[Patrickov]

France, Hong Kong, Iran, Bolivia, and now we have India.

India protests: students condemn 'barbaric' police

Students in Delhi have condemned their “barbaric” treatment at the hands of police who stormed a peaceful protest against the new citizenship bill over the weekend, injuring dozens.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, students who were caught up in Sunday’s protest at Delhi’s predominately Muslim Jamia Millia Islamia University – which turned violent after police descended on the campus firing teargas and rubber bullets and beating demonstrators with batons – said it had turned into a “battlefield”.

Mohammad Mustafa, who is studying for an MBA, alleged he was “beaten mercilessly and I fell unconscious”. He said he was taken to a police station. “They made us sit on the cold floor. I was not given any treatment although I felt like I was going to die.”

The students at JMI had gathered to protest against the citizenship act, which was passed by parliament last week, which they say is discriminatory against Muslims. Under the legislation, tens of thousands of Hindu, Christian, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan will be allowed to claim Indian citizenship. The same will not apply for Muslims as the act’s backers say they do not face oppression in those countries.

The law sparked protests first in India’s north-eastern states last week. These have since spread across the country and gathered particular momentum at university campuses. Violent protests against the citizenship law broke out in the east Delhi district of Seelampur on Tuesday afternoon.

The police have been accused of responding with disproportionate force, particularly in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the state of Uttar Pradesh, where the police used teargas and water cannon against demonstrators. At Tuesday’s press conference, activist Fawaj Shaheen alleged that “the right hand of an AMU student was amputated after he was hit by a teargas shell”.

“The 15 December is a black day in the history of this country,” human rights activist Farah Naqvi told the news conference. “It is as if Indian citizens are rising to save the Indian constitution from the Indian state and the state policy.”

The students at the conference described how many of those attacked by police had not even been demonstrating. Video footage from inside a library stormed by riot police shows students who were quietly studying fleeing for cover and hiding under desks as the police descended, wielding their batons.

Another video, which has gone viral in India, shows a group of five women forming a protective shield around a male student who the police had violently dragged out of his house and began beating in the street. Speaking to Indian media after the attack, the student, identified as Shaheen, said: “The policemen were not distinguishing between girls and boys. They were slamming everyone and smashing everything in front of them.”

On Tuesday the police confirmed they had arrested 10 people in connection with the violence at JMI but said none of them were students. They have also denied multiple reports that at least two protesters were shot by police in the riots.

Speaking to media outside Alshifa hospital, Hisham Siddiqui, a doctorate student, described how he was inside a mosque on the university campus when more than a dozen police burst in. His arm and head was heavily bandaged, and he was taken out of hospital in a wheelchair. “They smashed the glass doors and entered inside,” he said, adding: “Our faith is strong; we will continue fighting.”

More than 400 students and alumni of 19 universities across the US, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford, wrote a letter of support to students at JMI and AMU and condemned the “brutal police violence” against them.

Protests continued on Tuesday across India. At Punjab University, Harman Deep, the leader of the student society, addressed hundreds of protesters, saying that the new citizenship act was “an attack on our Muslim community”. He condemned the actions of the police against JMI students, adding: “This shameful act by Delhi police shows the moral death and decay of current police enforcement.” He said the violence showed the “true characteristics” of India’s Hindu-led government.

The prime minister, Narendra Modi, accused the opposition Congress party of stirring up fear about the new legislation, and denied that it discriminates against India’s 200 million Muslims. “The Congress is spreading lies, creating an atmosphere of fear for Muslims over the citizenship act,” he said. “I give my assurances no citizen in the country will be affected by the law.”

Writer Arundhati Roy was among those expressing their dismay at the new legislation and said that India faced the “biggest challenge since independence”. She said: “Are we going to stand in line once again, obediently, and comply with the policy that eerily resembles the 1935 Nuremberg laws of the Third Reich,” and she urged the people of India to “stand up. Please. Stand Up.”

The Guardian

The Government of India is funny. They are democratically elected by probably the largest electorate of the world, yet when it comes to civil rights oppression, they often act like they fear being overshadowed by China.

Earlier in the year they passed a controversial law regarding Jammu and Kashmir, and now we see this.

[skinster]

[Zionist Nationalist]

I support India
Fuck the Muslims

[Patrickov]

It takes a whooping four days to see any kind of response here. I think some Members who pledge "equal reporting for everybody" are not as equal as they want to.

[skinster]

India’s Government is going to war against its own people
On December 13, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights released a powerful statement that criticized India’s new citizenship law. This “fundamentally discriminatory” Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 would expedite citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from India’s neighboring countries. But in the list of those minorities, it names only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians. It does not name Muslims, despite the fact that there have been several important cases of Muslims being persecuted in Pakistan (the Ahmadis), in Afghanistan (the Hazaras), and in Myanmar (the Rohingyas). The UN said that not only does this law violate India’s obligations to conventions, treaties, and compacts that it has signed at the global level, but also that it is in violation of its own Constitution.

India’s ruling party—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi put this bill before both the lower and upper houses of India’s parliament. Apart from the Left and some regional parties, opposition in the lower house (the Lok Sabha) was weak; in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha), the bill passed by a slim margin—125 votes to 105 votes.

Protests against the Citizenship Act are now ongoing in every part of India, with a cross-section of society outraged by the religious implications of this law. There are 200 million Muslim citizens of India—almost 15 percent of the population; this bill sends a clear message that they should see themselves as second-class citizens. There is no other interpretation of the BJP’s agenda here.

The BJP government was particularly ruthless against protests at two major universities—Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi) and Aligarh Muslim University (Aligarh), both historically Muslim universities. The police have been extraordinarily violent against student protests in the past several months, but this was at another level. At Jamia, the police beat unarmed students, chased them into their dormitories and continued to beat them, and fired tear gas into the library. There is video evidence of policemen burning buses, assaulting journalists, and creating the conditions of a full-scale police-driven riot; in Aligarh, there is video evidence of the police breaking student motorcycles.

Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who went to Jamia during the attack, said, “The police action is unacceptable.” Jamia, she said, must be “freed of police presence and action be taken against those responsible.” The Delhi Police has announced that it “will investigate” the violence, although Deputy Commissioner of Police M.S. Randhawa seemed to suggest that all the violence came from the students, none from the police. Senior advocate Indira Jaising appeared before the Supreme Court on December 16 to urge the bench—headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde—to take up the case since the violence “is a very serious human rights violation all over the country.”

As if on cue, the BJP government hastily shut down internet access in India’s northeast, and in parts of the country where the protests have been most virulent. Last year, India led all other countries in internet shutdowns. Overall, 67 percent of all shutdowns of the internet took place in India; this year, already, 63 percent of all shutdowns have been in India. Internet in Jammu and Kashmir has now been off for 136 days (between August 4 and December 17); there is no sign that it will be restored. Indeed, the suffocation of Jammu and Kashmir continues unabated. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce says that Kashmiri businesses have lost over $1.4 billion in this period.

Several state governments have said that they would not fulfill the provisions of the new Citizenship Act, since they argue that it is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court of India will soon discuss this bill. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front’s Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, “We are accountable only to the ideals of the Constitution of India, not to the fundamentalist ideology of the RSS-BJP.” (The RSS refers to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fascist movement that is behind the BJP.)

The Left parties have called for demonstrations on December 19 across the country against the Citizenship Act.

Austerity
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Economist Gita Gopinath is in India this week. She said that the slowdown of the Indian economy has surprised many, “including us here at the IMF.” India’s Gross Domestic Product growth has slowed for the sixth consecutive quarter. All the noises made by the BJP government about “Make In India” are silenced by the slump in manufacturing and the low domestic consumption.

Not surprisingly, the IMF urges the Modi government to push ahead with its “structural reforms,” which include what is so euphemistically called “labor… market reforms” and “fiscal consolidation.” The former—labor market reform—means that the government should erase protections for workers, and regulations of businesses; the latter—fiscal consolidation—means that the government must cut spending to lower public debt levels. This means less earning power for the majority of the population, and lower government spending to create social programs for the public.

What the IMF proposes is what the BJP government wants to do—to push a much deeper austerity agenda in India.

This is precisely what the students and workers, the farmers and the youth have argued against in protest upon protest.

The BJP government pushed for a 150 percent rise in hostel fees for the flagship university in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). This astronomical increase would force at least half the post-graduate students to leave their studies. A #FeesMustFall protest dynamic opened up across the country in solidarity with JNU, it being clear to the students that what happens at JNU will spread outward. The police violence against unarmed students was shocking. It was equally outrageous that the intelligence services visited the home in Sopat, Jammu and Kashmir, of a former student leader—Aejaz Ahmad Rather—and said to his family chillingly, “A bullet never asks for an address.”

Farmer, peasant, and trade union organizations have been consistently on the march against the government’s various economic policies. In the past five months, the price of onions—a good indicator of food inflation—spiked by 253 percent. Rather than fix the endemic internal problems in the domestic onion market, a demand of the farmer and peasant organizations, the BJP government has loosened rules for the import of onions, a demand of the big traders. BJP policy is not made to benefit the working class and peasantry. It is made on behalf of the big businesses. It is almost as if the BJP-IMF slogan is “Save the Billionaires,” or “Billionaires Bachao,” as Srujana Bodapati, the coordinator of the Delhi office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes. Little wonder that the farmer, peasant, and trade union federations have announced a major general strike for January 8, 2020. It is expected that hundreds of millions of workers and peasants will be on the streets on that day. Their charter of demands is a direct assault on the BJP-IMF austerity policies.

The First Bullets
The temperature in India is very high. The BJP government feels that it has a mandate to push through a hard-right agenda, both in economic and social policy. It has received backing for this from the IMF (in terms of labor market reform and bank reform) and from its hard-right partners across the world (in terms of its citizenship and anti-immigration policies).

But the government faces stiff resistance that seems unwilling to abate. As night fell over Jamia, and the fires burned out, Chandrasekhar Azad, the leader of the Bhim Army—a social movement in nearby Uttar Pradesh—gave a powerful speech. He said that Muslims are an integral part of India, and that if the State fires on Muslim students, “we will take the first bullets.” This is the mood. It is something that the BJP and the RSS and the IMF need to consider.
https://mronline.org/2019/12/17/indias- ... wn-people/

[Deutschmania]

,

[fuser]

I am not exaggerating here but now I get how people must have felt in late 20s Germany living in India of today.

Just a quick rundown of events as per my understanding :

Assam is a north eastern state,with history of being "troubled". Various groups in there had this feeling that immigrants illegal and from other parts of India are taking their jobs, lands etc, so BJP the current ruling fascistic party promised to take care of it before last state elections and won that election, then they created NRC (National Register of Citizens) for Assam to kick out the so called illegal immigrants, now this NRC also excluded many Hindus with other so called legal hindus from other parts of India fearing that next they will be targeted and will have to leave Assam. Now the neighboring state of Bengal where BJP wants to make inroads for a long time and is currently ruled by another right winger Trinmool Congress(side note : Bengal was ruled by communists for over three decades) started fanning the fear that if this NRC was to be applied in Bengal many Hindus will get affected, trying to counter the BJP's hindu card which BJP is using to make inroads into Bengal.

So basically to counter that BJP announced CAA, (Citizen Amendment Act) which will allow all non Muslims to take citizenship of India. Keyword being non muslims, now this alleviates the fear of non muslims and at the same time it nods towards the core support of BJP that they still are dedicated to anti muslim ideology. Now obviously this goes against the very basics of India and its constitution i.e. you can't discriminate on the basis of religion. If India is going to give citizenship to prosecuted people running from neighbouring countries, it should be not on the basis of religion but another much more scary part is that :

Basically all non muslims can get citizenship, so only Muslims will have to register for NRC as in they are the only group who will have to proof their citizenship as everyone will get the citizenship even if they don't have currently effectively making them the "others". This is a huge discrimination and no group can silently bear this and everyone else should support them, as we all know, "first they came for".

In the meantime, no one dies in HongKong protests but western media will have us believe that China is second coming of Nazis wheres more than two dozen people have been killed in India by pigs in Police and it hardly even gets noticed and the simple reason behind it is that China is a threat to western Imperialism whereas India is not.

[Zionist Nationalist]

How can you feel sympathy for the Muslims after what they have done in Kashmir to hindus? also the most degenerate areas in India are Muslim areas. the less Muslims the better you should appreciate modi for what he is doing

[Saeko]

How can you feel sympathy for the Muslims after what they have done in Kashmir to hindus? also the most degenerate areas in India are Muslim areas. the less Muslims the better you should appreciate modi for what he is doing

Because whatever else they are, they're still human beings? Your bloodlust clouds your judgment.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Because whatever else they are, they're still human beings? Your bloodlust clouds your judgment.

I get that but I just dont like them and their culture some of them are nice guys but the majority are assholes and their culture is disgusting yes I am generalizing here because I know what Im talking about

Muslims need to be crushed everywhere they make troubles in Kashmir,Israel,China,Myanmar,Philippines
Europe is yet to see the fruits of Islam when that happens Im going to wish goodluck to both sides because fuck Europe too

[skinster]

In the meantime, no one dies in HongKong protests but western media will have us believe that China is second coming of Nazis wheres more than two dozen people have been killed in India by pigs in Police and it hardly even gets noticed and the simple reason behind it is that China is a threat to western Imperialism whereas India is not.

India is on the side of fash/rightwing in Ukraine, Israel, the U.S., U.K., Saudi Arabia, etc., which is why it escapes criticism. Birds of a feather...

[JohnRawls]

What is the point of this law and why is Modi even doing it?

The crackdown on the protesters is also BS.

[Rugoz]

I am not exaggerating here but now I get how people must have felt in late 20s Germany living in India of today.

Just a quick rundown of events as per my understanding :

Assam is a north eastern state,with history of being "troubled". Various groups in there had this feeling that immigrants illegal and from other parts of India are taking their jobs, lands etc, so BJP the current ruling fascistic party promised to take care of it before last state elections and won that election, then they created NRC (National Register of Citizens) for Assam to kick out the so called illegal immigrants, now this NRC also excluded many Hindus with other so called legal hindus from other parts of India fearing that next they will be targeted and will have to leave Assam. Now the neighboring state of Bengal where BJP wants to make inroads for a long time and is currently ruled by another right winger Trinmool Congress(side note : Bengal was ruled by communists for over three decades) started fanning the fear that if this NRC was to be applied in Bengal many Hindus will get affected, trying to counter the BJP's hindu card which BJP is using to make inroads into Bengal.

So basically to counter that BJP announced CAA, (Citizen Amendment Act) which will allow all non Muslims to take citizenship of India. Keyword being non muslims, now this alleviates the fear of non muslims and at the same time it nods towards the core support of BJP that they still are dedicated to anti muslim ideology. Now obviously this goes against the very basics of India and its constitution i.e. you can't discriminate on the basis of religion. If India is going to give citizenship to prosecuted people running from neighbouring countries, it should be not on the basis of religion but another much more scary part is that :

Basically all non muslims can get citizenship, so only Muslims will have to register for NRC as in they are the only group who will have to proof their citizenship as everyone will get the citizenship even if they don't have currently effectively making them the "others". This is a huge discrimination and no group can silently bear this and everyone else should support them, as we all know, "first they came for".

In the meantime, no one dies in HongKong protests but western media will have us believe that China is second coming of Nazis wheres more than two dozen people have been killed in India by pigs in Police and it hardly even gets noticed and the simple reason behind it is that China is a threat to western Imperialism whereas India is not.

That law obviously discriminates against Muslims, but compared to what China does it's a joke.

Besides, there are thousands of protests in China every year that never get reported. Hong Kong is different. It's relatively free, wealthy, and was once British.

[AFAIK]

Many in the west have turned a blind eye to Modi's right wing nationalism from day one cheering his election win whilst wringing their hands over the election gains or right wing nationalists in European elections that happened in the same week.

[Code Rood]

Many in the west have turned a blind eye to Modi's right wing nationalism from day one cheering his election win whilst wringing their hands over the election gains or right wing nationalists in European elections that happened in the same week.

Turning a blind eye? First off, why should it be the problem of the West what goes on in India? The only thing about India that kind of creeps me out (because it has potential to go worldwide) is the fact that they've pretty much become a cashless society overnight.

[Code Rood]

Muslims need to be crushed everywhere they make troubles in Kashmir,Israel,China,Myanmar,Philippines
Europe is yet to see the fruits of Islam when that happens Im going to wish goodluck to both sides because fuck Europe too

Trust me, we've seen the fruits. You only say fuck Europe, because apparently we don't kiss your Zionist bottom as much as the USA or even India. And there are good reasons for it:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,734 ... 81,00.html

[JohnRawls]

Many in the west have turned a blind eye to Modi's right wing nationalism from day one cheering his election win whilst wringing their hands over the election gains or right wing nationalists in European elections that happened in the same week.

Its hard to say because India is not exactly a really understandable place for the Western Audience. I, for one, do not understand even the reason why Modi created the law in the first place. I understand the pushback against it though. (Protest)

So its hard to critisize something when you have no knowledge of the situation. Hence he was given a free pass of sorts. First Kashmir and now this basically. I understand that it smells as right wing populism but this needs more context in my opinion. Give more details of Why, When and How. Especially how does it link in to his ideological or electoral promises.

For now, all i can say is that:
1) Crackdown against the protests is wrong.
2) The law smells as bullshit with no reason behind it.
3) Kashmir situation is wrong but nothing unusual considering the Indian/Pakistani relations. Don't get me wrong, it is bad but India and Pakistan literally fought wars over the place. So its hard to judge it strictly from a Western Narrative of opressor vs the opressed.

[Zionist Nationalist]

Trust me, we've seen the fruits. You only say fuck Europe, because apparently we don't kiss your Zionist bottom as much as the USA or even India. And there are good reasons for it:

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,734 ... 81,00.html

Its because the EU is hypocrite when it comes to Israel and they always seem to try to show us how "moral" and "progressive" they are and we should be like them

I say take your "morals" and shove it you know where we are not like you and we dont want to be like you

[Oxymoron]

India is acting in its own best interest, its time for countries and people to stand up for their identity.

[Code Rood]

Its because the EU is hypocrite when it comes to Israel and they always seem to try to show us how "moral" and "progressive" they are and we should be like them

A Zionist whining about hypocrisy is pretty comical. The EU supports Zionism, they just don't dig Bibi's kind of Zionism as much as the US of A does. The EU tends to give more support to secular Zionism, whereas the US (especially the GOP) supports religious Zionism. The whole impeachment thing in the US is basically about the battle between secular Zionism and religious Zionism, but that's another topic for another time.

I'm not a fan of the EU either (and that's not because they supposedly oppose Israel, which they really don't), but you and I were talking about Europe. The EU and Europe are two different things.