If you haven’t already please try to also follow non-journalist accounts in Gaza - there is so much suffering that perhaps does not rise to the level of news and so much resilience, patience and perspective on it.

A thread to start you off : Omar Hammad - a tailor and a film critic, who is deeply generous with his time and also has an excellent analytical mind:

https://twitter.com/omarhamadd/status/1861460362811580837

The entire women’s safety discourse since 2012 has been highjacked by the right wing “love jihad” conspiracy theory- legislation, media attention and executive action has all focussed on targeting Muslim men in relationships with Hindu women.

+ Even in violent crime and rape, the cases to receive maximum outrage in the media have been where the perpetrator is Muslim, thereby furthering the theory that majoritarian violence is a solution for women’s safety.

+

I was travelling in Northern Ireland once and a taxi driver was explaining how English imposition for them meant that him and his wife never learnt to speak Gaelic. Which led to them feeling utterly alienated from their own culture, poetry and writing.

+ He said he only felt better after his children went to university and learnt the language. For his mother, watching her grandchild give a commencement address in Gaelic was one of the proudest moments of her life.

+

And 18 year old and a 21 year old got together to commit a hate crime against Muslim women. They must if guilty face the full consequences of their actions but we must also talk of a few glaring societal failures that have got us here.

+ First, the insistence that Hindu radicalisation is something that only happens in some faraway rural areas to “poor” or “uneducated” people. That somehow “educated” people and their casual daily bigotry is something entirely different.

+

Actually no - see the British occupation of Kenya and their dealings with the Mau Mau uprising - as brutal as the Nazis.

The farmers have used this successfully more recently - mass non violent action can have power but the numbers required for success are huge.

https://twitter.com/quizzicalguy/status/1478290919807799296

This idea that non violent resistance equals politely asking is a curiously common misapprehension - it takes widespread long standing non cooperation on a scale that makes an area impossible to govern

When any young person becomes radicalised you have questions - how did it happen, did their behaviour suddenly change, who did they meet, where did they find these opinions, why did they do such a thing?

Upper class urban Hindus need to look around them and ask these questions It may be family, friends, TV, online friends or a combination of factors but it’s a process - and we need to break down that process to understand it.

Forms of Hinduism have endured for centuries in part because of its amorphous character - to identify as Hindu does not usually require rigid adherence to much - communities who eat beef in Kerala and “gau rakshaks” can (and do) both identify as Hindus.

+ A part of the radicalisation agenda is anti other faiths but a part also focusses on centralising and streamlining the identity itself - central deities, central principles (anti beef) and one or two temples that are seen as more important than all others etc.

+

The one thing liberal commentators don’t seem to realise is that if demonise vocal Muslim activists, the unfounded fear generated isn’t going to push voters towards “secular” parties - it’s going to push them towards the party that first based itself on that fear - the BJP. Apart from being morally repugnant, these false equivalences are directly contributing to the broader culture of majority radicalisation - a culture you say you stand against

I’m fortunate not to have bigots in the family - never voted BJP etc and never even voted JDS once after they began allying with the BJP - but even here many people’s opinions of say a Sharjeel Imam were influenced by what liberal writers wrote about him. And this was sort of understandable because back then they weren’t following everything Imam said so they trusted the liberal voices to have an accurate informed opinion - it’s only after taking the effort to read his speeches with context that you realise…

@SidrahDP just got done with filing her FIR in the #BulliDeals matter now after many hours at the police station following a sleepless night.

She’s exhausted but asked me to share a bit of her experiences on her behalf.

Thread.

+ Since this horror surfaced, she hasn’t been able to sleep. It’s been more than 24 hours.

She’s had to leave her new year weekend with her family and has been at a police station since 11 am this morning going through the process of just documenting what has happened.

+

Anger apart, let’s spend a minute breaking down the logic here - for RS, the only acceptable Muslim is one who stays absolutely quiet and let’s Hindu controlled secular parties speak for them or sticks to lines approved by these parties.

+

https://twitter.com/rohini_sgh/status/1474236416066404352

If you take away someone’s right to speak for themselves, their voice, you’re not offering equality- all you’re offering is perhaps a less violent enforcement of second class citizenship than the BJP.

A core of liberal political ideology is equality. This is not it.

Let us be clear- a government that does not act (or does some minor face saving) against hours of calls for genocidal violence against minorities is clear that it’s voters do not require it to.

+ We often reduce our understanding of the radicalised to the people actually threatening the violence but the people who stand by, silently approve or do not condemn all contribute to this govt inaction - and therefore indirectly to the violence.

+

23 people were killed during the anti CAA protests in UP in December 2019. Every one of them was Muslim.

So yeah, let’s tone down the “all communities fought against majoritarian state I too took placard to Jantar Mantar” type arguments please?

newsclick.in/who-were-23-pe… Two people were killed in Mangalore, Karnataka - both were Muslim.

livemint.com/news/india/two…

+

One of the skills Twitter has taught me, perhaps surprisingly, is listening.

+ Many of us will find ourselves as part of an oppressor’s community from time to time- we may share a religion, a caste, social profile. And when that oppressor gets called out, it can feel personal. The instinct is to defend.

+

No one seems to take this as seriously as they should - recently Yuvraj Singh using a similar term on an Instagram comment, Ravi Ashwin used a similar slur in Tamil on one of those videos he makes.

Not sure if anything happened in any of those cases.

https://twitter.com/mehmoodpracha/status/1391724094719086593

This was Ashwin

https://twitter.com/sankul333/status/1353346361320730632

“Calling out” and “educating” are two entirely separate things that serve two entirely different purposes. Both are important, but it’s important not to mix up the two.

Thread

+ The first serves to set social boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It might make the target defensive or double down, but that’s fine. The purpose is not to convince them. It’s to show the rest of the social space that something is not acceptable.

+

Congress MLA Zameer Ahmed really schooling Tejasvi Surya here.

People, please ignore the Tharoors of the world and watch this.

https://twitter.com/afsarparveez/status/1390688294476951556

Rough translation “jaati, what jaati, you see that man there (points to a Hindu colleague of screen), we would give our lives for each other. And that man (points at a Dalit leader) I, I will give my life for him. This is our country. This is the country we have built”

+

I think Andy Mukherjee’s article last year and today’s Vir Sanghvi piece both hit a nerve with me for the same reason. They are both unashamedly convinced that the lives of their own class are the lens through which the story of India’s unfolding tragedy must be told.

+ That’s usually fine, but in this case there are two glaring issues: first, this is a class that has been the least affected (none of us are unaffected but yes, the least), and second, has been very much complicit in bringing about the systems under which we all suffer today.

+

This pandemic is not an “equaliser” by any stretch of imagination. It’s just given us, the privileged, a tiny taste of what a vast majority of this country goes through to access healthcare every single day.

+ Carrying a sick person for miles, from place to place, to find medical attention? Yes. Facilities that don’t have things like ventilators and oxygen tanks? Yes. People sharing beds in hospitals? Yes.

All of these happen to Indians everyday even without this pandemic.

+

Rishi B*gree on some Space saying that people have to look at the larger picture - Bengal has been made Congress Mukt. If not by Modi then by Mamta 😭😭😭 Oh man- now he’s saying we have all got used to PMs not campaigning so much and actually governing because the Gandhis in the UPA used to appoint efficient bureaucrats to run the country and then they did the campaigning. 😭😭😭

This man is gold.

I’ve known Mr Shanbag since I was about 3 years old. Every single book I bought in my childhood was from Premier - mostly because it was close to my dads office and we knew if we got our dad into a bookshop, it was a guaranteed new book.

+

https://twitter.com/udupendra/status/1389835918798843904

(Our mom unfortunately wised up to that routine but still...)

I mourned the loss of the shop when their lease ran out, and now Covid has taken the man.

+