337,000 students, the United Kingdom has 185,000 students, and Germany hosts 42,997 Indian students, as per data from the Ministry of External Affairs.
Pratibha Jain, the founder of Eduabroad, a consultancy which for the past three decades has helped students get admission into some of the top universities across the globe, told Al Jazeera that there has been about a 10 percent decline in queries for Canada and the trend has been shifting to other countries instead including the UK, Australia, Dubai and in Europe.
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Canada Govt ends fast-track student visas for India, 13 other countries | Education News - The Indian Express
https://indianexpress.com/article/education/canada-govt-ends-fast-track-student-visas-for-india-13-other-countries-9662032/
In a decision that will impact applicants from India — and at a time when diplomatic ties between the two countries are strained — Canada ended its popular, fast-track student visa programme with effect from Friday.
The Student Direct Stream (SDS) programme was launched in 2018 to provide faster processing for eligible post-secondary students from 14 countries, including India. Besides a shorter processing time, the approval rates were also higher under the programme.
According to official estimates, 60 per cent of the 4 lakh Indian students who sought to study in Canada in 2023 applied under the SDS programme. Under SDS, the approval rate for Indian students was consistently higher, breaching 70 per cent in 2023. In contrast, those applying through the regular route had approval rates as low as 10 per cent.
Announcing the end of the programme on Friday, the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said: “Canada’s goal is to strengthen programme integrity, address student vulnerability, and give all students equal and fair access to the application process, as well as a positive academic experience. To meet this commitment, the Student Direct Stream (SDS)… ended as of 2 pm today… Canada is committed to giving all international students equal and fair access to the application process for study permits.”
The IRCC said prospective students can still apply through the regular study permit route, for which guaranteed investment certificates are accepted as proof of financial support.
Under the SDS programme, students could secure study permits in just 20 working days, even as processing times under the standard route often extend to around eight weeks for Indian applicants.
India is Canada’s largest source country of foreign students with an estimated 4.27 lakh Indian students studying there in 2023.
The SDS programme was available to residents of Antigua and Barbuda, Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vietnam.
Calling it a big blow to students aspiring to study in Canada, Gurpreet Singh, who has been running a visa consultancy in Kapurthala for the last 10 years, said all the students from his area had been taking the SDS route ever since it was introduced. “That’s the case with most of the students from the rest of Punjab as well,” he said.
By Samanth Subramanian
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/25/should-a-country-speak-a-single-language
Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) came to power, it has made the future of Indian languages even more uncertain. In addition to its well-known Hindu fanaticism, the B.J.P. wishes to foist Hindi on the nation, a synthetic marriage that would clothe India in a monolingual monoculture. Across northern and central India, roughly three hundred million people speak, as their first language, the standardized Hindi that the B.J.P. holds dear—but, this being India, that leaves more than a billion who don’t. Even so, the government tried to make Hindi a mandatory language in schools until fierce opposition forced a rollback. The country’s Department of Official Language, which promotes the use of Hindi, has had its budget nearly tripled in the past decade, to about fifteen million dollars. A parliamentary committee recently urged that Hindi be a prerequisite for government employment, raising the possibility that such jobs might become the preserve of people from the B.J.P.’s Hindi-speaking heartland. Three years ago, India’s Home Minister called Hindi the “foundation of our cultural consciousness and national unity”—a message that he put out in a tweet written only in Hindi.
In India, where language scaffolds culture and identity, this pressure affects daily life. On social media, people routinely bristle at encountering Hindi in their non-Hindi-speaking states—on bank documents, income-tax forms, railway signboards, cooking-gas cylinders, or the milestones on national highways. Two years ago, a man set himself on fire in Tamil Nadu to protest the imposition of Hindi. In Karnataka, the state where he lives, Devy sees a simmering resentment of Hindi-speaking arrivals from the north.
The B.J.P. believes that India can cohere only if its identity is fashioned around a single language. For Devy, India’s identity is, in fact, its polyglot nature. In ancient and medieval sources, he finds earnest embraces of this abundance: the Mahabharata as a treasury of tales from many languages; the Buddhist king Ashoka’s edicts etched in stone across the land in four scripts; the lingua francas of the Deccan sultanates. The coexistence of languages, he thinks, has long allowed Indians to “accept many gods, many worlds”—an indispensable trait for a country so sprawling and kaleidoscopic. Preserving languages, protecting them from being bullied out of existence, is thus a matter of national importance, Devy said. He designed the P.L.S.I. to insure “that the languages that were off the record are now on the record.”
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By the time (literary scholar Ganesh) Devy was born, Indian leaders had begun to regard language as an existential dilemma. This was a fresh, unstable country, already rent by strife between Hindus and Muslims; to mismanage the linguistic question would be to risk splintering India altogether. Mahatma Gandhi, fearing India wouldn’t hold without a national language, proposed that it be Hindustani, which encompasses both Hindi and the very similar Urdu of many Indian Muslims. (In the history of new nations, Gandhi’s concern is not an uncommon one.
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During his time in Vadodara, Devy had seen, up close, the rise of an ugly, intolerant Hindu fundamentalism. On the street one night, he encountered a Hindu mob hunting for Muslims to harm; he sent them in the wrong direction.
https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-politics/ambedkar-burn-effigy-amit-shah-9731980/
Shah had said in the Rajya Sabha a day ago, “It has become a fashion to say Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar, Ambedkar. If they had taken God’s name so many times, they would have got a place in heaven.” Shah also said that Ambedkar had resigned from Nehru’s Cabinet because he was “ignored” and “dissatisfied”.
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The RSS was bitterly opposed to the Hindu Code Bill, which aimed to reform matters related to aspects like marriage and succession, giving more rights to women.
Historian Ramachandra Guha in his book, India After Gandhi, writes: “On 11 December 1949, the RSS organised a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi, where speaker after speaker condemned the [Hindu Code] bill. One called it ‘an atom bomb on Hindu society’. Another likened it to the draconian Rowlatt Act introduced by the colonial state… he said, the struggle against this Bill would signal the downfall of Nehru’s government. The next day a group of RSS workers marched on the Assembly buildings, shouting ‘Down with Hindu code bill’ and ‘May Pandit Nehru perish’. The protesters burnt effigies of the prime minister and Dr Ambedkar, and then vandalised the car of Sheikh Abdullah.”
What RSS, Golwalkar, Savarkar said about Constitution
Among the reasons Ambedkar resigned as Law Minister was his frustration with Nehru on not getting the Hindu Code Bill passed soon enough, in the form Ambedkar wanted. Yet it was the right wing, including factions within the Congress, that had opposed the Bill tooth and nail.
Ambedkar had said about the Hindu Code Bill, “To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex which is the soul of Hindu society untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”
Guha wrote in an opinion piece for The Indian Express how the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, opposed this Bill. “An article in the Organiser, dated November 2, 1949, characterised the Hindu Code Bill “as a direct invasion on the faith of the Hindus”, remarking that “its provisions empowering women to divorce is revolting to the Hindu ideology”. An editorial published a month later (“The Hindu Code Bill”, the Organiser, December 7, 1949) led with this paragraph: “We oppose the Hindu Code Bill. We oppose it because it is a derogatory measure based on alien and immoral principles…” It then went on to state that “Rishi Ambedkar and Maharishi Nehru… would atomise society and infect every family with scandal, suspicion and vice.”
The right, including former Sarsanghchalak MS Golwalkar, were not particularly enthused by the Constitution either. Golwaklar wrote in his Bunch of Thoughts, “Our Constitution too is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries. It has absolutely nothing, which can be called our own. Is there a single word of reference in its guiding principles as to what our national mission is and what our keynote in life is? No! Some lame principles from the United Nations Charter or from the Charter of the now defunct League of Nations and some features from the American and British Constitutions have been just brought together in a mere hotchpotch.”
Similar views were echoed by VD Savarkar. In Women in Manusmriti, he wrote: “The worst about the new constitution of Bharat is that there is nothing Bharatiya about it…Manusmriti is that scripture which is most worship-able after Vedas for our Hindu Nation and which from ancient times has become the basis of our culture-customs, thought and practice. This book for centuries has codified the spiritual and divine march of our nation. Even today the rules which are followed by crores of Hindus in their lives and practice are based on Manusmriti.”
Government inquiry calls for legal action against unnamed person involved in foiled conspiracy
https://www.wsj.com/world/india/india-edges-closer-to-acknowledging-role-in-plot-to-kill-american-101a642f?st=aQPqwL&reflink=article_email_share
India inched closer to acknowledging a role in a murder-for-hire plot aimed at an American citizen, with a government panel calling for legal action against a person involved in the matter.
Relations between Washington and New Delhi were strained when federal prosecutors revealed in November 2023 an audacious plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American lawyer who has advocated for carving out a Sikh homeland from India. Prosecutors last year brought murder-for-hire charges against Vikash Yadav, a former official with India’s overseas intelligence service. He remains at large in India.
India didn’t name the person who would face legal action in the statement issued Wednesday, though it noted the person had “earlier criminal links.” A government inquiry panel set up after the American charges were unveiled last year recommended “legal action must be completed expeditiously.”
Before Wednesday’s statement, Indian officials have consistently denied any link to violence directed against American and Canadian citizens. A violent movement to create a Sikh homeland called Khalistan from the Indian state of Punjab once raged in India in the 1980s and 1990s, but was eventually brutally suppressed by Indian police forces. Many Sikhs migrated from Punjab to the U.S. and Canada, where some continued to campaign for the idea of Sikh sovereignty, something the Indian government views as an existential threat.
“This is the closest New Delhi has come to acknowledging some degree of complicity in the alleged plot, even though it didn’t publicly disclose the nature of its findings about the individual in question,” said Michael Kugelman, the director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.