Journalists Murders in India; BRICs Xiamen Declaration; DACA Repeal

[Riaz Haq]

Why was Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh murdered? Who killed her? Why are Modi's Hindu Nationalists supporters targeting public intellectuals and journalists critical of Indian government policies? Why has India joined the reporters without borders' list of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists? Why has Muslim become a "derogatory term" in the words of Indian journalist Anoo Bhuyan? How are anti-Muslim Hindutva trolls using the social media to spew hate and issue threats?

Murdered Indian Intellectuals Since 2014: Narendra Dabholkar, M.M. Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh and Govind Pansare. Photos: The Hindu, PTI

Why did China allow BRICs Xiamen Summit declaration to mention some of the "terrorist" groups targeting India over Kashmir issue? Was this a mistake as claimed by some Chinese think tank analysts like Hu Shisheng of the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations? How will this impact China-Pakistan ties? Is this a success of Modi's campaign to slander and isolate Pakistan?

What is DACA and why did President Trump repeal it? Is it a wise decision from moral and economic viewpoint? Who will be most affected by it? Are there any Indians and Pakistanis among the DACA recipients? Will Congress act before DACA expiration to legalize the status of DACA beneficiaries?

Viewpoint From Overseas host Misbah Azam discusses these questions with analysts Ali H. Cemendtaur and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFIhMCdguD4




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Why is India Sponsoring Terror in Pakistan?

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Pakistan-China-Russia vs India-US-Japan

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[Riaz Haq]

#India’s #Modi Criticized for Following Twitter Feed Tied to Nasty Post. #GauriLankeshMurder #BJP #Trolls

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/world/asia/india-modi-twitter.html

NEW DELHI — What are the ethics in choosing whom to follow on Twitter? Do influential people — say, a head of state — have a higher responsibility not to follow people who post hateful tweets?

That is the debate now in India after it was discovered that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a hugely popular but divisive figure, was following the Twitter feed of a man who wrote the following this week, after a female journalist was shot to death: “One bitch dies a dog’s death all the puppies cry in the same tune.”

Many Indians were bothered by that message, then doubly disturbed to learn that the writer, Nikhil Dadhich, a prolific tweeter who describes himself as a “Hindu nationalist,” was among the 1,779 accounts their prime minister was following.

“The prime minister shouldn’t be doing that. He’s giving legitimacy to filth,” said Sai Krishna, a medical student in southern India who heard about the nasty message after the journalist, Gauri Lankesh, was killed Tuesday. The police have few leads, but many analysts said they believed the killing was an assassination.

Mrs. Lankesh was a provocative intellectual who criticized many politicians and religious leaders. The way she was killed — gunned down outside her house by a mysterious assailant — was eerily similar to how several other critics of the Hindu nationalist agenda of the Modi government have been silenced.

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His political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (commonly referred to as the B.J.P.), is frequently accused of operating what detractors call a troll army — a group of bloggers who quickly swarm online anyone seen as critical of the party. Mr. Modi is following some of these people and in doing so, Mr. Krishna, the medical student, said, was acting “like a passive troll.”

Some of the accounts Mr. Modi follows on Twitter have made misogynistic comments, spread anti-Muslim feelings and dangerous rumors, or made remarks that do not always jibe with his message of tolerance. One account he follows suggested dropping an atomic bomb on Pakistan. The same account called a prominent female journalist a prostitute.

”What is the compelling need to follow these people?” asked Swati Chaturvedi, the author of, “I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army.” “Most of them boast in their bio saying, ‘Blessed to be followed by PM Modi,’ which is essentially like a license and a liberty to say what they want to.”

Mr. Modi’s party fired back, saying that he followed Indian opposition leaders, that just because he followed certain people did not mean he agreed with them, and that he had more pressing matters than arguing over whom he followed on Twitter and why.

[Riaz Haq]

Arundhati Roy on #India #BJP #Modi bigotry, brutality #Hindutva politics #GauriLankesh #Islamophobia #Kashmir. http://www.dw.com/en/arundhati-roy-india-is-colonizing-itself/a-404... …

Described as the "conscience of India" in Time's 2014 list of 100 most influential people, author Arundhati Roy has a voice that counts. Speaking in Berlin, she introduced her long-awaited second work of fiction.


(Arundhati) Roy's novel ( "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,") portrays many atrocities, and some reviewers were repelled by that. But a tragic event just days before her appearance in Berlin drove home the fine line between fiction and reality in India. Roy recalled with grief how her friend Gauri Lankesh, a newspaper editor and outspoken critic of the ruling Hindu nationalist party — a writer with similar views to Roy — was shot dead in Bangalore by unknown assailants.


"People are being lynched every day," Roy said. A person can be accused of having consumed beef, for example, and suddenly be surrounded by a dangerous mob. "If these things are not pushed back, we lose everything," she said.


Roy believes boundless hate is dividing the country under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, with emotions being stirred up by fake news and internet trolls. "The situation for me and other intellectuals is so dangerous now."
She thinks India is experiencing a kind of civil war, all the while presenting itself on the world stage as an economic superpower. "But India is colonizing itself. The army and paramilitary organizations are waging war against the poorest," she said.


At the end of the evening, the audience looked a bit shocked. The violence and divisions in present-day India don't seem to have been on the radar for many. But the mood lightens when an excerpt about love was read from Roy's new book. It is a novel, after all.

[Riaz Haq]

#India: Assassinating Dissent. #gaurilankeshmurder #Modi #Hindutva http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/15/india-assassinating-dissent/ … via @nybooks

Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a weekly tabloid published in Kannada, the main language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She was murdered on the fifth of September at the gate of her house in Bangalore, shot in the head and chest at close range. Her killers got away on motorcycles. This gangland-style assassination of a journalist would have made a stir in any case, but coming as it did after a series of political murders, it resonated across India and beyond its borders.

From the moment she died, the press reported her death not as an individual event but as the fourth in a sequence of assassinations; to the names Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi, journalists now added Gauri Lankesh. Politically they were all left-leaning, strongly rationalist, hostile to Hindu orthodoxy, and convinced that right-wing majoritarianism was the mortal enemy of republican democracy. They were also public intellectuals who chose to write in their mother tongues: Dabholkar and Pansare wrote in Marathi, Kalburgi and Lankesh in Kannada. They spoke to a vernacular readership beyond the reach of the country’s English media, with its pan-Indian but paper-thin Anglophone audience. Each of them was shot dead by men on motorcycles with homemade pistols who got away. 

India has always been a dangerous place for journalists. The Hindi journalist Ramchandra Chhatrapati, who in 2002 first published the anonymous letter accusing Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, the recently jailed cult leader, of rape, was shot and killed weeks after his story ran. More than thirty journalists have been killed in the state of Assam in the last thirty years. In the newly created state of Jharkhand, with its mining mafias, being a journalist is a conspicuously dangerous business: four journalists have died there since 2000 and no one has been convicted of their murders. Malini Subramaniam, a freelance journalist, was hounded out of Bastar in the state of Chhatisgarh by a vigilante group acting in concert with the local police because her reports on the Maoist insurgency didn’t fit the government’s counterinsurgency narrative. In Madhya Pradesh, a central Indian state, a scandal about corruption in a government-administered examination board was dwarfed by the horror of its aftermath: nearly forty people associated with the scandal as culprits or witnesses died seemingly unnatural deaths, and in 2015, a journalist investigating the case the case died in mysterious circumstances.