Who emboldened Mamata Banerjee to crush law and order in Bengal?

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

Even if someone coughs or sneezes, the BJP runs to the courts, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the other day. That does seem unfair. As a democratically elected chief minister of the state, she should have a free hand when it comes to dealing with coughs and sneezes of people at least. Except that she was not referring to actual coughs and sneezes here. This was supposed to be an analogy for at least eight people burned alive by political goons of her party in a village in Birbhum district.

What could have emboldened the chief minister of Bengal to become so brazen and insensitive? Towards the collapse of law and order in her state. Towards the suffering of people and the role of her party in perpetrating political violence. It could not just be the fact that she was elected with an overwhelming majority. A number of state governments in India enjoy similar majorities. In Uttar Pradesh for instance, the ruling BJP got re-elected only this month by showcasing its achievements in law and order.

So what protects Mamata Banerjee is a very particular kind of political immunity that is enjoyed by the state governments of West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and so on. The Chief Minister of West Bengal has faced no serious questioning of her disastrous record on law and order, endless political violence in her state, failure to attract investment, covid management, or anything else. It is the same reason that people rarely talk about allegations of corruption in Maharashtra, crimes against women in Rajasthan, or the fact that Kerala ranks at the bottom of rankings in ease of doing business.

I like to call this liberal privilege. In March of 2020, a leading publication produced a list of seven chief ministers who made “war with Covid-19 look easy.” These happened to be the chief ministers of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Punjab and Puducherry. At least one of the chief ministers was included for the supposed achievement that he put up banners of himself across the state and requested people to stay indoors. This is liberal privilege, and I believe it makes us less secure. When opposition state governments believe that they can maintain their image with little or no effort, they tend to let the people down. 

It is always in bad taste to make such comparisons, but I am going to ask what if an incident like Birbhum had happened in Uttar Pradesh. Even at the risk of being accused of the terrible crime of whataboutery. Indeed, I refuse to judge incidents individually, in a vacuum. Instead, as a citizen, I am going to compare and contrast the performance of various state governments, political parties as well as the reactions of so-called civil society. It is crazy, I know. 

So, what would have happened if an incident like Birbhum had happened in Uttar Pradesh? We would have seen a festival of “free speech” like no other. The spot would have become a pilgrimage site for politicians of every stripe, with saturation coverage in all forms of media. And all manner of activists, NGOs and civil society would have come along for the ride. There would be poets, artists and musicians giving voice to the suffering of the victims. So much so that sundry Youtubers and RTI activists would be scamming people right now, raising money online to bring out “ground reports.”

You can also bet that the international media would have gotten involved. Perhaps even a tweet from Greta Thunberg, or even the United Nations itself.  And India would have been downgraded on a whole bunch of made up global indexes. And if the most undeserving in our society had any awards left by now, they would have made a show of returning the symbols of state patronage gathered in a previous era.

But because the incident happened in West Bengal, the matter was forgotten within a day. Frankly, I am amazed that even this little bit of outrage actually happened. So who emboldened Mamata Banerjee? These people. They created this entrenched system of privilege which makes her believe, with good reason, that anything goes. Even as she positions herself as a potential Prime Minister, her record on law and order, on the economy, on pandemic management, on investment and infrastructure, remains above question. As long as she is shrill in criticizing the BJP, anything goes. Those are the rules of the game. Khela Hobe.

Does anyone remember Mamata Banerjee holding ‘court’ in Mumbai last year? Does anyone remember India’s much vaunted civil society showing up at the event, bowing before her, as if pledging their loyalty one by one? What if just one of those people had asked her what about the thirty eight percent of the electorate in Bengal that voted for BJP? Did these people deserve the reign of terror unleashed upon them because they happened to be on the losing side in an election? Did BJP workers deserve to be hunted down and killed? 

Why are there so many crude bomb factories across the countryside in Bengal? Why can’t the rural population live freely? Why do they have to live huddled together in homogeneous political communities, known as “party villages?” But the jetsetting upper class socialites who arrived at Mamata’s Mumbai Durbar had no time for such questions. They fly around the world, with the halo of dissenters, basking in the glory of their own liberalism. Their social media timelines are a mix between alleging 1930s style Nazi repression in Uttar Pradesh and influencer tweets for the hottest new designers. At least one such celebrity dissenter featured in ads from a top luxury brand, with the caption that she is as passionate about their designer handbags as she is about fighting fascism. This is how much of a farce the dog and pony show of Indian liberalism has become. Why would this class of people care if some BJP worker is hanged from a tree somewhere in West Bengal? 

Remember Trilochan Mahato. He was just eighteen years old when they got to him in his village in Purulia in West Bengal. They murdered him and hanged him from a tree. They wrote on his shirt that they had been looking for him since the day of the (panchayat) elections. They had been looking for him, to give him his punishment for being a BJP worker. That was 2018. It was certainly not the first instance of political violence under the TMC government. It is just an incident that has remained with me. What if the TMC regime had received the blowback it deserved at the time?

But they did not, so the violence got more and more out of hand. During the 2021 Assembly elections, the TMC was even bolder. At her election rallies, the Chief Minister publicly warned BJP workers that they would be begging for their lives once the election was over and central forces were gone. We all know what happened after the votes were counted. Oh wait, the responsibility for that lies with the Election Commission, because the state government had not been sworn into office till then. Because we know the state police goes strictly by the rule book, with no regard for the fact that the TMC would be back to dictating terms in less than one week. 

And now there is no opposition left, at least in Birbhum. Did you think the one party state would bring public order? The Communists would carry out their purges in orderly fashion. The TMC does not have that kind of discipline. Their cadres are now killing each other, in bloody turf wars over who gets to control panchayat funds, proceeds from illegal sand and gravel mining and so on. No investment comes into Bengal from outside. Because who would invest in a state with no law and order and no infrastructure? But the passions run high and the turf wars are bloody, precisely because the stakes are so small. A year and a half ago, a truck carrying 39,000 detonators was seized in this same area around Birbhum. When you have crude bomb factories in every corner, people living in “party villages” and a Chief Minister who has liberal privilege, you get only one thing: violence.

I must mention here one excuse that is made for the TMC that I find particularly offensive. No, political violence is not part of the culture of Bengal. Did Rabindranath Thakur advocate for political violence against those you disagree with? I think not. Yes, Bengal has had a history of political violence. And the blame for that should go to the parties that have ruled Bengal since independence: the Congress, the Communists and now the TMC. So Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is not helpless, and she has no excuse. Back then it was Jyoti Basu or Buddhadeb Bhattacharya who were to blame, and she is to blame now.

But you won’t believe the kinds of people, most often those who advertise their proud Bengali linguistic and/or cultural identity who make this exact excuse for the current chief minister. I made this point the other day on television about blaming the Congress, the Communists and the TMC. At this, I was interrupted by an “independent” journalist on the panel. What about the violence done by freedom fighters from Bengal such as those of Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar, I was asked. Indeed, if Khudiram Bose could have thrown a crude bomb to fight the British, why can’t a TMC goon burn down a village in a mafia war over smuggling rights? No difference really.

This is what ‘liberalism’ has done to the thought process of the intelligentsia in Bengal. The other day, a video went viral showing a TMC MLA calling for genocide of all Biharis in Bengal. This happened at a book fair in Kolkata. Moreover, the call for genocide was given in the name of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. Who will tell this TMC MLA, also a highly “respected” author,  that Netaji was born in Cuttack (now in Odisha) and that he made his famous escape through Gomoh (now in Jharkhand)? When spaces for book lovers turn into forums for hate speech, there is nothing left to be proud of. 

There is another major stakeholder here that needs to reflect seriously on its worldview, which is the BJP itself. The party cannot rely on the intellectual honesty of civil society, or that of the New York Times, to make its case before the public. They are the BJP’s political enemies. Why would the party expect them to give the BJP or its supporters a fair hearing? Who are they to give anyone a hearing anyway? Who made civil society the judge of anything? 

This is where the distinction between “bias” and “privilege” becomes important. All sides have their bias, but only one side has privilege. Privilege gets inside people’s heads, including the heads of those who do not have that privilege. Privilege is systemic. It makes those in the underclass uncomfortable asserting their own rights. Privilege is a slippery thing. Mere emancipation, or legal equality, cannot get rid of it. Seventy years into the republic, certain groups such as males or upper castes, still remain dominant in every sphere, be it politics, business, media or academia. How? Because everything from tiny social cues to systemic advantages deprive people of real liberty, and real choices.

When it comes to politics, the BJP and its supporters are the traditional underclass. They have faced six decades of apartheid from the establishment. Each time they stop to ask where the New York Times is, the old establishment is still ruling inside their heads. They are forgetting that they have the power now. The majority is with them. The BJP is close to its goal of Congress mukt Bharat, which may be a good thing or a bad thing. But they are nowhere close to “liberal privilege mukt Bharat.” 

Fighting liberal privilege is not easy. There are lots of incentives, and much cultural capital, that comes with being anti-BJP. The day after the Birbhum incident, one of India’s most celebrated journalists was busy raising awareness among his audience about potholes in some road somewhere in Ghaziabad. Because incentives matter. That is how you can get Magsaysay awards and Pulitzer prizes, maybe even a Nobel Prize at some point in future. Where are the counter incentives for talking about what happened in Birbhum?

What can the police do if a crime happens at midnight, a TMC spokesperson asked on a prime time news debate the other day. Beyond bitter laughs, this reminded me of the aggressive line of questioning adopted by some  media and opposition parties about what the Modi government had done for Indian students stuck in a war all the way in Ukraine! Does liberal privilege make this much difference to how the narrative is set? The Bengal CM gets a pass for things happening in Birbhum but India’s Prime Minister is perennially on the hook over Ukraine? 

Remember that the real victims here are the people, whose suffering has to be suppressed whenever there is no BJP government to blame. It made me understand how 85 paisa stolen from every rupee came to be treated as the general (and acceptable) state of affairs. It also made me shudder. What if those people had won the 2019 election? How would they have dealt with the multiple unforeseen crises since then? How would they have dealt with the shockwaves of covid, or the rollout of vaccines? The so-called idea of India has to be more than just liberal privilege, don’t you think?

Not ordinary hypocrisy : How to recognize anti-India lobbying

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

Let me start by asking you a question. Do you believe that India is a threat to world peace? In other words, do you believe that the Indian military goes around the world starting wars, occupying countries, carrying out purges and imposing puppet governments? I do not know which party you support, but I am sure you think the answer is no. 

But, have you noticed that a section of global elites, with many Indians among them, is pretending to believe otherwise? I am talking about the recent incident where an unarmed BrahMos missile was released by accident during routine inspection at a military facility in Haryana. The missile crashed just across the border, inside Pakistan. Thankfully, there was no damage to life or property, and the Indian government expressed regret.

The matter should have ended there, but it did not. There was a flurry of articles and opinion pieces on multiple forums, written by experts, asking if India is a responsible military power. And a responsible nuclear power. Seriously? Every military makes mistakes. At least the “experts” who wrote those opinion pieces would know this. Only last year, a US drone strike in Afghanistan killed ten innocent civilians, with seven children among them, by mistake. Our missile was unarmed, and nobody got hurt. Could people in good conscience, especially those who are experts in diplomatic and military affairs, be truly outraged by this?

Obviously not. Because this is not outrage. This is lobbying. They are using this incident to influence world opinion against India. 

Who is behind this? We do not know. It could be any of our hostile neighbors. But there are other possibilities. Remember that the missile in question was a BrahMos missile, which India is now exporting to the Philippines. Other international orders may soon follow. In recent years, India’s defense exports have grown exponentially. So there could be someone who just wants prospective clients to believe that the BrahMos system is unreliable and dangerous. 

It could also be someone who just wants to make it harder for India to purchase sophisticated military technology from say Israel, the United States, or France. If you tell the world that India is not a responsible military power, maybe you can demand a higher price. Or you could ask for concessions from India in matters such as foreign trade. It does not matter whether the diplomats or the defense contractors believe any of the charges against India. For them, there is no moral divide between “right” and “wrong.” All these lobbies are fully open to collaborating with all other lobbies wherever there are common interests. 

Lobbying has always been post-truth. We in India need to accept that it exists. And we have to learn how to recognize it when it happens. 

These examples of lobbying are all around us. But I chose to begin with this particular example because I know it unites all Indians. Oftentimes, our personal politics gets in the way of recognizing the class of lobbyists for who they are. These days, anybody who speaks against the government claims to occupy the moral high ground of “dissent.” Not surprising, because that is how lobbying is supposed to work. It is supposed to be disguised as genuine public opinion.

But we know that our military is not a threat to world peace. This is not an issue where we have a BJP vs Congress divide. That should give us clarity. So let us make a note of the intellectuals who are trying to use this incident to argue that India is not a responsible military power. Go to the social media timelines of the usual suspects, read their op-eds and remember all this for the next time when they voice their so-called opinions. These are not honest citizens expressing a view. These are lobbyists.

Now that we agree about these lobbyists, we can find several other examples. Look at how they are trying to drag India into a distant war in Ukraine. Even before the war officially began, there were op-ed pieces in top global newspapers arguing that India had a lot of moral high ground to lose in Ukraine unless it sided with the West. After India decided to abstain from the UN resolution condemning Russian military action in Ukraine, the elites have planted their talking points everywhere.

For sure, not all of it is lobbying. For example, there was at least one elected MP who said that India is set to become part of the “Axis of Evil.” That was not lobbying, but the result of stupidity, ignorance and unwillingness to learn. But you cannot say the same about experts who clearly know better. One such expert recently argued on a liberal portal run by an American citizen that our foreign policy must be based on moral values. These moral values always happen to coincide with Western interests, of course. Further, they asked that India should give up its “whataboutery”. In other words, do not ask what the West can do for you. Ask what you can do for the West. Yeah, that’s lobbying.

Does abstaining from a vote at the UN mean that we are taking the side of the bad guys? How about the UN resolution in December 2021 condemning Nazism, neo-Nazism and other forms of racism? India voted in favor of that resolution. There were 49 abstentions, almost all of which were from countries of Europe, including France, Spain, the United Kingdom and even Germany and Italy! Guess which were the only two countries that actually voted against this resolution? The United States and Ukraine. The countries of the West would not even condemn Nazism because they saw the resolution as a Russian pressure tactic. And now their lobbyists, masquerading as thinkers and intellectuals, say that history will not be kind to us. Actually, that last part is probably true. Because the same thinkers and intellectuals probably also intend to write that history.

Then, there is the question of buying Russian oil. Are Indians willing to pay the “moral price” of cheap Russian oil, one of these liberal portals asked the other day. Okay, then how do you explain the fact that America’s allies in Europe are all helping themselves to Russian oil even as they give moral lectures to India? Their answer is startlingly creative, something that could only have come from a lobbyist. Europe, they say, is too dependent on Russian oil to give it up overnight. India on the other hand, is increasing its imports of Russian oil, thus “profiteering” from the war. So the rich countries “depend” on their luxuries. Now that there is a war and the price of oil has gone up, a poorer country looking for a bargain is “profiteering.” This is how liberalism works today.

But this gets even more interesting when you ask yourself what they actually hope to get from India. Do these people believe that India could make Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine? Of course not. They just want to show India as a force for evil on the world stage. Tomorrow, if there is conflict between China and India, the West would like an excuse for not taking the side of democracy. They had been throwing this talking point in our faces long before the war in Ukraine began. Do not count on us if you have problems with China tomorrow, they said. 

But we already had problems with China, remember? A day after the Galwan clash, the New York Times carried a report which suggested that India had provoked China by abrogating Article 370, and the Chinese were simply responding. This insight came from experts who were not named in the article. Why would the global elite cynically take the side of China in June 2020? Because of India’s stance over Ukraine two years later?

If you think about it, this appears to be the whole point of the campaign over the last two years to vilify India in the global media. They need to destroy our democratic image to the point where they can say they do not need to choose between China and India. For this, they have an entire army of civil society workers who will generate hyperbole around anything that happens in India. Delhi riots? Genocide. Farmer protests? Genocide. There was even an opinion piece in a major Indian newspaper the other day which said that Hindutva supporters have a natural sympathy for Putin’s expansionism. You see, Putin might have quoted the Bible to justify his actions in the Ukraine, but the real blame always goes to Hindutva!

This is lobbying. And we have not even talked of the pandemic yet. Who can forget the morbid obsession of Western newspapers with funeral pyres in India? And the civil society in India that fed them such images? Yes, the Governor of New York might have hidden thousands of deaths in nursing homes, but the New York Times made sure that every image of Covid misery in India made it to their front page. And who can forget the pressure they put on India to buy foreign vaccines, the doubts planted about Indian made vaccines and more? Last year, there was even an article in one influential outlet that accused the Indian government of hiding data about virus mutations, leading to the wave of Delta variant across the world. Oh, so this entire pandemic is India’s fault now? Among the lobbyists who wrote that article, I counted at least one Indian name. Their parents must be so proud.

Who cares, you might ask. Who cares if some slippery lobbyist writes an article in a foreign newspaper attacking us? Are we so weak? It matters because civil society groups, both in India and abroad, essentially work like sleeper cells. They silently accumulate power that may one day prove to be useful. That is why they generate all these democracy rankings, freedom rankings and such. Tomorrow, if the West wants to push India over some issue, they can cite all this “independent” research accumulated over decades as an excuse. It doesn’t even matter if they actually put sanctions on us some day. What matters is that they could do it if they really wanted to. It is something they can hold over our heads. Why else would anyone support a think tank anyway? And what exactly is a think tank? 

And as long as they have something to hold over our heads, they can influence our decision making in India. With no outside support, could a small group of farmers have managed to force a rollback of the three agricultural reform laws which we now know were overwhelmingly popular? Possibly, but the adverse global attention certainly made their job a lot easier. In contrast, Canada was able to crack down on an unpopular protest and disband it in less than a week. They declared a national emergency, seized bank accounts, pets and even threatened to take away children from the protesters. Canada was able to do this because the same lobbies that defame India have been paid for decades to create an image of Canada as a heaven for civil liberties. This means that the vast majority of Canadians who were against the truckers’ protest got their way. The vast majority of Indians, including the vast majority of Indian farmers, did not. In this way, the lobbyists have managed to undermine the sovereignty of the Indian state.

For comic relief, let me also mention here one frustrated lobbyist who bashed up India in a newspaper column the other day, accusing us of having too big an ego compared to our real economic or military might. They began by arguing that India staying out of the war is a sign of weakness. Then they presented facts and figures to prove just how weak we are. And finally, they accused the government of not knowing about all these weaknesses. Wait, but didn’t the government keep India out of the war already? Then what are you so angry about? Is it because the relentless lobbying by you and your ilk did not pay off in the short run?

Again, you might ask who cares. We know that the Western media and intellectual elite are hypocrites anyway. So where is the need to put a spotlight on their lobbying? For one, this lobbying makes it harder for India to get its way on all international forums, from diplomacy to arms control to foreign trade and even domestic policy. Also, as long as we use words like ‘hypocrisy,’ we see it as the result of somebody’s ignorance or their moral failings. It makes us live in false hope. If only we could give this or that data point, or jump through this or that hoop, perhaps they would finally change their minds about us. 

But when you call them lobbyists, you internalize the fact that they are professionals who are doing their job. Their job is not to keep an open mind. They are not here to change their minds. Their job is to argue forcefully for a certain point of view, like a lawyer in a court. Imagine going to court believing that you might be able to win the heart of the lawyer on the other side. That is terribly naive, and the lawyer on the other side will just take advantage of you. 

Unfortunately, the only answer to a lawyer is another lawyer. The answer to one lobby is another lobby. You have to observe the other side closely, understand their strengths and weaknesses. You have to copy their most effective methods, and come up with new ones of your own. 

And above all, do not confuse the opposing lawyer with the judge. People are the judge, not the lobbyists themselves. Do not waste time arguing with them. We have to find ways to access the minds of people not just in India, but around the world. This is very difficult, and it will take a long time. But we cannot lose hope. The current hegemony was not built in a day. It will take more than a day to dismantle it completely. On the good side, nothing lasts forever.

Why Uttar Pradesh was the election of the fraudsters on Youtube

By 10 AM on counting day, it was clear that the BJP had won Uttar Pradesh with a historic majority. It is around this time that I came across a strange tweet, posted by an employee of an organization that I have nicknamed “Bootlaundry.” He cautioned people that only a few rounds had been counted yet, and that they must not jump to conclusions. He told them to wait until evening.

Just for a second, let us look at the math behind this. Yes, it is technically true that only a handful of rounds of counting had been completed. But that was already 1 crore votes counted! Could the trend really change after that? We all intuitively understand that the credibility of an opinion poll increases with sample size. So think of the counting until 10 AM as an opinion poll with a sample size of 1 crore, spread across every seat in Uttar Pradesh.

What are the chances that an opinion poll like that could go wrong? Almost zero. And sure enough, it did not. At 10 AM, the Election Commission showed the BJP vote share at just above 42% and SP at 31%. By the end of the day, the BJP was at 41% and SP at 32%. The reversal could never have happened.

Now let us come back to the tweet from the Bootlaundry employee that I was referring to. Do not laugh it off as a frustrated liberal looking for straws of hope. Indeed, all through counting day, or at least till noon, you can find many tweets from liberal influencers claiming to have ground reports about SP doing much better than “Godi media” was showing. For some reason, they insisted that the BJP was paying channels to maintain the fiction of a BJP win for a few more hours.

What could the BJP possibly gain from doing something this stupid? It does not matter. Basic logic was out of consideration. Ordinary liberals were looking for straws, and their favorite online influencers were giving it to them. But why?

Because money. As long as the influencers could keep up the fiction of SP winning, they could pick up tiny donations of Rs 50, Rs 100, or even Rs 10 from their followers by giving out teeny bits of hope. And those bits add up, when you consider their subscriber bases running into hundreds of thousands. The so called “Godi media” had nothing to gain by falsely showing a BJP lead while counting was in progress. The online influencers surely had something to gain by lying.

But why should you believe me, a BJP “bhakt,” with an alleged degree from Whatsapp University and now presumably employed by “IT cell” at the going rate of Rs 2 per tweet? But my dear liberal friends, I am writing this for you. I understand your passionate support for Akhilesh Yadav and his family, and your reverence for Rahul Gandhi and his entire dynasty. I am not asking you to give that up. I am only asking you to be smarter with your own money. I am trying to tell you not to waste your hard earned money on online liberal scamsters who play with your emotions.

If you want to ignore me, go right ahead. I am not the target market of these liberal scamsters; you are. I saw these people scamming you and thought I would give a word of caution. It’s for you, not me.

I noticed this all through the Uttar Pradesh election. A number of people began scouring the countryside claiming, with a camera, talking to people, and claiming to show the “real picture.” Some of these people already had a large online following, especially on Youtube. Others developed a following along the way, which soon became cult like.

You can go back and watch most of these videos even now. In retrospect, you realize that these were laughably one sided. Some of these influencers have done hours of “ground reporting” without meeting a single person who had a good word to say about BJP. Almost literally…

“Mujhe dhoonde se bhi BJP ka voter nahin mila…“

This was a refrain from a highly established liberal influencer about Uttar Pradesh, a day after 2019 exit polls. The individual works for a high impact liberal portal, perhaps even the highest impact liberal portal of all. Now why would she do that? To give hope and pick up scraps from people who were in deep despair about the exit polls.

This model has now been seized upon by many others. You probably know their names already, so I won’t take them. They stand on street corners, go to colleges, markets and more, with camera in hand. The one common thing is that they can never find a single person who supports BJP. Their streams go viral, they raise lakhs in their fundraisers with promises of an Akhilesh Yadav wave.

During the UP election, I was quite amazed at how organized this fraud became. Some of them set up fake “news channels” like “XYZ PM news.” In the evenings, there would be well known journalists going live on their streams, with backgrounds made to resemble the usual 9 pm news debates. The conclusion was always the same. Akhilesh is winning.

Consider their incentives. Why would these people make fools of themselves? The fact is they were not. They knew exactly what they had to say to make their streams go viral. If they said that BJP is winning, would they have got donations?

Like I said, I noticed that this fraud had been completely systematized and professionalized. Leading the pack were old Congress loyalists who had been fired from big banner TV channels after 2014. They are all known faces and known names. Now they run shady websites and scam people.

To the liberals, I say this. Yes, TV media favors the ruling party today, just as it always did. In fact, you have no idea how bad it used to be back in the days of Congress monopoly. But if that is a problem, these people are not the solution. Giving money to scamsters in return for false hope is not a solution. And no, you cannot compare these people to social media back in the days of 2010-2014. At that time, social media was amateurish, and almost everyone there was saying things out of conviction. Now people have figured out how to make money off social media, which has turned the medium just as fake as mainstream media.

You know what is funny? After the results were in, the folks at Bootlaundry held a stream to discuss the election. You should really go to Youtube and watch it. In it, the “ground reporters” can be seen admitting what people on the ground actually told them. People in UP knew just how badly the world had suffered from Covid. They were asking what UP could have done where America had failed. Why didn’t the ground reporters at Bootlaundry tell you this before? Because if they had told the truth, liberal simpletons would never have given them money.

So if you are a liberal, understand the incentives of those who are fooling you. You can venerate Akhilesh Yadav or Rahul Gandhi as much as you want. But stop giving money to scamsters on the internet. Who knows, if you get real feedback, you might be able to put together real opposition to the BJP. Ignore me at your own peril.

Separating myth from fact: A simple Q&A on Karnataka High Court and hijab judgement

The obvious has happened. The High Court of Karnataka has thrown out all petitions demanding that Muslim girls in Karnataka be allowed to wear the hijab irrespective of their school uniform. Not surprisingly, sections of the media are twisting facts, force-fitting this judgement into their fake narrative against India. After all, there is a lot of money in defaming India right now. And everyone wants a piece of it.

So here is a helpful guide to the facts of the matter, for anyone who has an open mind. The easiest way is to break it down into Q&A format.

Q: Has the High Court banned the hijab in Karnataka?

A: No. Muslim women are completely free to wear hijab in Karnataka, or anywhere else in India. So are people of all religions, whether men or women, allowed to wear religious symbols or clothing as per their choice.

Q: Has the High Court banned the hijab in schools?

A. No. The High Court has merely given schools the right to choose their uniform. And the schools can decide whether to allow the hijab as part of their uniform. In fact, Muslim religious schools are even free to *require* the hijab as part of their uniform!

Q: How can the government or the court tell somebody what to wear? Is this not unconstitutional?

A: Yes, that is why neither the government nor the court told people what to wear. The government and the court merely allowed individual schools to decide their uniform.

Q: But is it not the choice of a girl (or her parents, in case of minors) whether to wear the hijab?

A: Not inside the school, no. Most schools in India have prescribed uniforms. The word “uniform” itself means that the student does not get to choose.

Q: So you admit that the school is taking away choice from the students?

A: Yes. But this is not specific to Muslim students or Muslim girl students in any way. Some school uniforms require navy blue pants. Such schools are also taking away choice from kids who want to wear black pants. If you want to start a larger moral debate over whether schools should have uniforms, go ahead. But this has nothing to do with religion. And surely Muslims have no special right to be exempt from school uniforms.

Q: But Sikhs wear turbans to school and nobody objects. Why not treat hijab the same way?

A. Under Indian law, people can get exemptions for “essential religious practices.” This isn’t just applied to school uniforms. Those wearing Sikh turbans are also exempt from wearing a helmet while driving a two wheeler, for instance. In this case, the High Court held that hijab is not an essential practice of religion.

Q: Okay, so what if I argue that hijab is an essential practice in Islam?

A: You are most welcome to try. But be aware of the duplicity in what you just did. You were just saying that hijab is a choice. Now you are saying it is essential? In fact, this is roughly what the petitioners in the High Court tried to argue. They told the court that hijab is essential in Islam. But all their liberal feminist supporters were saying outside that hijab is a choice. No wonder the court was not fooled by this. On the other hand, Sikhs will tell you the exact same thing in the court as they will tell you on Facebook: the turban is essential to their religion.

Q: But who decides what is an essential practice of some religion?

A: The court decides, after looking at religious texts and letting petitioners make their case. This is exactly what happened in the hijab case as well. Remember how feminists always tell you that Islam gives women the right to choose whether or not to wear the hijab? This is exactly the view that the court took. For some reason, the feminists are still complaining. So you have to either accept that Islam does not give the choice to women, or you have to stop saying that the school is legally required to change its uniform for you. You can’t have it both ways.

Q: It isn’t just Sikh turbans, you know. Students routinely wear all sorts of religious symbols to school.

A. Yes they do. Feel free to start this discussion with the principal of the school your kid is interested in. The school will decide what is their uniform and what they will allow kids to wear.

Q: It seems like a complicated and confusing matter to prove that something is an essential practice of religion. Is the court being vindictive against Muslims?

A. Absolutely not. In fact, it is most often Hindus who suffer because of this essential practice test. Hindus have no single holy book, no central authority to decide what the rules of the religion are. As such, Hindus find it almost impossible to prove this or that is an “essential practice.” That is why courts routinely set rules on smallest aspects of Hindu practice, even how much water a devotee is allowed to pour on a Shivling.

Q: Why is the court getting involved in making decisions based on religious scriptures? I thought we are a secular state.

A. Excellent point. It should not be the job of the courts to interpret religious scriptures. But in India, let alone school uniform, so many big things such as disputes on marriage, divorce, inheritance etc are decided in courts by interpreting various religious texts. It is an absolute mess that makes our so called secularism look irrelevant. Kindly support a uniform civil code. Thanks.

Is the right to remain neutral during war a part of white privilege?

A lightly edited version of this article, written jointly with Vijita Singh Aggarwal, appeared on India Today here.

A few days ago, Lithuania, which is a member of the European Union, canceled its donation of over 4,40,000 vaccine doses to Bangladesh. This happened after the government of Bangladesh, just like the government of India, decided to abstain from voting on the recent UN resolution condemning Russian military action in the Ukraine. Quite a throwback to tribal societies and childhood rivalries with all the civilizational and humanistic proclamations casually abandoned. 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to a searing reaction from governments and the public across the western world. Apart from economic sanctions, some of the reactions have been downright absurd. For instance, there was the orchestra in Canada that canceled a show by a 20 year old music prodigy from Russia. Or the university in Milan that tried to drop the works of Dostoevsky from its literature curriculum. Then, there was the orchestra in Britain that decided they would no longer play music by Russian composer Tchaikovsky for celebrating Russia’s successful defense against Napoleon in 1812. Dear Piotr Tchaikovsky, who passed away in 1893, your reign of terror is over. 

As a result, the West has been putting tremendous pressure on countries such as India that have chosen to remain neutral during this war. The pressure has been applied through official channels as well as unofficial ones, such as media, think tanks and intellectual circles. They say that we are either with the West, or against the West. And that as a democracy, it is our moral duty to side with the West. 

But this raises a fundamental question. Who has the right to remain neutral in a war? For one, apparently Lithuania itself has that right. They were neutral during World War 2. So were its Baltic neighbors such as Latvia and Estonia. And also Spain, Switzerland, Sweden and Ireland. The Kingdom of Belgium remained neutral until Hitler invaded them in May 1940. In that case, how can countries that remained neutral towards Hitler’s war insist that Bangladesh must take sides in a conflict in Eastern Europe? 

With regards to India, sometimes there is a second argument that is brought up. As an aspiring great power, India must step up and be willing to lead. In other words, India must prove its worth. However, a quick glance at history shows that this argument has never been applied to other great powers. The United States remained neutral in World War 2 until it was invaded by Japan in December 1941. Perhaps even more strikingly, the USSR continued to be neutral towards Japan from 1941 to 1945. At this time, the US was allied with the USSR, the US was at war with both Japan and Germany, but the USSR was at war only with Germany. What is more, the USSR was receiving billions in military aid, from tanks and airplanes to shoes from the US to fight its own war against Germany. But the great power status of the USSR was never questioned. 

What explains therefore the hostile attitude of the West towards countries such as India or Bangladesh that have refused to take sides between Russia and Ukraine? Could it be that the right to remain neutral in a war is a part of white privilege?

As a matter of fact, the voting pattern in the UN General Assembly was quite revealing. While countries of the west voted en bloc against Russia, those of the Indian subcontinent as well as a number of prominent African nations such as South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, Namibia, Congo and Zimbabwe chose to abstain. It should be noted that while Mexico had to vote with the United States, their superpower neighbor and most important trading partner, Mexico refused to join any sanctions against Russia. 

The conclusion is inescapable. The public in countries where the majority is of people of color see this war differently from countries that are majority white. And there is no better instance of white privilege than to demand that the rest of us have a duty to pick sides in a war between two countries that are both full of white people. Would we expect the rest of the world to feel a similar moral obligation in a war that is between, say Ethiopia and Kenya? Probably not. For the same reason, countries such as India, Bangladesh or South Africa have a right to pursue an independent foreign policy that suits their own interests. We have no moral obligation to fit into binaries decided by the West. 

There is also a lesson here for the Indian elites, tutored by the West, and now so used to lecturing Indian masses on the supposed dangers of “nationalism.” All it took was one crisis in the Ukraine for the carefully constructed facade of western liberalism to fall apart, sending the European continent back to a 1914 trench warfare mentality. The city of Munich just fired the conductor of their orchestra for being Russian. Right now, Russian speakers in Germany are feeling threatened, some are even facing attacks on their homes and businesses. At least at one hospital in Munich, a doctor refused to treat patients who speak Russian. Given the history of Germany, you would think that at least the Germans would realize the dangers of targeting an ethnic group like this. But, apparently they do not. 

By contrast, Indian nationalism, driven by a simple love of our country, appears practically harmless. And yet, this nationalism has been written about in the most sinister terms in domestic and foreign media, often invoking Nazi comparisons. This nationalism is taunted daily by our intellectual class. They challenge our masses to prove their “tolerance” by singing songs about destruction of idols, penned by Pakistani poets no less. Think about all the aggression that India has faced from Pakistan in the last seventy five years. 

The fact is that neither Indian democracy, nor Indian nationalism, has anything to prove to anyone else. Those who defame either of these should be ashamed of themselves and they should start questioning their tutors in the west. The emergence of India from the woods will depend very clearly on choosing its own notions of democracy and nationalism emerging from our own bedrock of societal values and enlightened self interest

Agenda Matters, Not Margin in UP: Why BJP Must Focus on Implementing Its Vision

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here.

Who is winning Uttar Pradesh? For the last three months, this question has captivated our media, our political class and news audiences across the country. Well, now we know. To be fair, almost everyone already knew that the BJP was always ahead, whether they chose to believe it or not. This was generally accompanied therefore by a second, more intriguing question. If the BJP is winning, what will be the margin? Is it ‘enough’ for the BJP to win with a bare majority of 200 seats, a comfortable majority of 250 seats, or do they need a landslide of 280 seats? Or is it that anything below 300 seats is some kind of defeat for BJP, for PM Modi and Yogi Adityanath?

Let us see. We have a first past the post voting system and a parliamentary form of democracy. Whoever wins a majority of seats forms the government. It really is that simple. So where is this question of ‘enough’ coming from? 

But you cannot dismiss this question as ramblings of a defeated opposition and frustrated civil society. You could sense that BJP circles were also wondering about it. And BJP supporters on social media were heavily invested in it. But why? The answer is just as simple. Because the party and its supporters have let their critics run free inside their heads.

This has real consequences. For almost a year, there was the so-called farmers movement that blocked all routes to the national capital, demanding that the government take back three new agricultural reform laws. They went on a rampage, they destroyed mobile phone towers, they beat up police. They coordinated openly with separatist elements. They even held their own kangaroo courts and carried out gruesome public executions. The more they were treated with kid gloves, the worse they behaved. Ultimately, the government rolled back the farm laws.

But what do the election results say? In the first phase of Uttar Pradesh polls, the BJP won 46 out of 58 seats. In this phase, the BJP’s vote share was a jaw dropping 50 percent. This was in western Uttar Pradesh, where farmer anger was supposed to be the highest. Even in Punjab, the Congress which adopted an aggressive posture against the farm laws, was wiped out. 

This leads to a chilling realization. There never was any anger against the farm laws. Not even in western Uttar Pradesh. If there was real anger in Punjab, it was vastly exaggerated. Remember that half of all Indians depend on agriculture for a living. Remember that farmers in all other parts of India were silent. Remember that farmer organizations, including the Bharatiya Kisan Union itself, had been campaigning for these exact reforms for decades now. Remember that the opposition Congress had promised these reforms in their manifesto for 2019 elections. Remember that every economist had supported these reforms at one time or another. It all makes sense now.

But we have allowed a vocal minority, backed by vested interests, to prevail over the will of the people. This is dangerous for democracy. Who says that the opposition and civil society have not figured out a way to stop the BJP? As long as they can keep the BJP from implementing its agenda, they are still winning. 

How do they manage this? They play on the insecurities of the ruling party. They sow a sense of inadequacy in the ruling party regarding its electoral performance. Is 200 seats in Uttar Pradesh enough, or do they need 300, perhaps even 400? They are able to plant canards in the media about Jat anger, Brahmin anger, and make the BJP take these seriously. As long as the ruling party is fighting these phantoms, the opposition is still winning.

We have to note how unusual this is. In the 2004 general elections, Sonia Gandhi’s Congress won 145 seats and the BJP got 138 seats. This gap of seven Lok Sabha seats was trumpeted as a historic mandate for the Congress and all its imaginary qualities, such as liberalism and secularism. And even a victory for something described pompously as “idea of India.” For the next ten years, or at least until the lakh crore scams tumbled out, the UPA was able to pursue its agenda ruthlessly, without ever having to look over its shoulder.

But when the BJP returned to power in 2014, civil society changed its assessment of what it means to win an election. Even the first past the post voting system was questioned. In PM Modi’s first term, they asked if the BJP has a right to run India with just 31 percent of the vote. Never mind that 31 percent was the highest vote share for a ruling party since 1991. After 2019, they began asking if the BJP has a right to run India with just 38 percent of the vote. This is a trap. It is designed to keep the ruling party distracted, endlessly hankering for the moment when the critics finally admit that the BJP government is legitimate. 

Naturally, the BJP’s detractors realize their psychological advantage. They keep raising the bar higher and higher. After the BJP’s win in Uttar Pradesh, at least one well-known liberal portal argued that the party had fallen short of Yogi Adityanath’s target of 80 percent of the vote. And thus, the BJP had actually failed. This is ridiculous, and the liberals know it too. But they argue like this because they know they can get away with it. It is the only leverage they have over a party that continues to enjoy support of the people. Why wouldn’t they use it?

The problem is that it is not just the BJP here which is getting a raw deal, but also the people of India. Some three decades ago, we decided to put an end to the Nehruvian system and bring in economic reforms. And it made almost everything about India much better. But those reforms did not touch the agriculture sector. As a result, the Indian farmer remained in chains, caught in everything from a debt trap to a dependency trap. The agricultural reform laws would have opened a window, even a door towards bigger reforms. But we have lost that opportunity, for now.

The same goes for several matters related to labor reforms, industrial policy, land acquisition and so on, where the opposition’s street veto applies. It also extends to education, where the slightest attempt to correct for sixty years of bias of Communist historians is seen as something terrible. 

A similar situation exists on the issue of freedom of speech. All governments in India have interfered with freedom of expression and always will. This is a result of laws passed by successive Congress regimes. The Emergency is really just one example among many. More often than not, liberals will issue a proforma denunciation of the Emergency. They will then use that as a way to claim moral superiority, as well as some form of objectivity. In 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power, one of her first decisions was to pass the National Security Act, under which anyone could be kept in jail for a year without trial. In other words, her authoritarian instincts remained as sharp as ever. 

For liberals, the trick is to take one or two isolated incidents and blow them up into an international talking point against Modi sarkar. You talk endlessly about that one alleged comic who spent a night in jail. You get your friends at Freedom House or some think tank in Sweden to talk about it too. That way you create an environment where nobody notices how many BJP workers have been murdered in Bengal. You create an environment where only the voices of Modi’s critics are heard. You also manage to keep the government on the defensive, unable to wield its own agenda.

This system of liberal privilege has always existed, but it has become more starkly visible of late. In Canada, Trudeau’s liberal government declared a national emergency because it could not handle a two week protest. The New York Times tried to call it an attack on civil liberties, but apologized and changed its headline when the Canadian ambassador to the UN objected. Because nothing says civil liberty like a government official dictating a headline to a newspaper. Like the farmer protests in India, the trucker protests in Canada had no mass support. But the fact is that Canada’s liberal government was able to wrap up these protests in two weeks, limit damage to the Canadian economy and difficulties for common citizens. Because the Canadian government had no class of internationally connected class of critics nipping at their heels. In contrast, India suffered for a whole year. And ultimately, the people lost.

Nearly eight years since it started, the government cannot keep walking into rhetorical traps set by its implacable foes. Even if the BJP had won 400 seats in Uttar Pradesh, they would have come up with some other test of legitimacy that the BJP would have to meet. This latest round of elections have shown that people are firmly behind the ruling party. They want the Modi government to implement its decisions. The margin of victory in Uttar Pradesh may be huge, but it does not matter. What matters is that the opposition should not keep winning nationally by a margin of negative 251 seats. That is the difference between the 52 seats won by the Congress and the 303 seats won by the BJP.

In August 2019, we remember how the government acted suddenly and decisively. They yanked Article 370 from the constitution and tossed it into the trash heap of history. In one moment, the cobwebs in the minds of generations were swept away.  The opposition was reduced to a whimper. That is the kind of decision making that a young restless India wants and they have voted for it. 

The making of war: The complicated history of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Germany explained

A lightly edited version of this article, along with some illustrations, appeared on Firstpost here.

On the eve of his invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that Ukraine has no right to exist; that the latter has historically been a part of Russia. Anyone with a sense of history will tell you that this is bad news. As a matter of fact, the part of Europe sandwiched between Russia on the east and Germany on the west is where both world wars began. And whenever a German or a Russian leader starts talking about which countries in this region have no right to exist, something terrible is about to happen.

Of late, Indian television audiences have been bombarded with images of the war in Eastern Europe. Along with that, the names of cities that are difficult to pronounce: Kyiv, Kharkhiv, Mariupol and countries that we rarely think about: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, and so on. And yet, what does it mean? Who is trying to take over whom? What are their motivations and historical rationalizations?

The history here is messy. And it is complicated by the fact that this is an area of shifting borders. For instance, the city of Lviv in Western Ukraine is currently a staging area for people making their way across the border into Poland. But Lviv used to not be in Western Ukraine, but in Eastern Poland only a few decades ago. So where does Poland end and where do Ukraine and Belarus begin? Here is an explainer.

“The greatest criminal conspiracy of the 20th century”

On Sep 17, 1939 Polish army soldiers were huddled in their trenches, desperately trying to establish a defensive line against Hitler’s forces pouring into their country from the west (see [4]). The lightning advance of the German Wehrmacht had pushed the Polish government to relocate from Warsaw to the city of Brest-Litovsk. Then it came, like a stab in the back. Legions of Soviet tanks rolling across the eastern frontier of Poland to link up with the Germans. 

Less than a month ago, the Nazi regime in Berlin and the Communist regime in Moscow had concluded what historian Robert Forcyzk has labeled as the greatest criminal conspiracy of the 20th century.  The Germans and the Soviets had reached a non-aggression pact on Aug 23, 1939. But unknown to the world, this treaty, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (named after Stalin’s foreign minister Molotov and Hitler’s foreign minister Ribbentrop) contained a number of secret protocols, splitting Eastern Europe into Nazi and Communist spheres of influence. The Molotov-Ribbentrop line ran right through the heart of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine, from Romania in the south to Finland in the north. 

Accordingly, a few days after the German invasion began, the Soviets summoned the ambassador of the beleaguered Polish government in Moscow. To his surprise, the ambassador was told by the Soviets that the Polish government had ceased to exist. Accordingly, the Red Army would be marching to “protect” the people of Eastern Poland, which the Soviets now called “Western Ukraine” and “Western Belarus,” and thus part of the Soviet Union itself (see [4]). 

In short, both the Nazis and the Communists agreed on one thing. Poland, and most of the other modern day countries in between Germany and Russia, had no right to exist. They were, just as Putin argued the other day, artificial inventions and/or historical mistakes. 

What was the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth?

Beginning in 1569, and lasting nearly two hundred and fifty years, there existed in the region between Germany and Russia a state that was rather uniquely enlightened by the standards of the time. This was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, comprising as the name suggests, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. But it was also a multi-ethnic state, with Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Belarussians and more, living in relative harmony. The position of monarch was an elected one, though voting was restricted to noblemen, and there were strict constitutional limits to the power of the crown. The constitution even guaranteed freedom of religion. 

But then, as it happens so often, this rather enlightened state began to face aggression from its more militant neighbors. In this case, these would be the kingdoms of Prussia (mostly modern day Germany) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the west, as well as the Russian Empire to the east. This resulted in what came to be known as the three partitions of Poland. Finally, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth ceased to exist in 1795. From then onwards till 1914, the territory of this former multi-ethnic state remained divided between these three empires. 

The man who the Germans smuggled in through Finland

During World War I, which began in 1914, the German and Austro-Hungarian empires were fighting against the Russian Empire. By 1917, the Russians began to crumble, their economy left in tatters by the war. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated the throne in March of 1917, leaving his country tottering. All that the Germans needed was a final blow. For this, they turned to a socialist who had been in exile from Russia since 1907, after a couple of failed efforts to overthrow the Tsar. That man was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. 

And so, Lenin, who had spent most of the war in neutral Switzerland, was smuggled in by the Germans across their territory into Finland, and from there to Russia. This last part of the journey, which was by train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg, is now part of Communist lore, which of course omits the role of the German Empire in arranging it. 

Once in Russia, Lenin and his Bolsheviks organized the famous October revolution, which ultimately ended the Tsarist regime. At once, Lenin’s new government settled for peace with the Germans, pulling Russia out of World War I. This was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which conceded most of the Russian Empire to Germany. The treaty gave rise to a number of independent states, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus and of course, Ukraine. Russia also gave up claims in Finland, and soon lost parts of modern day Moldova, then known as Bessarabia, but later handed by the Germans to Romania. This is the “mistake of Lenin” that Putin was talking about. 

Lenin miscalculates badly, tries to fix it, but fails again

Unfortunately for the Bolsheviks, Lenin had badly misjudged the outcome of the war. Within months of the Russians settling for peace with Germany, the German Empire itself capitulated. The victors of World War I, namely Britain, France and America, dictated terms to the Germans at the Paris Peace Conference and eventually the Treaty of Versailles. 

Lenin’s government tried to back out of the treaty they had signed with the Germans only months ago, but it was already too late. The Treaty of Versailles resulted in the rebirth of Poland as a state. The Red Army tried to wiggle back into the region, but was soundly defeated. In fact, the armies of the new Polish state pushed all the way into Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. Incidentally, one of the top Soviet military handlers who was defeated in this war was Joseph Stalin. Unlike Lenin however, Stalin would get his revenge.

Stalin’s Great Terror and the genocide covered up by the New York Times

“There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation..,” wrote Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times. In the year 1932-33, roughly 3.5 million people died from the famine in Soviet Ukraine, known as the Holodomor. The New York Times journalist received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

In the 1930s, Stalin’s government began a process of mass persecution of Poles and Ukrainian nationalists in the Soviet Union, who were seen as enemies of the regime. But the reasons for Stalin’s brutality were also philosophical. The party believed that a society had to be more or less industrialized in order for Communism to work effectively. This was a problem, because most of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, was a largely agrarian society at the time (see [5]). The Communist Party solution to this problem was chilling. Everyone who lived in the countryside in Ukraine had to be starved to death. 

Accordingly, Communist Party officials were sent into the countryside to snatch every last bit of grain from Ukrainian farmers. When that ran out, the desperate people began eating the seed grain, the tiny portion of grain that a farmer sets aside for sowing the next year’s crop. Then the party took away the seed grain. The farmers tried to eat the grass, then they ate their animals, then human corpses, and were even reduced to cannibalism.

The Communist Party would not relent. Neither would the New York Times. The Great Terror continued to unfold in waves. By 1937, Stalin signed his infamous order no. 00447, which set targets for party officials in every local area in terms of executions (the so-called “death quotas”) and securing prisoners to be sent for forced labor in the gulag.

Katyn forest and NKVD prisoner massacres

After the Soviet invasion in 1939, the city of Brest-Litovsk (now Brest in Belarus) was established as the frontier between the German and Soviet zones of occupied Poland. As part of his arrangement with the Nazis, Stalin then launched a series of wars with countries that were east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. Finland was invaded in the winter of 1939 and put up an unexpected resistance, but ultimately crumbled three months later. The next to be invaded were the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which were occupied by the Soviets in June 1940. The final step was the Soviet occupation of the Bessarabia region in Romania, which now lies in Moldova.

In the occupied territories, Stalin began in earnest the process of “Sovietization.” This meant the seizure of land, private property and herding of the population into collective farms. From the Soviet run POW camps in Ukraine and western Russia, wave after wave of Polish prisoners began to leave. They were given good food, a promise of being sent home, and even a farewell by a marching band. They were then driven towards Katyn forest near Smolensk in Russia, and murdered. The ones especially chosen for these executions were Polish Army officers and intellectual elites. The Soviet aim, as on the German side, was the ‘decapitation’ of Polish society, based on the idea that Poland should never have existed. Many of the Polish Army officers executed at Katyn came from the prison camp in Starobilsk, now in Ukraine, but lying in the breakaway region of Luhansk, recently recognized as independent by Putin.

By 1941, the situation in Europe had changed. With his security guaranteed in the east by the Soviets, the Nazis had finished occupying Western Europe, including France. In June 1941, Hitler turned around and invaded the Soviet Union. He was soon joined in his efforts by the Romanians, by Ukrainian nationalists, the Tartar Muslims of Crimea and other groups looking to avenge the occupation by the Soviet Union. A number of these pro-Nazi groups remain active in Eastern Europe even today. Taken by surprise, as the Soviets withdrew, the Soviet secret police or NKVD began a series of mass executions of prisoners across Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania. At the NKVD prison in Lviv, the floor was covered in a slush of blood and organs from human bodies. Historians estimate that some 100,000 people were murdered by the NKVD in the space of a few weeks.

The Holocaust, and Hitler’s “Garden of Eden”  

Throughout 1942 and 1943, trains carrying Jews continued to arrive at what appeared to be a railway stopover near the village of Treblinka, in occupied Poland. It was certainly made to look like a quaint old railway station, with a clock, train schedules, a ticket window, and even a flower garden nearby. The prisoners were then ordered off the train, and filed into the well hidden area at the back, where they were gassed immediately. The extermination camp at Treblinka, where nearly 900,000 Jews were killed, was one among the many death camps set up by the Nazis in Eastern Europe. The other most infamous ones were at Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau, all in Poland. 

At the beginning of the invasion in 1941, Hitler’s forces had marched across Soviet territories with relative ease. Despite the failure to take Moscow, German forces rapidly occupied Minsk (Belarus), Kyiv and Kharkhiv (Ukraine) and laid siege to St. Petersburg in Russia. By mid-1942, the Germans had taken the Crimean peninsula, then reaching towards Rostov-on-Don in Russia and finally the city of Stalingrad (now Volgograd) situated between the Don and Volga rivers. This is as far as Hitler’s Third Reich would ever go in the east.

Inside Germany, the genocide continued, despite the war turning against the Wehrmacht. From as far as France and Netherlands in the west, to Hungary, Russia and Yugoslavia in the east, Jews were deported to the concentration camps inside the Reich. In all, around six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Hitler’s dream had been to establish a “Garden of Eden,” by colonizing the vast expanses of  Russia and Ukraine. By the time the war ended, some thirty million people had lost their lives on the eastern front.

Yalta, FDR’s weakness and the reoccupation of Eastern Europe

By February 1945, it was clear that the war was almost over, and the Germans had been defeated. Accordingly, US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Stalin and British Prime Minister Churchill met in Yalta in Crimea to decide the shape of postwar Europe. At this conference, Stalin got his way, reoccupying all the lands east of the original Molotov-Ribbentrop line and much more. Accordingly, Communist governments were established in Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic and Albania. The original Soviet zone of occupation in Poland in 1939 was absorbed into the Soviet Union itself, incorporated as western Ukraine and western Belarus. 

On the other hand, Poland was expanded into the west, by taking land from Germany. The borders of Germany were pushed westwards to the Oder river, which became the new line between Communist Poland and Eastern Germany. And for good measure, Stalin took eastern Germany as well, which he later turned into the Communist run German Democratic Republic. Roosevelt offered little resistance to Stalin’s assertiveness. The President’s health was failing at this time, and he died two months later.

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”

“The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” wrote Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Samuelson, who was dubbed as the “foremost academic economist of the 20th century” by the New York Times. The words are taken from the 1989 edition of his legendary textbook Economics, which has been translated into forty-nine languages to train generations of economic theorists since it first appeared in 1948.

However, outside of economics textbooks, the Soviet economy was a complete mess by 1989. As the economy crumbled, so did the power of the Soviet state. Communist governments collapsed all across eastern Europe; in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. Then, the constituent republics of the USSR began to revolt, among them Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet flag was removed from the Kremlin in Moscow. The USSR, and the Warsaw Pact which bound all Communist countries together, ceased to exist.

War, again…

With the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact, the reasons behind the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had also ceased to exist. But NATO continued to expand eastwards, pushing closer and closer to Russia, incorporating Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO also established levels of partnership with Georgia and Ukraine.

There are two narratives regarding what happened, which matter greatly to current events. The Russians argue that America had agreed not to expand NATO further, a promise that does appear in a speech by the Secretary General of NATO in May 1990. The Americans, on the other hand, insist that no such agreement was ever made in writing. Beyond these opposing narratives, what we do know for sure is that war is back in eastern Europe. Again.

The region between Germany and Russia is what historian Timothy Snyder has labeled as the “Bloodlands.” The centuries-long struggle between empires and contrasting worldviews in this region has sent millions of people, even hundreds of millions, to their deaths. Two world wars, and more. The world is playing with fire, again.

In his book “Bloodlands,” Snyder records a heartbreaking episode about a young girl starving during the 1930s Soviet sponsored famine in the Ukraine. When a stranger offers the little girl a piece of bread, she eats it gratefully. But having seen what happened to her entire village, the girl is under no illusions about her ultimate fate. “Now that I have eaten such wonderful things, I can die in peace,” she tells the stranger.

No war. Not again. 

Bibliography:

[1] Robert Forczyk (2014), Where the Iron Crosses grow, Crimea 1941-44

[2] Robert Forczyk (2019), Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939 

[3] Sean McMeekin (2021), Stalin’s War: A new history of World War II

[4] Jane Rogoyska (2021), Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish massacre and the search for truth

[5] Timothy D. Snyder (2012), Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin 

Why West Bengal Needs To Take Lessons From Elections in Uttar Pradesh

A lightly edited version of this article appeared on News18 here

Something must be rotten in the state of Uttar Pradesh. I bet a lot of people in Bengal must be wondering about this right now. We have already been through five phases of elections in India’s most populous state. And yet, where are the political murders? Where are the milling crowds of ruling party workers who will surround opposition villages and teach them a lesson? Where is the smell of gunpowder? And why is there no smoke rising from bombs thrown in the countryside?

We get to hear a lot about unemployment nowadays. What do the unemployed in Uttar Pradesh do all day? Do they take their elections seriously or not?

Unfortunately for me and my fellow Bengalis, the answer to all of those questions is quite distressing. They are not the weird ones, we are. Political violence during elections is not supposed to happen, nor is it common. In fact, it rarely happens anywhere else in the country. And therefore, instead of pointing fingers at other people, we need to look within and ask ourselves some hard questions. 

Incidentally, Bengal is also having a big round of civic polls right now. The ruling party is widely expected to win around 100 percent of the seats.  And perhaps even a little more than that, if possible. Leaving that aside for a moment, what matters is that these elections are happening on the usual ‘Bengal model.’ That means opposition party workers and leaders are being beaten, sometimes killed. Even journalists and polling officials are not safe. Honestly, this would have happened just as much even if we were having a clutch of college student union elections right now. Be it in the cities or in the countryside, no election is too small in Bengal.

Who can forget what happened last year during state assembly elections in West Bengal? Let alone opposition workers, the mobs even attacked police, CRPF and CISF personnel, even tried to snatch their weapons. What will happen to you once the central forces leave, the Chief Minister asked mockingly at one rally. For added effect, she even made a gesture showing the opposition begging for their lives. After the results came out, it seems ruling party workers proved that this was not just empty rhetoric. The ‘investigations’ are still going on, but we have high hopes.

Right now, Bengal is seeing a bit of stir over the death of an individual, allegedly thrown off a roof by the state police and murdered. It so happens that the deceased belonged to a certain community that is believed to have fully consolidated its votes behind the ruling party in the last elections. This means that the state government has had to take the unusual step of allowing street protests, instead of the expected brutal crackdown. Also, the deceased had links with Communist parties, which command the loyalty of large sections of the media. As a result, the media has had to do the right thing by not dehumanizing the victim. His name and face have appeared in newspapers, television channels and social media. In Bengal, at least some lives still matter. 

The state government may be on the defensive on this one. But we know this is temporary. Last year, BJP leaders had taken out a procession in Kolkata with the body of one of their candidates who had been killed in the post poll violence. How dare you do this, the Chief Minister roared. What if I told the municipal corporation to dump dead dogs outside your house, she added. In the recent case, that kind of swagger might be missing. Because of the religious identity of the victim, she does not have her usual media, intellectual and ‘fact-checker’ allies by her side. But they will return. They will justify themselves by saying that they are doing this to stop Modi and BJP. 

But there is a deeper distinction that emerges, when you compare Bengal to Uttar Pradesh. Or Bengal to almost any other state for that matter. Every election campaign will have some empty rhetoric, and some entertaining jibes at the other side. But in Uttar Pradesh, there is more than just that. The ruling BJP is contesting elections on efficient delivery of welfare schemes such as free rations, highway construction and improved law and order. They also argue that having the same party in power at the state and the center will make development work smoother. The opposition SP counters this by talking about jobs, promising to bring back a popular pension scheme for government employees, and more. This is what an election is supposed to be about.

Now let me ask you this. Could you name a single issue that came up during the elections in Bengal last year? I am not talking about “issues” such as Gujaratis taking over Bengal, with their alleged lack of appreciation for the great poets of the Bengali language. I am talking about real issues. Who is to blame for the collapse of industry in Bengal? Why is Bengal one of the poorest states in India? Who is to blame for the bad infrastructure, and the inability to attract investment? You could not possibly blame this on the BJP, which has not been in power even for a day. The TMC has already been in power for ten years. Even if they choose to distance themselves from the legacy of all the other “liberal” parties that have ruled the state in the past, they should talk about how they plan to make things better. At least in their third term!

That is when you realize what is really happening. Elections in Bengal are a blood sport. Don’t just focus on the word ‘blood.’ Also focus on the word ‘sport.’ It is only a game. The election in Bengal does not mean anything at all.

Don’t get me wrong. Ask anyone who has ever played a sport. It takes lots of hard work, dedication, and practice to beat the other team. It is fascinating to watch. Emotions run high. But ultimately, you are not actually fighting for anything. It is just entertainment.

In fact, I am not the one telling you that. The Chief Minister already told you that. Remember “khela hobe”?

That is what the election in Bengal was, a “khela.” We saw two teams facing off against each other. People gathered to watch. The stronger team wrestled its opponents to the ground. We were promised entertainment and we got that. 

Suppose I gave you two slogans side by side, both in Bengali. One is “korbo lorbo jeetbo re” (we will do it and we will win). Another is  “khela hobe” (start the game). Could you tell which slogan belongs to the TMC and which one to the Kolkata Knight Riders?

Significantly however, the TMC is not a cricket team. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP talks of  “double engine ki sarkar.” The BJP is asking voters to choose close cooperation between state and center, which they insist will lead to better development outcomes. Five years ago, the ruling SP went to campaign in Uttar Pradesh with the slogan “kaam bolta hai.” On the other hand, Mamata Banerjee only promised to defeat the opposition parties in the election, which she already did. So she has already fulfilled her campaign promise, if you can even call it one. In 2026, the TMC can go back to the voters of Bengal and promise to defeat the opposition once again. They will have a number of cricketing slogans to choose from.

After the election results in Bengal were announced, the Chief Minister declared that her “next” target would be economic development of the state. Next? It is heartbreaking to realize that economic development did not even come up as an issue during ten continuous years of her rule in the state. Also note that she said this as she was trying to pivot towards national politics. In other words, the Chief Minister knows that economic growth might not be an issue in Bengal, but people of other states will surely ask about it. Whither, Bengal?

Recently, Mamata Banerjee went to campaign in Goa, seeking to establish a bridgehead for TMC there. Incidentally, Goa is the state with the highest per capita income in India, while Bengal has one of the lowest. But, Mamata Banerjee argued, Bengal is a “strong” state. This is one of the scariest things I have ever heard.

If you follow the politics of Bengal closely, you will know that much of it is driven by a sense of superiority over people of other states. But whatever was the imaginary basis for that, it has worn thin. Our elections have hollowed out. Our intellectuals are reduced to propaganda. And the proletariat is reduced to street battles. It would make sense to become  humble, and try to follow better examples.