Her constituency overlapping with the city of Seattle, Pramila Jayapal, currently serving for a fourth term, belongs to the Democratic Party’s leadership in Congress, chairs its Progressive Caucus, and is respected across the U.S. Born in Chennai to Malayalam-speaking parents, at age 16 she moved to the U.S. Before long, she won entry into the American “parliament,” the first woman of Indian origin to do so.
In posts on X on Oct 15, Congresswoman Jayapal commented on the ongoing struggle in India to protect the right to vote:
“I am deeply concerned about the actions of the Indian government to purge 130 million from the electoral rolls. Protecting democracies everywhere is essential work, and the Indian people — like the American people — deserve free and fair elections. Nonviolent resistance movements are essential in these moments and I stand with the Indian people who are engaging in nonviolent protests to counter anti-democratic efforts in India.”
“This appears to be a similar playbook to what the Trump Administration is doing here at home to undermine voting rights in a democracy,” she added.
“Unacceptable Interference”
Annoyed by Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s comment, the Modi regime conveyed its irritation through Vinay Mohan Kwatra, India’s ambassador in Washington. He called her remarks “an unacceptable interference in India’s internal affairs.”
Must people born in India seal their lips about happenings there if they have moved elsewhere and joined the diaspora? From that diaspora, Prime Minister Modi, the BJP, and the BJP’s parent, the RSS, have always sought support. In fact the diaspora often seemed the primary focus of Modi’s international visits.
Since 2014, when he became prime minister for the first time, he has made 104 visits to 82 different countries. His interactions with people of Indian origin dominate India’s screens, large or small.
Reports that tens of millions in India have lost their right to vote have profoundly troubled the diaspora. Whether holding public office or not, they may wish to express unhappiness.
What is “unacceptable” to a regime may for others be a natural, legitimate, and necessary expression of human sentiment. Trying to foster a norm of silence when democratic rights are clipped is what should be firmly rejected.
But Some May Speak
According to ndtv.com, a widely watched pro-Modi portal in India, “More than 400 students, researchers, academics, and alumni of Indian origin [living outside India] have voiced concern over what they described as attempts to weaken India's democracy and constitutional institutions through disruptive street protests.”
Giving no names of those said to have voiced concern, this report claims that they are “linked to leading universities in 27 countries.” They are said to “have signed a joint statement titled ‘Spare India From Anarchy.’”
The signatories, we are told, are based in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries.
I don’t know whether Indian embassies and consulates have played any role in assembling these unnamed signatories. What norm holds that it’s OK for unnamed members of the diaspora to deplore protests in India, but a distinguished Congresswoman of Indian origin must not speak of the disappearance of millions of names from India’s voting lists?
Understanding Strength
It was hard not to be stirred by Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke’s remarks on Instagram on Oct 19 when he heard that the five-day detention of his CJP associates, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, had been extended by two days.
Ranka, 30, and Das, 26, had been placed in “judicial custody” on Oct 14 after being arrested for raising India’s national flag at Jantar Mantar, the historic New Delhi site designated for decades as a protest area. This was two days after the Modi government “denotified” Jantar Mantar as a protest site, meaning that protests could no longer be held there.
The CJP’s demonstrations are part of a continuing nationwide demand by opposition groups for the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, a demand linked to the alleged removal of millions of names from India’s voter rolls.
Still described by its leaders as a “pressure group” rather than a political party, the CJP, founded in the summer of this year, has sought to represent India’s Gen Z in venting grievances over the state of India’s schools, leaks of questions before entrance exams, and engineered political elections.
In his four-minute Oct 19 video, Dipke, speaking mostly in Hindi but with a few English sentences thrown in, touched on how Das and Ranka were responding to imprisonment, which had not featured in the futures the two had imagined before their present struggle began.
Saurav Das had once told him, says Dipke in the video, that he would not be able to cope with even a single day in jail. However, after five days in custody Saurav continued to smile and was not shaken on learning that his detention had been extended. This, said Dipke, was strength.
Coming across powerfully in the video, Dipke’s warmth for Das and Ranka probably descends from large goals that transmute any potential competition into a brotherly bond. But something in Dipke’s personality should also be recognized. He seems able, in his mind, to live his colleagues’ lives.
And he wishes to examine Prime Minister Modi’s doings. The video accuses Modi of hiding behind a large police force. Addressing him, Dipke says, “You may think you show strength by imprisoning Ashutosh and Saurav. They’re the age your grandsons would have been if you had grandsons. Knowing the consequences, they chose not to remain silent. It is they who’re strong.”
Pakhtun Versus Pakhtun
According to the Global Terrorism Index, in the year 2025 around seventy percent of the world’s deaths from terrorism occurred in only five countries: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Although sub-Saharan Africa was the world’s most impacted region, the country most affected was Pakistan, recording 1,139 terrorism deaths in 2025.
The Pakistani provinces bearing the brunt were Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which shares a long border with Afghanistan, and Balochistan, which adjoins both Afghanistan and Iran. Figures for the current year are not easy to locate, but the headlines we’ve been seeing month after month suggest that the two provinces may again top a melancholy list.
The profound unhappiness I feel in regards to the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or KPK as it is often termed, is connected to my visits to that province. I went there a couple of times for a biography, published in 2004, of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the lofty Pakhtun statesman, lofty in every sense, who had died in 1988 when he was almost 98.
The book was titled Nonviolent Badshah of the Pakhtuns – Badshah being a popular South Asian word for king as well as the moniker his people had given him, and Pakhtun the word in KPK for those still called Pathans in India and Pashtuns in many parts of the world.
It wasn’t just the decades for which rulers imprisoned him both before and after 1947’s British departure that had made Badshah Khan a loved hero across the Pakhtun lands, and all across South Asia. It was the way he lived his life hour after hour for almost a century. People couldn’t figure out which was stronger, his passion for his people’s dignity or his refusal to hate his people’s foes.
Badshah Khan didn’t think a miracle was needed to teach nonviolence to his Pakhtuns, but the world thought so. And the world marveled when for three historic decades, from 1920 to the end of the 1940s, Pakhtun men and women inspired and organized by him pitted nonviolent resistance against European rule and presented the world with astonishing results.
Loved by the Pakhtuns in what became Pakistan and also by the Pakhtuns of Afghanistan, where he spent years of exile because Pakistan’s rulers couldn’t abide his passion for Pakhtun autonomy, in 1988 he was buried in Jalalabad in Afghanistan during a remarkable truce to which, in his honor, all factions of what then was a bitterly divided Afghanistan quickly agreed.
His soul’s anguish today at the killings of Pakhtuns by fellow Pakhtuns must be unfathomably deep.
Badshah Khan is not the only or even the primary reason why I wish to express here a fervent longing for an end to the tragic violence between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Almost every day brings word of sudden and violent deaths of children, women and men, most of them Pakhtuns.
This longing must be agitating Pakhtuns from Pakistan and Afghanistan currently living in countries like the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, and Australia.
Stopped from Voting
The following from an article by Sevanti Ninan in Kolkata’s The Telegraph of Oct 19 speaks of successful drives by state-backed Hindu extremists to prevent a number of Muslims from voting in two bye-elections (in Rejinagar and Nandigram) in the state of West Bengal, where the BJP won power in May this year, defeating Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, which had ruled the state from 2011. In some West Bengal cities like Murshidabad, Muslims comprise a majority.
“Scroll.in’s headline from Rejinagar said it all: ‘Ground report: Muslim voters stopped, Opposition arrested, journalists blocked in Bengal bye-poll.’ ... [V]oters were inked but ‘not allowed’ to vote. A telling detail... said that a tactic the police used in Rejinagar was to block the social media pages of a number of prominent local journalists for the week leading up to the by-poll. Many of them were unblocked only after voting concluded, it said.
“AltNews was also at hand to confirm that at least a dozen Facebook pages run by local journalists from Murshidabad had been temporarily restricted — pre-censorship with a little help from Meta. Both the publishers of Murshidabad Today and Murshidabad News Time, which had lakhs of followers each on Facebook, got takedown notices from Meta, the former for specific videos about the police detaining [political] workers in late-night drives.”
France’s School Students
Thanks to vigilant, tireless Ravish Kumar and his YouTube video on the subject, a million Indians or more have learnt important facts about the protests in France by immense ranks of school students. That a great number of schools in one of our world’s richest nations function with overcrowded, fan-less classrooms and deplorable toilets, and that students from France’s better-off schools and from universities have lent support to hitherto neglected compatriots, has also come across to Ravish’s viewers. This exceptional educational feat must be saluted.
