The World Cup, a National Mourning, & More

Two spectacles on different continents have gripped our globe. One is of the World Cup contests in the US, Canada, and Mexico. The second is of the immense crowds gathering in Iran to mourn with due ceremony the death more than four months ago, from a coordinated US-Israeli attack, of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several family members. 

One round ball of synthetic leather with a diameter of under nine inches lures dozens of human feet to dance or sprint for kicking it, and maybe five billion pairs of human eyes to watch the drama. Like the audience, the cast is a mixture. Races, faces, skin colors, languages, and religions merge. Instant art is created, and thrills are remembered for a lifetime. 

At least for some moments, then, the world has come together. What hasn’t been attained by threats, diplomacy or peace talks has been secured by that round ball. 

(But what when a non-player, the president of a country, starts controlling the ball? When he gets the sporting contests’ organizer to suspend the game’s rules?)  

Only deep emotions could have unloosed the unbelievable ocean of humanity as it flooded Tehran’s streets to farewell Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and family members killed with him on February 28, when the Ayatollah’s compound was targeted and bombed: his daughter Boshra, son-in-law Mesbah Kani, daughter-in-law Zahra Haddad-Adel, and 14-month-old granddaughter Zahra. Though his wife and his son, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, sustained injuries, these two survived. 

“BOAST NOT” 

Iran’s surging millions seemed to tell the rest of us that even the world’s -- and history’s -- strongest military force cannot crush a people holding on to their values, even when the latter have profound internal differences, and even when a strongly-armed regional power works in tandem with the superpower. 

“Boast not of thy weapons, dollars, and spies, or those of thy allies.” That, too, is a sermon from Iran’s people to present and future superpowers. 

There may be inescapable truths for Iran as well. Retribution is a natural slogan, but Tehran’s rulers may need something larger for improving relations with the world and with their own people. 

*

More than six years ago, in February 2020, Indians concerned at democracy’s post-2014 decline in their land were momentarily thrilled when Justice Srinivasan Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court Court directed the police to register FIRs for hate speeches. Violence was taking place in northeast Delhi, and at last a judge was acting against the open preaching of hatred. 

The “system” immediately reacted. Not only was Justice Muralidhar transferred overnight to a neighboring court, it was ensured that he would never make it to India’s Supreme Court, which, given his record and abilities, had seemed the judge’s inevitable destination. 

India’s loss has been the world’s gain, for in November 2025 Justice Muralidhar was asked to chair theUN’s investigative commission inquiring into alleged human rights abuses and violations in occupied Palestinian territories. 

Reports of this UN commission, where a judge from Zambia and a former human rights commissioner from Australia sit alongside Justice Muralidhar, have pointed to the unbearably hurtful state of affairs that continues in Gaza. Some of the commission’s findings are described by Justice Muralidhar in this video, where Amit Baruah of The Hindu interviews him. 

We learn from Justice Muralidhar, who provides names and dates, that the elimination of Palestinian children is a policy urged in those precise words by prominent Israelis, and that weaponless children scraping for food in Gaza have been shot from behind in cold blood. 

LEFT OUT 

While pointing out that many Israelis are horrified by exhortations for the death of children, Justice Muralidhar also reminds us that the current US-Iran “agreement” is not merely fragile and limited; not only is it silent about Gaza’s ongoing tragedy; Palestine and its territories are wholly excluded from the agreement’s ambit. While Lebanon, thankfully, is named, Palestine is left out. 

According to the judge, the UN commission he chairs has repeatedly asked the Israeli government to dispute or correct its findings. There has been no response. 

Is there an adequate name for a policy of wiping out a people, a territory, a history? For preventing the birth of their children? 

*

Misdeeds at the Ayodhya Temple have become a big issue in India. All of India knows of the scam and its large size. Many are appalled that greed and theft have invaded the Ram Temple. Even large, pro-regime TV channels, termed Lapdog Media by pro-democracy critics, feel obliged to discuss it. “Where are the silver bricks we gave?” “How could a piece of land multiply its value in minutes?” Such questions are being asked and widely quoted. 

Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 ride to power was greatly aided by a campaign to build this temple on the site where a 16th century mosque had stood until a mob demolished it in December 1992. In 2019, it was Modi who formed the body which would construct the Ram Temple and who selected the body’s executives. In August 2020, Modi laid the foundation stone. In January 2024, he inaugurated the temple. The trust managing the temple was once more largely nominated by him. 

Questions about the temple are therefore questions about Modi too. How will he navigate the scam? On July 6, Champat Rai Bansal, the trust’s general secretary, in effect its CEO, resigned. Another trustee, Anil Mishra, named by many for culpability but, like Bansal, not formally charged, has also resigned. 

After several weeks’ complete silence, Modi seems to have permitted a local leader of the Ayodhya region, the former BJP MP Vinay Katiyar, to quote him as having asked Katiyar, in a 1:45 a.m. phone conversation, “What should be done?” 

After playing a conspicuous role in the anti-mosque agitation, and after founding the Bajrang Dal, a militant body of Hindu street-fighters with branches in most parts of India, Katiyar, now 71, has confined himself to the wings of India’s politics. Perhaps he will now become part of Modi’s response to the scam. 

Most current members of the temple trust have been associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), which was founded in 1964 at the RSS’s behest. The RSS had a hand in founding the BJP as well. Sponsored by the VHP, Katiyar’s Bajrang Dal too has a clear RSS link. 

POWER STRUGGLE? 

Some perceive, I don’t know how correctly, an ongoing power struggle between the RSS and the BJP, in which the latter, controlled by Prime Minister Modi and his close colleague, Home Minister Amit Shah, is said to have the upper hand at this time. 

On July 3, almost a month after the scam became public, the RSS’s influential general secretary, Karnataka-born Dattatreya Hosabele, said via Instagram that thefts at the temple had deeply hurt devotees of Ram and all of Hindu society. Expressing confidence that the temple trust would restore credibility and transparency, Hosabele called upon all Hindus to show patience and restraint and thwart “conspiracies by anti-Hindu forces to malign Hindus and Hinduism”. 

Others may ask whether “anti-Hindu forces” need to exert themselves unduly when some of those associated with the Ram Temple seem to be doing their best to hurt the Hindu image. 

Paralleling the presumed BJP-RSS tension is the undoubted and loudly expressed resentment of traditional Hindu temple priests in Ayodhya (and elsewhere) at the control over the Ram Temple by the RSS-VHP combine. 

All the eight men arrested so far over the Ayodhya scam are seen as small fish by the opposition. Evidently one of the eight, Tinnu Yadav, was for a long time Champat Rai’s personal driver. He was also, it seems, a committed RSS worker. Going forward, the careful exclusion of the Ram Temple trust from India’s Right to Information Act is bound to be underlined and challenged by the opposition.

*

The Cockroach Janata Party’s protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar continues. It has drawn the public backing of MPs from several opposition parties who’ve spoken forcefully from the young protesters’ makeshift dais. The Cockroaches’ staunchest supporter, Ladakh’s distinguished educator and environmentalist, Sonam Wangchuk, who has been on a hunger-strike from June 28, lies on that platform, providing precious psychological strength. 

The Indian Expressof July 6 carries the following thoughtful words, pertinent for change-makers anywhere, from Amulya Dhawan, student at Ashoka University, now volunteering at Jantar Mantar as the CJP’s media coordinator: 

“When [a] movement reveals its internal ruptures, it is not failing to transcend the society that made it. It is rendering that society legible. The social and political cleavages in the room are reflections of those outside it, which need to be brought to the surface and resolved. 

“A movement that presented itself as already pure would be repeating the oldest lie in Indian public life, that emancipation can be declared from inside structures one has not yet worked through. The cockroaches refuse that lie. Theirs is a reflexive politics still forming, one that takes its own compromised formation as the first thing to be reckoned with. They stay in the argument, on exclusion, on who gets spoken over, on what representation actually requires, because this... act of working-through is at the fundamental core of reform.” 

VILIFYING A JUDGE 

In the early 1400s, a local Muslim ruler in central India, Sultan Hoshang Shah, built a fortress on a bank of the river Narmada. The town around it was named Hoshangabad. The word survived for about 600 years. In 2022, disliking what was seen as a “Muslim” name, India’s BJP rulers renamed the city. It is now known as Narmadapuram. 

Also in 2022, a cattle transporter named Nazeer Ahmad was lynched in the area. Two of Ahmad’s companions, Sheikh Lala and Sheikh Mushtaq, were also assaulted but they survived. On June 12 this year, a judge in Narmadapuram, Tabassum Khan, sentenced seven men to life imprisonment for crimes of murder, armed rioting, and attempt to murder. 

The judge has since been receiving threats. She should be “driven out of the country” was one call. Covering the story, the courageous portal The Wire also quotes a healthy statement by the Supreme Court Advocates on Record Association “unequivocally condemning” the intimidation and vilification of Judge Tabassum Khan. The SCAORA statement points out that the correct way of challenging any judgment is by filing an appeal, not by threatening or maligning the judge. 

Fortunately the Madhya Pradesh High Court seems to have directed the state’s police to protect Judge Tabassum Khan.