Have Migrants Invaded Our World?

On a December night last year, 18-year-old Henry Nowak, a student of accountancy and finance at the UK’s Southampton University, was fatally stabbed. On May 28 this year, a jury in Southampton found Vickrum Digwa, 23, guilty of murdering Nowak with an 8.3-inch dagger. It also emerged that Digwa had falsely told police officers arriving on the scene that Nowak had racially taunted and assaulted him. (Evidently Digwa’s family are British Sikhs of Indian origin.)  Disregarding Nowak’s utterance that he’d been attacked and couldn’t breathe, the policemen had handcuffed him. Soon thereafter, Nowak lost consciousness and died. On June 1, a judge armed with the jury’s verdicts sentenced Digwa to 21 years in prison. 

Far-right UK politicians have charged that “genuine” Brits are being discriminated against in their own land. Nigel Farage has asked for “cold rage” from Brits. From across the Atlantic, Vice President J. D. Vance blamed Nowak's death on "the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of immigrants". Elon Musk called the police officers involved "disgusting," demanded that they be fired, and offered to fund legal action against them. 

The Nowak family have lost a son and a brother. Impressively, Henry’s father Mark has said that the family "did not want Henry's death to be used to create further division, hatred, or tension." 

We must hope that in detention Digwa will be induced toward reflection and repentance, and that he and his family will consider their responsibility towards the nation that has accommodated them. According to a story in The Hindu, the Digwa family has said in a statement, “We are deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the Nowak family has had to endure.” 

The politically tempting phrase used by Vance, “mass invasion of immigrants,” is inflammatory. It is also misleading. More often than not, population flows from one continent to another have met actual needs at both ends. If one place needed workers from anywhere, people in other places were willing to go anywhere for work. The movement of people, a personal step for everyone moving, may be inescapable for some, adventurous for others, and at times “illegal.” In totality, however, migration may be seen as the planet’s response to its needs. 

Given human nature, this movement was never frictionless and will never be. Altogether, however, it seems to have enriched all parts of our world. We could also ask: were the earth’s separate nations noticeably homogeneous, or friction-free, or anxiety-free, before these “invasions” of migrants? 

COCKROACH’S OPENING GAMBIT 

The June 6 landing in Delhi of the Cockroach Janata Party founder, Abhijeet Dipke, may be termed a successful first step for the unsettling movement it represents. 

Calculating, it would seem, that arresting Dipke would be more damaging, India’s BJP government permitted CJP protestors to gather inside a demarcated space in the capital within hours of his arrival and allowed the founder to join the rally. Subsequent taunts from some quarters that only a few thousand of CJP’s apparently 22 million internet followers showed up at the designated space ignore the courage of the said thousands of young men and women.  In joining the rally, these participants defied extreme heat as well as the risk of being marked for their dissent by India’s authorities, who keep an unfriendly eye on the words and acts of their critics. 

Expressed in improvised posters and slogans, the CJP’s demand at the rally was for the resignation by 5 p.m. that day of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Modi government’s education minister. Pradhan’s ministry presides over the nationwide tests for admission to advanced or professional courses that several million young Indians take every year. This summer, many of these millions are having to take these exams twice because test questions had leaked, or because a great many were graded for answers written by others. Suicides resulted. 

Before the June 6 rally closed, the CJP extended its deadline for Pradhan’s resignation by a week. If the new deadline is not met, the CJP promises protests across India. Will online fervor be reflected in the contemplated street protests? Is fear of the establishment’s response receding?  Or will caution override anger? Coming days may tell us. 

DILUTING THE OPPOSITION? 

Suspicious presenters on India’s courageous YouTube channels have been asking if the CJP isn’t diluting or dividing the opposition’s efforts. A few even wondered whether the CJP could be a government creation. However, the dominant trend on these channels is to welcome the CJP as a desirable and unexpected addition to India’s political scene. The CJP’s repeatedly expressed commitment to secularism, free speech, India’s constitution, and peaceful protest, and its demand that ministers should be held accountable, are being seen as strengthening the opposition to developing authoritarianism and to the unfolding project of Hindu supremacy. 

The fact that the CJP’s Delhi rally was joined by Sonam Wangchuk, a greatly respected champion from Ladakh of democracy, equal rights, education, and saving the environment, someone who quite recently paid a stiff price for demanding democratic rights, gave impetus to this positive assessment. 

THIS DECADE OF WARS 

The decade of the 2020s isn’t seeing humanity at its wisest. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Hamas surprised Israel with its attack of October 2023, and on February 28 this year the US and Israel jointly attacked Iran. Sudan’s internal war was renewed in April 2023. In May of last year, India and Pakistan, both possessing nuclear weapons, tasted a brief but dangerous neighborly war. 

The instances cited are not exhaustive. Mercifully, red lights have occasionally halted folly’s fast trains, though seldom for long enough. More unfortunate is the fact that vetoes of the “permanent five” have prevented the UN from restoring peace. Worse, in virtually none of this decade’s conflagrations have the warring parties been found willing to pause, reflect, and search for better ways of resolving their conflict. 

Peacemaking has been forgotten or rejected as an impossibility. As I type these lines, the governmental heads of western Europe’s three most powerful nations – France, Germany, and the UK – have just met in London along with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, to see how the latter could be helped more. (Russia’s Putin had rejected Zelenskyy’s offer to visit Moscow to discuss peace.) 

Putin hasn’t obtained anything like the results he expected when Russia’s invasion began more than four years ago. An incalculably heavy damage has since been inflicted on Russia and Ukraine alike. Today’s drone warfare seems to have circumvented Russia’s massive advantage in missiles and in resources such as oil. 

The future reactions of wounded Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, and of the families of dead Russian and Ukrainian soldiers (the numbers involved are immense, as the world knows), will have a major role in shaping tomorrow’s world. 

To ask about another geographical zone, how and when will Iran find safety from alien bombs and assassins? Moving westward of Iran, when will Palestinians, we must persist in asking, breathe the oxygen of liberty? When will Israelis liberate themselves from the fear that neighbors desire their extinction? When will Israel’s current leaders abandon their urge to cripple their country’s neighbors and expel them from their ancient homes? 

We must hope that the fragile attempts for a real and long-enough truce involving the US, Israel, and Iran will somehow succeed. Despite bombings, the firing of missiles, intensified Israeli attacks on Lebanon (where there is significant support for Iran), and the downing of an American helicopter, the world continues to hear expressions of hope for a truce which would allow the free passage of ships in the Strait of Hormuz and enable the US and Iran to talk to each other about their mutual complaints. 

Across the world, millions now employ AI or wrestle with it. Much efficiency is being generated. Some tasks that a couple of years ago required hours may today be done in seconds. 

Different from intelligence, wisdom asks us to guard against arrogance. It reminds us that never in human history have wounds in human hearts been healed by hatred, or by bombast, or by belief in the exceptional virtues of “my” race, “my” sect, “my” nation. 

MAMATA BANERJEE’S WOES 

Though not shocking, the spectacle of a number of legislators crossing over to the BJP from West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress (TMC) -- the party that ran this crucial state for 15 years under the leadership of an intrepid woman, Mamata Banerjee -- is certainly not pretty. After the TMC lost to the BJP in state-level elections held at the end of April, many of its MLAs as also its MPs in India’s national parliament have switched their loyalty to the BJP, whose policies they were only the other day calling undemocratic and divisive. The inducements and fears behind the sudden change need not be speculated upon. 

Enforcement agencies of the Indian state are currently targeting TMC politicians who remain loyal to Mamata Banerjee. Now 71, Ms. Banerjee has been one of India’s firmest foes of the drive to paint India’s religious minorities as inferior, unworthy, and traitorous. The drive is part, of course, of the project to turn India into an authoritarian Hindu state. 

One serious consequence of the crossover of TMC MPs is that it brings the BJP closer to its goal of a two-third majority in each house of parliament, which changing the constitution would require. Not that India’s citizens currently enjoy, to any appreciable degree, their constitutionally-assured right to speak freely, believe as one wishes, be treated as others are treated, and criticize the government of the day. Still, much-needed strength is drawn by protesters, journalists, professors, lawyers, civil servants, and judges from what the constitution promises. When those promises are diluted, dissent will become even harder and riskier than it is today. 

Federalism in India, let us remember, is both a constitutional and a practical reality. At present, opposition parties, of whom the Indian National Congress is the largest, are in power in only seven out of India’s 28 states -- four in the south (Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, and Telangana) and three in the north (Jharkhand, Punjab, and Himachal). The INC runs four of these on its own. In two other states, the Congress is a junior partner of a strong regional party. The seventh opposition-run state, Punjab, is under the Aam Aadmi Party, which opposes both the BJP and the Congress. 

RAHUL GANDHI 

The INC’s Rahul Gandhi (grandson of Indira Gandhi), who turns 56 this month, is the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha; he is also Prime Minister Modi’s, and the BJP’s, most tenacious and unafraid foe. Many forces are stacked against Rahul: the power of the state’s agencies, money-power, pressurized TV channels, vigilante groups, and more. 

However, India’s Gen Z, making up about 28 percent of the population, seems to have been put off by Modi. Unemployment and inflation levels have hurt everyone. The David-Goliath struggle on India’s ground will interest the world and matter to it.