India’s improved mood, with people speaking more freely, newspapers a little less fearful, judges a little bolder, and opposition parties more resolute, hasn’t gone away.
On Sept. 29, the country’s Supreme Court said, in response to a senior advocate’s plea, that it would take up next week the functioning of India’s Election Commission (EC), which seems to have lost the trust of much of the Indian public.
When, on Sept. 23, The Indian Express boldly published the deeply troubling results of its painstaking investigation of the EC’s decisions, the public’s fears, and the opposition’s charges, appeared confirmed. Countrywide demonstrations since have called for the resignation and arrest of the EC’s chief, Gyanesh Kumar, 62, a former civil servant who in earlier bureaucratic roles had worked closely with someone seen as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's most trusted colleague, Home Minister Amit Shah.
In 2023, a brazen amendment pushed through by the Modi government substituted the home minister for the chief justice of India on a three-member panel that appoints EC members — the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are the other two. At one stroke, the autonomous body lost its independence.
Another Hit
The EC’s image took another hit on Sept. 27 when the former chief secretary of Kerala state, Jiji Thomson, alleged that in the year 2016 Kumar, a fellow official at the time, had asked if he, Thomson, would be interested in contesting the 2019 Lok Sabha election as a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate from a Kerala constituency.
“I was serving as the Kerala chief secretary then. We were together on a flight. He was waxing eloquent about Prime Minister Modi and openly asked me if I was interested in contesting as a BJP candidate... He was very persuasive, I declined it promptly,” said Thomson.
Opposition attacks have increasingly focused on deletions and additions of millions of names on India’s electoral rolls. That the changes have been arbitrary and designed to favor the BJP is the charge. “Earlier the people chose the government. Now the government chooses electors.” The accusation is finding acceptance.
The Congress Party, other opposition parties, and the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) have all promised mass agitations if Kumar does not resign. Abhijit Dipke, the CJP founder, said his organization will commence its protest on Gandhi’s birthday, Oct. 2, from Mumbai. Will Modi and Shah concede? Or order a harsh crackdown? India is entering a tense phase.
“Welcome to the U.S.”
Reports speak of the U.S. welcoming white Afrikaners from South Africa. CBS News said: “The Trump administration is planning to welcome up to 17,500 additional White Afrikaners from South Africa as refugees over the next 12 months, according to a notice sent to Congress on Sept. 22.”
“While the second Trump administration has effectively shut down the U.S. refugee resettlement program for most people fleeing persecution and violence around the world, it has made an exemption for Afrikaners, resettling thousands of them over the past year and a half,” CBS News said, adding, “Trump administration officials have portrayed Afrikaners as victims of racial oppression in post-apartheid South Africa. The South African government has consistently denied persecuting the ethnic minority.”
Evidently Trump’s State Department, headed by Marco Rubio, has conveyed to Congress its view that South Africa’s Afrikaners face (1) seizure of agricultural property without compensation, (2) denial of equal opportunity in employment, education and business, and (3) hateful rhetoric fueling disproportionate violence.
CBS News added: “Mr. Trump has alleged that Afrikaners face a ‘genocide’ in South Africa. In a tense Oval Office meeting last year, he confronted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on the claims, showing him a video that spotlighted murders of farmers in the country. Those claims have been strongly disputed. A ‘60 Minutes’ report earlier this year featured Afrikaners who rejected the notion that White people are facing a ‘genocide’ and said murders on farms were linked to a broader crime problem in South Africa that harms members of all races.”
According to the website GA (standing for “Good Authority”), which a team of American academics brings out, Roelf Meyer, South Africa’s new ambassador to the U.S. (a white Afrikaner appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa) is focusing on sports and trade, avoiding political disputes. Ramaphosa and Meyer, who is 79, have apparently known each other from the successful negotiations of 1993, when the former represented Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress and the latter the last white government of South Africa.
James Lawson’s Exceptional Life
On Sept. 22, an illustrious panel discussed my new book, James Lawson: Teacher of Satyagraha, making me feel fortunate and also thankful to the online conversation’s organizer, Dr. Veena Howard of California State University, Fresno, who knew well the late Rev. Lawson (1928-2024). Howard is a philosophy professor holding an endowed chair at Fresno in Jain and Hindu Dharma and the director of her university’s M. K. Gandhi Center.
The panelists she had assembled were Father John Dear, the Catholic priest and prolific author famed for his unrelenting opposition to war; Dennis Dickerson, Emeritus Professor of History at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where Lawson had organized a historic satyagraha or nonviolent direct action, and where Dickerson occupied the Lawson Chair named after the activist it had expelled in 1960; and Michael Eze, professor at Fresno’s Africana Studies department, who hails from Nigeria. As the book’s author, I joined the discussion, which attracted a splendid group of attendees.
Two days later, on Sept. 24, I interacted online with students and faculty of two institutions (University of Texas and Texas State University) in Austin, Texas, after talking to them on “Liberty, Equality, and Our World’s Recent History.” This coming Friday, which is Gandhi Jayanti, I am scheduled to speak online on my Lawson biography in the “Book Talk” series of the Center for South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I taught for many years. To repeat, I feel fortunate.
During the Texas event, which was conducted by the South Asia Institute of UT Austin, I brought up the ancient Indian insight, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, which translates as “The world is one family,” while also noting that the grand dictum did not prevent the inhuman practice, for centuries, of untouchability.
Puzzling Irony
The participation of students with a Pakistani background in this Texan interaction gladdened me. One Pakistani-origin student recalled that her grandparents were from India, from Uttar Pradesh — and reminded me afresh of a puzzling irony.
People from dozens of distinct backgrounds can meet one another in the U.S. without passports and visas and without needing to travel. Yet this mingling, so easy to achieve, takes place on too tiny a scale. Why doesn’t it happen more often or in a sustained manner? Why don’t U.S. residents of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afghan, Nepali, Bhutanese, Sri Lankan and Maldivian origin (all of them South Asians) meet one another more regularly and more purposefully than they do?
Why aren’t we learning more from one another? If we want to, we can even make common resolves for putting aside old quarrels. Similar bridge-restoring possibilities exist in Canada, in different parts of Europe, in Australia and elsewhere. But very little advantage has been taken.
Listening, in the first interaction, to stimulating comments from Eze, the Nigeria-origin professor at California State, had underscored an old conviction of mine: our world is losing out because people from Nigeria and India, the most populous countries of Africa and Asia, talk very little to one another.
Although around a hundred thousand people from India may currently be living in Nigeria (a few have married Nigerians), and although several thousand Nigerian students currently study in different cities of India, we don’t see a common Indo-Nigerian platform where music, stories, movies and histories are exchanged and exciting new creations emerge.
Better Late Than Never
One thing I did after listening to Eze was to tap the net for something written by Wole Soyinka, winner in 1986 of the literature Nobel, who is 92 now. I found Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth and was gripped by the eerie suspense of its opening pages. Of course I should have years ago read a Soyinka play, novel or poem. Better late than never.
When I googled “Nigerian students in India” and came across the following lines from a 2016 story, I felt sadness and shame:
“New Delhi/Greater Noida, India – After a year in India, Zaharaddeen Muhammed, 27, knows enough Hindi to understand what bander means. Monkey.
“But it isn’t even the daily derogatory comments that make him doubt his decision to swap his university in Nigeria for a two-year master’s degree programme in chemistry [at a university just east of Delhi.] Nor is it the questions about personal hygiene, the unsolicited touching of his hair or the endless staring. It is his failure to interact with Indian people on a deeper level.”
“‘People often look at me as if I am different, and hard to be trusted,’ the tall, softly spoken student explains. ‘I try to be friendly. I speak Hindi and always laugh. But when I offer biscuits to the neighbours’ children, they don’t accept.’
“After a year, one of Zaharaddeen‘s biggest wishes remains unfulfilled: to be invited to an Indian wedding. ‘I am a big fan of Bollywood,’ he explains about why he wanted to come to India. ‘I did not come for the school because there are enough good universities back home. But I wanted to learn about this other culture and interact with the people here.’
“While he speaks with his Indian classmates at the university, a 75-acre campus accommodating students from more than 20 countries, and some of them also showed up for an international cultural event he helped to organize, none of these encounters lead to friendships.
“‘I have never been at an Indian person’s home, as a friend. No one has visited me,’ Zaharaddeen says.”
Atithi Devo Bhava, meaning the guest is like a god, is another ancient Indian aphorism. I don’t quite know how a god should be treated, but respectfully inviting to one’s home in India a Nigerian student, or any foreign student, would violate no social norm. No one will be upset, healthy curiosity will be aroused, and a friendship might begin that opens a door to wonderful outcomes.
Books Weeded Out
Over two million books have been scanned in Jammu and Kashmir as part of a large crackdown on books and literature with “objectionable and anti-national content”. The government said that after an extensive audit, 4,767 books have been weeded out from libraries and public institutions. The records were placed before the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly in response to a question by an independent member of the Legislative Assembly, Sheikh Khursheed Ahmad.
According to the Higher Education Department of the J&K government, which was turned in 2019 from a state into a union territory, a whopping 2,181,582 books and publications have been scrutinized so far.
Kashmir’s chief cleric, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, has called this withdrawal, for supposed objectionable content, of over 4,700 books by the government “disturbing and unfortunate,” and asked for the titles of the removed books and the reasons for their removal to be made public.
