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Javier E

What to read as an introduction to India | The Economist - 0 views

  • The book (which we reviewed in 2021), is two things in one: it is a relatively straightforward chronicle of eight centuries of Indian history, a period that gave rise to many things thought of today as quintessentially Indian, from biryani to the Hindi language
  • it offers powerful evidence, backed up with hundreds of examples from Professor Eaton’s scholarship, that Indians before the arrival of the British saw each other and themselves not through the lens of religion, as the leaders of the country today would have their citizens believe, but through the varifocals of language, ethnicity and community.
  • It is not uncommon to encounter, among a certain class of English gentleman, the notion that, on balance, India did not do so badly from British rule. Not only were Indians spared the horrors of French or Spanish—or, worse, Belgian—colonisation. But the British built the railways, the postal system and the administrative infrastructure of the country. They left behind the gifts of parliamentary democracy and the English language. In under 300 pages, Shashi Tharoor, a former under-secretary-general of the UN and a serving member of parliament in India, demolishes those arguments
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  • the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan
  • As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”
  • Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place
  • As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes
  • He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■
Javier E

India takes strong pro-Israel stance under Modi in a departure from the past | India | ... - 0 views

  • ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.
  • it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”
  • In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power
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  • BJP-associated Facebook groups also began to push the message that Hamas represented the same Muslim threat facing India in the troubled, majority-Muslim region of Kashmir and Palestinians were sweepingly branded as jihadis.
  • A turning point came in 1999 when India went to war with Pakistan and Israel proved willing to provide arms and ammunition. It was the beginning of a defence relationship that has grown exponentially. India buys about $2bn-worth of arms from Israel every year – its largest arms supplier after Russia – and accounts for 46% of Israel’s overall weapons exports.
  • it was the election of Modi that marked a fundamental sea change. While previous governments had kept their dealings with Israel largely quiet, due to concerns of alienating foreign allies and its own vast Muslim population, Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP government had very different priorities.
  • ssa said: “The narrative they were pushing was clear: that India and Israel are these ancient civilisations that had been derailed by outsiders – which means Muslims – and their leaders have come together, like long-lost brothers, to fulfil their destiny.”
  • The ideological alignment between the two leaders was certainly more apparent than in the past. The BJP’s ideological forefathers, and its rank and file today, have long regarded Israel as a model for the religious nationalist state, referred to as the Hindu Rashtra, that the Hindu rightwing in India hope to establish.
  • While Modi was also the first Indian prime minister to visit Ramallah in Palestine, much of the focus of his government has been on strengthening ties with Israel, be it through defence, culture, agriculture and even film-making. This year, Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire businessman seen to be close to Modi, paid $1.2bn to acquire the strategic Israeli port of Haifa.
  • Modi’s foreign policy has also overseen a transformation in ties with Arab Gulf countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which has been of great financial benefit to India and laid the foundation for a groundbreaking India-Middle East economic trade corridor, running all the way to Europe, which was announced at the G20 forum for international economic cooperation this year but has yet to be built.
sarahbalick

Indian leopard injures six in Bangalore school - BBC News - 0 views

  • Indian leopard injures six in Bangalore school
  • A male leopard which entered a school in the Indian city of Bangalore injured six people trying to capture it.
  • A recent wildlife census estimated that India has a leopard population of between 12,000 and 14,000.
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  • "It was a long struggle to capture the leopard. Although it was injected with tranquillisers it could be captured only around 20.15 local time when the medication took full effect,"
aqconces

British Army Enlisted Indian Children as Young as 10 in World War 1, Claims Book - 0 views

  • Britain's World War I Army included Indian children as young as 10-years-old fighting against the Germans on the western front
  • One of the youngest boys involved in direct combat was a "brave little Gurkha" called Pim, 16, who was given an award for valour by Queen Mary while he was recuperating in hospital in Brighton
  • "In the case of a 10-year-old, it should have been pretty obvious that they were underage,"
g-dragon

The Mughal Empire's 300-year Rule of India - 0 views

  • The young prince Babur, descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's, finished his conquest of northern India in 1526
  • Babur was a refugee from the fierce dynastic struggles in Central Asia; his uncles and other warlords had repeatedly denied him rule over the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Fergana, his birth-right. Babur was able to establish a base in Kabul, though, from which he turned south and conquered much of the Indian subcontinent.
  • Babur called his dynasty "Timurid," but it is better known as the Mughal Dynasty - a Persian rendering of the word "Mongol."
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  • Although he was a Muslim, Babur followed a rather loose interpretation of the Quran in some ways. He drank heavily at his famously lavish feasts, and also enjoyed smoking hashish.
  • His eldest son Humayan fought off an attempt to seat his aunt's husband as emperor and assumed the throne.
  • Humayan was not a very strong leader. In 1540, the Pashtun ruler Sher Shah Suri defeated the Timurids, deposing Humayan. The second Timurid emperor only regained his throne with aid from Persia in 1555, a year before his death, but at that time he managed even to expand on Babur's empire.
  • Akbar defeated the remnants of the Pashtuns, and brought some previously unquelled Hindu regions under Timurid control. He also gained control over Rajput through diplomacy and marriage alliances.
  • he was a committed Muslim, Akbar encouraged religious tolerance and sought wisdom from holy men of all faiths.
  • Akbar's son, Jahangir, ruled the Mughal Empire in peace and prosperity from 1605 until 1627. He was succeeded by his own son, Shah Jahan.
  • The 36-year-old Shah Jahan inherited an incredible empire in 1627
  • his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died during the birth of their fourteenth child.
  • As an expression of his love, Shah Jahan commissioned the building of a magnificent tomb for his dear wife. Designed by the Persian architect Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, and constructed of white marble, the Taj Mahal is considered the crowning achievement of Mughal architecture.
  • Shah Jahan's third son, Aurangzeb, seized the throne and had all of his brothers executed after a protracted succession struggle in 1658.
  • Shah Jahan spent his declining years gazing out at the Taj, and died in 1666.
  • The ruthless Aurangzeb proved to be the last of the "Great Mughals." Throughout his reign, he expanded the empire in all directions. He also enforced a much more orthodox brand of Islam, even banning music in the empire (which made many Hindu rites impossible to perform).
  • A three-year-long revolt by the Mughals' long-time ally, the Pashtun, began in 1672. In the aftermath, the Mughals lost much of their authority in what is now Afghanistan, seriously weakening the empire.
  • Increasing peasant revolts and sectarian violence threatened the stability of the throne, and various nobles and warlords sought to control the line of weak emperors. All around the borders, powerful new kingdoms sprang up and began to chip away at Mughal land holdings.
  • The British East India Company (BEI) was founded in 1600, while Akbar was still on the throne. Initially, it was only interested in trade and had to content itself with working around the fringes of the Mughal Empire. As the Mughals weakened, however, the BEI grew increasingly powerful.
  • After this victory, the BEI took political control of much of the subcontinent, marking the start of the British Raj in India. The later Mughal rulers held on to their throne, but they were simply puppets of the British.
  • In 1857, half of the Indian Army rose up against the BEI in what is known as the Sepoy Rebellion or the Indian Mutiny. The British home government intervened to protect its own financial stake in the company and put down the so-called rebellion.Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was arrested, tried for treason, and exiled to Burma. It was the end of the Mughal Dynasty.
g-dragon

Zheng He's Treasure Ships of the Ming Dynasty - 0 views

  • Between 1405 and 1433, Ming China under the rule of Zhu Di, sent out enormous armadas of ships into the Indian Ocean commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He.
  • dwarfed European ships of that century — even Christopher Columbus's flagship, the "Santa Maria," was between 1/4 and 1/5 the size of Zheng He's.
  • Along with dozens of baoshan, each armada included hundreds of smaller ships.
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  • Drastically changing the face of Indian Ocean trade and power, these fleets embarked on seven epic voyages under Zheng He's guidance, resulting in a rapid expansion of Ming China's control in the region, but also of their struggle to maintain it in years to come due to the financial burden of such endeavors.
  • The eight-masted ships, called "machuan" or "horse ships
  • Seven-masted "liangchuan" or grain ships carried rice and other food for the crew and soldiers in the fleet.
  • Finally, the small, five-masted warships or "zhanchuan," each about 165 feet long, were designed to be maneuverable in battle. Though tiny compared with the baochuan, the zhanchuan were more than twice as long as Christopher Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria.
  • Why did Zheng He need so many huge ships? One reason, of course, was "shock and awe." The sight of these enormous ships appearing on the horizon one by one must have been truly incredible for the people all along the Indian Ocean's rim and would have enhanced Ming China's prestige immeasurably.
  • The other reason was that Zheng He traveled with an estimated 27,000 to 28,000 sailors, marines, translators and other crew members. Along with their horses, rice, drinking water and trade goods, that number of people required a staggering amount of room aboard ship. In addition, they had to make space for the emissaries, tribute goods and wild animals that went back to China.
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    A history of Zheng He's fleet. It is intresting to see how enormus these ships were compared to Columbus' and how the Ming Dynasty used their massive navel power mainly to trade instead of colonize like the Europeans. It brings up the question, 'what if the Colombian exchange occurred by Zheng He instead of Columbus?'
mimiterranova

Indian Farmers Protest In New Delhi, Storm Historic Red Fort : NPR - 0 views

  • Tens of thousands of farmers rolled into India's capital Tuesday on tractors festooned with Indian flags, overshadowing a traditional military parade on a national holiday. They broke through barricades, clashed with police and occupied the ramparts of the 17th century Red Fort – a tourist attraction and symbol of Indian power.
  • t was one of the biggest protests in New Delhi in living memory, posing a fresh challenge to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reelected in 2019 in a landslide
  • "We came here for the farmers' support! Because they're not getting what they want,"
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  • At least one farmer reportedly died.
  • After nightfall Tuesday, those unions called off the tractor rally. Farmers climbed down from the ramparts of the Red Fort. But they did not go home. They returned only to their protest camps, on the outskirts of Delhi — from which they're planning another march on the capital in less than a week.
brickol

India citizenship law: 100,0000 attend Hyderabad protest | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • More than 100,000 protesters have taken part in a peaceful march in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, chanting slogans against Narendra Modi’s new citizenship law.
  • organised by an umbrella group of Muslim and civil society organisations
  • More than 40% of Hyderabad’s estimated population of nearly 7 million people are Muslims.
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  • Indian government has faced weeks of acrimonious and, at times, violent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which was passed by Modi’s government in December.
  • The Hyderabad protesters held placards with slogans including “withdraw CAA immediately”, and “India’s only religion is secularism”.
  • the protest remained peaceful, and estimated that more than 100,000 people were in attendance
  • The new law eases the path for non-Muslim minorities from the neighbouring Muslim-majority nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to gain Indian citizenship. But, if combined with a proposed national register of citizens, critics of the CAA fear it will discriminate against minority Muslims in India and chip away at India’s secular constitution.
  • Modi’s government maintains the new law is necessary to help minorities facing persecution in Muslim-majority nations, and it has called the pan-India protests politically motivated.
  • Protests against the CAA also went ahead in several other Indian cities on Saturday, with hundreds turning out in cities in the southern state of Karnataka.
zarinastone

Indians asked to eat more sugar to tackle oversupply - BBC News - 0 views

  • A glut of sugar has prompted India’s industry body to start a campaign to encourage Indians to eat more.
  • The Indian Sugar Mills Association (ISMA) said it wants to bust myths about sugar and its health effects.
  • At the launch of the website, India’s food secretary Sudhanshu Pandey told local media that sugar’s reputation is not deserved.
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  • The campaign takes a distinctly different approach to campaigns in other countries, which have pushed to reduce sugar consumption.
  • The government has taken an interventionist approach, using subsidies to help sell Indian sugar overseas, an approach that has been opposed by other sugar-producing nations.
Javier E

This rural liberal set out to talk to his pro-Trump neighbors - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Dick Burchell, a 77-year-old former Belknap County commissioner, speak of old-timers. “The people I’m closest to,” Burchell says, “the people I tried to represent, they’re traditional. They’re hard-working and down-to-earth. They’ve never made a lot of money, and now the forces of our economy are tilted against them.”
  • As Burchell sees it, “There’s such an imbalance between these working-class people and affluent second homeowners. There’s a real difference between their local conservatism and a more global way of looking at things.”
  • Black Lives Matter, Burchell believes, is a “myopic” organization that’s “fomenting violence” to serve a globalist agenda. “There’s some very powerful forces driving it,” he says, “Wall Street establishment types. Globalization works for them.”
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  • “We’ve become increasingly fragile as a society,” Burchell continues. “The hypertension surrounding race these days is totally unnecessary. And what’s being ignored is that you can be marginalized in ways beyond race. There are people who’ve been here for generations, and they’re working two jobs and just getting by.”
  • She moved here in 1983, a decade after undergoing a turbulent identity struggle. Her great-grandmother was a Mi’kmaq Indian, and when she was 16 she read “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” Dee Brown’s unsparing account of White people’s mistreatment of Indians in the 19th-century American West. When her history teacher delivered a different rendition of what happened — “it was just ‘the Indians scalped everyone,’ ” as she remembers it — Cote initiated a heated argument and then abruptly quit school for good. “I slammed the door and broke the glass on the way out,” she says. “They were lying to me. I was done.”
  • “I can understand that people are a product of where they come from,” she says, “and the inner city, where drugs are available left and right — it’s a lot like an Indian reservation. But the question is, ‘How do you pull yourself up out of it?’ Charles Payne” — she’s referring to a Fox Business Network host who is Black — “he went to school carrying a briefcase when he was a kid. He got picked on, but he didn’t let that stop him. Look, white privilege exists only if you let it exist.”
  • Great conversations are rooted in courage and trust. We need them to keep our nation civil and stable, and during the past few weeks I’ve seen just how difficult it is to make them happen. Over and over, I’ve been stonewalled and reminded that a lot of people would rather say cruel things online than talk in person.
Javier E

In India, Facebook Struggles to Combat Misinformation and Hate Speech - The New York Times - 0 views

  • On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.
  • The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.
  • The report was one of dozens of studies and memos written by Facebook employees grappling with the effects of the platform on India. They provide stark evidence of one of the most serious criticisms levied by human rights activists and politicians against the world-spanning company: It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential impact on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act on issues once they occur.
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  • Facebook’s problems on the subcontinent present an amplified version of the issues it has faced throughout the world, made worse by a lack of resources and a lack of expertise in India’s 22 officially recognized languages.
  • The documents include reports on how bots and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures were wreaking havoc on national elections
  • They also detail how a plan championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to focus on “meaningful social interactions,” or exchanges between friends and family, was leading to more misinformation in India, particularly during the pandemic.
  • Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts,
  • Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users
  • That lopsided focus on the United States has had consequences in a number of countries besides India. Company documents showed that Facebook installed measures to demote misinformation during the November election in Myanmar, including disinformation shared by the Myanmar military junta.
  • In Sri Lanka, people were able to automatically add hundreds of thousands of users to Facebook groups, exposing them to violence-inducing and hateful content
  • In India, “there is definitely a question about resourcing” for Facebook, but the answer is not “just throwing more money at the problem,” said Katie Harbath, who spent 10 years at Facebook as a director of public policy, and worked directly on securing India’s national elections. Facebook, she said, needs to find a solution that can be applied to countries around the world.
  • Two months later, after India’s national elections had begun, Facebook put in place a series of steps to stem the flow of misinformation and hate speech in the country, according to an internal document called Indian Election Case Study.
  • After the attack, anti-Pakistan content began to circulate in the Facebook-recommended groups that the researcher had joined. Many of the groups, she noted, had tens of thousands of users. A different report by Facebook, published in December 2019, found Indian Facebook users tended to join large groups, with the country’s median group size at 140,000 members.
  • Graphic posts, including a meme showing the beheading of a Pakistani national and dead bodies wrapped in white sheets on the ground, circulated in the groups she joined.After the researcher shared her case study with co-workers, her colleagues commented on the posted report that they were concerned about misinformation about the upcoming elections in India
  • According to a memo written after the trip, one of the key requests from users in India was that Facebook “take action on types of misinfo that are connected to real-world harm, specifically politics and religious group tension.”
  • The case study painted an optimistic picture of Facebook’s efforts, including adding more fact-checking partners — the third-party network of outlets with which Facebook works to outsource fact-checking — and increasing the amount of misinformation it removed.
  • The study did not note the immense problem the company faced with bots in India, nor issues like voter suppression. During the election, Facebook saw a spike in bots — or fake accounts — linked to various political groups, as well as efforts to spread misinformation that could have affected people’s understanding of the voting process.
  • , Facebook found that over 40 percent of top views, or impressions, in the Indian state of West Bengal were “fake/inauthentic.” One inauthentic account had amassed more than 30 million impressions.
  • A report published in March 2021 showed that many of the problems cited during the 2019 elections persisted.
  • Much of the material circulated around Facebook groups promoting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing and nationalist paramilitary group. The groups took issue with an expanding Muslim minority population in West Bengal and near the Pakistani border, and published posts on Facebook calling for the ouster of Muslim populations from India and promoting a Muslim population control law.
  • Facebook also hesitated to designate R.S.S. as a dangerous organization because of “political sensitivities” that could affect the social network’s operation in the country.
  • Of India’s 22 officially recognized languages, Facebook said it has trained its A.I. systems on five. (It said it had human reviewers for some others.) But in Hindi and Bengali, it still did not have enough data to adequately police the content, and much of the content targeting Muslims “is never flagged or actioned,” the Facebook report said.
abbykleman

US election 2016: Indians' verdict on Donald Trump's Hindi - BBC News - 0 views

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    US presidential candidate Donald Trump is speaking a little bit of Hindi in his latest campaign video as he attempts to woo Indian-American voters. He is appropriating Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's popular campaign slogan "Abki bar Modi sarkar" ("This time Modi government").
Javier E

Murty Classical Library Catalogs Indian Literature - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Murty Classical Library of India, whose first five dual-language volumes will be released next week, will include not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century, the series is to encompass poetry and prose, history and philosophy, Buddhist and Muslim texts as well as Hindu ones, and familiar works alongside those that have been all but unavailable to nonspecialists.
  • While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.
  • to some scholars, the project also comes as a timely if implicit rebuke to the Hindu nationalists of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, with its promotion of a unitary Indian identity based on selected Sanskrit religious classics.
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  • The series “debunks the myth of a Hindu orthodoxy as being the only classicism we have,” said Arshia Sattar, an independent scholar and translator in Bangalore. “In a strange way, the editors are creating a new canon.”
  • When it gained independence in 1947, India had a pioneering generation of homegrown classicists of the first rank. But today, scholars say, its universities produce and retain few classical scholars with the interpretive skills required by a project like the Murty, which has drawn its entire advisory board and most of its translators, South Asian and Western alike, from American and European institutions.
gaglianoj

Silicon Valley firm fined for paying Indian workers one-sixth of minimum wage - The Tim... - 0 views

  • NEW DELHI: A Silicon Valley company has been fined by the US Department of Labor for paying just $1.21 an hour to eight Indian employees it had flown in from its Bangalore office to install computer systems at its Fremont headquarters, the San Jose Mercury News reported on October 22.
katyshannon

Haryana State in India Proposes New Caste Status in Bid to Quell Protests - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • A state government in India promised to introduce a bill to grant coveted “backward” status to a relatively prosperous caste group, officials said Monday, in an effort to quell protests that have raged for the past four days.
  • The protesters, members of the Jat caste group, had blocked roads around the capital, set fire to railway stations and cars, and temporarily shut down a crucial canal that is a major source of the city’s water. Nineteen people were killed in the violence in surrounding Haryana State, and fears of water shortages led New Delhi to close its schools to conserve its supply.
  • The main thoroughfare in the area, Grand Trunk Road, which had been reopened on Sunday, was blocked again by fighting on Monday morning, the police said. Still, a state official said, 80 percent of the roads that had been closed were open again on Monday morning.
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  • Roshan Shankar, an adviser to the Delhi government, said the authorities had regained control of a canal that supplied water to New Delhi, though the canal was badly damaged. For now, he said, the government was using existing reserves and other water bodies to meet the need. He said severe, widespread shortages had not been reported so far.
  • Nevertheless, he added, officials were “trying to get people to ration.”
  • A Jat leader, Satpal Singh Sangwan, a retired government official, said in an interview that officials had assured him that the Jat group would be added to a list of more than 2,000 other groups considered “backward,” making their members eligible for quotas in government jobs and university admissions.
  • A year ago, another relatively prosperous caste group, in the state of Gujarat, also demanded, unsuccessfully, to be part of the “backward classes.” Yet the latest caste protests are only the most violent and visible in what has been a steady stream of requests from different caste groups claiming to be “backward.”
  • It is one of the country’s major paradoxes that a population that has been trying for decades to rid itself of the caste system finds so many groups demanding to be ranked lower on the socioeconomic ladder in order to advance themselves economically.
  • Experts say the trend is being driven by increasing numbers of Indians who fear being left behind in the rapidly modernizing economy and who see government quotas as the only tangible way they can gain influence to help better themselves economically.
  • Vast numbers of Indians now “feel totally helpless with regard to the economy and private capital,” said Satish Deshpande, a sociology professor at Delhi University.
  • Despite the economic liberalization that began here in the 1990s, many people still lack jobs and educational opportunities, intensifying the competition for the age-old staple of government jobs.
  • Almost half of government jobs and university seats in the country are reserved for members of special groups.
  • India’s Constitution guarantees equality to all, but it also enshrines caste-based affirmative action for the lowest social group, the Dalits, known in legal terms as scheduled castes, and for indigenous forest-dwellers, known as scheduled tribes. In time, the government created a third group, the Other Backward Classes.
  • In many cases, groups flex their electoral muscles to induce the government to add them to the list of groups considered backward.The Jats started on that path. In 2014, as national elections approached, the incumbent Congress party agreed to their demand for backward status. But the Supreme Court struck down the decision last year, noting that a commission set up to review the program had refused to recommend such a step for the group.
  • The Jat protests became so out of hand over the weekend that the Indian Army had to be called in. Mr. Das said several protesters were killed in clashes with another caste group whose property was being burned. Other people were killed when law enforcement officials fired at protesters who had turned violent, he said. At least 19 people in all have been killed, Mr. Das said.
  • The riots also disrupted businesses. Maruti Suzuki India, the country’s biggest car manufacturer, said over the weekend that it had suspended manufacturing at two area factories.
sarahbalick

Killer Meteorite Did Not Hit Indian Man - The Daily Beast - 0 views

  • Killer Meteorite Did Not Hit Indian Man
  • Though it first appeared as if a bus driver in India was killed by a meteorite this week, scientists and local officials say his death was more likely caused by
  • “a land-based explosion.”
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  • Images depicted a crater measuring five feet deep and two feet wide, and witnesses said they heard an explosion. The object recovered from the site allegedly weighed only a few grams. The event would have been the first case in history of someone dying from a meteorite’s impact.
maddieireland334

India Denies Visa Request From Religious Freedom Monitoring Group - The New York Times - 0 views

  • ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.
  • The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.
  • Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.
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  • In a report published last year, the commission said that religiously motivated violent episodes reportedly increased for three consecutive years in India, and that the struggle to provide justice to victims “perpetuates a climate of impunity.”
  • The group has traveled to China, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, “among the worst offenders on religious freedom,” he said.
  • India has had a checkered history with religious violence, and the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 raised concerns about the potential for increased religious tensions.
  • The Indian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Friday that there had been no change in policy regarding such visits and that the Indian Constitution guaranteed freedom of religion for its citizens.
  • A delegation from the commission was denied visas to India during the previous administration in 2009, according to the local news media.
jongardner04

Pathankot attack: Pakistan raids Jaish-e-Mohammad schools - BBC News - 0 views

  • Pakistan has shut down several religious schools run by the Jaish-e-Mohammad militant group, Punjab province's law minister has said.
  • Fourteen people were arrested in a police raid on a mosque and seminary near the city of Daska, officials said.
  • Seven Indian soldiers and six militants were killed in the gun battle at Pathankot, which lasted four days when heavily-armed gunmen entered the base dressed in Indian army uniforms.
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  • The law minister in a TV interview on Thursday said that Mr Azhar had been taken into "protective custody" prior to a decision being taken as to whether he should face legal action for his involvement in the Pathankot attack.
  • Started by Muslim cleric Maulana Masood Azhar, Jaish-e-Mohammed has been blamed for attacks on Indian soil in the past, including one in 2001 on the parliament in Delhi which took the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of war.
kirkpatrickry

The strange death of Indian Communism | The Indian Express - 0 views

  • Few can imagine how unlikely this is. From the Fifties to the Seventies, there was serious debate on how imminent the Communist Revolution was in India. The future was red. Now of course no one takes Communists or even Communism seriously. The Soviet Union collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Leninism proved to be a delusion which could not survive the 20th century.
  • Why did Communism fail so abysmally? Marx had a fascination with Capitalism and admired its immense productive potential. He and Engels advertised the advent of globalisation in their youthful Communist Manifesto. His ideal of Socialism was timed for well after the maturity of Capitalism.
  • Communism’s luck continued and Capitalism suffered the Great Depression. It looked like the Revolution was imminent. Lenin had conflated Imperialism and Capitalism. This enhanced the appeal of Communism for the colonies. Stalin consigned millions to concentration camps but the idea that the Soviet Union was the hope of the world remained strong. Victory in the Second World War and then taking over Eastern European countries enhanced the reputation of the Soviet Union. China had its own Revolution which confirmed Lenin’s wisdom that the Communist revolution would start in the backward countries, not developed ones as Marx may have thought. India was supposed to be the next ripe fruit to fall. The CPI had blotted its copybook by supporting the British rulers during the war, as for them the fight was for defence of the Soviet Union. They denounced independence as illusory and launched a premature Revolution in Telangana. Stal
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  • n thought India was not ready for a Revolution. So the Communists began to play the democracy game under orders waiting for the signal to revolt.
Javier E

Opinion | The India-Pakistan Conflict Was a Parade of Lies - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Social networks are now so deeply embedded into global culture that it feels irresponsible to think of them as some exogenous force. Instead, when it comes to misinformation, the internet is a mere cog in the larger machinery of deceit.
  • There are other important gears in that machine: politicians and celebrities; parts of the news media (especially television, where most people still get their news); and motivated actors of all sorts, from governments to scammers to multinational brands.
  • It is in the confluence of all these forces that you come upon the true nightmare: a society in which small and big lies pervade every discussion, across every medium; where deceit is assumed, trust is naïve, and a consensus view of reality begins to feel frighteningly anachronistic.
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  • It’s easier to appreciate the simmering pot when you’re looking at it from the outside
  • India conducted airstrikes against Pakistan. After I learned about them, I tried to follow the currents of misinformation in the unfolding conflict between two nuclear-armed nations on the brink of hot war.
  • What I found was alarming; it should terrify the world, not just Indians and Pakistanis. Whether you got your news from outlets based in India or Pakistan during the conflict, you would have struggled to find your way through a miasma of lies. The lies flitted across all media: there was lying on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp; there was lying on TV; there were lies from politicians; there were lies from citizens.
  • just about everyone, including many journalists, played fast and loose with facts. Many discussions were tinged with rumor and supposition. Pictures were doctored, doctored pictures were shared and aired, and real pictures were dismissed as doctored.
  • Many of the lies were directed and weren’t innocent slip-ups in the fog of war but efforts to discredit the enemy, to boost nationalistic pride, to shame anyone who failed to toe a jingoistic line. The lies fit a pattern, clamoring for war, and on both sides they suggested a society that had slipped the bonds of rationality and fallen completely to the post-fact order.
  • If you dive into the tireless fact-checking sites policing the region, you’ll find scores more lies from last week, some that flow across both sides of the conflict and many so intricate they defy easy explanation.
  • And you will be filled with a sense of despair.
  • The Indian government recently introduced a set of draconian digital restrictions meant, it says, to reduce misinformation. But when mendacity crosses all media and all social institutions, when it becomes embedded in the culture, focusing on digital platforms misses the point.
  • In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me. The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started.
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