British colonialism, exploitation and mistreatment of India

Bloody jewel in crown of British Empire: How India was mistreated during colonial rule

From the East India Company to the Raj, India was a British colony until the mid-20th century. And despite nostalgic imperialists extolling the virtues of the empire's rule, it left behind millions of victims.

The 1919 Amritsar massacre, the grim anniversary of which India marked on Saturday, is one of the best-known examples of the atrocities committed by the British during their two-century colonial rule of India. But, numerically, its total of 1,600 victims looks like a small blot among the millions of deaths India suffered during the empire's prolonged misrule and exploitation.

The famines

From the 18th to the 20th century, various parts of India endured over a dozen devastating famines, which killed tens of millions of people, most of the events exacerbated, if not outright caused, by the colonial administration.

The East India Company (EIC), merchants with their own army who ruled India on behalf of the British crown, were ruthlessly effective in generating exports and profits from the colonized land – ruthlessness being a key part of the efficiency. Exports of Indian produce – rice, tea, wheat, and even, illegally, opium – were a vital boost for the British economy, helping keep food prices low at home and generating income from sales to other nations, like China.

The EIC did not hesitate to decrease the areas for food crops and even destroy food plants to make room for other crops needed for export, including opium poppies. Many scholars agree that in a lot of the cases, famine would have come anyway, considering the poor rainfall and underdeveloped transportation, among other things – but it was made that much worse by the Brits, who exploited agriculture while failing to offset its troubles with proper investment.

The British response to famine was often inaction, at least until their troops were affected, like in Orissa in 1865, where a third of the regional population died before aid was finally sent in. As the Great Famine of 1876-78 struck Madras and Bombay, the British administration thought the free market would sort it out and government interference would only hurt in the long run. It took 5.5 million deaths for the Brits to begin relief work. At the turn of the century, the British Viceroy cut rations (saying famine relief was "philanthropy" and "complacency"), which resulted in another million deaths.

The most recent and infamous is the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, when 1.5 million people starved to death and another 2.1 million are estimated to have died from related causes.

Until recently, the Bengal Famine was attributed to the sheer ineptitude of the British administration, which could not be bothered to divert attention and resources from the war effort. But the 2010 book 'Churchill's Secret War' lays the blame directly at the feet of then-prime minister Winston Churchill and his "racism." Citing unearthed documents, author Madhusree Mukerjee says Churchill not only refused to divert supplies from British troops, but blocked Canada and the US from delivering aid, and even forbade India from tapping into its own currency reserves to buy food abroad.

Quelling the Sepoy Rebellion

It would be wrong to fail to recognize the brutality of the Indian mutineers who rose up in 1857 – it was the Indians who started the killing, after all, and the victims on the British side numbered in the thousands. It would be equally wrong to fail to acknowledge what drove them to revolt, or how disproportionate in both scale and brutality the British response was.

The rebellion kicked off in May 1857 over what might seem a trifle: the Brits had introduced to the Indian troops (sepoys, as they were called at the time) new breech-loading Enfield rifles, the paper-wrapped cartridges of which had to be bitten off at one end to prepare for firing. Those cartridges, according to a rumor spread among Indian soldiers, were lubricated with pig and cow lard – making oral contact with them anathema to both Muslims and Hindus.

This minute detail, which was never even proven to be true, capped off a mountain of very real grievances between the British Raj and the Indian population. So, when soldiers in Meerut, Bengal refused to take the offending Enfield cartridges and were subsequently sentenced to long prison terms, then freed by their comrades, who shot their British officers and marched on Delhi – the entire thing quickly spiraled from a soldiers' mutiny into a popular rebellion.

As the rebels sought to restore pre-British Mughal rule, the uprising soon engulfed the north of the country, its first stages marked by massacres of British civilians, soldiers, and loyal Indian troops. Estimates of British deaths range from 6,000 to 40,000, with historical accounts speaking of murders of women and children, rape, and torture.

However, as the Brits got their feet under them, and were reinforced from home, they started to respond in kind. Word of the rebels' atrocities spread through the British papers, and the soldiers were seen not as conquerors anymore, but as bringers of vengeance for innocent lives.

No response was deemed disproportionate – and an estimated 800,000 Indians died in the quelling and its aftermath. Brits perpetrated massacres as they recaptured Delhi and other cities. Sepoys were bayoneted, tortured, and tied to cannon muzzles to be shot point-blank. But illustrations of that are scarce among those depicting British soldiers as heroic liberators.

After the rebellion, the rule over India was transferred from the EIC to the crown, under what is known as the British Raj – until the partitioning and independence of 1947.

Partitioning of India

The same ruling that brought India independence also resulted in one of, if not the worst instances of mass migration in history, a division of enormous territories along religious lines and a scar on both the land and the collective consciousness of two peoples – as well as over a million deaths and thousands of stories of atrocities and hardship which could have been avoided with better planning on the part of the retreating Brits.

The British government decided to cede power to Indian leadership in 1946, but the initial plan was to keep the country whole – merely designating grouped provinces as majority Muslim and majority Hindu, to accommodate the deepening split between the country's two major religious groups, represented by the two largest political parties – the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress.

That plan came crashing down when in August communal tensions boiled over into what is now known as the Great Calcutta Killings. The Muslim League staged a Direct Action Day, ostensibly a peaceful protest to demand a separate homeland for Muslims, which spiraled into a massacre of an estimated 4,000 people over the span of days.

The British plan was then altered and accelerated – India would be split, Pakistan would be created, and independence would come several months earlier. The sometimes-voiced trope that the fate of the partition was decided over a single lunch is a bit of an embellishment – but several weeks of planning hardly proved a better time frame.

The partition plan, with the border slashing through the mixed Hindu-Muslim regions of Punjab and Bengal, was presented in June 1947 by the last British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, who did not see the need to organize an orderly transfer of populations, believing local authorities would sort it out as needed.

What resulted was the uprooting of 15 million people and the deaths of over a million. Let loose by the officially announced religious divide, yesterday's neighbors began killing each other and taking away each other's homes and livelihoods, settling old feuds with blood and perpetrating localized ethnic cleansing. Afraid of becoming minorities in what used to be their own land, people fled in both directions across the border, as well as out of the regions altogether. Punjab and Bengal, as well as Sindh, Uttar Pradesh, and Kashmir (a disputed flashpoint to this day) were among the worst affected areas.

Survivors' accounts, refreshed by the recent 70th anniversary of the partition, tell of torched houses, viciously slaughtered locals, frantic flights in caravans that were attacked and looted, women abducted and raped. Over 5,000 such accounts have been collected by one online resource, complete with a map that shows the mind-boggling scale of the displacement.

British imperialists argue that in the end, India is better off, pointing to the staples of progress colonial rule brought in. But whether or not railroads, education, and cricket were worth two centuries of ruthless economic exploitation, cultural suppression, and millions of lives, is a question few are prepared to ask without flinching.

Reference:

https://www.rt.com/news/456421-british-colonial-rule-india-atrocities/

The never ending Kashmir crisis

Kashmir is one of the regions of the world where conflict has more endured  in the last 75 years.

As in several other places, this conflict has been inherited from the times of  British domination of India during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

At the time of its retreat from India the British authorities promoted the division of the territory between Muslims and Hindus forming Pakistán and India and the migration of millions. 

In Kashmir the division created an Indian province that is mainly populated by Muslims, generating a very unstable situation since then.

 Geography

Kashmir is a region of the northwestern Indian subcontinent extending along the India, Pakistan and China boundaries.

It is bounded by the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang to the northeast and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the east (both parts of China), by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesy and Punjab to the south, by Pakistan to the west, and by Afghanistan to the northwest.

The region, with a total area of some 85,800 square miles 222,200 square km, has been the subject of dispute between India and Pakistan since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

The northern and western portions are administered by Pakistan and comprise three areas: Azad Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan, the last two being part of a territory called the Northern Areas.

The southern and southeastern portions are administered by India. They constitute the state of Jammu and Kashmir but are slated to be split into two union territories.

The Indian- and Pakistani-administered portions are divided by a “line of control” agreed to in 1972, although neither country recognizes it as an international boundary. In addition, China became active in the eastern area of Kashmir in the 1950s and has controlled the northeastern part of Ladakh (the easternmost portion of the region) since 1962.

Land And People

The Kashmir region is predominantly mountainous, with deep, narrow valleys and high, barren plateaus. The relatively low-lying Jammu and Punch (Poonch) plains in the southwest are separated by the thickly forested Himalayan foothills and the Pir Panjal Range of the Lesser Himalayas from the larger, more fertile, and more heavily populated Vale of Kashmir to the north. The vale, situated at an elevation of about 5,300 feet (1,600 metres), constitutes the basin of the upper Jheñi, Rover and contains the city of Srinagar. Jammu and the vale lie in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, while the Punch lowlands are largely in Azad Kashmir

In the 1901 Census of the British Indian Empire, the population of the princely state of Kashmir and Jammu was 2,905,578. Of these, 2,154,695 (74.16%) were Muslims, 689,073 (23.72%) Hindus, 25,828 (0.89%) Sikhs, and 35,047 (1.21%) Buddhists (implying 935 (0.032%) others).

A Muslim shawl-making family shown in Cashmere shawl manufactory, 1867, chromolith., William Simpson.A group of Kashmiri Pandits, natives of Kashmir Valley belong to one of the prominent Shaiva sects of Hinduism, shown in 1895.

Among the Muslims of the Kashmir province within the princely state, four divisions were recorded: "Shaikhs, Saiyids, Mughals, and Pathans. The Shaikhs, who are by far the most numerous, are the descendants of Hindus, but have retained none of the caste rules of their forefathers. They have clan names known as krams ..." These kram names included "Tantre", "Shaikh", "Bat", "Manto", "Ganai", "Dar", "Lon", "Wani" etc. The “Saiyids"could be divided into those who follow the profession of religion and those who have taken to agriculture and other pursuits. Their kram name is 'Mir.' While a Saiyid retains his saintly profession Mir is a prefix; if he has taken to agriculture, Mir is an affix to his name.” The Mughals who were not numerous had kram names like "Mir" (a corruption of "Mirza"), "Beg", "Bandi", "Bach" and "Ashaye". Finally, it was recorded that the Pathans "who are more numerous than the Mughals, ... are found chiefly in the south-west of the valley, where Pathan colonies have from time to time been founded. The most interesting of these colonies is that of Kuki-Khel Afridis at Dranghaihama, who retain all the old customs and speak Pashto." Among the main tribes of Muslims in the princely state are the Butts, Dar, Lone, Jat, Gujjar, Rajput, Sudhan and Khatri. Some Kashmiri families belonging to Butt, Lone and Wani/Wain clans use the title of Khawaja which was given to them by Mughal governors as these families were associated with Mughal Darbar. The Khatri use the title Shaikh and the Gujjar use the title Chaudhary. All these tribes are indigenous to the princely state which converted to Islam from Hinduism during its arrival in the region.

The Hindus were found mainly in Jammu, where they constituted a little less than 60% of the population. In the Kashmir Valley, the Hindus represented "524 in every 10,000 of the population (i.e. 5.24%), and in the frontier wazarats of Ladhakh and Gilgit only 94 out of every 10,000 persons (0.94%)."^[80] In the same Census of 1901, in the Kashmir Valley, the total population was recorded to be 1,157,394, of which the Muslim population was 1,083,766, or 93.6% and the Hindu population 60,641.^[80] Among the Hindus of Jammu province, who numbered 626,177 (or 90.87% of the Hindu population of the princely state), the most important castes recorded in the census were "Brahmans (186,000), the Rajputs (167,000), the Khattris (48,000) and the Thakkars (93,000)."

In the 1911 Census of the British Indian Empire, the total population of Kashmir and Jammuhad increased to 3,158,126. Of these, 2,398,320 (75.94%) were Muslims, 696,830 (22.06%) Hindus, 31,658 (1%) Sikhs, and 36,512 (1.16%) Buddhists.

 In the last census of British India in 1941, the total population of Kashmir and Jammu (which as a result of the second world war, was estimated from the 1931 census) was 3,945,000. Of these, the total Muslim population was 2,997,000 (75.97%), the Hindu population was 808,000 (20.48%), and the Sikh 55,000 (1.39%).^[81]

The Kashmiri Pandits, the only Hindus of the Kashmir valley, who had stably constituted approximately 4 to 5% of the population of the valley during Dogra rule (1846–1947), and 20% of whom had left the Kashmir valley by 1950,^[82] began to leave in much greater numbers in the 1990s. According to a number of authors, approximately 100,000 of the total Kashmiri Pandit population of 140,000 left the valley during that decade.^[83] Other authors have suggested a higher figure for the exodus, ranging from the entire population of over 150^[84] to 190 thousand (1.5 to 190,000) of a total Pandit population of 200 thousand (200,000)^[85] to a number as high as 300 thousand^[86] (300,000).

People in Jammu speak Hindi, Punjabi and Dogri, the Vale of Kashmir speaks Kashmiri and the sparsely inhabited Ladakh region speaks Tibetan and Balti.^[87]

The total population of India's division of Jammu and Kashmir is 12,541,302^[88] and Pakistan's division of Kashmir is 2,580,000 and Gilgit-Baltistan is 870,347.^[89]

India has control of about half the area of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which continues the name Jammu and Kashmir, while Pakistan controls a third of the region, divided into two de factoprovinces, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Although there was a clear Muslim majority in Kashmir before the 1947 partition and its economic, cultural, and geographic contiguity with the Muslim-majority area of the Punjab (in Pakistan) could be convincingly demonstrated, the political developments during and after the partition resulted in a division of the region. Pakistan was left with territory that, although basically Muslim in character, was thinly populated, relatively inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped. The largest Muslim group, situated in the Valley of Kashmir and estimated to number more than half the population of the entire region, lay in Indian-administered territory, with its former outlets via the Jhelum valley route blocked."

India has control of about half the area of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which continues the name Jammu and Kashmir, while Pakistan controls a third of the region, divided into two de factoprovinces, Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Although there was a clear Muslim majority in Kashmir before the 1947 partition and its economic, cultural, and geographic contiguity with the Muslim-majority area of the Punjab (in Pakistan) could be convincingly demonstrated, the political developments during and after the partition resulted in a division of the region. Pakistan was left with territory that, although basically Muslim in character, was thinly populated, relatively inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped. The largest Muslim group, situated in the Valley of Kashmir and estimated to number more than half the population of the entire region, lay in Indian-administered territory, with its former outlets via the Jhelum valley route blocked."

Kashmir, a centuries-old conflict that still is going on

The Kashmir region also called Jammu and Kashmir is a mountainous region in the vicinity of the Karakoram and westernmost Himalayan mountain ranges of the Indian subcontinente.  

Kashmir, formerly one of the largest princely states of India, has an area of 225,000 km2 and since the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 has been the subject of dispute between India, Pakistan and China ´

The region was divided amongst these three countries in a territorial dispute: Pakistan controls the northwest portion (Northern Areas and Kashmir), India controls the central and southern portion (Jammu and Kashmir) and Ladakh, and the People's Republic of China controls the northeastern portion (Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract). India controls the majority of the Siachen Glacier area, including the Saltoro Ridge passes, whilst Pakistan controls the lower territory just southwest of the Saltoro Ridge. India controls 101,338 km2 of the disputed territory, Pakistan controls 85,846 km2 , and the People's Republic of China controls the remaining 37,555 km2 

The population of the entire region is about 16 million of which the majority are in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir (12.5 million).

Although there was a clear Muslim majority in Kashmir before the 1947 partition and its economic, cultural, and geographic contiguity with the Muslim-majority area of the Punjab (in Pakistan) could be convincingly demonstrated, the political developments during and after the partition resulted in a division of the region. Pakistan was left with territory that, although basically Muslim in character, was thinly populated, relatively inaccessible, and economically underdeveloped. The largest Muslim group, situated in the Valley of Kashmir and estimated to number more than half the population of the entire region, lay in Indian-administered territory, with its former outlets via the Jhelum valley route blocked.

The eastern region of the former princely state of Kashmir was also involved in a boundary dispute that began in the late 19th century and continues into the 21st. Although some boundary agreements were signed between Great Britain, Afghanistan and Russia over the northern borders of Kashmir, China never accepted these agreements, and China's official position has not changed following the communist revolution of  1949 that established the People's Republic of China. By the mid-1950s the Chinese had entered the north-east portion of Ladakh.

"By 1956–57 they had completed a military road through the Aksar Chin area to vide better communication between Xinjiang and  western  Tibet. India's belated discovery of this road led to border clashes between the two countries that culminated in the Sino.Indian war of October 1962.

The main preent conflicts are mainly between India and Pakistan, with the large Muslin population in the Indian state Jammu-Kashmir do not agree with their belonging to an Indian state and are more linked to the Pakistan Kashmir population.  This conflict, which is at least 70 years old is still going on in 2019 and skirmiches and aerial bombing continues to take place and will probably still go on for many years in the future..

India's lower house passes citizenship bill that excludes Muslims

Legislators approve bill that will grant citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants amid protests in northeastern Assam.

India's lower house of parliament has approved a bill that would grant residency and citizenship rights to non-Muslim immigrants, sparking protests that brought the country's populous northeast to a near standstill.

The legislation, which still needs the approval of the upper house, seeks to grant rights to Hindus, Jains, Parsis and several other non-Muslim religious groups who migrated illegally from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"They have no place to go except India," Home Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament on Tuesday. "The beneficiaries of the bill can reside in any state of the country."

Critics have called the proposal, contained in the Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019, blatantly anti-Muslim and an attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to boost its Hindu voter base ahead of a general election due by May.

The bill sparked a second day of protests in the northeastern state of Assam, where nearly 4 million people, accused of being foreigners, were effectivelystripped of their citizenship last year.

Protesters there are angry not because the bill excludes Muslims, but because it would grant citizenship to undocumented Hindus who failed to prove their citizenship and hence were excluded from the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) published last July.

The final NRC list is due to be published on June 30.

Suhas Chakma, director of the New Delhi-based Rights and Risks Analysis Group, said the citizenship bill was "absolutely unconstitutional as it targets specific groups". 

The bill is unlikely to pass the upper house of parliament, he told Al Jazeera, because the chamber is not controlled by the ruling party.

"This is going to backfire on the BJP," he said, pointing to the anger in Assam. 

Protests in Assam

In Tuesday's protest, demonstrators set up blockades with burning tyres and vandalised two BJP offices, disrupting traffic and business from early in the morning to late afternoon.

They also burned effigies of the prime minister.

Mukesh Agarwal, Assam police spokesperson, said more than 700 demonstrators were arrested. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowds.

Samujjal Bhattacharya, leader of the All Assam Students Union, said that providing residency and citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh, with which Assam state shares a long border, would threaten indigenous communities.

"Already, we have a whole lot of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh who entered Assam illegally over the years. Now, the government is trying to make a law seeking to confer citizenship to Hindus from Bangladesh. We want all illegal migrants to be detected and deported, irrespective of their religion," Bhattacharya said.

The issue of immigration from Bangladesh has spurred periodic public uprisings in Assam since the Indian government granted rights to Bangladeshis who entered the country before 1971 - the year Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan.

BJP's alliance partner in Assam, the Asom Gana Parishad or Assam People's Party, quit the coalition government on Tuesday in protest against the new bill.

"We have always opposed the entry and presence of illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Our party was formed in 1985 with this promise of freeing Assam from illegal migrants from Bangladesh," AGP president Atul Bora said.

Reference: Al Jazeera

"We, therefore, cannot remain an ally of the BJP after this move by the Modi government."https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/01/india-house-passes-citizenship-bill-excludes-muslims-190108145755215.html

Two Indian women defy prohibition to enter to the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, India, and crowds oppose them

Two Indian women have made history by entering a prominent Hindu shrine in the southern state of Kerala, following months of protests against their entry.

The Sabarimala temple was historically closed to women of "menstruating age" - defined as between 10 and 50.

The Supreme Court overturned that ban but protesters then attacked women and stopped them from going in. The women's entry to the shrine sparked fresh protests and police used tear gas at several locations in Kerala.

Bindu Ammini, 40, and Kanaka Durga, 39, devotees of the temple deity, Lord Ayyappa, entered around dawn.

"We arrived early in the morning and we had a darshan [saw the idol] for a few minutes," Ms Ammini told the BBC.

Kerala's Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, whose government supports the Supreme Court ruling, told reporters that the women's entry into the temple was a historic moment.

On 1 January, his left-wing coalition government organised a “women’s Wall” in which women from across Kerala formed a 620 km human chain to protest to protest against the ban.

Temple officials say the women have "defiled" the temple. It was closed for an hour in order to perform "purification rituals" but has now reopened.

Demonstrations across the state have since erupted and police have fired tear gas to disperse crowds. Violent clashes have been reported outside the state parliament, according to local media.

The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also called for a two-day protest after news of the women entering the shrine broke.

How did these women get into the temple?

Ms Ammini told the BBC that they began trekking up the hill on Wednesday morning around 1.30 local time (20:00 GMT Tuesday) and reached the shrine in two hours.

"We had no trouble trekking to the shrine and the officials were co-operative," she added. "We left before the protesters spotted us."

She said that plain-clothed police officers accompanied them. Given the early hour, it's likely there were no protesters and only a few devotees. The presence of the police also helped as temple officials would be breaking the law by refusing to let them enter the temple.

The shrine sits atop a steep hill and every year, millions of male devotees make the trek, often barefoot, to visit it.

One of the ways to enter the temple is to climb 18 holy steps - a sacred activity requiring a rigorous 41-day fast.

Ms Ammini said they did not climb the steps because they did not want to attract the attention of too many devotees and feared they might be attacked.

An activist opposed to women entering the temple, Rahul Easwar, told the BBC that "the police cheated other devotees by claiming the two women are transgender". Families of the two women have since denied this.

The women, who are now under police protection, can be seen leaving the shrine in videos that have been circulating on WhatsApp.

Why are women of a certain age not allowed to enter Sabarimala?

Hinduism regards menstruating women as unclean and bars them from participating in religious rituals.

While most Hindu temples allow women to enter as long as they are not menstruating, the Sabarimala temple is unusual in that it was one of the few that did not allow women in a broad age group to enter at all.

According to the temple's mythology, Lord Ayyappa is an avowed bachelor who has taken an oath of celibacy. Devotees say the ban on women of "menstruating age" was in keeping with the wish of the deity who is believed to have laid down clear rules about the pilgrimage to seek his blessings.

Women who had tried to enter following the court ruling had to turn back because of protesters. Police arrested more than 2,000 people in October for rioting and unlawful assembly.

Image copyrightGETTY IMAGESImage captionEvery year, millions of male devotees climb the steps to the temple

Why has the issue become so political?

The Kerala state government supports the court verdict and Mr Vijayan has repeatedly said his government will provide the security to enforce it.

But India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Party (BIP) has argued that the court ruling is an attack on Hindu values..

The issue has become increasingly contentious in the run-up to India's general election, scheduled for April and May. Critics have accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of pursuing a religiously divisive agenda to court the BJP's mostly-Hindu support base.

Referebce: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46733750

Cow protection gangs and violence in India

India's so-called "cow protection gangs" display antithetical qualities to the ones they attribute to their sacred animal - they are unholy, ungentle, frenzied and violent.

According to data analytics site India Spend, 45 people were killed in 120 cases of cow-related violence reported across India between 2012 and 2018. The highest number of violent incidents were recorded in the state of Utter Pradesh, with 19 verified incidents of cow-related violence resulting in 11 deaths.

On December 3, the killing of police officer Subodh Kumar singh was added to this worrying statistic. Inspector Singh was killed alongside a 20-year-old man when a violent mob clashed with police in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district. The attackers, many of them members of far-right Hindu groups, were protesting the alleged inability of the police in the village of Chingrawathi to stop cow slaughtering, claiming that animal carcasses - including those of cows - were found in the area. 

When rumours about the slaughter of the sacred symbol of Hindu nationalism arise, it appears, even an officer of the law is not safe.

Incidentally, Singh was part of the team that investigated the 2015 lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq, a 52-year-old resident of Bisara village, over allegations of cow slaughter and beef consumption in a district neighbouring Bulandshahr. Saroj Singh Chauhan, sister of the slain officer, believes her brother fell victim to "a conspiracy by the state police" because he "was investigating the Akhlaq case". She questioned why her brother was left alone in his vehicle in the middle of a violent mob and said the police, who she accuses of collaborating with cow protection gangs, are complicit in the incident.

Her allegation daringly suggests that law enforcement in Utter Pradesh is taking on a political role when it comes to cow protection and helping the expansion of majoritarian politics.

Abhishek Singh, the younger son of the deceased police officer, toldreporters, "My father wanted me to be a good citizen who doesn't incite violence in society in the name of religion." The good citizen in India currently seems to be under severe stress, facing fatal consequences for obstructing the tide of right-wing vandalism.  

The reversal of justice

A day after the incident in Bulandshahr, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath called a meeting in the state capital, Lucknow. An investigation into allegations of cow slaughter and "illegal slaughterhouses" was ordered by Adityanath, but local reports said he did not address Singh's killing in the Lucknow meeting.

A day later, Utter Pradesh Director General of Police Om Prakash Singh described the Bulandshahr incident as "part of a larger conspiracy". His concerns, just like the chief minister's, centred solely around cow slaughter and he told reporters that the police would be conducting "a reverse investigation" - an investigation that would focus on how and why animal carcasses ended up in the area rather than the two murders.

This reverse order of concern by the police and political leadership raised a legitimate fear that the so-called "reverse investigation" is going to lead to a reversal of justice.

Just days after the December 3 attack, four Muslim men were arrested in connection with the Bulandshahr case in villages dozens of kilometres away from the place where the animal carcasses were found. They were released after being found innocent. There is however, encouraging news. Bajrang Dal leader Yogesh Raj, who was the main accused in the mob violence and was absconding since, has been arrested on January 3. Raj has reportedly confessed to his role in the violence. It was based on Raj's complaint that the police had earlier arrested the four Muslims. The question lingers, why is guilt attributed more readily to people of the minority community.

'The complete collapse of constitutional values'

The fear that the murderers of officer Singh may never be brought to justice led 82 former bureaucrats, including a former national security adviser, to write a fiercely worded open letter demanding Adityanath's resignation.

The signatories call the Bulandshahr incident "a frightening indicator of the complete collapse of constitutional values". They claim this collapse is epitomised by Adiyanath, who wears his "bigotry as his badge of identity" and protects perpetrators as "defenders of faith and culture". The signatories claim that the chief minister's actions promote "the rule of lawlessness".

There seems to be a political attempt under way to reorder social spaces in India according to majoritarian diktats. The secular framework of law is being compromised to favour Hindu religious outfits who are using lawless means of violence to intimidate and punish minorities.

signatories of the letter see in the murder of the police officer a calculated attempt by the state administration to "teach a lesson" to those who are nonpartisan in cases that involve minorities.

This is a serious indication of the growing order of lawlessness: a member of the state police paid the price for defending the law against the "moral police" hell-bent on spreading social disorder and indulging in violence. The image of Singh's burned-out jeep is a stark exemplar of the lawlessness overtaking the law. 

The ex-bureaucrats view the Bulandshahr mayhem as a deliberate ploy to further subordinate Muslims and make them "live in fear". This need is so overwhelming that even if Muslims in the country stop dealing in cows, the right-wing vigilante will invent other methods, like the allegations of so-called “love jihad”, to harm them. There is a concerted move to turn Muslims into political and social outcasts in India by coercion and segregation.

So far, more than half the victims of lynchings over alleged cow slaughter have been Muslims. Hindutva groups use the cow as a tool to demarcate territories of fear and intimidation. The politics of communalism never hesitates to put symbols it holds sacred to utilitarian use. In any supremacist project, majoritarian pride is incomplete without its obverse (and perverse) side: prejudice and paranoia against minorities. The diktat is clear - minorities have to lose their identity or perish.

Hindu nationalism seeks to make the minority feel minor. Hindutva's cunning rhetoric pits a rigid idea of national unity against disunity, rather than accept legitimate (and competing) political and cultural difference.

India's founders stood up to majoritarian pressure

In his recently published book, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, Rohit De offers a fascinating account of the vexed history of cow protection laws in post-colonial India.

Public debates, sporadic violence and mass mobilisations on the cow slaughter issue have been ongoing in India since the late 19th century. During partition, De mentions, Gandhi made the secular argument that "Hindu law cannot be imposed on non-Hindus". The Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, in the spirit of defining India as a secular republic, kept the question of cow protection out of its original draft.

BR Ambedkar, the chairman of the Drafting Committee, pushed the amendment on cow protection to Directive Principles, skirting the cow protection lobby's demand to include it as a Fundamental Right. India's first prime minister after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who shared Ambedkar's modernist indifference to the issue, tried to defuse the problem of cow slaughter by referring it to state legislatures, which brought it under the purview of "statutory law".

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The lynching that changed India

Hindu cow protectionists' arguments, explains De, were based on "cultural homogeneity and majoritarianism". The Qureshis, a marginalised butcher community, on the contrary, challenged the Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act in the states of Utter Pradesh and Bihar in early 1956, on grounds of economics and livelihood.

In 1961, the Allahabad High Court, while drawing up the principles for punitive action in cow slaughter cases, did not deem the religious sentiments of the majority community relevant "unless there was a deliberate attempt to inflame communal passions".

These instances reveal that the founding thinkers of the Indian democracy, despite facing an emotive issue like cow slaughter, did not allow their sensibilities to buckle under majoritarian pressure. The secular law of the state was deemed higher than communal sentiments.

A threat to constitutional morality

Currently, 24 states in India have various regulations prohibiting either the slaughter or sale of cows. The idea of an existing prohibition is being used in Utter Pradesh by Hindu cow vigilante groups to spread lawlessness and inflame communal passions within their own community.

If the Utter Pradesh state administration does not act against this vandalism, constitutional morality will suffer. "Constitutional morality", Ambedkar said in his 1949 Constituent Assembly Speech, "is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated."

Communalism is not a natural sentiment either. It is aroused by political design, to undermine the spirit of secular law. India needs a strong culture of resistance against communal passions that prevent people from cultivating their constitutional morality.

The Bulandshahr case will have lasting effects on the sense of political security among local communities. Sarfuddin, a 38-year-old shop owner who was arrested kilometres away from Chingrawathi village and wrongly accused of cow slaughter, has just been released along with three other Muslim men. He is worried the people in his village will now see him as a criminal. "How will I live with this charge on my name?" he told local media.

Sarfuddin is also worried about holding on to his reputation as a good citizen. An administration that is incapable of upholding constitutional morality would do well to at least not charge good citizens wrongfully.

The devil you know: Old foes India & China strengthen ties as America proves too unreliable

Regarding this two subcontinental countries we should remember first that in their 13 milliion square kilometers, China and India together possess a population of more than 2,600 million people which represents one third of the world population. They also have a 4,000 km long border which in some cases has become the theater of armed confrontations. Here we reproduce an analysis of the present situation connsidering the worldwide geopolitical unstability and uncertainty (author: Darius Shahtahmasebi)

"China and India have had a rocky relationship for years and are continuing to find areas of dispute. However, the two countries have managed to end the year on an amicable high-note, proving that rival nations can cooperate.

Together, China and India account for just under 3 billion of the world’s total population. The decisions that the leaders of these two countries make is therefore relevant for approximately a third of the global population. Whether or not these two regional players are on a path to peace or war is something the western mainstream media should pay its undivided attention to.

While outrageously underreported in the corporate media, India and China  experienced a brief skirmish on he Indo-Tibetan border in August last year. Video footage of the skirmishes shows soldiers kicking, punching and throwing stones at each other on the border, which appeared to symbolize a potential escalation between the two Asian powers. The two nations maintain a tense border dispute with hundreds of soldiers stationed just meters apart.

India has also been rattled by China’s overt support and rising participation in Pakistan. India remains unnerved by the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of China’s Silk Road Project Reports have also emerged that China has been considering establishing its own naval bases in Pakistan, even though both Pakistan and China have denied such a claim.

China has only one overseas military base, currently in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. In other words, China’s only overseas military base puts China’s logistical military hubs in the Indian ocean, a constant source of tension for India.

However, despite this, no such escalation has appeared to eventuate since the skirmishes in August. In fact, China and India have both taken steps to reduce tensions and may have found a middle path to pursue their conflicting interests. As explained further below, these conflicting interests are not to be taken lightly.

Just recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took a four-day visit to India to meet high-level Indian officials, including India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. It should be noted that India is China’s largest trading partner, with a trade deficit in favor of China by about $63 billion during 2017-2018.

China and India have had a rocky relationship for years and are continuing to find areas of dispute. However, the two countries have managed to end the year on an amicable high-note, proving that rival nations can cooperate.

Together, China and India account for just under 3 billion of the world’s total population. The decisions that the leaders of these two countries make is therefore relevant for approximately a third of the global population. Whether or not these two regional players are on a path to peace or war is something the western mainstream media should pay its undivided attention to.

While outrageously underreported in the corporate media, India and China experienced a brief skirmish on the Indo-Tibetan border in August last year. Video footage of the skirmishes shows soldiers kicking, punching and throwing stones at each other on the border, which appeared to symbolize a potential escalation between the two Asian powers. The two nations maintain a tense border dispute with hundreds of soldiers stationed just meters apart.

India has also been rattled by China’s overt support and rising participation in Pakistan. India remains unnerved by the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of China’s Silk Road Project. Reports have also emerged that China has been considering establishing its own naval bases in Pakistan, even though both Pakistan and China have denied such a claim.

China has only one overseas military base, currently in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. In other words, China’s only overseas military base puts China’s logistical military hubs in the Indian ocean, a constant source of tension for India.

However, despite this, no such escalation has appeared to eventuate since the skirmishes in August. In fact, China and India have both taken steps to reduce tensions and may have found a middle path to pursue their conflicting interests. As explained further below, these conflicting interests are not to be taken lightly.

Just recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took a four-day visit to India to meet high-level Indian officials, including India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. It should be noted that India is China’s largest trading partner, with a trade deficit in favor of China by about $63 billion during 2017-2018.

Altogether, Chinese President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi have met four times this year alone; and India’s defense minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, have also met three times this year. During these meetings, China has agreed to some concessions, including an agreement to increase its imports of Indian rice, sugar, rapeseed oil and pharmaceuticals.

It is also worth noting that China and India also just completed a joint anti-terrorism military exercise in the Chengdu area of China.

Furthermore, there are some suggestions that China and India may begin working closer together on the issue of Afghanistan as well. Given the Trump administration’s surprise announcement that it will withdraw thousands of troops from the war-torn country, this partnership between China and India may become a distinct possibility.

This is not to say that India does not maintain its wariness of China’s expanding influence in the region.

According to a recent paper entitled “From Denial to Punishment: The Security Dilemma and Changes in India’s Military Strategy Towards China” in Asian Security by Anit Mukherjee and Yogesh Joshi the power imbalance between India and China is no longer manageable. China has rapidly developed its infrastructure, modernized its military and taken a more aggressive stance at the border (as seen in the skirmishes last year), leading India to adopt some strategies of its own. The result is that India will embrace a more active and offensive posture, as opposed to a defensive one.

At the beginning of December, Indian media reported that India was taking steps to counter China’s “strategic footprint” in the Indian Ocean. Specifically, it has approved the construction of 56 new warships and six submarines for its navy over the next decade. One of the submarines will reportedly be from Project-75I, a $US12 billion initiative to “acquire advanced subs equipped with air-independent-propulsion systems that allow non-nuclear subs to operate without atmospheric oxygen, replacing or augmenting diesel-electric systems,” according to Business Insider.

Altogether, Chinese President Xi Jinping and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi have met four times this year alone; and India’s defense minister Nirmala Sitharaman and her Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, have also met three times this year. During these meetings, China has agreed to some concessions, including an agreement to increase its imports of Indian rice, sugar, rapeseed oil and pharmaceuticals.

It is also worth noting that China and India also just completed a joint anti-terrorism military exercise in the Chengdu area of China.

Furthermore, there are some suggestionsthat China and India may begin working closer together on the issue of Afghanistan as well. Given the Trump administration’s surprise announcement that it will withdraw thousands of troops from the war-torn country, this partnership between China and India may become a distinct possibility.

This is not to say that India does not maintain its wariness of China’s expanding influence in the region.

According to a recent paper entitled “From Denial to Punishment: The Security Dilemma and Changes in India’s Military Strategy Towards China” in Asian Security by Anit Mukherjee and Yogesh Joshi the power imbalance between India and China is no longer manageable. China has rapidly developed its infrastructure, modernized its military and taken a more aggressive stance at the border (as seen in the skirmishes last year), leading India to adopt some strategies of its own. The result is that India will embrace a more active and offensive posture, as opposed to a defensive one.

At the beginning of December, Indian media reported that India was taking steps to counter China’s “strategic footprint” in the Indian Ocean. Specifically, it has approved the construction of 56 new warships and six submarines for its navy over the next decade. One of the submarines will reportedly be from Project-75I, a $US12 billion initiative to “acqiore advanced subs equippedequipped with air-independent-propulsion systems that allow non-nuclear subs to operate without atmospheric oxygen, replacing or augmenting diesel-electric systems,” according to Business Insider."

Author:

Darius Shahtahmasebi 

Reproduced from:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/447544-india-china-relations-rivals/