We know Abraham will reign supreme. We know Abraham will pass his test. We know Abraham will prove worthy of being remembered. Everyones remembers Abraham. But how do we “know” Abraham?

We come to know Abraham in the retrospective. We first know his greatness before we know his fear and trembling. He has already won before we even know him or ever get to know him. We have already betrayed Abarahm. We laud Abraham only because we were told the ending before the beginning, his eventually success, his predetermined prevailing.

Kierkegaard writes that the narrative of Abraham as the prevailed betrays Abraham more than the logician that tries to engineer the rationality of faith. You cannot reach Abraham via dialectics, he contends. But, you cannot also reach Abraham in the retrospective, from the end.

“It is the outcome that arouses our curiosity, as with the conclusion of a book; one wants nothing of the fear, the distress, the paradox. One flirts with the outcome aesthetically; it comes as unexpectedly and yet as effortlessly as a prize in the lottery; and having heard the outcome one is improved. And yet no robber of temples hard-labouring in chains is so base a criminal as he who plunders the holy in this way, and not even Judas, who sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, is more contemptible than the person who would thus offer greatness for sale.”

There is no leap of faith in the retrospective. There is no leap of faith, no greatness when you are convinced of your chosen-ness, of your trial being a trial. Anyone could sacrifice their son if they were sure it is for a higher purpose. Kierkegaard makes a parallel of Abraham with the virgin Mary and her “trial” and anxiety.

“Was there ever in the world anyone as great as that blessed woman, the mother of God, the Virgin Mary? And yet how do people speak of her? To say she was favoured among women doesn’t make her great, and if it were not for the odd fact that those who listen can think as inhumanly as those who speak, surely every young girl would ask, why am I not favoured too?... What is left out is the distress, the fear, the paradox. No doubt the angel was a ministering spirit, but he was not an obliging one who went round to all the other young girls in Israel and said: ‘Do not despise Mary, something out of the ordinary is happening to her.’ The angel came only to Mary, and no one could understand her.”

“She needs no worldly admiration, as little as Abraham needs our tears, for she was no heroine and he no hero, but both of them became greater than that, not by any means by being relieved of the distress, the agony, and the paradox, but because of these.”

Every girl wants to be Mary. Everybody claims to understand Abraham even as a father set out to slay his son. Yet noone wants their portion of agony.

You must accompany Abraham in his journey. Abraham’s story is not the sacrifice of his much awaited dear son, it is merely the end of it. So engulfed are we in the climax that we forget Abraham took a journey of 3 days before he reached the mountain where he was meant to sacrifice Ismail. So engulfed are we in the redemption, that we forget that Abraham tried to waive off the recurrent dream as some satanic spell to avoid reckoning with his reality.

Abraham’s story is not the knife on Ismail’s neck but his journey to the mountain. His silence towards his wife, Hajar. And the making up of his mind and coming to accept the reality of what he was meant to do.

Knowing Abraham is not about knowing his victory but knowing his “fear and trembling”.

Let’s trace the journey of a man who was granted a son after many prayers, patience and trials. That in itself was the first “leap of faith” as per Kierkegaard, ie, to believe you can have a son in old age. Once you were granted your desire, it’s as if as per a cruel joke, you were meant to kill him (if we avoid the euphemism “sacrifice” for a moment) with your own hands.

How did Abraham know it was the will of God. Did he genuinely think he was being misled by Satan or was it willful ignorance to shake off what was inevitable. You and I know the outcome. Abraham didn’t. Abraham lived through days of visions, dreams, deliberations with self, doubt, silence, fear and trembling. He had no confidante. We narrate the story generations after generations in a manner of teleportation, robbing Abraham of all his anxiety. We tell Abraham that it was just a trial. Abraham saw, Abraham willed, Abraham did and Abraham prevailed. Clean linear sequence. Nowhere Abraham faltered, shivered, doubted, trembled.

“What is left out of the Abraham story is the anguish; for while I am under no obligation to money, to a son the father has the highest and most sacred of obligations. Yet anguish is a dangerous affair for the squeamish, so people forget it, notwithstanding they want to talk about Abraham”

“There were countless generations that knew the story of Abraham by heart, word for word. How many did it make sleepless?”

He did not know his son will be saved. He was about to kill his son. It is not the replacement of Ismail with the ram that makes Abraham’s story great. It is specifically everything before the replacement that makes Abraham memorable. Kierkegaard asks, “Had Abraham actually sacrificed Isaac, would that have meant he was less justified?”.

We have celebrated Abraham’s victory with him without being a companion in his anguish, without trying to be a witness to his torment. We observe him at the mountain being congratulated on his victory, we never observe him on his journey. How did he face his son on his journey? How many times did he doubt himself, the dreams? What will he tell his wife upon returning? How will he live with himself having slain his son with his own hands? What went on his mind? How many times did he consider returning home? Did he imagine himself carrying out the execution throughout the journey? How did he imagine a life post-Ismail? When was he just a father than a prophet? We have abandoned Abraham at his most defining moment and joined him only at the celebration.

But hold on, could Abraham celebrate his victory? What we imagine is rejoicement and things going back to “normal” as soon as the trial is revealed as such.

Kierkegaard imagines that such a leap of faith is bound to permanently change a regular person.

“From that day on, Abraham became old, he could not forget that God had demanded this of him. Isaac throve as before; but Abraham’s eye was darkened, he saw joy no more.”

However, for Kierkegaard, the trial continued after the cancelled sacrifice. Abraham was meant to return to normalcy. He frames the return of Ismail as itself a second act of faith, harder than the first: this is the marvel, not the sacrifice, but the return to ordinary life afterward. Most people, he argues, could make the sacrifice. Nobody could make the return.

He received Ismail back with joy, really heartfelt joy, that he needed no preparation, no time to adjust himself to finitude and its joy.

It is neither loyalty nor allegiance to Abraham to remember him in his victory, for Abraham is Abraham because of what he did precisely before and after the divinely ordained victory.

“So let us either forget all about Abraham or learn how to be horrified at the monstrous paradox which is the significance of his life.”

For him, the full movement of faith is precisely this double motion: first the infinite resignation, the total surrender, and then the return to the finite, to ordinary life, to Isaac, to dinner, to joy. Without that second movement you have not faith but tragedy.

—-

PS- The story of Abraham is Islam narrates the concerned son to be Ismail. While Christian and Jewish tradition narrate him to be Isaac. Kierkegaard follows Isaac; however, it has been modified by me for this piece to Ismail.

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KEYWORDS:Prison reform and abolition, capitalism and punishment system, racism, classism, sexism and xenophobia in punishment system, alternatives

LEVEL: BEGINNER

PRISON REFORM OR PRISON ABOLITION?

United States is one of the countries where capital punishment has yet not been abolished and a small but significant number of people are sentenced to death for what is considered specially grave crimes. Capital punishment has already been abolished in most countries. Yet few people find life without  death penalty difficult to imagine. Most people are quite surprised to hear the prison abolition movement has a long history that dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment. Most people think that prison abolition activists are not actually trying to abolish prisons but simply trying to ameliorate the condition for prisoners in prison and advocate for better rehabilitation. This shows how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families. The prison is considered natural. Davis says that during her own career as an anti prison activist, she has seen the population of US prisons increase with such rapidity that many people in Black, Latin or Native American communities now have far greater chance of going to prison than of getting a decent education. When many young people decide to join the military service in order to avoid the inevitability of a state prison, it  should cause us to wonder whether we should not try to introduce better alternatives. More than 2,000,000 people now inhabit US prison facilities and immigrant detention centres. Prisons relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease and technologies of surveillance that produced severe mental instability.  According to a recent study there were twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined. In the late 1960s there were close to 200,000 people in prison. Two decades later there were 10 times as many people in prisons. A few decades ago it would have been unbelievable to imagine that United States would lock up so many people without the public resisting against them. The reality is that we were called upon to inaugurate the 21st century by accepting the fact that 2,000,000 people, a group larger than the population of many countries, are living their lives in places like Sing Sing, Leavenworth San Quentin and Alderson federal Reformatory for women.The gravity of these numbers becomes even more apparent when we consider that the US population in general is less than 5% of the world’s total whereas more than 20% of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States. The prison has become a looming presence in the society to an extent unparalleled in our society or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time. During the 1960s, the Regan era  introduced tough on crime stances including certain imprisonment and longer sentences to keep communities free of crime. However the practice of mass incarceration during that had little or no effect on official crime rates. Larger prison populations did not lead to safer communities but rather to even larger prison populations. Each new prison spawned yet another new prison. As the US prison system expanded so did corporate involvement in construction, provision of goods and services and use of prison labor. Hence the industry of prison began to attract vast amounts of capital from the construction industry to food and health care provision, in a way that records the emergence of the military industrial complex we began to refer to a “prison industrial complex”.

Between 1980s and 1990s the number of prisons in California doubled. There are now 33 prisons, 38 camps, 16 community correctional specialties in California alone. The racial composition of this prison population is revealing: Latinos who are now in the majority,account for 35.2%, African Americans 30% white prisoners 29.2%. There are now more women in prison in the state of California than there were in the entire country in the early 1970s. In fact California can claim the largest women’s prison in the world with more than 3500 inhabitants.  A massive system of incarceration was introduced with the implicit consent of the public. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist? Why are people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? Geographer Ruth Gilmore described the expansion of prison as “a geographical solution to socio- economic problems”. She describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, labor and state capacity. California’s new prisons are sited on devalued  rural land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres . The state bought land sold by big land owners. And the state assured the small depressed towns not shadowed by prisons that the new recession-proof, non polluting industry would jumpstart local redevelopment. But neither jobs nor the more general economy revitalization promised by prisons has occurred. People wanted to believe that prisons would not only reduce crime but they would also provide jobs and stability and economic development.

People tend to think of prison as disconnected from our own lives even though its presence is accepted as an inevitable fact of life like birth and death. We think about prison as a field reserved for “others”, a place for “evil doers”, a term popularized by George W Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, criminals and evil doers are seen in the collective imagination fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues of lifting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. Prisons relieve us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of racism and increasingly global capitalism.

We live in an era of migrating corporations. In order to escape organized labor in the country and higher wage, benefits and so on, corporations roam the world in search of nations providing cheap labor pools . . This corporate migration  leaves entire communities in shambles. Huge number of people lose jobs and prospects for future jobs. Because the economic base of these communities is destroyed, education and other surviving social services are profoundly affected. This process turns the men, women and children who live in these damaged communities into perfect candidates for prison. In the meantime corporations associated with punishment industry profit from a system that manages prisons and acquire a clear stake in the continued growth of prison populations. Put simply, this is what a prison industrial complex is. Mass imprisonment generates profits as a devours social wealth and thus it trends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.

The demand for prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. “More prisons were needed because there was more crime”. Yet many scholars have demonstrated  time and again that the prison construction boom began when official crime statistics were already falling. Why was there no public outcry against the construction of such large number of prisons? Cultural critic Gina Dent says that it has to do with the way we consume media images of the prisons. Culture paints a sense of familiarity with the prison in the form of representation in films and other visual media. The prison is presented as a naturalized part of our society landscape. The history of film has always been laced with  the representation of incarceration. We also have a constant flow of Hollywood prison films, in fact a whole genre. Television programmes have become increasingly saturated with images of prisons. The long running HBO program Oz has managed to persuade many viewers that they know exactly what goes on in male maximum security prisons. The prison has become one of the most important features of our image environment.

From existing categories of prisons such as low, medium and maximum security, a new category was invented called “super maximum security prison”. The state increase its reliance on prisons to solve social problems that are actually exacerbated by mass incarceration. In 1990 a Washington based intensive project published a study of US population in prison and jail which concluded that one in four black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were among these prison numbers . Five years later, a second study revealed that this percentage had soared to almost one in three. More than one in 10 Latino men in the same age range were in jail or prison or on probation or parole. The group experiencing the greatest increase was black women whose imprisonment had increased by 78%. As public discourse has become more flexible, the emphasis is almost inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a better prison system. But as important as reforms may be,frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms helped to produce the idea that nothing lies beyond the prison. 

Debates about strategies of decarceration should be the focal point of our conversations. We should ask how to prevent the further expansion of prison populations and how to bring  the many prison people back into the “free world”.  How can we take seriously strategies of restorative justice rather than exclusively punitive justice. Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing crime and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities and especially communities of color into the juvenile system and then onto prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice where the prison no longer serves as their major  anchor.

SLAVERY, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND ABOLITIONIST PERSEPECTIVES TOWARDS PRISONS

Advocates of incarceration hope that the penitentiary would rehabilitate it’s image. Yet herein lies the paradox of the penitentiary’s internal regime that resembled that of the plantation so closely that the two were often loosely equated; how could then, the prison possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?

Within the history of United States the system of slavery immediately comes to mind. Before abolishing of slavery, antislavery abolitionists were represented in the dominant media as extremists and fanatics. When Frederick Douglass embarked on his career as an anti-slavery orator, people refused to believe that a black slave could display such intelligence. Even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people as equals. It took a long and violent civil war to legally de-establish the institution of slavery. However white supremacy continued to be embraced by vast numbers of people and became deeply inscribed in new institutions. One of these post-slavery institutions was lynching which was widely accepted for many decades thereafter. Segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed a century after the abolition of slavery. Many people who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system defined by racial equality. Slavery, lynching and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that like the prisons were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun. US chattel slavery was a  system of forced labor that relied on racist ideas and beliefs and justified the relegation of people of African descent to the legal status of property. Lynching was an extralegal institution that surrounded thousands of African American lives with the violence of reckless racist mobs. And with segregation, black people were legally declared second class citizens , for whom voting, jobs, education and housing rights were drastically curtailed. What is the relationship between these historical expressions of racism and the role of prison system today? If you’re already persuaded that racism should not be allowed to define the planet’s future, then we can successfully argue that the prisons are racist institutions. Prisons reveal congealed forms of anti black racism that operate in clandestine ways. Here we are focusing on anti black racism but the idea extends to all forms of racism and discrimination. Prisons are rarely recognized as racist but there are racialized histories that have affected the development of US punishment system. Consider the mass arrest and attention of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian or Muslim heritage in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon in World Trade Center. To answer whether prisons are racist institutions we must examine the historical links between US slavery in early penitentiary systems. The penitentiary as an institution that simultaneously punished and rehabilitated  its inhabitants, was a new system of punishment that first made its appearance in the United States around the time of American Revolution. This new system was based on the replacement of capital and corporal punishment by incarceration. Imprisonment itself was new neither in USA  nor the world but until the creation of this new institution called penitentiary, it served as a prelude to punishment. People who are to be subjected to some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison until the execution of punishment. With the penitentiary, incarceration became the punishment itself. As indicated in the designation, “penitentiary”, imprisonment was regarded as the rehabilitative and the penitentiary prison was devised to provide convicts with the conditions for reflecting on their crimes and thorough penitence for shaping their habits and even their soul. The penitentiary was generally viewed as a progressive reform. In many ways the penitentiary was a vast improvement over the many forms of capital- corporal punishment inherited from the English. However the contention that prisoners would refashion themselves if given the opportunity to reflect in solitude and silence disregarded the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and work. Some similarities noted between slavery and penitentiary prison are that both institutions subordinated their subjects to the will of others. Like certain slaves, prison inmates follow the daily routine specified by their superiors. Both institutions reduce the subject of dependence on others for the supply of basic human services such as food and shelter. Both isolated their subjects from the general population by confining them to a fixed habitat. And both frequently forced their subjects into work often for longer hours and for less compensation than free  laborerers . The prison regulations were in fact very similar to “slave codes”, the laws that deprived enslaved human beings of  virtually all rights. Both prisoners and slaves were considered to have pronounced proclivities to crime.

While free people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard  labor, such a sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already experienced by slaves. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sentencing them to penal labor would not make a difference in their condition. Thomas Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead. In United States specially race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. The new black codes prescribed a range of actions such as “vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts and the possession of firearms and insulting gestures or acts” that were criminalised only when the person charged was black. With the passage of 13th amendment to constitution, slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished however the amendment read, “except as a punishment for crime wherof the party shall have been duly convicted”. According to black codes,there were crimes defined by state law for which only black people could be convicted. Thus former slaves who had recently been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life could be legally sentenced to penal servitude.The Southern states developed a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Many black people became the prime targets of a developing “convict lease system”. The Mississippi Black Codes for example declared vagrant anyone who was guilty of theft, had run away, was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and other idle and disorderly persons”. Thus vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.

Before the 400,000 black slaves in the state were set free, 99% of prisoners in Alabama's penitentiaries were white. After abolishing and as a consequence of the shifts provoked by the institution of the black Codes within a short period of time, the overwhelming majority of Alabama's convicts were black. Earlier sending black people to prisons could have been a loss to the white masters who regarded black people as their property. After abolition, sending black people to prisons became profitable to  the prison industry. The popular perception was that South’s true criminals were its black slaves. Frederick Douglass noted South’s tendency to “impute crime to color”. When a particularly egregious crime was committed not only was the guilt assigned to a black person but white men sometimes sought to escape punishment by disguising themselves as black. In one such incident in Grainger County, Tennessee, a man who appeared to be black was shot while committing a robbery. The wounded man however was discovered to be a respectable white citizen who had colored his face black. The above example demonstrates how whiteness operates as property. According to Cheryl Harris, “the fact that white identity was possessed as property meant that rights, liberties and self identity were affirmed for white people while being denied to black people”. The racialization of crime did not wither away as the country became increasingly removed from slavery. Racial profiling exists more than ever and it is possible to be targeted by the police for no other reason than the color of ones skin. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks vast numbers of people of Middle Eastern, South Asian heritage were arrested and detained by the police agency known as INS ( immigration and naturalization services). The INS is a federal agency that claims the largest number of armed agents even more than the FBI.

The punishments associated with slavery became further incorporated into the penal system. Whipping was the most famous form of punishment during slavery, and the lash along with the chain became the very emblem of servitude for slaves and prisoners. Southern criminal justice largely became means of controlling black labor. Among the multifarious debelitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that Blacks could only labor in a certain way, the way experience had shown them to have labored in the past, in gangs subjected to constant supervision. And under the discipline of the lash. Southern whites concluded that Blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline. Scholars have pointed that in many ways convict leasing was far worse than slavery. Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves who after all represented significant investments. Convicts on the other hand were leased not as  individuals but as a group and they could be working to  death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew. For example the records of Mississippi plantations during the late 1880s indicate that the prisoners ate and slept on bare grounds without blankets or mattresses and often without clothes. They were punished for slowing, 10 lashes, “sorry planting” 5 rashes, and being light with cotton 5 lashes. Some who attempted to escape were whipped till the blood ran down their legs, others had a metal spur riveted to their feet. Convicts dropped down  from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery , gunshot wounds and shackle poisoning, that is, the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh. The convict lease system recapitulated and further extended the regimes of slavery.

Many historians have noted how black people were made into criminals.In the aftermath of emancipation, large number of black people were forced by their new social situation to steal in order to survive. It was a transformation of petty thievery into a felony that relegated substantial numbers of black people to the involuntary servitude legalized by the  13th amendment. Moreover charges of theft were frequently fabricated outright. After emancipation, the courtroom became an angry place to exact racial retribution.

Let us also see the role of the convict lease system in forging a new labor force for the South. New South capitalists were able to use the state to recruit and discipline a convict labor force and thus were able to develop their states’ resources without creating a wage labor force and without undermining planters’ control of black labor. The penal system could be used as a powerful sanction against rural blacks . Convict lease was just the deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.(Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor which was historically practiced in the Southern United States and overwhelmingly involved African-American men. Recently, a form of the practice (which draws voluntary labor from the general prison population) has been instituted in western states.[1] In the earlier forms of the practice, convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations). Convict labor was used to kickstart region’s first tentative steps towards modernity. It is extremely unsettling to think of modern industrialized urban areas of having been originally produced under the racist labor conditions of penal servitude that is often described by scholars as worse than slavery.  Many exprisoners became miners because Alabama used prison labor extensively in its coal mines. By 1888, all of Alabama's able male prisoners were leased by two major mining companies that are Tennesse Coal and Iron company and Sloss Iron  and Steel company.

There are uncanny parallels between the convict lease system in 19 century and prison privatization in the 21st. In the late 19 century coal companies wished to keep the skilled  prison laborers for as long as they could leading to denials of “short time” prison sentences. Today slightly different economic incentives have similar consequences. Corrections Corporation of America is paid per prisoner. If the supply dries up or too many prisoners are released too early, the profits are affected. Longer prison terms mean greater profits but a larger point is that the profit motive promotes the expansion of imprisonment. While the convict lease system was legally abolished, structures of exploitation have emerged in patterns of privatization and the wide ranging corporatization of punishment that has produced the prison industrial complex. 

In some states more than 1/3 of black men have been labeled felons. In Alabama, Florida, “once a criminal always a criminal”  language has resulted in the loss of status as the rights bearing citizen. One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 election of George W Bush as president. If only the black men and women who were denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record,  had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing with the awful costs of the war on terrorism.

IMPRISONMENT AND REFORM

It is ironic that the prison itself was the product of concerted efforts by reformers to create a better system of punishment. Incarceration within a penitentiary was assumed to be humane, at least far more humane than the capital and Corporal punishment inherited from England and other European countries.  Foucault writes in his study “Discipline and Punish”,a description of a 1757 execution in Paris. The man who was put to death was first posed to undergo a series of formidable tortures ordered by the court.A red hot pincer was used to burn off the flesh from his limbs and molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin and other substances were melted together and poured onto their wounds. Finally he was  drawn and quartered and his body burned and the ashes flown into the wind. Under English Common Law, conviction for sodomy led to the punishment of being burned alive and convicted heretics were also burned alive. The crime of treason by a female was punished initially under the common law by burning alive the defendant. However in the year 1780 this method was stopped and punishment became strangulation and burning of the corpse. Punishment such as stocks and pillories, whippings, brandings and amputations were common. Such punishments were designed to have its most profound effect not on the person punished but on the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence, a public spectacle.  European and American reformers later argued that instead of this public spectacle if punishments were carried out in isolation behind the walls of the prison they would cease to be revenge and would actually reform those who had broken the law.

It should also be pointed out that punishment has not always been without its gender dimensions. Women were often punished within the domestic domain and instruments of torture was sometimes imported by authorities into  the households. In 17th century Britain women whose husbands identified them as quarrelsome and unaccepting of male dominance were punished by means of a gossip’s bridal that had a headpiece with a chain attached and an iron bit that was introduced into the woman’s mouth. Although the branking of women was often linked to a public parade this contraption was sometimes hooked to a wall of the house where the punished woman remain until her husband decided to release her

Other modes of punishment that created the rise of the prisons include banishment, forced labor in galleys,  transportation and appropriation of the accused property. Imprisonment was not employed as a principle mode of punishment until the 18th century in Europe and 19th century in the United States. And European prison systems were established in Asia and Africa as an important component of colonial rule .

Incarceration itself eventually became the penalty bringing about a distinction between imprisonment as punishment and pre-trial detention or retention until the infliction of punishment. The process through which imprisonment developed into the primary mode of state inflicted punishment was  very much related to the rise of capitalism and the appearance of a new sort of ideological conditions. These new conditions reflected the rise of the bourgeoisie as the social class whose interests and aspirations furthered t new scientific, philosophcal,  cultural and popular ideas. Prisons as you know today did not make its appearance on the historical stage as the superior form of   punishment for all times. It was simply what made most sense at a particular moment in history. We should therefore question whether a system that was intimately related to a particular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during 18th and 19th centuries  can lay absolute claim on 21st century. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the individual came to be regarded to be formal bearer of  rights and liberties. The notion of individuals inalienable  rights were eventually  memoralized by the French and  American Revolution as “Liberty equality and fraternity”. Even though they were not extended to women workers, Africans and Indians. Before the acceptance of this entity of individual rights, imprisonment could not have been understood as a punishment. Banishment beyond the geographical diversity town may have made sense but not alteration of the individuals’ legal status through imposition of prison sentence. Moreover the present sentence is always computated in terms of time. We should keep in mind that this was precisely the historical period when the value of labour  began to be  calculated in terms of times and therefore compensated in other quantifiable way ie by money. The compatibility of state punishment in terms of times resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose  is the era during which penitentiary sentence  emerged as the primary form of punishment.

But convicts punished in penitentiary systems were primarily male. This reflected deeply gender-biased structural legal political and economic rights. Since women weren’t considered rights bearing individuals ,they could not be really punished by the revocation of such rights through imprisonment. This  was especially true of married women who had no standing before the law. According to English Common Law, marriages resulted in a state of “civil death” as symbolized by the wife’s assumption of the husbands name. Women were tended to be punished for revolting against domestic duties rather than for failure in her meagre  public responsibilities. The relegation of white women to domestic economies prevented them from playing a significant role in emerging commodity realm. This was especially true  since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialised as white. 

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham claimed that criminals could only internalise productive labour habits if they were under constant surveillance but the warden  would be able to see all the prisoners. Now since each individual prisoner would never be able to determine whether the warden’s gazed was focused on him, each prisoner will be compelled to act in  his work as if he were being watched at all times. This technology of internalisation designed to make surveillance and discipline the purview of individual prisoner had far reaching implications.Keep in mind that this was an era in which the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisite industrial task in the developing capitalist system. Jeremy Bentham’s ideas influenced the development of the first  National English penitentiary but the first full fledged effort to create a panopticon prison was in the United States.

Pennsylvania’s Walnut St jail was at first state penitentiary in the United States when a portion of the jail was converted in 1790 from a detention facility into an institution housing convicts whose prison sentenvces simultaneously became punishment and an occasion for penitence and reform. Walnut St’s austere regime - total isolation, single cells where prisoners lived , work, read  the Bible and supposedly reflected  came to be known as  the Pennsylvania system. This regime caused two major models of imprisonment: The Pennsylvania model that utilized isolation, silences and solitude whereas the Auburn model called for solitary cells but labor in common. This mode of prison labor which was called congregate was  supposed to unfold in total silence. Prisoners were allowed to be with each other as they work but only under conditions of silence. Because of its more efficient labor practices, Auburn eventually became the dominant model for both United States and Europe. Today African Americans Latinos are vastly overrepresented in the supermax prisons which emerged when federal autgorities began sending “dangerous” criminals to the federal prison in Marion , Illinois. In 1983, the entire prison was locked down which meant the prisoners were confined to their cells 23 hrs a day This lock doen became permanent thus furnishing the general model for  control unit in supermax prison. Today there are approximately 60 supermax security federal and state prisons located in 36 states.

Inmates in  super maximum security facilities are usually held in  single cells commonly referred to “solitary confinement”. Congregate activities with other prisoners are usually prohibited.  The prisoners cannot even be seen from an inmate’s cell, communication with other prisoners is  prohibited or difficult, visiting and telephone privileges are limited. This new generation of super maximum security facilities also rely on state of the art technology for monitoring and controlling   prisoners’ contact and movement utilizing for example video monitors, remote control electronic doors etc. These prisons represent the marriage of technological superiority and political backwardness. The justification for supermax is that the  horror it creates is the perfect complement for the horrifying personalities it holds. In other words there is no pretense that rights are respected, there is no concern for the individual.

Literature has continued to play a role in campaigns around the prison. While many prison writers  had discovered the emancipatory potential of writing on their own, relying either on the education they had received prior to the imprisonment or on their tenacious efforts at self education, others pursued their education as the direct result of the expansion of prsion educational programs during that era. Since then there has been a concerted effort at killing the prison educational programs. What social interest is  served by prisoners who remain illiterate? Who profits other than the prison establishment itself from stupid priosners. Mumia Abu Jamal has regularly produced articles on capital punishment focusing especially on its racial and class disproportions. Abu Jamal and many other prison writers have criticized the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners  as indicative of the contemporary pattern of dismantling educational programs behind bas. Creative writing courses for prisoners were soon defunded and virtually every literary journal publishing prisoners’ writing eventually collapsed. This means that precisely at the time of consolidating a significant writing culture behind bars,repressive strategies are being deployed to dissuade prisoners from educating  themselves. In the 1950s Malcolm X’s prison education was a dramatic example ofprisoners’ ability to turn their incarceration into transformative experience.He writes in his autobiography that by the time he could immerse himself in reading, months passed without him even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact up till then he “never had been so truly free in his life”. Even so ,in order to pursue his education, Malcolm had to work against the prison regime, he often hid on his cell floor long after lights out  by the blue of the corridoor taking care to turn to bed  for the two minutes during which the guard marched past his cell. The contemporary disestablishment of writing in the prison  education programs is an indicator of the official disregard today for rehabilitative strategies. In the aftermath of the 1971, prisoner rebellion in Africa and the government sponsored massacre, public opinion began to favor Prison Reform. 43 orisoners wwere killed by  the National Guard who had been ordered to retakethe prison by governor Nelson Rockefeller. The leaders of the rebellion had been very  specific about their demands.  In their  “practical demands” they expressed concerns about diet, improvement in quality of guards, more realistic rehabilitation programs and better education programs, They also wanted  religious freedom, freedom to engage in political activity and to  censorship- all of which they saw as indispensable to their education.. After the Attica rebellion, more than 500 prisoners were transferred to Greenhaven including some of the leaders who continue to press for educational programs. As a  direct result of their demands,  New York State college began to provide college level courses in 1973 and eventually stablished infrastructure for an on site 4 year college program. The program thrived for 22 years. Many of prisoners who earned their  degrees in prison went on to pursue post graduate studies after there release. In 1994, consistent with the general pattern of creating more prisons and more reppression in prisons, Congress took up the question of withdrawing college funding for inmates. In 1994 Pell Grants for prisoners  was eliminated, thus effectively defunding all higher education programs. Soon after education programs were de-established, weights and bodybuilding equipments were also removed from most US prisons.

HOW GENDER STRUCTURES THE PRISON SYSTEM

Women have often been left out of public discussions about the expansion of the US prison system. Addressing issues that are specific to women’s prisons is of vital importance but it is equally important to shape the way we think about prison system. We need to recognize that deeply gendered  character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of the larger society. Assata Shakur memoirs revealed dangerous intersections of racism, male domination, state strategies of political repression. She and her companion Zayd Shakur were targets of racial profiling and at that time she was known by the media as the  “Soul of black Liberation Army”.  In the history of New Jersey no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in male prisons under a 24 hour surveillance of her most intimate functions without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention and exercise and without the company of other woman for all the years she was in their custody. However her account  emphasizes the extent to which her experiences reflected those of other imprisoned women, specially black and Puerto Rican.Her description of strip search which focuses on the internal examination of body cavities is especially revealing. The prisoners were told to sit on the edge of the table and the nurse held their legs open and stuck a finger in their vaginas and moved it around. Some of them tried to put one from finger in rectum and another one up vagina at the same time. This exposes an everyday routine in women’s presence that verges on sexual assault

Prison regimes were based on the assumption that criminal women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors, that is, they need to become experts in domesticity specially cooking, cleaning and sewing. Of course training designed to produce better wives and mothers among middle class white women effectively produced skilled domestic servants among black and poor women. In United States women have become the fastest growing sector of the prison population.

Masculine criminality has always been deemed more “normal” than feminine criminality, hence women criminals are regarded as significantly more aberrant and far more threatening to society than their numerous male counterparts. Women continue to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such, for example women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in larger proportions than in prisons. Women are even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men which suggests that while jail and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminals while deviant women have been constructed as insane.Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.

Prior to the emergence of the penitentiary and thus of the notion of punishment as “doing time”, the use of confinement to control beggars, thieves and insane did not necessarily distinguish among these categories of deviancy. At this phase in history of punishment, prior to the American and French revolutions, the classification process through which criminality is differentiated from poverty and mental illness had not yet developed. As the discourse on criminality and the corresponding institutions to control it distinguished the “criminal” from the “insane”, the gender distinction took hold and continues to structure penal codes. Gendered as female, this category of insanity was highly sexualized. For white and affluent women this equalization tends to serve as evidence for emotional and mental disorders, but for black and poor woman it has pointed to criminality. Before abolition, black women were subject to regimes of punishment that differed significantly from those experienced by white women.They were directly and brutally disciplined for conduct considered perfectly normal in context of freedom. Slave punishment was visibly gendered, special penalties were reserved for pregnant women unable to reach the quotas that determine how long and how fast they should work. If we expand our definition of punishment and slavery we can say that cause sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted only from black women. The deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman whom he victimized. Likewise sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female deviants always have a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized. Thus white  women labeled as criminals are more closely associated with blackness than their “normal” counterparts.

We need to understand the connection between state inflicted corporal punishment and the physical assaults on women in domestic spaces. This form of bodily discipline has continued to be routinely meted out to women in the context of intimate relationships but it is rarely understood to be related to state punishments. During the 1700s, incarcerated women were placed  in male prisons  and the demand for separate women’s presence was viewed as quite radical . Incarcerated men were assumed to have forfeited their rights and liberties but it was not the same for women because they did not have these rights and liberties in the free world in the first place.Officials employed isolation, silence and hard labor to rehabilitate male prisoners but female prisoners were put through overcrowding, harsh treatment and sexual abuse. Women convicts were irrevocably “fallen women” with no possibility of salvation in contrast to male prisoners who were given the option of redemption. Male criminals were considered to be public individuals who had simply violated the social contract, whereas female criminals were seen as having transgressed fundamental moral principles of womanhood. Even the reformers of those times like Elizabeth Fry merely argued against the concept of women being denied salvation and not the concept of fallen women. The reformers called for architectural models that replaced cells with cottages and rooms in a way that was supposed to infuse domesticity into prison life. They were supposed to be given trainings in domestic life of wife and mother. Training that was designed to produce good wives and mothers in effect steered poor women into free world jobs in domestic service. Instead of turning them into skilled wives and mothers, the training made these prisoners into potential maids, cooks and washerwomen for affluent families.

However this feminised public punishment did not reach all women equally. Black and Native American women were imprisoned in reformatories and segregated from white women. They also tended to be disproportionately sentenced to male prisons and endured the cruelties of the convict lease system unmitigated by the feminization of punishment. Feminized  modes of punishment were designed ideologically to reform white women. At the same time, as  Zeidner points out, there was a tendency to send women to prison for longer terms than men due to the influence of the eugenics movement which sought to have genetically inferior women removed from social circulation for as many of the childbearing years as possible.

Within the correctional community however feminism has been influenced largely by liberal constructions of gender equality. In contrast to the 19th century reform movement which was grounded in an ideology of gender difference, late 20th century reforms  relied on a “separate but equal model”. The “separate but equal” approach often has been applied uncritically  ironically resulting in demands for more repressive conditions in order to render women facilities equal to men’s. For example Tekla Miller during the 1980s advocated a change in policies within the Michigan correctional system that would result in women prisoners being treated the same as men prisoners. This was her feminist fight for gender equality between male and female prisoners. Miller’s position was that guards should be instructed to shoot at women just as they were instructed to shoot at men. Demands for parity with men’s prisons instead of creating greater educational location and health opportunities for women prisoners often have led to more repressive conditions for women. Miller points out that she attempted to prevent a female prisoner whom she characterizes as a “murderer” serving a long term, from participating in graduation ceremony because male murderers were not given such privileges. Although Miller did not succeed in preventing the inmate from participating in the ceremony but the prisoner was made to wear leg chains and handcuffs throughout the event.This is indeed a bizarre example of feminist demands for equality within the prison system.

Another example of equality for female prisoners was when it was decided in 1996 by Alabama’s prison commissioner to establish women’s chain gangs. It was decided that women prisoners would be shackled while they cut grass, picked up trash or worked at the vegetable garden . This attempt to Institute chain gangs for women was in part of a response to lawsuits by male prisoners who charged that male chain  gangs discriminated against men by virtue of their gender.

Although guard-on-prisoner sexual abuse is not sanctioned as such, the widespread leniency with which offending officers are dealt with suggests that for women prison is a space where threat of sexualized violence that looms in the larger society is effectively sanctioned as a routine aspect of the land. Male correctional employees routinely vaginally, anally and orally rape female prisoners and sexually assaulted and abused them. Male officers not only use actual threatened physical force but also used their near total authority to provide or deny goods and privileges to female prisoners to compel them to have sex or in other cases to reward them for having done so. The criminalization of black and Latino women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them. Many female prisoners are made to go through unnecessary pelvic examinations including when they visited the doctor with routine illnesses such as colds. In an attempt to justify these examinations, prison authorities have often explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for male contact and that they therefore welcome these superfluous gynecological exams. Sexual offences are normally understood as crimes in the free society for which individual and not the state is responsible. At the same time as the state deplores “unlawful” sexual assaults by its employees, it actually uses sexual assault as a means of control. If a person does not consent to being stripped naked by the officers, force can lawfully be used to do it. 

At a November 2001 conference on women in prison held by Brisbane based organization, Sisters Inside, Amanda George described an action performed before a national gathering of correctional personnels working in women’s prisons. Several women seized control of the stage and some playing guards other playing the roles of prisoners dramatized a strip search. According to George, the gathering was so repulsed by this enactment of a  practice that occurs routinely in prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to dissociate themselves from such practices insisting that this was not what they did. Some of the guards simply cried upon watching representations of their own actions outside the prison context. What  most of them  realized is that without the uniform, without the power of the state, the strip search would be sexual assault. The many corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the prison system are also directly implicated in the institution that perpetuates violence against women.

THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

For private businesses, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes, no union organizing, no health benefits, unemployment insurance or workers’ compensations to pay. No language barriers as in foreign countries. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure and make circuit boards in limousines, water basins, lingerie for Victoria’s Secret, all at a fraction of the cost of free labor. The term prison industrial complex was introduced by activists and scholars to contest the prevailing belief that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction was being driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. The fact that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. Further several studies have shown that the persistence of racism in prison system is not unique to United States, Europe, South America or Australia. The expanding system of prisons throughout the world both relies on and further promotes structures of racism even though its proponents may adamantly maintain that it is race neutral.

The transformation of imprisoned bodies-and they are in their majority bodies of color- into sources of profit to consume and also  produce all kinds of commodities devours public funds which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing children, recreation and drug programs. Corporation producing all kinds of goods from electronical devices to hygiene products are  directly involved in the punishment business. These companies have developed major stakes in the perpetuation of  prisons. But even before the corporate ties to the punishment system became widespread, the history of US prison system has always pitted prisoners as a potential source of profit. For example they have served as valuable subjects in medical research. During the post World War II period for example, medical experimentation on captive population helped to hasten the development of the Pharmaceutical industry. Society’s marginal people were the grist for medical pharmaceutical mill and prison inmates in particular would become the raw materials. Albert Kligman known as the father of retin A, conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in holmesburg prison and in the process trained many researchers to use what were later recognized as unethical research methods. When doctor Kligman entered the aging prison he was awed by the potential it held for his research. In 1966 he recalled in a newspaper interview, “All I saw before we were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time”. By the time the experimentation program was shut down in 1974 and federal regulations prohibited the use of prisoners as subjects for academic and corporate research, numerous cosmetics and skin creams had already been tested. Some of  them had caused great harm to these subjects and could not be marketed in the original form. Johnson and Johnson, ortho pharmaceutical and Dow chemicals are only a few of the corporations that reaped material benefits from these experiments.

The massive prison building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalists system had implicitly declared to be a “human surplus”. During the same time when crime rates were declining, prison populations soared. The prison privatization trends are simply an effort to create a profitable punishment industry based on the new supply of free black male laborers in the aftermath of the civil war. Companies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw material to guarantee long-term growth. In the criminal justice field the raw material is prisoners and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. This human raw material is used for purposes of labor or for consumption of commodities provided by a rising number of corporations directly implicated in the present condition complex. It is clear that black bodies are considered dispensable within the free world but a major source of profit in the prison world. The companies have tried to take advantage of the expanding prison population and frequently provide services like financing, design, construction and ownership of the prisons. Companies court the state within and outside the United States for the purpose of obtaining prison contracts, bringing punishment and profit together in a menacing embrace. The variety of corporations making money from pistons is truly dizzying, ranging from daily soaps, to famous Amos cookies, from AT&T to healthcare providers. Private prisons are direct  sources of profit for the companies that run them but even public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit producing products and services of private corporations that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect. Hence campaigns against privatization that represent public prisons as an adequate alternative to prove private prisons can be misleading.

ABOLITIONIST ALTERNATIVES

It is time to forget about reform and talk about abolishing jails and prisons. The only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons. A decent redistribution of power and income so as to put out the hidden fire of burning envy that now flames up in crimes of property, both burglary by the poor and embezzlement by the affluent. And a decent sense of community that can support, reintegrate and truly rehabilitate those who suddenly become filled with fury and that can face them as  people who have just committed illegal acts as almost all of us have.

There are many reasons why we tend to be in disbelief at the idea of creating an entirely different and more egalitarian system of justice. Even anti death penalty campaigns tend to rely on the assumption that life imprisonment is the most rational alternative to capital punishment. The exaggerated dependence on imprisonment has led us to the assumption that it is the only alternative to death. So how can we imagine an alternative to the prison system itself?

The first step then would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system. The prison system has developed relationships with correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards, unions and legislative and court agendas. Hence in order to abolish prison we will be required to contest these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit. How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? We need to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions with the ultimate aim of removing the prisons from social and  ideological landscapes of our society. We need to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels,a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to  prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color, including the presence of armed security guards and police and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prison. Within the health care system it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jail and prisons than in mental institutions. 

To reiterate, rather than trying to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of society. It is within this context that it makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use. The war on drugs played a huge role in bringing a large number of people of color into the prison system when instead we should have community based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle their drug problems.

These are only few examples which can be used as rehabilitation measures in a justice system which can also include job and living wage programs, alternatives to  dis-established welfare programs, community based recreation and many more. We need to understand that punishment does not follow from crime in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment. But rather punishment is linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations and media representations of crime. Imprisonment is associated with racialization of those most likely to be punished. It is associated with the class and as we have seen, gender structures the punishment system as well. We need to question why criminals have been constituted as a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category “lawbreakers” is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed “criminals” since many point out almost all of us have broken the law at one point or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at one time. Thus if you’re willing to take seriously the consequences of a recent class based justice system we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because they are  black, chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor regardless of their ethnic background. They were sent to prison not because of their crimes but largely because their communities have been criminalised.

There is a growing body of literature on reshaping system of justice around strategies of reparation rather than retribution. To conclude, Angela Davis narrates the story of Amy Biehl, the white Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach California who was killed by young South African men in Cape Town. Amy was devoting a significant amount of time as a foreign student to the work of rebuilding South Africa. On August 25 , Amy was driving several black friends to their home when a crowd shouting anti white slogans confronted her and some of them stone and stabbed her to death. Four of the men were convicted of her murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. In 1997 Linda and Peter Boyle, Amy’s mother and father decided to support the Amnesty petition the men presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The four apologized to the Biehls and were released in July 1998.Two of them  later met with the Biehls. One of the convicts told them, “I know you lost the person you loved. I want you to forgive me and take me as your child”. The Biehls who had established the Amy Biehl foundation in the aftermath of their daughter’s death  asked them to work at one of the branch of the foundation. Linda Biehl when asked how she now feels about the man who killed her daughter said, “I have a lot of love for them”. After Peter Boyle died in 2002, she bought 2 plots of land for them in memory of her husband so that they could build their own homes. After the September 11 attacks the Biehls had been asked to speak at a synagogue in their community. According to Peter Biehl, “We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask why do these terrible things happen instead of simply reacting”.

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Hey everyone,

I hope you liked the book. Please drop your comments below!!

If you’d like to support me in any way or show appreciation, you can find ways to do so in my linktree which also contains other educational resources. Your voluntary support helps me to keep the newsletter free and accessible to all.

If you have any questions, please drop them below in comments.

Thankyou! <3

Hanan.

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Hey everyone,

This is a slightly different “newsletter”. This is taken from an Instagram post that I created on my bookreview page (@ibn_baatuti) about western gaze,orientalist tropes and US imperialist propaganda in the writings of Hosseini and several other authors like him. the reason why I singled out Hosseini though is not being he is the only author peddling problematic books but because he is the most popular of them all and his patronage by the White House is no secret and can be easily proven. The post however applies to several several authors.

Cover picture taken from the Pinterest of Danielle Mills.

Some reiterations:

To people who are in disbelief Hosseini peddles US imperialist propaganda, it only takes a glance through his social media to judge his politics. If that’s not enough, here’s an excerpt from Laura Bush’s statement made in 2007 at White House where Hosseini was invited. (The images are taken from my Instagram which I posted rather hurriedly so pls excuse me for the typos. )

So, in case you’re not following me on Instagram, here’s a brief chronology of events. This post was meant to broadly outline subtextual political commentaries in works of “fiction”. It blew up and was widely shared and people ended up getting defensive (although every single person from the Afghan diaspora showed support for the post and added some brilliant insights in the comments. The defense came from the non-afghans.) First off, let me say I used to be a huge fan of Hosseini as a teenager but we eventually learn that things, especially global politics isn’t as simple or black and white and how omnipresent propaganda is. This isn’t my original observation. I draw heavily from several scholars, public intellectuals, writers, journalists, gender theorists, anthropologists etc who have been speaking out this since ages. Now it is important to understand that it is impossible to squeeze all of that information in one instagram post. Or even a dozen. That is the reason I’m sending out this newsletter. If this post makes you squeamish or it’s not entirely clear or you want to read more about it, I’m listing some reads to get started on the same. Obviously there are multiple books and multiple authors talking about this but I have tried to make a short do-able list of some essential readings:

1)Orientalism by Edward Said

2) Covering Islam by Edward Said

3)Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky

4)Research paper on Embedded feminism written by Krista Hunt.

5)Do Muslim Women Need Saving? by Lila Abu Lughod

6)Politics of Piety by Saba Mahmood

7) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmud Mamdani.

8)Dozens if not more books written by Noam Chomsky on US intervention in Afghanistan and West Asia.

These are some very basic readings needed to understand the interplay of orientalism, war on terror, propaganda, neo-colonialism and authors like Khaled Hosseini . It is impossible to explain the gist of these books and several several others by renowned scholars in one instagram post.

I will be trying to do newsletters on all of these as well insha’allah so it becomes more accessible and easily understood.

-Hanan

(sorry for the low effort newsletter lol but wanted to send this out seeing the way the post blew up on my IG)

Bismillahirrahmaanirrahim

(If you’re viewing this in your email inbox, please click here to visit the site. The email clips the article.Also, reading it on the desktop/desktop site version would give a much better reading experience. )

Many people think that they do not need to care about Internet privacy because they have nothing to hide. It is a common perception that only criminals need to protect themselves .Few people know that privacy does not just affect our rights but it is a human right in itself. In fact privacy is recognized as a fundamental human right in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of human rights. Online monitoring can see what books we buy what news articles we read and even which parts of the articles are most interesting to us. We carry small tracking devices on us all the times, smartphones. Much of the monitoring that is done today is used by companies to make money. Companies that offer free services somehow convert those free services into billions of dollars of revenue. There’s also a more targeted kind of monitoring done by the government agencies, domestic or foreign. Digital communication has made it possible for governments to do bulk surveillance which means data collection from a large number of people.

Even after close to 8 years after Snowden’s revelation about bulk collection and government monitoring there are very few of us who are aware of the privacy issues and how to evade them. Snowden explained that government programs that can and do record people in their most intimate spaces are less farfetched than we might imagine.  Companies like Google have servers physically located all over the world and even an even a simple message between   partners within the same US city may first bounce off a foreign server. Since that data leaves the United States even for a nanosecond the government can collect and archive that text or email because it technically entered the United States from a foreign source at the moment when it was captured. This can be true for any country. Snowden pointed that average Americans and in fact average civilians all over the world are being caught up in a post 9/11 dragnet that was initially designed to stop foreign terrorists (hypothetically) but now spies on practically everyone.

You will be surprised to know that a lot of data collection is perfectly legal. In some cases you voluntarily give up your data such as when you fill out an online form for a school or an organization that publishes information online; you have volunteered personal information to a third party that is legally free to do with the information whatever it wishes. Chances are that some of it if  not all of their data is now online and available to companies that make it their business to collect every bit of personal information on the Internet. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse lists more than 130 companies that collect personal information about you. And then there’s data that you don’t volunteer online but is nonetheless being harvested by corporations and governments. Much of it is also legal.

The fact is that we live with the illusion of privacy. What is done with the data once it is collected? Data today sometimes collected out of context will live forever.  Even US Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer agrees that it is difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear to be relevant to some sort of investigation. Privacy is complex. It is not a one size fits all proposition. It’s not just a computer and your phone but your car, your home alarm systems, even your smart refrigerator or other potential points of access into your private life.

This is a short basic guide on how to level up your privacy and simple precautions that all of us must take, can take according to necessity.

Password protection

 Sometime in 2014 there was a huge leak of nude and nearly nude photographs of several celebrities. The event was called The Fappening. Since all the celebrities used iPhones, early speculation centered on a massive data breach affecting Apple’s icloud services and cloud storage option for iPhone users. As your physical device runs out of memory your photos, new files, music and games are installed on a server at Apple usually for a small monthly fee. Google offers a similar service for Android. Apple denied any fault on their end and said that it was a very targeted attack on usernames, passwords and security questions.One of the tools used to force into someone’s account is called Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker,EPPB, that requires that users have the target’s icloud username and password information first. Now acquiring icloud usernames and password is not a difficult task. It so happened that over the holiday weekend in 2014 someone posted a tool called ibrute on GitHub (which is an online code repository) a password hacking mechanism specifically designed for acquiring icloud credentials from just about anyone. Using ibrute and EPPB together, someone could easily download a full backup of victim’s cloud.

To protect your icloud and other online accounts or any cloud storage whether on apple or android, the first and the most simplest and obvious step is to use a strong password. There are several hacking tools such as oclhashcat that can easily crack even tough passwords but the intention of using complicated passwords is that it slows down these tools and so the attacker often moves onto an easier target leaving your account safe. You can always check the site www.haveibeenpwned.com to see if your account has been compromised in the past(funfact, mine has been subject to 4 data breaches recently :)).

(Picture of the data breaches one of email ids has gone through).

 The easiest approach to strengthen the creation of your own password is to automate the process. There are several digital password managers out there. Password managers not only store your password within a logged vault and allow one click access when you need them but they also generate new and really strong unique passwords for each site when you need them.  There is a problem though.Password managers use one master password for access and if someone happens to infect your computer with malware that steals the password database and your master password through keylogging(Keylogging is a malware that records every keystroke you make on your computer or device) it’s game over. That person will have access to all your passwords. Then another problem is that if we lose the master password you lose all your passwords. Apart from these two flaws password managers are the best and most recommended ways of choosing and managing strong and different passwords for every site. It is recommended that passwords should belong at least 25 characters which can be very difficult to remember. Using a password manager like Password Safe or Keepass that are open source is recommended. They only store data locally on your computer or whatever device you're using. However you must remember that it is perfectly possible to hack every single password. You can only delay the process of hacking and make it difficult so that the attacker gets bored or tired and moves on to a different target. When you type a password that password is put through a one way algorithm known as  hash function. A hash is a fingerprint representing a particular string of characters.In theory, one way algorithms can't be reversed. What is stored in the password database on a traditional PC, your mobile device or your cloud account is not your actual password but its hash value which is a sequence of numbers and letters representing your password. It is the password hashes, not the password themselves that are stored in the protected memory of your computers and can be obtained from a compromise of targeted systems or leaked data breaches. Once an attacker has obtained these password hashes. He can use a variety of tools like Jack the Ripper or oclhashcat to figure out your actual password.

Check out this youtube video in case you need help with figuring out password managers.

 Another lock option is visual. Since 2008 Android phones have been equipped with something called Android Lock Patterns,ALPs, that is, when nine dots appear on the screen and you can connect them in any order you want and that becomes your passcode. But  at the Passwords Con Conference in 2015, researchers reported that there were 140704 possible combinations on an ALP which are itself not too many and out of those possible patterns only a few were popularly used by almost everyone who used pattern lock. Most of these patterns were easily predictable. Hence ALPs are one of the weakest methods of protection.

Password and pins are part of security solution but we have just seen that these can be guessed. Even better than complex passwords are two factor authentication methods. What is 2 FA? When attempting to  authenticate a user, sites or applications look for at least two of three things. Typically these are something you have, something you know, and something you are. Something you have can be a magnetic stripe or chip embedded credit or debit card; something you know is often a pin or an answer to a security question. And something you are  encompasses biometrics, fingerprint scanning, facial recognition, voice recognition and so on. If this sounds like a new technology it’s not. For more than 40 years most of us have been performing 2FA without realizing it: at the ATM. When more two factors are being used to authenticate your identity it is known as multi factor authentication. If you have 2FA enabled, an attacker should not be able to access your 2FA protected accounts without having your mobile device in hand. Say you use Gmail, to verify your identity, Google will then send an SMS code of 6 digits to your phone. By subsequently inputting that code on the Gmail site, we have just verified that this computer and that cell phone number are connected (had your  computer been hacked, the person wouldn't have your cell phone number and the 2FA SMS). To enable 2FA, download Google Authenticator app from Google play or iTunes App Store which will generate a unique access code on the app itself each time you want to visit a site that requires authentication,. This eliminates the need for the site to send the code via SMS since SMS codes are not encrypted and can be obtained by attackers.

Email services

To wonder if you’re the only one reading your email is not a paranoid concern. If user web based email service such as Gmail or Outlook 365 the answer is kind of obvious and frightening. Even if you delete an email the moment you read it on your computer or mobile phone that doesn’t necessarily erase the content. There’s still a copy of it somewhere. Webmail is cloud based, so in order to be able to access it from any device anywhere at anytime there have to be redundant copies. If you use Gmail for example, a copy of every mail sent or received through Gmail account is retained on various servers worldwide. This is also true if we use email system provided by Yahoo, Apple, Comcast, Microsoft etc. Any emails you send can be inspected at anytime by the hosting company. This practice is usually carefully spelled out in the terms of services that most of us agree to. Allegedly the scanning of emails is to filter out malware but the reality is that third parties can and do access our emails for other sinister reasons and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. In defending itself against an email scanning lawsuit in 2014, Google accidentally published information about their email scanning process in a court hearing then quickly attempted and failed to have that information redacted or removed. The information revealed that Google realized at some point that by scanning only the contents of the inbox they were missing a lot of potentially useful content. The lawsuit alleged that  Google shifted from scanning only archived emails which reside on the Google server, to scanning all emails still in transit .Some companies including Microsoft are known to secretly scan emails for their own purposes as well. One well known instance of this happened at Microsoft when it  revealed that it had scanned the inbox of a Hotmail user who was suspected of having pirated a copy of the company’s software, which turned out to be false.

Most web based email services use encryption when the email is in transit, however when some services transfer mail between Mail Transfer Agents,MTAs, they may not be using encryption, thus your messages are in the open. 

Data in transit, or data in motion, is data actively moving from one location to another such as across the internet or through a private network. Data protection in transit is the protection of this data while it’s traveling from network to network or being transferred from a local storage device to a cloud storage device – wherever data is moving, effective data protection measures for in transit data are critical as data is often considered less secure while in motion.

Data at rest is data that is not actively moving from device to device or network to network such as data stored on a hard drive, laptop, flash drive, or archived/stored in some other way. Data protection at rest aims to secure inactive data stored on any device or network. While data at rest is sometimes considered to be less vulnerable than data in transit, attackers often find data at rest a more valuable target than data in motion. The risk profile for data in transit or data at rest depends on the security measures that are in place to secure data in either state.

Protecting sensitive data both in transit and at rest is imperative for modern enterprises as attackers find increasingly innovative ways to compromise systems and steal data.

What is encryption? Encryption  is nothing but a code.Data encryption transforms data into another form, or code, so that only people with access to a secret key (formally called a decryption key) or password can read it. Encrypted data is commonly referred to as ciphertext, while unencrypted data is called plaintext. You put plaintext into an encryption algorithm from one side and from the other side comes out ciphertext which looks like complete gibberish to anyone who doesn’t have the key to it. A very simple encryption example, a Caesar cipher substitutes each letter for another one a certain number of positions away in the alphabet. If that number is 2 for example then using a Caesar cipher a becomes c, c becomes e, z becomes to b and so forth.The encryptions used for privacy purposes are much much stronger than a simple Caesar cipher and much harder to break. One thing that’s true about all forms of encryption is that they require a key which is used as a password to lock and open the encrypted message. Symmetrical encryption means that the same key is used to both lock an unlocked encrypted message. Symmetrical keys are hard to share  when two particles are unknown to each other are physically far apart. Most email encryption actually uses what's called asymmetric encryption . That means I generate 2 keys: one private key that stays on my device which I never share and a public key that I post freely on the Internet. The two keys are different yet mathematically related. Say for example you want to send your friend XYZ a secure email. You will have to find XYZ’s public key on the Internet or obtain it directly from XYZ and when sending a message to her you need to encrypt the message with her public key. This message will stay encrypted until XYZ and only XYZ uses a passphrase to unlock her private key and unlock the encrypted message. No one except XYZ who has the private key will be able to access the message. Here is a video to understand the very basics of encryption.

The most popular method of email encryption is PGP which stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It is not free it is a product of Symantec corporation but its creator Phil Zimmermann also authored an open source version called open OpenPGP which is free.OpenPGP is a non-proprietary protocol for encrypting email communication using public key cryptography. It is based on the original PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software. The OpenPGP protocol defines standard formats for encrypted messages, signatures, and certificates for exchanging public keys.(Tutorial on how to encrypt emails and generate public and private keys from one PGP tool.).  The purpose of encryption is to encode your message so that only someone with the correct key can later decoded. Both the strength of the mathematical operation and the length of the encryption key determine how easy it is for someone without a key to crack your code. Encryption algorithms in use today are public. You want that. Be afraid of encryption algorithms that are proprietary and not public. Public algorithms have been vetted for weakness meaning people have been purposely trying to break them. Whenever one of the public algorithms becomes weak or is cracked it is retired and people stop using it and stronger algorithms are developed and brought into usage. 

The keys are more or less under your control and so as you might guess their management is very important. If you generate an encryption key you and no one else will have the key stored on your device. If you let a company perform the encryption, say in the cloud, then the company might also keep the key after he or she shares it with you. The real concern is that this company may also be compelled by court order to share the key with law enforcement or a government agency with or without a warrant. It is always recommended for you and only you to own your keys.

When you encrypt a message, an email, text or a phone call, use end to end encryption. That means your message stay unreadable until it reaches its intended recipient. With end to end encryption, only you and your recipient have the keys to decode the message, not the telecommunications carrier website owner or app developer, the parties that law enforcement or government will ask to turn over your information about you. There are PGP plugins for Chrome and Firefox Internet browsers that make encryption easier. One is Mailvelop which neatly handles the public and private encryption keys of PGP. Simply type in a passphrase which will be used to generate the public and private keys. Then whenever you write  web based emails, select a recipient and if any of the recipient’s public key is available you will then have the option to send that person an encrypted message.Tutorial on how to use mailvelop.

Even if you encrypt your email messages with PGP there is still an information rich part of your message that is readable by anyone. It is your mail’s metadata. What is metadata?It is the information in the to and from fields as well as the IP address of the various servers that handle the email from origin to recipient. It also includes the subject line which can sometimes be very revealing as to the encrypted contents of the message. PGP does not encrypt the metadata. This remains in plain text whether it is visible to you yourself or not. Third parties will still be able to see the metadata of your crypted message;they’ll know that on such and such date you sent an email to someone that two days later you sent another email to that same person and so on. You’d be surprised by how much one can learn from the email path and frequency of emails alone. Metadata in most cases are much more useful than the actual contents of the email.

To become truly invisible in the digital world you will  need to do more than encrypt your messages you will have to remove your true IP address,. Your IP address is a point of connection to the Internet, your fingerprint, it can show where you are down to your physical address and what provider you use. And then you need to obscure your hardware and software. When you connect to a website online, a snapshot of the hardware and software you’re using may be collected by the site. The browser is able to tell the  website what operating system you’re using, what version of that operating system you have, and sometimes what other software you have running on your desktop at that time. 

Let us understand how IP address works.An IP address is a unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network. IP stands for "Internet Protocol," which is the set of rules governing the format of data sent via the internet or local network.

In essence, IP addresses are the identifier that allows information to be sent between devices on a network: they contain location information and make devices accessible for communication. The internet needs a way to differentiate between different computers, routers, and websites. IP addresses provide a way of doing so and form an essential part of how the internet works.

 Every time you connect to the Internet there’s an IP address associated with that connection. An IP address can reveal your location, what provider you use, and the identity of the person paying for your Internet service stop any communication whether email or not can be used to identify you based on the Internet protocol address. One way of masking your IP addresses to use what is known as proxy services so that an email appears to originate from another location. You can use a service known as an anonymous remailer which will mask your email’s IP address for you. An anonymous remailer simply changes the email address of the sender before sending the message to his intended recipient. Then recipient can respond via the reemailer.That's the simplest version. Type one and type 2 remailers do not allow you to respond to emails; they are simply one-way correspondence. Type 3 or mixedminion remailers do offer a full suite of services : responding, forwarding and encryption.

Another way to mask your IP address is to use the onion router, Tor, which is what Snowden and Poitras did. Developed by US Naval Research Laboratory in  2004 as a way for military personnels to conduct searches without exposing their physical locations, the Tor open source program has since been expanded. Tor is designed to be used by people living in harsh regimes as a way to avoid censorship of popular media services and to prevent anyone from tracking what search terms they use. Tor remains free and can be used by anyone anywhere. So how does Tor work? Usually when you go online and type the name of a site, a request goes out to that site and milliseconds later response comes back to your browser with the website page.The website knows based on the IP address who the service provider is and sometimes even where in the world you are located based on where the service provider is located. When you use Tor, the direct link between you and your target website is obscured by additional nodes and every 10 seconds the chain of nodes connecting you to whatever side you are looking at changes . The various nodes that connect you to a site are like layers of an onion. In other words if someone were to backtrack from their destination website and try to find you, they’d be unable to because the path would be constantly changing. When you use Tor, your request to open a page is not sent directly to that server but first to another node. And just to make things even more complicated that node then passes the request to another node, which finally connects to your desired website. So there’s an entry node, a node in the middle and an exit node. If I were to look at who was visiting the website I would only see the IP address and information from the exit node, the last in the chain and not the first ie your entry node. You can configure Tor so it uses exact nodes in a particular country such as Spain or even specific exit nodes perhaps in Honolulu. To use Tor, you will need the modified Firefox browser from the torproject.org. For Android operating systems Orbot is a legitimate free Tor app from Google playstore that both encrypts your traffic and obscures your IP address. On iOS devices install the onion browser from iTunes App Store. Tor also gives you access to a world of size that are not ordinarily searchable, what’s called the dark web. These are sites that don’t resolve to common names such as google.com and instead end with the .onion extension. Some of these hidden sites are illegal whereas some of them are legitimate sites maintained by people in oppressed places in the world, by journalists, activists and whistleblowers. However not all sites accept Tor traffic. For those sites that don’t accept Tor connections, you can use a proxy however you should keep it in mind that proxies are not so safe and should be avoided as far as possible.

Understanding cellular service

Cellular service used on mobile  devices is wireless and relies upon cellular towers or base stations. To maintain connectivity, cell phones continually send  tiny beacons to the tower or physically closest to them. The signal response to these beacons translates into the number of bars you have, that is, no bars = no signal. These beacons from your cell phone use what is known as International Mobile Subscriber Identity or IMSI, a unique number assigned to your SIM card. The first part of the IMSI code uniquely identifies the mobile network operator and the remaining part identifies your mobile phone to that network operator. Law enforcement has created devices that pretend to be cellular base stations. These  are designed to intercept voice and text messages. The IMSI is captured instantly in less than a second and without warning. Typically IMSI catchers are used at large rallies and protests where the law enforcement uses these to identify later who was  present at the gathering specially if those individuals were actively calling others to join in. Your mobile device connects to a series of cellular towers whenever it’s powered up. The closest tower actually handles your call, text or Internet session. As you move around your phone pings the nearest tower and if you move, the call moves from tower to tower all the while maintaining consistency. The other nearby towers are always standby so that you shouldn’t experience a drop call. So anyone looking at the logs of a specific tower would see their Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity, TMSI, of all people in the general area at any given moment whether they made calls or not. Law enforcement can and does request information from cellular carriers including the back end account identities of specific holders. Ordinarily if you look at just one cell towers log the data might only show that someone was passing through and that his or her device contacted a specific cell tower as a standby. If a call was made or a text  was exchanged, there would also be a record of that call and its duration. So how can you avoid being tracked? A burner phone seems like a reasonable option. A prepaid cell phone, perhaps one that you replace frequently avoids leaving much of a trail. Your TMSI will show up on cell tower logs then disappear. If you purchase the phone discreetly it won’t be traceable back to a subscriber account.If you are a journalist or an activist at high risk, it is advisable to invest in multiple burner phones.

Coming to Voice over Internet Protocol, it is great for any wireless device that lacks a native means of making a phone call. It’s more like surfing the Internet than making a classic phone call. VoIP is simply transmitting your voice over the Internet either using wired or wireless Internet services. The good news is that VoIP phone systems do use encryption so your communication remains confidential. The bad news is that the keys are often shared with the carriers so it is not completely end to end encrypted as apart from the communicators, the carrier or the operator also has the keys to the VoIP. Something like this also happens with Skype and Google Voice. New keys are generated whenever a call is initialized but those keys are then given over to Microsoft and Google. Fortunately there are ways to encrypt mobile VoIP from end to end. Signal, an application from Open Whisper Systems is a free open source VoIP system for mobile phones that provides  end to end encryption for both iPhone and Android. The main advantage of using Signal is that the key management is handled only between the calling parties, not through any third party. That means that in every new session new keys for encryption are generated and the only people to have the copies of the keys are the ones involved in communication. The copies of the keys are stored on the user’s devices so the law enforcement agencies have no point in requesting/threatening Signal to hand over the keys since they do not possess it. In addition to using end to end encryption, Signal also uses Perfect  Forward Secrecy, PFS. What is that? It is a system that uses slightly different encryption key for every call so that even if someone does manage to get hold of your one encrypted phone call, all the keys  to encrypt all your other calls will remain secure. All PFS keys are based on a single original key but the important thing is that if someone compromises one key, it doesn’t mean your potential adversary has access to your further communications.

Encryption

One of the earliest forms of communication, that is text technology also known as short message service or SMS has been around since 1992. Text messages are not necessarily point to point, in other words, the messages do not literally travel from phones to phones. Like an email, that message you type out on your phone is  sent unencrypted in clear to a Short Message Service Center, SMSC, part of the mobile network designed to store, forward and deliver the SMS, sometimes hours later. These text messages pass through an SMSC and the carrier where they may or may not be stored. The carriers state that they retain for only a few days but there is nothing to verify this information and there has been speculation that most mobile operators retain text messages regardless of what they tell the public. So how can you keep your text messages private? First of all, don’t use the native text messaging service that goes through your wireless carrier instead use a third party app. In general use open source and non-profit organisations because they provide the most secure software and services. In open source services there are literally thousands of eyes poring over the code and flagging anything that looks suspicious or vulnerable. When you use proprietary software you more or less have to take the vendor’s word. For example in 1990s Peter Norton  went on to create a lot of great system utilities and gave rise to the system of Norton security. One of his products called Norton discreet promised 56 bit DES encryption. DES stands for data encryptions standard. It was a big deal in those days. To give you some context today we use AES 256 bit encryption. AES stands for Advanced Encryptions Standard. Each added bit of encryption adds exponentially more encryption keys and therefore more security. DES 56 bit encryption was cracked in 1998 however it was analyzed that even though Discreet promised 56 bit key, it used only 30 bits. Meaning that any hacker or law enforcement could crack the Discreet product much more easily than advertised and so the users were only having a false sense of security. Hence it is always better to go for open source services.

The good news is that today all the popular messaging apps provide some form of encryption when sending and receiving your text, that is, they protect what’s called data in motion. The bad news is that not all the encryption being used is strong. In 2014 researchers from the security firm Praetorian found that it was possible to circumvent the encryption key used by WhatsApp and engage in a man in the middle attack, in which the attacker intercepts messages between the victim and his recipient and is able to see every message. Since then WhatsApp has been updated and started using end to end encryption. The worse news is  what happens to data that’s archived or data at rest. Most mobile text apps do not encrypt archive data either on your device or on a third party system. Apps such as  BlackBerry Messenger and Skype, all store messages without encrypting them. That means a service provider can read the content if it’s stored in the cloud.

 While looking for messaging apps you should look for one that provides end to end encryption,meaning that no third party is access to the keys. The key should exist on each device only. Telegram is one messaging app that offers such encryption and it is considered a popular alternative to WhatsApp . It runs on Android iOS and windows devices. Researchers have however found an adversary can compromise telegram servers and get access to critical data. And researchers have found it easy to retrieve encrypted telegram messages even after they have been deleted from the device. Here’s Telegram’s response to that.

Whisper and Secret may not be totally private as well. Whisper tracks its users while identities of Secret users are sometimes revealed. So now that we’ve eliminated some popular choices what remains. Plenty. When you’re on the App Store or Google play look for apps that do something called Off The Record messaging or OTR. It is a higher standard  encryption protocol used for text messages that can be found in a number of products.Your ideal text message app should also include Perfect Forward Secrecy, PFS. This implies a randomly generated session key that is designed to be resilient in the future. That means if one key is compromised it can’t be used with your future text messages.There are several apps that use both  OTR  and PFS. ChatSecure is a secure text messaging app that works on iPhones. It also encrypts the conversation log stored on the device that is the data at rest. Perhaps the best open source option is Signal from open whisper systems. Another text messaging app to consider is cryptocat .However out of these only Signal works on Android while the rest are only for iPhone users.

Browsing

 Funfact: Deleting your browser history is considered a crime in America under Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act.  To date, the legislation has hardly been invoked but in the wake of increased surveillance, prosecutors aware of its potential have started invoking it more frequently. Your browser history can provide a lot of prosecutable content to law enforcement even if it is not an outright crime. One of the easiest ways of having some privacy while browsing is to use an Incognito tab. Once you shut down the private browser window all the traces of the sites you visited will disappear from your PC or device. However even in an  Incognito mode your request for private website access still has to travel through your ISP, your Internet service provider. And your provider can intercept any information that’s sent without being encrypted. If you access the website that uses encryption then the ISP can obtain the metadata that we visit such and such site at such and such date and time.When an Internet browser connects to a website, it first determines whether there’s encryption and if there is, what kind. The protocol for web communication is known as http. When you connect to a site using encryption the protocol changes slightly and becomes https which is more secure. Keep in mind that when you’re logged into your Google, Yahoo or Microsoft account, these accounts may record the web traffic on your device to build your online behavioral profile so the companies can better target the ads for you. One way to avoid this is to always log out of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft accounts when you have finished using them.

Now coming back to private browsing it is clear that your browsing history is kept off only your concerned device. A third party can still see your interaction with a given website unless that interaction is first encrypted. To accomplish this the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a browser plugin called HTTPS Everywhere. This is a plugin for the Firefox and Chrome browsers on your traditional PC and for the Firefox browser on your Android device.  HTTPS Everywhere plugin can force HTTPS usage whenever possible even if PFS is not in use.

We already know that email metadata contains the IP address of all the servers that handle the emails on their way to you. Once again the IP address coming from your browser can identify which ISP you are using and narrow down the possible geographical areas where you might be located. In case you want to fake your location you can install a browser plugin in Firefox or Chrome, called Geolocator .This allows you to define the exact latitude and longitude you want to share and you can use anything from a famous landmark or a site in the middle of an ocean as your location and the concerned website won’t know where you really are.

Even if you’re not logged into your Microsoft, Yahoo or Google accounts, your IP address is still tied to each search engine request. One way to avoid this is to use the Google proxy startpage.com(Startpage is a Dutch search engine company that highlights privacy as its distinguishing feature. The website advertises that it allows users to obtain Google Search results while protecting users' privacy by not storing personal information or search data and removing all trackers.) or the search  engine DuckDuckGo instead. Duckduckgo is already a default option within  Firefox and safari. It has no provision for user accounts and the company says your IP address is not logged by default. And the company also maintains its own Tor exit relay , meaning that you can search DuckDuckGo while using Tor.Having HTTPS everywhere enabled on your browser would encrypt the contents of the site you are visiting assuming the site supports HTTPS but it doesn’t encrypt the URL. In fact HTTPS was never designed to conceal the identity of the sites you visit. 

91% of health related sites make requests to third parties.  These third parties use this information to target you with online advertising. On the healthcare sites analyzed in the 2015 study the top 10 third parties were Google, comScore, Facebook, appNexus, addthis, Twitter, quantcast, amazon, Adobe and Yahoo. Also mentioned in the study where the third parties Experian and Axiom which are simply data warehouses, that is, they collect as much data about a person as they possibly can. And then they sell it. Remember the security questions and creative answers in various forms and account information? Often companies like Experian Axiom collect  user security questions to build online profiles.These profiles are valuable to marketers that want to target their products to certain demographics. Often when you request for a website from your web browser the page that is returned to you may come with elements that call out to other website for additional images or scripts. Some of these scripts may be for tracking purposes. Your browser can reveal information about your computer’s configuration for example what version of word browser and operating system you’re using what add ONS you have for the browser and what other programs you’re running on your computer. It can even reveal details about your computers hardware such as the resolution of the screen and the capacity of the on board memory. Take a moment and surf over to panopticlick.com. This is a site built by Electronic Frontier Foundation that will determine just how common or unique your browser configuration is. If the numbers on the left hand side the results from the panoptic click are high say a 6 digit number then you are somewhat unique. However if your numbers are  less than 3 digits then your browser settings are fairly common. You’re just one in a few 100. And that means an attacker is most likely to target you be it with ads or malware.

Mozilla’s Firefox offers one of the best defenses against third party tracking through a plugin called Noscript. This add-on effectively blocks just about everything considered harmful to your computer and browser namely flash and JavaScript. Adding security plugins will change the look and feel of your browsing session although you can cherry pick and enable specific features or permanently trust some sites. One result of enabling noscript is that the page you will visit will have no ads and certainly no third party reference. As a result after blocking the web page looks slightly duller than the version without noscript enabled however you can customize it and enable the features that you would like to see. Similarly Chrome has Scriptblock which allows you to defensively block the user scripts on a web page.  Another useful plugin is Ghostery available for both Chrome and Firefox which identifies all the web traffic trackers that sites used to follow your activity.

Now let's say you have private browsing, noscript, HTTPS everywhere and periodically delete your browsers cookies and extraneous toolbars. You can still be tracked online. Websites are coded using something called Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. The current version is HTML5 that has enabled new tracking technologies. One of these is canvas  fingerprinting, an online tracking tools that uses their HTML5 canvas element to draw a simple image. The drawing of the image takes place within the browser and is not visible to you. The image is then converted into a unique number which is then matched to previous instances of that number seen on other websites around the Internet. And from that, the number of places that  unique number is seen, a profile of websites you visit can be built up. Canvas fingerprinting is a drive by processor, ie, it does not require you to click or do anything; simply view a web page and it can build up an online persona of you. Fortunately there are plugins for browsers that can block it. Or Firefox there’s canvas blocker. For Google Chrome there’s canvas fingerprint block.

VPN

A virtual private network VPN is a secure tunnel that extends a private network to your device on a public network. Everything you do within the VPN is protected by encryption, as all your Internet traffic is now secured over the public network. It is important to use a VPN provider you can trust because they can see your Internet traffic. If anyone tries to monitor your Internet activity they will only see that you have connected to a VPN server and nothing else, your activities in the sites you visit are completely hidden behind tough to crack encryption. However you will still touch the Internet with an IP address that is traceable directly to you. So you are still not invisible even using a VPN. Don’t forget your VPN provider knows your originating IP address.OpenVPN an opensource project includes PFS, so you might want to use products that use OpenVPN.ProtonVPN is another great alternative.

SOCIAL MEDIA

There are several other privacy considerations to take for example some cell phones share your location automatically. In such cases, even when you upload a picture on social media it’s meta data might contain the exact longitude and latitude of the place where the photo was taken. Companies such as Google and Apple also have facial recognition technology built into some of their applications.Another thing to know is that once you post something to a social network it is owned by that network and out of your hands. And you agree to this in the terms of service. If you use the popular Google Photos app, even deleting a photo there doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gone. Once the image hits the cloud it is app dependent, meaning that other apps may have access to it and may continue to display the image you deleted  for yourself. Although it may be your personal social network account, it is the social network’s data now. The terms and services often include clauses permitting the sites to store data obtained from users and even share it with third parties. For example Facebook’s terms and conditions say that it has the right to use anything you post to the site in any way it wants. It can even sell your picture, your opinions, your writing, or anything else you post making money from your contribution without paying you a penny. It can use your posted comments, criticism, opinions, and even the most personal details you have posted about your children, your boss or your lover. And it doesn’t have to do it anonymously, if you have used your real name the site can use it to. You agree to these terms and conditions once you sign up to Facebook and several other social media platforms too. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation social networks have been used for passive surveillance by federal investigations for years. In 2011 the EFF released 38 page training course for IRS employees that the foundation said was used for conducting investigations by a social network. Even Twitter’s privacy policy acknowledges that it collects and retains personal information through its various websites application, servers, APIs and other third parties. When people use Twitter services they consnet to the collection, transfer ,storage, manipulation, disclosure and other uses of this information. Snapchat  out of all social media networks is the most creepy. In 2014 snapschat agreed to a Federal Trade Commission settlement over charges that the company had deceived users about the disappearing natures of its messages, that is, the self destructive photos that disappear once the recipient has seen them. The Federal agency alleged that the photos could be saved or retrieved at a later time. Snapchat’s privacy policy also says that it does not ask or track or access any location specific information from your device at anytime but the FTC found these claims to be false as well.

HARDWARE

In talking about hardware. When you delete any file on your device it is not actually wiped from the hard drive. Wiping data is not the same as deleting data. Deleting data only changes the master boot record entry for a file, that is, the index used to find parts of the file on the hard drive. It means that the files are stored in different locations in the memory on the hard drive. When you delete it, the address of that location in the memory gets lost. So when you try to search that file it will show that the file no longer exists simply because the address of the files location is lost. This does not mean the file itself has been wiped off. You’re only deleting its address, not the actual file. The file remains on the hard drive until new data is written over that part of the hard drive. This is how digital forensic experts are able to reconstruct deleted data. Wiping on the other hand securely overwrites the data in the file with random data. File shredding software does this by overwriting random data hundreds of times in each pass over a deleted file making it hard for anyone to recover that data. Here is a list of file shredders you can check out to actually wipe a file.

Repressive governments present another challenge. And they may insist on looking at your electronic devices and even take away your devices away from you. Or your laptop or mobile may get stolen. One way to prevent someone from access is that the file on your device if they have your device is to encrypt the entire hard drive. You can use whole disk encryption to encrypt the entire contents of your hard drive. So any second person cannot do anything with your device or your hard drive unless they have the key to it. It is important to always power down your laptop if you’re not using it because if it is simply hibernating or turned on, an attacker could possibly dump the memory and obtain the encryption keys. Hard disk encryption works like this: when you boot up your computer you enter a secure password, after this the operating system boots up and you can access your files and perform your task without noticing any time delay because a driver performs the encryption task transparently and on the fly. As soon as you shut down, the encryption key is no longer available to the operating system, that is, it just removes the key from its memory so the data on the drive is no longer accessible unless someone again enters the passphrase. One good commercial option for hard drive encryption is PGP Whole Disk Encryption from Symantec. A perpetual license sells for around $200. And it may be worth investing in if you are living under repressive regimes and are a part of protests or organisations that may suffer crackdown or if you are a journalist or activist under check.  If you choose to encrypt your Android phone, you must remember that you cannot undo it.

These were some basic privacy measures that we can employ as far as possible. Hopefully, I may do an advanced part on the same.

Being anonymous in today’s digital world requires a lot of work and constant vigilance. There’s a truism in the security business that a persistent attacker will succeed given enough time and resources. All you are doing by trying to make yourself anonymous is putting up so many obstacles that an attacker will give up or they are simply not good enough to peel through the layers of anonymity. Your individual requirements for privacy will dictate the necessary steps you need to take to  maintain the desired level of anonymity. It sounds like a lot of work but building your privacy is like building a habit.Do not ignore concerns of cyber security simply because they seem tedious at first. Incorporate private measures in a step-by-step manner and do not get intimidated. After a bit of practice, it should come naturally to you. 

Stay safe and private!

~Hanan :)

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Hanan.

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The Indian ideology written by Perry Anderson is a book that ponders upon the emergent Interstate system of leading powers like India. His previous works have covered United States, China, Russia, Brazil etc. He says that in the new world countries like Turkey and India are the products of national movements of the early 20th century whose history has become the object of official versions of the past and have dominated the popular discourse. The Indian Ideology deals with not just a prevailing set of ideas but also the conditions and events that generated them.The questions addressed in the book are : the beliefs and actions of Gandhi as the central figure of the struggle for independence, the transfer of power from the Raj to Congress, partition, the ideology of Nehru, social anchorage of democracy in India and the bearing of caste on it, the place of religion in the union and the cost of unity of the nation. The principle carrier of the Indian ideology is the liberal mainstream of Indian intellectual lives which also substantially permeates to the left of this mainstream. The record of Indian communism from its late birth is certainly one replete with errors, strategic and tactical, many imposed by the Soviet party in his heyday, others unforced. Among the various errors of the Indian left, one is the passive accommodation to the myths of Indian Ideology and the crimes of the state committed in their name. If the left is to regain a stronger place in the intellectual scene a break with these is desperately needed. The left would do well to recapture some of the insolence of Ambedkar or Ramaswamy.

Independence

Indian academiques and noted personalities have always marveled over the fact that any cultural civilization should have this continuity for 5000- 6000 years or more,and how the dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization, how India is the boldest statement ever of social democracy. From Meghnad Desai to Ramachandra Guha to Pratap Bhanu Mehta to Amartya Sen, are all strong believers in the miraculous democracy of India in such a diverse and large country. All countries have fond images of themselves and big countries have bigger heads than others.  To the Idea of India, the four central tropes are the couplets of antiquity-continuity, diversity-unity, massivity- democracy, multiConfessionality- secularity. Each has in its own way become a touchstone of the Idea of India and enjoys an overlapping consensus.

According to Gandhi India was one undivided land made by nature in which we were one nation before British came to India. This has been widely accepted even by Nehru and has been propagated as a fact in independent India. The facts prove otherwise. The subcontinent has actually never formed a single political, cultural unit in premodern times. Its lands were divided in various middle sized kingdoms and even the three larger empires Maurya, Mughal  and Gupta never covered the territory of today’s India. Maurya and Mughal control extended to contemporary Afghanistan and did not go beyond Deccan and never came near Manipur. The area of Gupta control was considerably less. Beneath the changing mosaic of regional rulers there was more continuity of a social pattern: caste. The Idea of India was essentially a European, not a local invention. No such term as “India” existed in any indigenous language; it is a Greek coinage taken from river Indus and the Greeks took this in  turn from earlier Persian reference to the land. It was the British who saw this fragmented  society and with the relative ease gained control of it using one local power against the other. India’s segmented society made it easier for the British to take power as it is said, “Indian troops conquered the country for British”. For centuries after the seizure of Bengal, the Indian soldiers in East India company outnumbered British soldiers 6:1. After the mutiny of 1857, this ratio was shaken up and then it became 2:1. Wood, Secretary of State for India said, “I wish to have a different and rival spirit in different regiments so that a Sikh may fire into a Hindu, Gorkha into either, without any scruple in case of need. Then Eden Commission would subsequently explain, “As you cannot do without a large native army in India, our main object is to make that army safe and next to the grand counterpoise of a sufficient European force comes counterpoise of natives against natives; for example, that distinctiveness which is so valuable and which while it lasts makes the Mohammedan of one country despise the Mohammedan of another”. The mutineers in Delhi sought the restoration of Mughal powers and hence Muslims came to be seen as suspect by the British. There after, no all-Muslim units were ever to be allowed within the army. Recruits came from the least literate groups and no natives could become officers. The peacetime strength was around 250,000 and the Indian army was the largest employer in the Raj and absorbed a third to half of its revenue. Its services included provision for soldiers for imperial expansion in Middle East, Africa, South Asia and cannon fodder in the First World War but its primary function remained domestic intimidation. Simultaneously a large police apparatus already won 50,000 regulars by the 1880s and paraded as the forward screen of repression against resentment.

Coercion of course never sufficed so it was complemented with collaboration such that 2/5th of the territory of the Raj and 1/5th of its population were left in the hands of princes mostly Hindu, under the watchful guidance of the British residents. In the rest of the subcontinent under British rule, landlords were beneficiaries of the colonial regime. Moreover it was the official policy of the colonial regime to produce native elite educated to metropolitan standards, which were Indian in blood and color by English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect. Two generations later a layer of articulate professionals had emerged, the seedbed of Congress nationalism. The British had taken over the subcontinent with such ease because it was politically and socially so fragmented. They unified it as an administrative and ideological reality for the first time in its history. The “Idea of India” was theirs.

 Congress was founded in the 1880s for a meager demand of colonial self government. The first outbreak of radical nationalist agitation occurred by Hindu anger at Curzon’s division of Bengal two decades later. The liberal government of Britain elected in 1906 introduced a legislative machinery of the Raj allowing for 2% of Indian population to vote. The aim was to avoid any further shifting of balance and provide a vent for nationalist anger. Congress while regretting provision for separate electorates for Muslims welcomed the changes and expressed its loyalty to the emperor in 1911. Three years later it gave unstinting support to the empire in the Great War. This is when Gandhi stepped on the national movement scene, on his arrival in Bombay in  1914 after 21 years in South Africa. Within two years he had transformed Indian politics leading the first mass movement to rock British powers  since the mutiny and remaking Congress as a popular political force. He launched three mass movements in 1919 to 1921, 1930-31, 1942- 43. He was a first class organizer and fundraiser who rebuilt Congress from top to bottom, he was an excellent mediator and an exceptionally  fluent communicator which made him immediately popular.

In the  20th century, leaders of several national movements were  men of religion like the grand Mufti , archbishop Makarios, Ayatollah Khomeini, Abe but for most their faith was subordinate to their faith. Within this gallery, Gandhi is an exception; for him alone religion mattered more than politics. The first scrupulous account of Gandhi’s religious life comes from the account of Kathryn Tidrick’s, “Gandhi:A Political and Spiritual Life”. She showed that Gandhi’s faith was born of a cross between Jain inflicted Hindu orthodoxy, garbled ideas of karma, reincarnation, ascetic self perfection with western spiritualism. His aim in life was to attain moksha and to become one with God. He said, “When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen”.

In giving up desires it did not just include vegetarian prohibitions by his caste background but also in his sexual life. He mixed Christian fears of sex with Hindu phobias of pollution and looked down upon any “animal indulgence” except for perpetuating the race. Complete continence, “brahmacharya” was of such importance that an involuntary ejaculation at the age of 65 was matter for an anguished public communique and at 77 he tested himself by sleeping nude with his great niece. He wrote his fundamental beliefs in his “Swaraj” in 1909 in  which he explained that machinery represented a great sin, that railways have spread the bubonic plague and increased the frequency of famines, accentuating the evil nature of man and hospitals are institutions that were propagating sin, that a peasant needs no knowledge of letters add education would only make him discontent with his lot. He said that India will never be godless and to restore it to its pristine condition, it was imperative to drive out western civilization. Politically speaking this was in effect a call for home rule on Irish lines. He believed that Swaraj was a religious imperative and political aims were only secondary to it. The method of his struggle was passive resistance or nonviolence which he had learned from Tolstoy. Gandhi on drawing on his ideas gave them a distinctively Hindu cast and used the term “satyagraha”, that is, truth-force. Gandhi’s takeover of Congress not only made it popular but injected a massive dose of religion, mythology, symbologies, theology into the national movement. But how could the millions of Muslims be rallied in the same idiom? In South Africa Gandhi had been a staunch advocate of Hindu Muslim unity because they were bound together there by a white racism of which they were indifferent victims. But in India it was clear that one religion was more equal than the other, Hinduism was indigenous to the subcontinent.  He could not win over the Muslims on a secular basis because it went against everything he himself believed in. The solution he hit upon was to rouse Muslims to action against the Raj under the banner of Islam itself. After the Ottoman Empire fell in the First World War ,Gandhi saw an opportunity to encourage Muslims to agitate in support of the caliphate. Under the Raj, Muslims steadily lost ground after the mutiny, and were left behind Hindus in government service, industry and profession. In the subcontinent, with no experience of Ottomon rule, the fall of empire was perceived by many Muslims as a humiliation which resonated emotionally with their own descent . A clamor began that the caliphate itself was in danger and this was what Gandhi cashed upon. The more secular Muslims including Jinnah noticed that the issue was not merely irrelevant but also regressive. Jinnah greatly resented Gandhi for making Ottomon empire and the caliphate as the primary point of Muslim resistance in India. On the other hand Gandhi referred to the Treaty of Sevres’s that wound up the Ottoman Empire as a “staggering blow to the Indian Mussulmans”. All India Khilafat committee was founded in 1919 which also became the scene of Gandhi’s first attempt at an All India satyagraha protesting the Rowlatt act. Response to the call proved patchy and after Jallianwala bagh massacre, faded quickly.

 In 1920, Non-cooperation movement was launched which included renunciation of titles, resignation from positions of civil service, resignation from police and army and finally refusal to pay taxes. The ultimate weapon was tax strike since the structure of Raj heavily dependent on land revenue and without it it could not be sustained. On 1st February, 1922 Gandhi announced that in the face of British obduracy it was time to refuse to pay taxes in Bardoli district of Gujarat. Three days later, a police in the small town of Chaurichara in UP  fired on a crowd protesting food prices killing three demonstrators. The infuriated crowd barricaded the police station and set it on fire. On learning the news of this event Gandhi declared a five day fast of penance and withdrew the movement.  He could do this because by this time the Congress has granted him “sole executive powers” and he justified that the Indian masses were not yet spiritually advanced enough to adhere to nonviolence.

This incident is used to show his commitment to nonviolence but in reality his attitude to violence had always been quite ambiguous. For example at the start of his career he twice volunteered for active service for British colonialism in South Africa, first in the Boer War and then in crushing the Zulu rebellion in 1906. When the First World War broke out he organized ambulance corps for the British war effort in 1914 and in mid 1918 he tried to recruit people for the imperialist slaughter in Flanders. He said, “The ability to use physical force is necessary for a true appreciation of satyagraha. He alone can practice nonviolence who knows how to kill, in fact, in the practice of ahimsa it may even necessitate  killing”. In 1942, he told reporters, “In India rivers of blood might be the price of freedom” and in 1946 he told the viceroy, “If India wants blood she shall have it”. He said that it was God who was inspiring him and things will shape as he wills. If God wants to destroy the world through violence using Gandhi as his instrument then how could he prevent it. Gandhi's truth was not objective but simply what he subjectively felt at any given time. He wrote in his autobiography titled “The Story of My Experiments with Truth” that truth was merely what he felt was right from his point of view at a given time. He was free from any requirement of consistency. “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements but with truth as it may present itself to me at a given time since I am called the great soul”, he wrote. The result was a license to say whatever he wanted regardless of what he had said before.  Even though he stood against railrways and hospitals he was still using railways and doctors for his own personal usage. He defended himself in 1945 by writing, “It is not necessary for me to prove the rightness of what I said then; it is essential only to know what I feel today”. He claimed to be growing from “truth to truth” and claimed, “Whenever I have been obliged to compare my writing even or 50 years ago with latest I have discovered no inconsistency between the two”.

The goal of non-cooperation was Swaraj within a year but Gandhi spelled out what it did NOT mean, “Assuming that Great Britain alters her attitude, it will be religiously unlawful for us to insist on independence”. He advocated that India should seek a status like South Africa within a Commonwealth of equal partners that retained the British connection. The incident at Chaurichara made him realize that a demand to evict the British was to give rise to social upheaval. The revolution was a greater danger than the Raj. Any semblance of revolution was bound to challenge Hindu social structure which he did not want. The Congress he commanded was a coalition of industrialists, traders,professionals etc but it did not include the urban workers, rural poors, who formed the vast majority of the population. A revolution would pitt these groups against the employers or landlords and would bring forward the class conflict. He said, “In India we want no political strikes and there must be no discord between landlords and tenants and tenants are advised to suffer rather fight in the cause of preserving national unity. Property was a trust that had to be respected and protected”. At all cost their momentum must be stopped.  And in order to evade a revolution and a  countrywide resistance movement that would lead to the breakdown of not just the Raj but the Indian societal structure, Gandhi withdrew the non cooperation movement.

Muslims once roused to action and then unceremoniously abandoned by Gandhi never trusted him again. Jinnah, a member of Congress long before Gandhi had already left the Congress by 1916 in a mixture of dismay at the radicalization of its practices and disgusted at the overt religious symbols once Gandhi took over. Disliking the caliphate campaign by Gandhi, he thought of a second arrangement between the League and Congress which was to demand a vote to 6% of adult males at central and provincial level. In 1927 he proposed a pact that would reserve for Muslims 1/3rd of seats in central legislature; which Nehru at first accepted then later reduced the quota to ¼th and rejected any reservations in Punjab and Bengal where Muslims were a majority of the population. Elsewhere he remarked they could be settled, “by throwing them a few crumbs here and there”. At an all party conference in Calcutta Jinnah’s attempts at amendments were shouted down.

By 1928, Congress membership had increased from 80,000 to 4,50,000. Gandhi again launched his 2nd great campaign in March 1930 of Civil disobedience against the state’s salt tax.  The response was geographically wider but communally narrower, virtually no Muslims took part. In order to call off the movement the viceroy presented a deal to Gandhi and invited him to attend the Roundtable conference in London.  At the conference, Gandhi was shocked by Muslim and Sikh insistence on separate electorates and worse by the untouchable leader Ambedkar. Returning empty handed to India he resumed civil disobedience but by 1932, the movement had been defeated and London announced that untouchables would be granted separate electorates. Gandhi’s religious beliefs were put to a direct political test. What was his attitude to caste?  He said that untouchability was a heinous crime but it had nothing to do with caste itself which was not a human invention but an immutable law of nature itself. He said that the caste system is not based on  inequality and that reincarnation of Hindus maintained the balance in life. He believed that  interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying are not essential for the promotion of the spirit for democracy. Overtime he would tune down such claims and then explain that varna was not to be confused with subdivisions of jati. Apparently jati or caste were corrupt practices whereas varna are institutions that helped each one earn their bread following their ancestral calling. Overtime he would even try to dilute varna with palatable egalitarian opinions but he never abandoned the core identification with Hinduism itself. The demand for separate electorates for untouchables would confirm that untouchables were external to Hinduism and caste was indeed a vile system of discrimination.  Taking mathematical consideration, the breaking up of untouchables from the Hindu bloc may give predominance two Muslim community. Gandhi confided in a colleague, “Might not untouchables accorded separate identity then gang up with Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus?”. Thus Gandhi vowed to fast unto death until the separate electorate was taken back and untouchables were bundled back into the Hindu electorate. Under colossal pressure Ambedkar yielded to Gandhi’s blackmail. A pact was reached to give a larger number of reserved seats to untouchables selected not by their own people but by Hindus at large so that the Congress could pick its own stooges for this post. Ambedkar argued that there was nothing noble in the fast, it was a foul and filthy act, the fast was not for the benefit of untouchables, it was against them to force them to agree to live on the mercy of the Hindus.In 1934 Gandhi announced his resignation from the Congress but he could rely on Motilal Nehru, the head and his son Jawaharlal Nehru not to challenge his authority if he chose to exercise it.

By the end of the decade there was some promotion for Congress to adopt socialism as a goal but Gandhi always rejected any talk of socialism as a breach of the sacred trust in which capitalist property was legitimately held. The leader of the new left wing current Subash Chandra Bose heading the Congress youth organization also stood for a coalition with the Muslim peasant party in his national province of Bengal. This was unacceptable to Marwari businessmen of Calcutta. The wealthiest of these, G M Birla not only bankrolled Congress  millions of rupees but was also  intimate with Gandhi and hence Gandhi did everything to terminate Bose’s intercommunal initiative. Soon Bose was elected the president of Congress and in the following year re-elected defeating Gandhi’s candidate. This was an unprecedented affront to Gandhi therefore he toppled Bose in an inner party coup and then forced him out of Congress altogether.

When Second World War broke out, Gandhi admired Hitler as a fellow ascetic since, “He has no vices; he has not married;his character is said to be clean”. He zig-zagged from initial support of British declaration of war on Germany in 1939 to requiring individual demonstrations of satyagraha in 1942 to asserting that British must be driven away from the continent in 1942. He launched the Quit India movement in which he not only called for tax strike but warned that violence may break out. Riots erupted across the country, police stations were attacked, rail tracks torn out will.The rebellion without training or leadership was put down with 60,000 arrests, 4000 casualties after which Gandhi described it as a calamity. His last mass movement like the previous two ended in utter failure. 

 Satyagraha had not been a success, each time Gandhi had tried it the British had subdued it. His great achievement lay elsewhere: in the creation of a nationalist party, for in the end independence did not come from passive resistance.  In 1929, a scheduled 10 year review of the system put in place after the First World War led to the passing of the Government of India act of 1935 in the British parliament. The act extended the franchise from 6 to 35 million voters. By 1938, 8 out of 11 provinces were under Congress rule and party membership had soared to 4.5 million. The wine of electoral success had done what the water of nonviolence had failed to do, give Congress a political weight and strength. Important sections of Indian political society like the poor peasantry, tribals factory, workers and people of princely states were left out and the Congress was indifferent, suspicious, resentful and above all paternalistic towards them. Like the British Raj, the Congress claimed it knew what was good for the Indian people. Its provincial governments often proved as repressive of labor or the left as the colonial authorities. The raj was not threatened by any popular upheaval from the Congress. What changed  the situation was an external influence when Japanese armies swept through Southeast Asia. Singapore, Rangoon and Colombo had fallen by February, March and April respectively. The effect in London was electric and Cripps was dispatched to deal with major parties in India where he promised Dominion status in exchange for full support to the British war effort. Congress became bold and demanded immediate formation of an Indian government instead, which led to the deal being rejected. Meanwhile Bose had reached Singapore where he took command of 60,000 Indian prisoners of war there as the Japanese ally. Under Bose, the dedication and courage of Indian National Army in battle against British in Manipur and  Burma won widespread admiration even from Gandhi. Superior American might overpowered Japan by 1945 but the blows the Japanese army had dealt European colonialism in Southeast  and South Asia where irreparable. At  war’s end, the independence of the subcontinent was a foregone conclusion. What was not decided was the form it would take.

Partition

By 1945, the era of Gandhi was over and that of Nehru had begun. Nehru had fallen under the spell of Gandhi in his late 20s when he had little political ideas of his own. At nearly 40, he was still writing to him as, “Am I not your child in politics though perhaps a truant and errant child”. Even if he initially disagreed with some of Gandhi’s decisions, he would eventually justify them to himself. Even at the height of his communist philosophy in 1936, Nehru wrote, “What a wonderful man Gandhi is after all”. By 1939 he was simply exclaiming, “India cannot do without him”. Gandhi’s affinity to Nehru was due to calculations of mutual interest. As long as Nehru controlled the Congress, Gandhi could count on him to never act against him. Meanwhile Nehru could count on Gandhi to prevail over rivals to head Congress and after independence to rule the country. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru had enjoyed higher education but he seems to have learned very little at Cambridge, scraping a mediocre degree in natural sciences and performed poorly in his bar exams. The contrast with Bose, a brilliant student of philosophy at Cambridge who was the first native to pass the exams into the elite ranks of Indian civil service and decline  it on patriotic grounds is striking. It would even be more unfair to compare Nehru to Ambedkar who was intellectually much superior over most Congress leaders.  Even though Nehru was not a believer he identified  Hinduism with the nation explaining that “Hinduism became the symbol of nationalism and it was indeed a national religion”. He claimed that, “Caste was a group system based on services and functions and it was meant to be an all inclusive order. It was infinitely better than slavery even for those lowest in scale as within each caste there was equality and a measure of freedom, each caste was occupational and applied itself to its particular work”. Later even though he mentioned caste had become a barrier to progress he never so much touched on the subject of untouchability. Nehru’s first real test as a political leader came with the elections of 1937 when he was the president of Congress. He announced that now there were only two political forces that mattered in India: the Congress and British government. By this time the membership of Congress was 97% Hindu. Across India it could not even find candidates to run in close to 90% of Muslim constituencies. In Nehru’s own province, Uttar Pradesh, Congress had swept the board of Hindu seats but it had not won a single Muslim seat. The Muslim League sought a coalition between the two parties that would give some sort of representation to Muslims in the ministry which Nehru vehemently rejected. Ambedkar would describe the mentality of high caste Hindus as monopolised as Congress claimed a monopoly of legitimacy in the struggle for independence. When Muslims refused to vote for Congress in large numbers Nehru launched a mass contacts campaign to convince them. But he had little success with the masses and even little experience so his efforts soon fizzled. In fact it was the last time he would ever try to engage with the masses from below. During the Second World War, the Congress instructed all provincial governments to resign in protest at the viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany without consultation with the people of India. Due to the political vacuum created, Jinnah aware that London badly needed some show of loyalty stepped up with assurance. He expressed support for Britain in its hour of need and earned in exchange its wartime favor. He was the uncontested leader of the Muslim League but the Muslim population of subcontinent were far from united. Historically the culture and political heartland of the Muslim elite lay in UP where the League was the strongest but only 1/3rd of the population was Muslim. Far away to the west, Sind, Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier were overwhelmingly Muslim. But they were a rural backwater dominated by local leaders who did not speak Urdu and felt no allegiance to the League. In two of the richest provinces of India, Punjab and Bengal Muslims formed a majority but in neither was the League a dominant force. In Punjab the Unionist Party controlled the province which was a coalition of big Muslim landlords and rich Hindu jat farmers. In Bengal the League was led by aristocratic land owners owning huge estates in the east of the province, it was a mass peasant based party the KPP that made the political running. Thus wherever observers looked Muslim League was weak, either locked out of power by Congress or bypassed by rival formations in Muslim majority zones. What saved it was Jinnah standing as the only Muslim politician capable of operating with sufficient skill and calibre  at an All India level to make the Unionist,KPP and other leaders willing to let him represent them in negotiations with the British at the centre. The war however would rapidly alter this configuration

The British who viewed the Muslims with suspect after the mutiny now came to see Muslims as the safest counterweight to the rise of Hindu nationalism, granting them separate electorates to ensure they would not automatically form a bloc with it in common struggle against the Raj. Though Jinnah was thoroughly secular in his outlook and mode of life, he was still rebuffed by Congress because he clearly saw the sociological reality of the party that was essentially a Hindu party. Jinnah was aware of the weakness of his base so he avoided formulating any too specific demands of the Raj. At Lahore in 1940 he announced that there were two nations not one in the subcontinent and that independence would have to accommodate their coexistence in a form that gave autonomy and sovereignty to those areas where there was a Muslim majority. He did not mention the word Pakistan anywhere which Jinnah later complained was being pinned on him by Congress. He was faced with a dilemma. Even if majority Muslim areas were possible candidates for independence, what would happen to the minorities they left behind? Wouldn’t these minorities need some protection from the arbitrary exercises of Hindu will under Congress? Nehru in his autobiography dismissed any possibility of a Muslim nation in India. In 1938 he informed an American audience that there is no religious or cultural conflict conflict in India. Even in 1941, he reasserted that there was no force which can break up the unity of India.

In the elections of 1945 The Muslim League won every single Muslim seat in the central elections and 89% of them in provincial elections. Nehru who had been proven wrong, the position of League in the Muslim community was the same as that of Congress in the Hindu community. The labor government dispatched a cabinet mission to negotiate a constitutional framework for independence which bore some resemblance to the arrangements evoked by Jinnah. At first both parties agreed to this arrangement but soon Nehru changed his mind and single handedly rejected it. Jinnah lost his patience and declared a day of direct action to demonstrate that Muslim patience with constitutional road was now over. A politician skilled in maneuver at elite level, he had no experience of mass action and hence communal slaughter ensued in Calcutta. Even though it was initiated by Muslim thugs it ended with many more Muslims killed than Hindus. Wavell called an interim government into being, headed by Nehru, Patel as interior minister and Jinnah’s deputy as finance minister. Each party was determined to thwart the other. Such was the situation in February 1947, when the Atlee government announced that India would have independence by June 1948 and dispatched Mountbatten to take over as viceroy.. The labor regime in Britain viewed Congress as the Indian party closest to its own outlook and now the Imperial policy towards religious divide in India came full circle. During the second half of the 19th century Muslims were suspect to the Raj as first movers of mutiny, in the first half of 20th century favors were reversed and Hindu nationalism became more assertive so Muslim aspirations were patronized. Now on the last lap, London returned violently back towards the political expression of the majority community. Britain had made, of a dispersed subcontinent, for the first time in history a single political reality and it wanted to preserve the most remarkable creative achievement of the empire. Alongside ideological investments in the unity of the subcontinent, Britain still had material positions in Asia which could have been under the threat of a communist insurgency. Division of the subcontinent could play into the hands of the Russians and if the gates of South Asia were to be barred securely against communism, The West required the bulwark of a united India. This indicated that Muslim League once a tactical experience for the Raj was now an obstacle to a satisfactory settlement of its affairs. Jinnah  hardly received the same favors as the leaders of the Congress but to this imbalance was added the influence of Mountbatten

Mountbatten was a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler who had suddenly realized he had been made the most powerful man on earth. He had two overriding concerns, to cut a figure fit for Hollywood as the last ruler of the Raj and above all to ensure India would remain a Dominion within the Commonwealth. If the Raj had to be divided then it was the larger part that mattered for British purposes so naturally Congress was  the preferred partner in planning the future of the subcontinent. In Nehru, Mountbatten found delightful company. Within weeks not only was the congressman fast friends with the viceroy but soon thereafter in bed with his wife to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Affairs of heart rarely affect affairs of state but in this case the erotic ties of the triangle tilted British policy towards the Congress. For Mountbatten Jenna was a “lunatic”, “a bastard”, “a clot” and for Nehru, “a paranoid heading a party of hitlerian leadership and policies” , for Atlee,  “that twister” .Communal riots were raging in Punjab as Mountbatten arrived and since the deadlock between congress and League could not be overcome, Mountbatten decided that partition was inevitable.But how was this partition supposed to be accomplished? Six years after Lahore Jinnah had still not found any way to square the circle of sovereignty for Muslim majority provinces with safeguards for Muslim minorities in Hindu majority provinces. Jinnah had hoped that the British confronted with the incompatibility of League and Congress would ultimately impose a confederation on which both the parties would agree in which the Muslim majority zones of the subcontinent would be self governing with the central authority weak enough not to impinge on them but strong enough to protect Muslim minorities in self governing Hindu majority zones. In the event the cabinet mission had produced a plan close enough to this vision. Jinnah had hoped that this plan would be followed instead of a partition. But for Nehru such a scheme was worse than partition since it would deprive his party of total control at the center. To Nehru, it was better to enjoy a full monopoly of power in a divided India than to have to share it in an undivided India. Nehru could be confident of his favor from the side of Mountbatten and he was right. For Mountbatton, of paramount importance was the objective of keeping whatever states were to emerge from the Raj within British Commonwealth. That meant they must accept independence as dominions. The League had no objections but Congress  rejected any future as a Dominion. For Mountbatten, this was an issue since his loyalty lied with Congress but Congress would not concede to his aims. How was this contradiction to be solved?  The answer came from V P Menon, a Hindu functionary from Kerela working on Mountbatten’s  personal staff and a close compatriot of Patel. He advised that Congress should be offered a divided India in which it not only had a much bigger territory and population but it would also have a larger share of military and bureaucratic machinery of the Raj. In return for this favor, Congress must accept to be a Dominion of the British Raj. In addition to this,Menon suggested why not also hand over the princely states to Congress. Mountbatten was overjoyed, later writing to Menon said, “It was indeed fortunate that you were the reforms commissioner on my staff. You were the first person I met who entirely agreed with the idea of dominion status and you thought of the solution which I had not thought of”.

Mountbatten due to his friendship towards Nehru, felt that he should show the plan to him before it was officially ruled out. Nehru was furious as the plan did not adequately acknowledge that the Indian unit would be the actual successor state of the Raj and Pakistan was barely a secession from it. How can the two be put on similar footing?Again this discrepancy was sorted out by the invaluable hand of Menon and he redrafted the plan to Nehru’s satisfaction. In the first week of June, Mountbatten announced that Britain would transfer power on August 14. The rules laid down for territorial division of the Raj excluded any consultation with the population ; instead the legislative assembly of each province decided which state it wanted to belong with three exceptions. In Punjab and Bengal the assembly would be given the option of dividing the province and in the northwest frontier there would be a referendum. In Punjab the Muslim majority in the assembly voted for Pakistan, the Hindu and Sikh minority for India. Bengal was another matter. With nearly four times the population it had a stronger common identity, a richer cultural intellectual tradition and more advanced politics.In the Hindu community, a movement led by Bose’s brother Sarat and in the Muslim community by the local head of the League joined forces to call for united Bengal as an independent state adhering neither to Indian or Pakistan. Mountbatten wanted only two dominions in the subcontinent though he did not completely rule out a third. Jinnah too said he would not oppose a unitary Bengal. Leading a violent attack on the idea of a united Bengal was the ancestor of today’s BJP, the rabidly confessional Hindu Mahasabha. The first mass upsurge of Indian nationalism had come over the division of Bengal now the roles were reversed. Hindu chauvanists insisted that Bengal be partitioned on religious lines. Nehru himself was not in favor of an independent Bengal unless closely linked with India as he said that partition now would anyhow bring East Bengal into Hindu stand in a few years. But soon the Congress realized that the independence of Bengal would mean the dominance of Muslim League in Bengal and so the Congress party rallied behind the mahasabha whipping up Hindu demands for its partition, Gandhi in support. In the Bengal assembly, the vote was 126 to 90 in favor of unity but when representatives of West and East cast ballots, the west voted for partition, the East against it  and hence Bengal was divided along religious lines.

Coming to North west frontier, the region had seen prevalence  of a strong Muslim anti-colonialist movement: The Red Shirts. Led by a local landlord Badshah Khan, it was affiliated to Congress though by no means always in the line with. The red shirts had won a majority in the provincial election of 1946 but when Nehru paid them a visit in autumn of that year he was given a hostile reception. Muslim League also had been very weak in the province but as communal tensions rose it started to gain strength. The red shirts had campaigned on the platform for a united India but the northwest frontier was 95% Muslim and geographically separated from the rest of the Congress held subcontinent. Congress opposed any kind of referendum about partition, accepted one in the NWFP only on the condition that they should not be given the option of independence. For Badshah khan,Nehru’s acceptance of partition was a betrayal of innumerable promises and the exclusion of any choice for an independence in a referendum was a double betrayal. The Redshirts boycotted the referendum along with half of the voters, but the rest rallying behind the League gave an overwhelming majority for joining Pakistan.

Congress could not have cared less because it did not want a detached borderland from the mainland. Moreover it is often said that Nehru was so vain that he might have even let go of the provinces because of the unceremonious treatment he had received during his visit. Badshah Khan is supposed to have told Gandhi, “You have thrown us to the wolves”.

A bloodless winning of independence was accompanied by an unimaginably  bloody communal carnage. Though communal killings occurred across North India there was significant difference between Punjab and Bengal. Huge waves of refugees crisscrossed  Bengal with relatively little violence. In Punjab, on the other hand with inter-culture bond  weaker and a traditionally militarised ambiance, religious hostilities exploded in a reciprocal massacre. 4 ½ million Hindus and Sikhs were driven out of their homes to East Punjab, 5 ½ million Muslims to West Punjab in a communal inferno. The trial to this was set in motion on July 7 when  Radcliffe was sent to India to determine the boundaries of the two states India and Pakistan. He knew nothing of the subcontinent but there already existed a detailed plan to divide it drawn up by none other than V P Menon and another Hindu bureaucrat   B N Rao. Radcliffe adhered closely to it when Mountbatten intervened at the behest of Nehru to also include in 2 pivotal Muslim majority districts in Punjab rather than to Pakistan, one controlling the only access road from Delhi to Kashmir, the other containing a large arsenal. The plan of partition would have required at least an year of orderly admistration and preparation. It’s conveyance within six weeks was a sentence of death and devastation to millions. The eagerness of Congress for the prize money of an instant division was the local motive of the disaster.

In the ensuing violence, Congress made good a primary objective. It earned the  successful status to the Raj with its seat at the United Nation and control of the capital and ¾ of territory and population of British India. 14 out of 20 armored regiments, 40 out of 48 artillery regiments,  21 out of 29 infantry regiments fell into its grasp. Of the 160000 tons of ordnance legally allotted to Pakistan, no more than 23,000 ever reached it. The princely states were given the choice to choose their future. In practice if any of them declined  to join one of the two states,none had the means to resist annexation. The overwhelming majority  550 out of 560 were Hindu rulers with Hindu populations and were swiftly rounded up for India. In Junagadh (present Gujrat) a Muslim ruler ruled a Hindu population and opted for Pakistan. Congress sent in its troops without further ado to secure the state for India overriding the choice of the ruler. The vastly larger state of Hyderabad, the Nizam wished to maintain his independence was seized with an invasion.

In Kashmir there was a Hindu ruler ruling over a Muslim population. It had been sold by the East India company to a Dogra adventurer in the 1840s whose senior officers were exclusively Hindu and downright secretarian. Till 1920 there was death penalty for Muslim peasants most living in abject misery should they kill a cow. In that decade a Muslim conference led by Sheikh Abdullah came into being and adopted a social program drafted by communists within the party envisaging an independent Kashmir. Abdullah landed in jail after collaboration between Maharaja and British. Kashmir had never been significant in Jinnah’s political outlook. The six provinces that he was demanding for Pakistan included Assam  but not Kashmir. Opposite was true of Nehru. Though himself raised in UP, his ancestors had come from the elite of Kashmir, thus offering a sentimental investment in the region. He commemorated his experiences in Kashmir in sexual gushes enough to embarrass the lowest tourist brochure. Kashmir was also a strategic road out commanding the approaches to Central Asia. Moreover it was an ideological price for Congress to show that it was a secular state in which a Muslim province could take its place among Hindu provinces. Nehru cried before Patel that Kashmir meant more to him than anything else, adding to Edwina that “Kashmir affects me in a peculiar way” and later simply whining “I want Kashmir”.

In Kashmir the dogora ethnic cleansing started to drive out Muslims even before partition. Inflamed by reports of massacre, Muslims in Punjab and UP backed by Pakistan and Pathan tribesmen pulled down from the northwest frontier towards Srinagar killing and plundering in their path; the maharaja fled to Jammu.  Mountbatten was aware of Nehru’s demand for Kashmir and as early as nine days after the arrival of Radcliffe in India he was instructed by Menon that for India to have access to Kashmir,it required passage to the district of Gurdaspur in Punjab, the only overland route from Delhi to Srinagar and though it had a Muslim majority Radcliffe duly awarded it to India. There was never any doubt where Mountbatten’s sympathies lay. But legal cover was still required for military intervention by India and on October 26 this was provided by Menon with a forged Declaration of Accession to India by the Maharaja supposedly brought back by him from Srinagar when in fact he was still in Delhi. A document recently discovered on which the Indian state bases its entire claim to Kashmir but was unable to produce for a half a century. Patel airlifted troops into the city and under mountbatton’s supervision took control of Kashmir. Still it remained too obvious that a province with an overwhelming Muslim majority had been acquired by force. The backdated instrument of accession justifying  Indian seizure of Kashmir that could not be found after the event was an embarrassment that apologists have since only worsened with false stories. India had famously brushed aside princely decision in favor of popular preference to take over junagadh and Hyderabad but in case of Kashmir it was the popular preference that was brushed aside. Abdullah’s National Conference  wanted integration with India so he was installed as the Prime Minister by Delhi and Congress hoped that his popularity would bring a positive result for Congress whenever a referendum was held. But it was soon clear that the Kashmiri masses could not be turned towards the Congress and hence all promises of referendum disappeared. 

The concluding act of partition was hence a military conquest of a familiar stamp: territorial expansion by force of arms in the name of nationalism. What was Gandhi’s stance on this occupation of Kashmir? He’s known to have said, “Do I imagine that several crores of Muslims in India will be loyal to India in a  fight against Pakistan? It is easy to pose such a question but difficult to answer them.If they later betray you, you can shoot them. You may shoot one or two or a certain number. Everyone will not be disloyal. Kashmir belongs to Maharaja because Maharaja still exists.The government is composed of patriots and no one will do anything that is in conflict with the interests of the country”. He further said, “I feel so proud when I hear the noise of those airplanes; at one time I was feeling very miserable when I heard this but when this Kashmir operation began I began to feel proud of them and every aeroplane that goes with materials and arms and ammunition and requirements of the army I feel proud”. Patel himself was not in favor of stopping just at the occupation of Kashmir. He said, “If all the decisions rested on me I think I would be in favor of extending this little affair in Kashmir to a full scale war with Pakistan. Let us get it over with once and for all and settle down as a united continent”. Nehru himself believed that Pakistan was such a rickety structure that it had no chances of surviving. The delusions of Congress nationalism issued by Gandhi to Hindu specifications died hard. Only Ambedkar was clear sighted enough to see that self determination could not be denied to Muslims if they wanted it. He published the only serious work on the issue which would determine the outcome of the struggle for independence “Pakistan or partition”.  He did not advocate for separation of two communities but he proposed referenda to determine popular wishes. He would call for a division of Kashmir to allow its Muslim majority zone including the valley to join Pakistan. The condition of Ambedkar’s sanity was that he had broken up with Hinduism. The condition of Nehru’s obduracy was that he had not.

When the Indian army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out and an investigation team was later set up at the behest of Maulana Azad. Conservative estimates say around 27 - 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover dwarfing the killings by Pathan raiders enroute to Srinagar which India had ever since used as a leverage for annexation of Kashmir. After its victory in Hyderabad Nehru announced that “not a single communal incident had marred the Indian  triumph”. 20 years later when news of the report finally surfaced, his daughter Indira Gandhi banned any publication or document as “injurious to national interests”.

The standard nationalist version in India is that British policies of Divide and Rule was responsible for partition. Historically British power had indeed always rested on divisions but in the 19th century divide and rule was not the primary instrument of control for the British because there was a danger of  aggregating dangerously wide blocks of religious identity. The Raj preferred safer subdivisions. Even though it initially stoked religious tension it later found an ideal arrangement which was the condition of Punjab, Inter confessional unity around a strong regional identity loyal to the Raj against which neither Congress nor Muslim League made any headway in the inter-war years. Popular conceptions in India blaming the creation of Pakistan on British plot are false legends. Jinnah was an early architect of Hindu-Muslim unity but had little mass following down to the end of 30s. Till quite later he aimed at a confederation rather than complete separation and it was not Jinnah who had injected religion into the vocabulary of the national movement, it was Gandhi. Even his demand of separation was not sectarian nor was it calling on Muslims to  defend the caliph in the same breath as Hindus to restore the Golden age of Rama. He did so out of political consideration  and safety of minority Muslim population under a strong Hindu central government.

By mid 30s Congress as the party was close to monolithically Hindu iwith just 3% of its membership being Muslim. It also commanded loyalty of an overwhelming majority of the Hindu electorate but had minimal Muslim support. The Congress did nothing to bridge this gulf and  refused any arrangement with Muslim League. In 1928,  it reduced the allocation of Muslim seats from 1/3 to ¼, in 1937 coalition government in UP was rejected, in 1942 Cripps mission was redrafted for allowing constituent units freedom to choose whether or not to join a future Indian union, in 1947 Nehru killed off the cabinet plan as a Confederation for giving too much leeway to areas where the Muslim League was likely to dominate. Central to these was the claim that India had existed as a nation time out of mind with a continuous identity and overarching harmony prior to the arrival of British. The Congress was hell bent on proving that imperialism had sought to set community against community which had lived in perfect peace till now. The facts were however different. The variegated Hindu populations had never formed a subcontinent state of these dimensions As one historian has written, “It was the persistent Congress claim to speak for the whole country as the only alternative to British rule that precipitated the crisis and made partition inevitable”. It is true that well before Gandhi the first stirrings of nationalism in Bengal were sold with modernized Hindu appeals. Bankim chatterjee’s Anandanath that would supply Congress with its anthem Vande Mataram, already extolled whole sole destruction of Muslims as alien underlings of the British while Tilak was leading his compatriots in Maharashtra with a new cult of the elephant headed God, Ganesh. All this was peppered with Gandhi’s claims, “if religion dies then India dies”. The truth is that partition could have been well avoided if Congress had acted wisely and had conceded to some demands of Muslim League and the masses themselves. On the other hand Congress took scarcely any intelligent steps to avert it and in many cases,it caused it to  take the cruelest form with the worst human consequences. Of partition Gandhi said in 1928, “I am more than ever convinced that the communal problem should be solved outside of legislation and if in order to reach that state there has to be a civil war so be it”. In 1947,he told Mountbatten that the only alternatives were a continuation of British rule to keep law and order or an Indian bloodbath. “The blood bath must be faced and accepted”. To an Indian journalist he said he would rather have bloodbath in a united India after British quit than accept partition on a communal basis. To his credit when the programs erupted in 1947 he did what he could to prevent them to good effect in Calcutta but still strapped in the Hindu nationalism he cheered on the seizure of Kashmir. Nehru on the other hand was eager to acquire his inheritance and believed that all subtractions from it would only be temporary.

Republic

Nehru and his colleagues sat crosslegged around a sacred fire in Delhi where Hindu priests chanted hymns and sprinkled holy water. 3 hours later on a date and time stipulated by Hindu astrologers the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947 Nehru told his listeners that their “tryst with destiny” was consummated and had given birth to the Indian Republic as the rest of the world was asleep.( London and New York were wide awake lol). Within a fortnight a constituent assembly was appointed to draft a constitution and it was chaired by Ambedkar. It took two years to come up with a charter of 395 articles and came into force on 26th January 1950. It combined a strong central executive with a symbolic presidency, a bicameral legislature with reserved seats for minorities, a Supreme Court with robust provincial governments in a semi feudal structure. India’s democracy is impressive not because of its virtue but because of its size. The stability of Indian democracy came because there was no overthrowing of the power of the Raj but a transfer of power by it to Congress as its successor. The colonial bureaucracy and army was left intact minus the colonizers.  Along with British machinery of administration and coercion, Congress inherited its tradition of representation. The constituent assembly that gave India’s constitution was a British created body from 1946 for which only one out of seven of the subjects of the Raj had been allowed to vote. Once independence was granted Congress could have called for new elections but fearing that outcome might be less convenient than what they had in hand, it took special care to not conduct any elections. No election on an expanded franchise was held till 1951. Some 250 out of 395 articles of the constitution were taken word for word from the Government of India act passed in 1935. A mere six articles out of nearly 400 dealt with elections but these laid down that the victors would be those first past the post in any constituency. For 20 years across 5 polls between 1951 and 1971 Congress never once won a majority of votes. Its average share of the electorate was 45%. At the national level it had no political opposition but had there been any opposition the centre had power to swiftly deal with it. These two were heirlooms of the Raj appropriated by Congress.Congress made use of preventive detention that dated back to a Bengal State Prisoners Regulation of 1818 and was later approved by Nehru and Patel to be retained in the constitution. Similarly intervention by the  viceroy to override elected governments was authorized by the section 93 of Government of India Act of 1935. The same powers now reappeared in article 356 of the constitution transferred to the president of the Republic. Nehru and Patel wasted no time in showing the use of the first, sweeping communist leaders and militants into jail across the country within a few months of independence. In Kerala where the communist governments were intermittently elected president’s rule was imposed five times from 1959 onwards. By 1987 there had been no less than 75 of these takeovers by the centre affecting virtually every state in India.

There’s a peculiar characteristic about Indian electorate where the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate but  vote in larger numbers than the better of.  Everywhere else the ratio of electoral participation is without exception by reverse, the better of population votes more than the underprivileged population. So why was it that the massive power that lay in the hands of the impoverished masses was not able to overthrow an oppressive government. The answer lay in the historic pecularities of Indian system of social stratification:caste. Virtually all ruling classes enjoy an advantage over the ruled in the capacity for collective action. Subordinate classes always tend to be organizationally outflanked. Nowhere has this condition being more extreme than India. But the truly deep impediments to collective action lay in the impossible trenches of the caste system. Hereditary, hierarchical, occupational through and through with phobias and taboos Hindu social organization fissured the population into some 5000 jatis. Caste system accorded the structural significance and the ultimate secret of Indian democracy. Gandhi declared that caste alone had preserved Hinduism from disintegration. Ambedkar  famously remarked, “We’re going to enter a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. We must remove this contradiction at earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously constructed”. This inequality  was not a contradiction of the democracy to come, it was the condition of it. India would be a caste- iron democracy.

The test of undeclared federalism of Indian constitution came with emergence of movements for linguistic redivision of territorial units inherited from the Raj. Even though the Congress was instinctively hostile to this but it was forced by popular pressures in the Telugu zone to accept the creation of Andhra in 1953. Top down reorganisation brought Karnataka, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh three years later. The Bombay presidency had to be split into Maharashtra and Gujarat in 1960. At independence there were 14 states, today the number is 28 and still counting. Therefore the notion that the preservation by the Indian state of the unity of the country is a feat so unique as to be little short of a miracle is just vanity. A glance at the map of postcolonial world is enough to show that no matter how  artificial the boundaries of any given European colony may have been, they continue to exist today. Meaning to say that no matter how arbitrarily the European colonizers may have drawn the boundary of nations, they persist to this day for most nations. The motto of independence in former colonies has invariably been, “what the empire has joined, let no man put asunder”. In this general landscape India represents not an exception, but the rule.

Typically military force deployed to preserve post colonial unity has meant military government in one guise or another, state of emergency in the periphery, dictatorship at the center. India has escaped the latter but has exhibited the former with a vengeance . Coming to the northeast of India, the British had conquered an area larger than UP of densely forested mountains inhabited by tribal people of Tibeto- Mongloid origin untouched by Hinduism. In the valleys three Hindu kingdoms had long existed, the oldest in Manipur, the largest in Assam. So detached are these areas from India that when Burma was detached from the Raj in 1935, officials came close to allocating them to Rangoon rather to Delhi. Only 2% of northeast borders are contiguous with India. The ruler of Manipur had been adequately rounded up by VP Menon in 1947 and by 1949 was resisting full integration into the union. Within days the Maharaja was kidnapped and surrounded by troops and made to sign his Kingdom into oblivion at gunpoint. In Assam about half the native population of 1.5 million made it clear that they did not want to be impressed into the future Indian state. Nehru dismissed the idea of Naga independence as absurd. Undeterred Nehru claimed, “Whether heavens fall or India goes into pieces and blood runs red in the country whether I’m here or anyone else Nagas will not be allowed to be independent. The Naga National Council was derecognized, police raids multiplied. By late 1955 a Naga feudal government had been proclaimed and full scale war for independence had broken out. Under the commander in chief of the Indian army two divisions and 35 battalions of the paramilitary Assam rifles,a largely Gurkha force notorious for its cruelties were dispatched to crush the uprising. In 1958, Nehru’s regime enacted perhaps the most sanguinary single piece of repressive legislation in the annals of liberal democracy, the Armed Forces Special Powers Regulation which authorized the killing out of hand of anyone observed in a group of five persons or more if such were forbidden and forbade any legal action whatsoever against any person in respect of anything done in exercise of the powers of this regulation unless the central government so consented. With this license to murder Indian troops and paramilitaries were guaranteed immunity from atrocities and made ample use of it. Half a century later the armed forces special powers act is still required to hold the region down.

In 1957 China had already completed a 700 mile road from Sin kiang to Tibet passing through the uninhabited Aksai plateau claimed as a part of India without anyone in Delhi even being aware of it. Aksai Chin was of use to China whereas it was of so little significance to India it had not even noticed that China had built a road through the region. Had Nehru shown a grain of historical common sense or political realism he would have settled on that basis but he said, “If I give them that I shall no longer be Prime Minister of India. I will not do it”. He claimed that the  MacMahon line coincided with the borders of India for nearly 3000 years as testified by the Upanishads. Shastri announced that if China did not vacate the disputed areas India would eject it from them. In the first round of fighting lasting a fortnight in October, Indian troops attempting to advance in northeast were thrashed. US, British and Israeli weapons were hastily summoned to bulk up the national arsenal. On 14th November Indian troops launched a counterattack  and within less than a week they disintegrated completely as a military force.  Had China wished, the PLA could have marched without opposition to Calcutta. But Chinese leadership had already achieved all that it intended to do and its control of Aksai Chin now beyond challenge withdrew its troops back in a move of olympian closure virtually as humiliating to Nehru as his crushing defeat in the field. Psychologically broken and physically diminished he lingered in office for another 18 months before his death in the spring of 1964. 

In retrospect, Nehru stock has risen among Indian intellectuals of liberal or left persuasion as that of the political class that came after him has fallen. Bent on retaining power for himself he took care to appoint no deputy premier to succeed him. Ambedkar whom Nehru feared and whose funeral really pointedly failed to attend was rapidly edged out. Bose the only leader Congress ever produced who united Hindus Muslims and six lay buried in Taiwan.Nehru accumulated more power than he could handle, permanent foreign minister as well as Prime Minister, not to speak of defense minister, head of Planning Commission, and president of Congress at various times. It was a one man show. He was a poor judge of character, surrounding himself with incompetent henchman and an even worse administrator. Throughout his years as Prime Minister, Congress enjoyed enormous majorities in parliament and controlled virtually every provincial government in a caste divided society. Political scientists called it  a “one party democracy”. In 1961 he made it a crime to question the territorial integrity of India in writing or in speech punishable with three years imprisonment. The nagas whom he started to bomb in 1963 were unbeaten when he died. Three years later a full scale rebellion broke out  among the neighboring Mizo. By the end of the decade Manipur, Tripura and Assam were all in flames.

Nehru normalized sycophancy and hereditary principle within the party. His successor, his own daughter was more authoritarian than her father and within weeks her first action was  to call for the ouster of the government of Kerala. She would later go on to declare an emergency and jailing 140000 citizens without charges. These actions were straight from the handbook of the Raj. In the struggle for independence the legitimizing ideology of Congress had always been a secular nationalism but the word “secular” was nowhere mentioned in the constitution. There would be no uniform Civil Code and Hindus and Muslims would continue to be subject to their  respective customs of their faith. Nor would there be interference with religious hierarchies in daily life, untouchability was banned but caste itself was left untouched. Protection of cows and prohibition of alcohol were enjoined and seats were reserved in parliament for two minorities, scheduled caste and tribes , but not Muslims. In 1951 Ambedkar introduced a Hindu code bill for marital inequality. The bill and Ambedkar both were abandoned by Congress and he left the party. In 1947 he had been inducted into it by Patel and Nehru because they feared the alliance between his party the Scheduled Castes Federation and Jinnah’s Muslim League which had actually elected him from Bengal to the constituant assembly; the combination of untouchables and Muslims that Gandhi had dreaded in the 30s. Ambedkar said that the position of his own people had not altered much as the same old tyranny, the same old oppression existed and perhaps in a worse form. He knew he had been used by Congress and said two years later, “People always keep on saying to me, you are the maker of the constitution. My answer is I was a hack. What I was asked to do I did much against my will”.

Congress had failed to avert partition because it could never bring itself honestly to confront its composition as an overwhelmingly Hindu party. Only within a few years of independence it was rebuilding with much pomp the famous Hindu temple in Somnath and authorizing the installation of Hindu idols in a famous mosque at Ayodhya.How have Muslims fared under the secularism of India?In 2006 government appointed Sachar  Commission found that out of 130 million Muslims in India numbering some 13.4% of the population less than three out of five are literate and one out of three were among the most destitute layers of Indian society. ¼ of their children between the ages of 6 to 14 were not in school. In top 50 colleges of the land 2 out of 100 post graduates were Muslims, in the elite institutions of technology 4 out of 100. In the cities Muslims had fewer chance of any regular job than Dalits or Adivasis and higher rates of unemployment.  The report confessed Muslims shares in employment in various departments  are abysmally low at all levels not more than 5% . In state governments the situation could be still worse nowhere more than in communist run West Bengal which with a Muslim population of 25% posted a figure of just 3.25% of Muslims in its service. It is possible moreover that the official number of Muslims in India is an underestimate. In a confidential cable to Washington released by WikiLeaks, the US embassy reported that the real figure was somewhere between 160 and 180 million. Were that so Sachar’s  findings would need to be further deflated. The discrimination against Muslims began with the constitution itself which accorded rights of representation to minorities but denied it to them. Scheduled castes and  scheduled tribes were granted special  seats in Lok Sabha and later  still more Hindu groups under “Other Backward Classes” acquired reservations. But Muslims were refused both on the grounds that conceding them would violate the precepts of secularism by introducing religion into matters of state. In mechanics such as these Indian secularism is Hindu confessionalism by another name. All told, the security agencies of the Indian union as the Sachar report politely calls them, number close to 2 million. How many Muslims do they contain? The report notes no figures are available for ¾ of these. Put simply, Muslims are not wanted in their ranks, the fewer the better. In 1999, a former defence minister let it slip that the number was just 1% out of 11,00,000 regulars. In the Research and Analysis Wing and intelligence Bureau, it is an unwritten code that there should be not a single Muslim, so too in the national security guards and special protection group in the Secret Service Corps. As with other oppressed minorities in society is keen to advertise their pluralism, a sprinkling of celebrities, a batsman, a film star, a scientist or a symbolic officeholder here and there may be found but this does not alter the position of the overwhelming majority of Muslims in India. They are second class citizens.

In areas where Hinduism has no influence such as Kashmir, Nagaland, Mizoram and Punjab the rule of AFSPA has fallen upon them. To be successful in India there is no need to be a Hindu in any sense other than by birth. Descent not piety is the criterion.  Much of the making of Congress’s secular ideal are based squarely on the Hindu community. Neither the state nor the party has ever made any serious effort to improve the social or political position of his Muslim minority. Neither party nor state has ever contemplated doing that because both have rested, sociologically speaking, on Hindu caste society. The continued dominance of upper castes in public institutions -administration, police, courts, universities, media- belongs to the same metrics. 

Coming to the growth of explicitly right wing parties BJP, their success was due not just to the faltering of the first wave of officeholders of Congress but due to their ability to articulate openly what had always been latent in the national movement: which is Hindu confessionalism.Half a century passed after independence when the BJP started to gain office.RSS,a mutation of the Hindu mahasabha with which Gandhi had been on good terms, it played a very little role in the independence struggle if hardly any. It was only during partition where it led huge campaigns to divide Bengal along religious lines pulling Congress in along with it. In the RSS, the BJP had a disciplined mass organization behind it. The time for hindutva the vision of a revolutionary fighter(Savarkar /s) incarcerated by the Raj on the Andamans before Gandhi ever set political foot in India had come. The rise of BJP was likened to fascism by several intellectuals. This was a category mistake, there was no working class threat, no economic slump, no revanchist drive to produce any subcontinental equivalent of the interwar scene in Europe. It flourished because the Indian state had never been able to develop any systematic critique of Hinduism. On the contrary another discourse embellishing Hinduism as preeminently a faith of tolerance pluralism and peaceful harmony was popularized. For Amartya Sen, “no other religion has so capaciously included even atheism in it along with monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and any other sort of theism”. Long before Sen, Savarkar cast the generous mantle of Hinduism over atheists. The idea was that the BJP does not oppose but upholds secularism, for India is secular because it is Hindu. About 25 words in an inscription of Ashoka became testimony to Hindu peace and harmony and hence ignoring a whole of Sanskrit literature which bear testimony to the incorrigible militarism of the Hindus. According to Nirad Chaudhry there is not one word of nonviolence in the theory and practice of statecraft in the whole of Sanskrit literature. Generalization for generalization, who could doubt which Bengali judgment is more historical?(lmao XD)

BJP is able to appropriate the language of secularism because Congress made a steady disposal of so called soft hindutva and the communist parties preferr and publicize versions of a “purer” and “truer” Hinduism closer to popular religion as they understand it. Is such a process of competitive desecularisation, the initial advantage could only lie with the BJP. Its breakthrough came in 1992 with a national campaign to demolish the mosque at Ayodhya designated as the supposed birthplace of Rama. The triumphant destruction of the mosque  gave the BJP the momentum that put it into office in Delhi by the end of the decade. In the time of Nehru Congress had ruled a segmented society divided by caste. After the emergency imposed by Nehru’s daughter, the carapace of the Congress system of caste subordination was cracked with wealthy farmers breaking away from it to lead the rebellion that brought the first non Congress coalition to power in 1977. The reservations for scheduled caste scheduled tribes fixed initially at 12.5% and 5% was later increased to 15 and  7.5%. It was then that the mandal Commission recommended that other lower castes amounting to half the population should be accorded 27% of public sector jobs. The upshot was to galvanize an entire spectrum of hitherto apathetic, resigned  or intimidated lowercastes into active political life. A year later and then another two years in Lucknow had the first Dalit chief minister in history, Mayawati. Congress has never recovered in what was once Nehru’s electoral fief.It represents a rise of the lower classes amounting to a silent revolution if one yet to be fully consummated. But castes are not classes. Castes have no permanent friends when it comes to politics, electoral alliances of brahmins and kshatriyas  with untouchables against OBCs can be seen in one part of the country while higher caste armies wage vicious rural wars on dalits in another. The BJP as a party aiming to unify the nation under its true Hindu banners thus found caste blocking its path. Realizing that it could not hope to win national power without attracting middle and lower caste it set about broadening its appeal and by the time of its first major electoral success in 1998,won 42% of the OBC vote in North India.

Congress and the BJP are each pursuing at home a neoliberal economy and abroad a strategic rapprochement with the United States. Culturally they now bathed in a common atmosphere in which religious Insignia, symbols, idols and anthems are taken for granted in commercial and official spaces alike. Congress relies on Muslim and tribal vote banks by pointing to the BJP as a greater sectarian danger. The BJP calls itself secular but it can rely on the fervor of the devout and the attraction of a more muscular nationalism. Practically though the differences are very few. Where communalism suits them there is little to choose between the two. More died in the program of 1984 in Delhi covered by Congress than of 2002 in Gujarat covered by the BJP although the latter’s active political complicity was greater. Neither compare with the massacres in Hyderabad under Patel and Nehru. 

Pervasive corruption dates back to 3rd generation of Nehru family rule. The cost of securing a seat in parliament have risen vertically so it has become a club of the super rich. One out of five MPs is a dollar millionaire and the total assets of its 543 members can be reckoned at 2 billion dollar in a society where over half the population lives on less than $2 a day. In the present Lok Sabha some 150 ministers have a total of more than 400 criminal charges against them. A third of all Congress MPs have inherited their seats by family connection.The tidal wave of corruption in Indian public life has been a byproduct of neoliberal turn of state since the 90s. Among the BRIC powers the Indian economy is the second largest in size. Services account for over half of the GDP in a society where agriculture accounts for more than half of the labor force, yet less than 50% of the GDP. Cultivable land is 40% more than  China, but the demographic dividend is not being cashed, for 10 million new entrants in the labor force each year just 5 million jobs are being created. The greatest economix success of the past 20 years has been achieved in IT but it accounts for only 2% of the labor force. Just 66 resident billionaires control assets worth more than 1/5 of the country’s GDP. Capital at large is 3 times more concentrated than in the United States. Infant mortality is 3 times as high as China. Undernourishment is much worse even then in sub saharan Africa afflicting over half of all Indian children under the age of five. 2/3 of all government subsidies go to the relatively well of rich farmers. Over 80% of expenditure on healthcare is private. Military expenditure virtually equals spending on all antipoverty programs combined

The Indian intelligentsia is another matter. There, India possesses a range and quality of minds that perhaps no other developing society in the world can match. Yet compared with social criticism, political critique is typically less comprehensive and less searching.  They are always buttressed by its apparatus of repression. Local literature rarely ever mentions repressive law such as armed forces special powers act, unlawful activities prevention act, prevention of insults to national honor act, maintenance of internal Security Act, national Security Act, terrorism and disruptive activities act, prevention of terrorist activities act, unlawful activities amendment act. Out of 53,000 people  arrested under the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Act only 434 could be convicted seven years later. Torture is routinely practiced in most police stations and death in police custody is a frequent phenomena. The police practice of getting rid of suspects through staged encounters is unfortunately all too common. In the 60s the army was deployed in “aid of the civil power” some 476 times.

 To this political inhibition was added a cultural difficulty. Sociologically Hinduism was not a realm of belief or practice separate from the rest of existence but permeated as the ubiquitous texture of popular life. Hence even secular progressive affront were threatened by losing popular sympathy if they tried to detach from Hinduism. The great epics of Hindu legend the Mahabharata and Ramayana are dramatized on television not just as entertainment but occasion many a little act of worship before the small screen.

In the Trimurti of much boasted Indian values: democracy may be imperfect, Secualrity ambiguous but Dissent comes close to banishing altogether. The nation and the land belonging to it has become virtually unquestionable. The idea of India is suffused with religious and mythical meanings so is the territory it covers. Just how Nehru explained to Zhou Enlai that mahabharata promised him the McMahon line.The narrative of nationhood becomes simply territorial integrity. The reality is otherwise. There should be little need for any reminder of the fate of Kashmir or northeastern states. Brazen celebration of India’s goodwill in Kashmir is a staple of the media. To question the territorial integrity of the union is a crime punishable at law. 

An ideology to be effective  must always in some measure answer to reality. The idea of India is not a mere tissue of myths. The realities of the union as a whole are more complex many of them much darker. Once any independent state has emerged from an anti colonial struggle, what was once a discourse of awakening can easily become one of intoxication. In India that danger is great  both because of the size of the nation and the particular character and outcome with the way it came into being. Indian intellectuals will often contrast the happier condition of their country with that of Pakistan but given their respective starting points, not to speak of the responsibility of the stronger in doing their best the comparison risks pharisaism. Though the military loom larger, today the media are more outspoken in Pakistan, though it is yet poorer there is less undernourishment and better health care in Bangladesh. 

Congress had its place in the National Liberation struggle. Gandhi who had made it the mass force it became called at independence for its dissolution. He was right. Since then the party has been a steadily increasing calamity for the country .Its exit from the scene would be the best single gift Indian democracy could give itself. The BJP of course now a more dangerous force cannot be wished out of existence because it represents a substantial political phenomena which has to be fought actively. These political ills are not sudden or recent maladies of a once healthy system. They descend from its original composition. Today the world’s tallest statue of Patel is being commissioned by BJP. It honours a Congress leader who wanted the RSS to join his party. It is time to put away these effigies and all they represent.

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Review: What strikes the most about The Indian Ideology is the absolute non-euphemistic, unapologetic tone of Anderson. Laced with brazen commentary and dry humor, Anderson makes it helluva ride through the various myths of the Indian ideology finally culminating in the conclusion that the projected “idea of India” is false. If anything, the idea of India is not about unity, diversity and secularism but crypto Hindu confessionalism and caste-iron democracy. I would have liked to see some more attention to history of “India” before it became India and how Gandhi and Nehru built this image of a pre-modern united civilisation that never was. Nevertheless, the book covers a significant period of time and issues , deconstructing the ideological basis of India that has dominated the popular discourse.

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This is the biography of Edward Snowden.

Snowden used to work as a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency but now, he works for the people. His career in American intelligence agency lasted a short seven years during which he saw the change from targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. He helped make it technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for ages and search through them at will. Post 9/11, the IC was racked with guilt for failing to protect America. They sought to build a system that would prevent them from being caught off guard ever again and it’s foundation was to be technology. At the age of 22, Snowden got his first top secret clearance from NSA and less than a year later he was at the CIA as a systems engineer with sprawling access to some of the most sensitive networks on the planet. From 2007 to 2009 he was stationed at the US embassy in Geneva as one of the rare technologists deployed under diplomatic cover tasked with bringing the CIA into future, by bringing its European stations online, digitizing and automating the network by which the US government spied. By the age of 26 he was a nominal employee of Dell but again working for National Security Agency. He helped design what amounted to the agency’s global backup: massive covert network that ensured that even if the NSA’s headquarters were reduced to ash in a nuclear blast, no data would ever be lost. He came back to the United States at the age of 28 and received a promotion to the technical liaison team handling Dell’s relationship with the CIA. His team help the agency build a new type of computing architecture, “a cloud”, the first technology that enabled every agent no matter where they were physically located to access any data they needed, no matter the distance. He took up a new contract with the NSA at the age of 29 in Hawaii where he realized how he had helped in developing a giant machine to form a system of global mass surveillance. Deep in a tunnel in Hawaii he sat at a terminal which had practically unlimited access to the communications of every man, woman and child on earth who had ever dialed a phone or touched a computer.The reason we have this book is that Edward Snowden decided to tell the truth. He collected archived documents that gave evidence of the US government’s lawbreaking and turned them over to journalists.

Snowden says that the Internet of today is unrecognizable from the Internet of his childhood. He says that this change has been a conscious choice; the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few. The internet turned commerce into e-commerce after companies realized that people who went online were far less interested in spending, than in sharing, and that the human connection the Internet made possible could be monetized. Then all companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit.This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism . Then it was the creative web that collapsed. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The successors to the e-commerce companies that had failed because they couldn’t find anything the consumers were interested in buying now had a new product to sell. That new product was ‘us’. Everything about Internet users came under surveillance and the surveillance would go on to be actively encouraged and even funded by an army of governments greedy for the vast volume of intelligence they would gain. The power of mass surveillance afflicts the innocent far more than the guilty. Snowden says that it has been six years since he came forward and he has witnessed a decline in the commitment of advanced governments throughout the world towards protecting the privacy of their citizens .This decline has only continued as democracies regress into authoritarian populism. Nowhere has this regression been more apparent than in the relationship of governments to the press. The same agencies that over the span of Snowden’s career had manipulated intelligence to create a pretext for war, used illegal policies, and a shadow judiciary to permit kidnapping as extraordinary rendition, torture as enhanced interrogation, and mass surveillance as “bulk collection”, didn’t hesitate for a moment to call him a Chinese double agent, a Russian triple agent and worse,a “millennial”. Edward Snowden did not disclose a single document directly to the public. He disclosed the government’s documents only to the journalists because he refuses to presume himself to be the sole arbiter of another’s privacy. This is an account of his life.

Part one:

Snowden says the first thing he ever hacked was bedtime when he was six years old. He went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours. But how would you do it now in the age of Internet. Look at your phone, you’ll see that time on your phone is automatically set.Every so often your phone quietly asks your service providers network, “hey do you have the time?”. That network in turn asks a bigger network which asks an even bigger network and so on through a great succession of  networks, until the request reaches the true Masters of times, are at work: times server run or referenced against the atomic clocks kept at places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States or Institute of Meteorology and Climatology in Switzerland and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. That long invisible journey accomplished in a fraction of a second.

Snowden was born in 1983. And that was the year that the US Department of Defense split its internal system of interconnected computers in half, creating one network for the use of the defense establishment called MILNET and another network for the public, called the Internet. New rules defined the boundaries of the virtual space giving rise to the Domain Name System that we use today: the .gov, .mil, .edus and .com,and the country codes assigned to the rest of the world like .uk, .de, .fr, .cn, .ru. It would be another six years before the World Wide Web would be invented.

The Internet is not a single entity. It is a global cluster of interconnected communications network that 3 billion people or roughly 42% of the world’s population use regularly. In a broad sense it means the universal network of networks connecting the majority of the world’s computer to one another by a set of shared protocols. Now what are protocols?  Think of protocols as languages for machines, the common rules they must follow. For example HTTP refers to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the language used to access the World Wide Web. Every time we check our email we use a language like IMP (Internet message access protocol), SMTP (simple Mail transfer protocol), POP3 (post office protocol).All these protocols are known as application protocols . In order for the data in any of these application protocols to cross the Internet and be delivered to your device, it first has to be packaged up inside a dedicated transport protocol; think of how the regular Postal Service prefers you to send your letters and parcels in their standard size envelopes and boxes. Similarly, protocols just standardize the format in which data is passed to and fro. These protocols have given us the means to digitize and put online damn near everything in the world.

Snowden recalls his childhood and the first 9 Internet-less years of his life. He would spy on his older sister Jessica and he would spy on his mother Wendy but most of all he spied on his father who was a Coast Guard. His father left home early and came home late often with new gadgets. One day his father father brought home a computer system and some video games. That was one of the first interaction of Edward Snowden with technology.

His mother loved giving him maths challenges. She would have him pick out books and model cars at malls and buy them for him if he was able to mentally add together their prices. On Christmas 1989, a nintendo appeared in his house but a rule was imposed that he could only rent a new game when he finished reading a book. One day his Super Mario Bros cartridge wasn’t loading and Snowden decided to fix it himself. He was just seven years old and he went on to dismantle the entire console with a screwdriver. After wiping and blowing on the circuit board, he tried to reassemble it; he somehow pushed the lid close but the console refused to work. When his father returned home, surprisingly, he was not angry, and patiently explained  that in order to fix a malfunction one had to analyze the mechanism of individual parts of a machine. . You must know how the device you’re handling works. This was a lesson in self reliance for Snowden. He believes that the lack of understanding of this fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny which was perpetrated not by technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who uses it daily and yet fails to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively agree to its terms, when your equipment works you’ll work and when your equipment breaks down you’ll breakdown too.

Snowden’s father decided he was ready to see his lab. The lab was dim and empty and it was filled with several screens of computers. His father showed them to him one by one and tried to explain how they worked. He found himself in front of a keyboard. His father told him that every key on the keyboard had a purpose and opened a text editor and wrote down a couple of lines on a paper nearby for Snowden to type it on the keyboard. It was a simple code which asked the user for his name and allowed the user to input some characters. He was fascinated, and this was his introduction to programming and to computing in general. These machines do what they do because somebody tells them to in a very special, very careful way. Nowhere else had he ever felt so much in control.

Snowden’s family moved to Maryland when he was barely 9. Suddenly he found himself in a school where he felt alienated and constantly mocked for his glasses, disinterest in sports and specially his accent. He got so sensitive about his accent that he completely stopped talking add his grades plummeted. His father worked as a chief Warrant Officer in the aeronautical engineering division at Coast Guard headquarters. His mother worked at Fort Meade. He stresses that this kind of employment was normal. Everyone they knew worked for the government either it was the Department or Department of Energy or Department of Commerce or the FBI. The place was home to 115 government agencies in addition to forces from all the five branches of the military. To put it in perspective, in Anne Arundel County, in a population of just over half a million, every 800th person works for the post office, every 30th person works for the public school system and every fourth person works for or serves in a business agency or branch connected to Fort meade. Both his parents had top secret clearances. His mother worked as a clerk at an independent insurance and benefits Association that served employees of the National Security Agency. His father’s career remained fairly opaque to him. Nobody really talked about their jobs. Most of them are legally prohibited from discussing their work even with their families . Snowden also stresses that tech-people rarely ever have a sense of the product applications and policy implications of the projects to which they are assigned. They are never told the larger project for which their skills are going to be used.

His family soon got their first desktop computer, a Compaq Presario 425. The computer became his constant companion. He was barely short of being addicted to the machine. He tried to rush his family through their tasks so he could get back to his which were more important like playing video games. There for him was the true magic with just one cord, the computers expansion card and modem and a working phone he could dial up and connect to something new called the Internet. It was a miracle for him. Internet access and the emergence of web was his generation’s Big Bang, it became his sanctuary. He stopped sleeping at night and his grades went back into freefall, after all the education that he was getting online seemed better and even more practical then what he received at school. He developed an insatiable curiosity about nearly everything he heard of. A crash course on how to build his own computer led to a crash course in processor architecture with side excursions into information about martial arts, guns ,sports car and and goth porn. He’d stay up all night and browse the web hiding from his parents. It was the era before the online world became centralized and consolidated by governments and businesses. To this day he considers the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy he has ever experienced. The strangers on the Internet were so considerate and thorough that would be unthinkable today. When he panicked about a query on a certain chipset, a professional computer scientist on other side of the country or wrote a 2000 word explanation to help him solve it. One of the greatest joys of their Internet was anonymity. And the ability to to delete your previous mistakes. His computer skills were improving so swiftly that instead of being proud of all the progress he had made , he was embarrassed by his previous ignorance and would go away and delete all his previous history on the Internet. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the offender to move on. To him this felt like freedom. Internet dissociative opportunities actually encouraged him and those of his generation to change their most deeply held opinions instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged.

As he turned 13 years old, he vowed to  never return or to take seriously his classroom commitments. He analysing the exam marking pattern to understand how he could score enough to pass his classes yet still not have to attend every single class and finish every single assignment. He would use his free time to browse the web. Unshackled from homework he started doing some more conventional computer based hacking and his abilities improved gradually. Once he was reading some article about the history of American nuclear program and before he knew it, he was at the website of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the country’s nuclear research facility. He noticed a glaring security hole in their website which was an open directory structure. Imagine you get sent a link to download a PDF file that’s kept on a multipage website. Most websites will confine your visit to that specific file keeping their entire directory or library closed and private. But back in those days even major websites were created and run by folks who are new to technology and they often left their entire directory or library wide open which meant that if you truncated the website’s URL, you would be able to access every file on their site, PDF or otherwise, including those that weren’t necessarily meant for visitors. He had stumbled upon a trove of files meant only for the lab security workers. He sent an explanatory mail to the laboratory’s Webmaster about the vulnerability and waited for a response that never came. He regularly checked the website to see if they had fixed it but there are been no change, when one day, after several weeks the phone rang during dinner time. His mother picked a phone and all color drained out of her face as she handed the phone to Snowden. On the line was a friendly representative from Los Alamos IT who thanked him for reporting the problem and Snowden calmly explained how he had found the directory traversal problem, how he reported it etc While hanging up the officer asked him to keep his contact and get in touch with him when he turned 18.

 Snowden never took school seriously and the constant reproach of the administration never bothered him. However at the end of his freshman year he was faced with a different kind of assignment which was to produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1000 words. He did not know what to write. His parents were getting a divorce and he reacted by turning inwards. When he was alone he was subdued even morose,he constantly worried about being a burden he started ignoring his emotions, and feeling of self sufficiency. He started calling himself Ed. At the beginning of the sophomore year he started getting tired a lot and falling asleep more than usual not just at school anymore but now even at the computer. Soon his joints were aching his nodes were swollen and the whites of his eyes turned yellow. He was diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. School was totally forgotten and his absences piled up. He wondered why he was even alive and just at the point when his glandular disease had developed into full on depression the school informed him that he needed to repeat two semesters. Suddenly he was back online and on the phone searching for systems edges, searching for a hack. After a bit of research he realized that apparently you don’t need a high school diploma to apply to colleges. After a lot of form filling he got himself accepted to a college, Anne Arundel Community College. He was the youngest person in his class. He figured out that by taking classes above his grade level he wouldn’t have to suffer through the year he had missed. He just skipped it. By the age of 16 he was pretty much living on his own. He met a new friend group in Japanese class where he met an older woman called Mae. She was his Japanese conversation partner and also ran a successful web design business call Squirreling Industries. He soon became a freelancer and started working as a web designer for her. He thought that he was in love with her and would do everything she asked him to even though she was married and never led him on. Her house was located on base at the southwestern edge of Fort Meade where her husband worked as an Air Force linguist assigned to the National Security Agency. It’s nearly inconceivable now but at that time Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. About a year into his tenure with squirreling industries he realized he had to plan for his future.  Professional industry certifications for the IT sector were becoming hard to ignore. The certification credentials were being adopted as industry standard almost as quickly as the industry could invent them. With payments looming on his tuition loan he asked Mae to give him more work so he could earn more. She agreed and asked him to start coming in at 9:00 AM.

On September 11 as he sat at Mae’s home, she received a call and immediately turned on the television. There was the news about a plane hitting one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. A second plane just hit the other tower. The Pentagon was attacked then. Madness poured out of agencies black glass towers .  NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Snowden got into his car and tried to drive home as well. In the ensuing days and weeks, the NSA’s special police were joined by convoys of Humvees top with machine guns guarding the roadblock and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent supplemented by endless rules of wires and massive installations of surveillance cameras. These trappings of what would be called the War on Terror were one of the reasons why he gave up on Mae after 9/11. By the time she and her husband moved to California she felt like a stranger to him. She was too opposed to the war and he couldn’t understand why.

Nearly 3000 people died on 9/11 and over 1 million people have been killed in the course of America’s response. The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret codes and secret wars. Snowden says that having spent roughly half that time as an employee of the American intelligence community, he knew better than most how often the agencies got things wrong. America had issued a new order which was of total submission:stop resisting. Whenever he tried to understand how the last two decades happened, he returns to that September, to that Ground Zero of 9/11’s immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against the truth darker than the lies that tied the Taliban to al Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.

America immediately divided the world into “us” and “them” and everyone was either with us or against us as President Bush so memorably remarked. People in his neighborhood put up new American flags as if to show which side their chosen. He would sometimes got o shooting clubs and now next to shooting range old targets, the bull’s eyes and flat silhouettes were effigies of Middle eastern men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished for years behind the dusty glass of display cases were now marked sold. Nearly 100,000 spies returned to work. Meanwhile their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and extraordinary powers leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities. September 12 was the first day of a new era.

Snowden says that his country could have done so much with this opportunity and could have treated terror not as the theological phenomena it purported it to be but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now connected global public. Instead, it went to war. He says that the greatest regret of his life is his reflexive unquestioning support for that decision. He was outraged and accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts and embrace the truth constructed for the good of the state. At the time he was growing up, America lacked enemies. It was the sole global power. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now finally there was a fight. A normal IT job seemed too comfortable for him now, he wanted to fight the enemies. Unfortunately the primary agencies that did that, the NSA and CIA, had their hiring requirements written ½ century ago and required a traditional college degree but the agencies were growing so much and needed technical assistance so desperately that they waived the degree requirement for military veterans. Snowden decided to join the army.

He joined the army and scored high enough on his entrance exam to qualify for a chance to come out of training as a special forces sergeant. He had to go through basic training at Fort Benning Georgia. The physical training completely drained him and once while he was on track scrambled atop a tree that arched over the path, he noticed a snake and lost his balance and fell down. He knew immediately something was wrong. He had bilateral tibial fractures. He was despondent if he didn’t finish the basic training cycle on time he would lose his slot which meant that he'd be reassigned according to the needs of the army. They could make him into whatever they wanted, a mechanic, a desk jockey, a potato peeler! The doctor offered him administrative separation which was only available to enlistees who had been in the services fewer than six months. He had to sign a statement attesting that he was all better and his bones were all healed. As he held the statement, a knowing smile crossed his face. He recognized the hack. The administrative separation was the government's way of avoiding liability and disability claim. Under the military’s rule if he had received a medical discharge the government would have had to pay the bills for any issues stemming from his injury and treatment and therapies it required. An administrative discharge put the burden on him and his freedom hinged on his willingness to accept that burden. He signed and left that same day.

He still had the urge to serve his country and if he couldn’t do it through his body then he would do it through his head, via computing . He understood the necessity for a security clearance if you wanted to work at the intelligence agency. There are three levels of security clearance from low to high, confidentials, secret and top secret. The last can be further extended with a sensitive compartment information qualifier creating the coveted TS/SCI access required by positions with top tier agencies CIA and NSA. He applied for the clearance of the same. He was a perfect candidate on paper. He was a kid from a service family and almost every adult member of his had some level of clearance. He had no criminal record and no drug habit.

This was the time Snowden also joined a dating site called “Hot or Not” where people rated each other based on their pictures and if each had rated the others photo hot, they were able to contact each other. This is how Edward Snowden met his life partner Lindsay Mills. She studied fine art photography and had her own website where she kept a journal. They soon met and found out that online spark had translated even in real life They confided in each other everything and he had never felt so comfortable around anyone.He had her thoughts in his head when he went to NASA’s friendship annex complex for the final interview for his security clearance. He was connected to a large polygraph machine and was asked generic questions about his life. He passed with flying colors which meant that not only had a qualified for the TS/SCI, he had also cleared the full scope polygraph, the highest clearance in the land. He was only 22 years old.

Part 2

At this point Edward Snowden explains about his politics at the age of 22. He didn’t have any. His parents were dismissive of politics in general and more dismissive of politicians. It was a certain bemused detachment particular to their class of federal civil servants or who can be referred to as the deep state or the shadow government. They are a class of career officials who unelected and non-appointed  worked in the government either at one of the independent agencies like the CIA and NSA or at one of the executive departments like state Treasury, Defense, Justice and like. A nearly 3 million strong professional government workforce dedicated to assisting the amateurs chosen by the electorate and appointed by the elected in fulfilling their political duties. These civil servants stay in their positions even as administrations come and go work as diligently under Republicans as under Democrats because they ultimately work for the government itself. The patriotism taught by Snowden’s parents had easily converted into nationalist fervor. However as his abilities developed he realized that the technology of communications had a chance of succeeding where technology of violence had failed. Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun. The Internet was the freest society. A place where everyone was equal, a place dedicated to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness . An open frontier that belonged to anyone bold enough to settle in it. John Perry Barlow’s “Our Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” stated, “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice  accorded by race, econonmic power, military force or birth. We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or hers believes no matter how singular without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity”.

 There were different careers available to Snowden as a technologist working for the government. He chose to get into Systems which was like being an urban planner, to take all of the components available an ensure their interaction to maximum effect. There are two ways to be a systems guy. One is that you take position of the whole of an existing system and maintain it gradually making it more efficient in fixing it when it breaks. That position is called System Administrator or sysadmin. The second is that you analyze the problem such as how to store data or how to search across databases and solve it by engineering a solution from a combination of existing components or by inventing entirely new ones. This position is called systems engineer. Snowden came about to do both of these jobs. The job of technologist is often very specialized and they are kept detached from different departments. This is to ensure that no one person  can have access to all sensitive information. Over the course of his career it became increasingly difficult for him to ask questions about the technologies he was responsible for. A number of times he could not figure out what the technology he was working at was being used for.

He had hoped to serve his country but instead he went to work for it. By the time he noticed it , working in the sincerity of public service had  given way to greed of the private sector. America heavily relies on contracting with the help of privatized forces to keep the National Defense working. Today contracting is most often associated with its major failures such as fighting for hire work of Blackwater (which changed its name to XY services after its employees were convicted of killing 14 Iraqi civilians and then changed its name to Academi after it was acquired by a group of private investors), or the torture for hire work of CACI and Titan both of which supplied personnel who terrorized prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Contracting is essentially a process by which the Defense department of USA hires employees of private companies like Dell to work for them or handle their technology. So on paper the workers are employees of the private company but instead they report to the government. The primary purpose served by contracting is that it lets agencies avoid federal limit on hiring. Every agency has a head count that dictate the number of people it can hire to do a certain type of work. But contractors because they are not directly employed by the federal government aren’t included in that number. The agencies can hire as many of them as they can pay for and they can pay for as many of them as they want, all they have to do is testify to a few select congressional subcommittees that the terrorists are coming for our children or the Russians are in our emails or the Chinese are in our  power grid. Congress never says no to this type of begging. Among the documents that Snowden provided to journalist was the 2013 Black Budget. This is a classified budget in which over 68% of its money around 52.6 billion dollars was dedicated to intelligence community including funding for one 207035 IC employees more than 1/5 of whom were full-time contractors. And that number doesn’t even include the 10s of thousands more employed by companies that have signed contracts or subcontracts or sub subcontracts with the agencies. These contractors are never counted by the government not even in the black budget because to add their ranks, the contracting total would make one disturbing fact extraordinary clear, the work of American intelligence is done as frequently by private employers as it is by government servers.

Snowden was officially an employee of the state of Maryland working for the University of Maryland at College Park. The University was helping the NSA open a new institution called CSL the Center for Advanced Study of Language. The mission of the center was to study how people learn languages and to develop computer assisted methods to help them do so more quickly and better. The NSA was having a tough time ensuring that its computers could comprehend and analyze the massive amount of foreign language communication that they were intercepting or spying upon. His responsibilities included showing up everyday to patrol the empty halls after the construction workers had left and make sure nobody broke in or bugged in at night. During daytime he caught up on his sleep and went out with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills.

 After the 2013 revelations by Snowden, the US government tried to disparage him by referring to him as only a contractor or a former employee with the implication that he didn’t enjoy the same kinds of clearance and access a blue badged agency staff. In national security contracting especially in tech contracting, you often find yourself physically working at an agency facility but nominally on paper working for Dell or Lockheed or Martin or other private companies.

His first major contractor gig was actually a subcontracting gig. The CIA had hired BAE systems which had hired COMSO which hired him. With a salary of $62,000 per year, he never once worked at the COMSO office. He took orders directly from the CIA and had to move to Virginia. He reported every day at the new headquarters building of the CIA with other young techies all of whom wore contractor badges. There is a remarkable similarity between the intelligence community and the tech industry; both are entrenched in unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism. Both believe that they have the solutions for everything which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above all they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical because there based on data whose decisions are regarded as preferable to the chaotic whims of the common citizen.

 At the end of the indoctrination program of the newly recruited techies, suddenly the lights came down in the room and the power point was wired up and faces appeared on the screen that was bolted to the wall. These were the faces of former agents and contractors who whether through greed,malice, incompetence or negligence failed to follow the rules. The people on the screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one and some would be there until they died. It is said that ever since Snowden’s career ended, this “Parade of Horribles” of incompetents moles, defectors and traitors has been expanded to include an additional category: people of principle, whistleblowers in the public interest. Snowden hopes that the next 20 something group of techies are struck by the governments conflation of selling secrets to the enemy and disclosing them to journalists when the new faces, when his face, pops up on the screen.

Snowden’s team was attached to the directory of support and his task was to manage the CIA’s Washington Metropolitan server architecture. His top security clearance reflected him having been a read into a few different compartments of information. Some of these compartments were SIGINT (signal intelligence) and another was HUMINT (human intelligence). On top of these he was read into COMSEC (communication security) compartments that allowed him to work with cryptographic key material, the codes that are used to protect all other agencies secret. The cryptographic material was processed and stored on the servers he was responsible for managing.

In the CIA, secure offices are called vaults and his team’s vault was located a bit past the CIA helpdesk station. His job was to sit in the secure office 12 hours each night and keep the CIA’s global network online. Was something to go wrong he had to log in to try to fix it remotely. One of his seniors who also work the night duty was given the task of backing up the data every few hours into a tape. He said that the CIA did not trust their own servers as they are always breaking. But when the servers breakdown, they risk losing whatever they were storing so in order not to lose anything that comes in during the day, they back up everything on tape at night. The old way. Tape hardly ever crashes.

When you go online at the CIA you have to check a box or consent to monitoring agreement which basically says that everything you do is being recorded. This is one major reason why most IC workers don’t share civilian customers’ concern about being tracked online, because they have simply become desensitized to being tracked all the time. The CIA has its own Internet and web. It has its own kind of Facebook which allows agents to interact socially, its own type of Wikipedia which provides agents with information about agency teams projects and missions and its own internal version of Google, actually provided by Google, which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network.

The disorganised CIA quite understands that the computer guy knows everything or rather can know everything. The essence is that the more system levels privilege he has, the more access he has to virtually every bit of CIA’s existence. Among the things Snowden Googled on CIA server out of curiosity and fun,  were: aliens have never contacted the earth, climate change is real, man really did land on moon, chemtrails are not a thing, and al Qaeda maintained close ties with Saudi a fact that the Bush White House works suspiciously hard to suppress. The CIA’s internal news sites had top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding. He was so fascinated by how truly international the CIA was that he decided to give up his job as a private contractor to CIA and instead work directly under the government. This would mean that as a government employee would be paid lesser than a private employee but then he would have much more opportunities to travel. He applied for a systems administrator at the CIA and was accepted. But before going back to work he had to finish a sit in a classroom schooling to get prepared.

He was sent to Warrenton training center in Virginia and a place called Comfort Inn was to be his home for the next six months. Warrenton was nicknamed The Hill and is believed to be the most mysterious and classified center of CIA. The Hill served as the heart of CIA’s field communications network. Being trained to be a TISO (Technical Informant Security Officers) that is, the CIA’s cadre of elite communicators.  A TISO is an undercover officer to manage the technical infrastructure of CIA operations most commonly overseas at stations hidden inside American missions consulates and embassies. They are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building. If an embassy is under siege, the TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to headquarters after they have shattered, burnt, wiped and disintegrated anything that the CIA has its fingerprints on. The worst kept secret in modern diplomacy is that primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as the platform for espionage. Only espionage justifies the expense for the ability of a country to use the cover of its foreign services to conduct and legitimize its spying.

Snowden was assigned to work in Geneva.

In the intelligence  community, the Frankenstein Effect refers to situations in which  policy decisions intended to advance American interests that end up harming them irreparably. Some examples include American funding and training of mujahideen to fight the Soviets which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al Qaeda as well as de-bath-ification of the Saddam Hussein era Iraqi military which resulted in the rise of Islamic state. In Geneva , America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreck havoc on the life of his creator. The CIA traditionally handed its intelligence with the help of human intelligence or covert officers who specialized in face to face information collection. As everything was being digitized Geneva was regarded as the Ground Zero for this transition because it contains the world’s richest environment; sophisticated targets from the global headquarters of United Nations to the home offices of numerous specialized UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations. Intelligence was increasingly becoming cyber-intelligence and anyone could be searched while the searcher would remain anonymous. An issue would emerge when a case officer would search the name of a person from a country like Iran or China in the agencies databases and come up empty handed. They turned to the public Internet which was risky. When you go online you request for any website travels from your computer to the server that hosts your final destination that is the website you’re trying to visit. At every stop along the way however you request announces exactly where on the Internet it came from an exactly where an Internet is going thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address information on a postcard. Because of these headers, your Internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by webmasters’ network administrations and foreign intelligence services..

During his stay in Geneva, whenever a case officer asked him if there was a safer, faster and all around more efficient way to do this he introduced them to Tor. The Tor project was the creation of the State that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against their state surveillance. Tor is a free and open source software that allows users to browse online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity. Its protocols were developed in the US naval research laboratory throughout the mid 1990s and in 2003 it was released to the public, to the world wide civilian population on whom its functionality depends. Tor operates on a cooperative community model relying on tech savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their basements, attics and garages. Tor does the job of protecting the origin of the Internet traffic . With Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor server to Tor server with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of the last or server in the constantly shifting chain. Virtually none of the Tor servers know the identity of the origin of the traffic. Tor server that does know the origin is the very first server in the chain but it does not know whether traffic is  headed. This layering method is called The Onion Routing which gives TOR  its name. The classified joke was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony, here was a US military developed technology that made cyber intelligence simultaneously harder and easier applying hacker know-how to protect the anonymity of IC officers but only at the price of granting the same anonymity to adversaries and to  average users across the globe.

The Internet is fundamentally American. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva at the CERN research laboratory in 1989 but the ways by which the web is accessed are  American; which gives the American intelligence community the home field advantage. The cables and satellites, the servers and towers, so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under the US control that over 90% of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned and operated by American government and American businesses. Countries like China and Russia have attempted to make alternative systems such as the Great Firewall or state sponsored, censored search engines or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS but America remains the hegemon. It’s not just in terms of  infrastructure, but it’s also the computer software, from Microsoft, Google to Oracle and hardware from HP, Apple and Dell,  everything from chips (Intel, Qualcomm) to the routers and modems (Cisco or Juniper) to the web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook) and the more structurally important Amazon which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet. Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices, say in China, the companies themselves are American and subject to American law. The problem is that they are also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone. Given the American nature of  communication infrastructure it should have been obvious that the US government would engage in this type of mass surveillance.

Snowden moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA America’s Premier Signals Intelligence Agency. Again working as a private contractor he became an employee of Dell formally but only ever worked in an NSA facility. The NSA’s Pacific Technical Center (PTC ) occupied ½ of a building inside the enormous Yukuto  air base. The PTC handled the NSA’s infrastructure for the entire Pacific and provided support for agency’s spoke sites in nearby countries. Communications interception was a major part of the mission. Snowden’s job was systems analysis with responsibility for maintaining the local NSA system and connecting it with the structure of CIA. The NSA was much more technologically sophisticated compared to the CIA but much less vigilant about its security. Each of any CIA’s site collected its own intelligence, stored the data on its own local service and often then sent back copies to the main servers at NSA headquarters. This meant that if any data were destroyed at any particular site then the intelligence that the agency had worked hard to collect would be lost. This problem was acknowledged and Snowden was given the task of engineering a solution. The result was a backup and storage system that would act as a shadow, a complete automated and constantly updating copy of all the agency’s most important material. The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be. The agency’s ultimate dream was permanency; to store all the files it has ever collected till perpetuity.The NSA had developed several programs meant for spying, like FOXACID which was the code name for NSA servers that host malware versions of familiar websites. EGOSTISTICALGIRAFFE was an NSA program intended to exploit a vulnerability in certain web browsers running Tor since they couldn’t break Tor itself. GRAPHICTHIEF was the VPN attack orchestrator.

In the midst of work, Snowden was informed that the PTC hosted a conference on China sponsored by the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy where he was asked to be the technology briefer. He prepared his presentation on counterintelligence, cyber intelligence and ways to thwart the adversary’s attempt to use the Internet to gather surveillance. The primary task was to provide a summary of the intelligence community’s assessment of China’s ability to electronically track American officers and assets operating in the region. On reading the technical details of China surveillance of private communications, Snowden was completely appalled as well as impressed. But there were certain aspects of what he was reading that disturbed him. There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself. What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be doing secretly to the whole world.

After 9/11 president George W Bush lead one of the most publicly contested initiative of ,mass surveillance which was the warrantless wiretapping component of the President Surveillance Program (PSP) which had been disclosed by the New York Times in 2005 by some whistleblowers. The PSP empowered the NSA to collect telephone and Internet communications between the United States and abroad without having to obtain a special warrant from a foreign intelligence surveillance court. Following the outcry that attended the Times revelations, the Bush administration claimed to have let the program expire in 2007. But the expiration turned out to be a farce. Congress spent the last two years of the Bush administration passing legislations that retroactively legalized the PSP. President Obama once in office, refused to call for a full congressional investigation of the PSP. Snowden went about searching for the classified version of the report on PSP. The report he found had everything,from the complete accounting of NSA’s most secret surveillance programs and the agency directives to Department of Justice policies that have been used to support American law and contravene the US constitution. The report recorded how an NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to “bulk collection” which is the agency’s euphemism for “mass surveillance”. It justified this shift as the legitimate corollary of expanded technological capabilities. An integral component of this plan was the program called STELLARWIND. STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s inception in 2001. The Bush administration attempted to legitimize it by changing the meanings of basic English words such as “acquire” and “obtain”. According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could “collect” whatever communication records it wanted without having to get a warrant because it could only be said to have “acquired” or “obtained” them in the legal sense if and when the agency searched for and retrieved them for its database. This just meant that as long as American agencies were merely conducting mass surveillance, it could not be considered illegal because they were not actually “acquiring” or “obtaining” data. They were merely “collecting” it. It would be called obtaining or acquiring only when they went back into their database of collected information and pulled about a particular information. This type of word play was mindboggling.

Most people tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of “content”, i.e,  the actual words in a chat or their email. But the government cares little about the actual content.Most people find it relieving but the unfortunate truth is that the actual content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements, that is the metadata. Metadata is data about data. It is a cluster of tags and markers that allow data to be useful. It records all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on their own. Take a phone call for example, its metadata might include the date and time of the call, the calls’ duration, the number from which the call was made, the number being called, and their locations. Metadata can tell your surveillant the address you slept last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited during your day and how long you spent their. It shows who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.You do not have any control over the metadata you produce because it is generated automatically. Your devices are constantly communicating for you and they don’t withhold private information or use code words in an attempt to be discreet. Metadata is far more important than the actual content of our messages or calls or emails.

 After reading the classified report Snowden spent the next weeks in a daze, he was horrified. He now understood that he was totally transparent to his government.The only two countries that had previously practiced mass surveillance were the major combatants of World War 2:  Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The first All Union Census of the Soviet Union had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count; it overtly queried so with citizens about their nationality. Census‘s findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were the minority when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed  Central Asian heritage. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate these cultures by re-educating their populations. The Nazi German census of 1933 took a similar statistical project but with the assistance of computer technology. It set out  to count the Reich’s population in order to control it and to purge it mainly of Jews and Roma before exerting its murderous efforts on populations beyond its borders. The Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American IBM which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punches into the cards. Each citizen was represented by a card and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of identity. Soon the census information was being used to identify and deport Europe's Jewish population to the death camps.

The United States  census was set up by the British monarchy as a method of assessing taxes and ascertaining the number of young men eligible for military conscription. It was the constitution’s genius to repurpose what had been a mechanism of occupation into one of  democracy. The census which is officially under the jurisdiction of the Senate was ordered to be performed every 10 years which was roughly the amount of time it took to the process the data of most American censuses  following the first census of  1790. This decade long lag was shortened by the census of 1890 which was the world's first census to make use of computers; the prototypes of the models that IBM later sold to Nazi Germany. With computing technology, the processing time was cut in half. It was in Japan that Snowden realized where all this technology was leading to. The ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage and any person could be selected by the government to be a scapegoat.

He was back in the United States in 2001 as an employer of Dell and attached to his old agency CIA.The title of his job was Solutions Consultant; it meant that he had to solve the problems created by his new partner who he’s going to call Cliff , the account manager. Cliff’s job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise to the CIA by any means and Snowden's job was to make it a reality.  This meant that he had to make truth the slick promises Cliff made without any technological understanding. Their main project right now was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge standards of NSA by building a private cloud. The aim was the unite the agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed. Essentially they wanted to make it so, that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency had a problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that they couldn’t keep track of or access so a private cloud would help people to access any data from anywhere in the world.

The realization and understanding of technological competency made Snowden even more and more paranoid. He knew every time he used his phone or his credit card he could be tracked. He recalls how once he saw at a mall a smart fridge which was being advertised as Internet equipped. It blew his mind. It had a screen, it could record audio and videos, you could check your mails, calendar, watch YouTube clips etc. Snowden was convinced that the only reason that thing was Internet equipped was so that it could report back to its manufacturer about its owners’ usage and any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer in turn would monetize that data by selling it. It would be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before virtual assistants like Amazon Echo and Google  were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on night stands to record and transmit all activity within range. The data we generate just by living would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence. Corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product which corporations sold to other corporations,data brokers and advertisers.

Meanwhile every tech company was rolling out new civilian versions of a cloud. In fact Dell had even tried to trademark the term “cloud computing”. People were more than willing to sign up at the prospect of their data, be it photos, videos and music being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an uber sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for free or so cheap.

The cloud was as effective a sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amzaon and  Apple and Google to sell to their users. “With the cloud you  will be able to push security updates across agency computers worldwide, when the cloud is up and running the agency that is the CIA will be able to track who has read what file worldwide”. The essence of cloud storage was similar to the mainframe architecture of computing’s earliest history. Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had because the real computers that you relied upon to store your data were warehoused in the enormous data centers that cloud companies built throughout the world. To speak simply, a cloud is just a storage mechanism that ensures your data is being processed or stored not on your personal device but on a range of different servers which can ultimately be owned and operated by different companies.  The result is that your data is no longer truly yours, it has become  controlled by companies which can use it for virtually any purpose. When we choose to store our data online we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us and can willfully delete any data they object to. If any of our data is found to be objectionable they can delete our accounts , deny us our own data and yet retain a copy for their own records which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data.Our user data was returning enormous profits for the companies.

Even though certain American laws  prohibit against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant, there are very few laws that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes a vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks. Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was promoted as a crime deterrent but soon their role became preemptive. The law enforcement started using these security cameras to track people who had not committed any crime or or  even suspected of it. The greatest danger still lies ahead with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI equipped surveillance camera would be no mere recording device but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer that filters out suspicious activities and features, such as people of a certain color or wearing certain clothes. A world in which all people were totally surveilled would be a world of equality of oppression alone. There would be no provision of leniency or forgiveness.

The constant preemptive surveillance is a way of saying that if you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.Think of a spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you. It would pose a mortal hazard. Imagine all the secrets, big and small that could end your marriage,end your career, poison even your closest relationships and leave you broke, friendless, or maybe it’s just information about a petition you signed or a protest you attended. Everyone has something. This information was being stored by the US government. 

Meanwhile,Snowden noticed that he was having strange physical symptoms. He had become weirdly clumsy falling off ladders and started feeling dizzy frequently. It led to a gradual diminishing of his senses and he couldn’t figure out if his experiences were psychosomatic or genuine. One day when he was home at around noon the dizziness hit him hard and he was sure he was going to die. He slammed into a chair and lost consciousness. After being out for around an hour he tried to reach for the phone and panic and somehow got himself downstairs and slumped on the kitchen floor and fell asleep which is how Lindsay found him. He had just had an epileptic seizure. His mother had epilepsy and it’s possible that he had gotten it from her. In time he came to know the warning signs of a seizure and he could prepare for an oncoming attack. He had his CAT scans and MRISs and other diagnoses. His brain had quite literally, short circuited.

It was May 1, 2011 when the news boomed : Osama bin Laden had been tracked down to Abbottabad in Pakistan and killed by a team of Navy SEAL. 10 years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the twin towers; what had the last decade actually accomplished? The previous ten years had been marked by a number of American made tragedies, the war in Afghanistan the catastrophy created in Iraq, indefinite detentions in Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killing of civilians etc. Terrorism was the stated reason why most of the country’s surveillance programs were implemented but it turned out that Fear was the true terrorism perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use any justification to authorize the use of force. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself . The repeated invocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by an unquestionable authority. There was a permanent “us versus them”.

Due to his epileptic seizures, Snowden took a short-term disability leave from Dell. He spent his time scrolling through the news while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured by secret state agents many of which America had helped keep in power. Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence with work and school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. The crowds in the city of Cairo or be it Damascus or at every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian  green movement were calling for an end to oppression ,censorship and precarity.  It was a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn and inalienable.

In contemporary life we have a single concept that encompasses all space that’s off limits to the government. That concept is privacy. It is an empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state avoid into it the law is only permitted to venture with a warrant. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. Saying that you don’t need any privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have or could have to hide anything including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history and health records. Saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of press because you don't like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God.

The young people of the Middle East were agitating for higher wages, lower prices and better pensions. They were however also agitating for a freer Internet. They were decreeing Iran’s  censoring of web content and shutting down certain foreign ISP entirely. They were protesting Egypt's president who had cut off Internet access for his whole country. Snowden got up his  couch and staggered over to his home office to set up a bridge relay that would bypass the Iranian Internet blockades. He then distributed its encrypted configuration identity to the Tor core developers. This was the least he could do. Even if one young kid from Iran who hadn’t been able to get online could now bypass the imposed filters and restrictions and connect to the Internet protected by the Tor system with anonymity, then it was certainly worth his own minimal efforts.The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly his age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia selling fruits and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities he stood in the square and set fire to his life by dying a martyr. If burning himself to death was a last free act he could manage in defiance then, Snoowden thought, he can certainly get up off the couch and press a few buttons.

Part 3 

Snowden was working at an enormous Pearl Harbor era airplane factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple field in Hawaii. It was designed like a tunnel and hence earned its name “The Tunnel”. He was the sole employee of the aptly named “Office of Information Sharing” where he worked as a SharePoint systems administrator. SharePoint is a Microsoft product focused on internal document management, that is, who can read what, who can edit what, who can send and receive what and who can have access to what information. He was basically the reader in chief at one of the agency’s most significant facilities. He emphasizes that his active searching out of NSA abuses began not with copying of documents but with the reading of them. He was determined to find out if an American system of mass surveillance existed and if it did how it functioned.It was no easy task to correlate the various NSA’s activities; it was so secretive that by design the left hand rarely knew what the right hand was doing.

 In the hopes of organizing all the documents he put together a personal best-of-the-reader- boards. The files quickly began to pile up and he realized that his personal reader board had become less of a daily digest than an archive of sensitive information with relevance far beyond the day's immediacy. He decided to share it with others in the agency who would do good reading about the department they were working at. So with his bosses’ approval he set about creating an automatic reader board, one that did not rely on anybody posting things to it but edited itself. The reader board essentially scanned for new documents and its findings would be made available to every NSA officer by comparing their digital identity badges and documents pertaining to their relevance would be sent to them. Essentially it would be a reader board of individually tailored news feed. He called the system Heartbeat. Nearly all of the documents that he later disclosed to journalists came to him through Heartbeat. It showed him not just the aims but the abilities of  NSA’s mass surveillance. Snowden explains NSA’s surveillance as a matter of six protocols: sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all, partner it all. It intended to impress America’s allies Australia,Canada, NZ and the UK:the primary countries with which the United States shared intelligence. Together with the United States these countries are known as the Five Eyes. Sniff it all meant finding a data source, Know it all meant finding out what the data was, Collect it  all meant capturing that data, Process it all meant analyzing that data for usable intelligence and Exploit it all meant using that intelligence to further the agencies aims and Partner it all meant sharing the new data source with allies.

He found an order from the FISA code demanding a private company to turn over its customers’ private information to the federal government The NSA had secretly interpreted this authorization as a license to collect all of the business records or metadata of telephone communications coming through American telecom such as Verizon and AT&T on an ongoing daily basis of each and every customer. This included records of telephone communications between American citizens the practice of which was unconstitutional. This legalization was being used to justify two most prominent Internet surveillance methods:  the PRISM  program and upstream collection. PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube,Skype, Apple and AOL including email, photos, video and audio chats, web browsing content and all other data stored on clouds. Upstream collection meanwhile was arguably even more invasive and enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private sector internet infrastructure. This collection was managed by NSA’s special sources operations unit which built secret wiretapping equipment and embedded it inside corporate facilities of obliging Internet service providers around the world.

The next stage of his investigation was to figure out how this collection was actually accomplished. Imagine you’re sitting at a web browser and you type in a URL which is a request that goes out in search of his destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travel before your request gets to that server it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of NSA’s most powerful weapons. Your request passes through a few black servers in special rooms at major private telecommunication buildings throughout allied countries as well as in US embassies, and contain two critical tools. The 1st :The program called TURMOIL handles passive data collection, making a copy of the data coming through. The 2nd program: TURBINE, is in charge of active collection that is actively tampering with the users. Seeing a request, it checks the metadata for selectors for more scrutiny. If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. Their algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploit-malware programs to use against you. These chosen malware are sent back to TURBINE which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with the website you requested. The end result is that you get all the content you want along with all the surveillance you don’t and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. NSA can access not just your metadata but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

The NSA does not regard citizens data as their legally protected personal property. The NSA maintains that because citizens had already shared their phone records with a third party that is your telephone service provider, they had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest they may once have had. In early 2013 James Clapper, director of national intelligence testified under oath to the US Senate that the NSA did not collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. This was a bald faced lie. When civil society groups like ACLU try to challenge NSA, the latter did not defend itself and  instead declared that ACLU had no right to be in court at all and that existence or nonexistence of surveillance was a state secret. In other words the court couldn’t recognize the information that was publicly known from having been published in the media, it could only recognize the information that the government officially confirmed as being publicly known.

Leaking and whistleblowing isn’t the same thing. Leaking is disclosure done not out of public interest but out of self interest when someone may leak a confidential information for some money or out of spite. The agency itself leaks some documents for its own benefit such as the leaking of detailed accounts of a conference call between al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawhiri and his global affiliates helped the agency to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance. Whistle blowing on the other hand is an act in which a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in the greater society outside it to which that institution should be accountable.  Whistle blowing is not a radical act of dissent or resistance but a conventional act of return to original principles.Snowden decided to become a whistleblower.

He started planning how he would reveal top secret documents to the public. Cooperating with some type of media organization would  defend him against the worst accusations of a rogue activity but the lack of journalists’ expertise and technology made him question his decision. He says that the journalists have failed to pick up on two events that stunned him. The first was NSA announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility called Massive Data Repository. No one bothered to ask why any government agency let alone an intelligence agency needs that much space for data storage? What data and how much of it? The next event happened one year later in March 2013 after Clapper denied that NSA collected bulk data on Americans. But no one covered a rare public appearance by Ira Hunt , the chief technology officer of CIA. He was appearing as a special guest speaker at a civilian tech event in New York called the GigaOm structure data conference. At the conference he said that, “At the CIA we fundamentally tried to collect everything and hang onto it. It is nearly within our grass to compute on all human generated information”. He told the journalist that, “the agency could track their smartphones even when they were turned off and they could surveil every single one of their communications”. Coverage of Ira’s confession ran only on Huffington Post but the performance itself ran live on at YouTube where it still remains.

Meanwhile the CIA had finally decided on the  disposition of its cloud contract with Dell and had turned down HP too. They instead signed a 10 year deal of 600 million dollar cloud development and management with Amazon.

Snowden finally narrowed down on  documentarian Laura Poitras to reveal NSA’s documents. Her film “My Country, My Country” depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under US occupation. She had also made the program about NSA cryptanalyst William Binney. Laura herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work. Glenn Greenwald was a civil liberties lawyer turned communist who wrote about the unclassified version of the NSA IC report back in 2009 . The problem was how to get in touch. He used the alias “cincinnatus'' which was followed by “citizen 4”. Anonymity was very important in order to avoid being tracked by the CIA. He decided to use somebody else's Internet connection. He couldn’t use public Wi-Fi because it leaves on record with every access point it connects to. So he went driving. He converted his car into a roving Wi-Fi sensor for which he needed a laptop, a high powered antenna and a magnetic GPS sensor. He took along a cheap laptop working on Linux based “amnesiac” operating system meaning, it forgets everything once you turn it off. At night and on weekends he drove around for hours letting his antenna pick up the pulses of each Wi-Fi network he passed and his GPS sensor tagged each access point with the location at which it was noticed. What resulted was a map of invisible networks we pass by every day without even noticing,  many of which had no security or very little security. Thus he tried to get in touch with the journalists who would be willing to expose the documents to public.

“Read, Write, Execute” was his simple three step plan. Almost everything we do on a computer or any device leaves a record.  Each permission he used left its own forensic trace; every time he opened a file, copied, downloaded, moved, or deleted, everything was recorded. Luckily the strength of the systems were also their weaknesses; their complexity meant that not even the people running them necessarily knew how they worked. The NSA may have paid for the network but sysadmins like Snowden were the ones who really owned it. The Read phase would involve dancing through the digital grid of tripwires laid across the routes connecting the NSA to every other intelligence agency domestic and foreign. One such program was OPTICNERVE approach that saved a snapshot every five minutes from the cameras of people video chatting on platforms like Yahoo or Messenger. By using HEARTBEAT to bring in the documents he wanted he could award suspicion. He could just say he’s compiling documents for the reader board that everyone knew about. Now, he couldn’t just copy the files from HEARTBEAT server onto a personal storage device without being caught. If you try to transfer files from the server he could easily be tracked, so he decided to make use of some old computers lying around in the NSA facility which were not connected to the central network. If anyone asked, he could say that he was making sure HEARTBEAT was compatible even on old computers since not everybody has sophisticated technology experience. Under the guise of compatibility testing he could transfer the files to these old computers where he searched, filtered and organized them as much as he wanted. The WRITE phase now included copying the documents from these old computers into  SD cards. The process was excruciatingly slow considering the amount of documents that were to be copied and by the end of the process he would be so paranoid he’d be sweating, seeing shadows and hearing footsteps around every corner. 

Execute was the final step. He had to get that vital archive of documents out of the building. After sneaking out the SD drives from the facility he had to transfer the files to a larger external storage device via his laptop. Now the problem of anonymity arose. He knew that the documents could lead back to him once he had sent them to the journalists because all digital files contain metadata, invisible tags that can be used to identify the origin. He thought of stripping the metadata but that could cast a doubt on their authenticity. And even if you strip the metadata, there was no guarantee that the documents had not been embedded with further unique identifying programs that could track the sender of information. This technological difficulty forced him to confront the prospect of discarding his practice of anonymity and coming forward to identifying himself as the source. He decided to embrace his principles by signing his name to them and letting himself be condemned. All the documents he selected fit on a single drive which he left out in the open on the desk at home. He knew that the materials were just as secure as they had been at office, actually more , thanks to multiple levels and methods of encryption he had covered them in. That’s the beauty of cryptological art. A little bit of math can keep a secret.

Most people think that apart from read, write and execute there is another basic function called delete. What does deleting mean? As countless despots have been reminded, to truly get rid of a document you can’t just destroy every copy of it. You also have to destroy every memory of it which is to say you have to destroy all the people who remember it. Deleting functions appeared from the very start of digital computing so that users could feel in control of their mistakes. But the truth is that deletion has never existed technologically in the way we conceive of it. The file only appears to be deleted.Deletion is  a public fiction, a lie. In technical terms deletion is really just a form of overwriting. Normally when we press delete for one of our files, its data which has been stashed deep down on a disk somewhere is not actually touched. Only the computers map of where each file is stored is rewritten to say that the space where the file belong is now empty. A good analogy would be to think of a book in a vast library that is not mentioned in the records of the library. Just the fact that it is not named in library references does not mean that the book does not exist. Similarly, the deleted file remains stashed deep inside our device, and we look really really close, we can still find it.This is why it takes so long to copy a file but the act of deletion is almost instantaneous.

In 2012, the governments of both Australia and UK were proposing legislation for the mandatory recording of telephone and Internet metadata. These were presented as public safety measures but they actually represented a breathtaking intrusion into the daily lives of the innocent. Sometime during the year Snowden attended a gathering called a crypto party in Honolulu where international grassroots cryptologists volunteer their time to teach free classes on the topic of digital self defense. Snowden started his  presentation by explaining the illusory nature of deletion. Then he pivoted to encryption. It is the only true protection against surveillance. If all the emails in your inbox are encrypted Google can’t read them to profile you unless it has the encryption key. If all your communications are encrypted, spies can’t read them unless they have the encryption key. Encryption works by way of algorithm. As a mathematical method of reversibly transforming information in a way that it becomes incomprehensible to anyone who doesn't have a copy of the encryption key. Encryption algorithms are basically just sets of math problems designed to be incredibly difficult even for computers to solve. The encryption key is the one clue that allows a computer to solve the particular set of math problems being used. Your readable data is pushed into one end of the encryption algorithm and it gives out incomprehensible gibberish called ciphertext. If anybody wants to crack the ciphertext they must have the encryption key. The security of an encryption key is based on its length which indicates the level of difficulty involved in solving the algorithm.If you presume that an attacker takes one day to crack a 64 bit key which scrambles your data in one of 2^64 possible ways, then it would take double that amount of time, two days to break a 65 bit key and four days to break a 66 bit key. Breaking a 128 bit key would take 2^64 times longer than a day, or 50,000,000 billion years. In his communications with the journalists, Snowden used 4096 and 8192 bit keys. Even all of NSA’s cryptoanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would not be able to get into his drive. For this reason encryption is the single best hope for fighting surveillance of any kind. Any government hoping to access encrypted communication has two options, go after the key Masters or go after the keys. For the former they can pressure device manufacturers into intentionally selling products that perform faulty encryption. For the latter they can launch targeted attacks against the  endpoints of the communication that is the hardware and software that perform the process of encryption. The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called Zero knowledge. It is a method in which any data you try to store externally on a cloud, is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are only in the user’s hands and no one can touch them.  Snowden’s key to the NSA secrets went beyond zero knowledge, it was a zero knowledge key consisting of multiple zero knowledge keys. The keys to the drive containing the disclosures had a twist. While he distributed most of the pieces of the keys, he retained one for himself. If you destroy just the single lone piece that he kept for himself he would destroy all access to the NSA’s secrets forever.

Snowden wanted to find out if there was anyone in the world the NSA could not surveil. The program that enabled the robust access to individuals was called XKEYSCORE which was a sort of search engine that let an analyst search through all records of your life. A kind of Google that instead of showing pages from public Internet returns results from your private email or private chats, your private files, everything. Snowden applied for the job of infrastructure analyst which involved using the complete spectrum of NSA’s mass surveillance tools including XKEYSCORE to monitor activity on the infrastructure of interest, that is, the Internet. He decided to bring out archives of the agency and pass them through the journalists he had contacted.  The NSA described XKEYSCORE in the documents as its widest ranging tool used to search nearly everything a user does on the Internet. It was the closest thing to science fiction he had ever read, the difference being that this was a science fact. The interface allowed you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number and go through the recent history of their online activity. You could even playback recordings of their online session so that the screen you would be looking at, was the screen whatever was on the user’s desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop when they became active on the Internet.

Sometimes this elaborate software was used by analyst to stalk their love affairs or their partners and to hack into their phones and chats. Or other times he learned that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency; an analyst would share the nudes they had acquired of random strangers with colleagues. Right there sitting at his screen Snowden had access to almost every single human that had ever used a computer or had been on the Internet.

He thought to himself, “I’ll never see my family again”.

He started making preparations like those of a man who was about to die. He emptied his bank accounts putting cash into an old steel ammo box for Lindsey to find. He started doing his procrastinated chores and  encrypted his old computers . In sum, he was putting his affairs in order to make everything easier for Lindsey or just for his conscience which was about to switch allegiance from a world that hadn't earned it to the woman who had and the family he loved. It was difficult to get the journalist to come to a meeting because he couldn’t tell them who they were meeting. It was even more difficult to find a place where he could meet them. All of the Five Eyes countries were obviously off limits. In fact all of Europe was out because these countries couldn’t be counted upon to uphold international law against the extradition of those charged with political crimes in the face of what was sure to be significant American pressure. Africa, Latin America were no go zones too. The United States had a history of acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was Russia and China was China. The optics would only be worse in Middle East. It seemed like no when he was independent enough from the White House. The process of elimination left him with Hong Kong, sort of a nomansland but with a vibrant media and protest culture and a largely unfiltered Internet. That night he lay in bed and held Lindsey too tightly. He told her he was sorry and how busy he had been; he said he was going to miss her and she was the best person he had ever met in his life. After Lindsay left for a trip with her friends Snowden broke down and started crying. He took an emergency medical leave from work citing epilepsy, packed his luggage for laptops, secure communications and a computer that had never gone and would never go online etc. He left his smartphone on the kitchen and alongside her notepad scribbled, “Got called away for work, I love you”. Then he went to the airport and bought a ticket to Tokyo. In Tokyo he bought another ticket in cash for Hong Kong, the city where  world first met Edward Snowden.

A single mistake would have been enough to get him caught by the NSA. He had imagined all sorts of unpleasant scenarios. He barricaded himself in the room at Mira hotel and didn't leave his room for days out of paranoia. Finally Laura and Glenn showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. They seem to be disappointed looking at him as they expected someone older, tipsy, depressive man with a guilty conscience waiting to expose the NSA. In the room Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights and setting up her camera. They talked and talked about the ongoing NSA’s programs while Laura filmed. Glennan and Evan would retreat to their own hotels to write up their findings into an articles while Laura would edit her footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gilman of Washington post. On June 5, the Guardian broke the first story of the FISA court order that authorized the NSA to collect information from the American telecom Verizon about every phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran the PRISM story pretty much simultaneously with a similar account in the Washington post by Laura Ann Bart. Snowden knew  he would soon be  identified. As the revelations ran on every news channel, it became clear the US government had thrown the whole of its machinery into identifying the source. He had to seize the initiative before it was too late and the US government gave it a different spin. He had to come forward and identify himself. Laura proposed a recorded statement which she started filming right then and there most of which has been included in her documentary Citizen 4. Snowden faced the camera and said, “My name is Ed Snowden. I am 29 years old”.

 Hello world.

All he cared about was getting the facts out into the world. He was at the public’s mercy. The major impedance to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in his position would not be allowed to argue in a court that their disclosures were beneficial to the public. The only thing the court would recognize was that he disclosed classified information to journalists which was supposed to be state secrets. Laura’s video of him was posted on Guardian website on June 9. He knew how the stories of several other whistleblowers had gone like Daniel Ellsberg, Anthony Russo, Thomas Tam, Drake, Benny, Loomis etc all of these people had faced some sort of backlash.

Within hours after his Guardian video ran,  one of Glenn’s regular readers in Hong Kong contacted him and offered to put him in touch with Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Mann to local attorneys who then volunteered to take on his case. They helped him get out of Mira hotel and took him to one of the poorest neighbors of the city to help him hide. He was supposed to live with refugees who offered  him there home with  unfailing kindness and grace. All of these people were asylum seekers and he remains on good terms with them even today.

With the US government having decided to charge Snowden under Espionage Act, he stood accused of a political crime, meaning a crime whose victim is the state itself, than a person. The team supporting him had reached out to officials everywhere from Iceland to India asking if they would respect the prohibition against extradition of those accused of political crimes. It soon became evident that even the most advanced democracies were afraid of incurring the wrath of the US government. Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and editor for WikiLeaks who was poised to offer him the world’s best asylum advice. She made a plan to travel to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow via Havana via karikas for a simple reason it was the only safe route available. There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong and all of the other connecting flights travel through US airspace. They landed at Moscow airport on June 23 for a 24 hour layover till the next flight. It has now dragged on for over 7 years. Exile is an endless layover. 

As he got in line for the customs, two security officers in suits approached and said there is a problem with the passport. They took him to a conference room with men in grey sitting around a table where there were a half dozen of them with military haircuts. It was Russia’s FBI, the Federal Security Service. In very polite terms and decent English this spoke to him the gist of which was “come and work for us”. And return for cooperation they were offering him anything from stacks of cash to a get out of jail free card, for pretty much anything, from fraud to murder. Snowden said, “Listen I understand who you are please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with you. I’m not going to cooperate with any intelligence service”.  He informed that he was going to Quito, Ecuador via Havana. The men informed him, “I’m afraid to inform you that your passport is invalid your passport has been canceled by  your government and the air services have been instructed not to allow you to travel”. It was incredulous! His own government had trapped him in Russia. When you’re trying to catch a fugitive, putting out an Interpol alert and canceling their passport is just standard operating procedure. But in the final accounting it was served as a defeat, as it handed Russia a massive propaganda victory.

All told, they were trapped in the airport for a biblical 40 days and 40 nights. Over the course he applied to a total of 27 countries for political asylum and all of them denied. Soon his presence became a global spectacle, even the Russians found it a nuisance. On July 1, the president of Bolivia, Eva Morales left another airport in Moscow in a Bolivian state plane. The US government suspected that he was on board due to president Morale’s expression of solidarity and pressured the governments of Italy,France and Spain and Portugal to deny the plane access to their airspace and succeeded in diverting it to Vienna, Austria. This was a startling violation of Russian sovereignty. The incident wasn’t affront to Russia which couldn’t guarantee a visiting head of state safe passage home. And it confirmed Russia and to him that any flight that America suspected him of stowing away on, ran the same risk of being diverted and grounded. On August 1, Russia granted him temporary asylum.

This part of the book takes entries from the Diaries of Lindsay Mills. Snowden says that ever since he left home he had no idea what had been going on with his family and the best person to tell would be no other than Lindsay herself. The following account is in Lindsey’s own words from her personal journal.

Lindsey writes that Edwards mother was to come over at his invitation on 22nd may but he was not at home when she woke up. She checked her phone and found three missed calls from an unknown number and one missed call from along for a number no voice mails. She googled the long  number. Ed must be in Hong Kong for some work. On 24th may she started getting worried, “Where is Edward?”. On June 7, she received a call from NSA special agent Megan Smith asking her to call him about Ed. She was being followed by government agents and SUVs. Some HPD officers searched through the house and over the next few days she was followed by government vehicles wherever she went. On 9th June, a friend called Tiffany called her and asked her to watch the news. She turned on the news and waited for the 12 minute YouTube video to load. And then there he was, real, alive. He looked thin but he sounded like his old self. The old Ed,confident and strong. This was the man she loved, not the distant, cold ghost she had been recently living with. She thought, “Ed what have you done? How can you come back from this?” 

Her friends helped her through the constant interrogations, interviews and searches; her name was all over the media: Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend of Edward Snowden. She took care of all her affairs with urgency like withdrawing all her money kept at banks in case the government froze her accounts. She hired some lawyers to represent her. The interviewers asked her question with the complacency that showed that they already knew everything about her. That was Ed’s point. The government always knows everything.

The next few days were marred with exhausting interrogations again and again, she was frustrated. The feds had copied all of her emails and chats and printed out and read things that she had written to Ed and that Ed wrote back to her, demanding that she explain them. But this is just how people who have been together for eight years communicate! Agents even followed her around the women’s department. The Internet and TV was full of labels calling her a stripper or a whore.

She finally understood why Edward had insisted on calling her mother. They would be together. He had wanted them to be together in Hawaii when he went public so that they could keep each other company and give each other strength and comfort. It’s so hard to be angry at someone you love and even harder to be angry at someone you love and respect for doing the right thing. She decided to move to LA and started packing her stuff like a crazy woman and cleaning up and then just gazing at his side of the bed. All that was left of Edward stuff after the FBI raided the house fit into one small box; she set it alight with a box of matches and just watched it burn.

Love and exile:

Once American spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all your communications, they started actively tampering with it too. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device including his camera and microphone. Which means that if you are reading this book on any sort of modern machine like a smartphone or tablet they can follow along and read you. They can tell you how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. This is a result of two decades of unchecked innovation, the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master.  The revelations of 2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of which launched multiple investigations into NSA abuses. Those investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature of its mass surveillance programs. In 2015, Court of Appeals ruled in the matter of ACLU versus Clapper.The court ruled that an NSA program had violated even the new standards of the Patriot Act and was most probably unconstitutional. In the court’s opinion the government’s definition of “relevant data collection” was so expansive as to be virtually meaningless. The amount of data they collected was unprecedented and unwarranted. Snowden says that the American legal resistance to mass surveillance was just a beta phase of what has to be an international opposition movement fully implemented across both governments and private sector. The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosure was immediate and forceful. The documents revealed NSA so determined to pursue all information it perceived as being deliberately kept from it, that it had undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet, hence making citizens financial and medical records for example more vulnerable. Eventually, Apple adopted strong default encryption for its iPhones and iPads and Google followed suit for Android products and Chromebooks. But perhaps the most important private sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching their website platforms replacing HTTP with the encrypted HTTPS; the “S” signifies Security, which helps prevent third party interception of web traffic. The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history. The Internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013. Snowden now works for his Freedom of Press foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering public interest journalism in the new Millennium. To that end the FPL financially supports Signal, an encrypted texting and calling platform created by open whisper systems, and developed Securedrop originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz, an open source submission system that allows media organisations to securely accept documents from anonymous whistleblowers.

Internationally the disclosures had to revive debates about surveillance in places with long histories of abuses. The countries  whose citizens were the most  opposed to American mass surveillance were those whose governments had most cooperated with it, from the Five Eyes nations. Specially the citizens of Germany who to learned that the NSA was surveilling German communications and had even targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s smartphone. Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind” its citizens outraged, its government complicit. For the first time since the end of World War 2, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing privacy as the natural inborn right of every man, woman and child. The EU established a new directive that seeks to standardize whistleblower protection across its member states along with a standardized legal framework for privacy protection. The GDPR treats the citizens of European unions as “data subjects”, that is, people who generate personally identifiable data. In the US data is usually regarded as a property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as a property of the person it represents which allows it to treat our data subject as deserving of civil liberties protections. The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance but even its transnationalism is too parochial The Internet is global. Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly. We start generating this data even before we are born when technologies detect us in the utro and data will continue to proliferate even after we die.This is why we have a special duty; we must ensure that these records of our past can’t be turned against us or turned against our children.

We must make sure that the world we leave behind for our children should be free of this pressure of mass surveillance. If you don’t actually claim our data now our children might not be able to do so. Our data is used for algorithms to analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell as the very things that must not be sold such as journalism. We can’t let the God like surveillance we’re under be used to calculate a citizenship scores or to predict our criminal activities to tell us what kind of education we can have or what kind of job we can have to discriminate against us based on our financial legal and medical histories not to mention our ethnicity or race which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. Of course all of the above has already happened and it’s still happening.

Exile: When people ask Snowden what his life is like now he tends to answer that its a lot like there’s, in which he spends a lot of time in front of the computer reading, writing and interacting. He lives in a 2 bedroom apartment in Moscow and attends several conferences on the protection of civil liberties in the digital age to audiences of students, scholars, lawmakers and technologists. He has virtual meetings with fellow board members at the Freedom of Press foundation. On other days he just picks up some Burger King. That was his life which got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of 2014 when Lindsay came to visit him, the first time he had seen her since Hawaii. He knew he did not deserve the chance. When she opened the door and saw him, she placed her hand on his cheek and he told her he loved her. “I know” she said. They held each other in silence each breath like a pledge to make up for lost time. From that moment his world was hers. Lindsay forced him to get out of his room and go sightseeing which he had never done in those years alone. She helped him calm down his paranoia. Whenever he goes outside he tries to change his appearance a bit, maybe get rid of his beard or wear different glasses just for the semblance of some anonymity. He changes the rhythm and pace of his work and looks away from traffic when crossing the street. He used to worry about the bus and Metro but nowadays everybody is too busy staring at their phones to give him a second glance. Lindsay’s russian has grown to be better than his own. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind. Lindsay moved out to be with him three years ago and two years ago today they got married.

(Update: Lindsay and Edward gave birth to a baby boy in December 2020.)

Concluding, in the words of Edward Snowden, “The only way I can end this book is the way I began it, with a dedication to Lindsay, whose love makes life out of exile”.

fin.

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 REVIEW: okay, firstly, MASSIVE impressed with Edward Snowden’s writing style. He is an excellent storyteller. Absolutely in love with Lindsay and him and their story. This is book that has no criticism. Snowden revealed some of the biggest state secrets with grave threat to his life that everyone needs to read upon. He stresses on the need to understand technology that has surrounded our lives which I think is SO important. If you’d like to read more about the revelations that Edward Snowden made, you can check them out here.

Fun fact: Snowden only follows one account on Twitter. No it’s not his wife. It’s the NSA. LMFAOOO T_T

oK DAS IT.Drop comments pls. Im exhaUSTED.

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I am starting a third batch of Urdu classes. After previous two batches with 250 students, we are ready for another session starting 19th December.

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Blurb: In 1987 as the Ram Janmbhoomi movement gathers momentum, a 13 year old from a village in Rajasthan joins the RSS. Despite his untouchable status he quickly rises to the post of Karyavah. Ahead of the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992, he becomes the RSS district officer chief of Bhilwara. He hates Muslims with a passion without having met one. He joins thousands of Karsevaks to Ayodhya. He mocks Mulla-Yam Singh. He participated in riots. He goes to jail. He finds Hindutva intoxicating. He is ready to die for the Hindu Rashtra. And yet, he remains a lesser Hindu. He turns into a critic of the Sangh, becomes an Ambedkarite and makes it his life's mission to expose the hypocrisies of Hindutva.

 The author takes us through his childhood when the Ram Janmabhoomi –Babri Masjid dispute was at fever pitch. The air was ringing with slogans like, “bacha bacha ram ka/ janmabhoomi ke kaam ka”, “ Jo hindu ka khoon na khaule/ khoon nahi wo paani hai”. It was October 1990,he was 15 years old studying in class 10 conducting a campaign from ram temple in his village Sirdiyas in Maandal Tehsil in his home town Bhilwara. Bricks to build the temple had already been sanctioned with prayer. He was so desperate to join the karsevaks that without his letting his family know he ran away with the workers of RSS. People wearing garlands, saffron band tied around their necks, red tika chanted, “Ram ji ke naam par jo mar jayenge, dunya me naam apna amar kar jaayenge”.  They set out for Ajmer by train and thousands of karsevaks met up in a choultry. Leaders of RSS and VHP were also present and exhorted the karsevaks to  reach Ayodhya at any cost. The senior leaders who spoke were clear in the instructions that even at the cost of their lives the workers must meet the objective of wiping out that stain of slavery- the Babri Masjid. They were told that equipments to destroy the structure, hoes, spades, crowbars etc would be provided by the locals at Ayodhya. The workers caught a train to Lucknow where well known faces of RSS, VHP, and BJP were present to motivate the workers. The crowd consisted of young, old, rich, poor, ordinary and privileged workers who had come together to do God’s work. As the train started to slide out of the station, all the important functionaries slid out of the train.

One by one. the big folk, the industrialist, the Sangh Pracharak, the leaders of the VHP and BJP all excused themselves. Only impassioned dalits, Adivasis, other young people from lower castes and a few sadhus, sants and ascetics remained in the train. They were told that the leaders have other contingents to see off and they'll follow them to Ayodhya. They never came. They were sensible people and went back to their homes.

The train was full of RSS of workers and a few regular passengers sat quite intimidated. There were also a few Muslims in our compartment seeing whom the workers started shouting, “If it’s in India that you want to stay, Vande mathram is what you must say”. They wanted to throw them off the train because of whom Lord Ram was imprisoned, who had made them into second class citizens in their own country, each one of whom marries four women and they keep multiplying breeding armies of their kind.

The Muslim passengers were terrorized by the hate filled stares and slogans and seeing them frightened and cowering thrilled the workers. As the Karsevaks went to sleep, the situation became less tense and the author noticed that the other passengers were looking relieved. They had shown them their place!

The train reached the station called Tundla. The Mulayam singh government had stopped the train and everybody was arrested. They were packed inside trucks and take to Mathura Inter College which was already full so they were moved to Agra’s multipurpose stadium where a provisional jail camp had been set. The stadium was full of arrested passionate youth while all the great respected Big Brothers who  had inspired them to martyr themselves for the temple had left them at Ajmer and gone back. Still they felt immense pride that they had been jailed for Lord Ram. That jail was really not a jail at all. Daily meetings of the Sangh call shakhas were held regularly along with lots of discussion hymns and religious discourses. Mulayam Singh’s government had ordered police firing on RSS workers at the bridge over the Sarayu . Many had died, many were injured and others had thrown themselves into the swift flowing river to escape bullets. After some time the detainees were released from the makeshift jail and as they were walking along the tracks suddenly in front of them appeared a  dozen people. They were Muslims with stones in their hands who chased the workers away from the settlements along the tracks. The workers made to the railway police station . They went out after the angry Muslims had left and caught a train headed for Jaipur. Both the author and his brother BadriLal had embarked upon the journey and their parents were certain that they had fallen to police bullets; instead in 15 days they were back home alive and perfectly well.

The intoxication of Karseva may have worn off but the madness of nationalism had gripped the author. He was just a school student when he had enrolled in RSS. Modern subjects like Geography and Mathematics were followed by religious indoctrination, chanting of praise of Hindu Gods. The author once questioned his geography teacher that if the sun was a ball of fire how had Lord Hanuman swallowed it. The teacher replied that Bajrangbali was so powerful that he could have easily chewed up the sun. He said that the son is a God in the shaka but in school it is a ball of fire. He was told that anyone who had entered the shaka and still doubted the faith will perish. His teachers turned him away from science and told them that their best teaching was all sports, exercise and Shakha education. In his village they were about 50 members in the shakha who came from all castes. They all addressed each other as “ji”.   The entire village which mostly consisted of OBCs was organized around caste including the school but it was less evident in the shakha. Gradually, the writer noticed that the chief activists of RSS were all from the so called upper caste while the lower caste people made the rank and file workers. He started to internalize RSS’s ideology very quickly, going through its magazines and looking up to the teachers, very soon he was promoted from a ground level leader to the chief teacher. He was called at the district headquarters to be given the responsibility of being district office chief of the RSS.

In the Shaka, which in Hindi means “branch”, the daily gathering of RSS workers were held for an hour. There are even WhatsApp shakhas and apparently some in IIMs too. The routine of the shakha is: running for five minutes, physical exercises for 10 minutes, games for 20 minutes, yoga for 10 minutes, intellectual input for 10 minutes and prayer for five minutes. The instructor blows a whistle and everyone turns towards the saffron RSS flag in a stand at-ease position.The saffron flag is hoisted and hands are placed on hearts, heads bowed, the attendance is taken, the prayer to the motherland is recited and then the order of dispersal is given. Every day the surya namaskar must be performed, beginning with the chant of of mitrayah namah and ending with surya narayananana namah. Other yoga postures like the mountain pose, the tree pose, the triangle, the warrior, the thunderbolt, the camel and corpse were performed.

The Sangh celebrated 6 main festivals among which, Diwali, Holi, Republic day, Independence Day are NOT included . What the Sangh did celebrate was, The Hindu new year and the RSS’ s founder’s birthday on 1st April, Vijay Dashami, Makar Sankranti, Hindu Empire Day (the coronation of Shivaji Bhonsle in 1774 as emperor) , Rakhsha Bandhan and Guru Poornima (in which donations were collected under the RSS saffron flag). Each member had to buy the uniform called the ganvesh with his own money, that consisted of  a white shirt, black cap, belt, brown shoes, and khaki shorts. The classes included learning about and hailing Shivaji , Rana Pratap, Shiva, Mahadev and RSS leaders like Golwalker and Hedgewar. The karsevaks were taught ekamata stotra and ekatmata mantra about the unity of Bharat Varsh.

The smallest unit of the shakha is the individual Swayamsevak himself , above him the gatanayak, the group leader, the chief teacher, who was at the top and gave all the orders . There was a lot of emphasis on nationalism in the shakhas and it was made obvious that those who attended the shakhas were the true patriots , the rest were clearly traitors .

A Pracharak is a full time activist who remains celebate and a vistarak is a part time activist who enters family life (grihastham) and works in society to expand the work of the sangh . In Bhilwara, the Sangh’smoney was placed with a trader which was used for “social welfare”. The pracharaks received no salary and lived a life of austerity with two sets of clothes, spreading the mission of the Sangh. The district pracharaks would travel across the districts and the money for petrol and daily expenses were taken from the trader assigned in the area, here, the BJP leader Shyam ji Daad . The businessman who handled the shakha' s money were always harsh and uncouth, as if they were doing a favour when they were actually just the custodians of the money .

Once the author asked the pracharaks why these baniyas are given the control over the money and he was told that wealthy RSS workers are able to keep the money safe whereas others might end up spending it out of need. This community has proved to be best at maintaining an accounting for money. The author was convinced, perhaps this is why every caste has been allotted a particular kind of work and they’re good at it.

Big businessmen and professionals considered it an honor to have the Pracharak over for a meal. The food was mostly vegetarian but the pracharaks who were kshatriya were permitted to eat meat but never in the Sangh office or in public spaces. At a personal level everyone was permitted to eat meat , in fact certain enthusiasts believe that Hindus had become weak and cowardly because of their vegetarianism. But the culture of vegetarianism stayed in the Sangh because the strongest supporters of the Sangh were Brahmins and Baniyas. The practice of RSS workers eating at homes was very special, it took the reach of the Sangh deep into the society. The Sangh called itself a factory for the construction of individuals, to touch individual by individual, to bring them to the shaka, go to their homes, eat with them, prepare them for their ideology, this was the style of the song.

The sangh has organized the country into 11 regions and 41 districts for its work. Each administrative district has been further divided into two or three sangh districts and sangh activists at various levels are appointed to each of these units. In different regions there are what is called sangh “Thought family” that have official post holders at every level. The sangh office in every district has a store with uniform, books and other materials that can be purchased. In order of leadership, the chief manager ( satkaruavah) and the sarsangchalak are at the very top. So far 6 pracharaks have become sarsangchalaks out of whom 5 are Brahmins and one kshatriya. In the sangh posts are filed by nomination not election as the sangh is thought to work like a family where the choice made in consultation among elders is more acceptable than elections. Questions have been raised never from within the sangh, only from outside, about the fact that the leaders have always been Brahmans. Dalits, Adivasis and backward classes who form the rank and file of the sangh aren’t allowed to rise beyond certain posts. Over the last two decades ever since this question has arisen the RSS has been very aware that marginalized community should be given organizational responsibilities yet  the presence of such groups at the national levels of the organazation is still barely noticeable. Dalits and backward classes had participated enthusiastically in the 1990 and 1992 karseva campaigns and the sangh leadership too had paid special attention to young men of these group. But despite such conscious efforts very few dalits have become pracharaks and remain at the low to middling level of district organisation. According to the All India Working Committee, even after 2000 most post holders were Brahman, Baniya or Kshateriya and a couple of people from backward classes but not a single Dalit or Adivasi. The example of Ramnath Kovind is revealing. He belongs to an untouchable caste, rose high in the BJP and has now reached the highest constitutional post in the country but never made the cut to be considered for the highest post in the unconstitutional RSS.

The sangh’s larger agenda is to reach every limb of the social body. A women’s organization was founded in 1936 setting up the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti. The author wondered why the word “self” (swayam) was missing from its name and thus making women workers ”servants” rather than working for self. He asked several seniors but received no satisfactory reply and finally contended that women are incapable of deciding what to do with “self” unlike men, hence they must “serve others”. After all, the seniors of the sangh, believed Hedgewar was right not to include women in sangh because that would ensure it’s destruction. Not only was there a separate organization for women but for workers, farmers, writers, intellectuals, journalists, filmmakers, Dalits and Adivasis. The students organisation ABVP was founded in 1948. In 1952 Vanvasu Kalyan Ashram – Forest Dwellers Welfare body was founded to save innocent Adivasis from Christian missionaries. All kinds of legal hurdles were placed in RSS’s functioning after the assassination of Gandhi so the leaders thought they needed some political power. Swama Prasad Mukherjee resigned from Nehru’scabinet and directly asked sangh for political support. Hence in 1951 a party called the Bhartiya Jan Sangh was formed which later became BJP under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani.

After its intervention in electoral politics, a trade union Bhartiya Mazdoor Sangh was set up in 1955 to counter Left's influence on workers. Saraswati Shishu Mandir  were established to indoctrinate young children with sangh's ideology. The Vidya Bharti network of sangh runs 13067 schools  with 150190 teachers and 3475757 students . For businessmen, Bharatiya Vikas Parishad was formed in 1963 and for more religiously inclined, the VHP was formed in 1964.

There are about hundred such organisations devoted to cultural and general research, some to rewriting history and science, some to foster social harmony, for sick welfare, for religious awakening, indigenous economics. platforms for lawyers, traders, doctors, and ex-servicemen. In order to reach larger number of people the sangh has also set up several publishing houses like Bharat Prakashan , Suruchi Prakashan , Lokhit Prakashan, Gyan Ganga Prakashan, Archna Prakashan and many many others. Without being formally registered the sangh is the world’s largest NGO. Organisations run on Sangh ideology receive the lion’s share of their funding from all over the world. Organisations linked to the sangh have been fundraising on a massive scale but they never come under question, the nationalism label is a powerful charm.At the shakha, the portrait of Bharat Mata held a saffron flag  instead of the tricolor. When the author questioned his seniors, he was told that the tricolour was accepted as a national flag only after independence in 1947 but the saffron flag is from ancient times.

The aim of the sangh was militarization of Hinduism and Hinduisation of military. Thus instruction given in the shakha were actually commandments  given in military style and Sanskrit was used over local languages. During the intellectual session, questions such as who are we, who is this country, who considers this their motherland were asked. The reply generally was around, “we of pure Aryan blood. We are Hindus of Sanatana Dharma, only we Hindus consider this our motherland, we were gurus of the universe, we were invaded by the s Huns, Kushanas, Mughals,Britishers etc who looted our wealth and made us slaves. Only the Hindus are true sons of mother India”. The author was filled with pride about being Hindu and of pure Aryan blood and began to look down upon people of other faith.

Now that the author was the chief teacher, he religiously went to the shakha everyday. His family who had been Congress supporters were opposed to his involvement in the RSS. He convinced his brother to come to the shakha even though he is not a member of the RSS, now he has joined BJP. The author tried to learn Sanskrit and internalize the teachings of the sangh. On Guru Poornima everybody placed an amount in an envelope and presented it under the flag in the shakha. It was called guru dakshina.The author questioned how could a lifeless object like a flag could be our teacher. He was told the story of a Vedic sage who accepted as his guru 24 objects and animals, plants, trees, rivers, dogs, cats. The author’s doubts were stilled. On another occasion he asked if Hindus are the majority in India how can they be insecure? There was not a single Muslim or a person of any other religion other than Hinduism in his village; he had never heard the azaan or seen namaz being offered. It was difficult for him to imagine people of this community as his enemy. He was told that even Mahatma Gandhi said that Hindus are peace-loving cowards and Muslims are aggressive goons. One can never trust them to not to betray us and that’s why Hindus are not safe even in our country.

The author religiously read several publications and magazines of the RSS, one of the releases called the Panchjanya is what turned him into an ideological and intellectual fanatic in the cause of this Hindu rashtra. The RSS also has a training camp called the Initial Training Camps of 20 days which included training in physical exercise, wielding knives,  swords etc supposedly for self defence. The activities were kept away from the eyes of the media. The author was determined to fight Muslims and congressis once he went far and wide to seek them since he had never seen a Muslim in his life. These infidels consider Bharat not as mother but as a witch, they celebrate the victory of Pakistan, they each have 4 wives and each produces 40 children, they practice no birth control and refuse vasectomies. They even have protection from the law they don’t obey the Supreme Court, the government changes the law to please them, they get subsidy to go on haj.Their men emerge all dressed up in the evening to seduce Hindu women and Hindu girls end up falling in love with them. After exploiting them sexually they sell them into brothels. They have arms buried under the Masjids, they eat beef,they spy for Pakistan. They are not ours, not of our religion, not of our nation.

The author was promoted from the post of chief teacher to karyavah.The highest post in the shakha. There were no brahmin workers in the village and being the most active member in the shakha,  he was the natural choice. At meetings he discussed how to expand membership of the shakha, how to arouse the Hindu society etc.People were trained in the art of delivering lectures and given information about the injustice against Hindus

The order expressed his desire to be a full time Pracharak to the then district pracharak. He desired to give up his family and home, living a life of an ascetic to forward the goal of the sangh. The reply of the district pracharak shocked him. He said “ Brother you have to see the broader picture,the society is very complicated. Tomorrow someone may ask you your name, your village, your samaj and the moment he realizes that you are from a marginalized community his attitude to you might change. You may have to swallow the insult, you may be upset and want to retaliate. All this will weaken the work of the sangh. My advice is to remain of vistarak and serve the nation in that capacity”. The author was devastated and felt intense pain at having been born in a lower caste community. He was ready to give his life for the sangh and the only obstacle was his birth itslef.

He also tried to contributed to the ideology. He would write content and poetry titled as “Annihilate Pakistan” and other jingoistic Islamophobic tirades and seemed to be very proud of them. About those, the pracharak humiliated him saying he was doing too much thinking. “ The sangh needs people who are physically strong, not people like you who are constantly thinking and questioning”.

The pracharaks form the spine of the sangh . One RSS leaflet stated that there are 2559 pracharaks of whom 1646 are for shakha work , 147 for organizational work, 437 for work in sangh related bodies, and 335 for starting work in new areas.

The author was working for the RSS at the district level in Bhilwara and stayed in the Ambedkar Hostel run by the social welfare Department for students. He was 16 years old. He would try to convince the dalit and adivasi boys in the hostel about hindutva ideology. It was the first time he was in an environment where everybody was from scheduled caste and tribe and so there was no sense of being inferior to anyone. But soon he was called by the district head of RSS and was told to vacate the hostel because that environment would “corrupt his ideology”. To protect his ideology the author left the hostel and started to live in the district office of the sangh where he was given the responsibility of being the chief of the district office. He was so pumped by the idea of Hindu rashtra that he was not even aware such a thing as constitution exists, he only knew of the manusmriti. His idols in those days were brahman men like the RSS founders and he knew nothing about lower caste and dalit figures.

The process of shaking the foundation of his ideological beliefs began with him moving into the sangh office. Once he was taken into the home of a RSS worker who had come under the influence of Osho Rajneesh.The workers tried to convince him to return to the work of the sangh but he refused. While leaving he handed out a newspaper called the “Osho Times” to him. The author read the issue in secret and began to buy Osho Times regularly.The RSS trained to value nothing but nationalism, nobility of character, celibacy and spirituality. There was no concept of anything like sexual attraction and there were no girls in shakhas anyway. The participants were made to believe that sex was in fact destructive of the spiritual power of men. They were indoctrinated with notions of chastity specially of women and the need for women in particular to be good, self sacrificing wives and mothers. But reading Osho opened his mind to that sexual desire is natural and good.

Although the first karseva campaign for Ram temple had failed, the demand to build a Ram temple was kept on the boil in the Hindu community all over the country. Sangh affiliated organisations were running a campaign targeting the government with the challenge, “Build the ram temple or resign”. On March 12, 1991 a huge rally was launched for the temple at Ayodhya in Bhilwara planning to wind through the Muslim majority area to reach the district collector's office. The police thought there might be law and order issues arising from the rally being held at the same time as the afternoon namaz. A confrontation took place between the police and rambhakts  and the police started a lathi charge. The police fired in the air several rounds and two people were killed : Ratanlal sen and Suresh Jain. Jain and Sen. Truth is that their deaths had nothing to do with the movement, Jain was returning from his night duty while Sen was doing some shopping nearby and fell victim to the police bullets.  Since both happened to be Hindu, legally a Jain is regarded as a Hindu in India, they were declared as martyrs for ram janmabhoomi and a protest procession carrying their ashes was promptly announced. Good for them they were Hindus, they received the title of martyrs. Had they been Muslims they would have been quietly buried by their families.

For a while the author kept throwing stones at the police, soon did he realize he was the only one doing so. He spotted a nearby school and ran to hide inside it among the students. The police and teachers started taking the students out and he tried to slip out with them but the moment he reached the lane some policemen burst at him with lathis. Somehow he escaped them and found himself in a nearby hospital where thousands of people had gathered. After basic first aid he was jolted to reality and was quite affected by the entire incident and decided to return home for some days. The author’s father was a hardcore Congress supporter and would often stop him from going to the shakha. He said this party of Baniyas and Brahmans will never be with us farmers and outcastes. “They just use us to start fights with our Muslim brothers. They themselves can never fight they use us”. The author was disgusted at his father’s Muslim appeasement.

Those who had died in the protest procession were declared martyrs and their ashes were being paraded from village to village with the sangh, VHP activists and office bearers. In April-May, 1991, a film was screened at one of the meetings about police brutality towards RSS workers and the Hindu leaders described the atrocities in detail even though not a single of them were present on the scene or had received even a scratch. The way they described what happened brought tears to everyone’s eyes, even those who were personally present and had borne the beating of the day. The first meeting ended with exhortation to Hindus to be united and organized. This was the first successful meeting in their dalit basti.

As the meeting got over the author arranged for everyone to have a meal at his home. His father tried to stop him saying that those people will not eat in the home of an untouchable. The author was furious and tried to contradict him by saying he had been with the sangh for several years and was the chief of the district office and had eaten with so many RSS workers. The sangh does not practice untouchability and caste prejudice like the village. That’s the kind of thing the Congress has propagated. His father was shook and conceded to his demand and prepared to feed the incoming guests. The order was thrilled to be able to prove his congressi father wrong. Just that morning he had put up two stickers on his front door that read “Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain,  bhagya se hum Hindu hain”.

The moment he invited the participants to come home for the meal there was a certain hesitation. The district chief took him aside. He was a baniya. He told him, “ friend you are aware of the inequalities in our society. Today we have sadhu sant among us who would be really upset if without informing them we give them food from a lower caste home. They could be so angry they might leave”.

These words turned the author into stone, he was speechless.He stared at him blankly when finally the district chief asked him to pack the food and have it put in the car. They will be used to feed people in the next village. His intention was crystal clear; it was to be kept a secret that the food was from a lower caste worker’s home.He experienced fully what it meant to be of lower caste. If they actually didn’t believe in untouchability or in caste discrimination and believed all Hindus to be one and talk of a united Hindu society then what kind of hypocrisy is this? If this can happen to him, what kind of intolerable behavior must the rest of his community face. For the first time in his life he stepped aside from his Hindu identity and started seeing the world like a person from a lower caste.

The next day brought no relief to him.His friend Puroshottam Shrotiya, a brahmin who had gone with last day's processions, had come back to Sirdiyas. When he returned in the morning he was carrying the kettle in which the sweet had been sent by him. He informed him that the food the author had sent was thrown out on the road just before Bhagwanpura and the night’s meal was provided from the home of a brahman. “Your food was not eaten, it was thrown away”, he said. The author was enraged; he did not believe him.The sangh couldn’t be so casteist and cruel.His friend said that if he doesn't believe him he should come and see for himself, some of the food must still be lying there. They went off on their cycles towards the site and there the author saw with his own eyes there, on the side of the road the food he had sent from home lying scattered about. And crows and  dogs with no discrimination amongst themselves were feeding on it. He decided to follow the yatra and confront them.

He confronted the leaders of the yathra on their shameful conduct but they flatly denied throwing out the food. Upon insistence, they said that the car turned the corner at a high speed and the food flew out of the hands of the person holding it. How easily the most revered brothers can lie! There could be no doubt they had deliberately thrown away the food prepared by an untouchable. He felt intense humiliation and a sense of insult. He asked himself, “ Was this the Hindu rashtra I was working so hard, so ready to kill and be killed? What is my own history?”. He realized that in the Hindu caste system he was lower than the shudra, he was an untouchable, not one of the four varnas but an outcast, the 5th cast. He may be an RSS worker but he was not a Hindu all the way. He did not lose hope immediately and spoke to as many influential people as he could, from leaders to pracharaks at every level. He even approached the sarsangchalak. But every person he spoke to dismissed his complaint as a small matter and instead exhorted him to move on. But untouchability and discrimination is not a small matter in anybody’s life. To declare someone untouchable by birth and then refuse to accept their hospitality, this can be a small matter only for the architects of the Hindu rashtra.

The incident depressed him so much that he started to think about suicide and the many ways he could carry it out. One night he ate rat poison along with his food and went to bed thinking there would never be another morning in his life. A powerful wave of pain or rose in his stomach, nausea overwhelmed him, the pain was unbearable. He vomited violently and passed out. Upon waking up he found his brother with him in a hospital. The news of his attempted suicide spread like a wildfire and in order to escape the embarrassment he went to bhilwara. Once in seclusion he questioned himself why was he ready to die and for whom, for what, would anybody care if he died? He contemplated his own foolishness about being ready to die for the love of the sangh and at even their hatred. Be it sorrow or joy, it was he who was dying. After much inner churning and deep thought he decided not only to make a clean break with the sangh but to widely publicize its casteist  behavior towards him. Knowing his limited resources and the strength of sangh, the struggle was sure to be lifelong.

May 1991 marked the beginning of his days of struggle. Yet he continued to rest his hopes in the RSS and believed that someday he would get justice; he met other office bearers and presented his case but they all just asked him to be positive. The period between may 1991 and December 1992 was one of utter despair. He roamed aimlessly like a homeless man.During that time the mass fervor for kar seva and Demolition of babri Masjid came back with a vengeance in 1992. This time no one from his family or village joined the karseva. He made it a point to speak to people specially those belonging from scheduled castes telling them about his own experience. He also started working with some friends to establish a students outfit that would eventually become Vidyarthi Adhikari Rakshak Sangh (VARS). He was at the Ambedkar hostel on 6th December when they heard the news of demolition of Babri Masjid on the radio. Nobody responded to it in any way in the hostel or discussed it among themselves. The author went out into the market to see jubilant Hindus bursting crackers and distributing sweets. By contrast there was visible police presence at the mosque near the railway station, the Muslim majority areas were marked by such massive police presence that it was as if curfew had been clamped. In the upcoming days some restrictions had been placed on RSS for its role in bringing down the Babri Masjid. There were raids at certain RSS office and several leaders went underground. But the truth is that the police were never serious about apprehending anyone. His father felt that what these people had done was not right, a house of God has been destroyed. The author reflected on his past and how eager he was to bring down the mosque but when finally the aim reached its conclusion he felt no joy. He had realised that it was all just an excuse to humiliate the Muslims.

The order was convinced to attack this Indian version of the Taliban. He enrolled in a Bachelors of Arts degree in 1993 and started working on his student organization. The members of VARS were hounded by ABVP and the leader Briraj Krishna was beaten so brutally, he almost died . The author also became aware that behind all the facade of chastity, purity and nobility, the sangh was involved in various corrupt activities such as manufacturing of illegal explosives, bootlegged liquor ,exhorting money from mafias etc. Most of the times sangh activists preferred to use the lathi rather than argument.

He wanted to take revenge on RSS in whatever way possible. His circle now included people from other faiths and secular minded people. He befriended some Muslims one of whom was Naushad Alam. He was the imam of a mosque and also taught in the madrasa. Once he was sitting in the madrasa attached to the mosque and he recalled all the conversations about weapons being stored in the basement of the mosques and got a little scared. He started talking to Naushad and was surprised that the ice of hatred towards Muslims in his heart began to melt. Muslims turned out to be people just like him, he went inside the mosque and its madressa, their kitchen, their bedroom, sat with them, ate with them. They discussed poetry and patriotism and reached the conclusion that the enemy of Muslims and dalits was the same. They decided to form 2 organisations one of Muslim youth and the other of dalit youth. The objective of both was to expose the activities of RSS. Naushad eventually joined the Communist Party of India Marxist leninist and served as a block president of a district in Bihar for four years. He is now Zone president of the AAP. The author on his part decided that the way to counter the RSS was to convert out of Hinduism.

He deliberated which religion should he convert to. The sangh had taught him that Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism were part of the Hindu society. Islam was out of question because he had been fed so much disinformation about its cruelty and violence that he had enormous distrust of it even now and did not even consider it as a possibility. So finally he thought why not become a Christian. He started searching for Christians so that they could lead him to conversion; he met the owner of a printing press whose name was Bethuel Gaekwad and told him why he wanted to become a Christian. But the Christian man chastised him saying Christianity does not believe in revenge but in forgiveness so forgive the RSS if you want liberation. But the author was not interested in liberation, he had one objective and it was to expose the sangh. He met several more Christians asking them to convert him but all of them stepped back scared when they heard the name RSS. They thought he was a spy for the RSS trying to trap then.

Soon he met a school teacher who was originally a brahman and had later converted to Christianity. His name was Newman and he taught him some chapters from the Bible. Soon they decided that he should be baptized and for that he had to present himself before the district collector and declare that he wanted to convert to Christianity. He flatly refused to do so since he just wanted to provoke the anger of RSS and thus they decided to induct him secretly by the rituals of baptism. After the conversion was complete the author felt no joy, he felt like he had climbed out of a dith and  fallen into a well. He soon realized that religion was not for him. He realized that liberation was to be found not in the Bible or any religion but in liberating himself from all of that, he accepted that he was not a believer.

Around May 1991, he had no place to live so he went to a priest that he knew, Sant Chaitanya Sharan Shastri.He started living with him and found that he also harbored some grudge against the RSS as a junior priest had been acknowledged over him during some yatra. He kept bashing the sangh before the priest and he would always warn him not to keep on talking about the sangh like this. He said, “ they’re capable of stuffing people into a sack, pounding them to a pulp and the world wouldn't even know”. Even though the priest was a good person but he was casteist to the bone. Once they went to a Bihari Banya’s house for dinner and the host asked the author’s name. After hearing the name they asked what sort of brahmans are they. As the author was about to answer that he is not a brahman the priest hastily broke in saying that they are Kshatriya Brahmans. Upon returning the priest was angry with him for trying to declare his scheduled caste status and going to the extent of saying that lower caste people have no intelligence hence even though he had a chance to pretend to be a brahman he was about to reveal his true identity as an insect of a dirty gutter. The author realized that he could not become a Brahman and the brahmans could not become humans. He left the temple and never met the priest again.

The order returned to his village in August 1995. He was completely disillusioned with the idea of religion and found each one of them expansionist, each conjuring visions of heaven and hell and wanted to run away from the abstractions of fear fortune And God. This is when he started reading Ambedkar. He knew Ambedkar in two ways: first was through the RSS where in every morning prayer at the shaka they were made to remember Ambedkar; they read the sangh approved story of his life. Second was through his reading of Osho where Gandhi was criticized and Ambedkar counterposed to him as the more scientific and rational thinker. The sangh had taught him that Babasahab was a great nationalist and had contributed to writing the constitution of India, that he had wanted to make sanskrit the national language and saffron flag the national flag. That despite every temptation he had not converted to Islam or Christianity but to Buddhism, which was a part of Hinduism. And that he was opposed to the continuation of article 370 in Kashmir. Now reading Ambedkar himself the author found out that his views and everything were the exact opposite. The first book he read was “Riddles in Hinduism” which completely blew his mind and “Annihilation of Caste” gave him a clear understanding of how Brahmanism is responsible for the establishment of the hateful system of caste hierarchy and discrimination. He was horrified that he was made to sing the sangh in praise of Manu who was responsible for the evil of untouchability. After Ambedkar,he went on to read Kabir, Periyar and Phule.His desire for revenge was slowly turning into a desire for transformation. He read a lot of literature critical of the RSS and this humanist and Ambedkarite thought changed the direction of his life.

In 1996, he received a Xerox copy of a supposedly confidential letter of the sangh circulated by a Dalit organization (BAMCEF) and Minority communities Employees Federation founded by Kanshi Ram.Reading that letter made the origins of the organizations  clear. The brahminical casteist structure had kept the lesser shudras in slavery for thousands of years. When the system started to crumble under modern education and the British rule, the utterly casteist Marathi Chitpavan Brahmans led by Baliram Hedgewar set up RSS in 1925. Its function was to use the façade of hindutva cleverly. Women, backward classes and Dalits were to be eternal slaves. Systematically using nation, religion, culture and nationalism as popular slogans to mislead the masses, they put the mentally in thrall to them. They became blind followers. This is why the backward castes still carry their dead ideas of brahmanism on their shoulders. The confidential letter of the sangh was addressed to upper castes exhorting them to make the caste system of Hindu society even stronger. “If not for the caste system everyone would have become Muslim or Christian”, the letter read. In the name of harmony the letter encouraged the upper castes to bring educated professional dalits, adivasis and backward castes together under hindutva. The letter also exposed the anti reservation ideology of the RSS. One of the author’s journalist friends Surendra Prabhat was courageous enough to publish this confidential letter and was harassed viciously. The letter was eye opening. It convinced the author that religious indoctrination and fundamentalist organisations can never work for the welfare of scheduled castes.

Initially the author’s battle was only against the casteist members of the sangh and not entirely against the RSS. He somehow believed that once the highest leaders of the sangh were made aware of his grievance, they would look into it. When absolutely nothing was done, the full hypocrisy of the sangh became painfully obvious.He turned towards fresh audiences and started targeting Dalit, RSS workers. He was astonished to find that each of them reported similar disheartening experiences in the sangh, relating to their caste identity. They all had their own depressing stories but they lacked courage . Each one was in the sangh at the behest or orders of some so-called upper caste patron and it was futile to expect them to be a part of his rebellion. He realized that the Dalits and Adivasis were mere tokens. The real owners of the song were brahmans and baniyas. It would never be any place for the dignity and self respect of the scheduled caste and scheduled tribes. They only wanted to use them to attack the Muslims.

In 1999, An Australian missionary Graham Staines was murdered along with his two small sons in Odisha by Dara Singh of Bajrang dal. The author with his friend Alauddin Bedil launched a signature campaign against this heinous act. He had no fear and started his fight against the sun with all his might. Later when he joined a government school as a primary teacher the battle became sharper because the RSS had full control over Hindi medium primary school teachers.At the teacher training program, the teachers were being welcomed by tying a turban and applying tika . The author strongly objected to this and was supported by some other Muslim and dalit trainees. They objected to the singing of RSS songs and hindu slogan. This enraged the authorities many of whom had affiliations with RSS and they started harassing him . After the training when he was allotted his school, it was two kilometers from his village. It was a village of a backward caste community called Gurjars whose work was agriculture and animal husbandry. The tragedy of backward castes is that they consider themselves pure Hindus and under this sway of Hindutva are at the forefront of committing atrocities against Dalits. If we ask these foot soldiers of Hindutva of their own position in the caste hierarchy of Hinduism, they are stumped. When forced to accept that they are sudras, their face dark and they become quiet. The babasaheb whose constitution made them humans, they look upon with hatred, treating him as a hero for dalits alone, distancing themselves from him. Another feature of backward castes today considering themselves superior and proving this by attacking and humiliating the scheduled castes. The Sudras failed to understand that the other 3 upper castes watch these activities with amusement and joy. It’s fine by them if the lower caste an outcast are at each others throat. The sangh hasn’t provided them anything not even a place in the leadership structure but the youth of backward caste roam around clutching to themselves the practically dead body of hindutva.It was among these people that the author had to serve as a teacher to their children. The children were already indoctrinated with the idea that the new teacher was of a lower caste. They would not drink water from the same container he used. There was not a single family or individual with whom he could sit and chat for a while or whose home he could enter. They would stop him from even riding his cycle or inviting to any functions.  In many other places his colleagues could not even sit on chairs or if they touched the midday meal, it was thrown away. One of the teachers committed suicide.He soon realized that there was no point teaching these people who are so obsessed with the caste hierarchy. He resigned.

The author decided to start a monthly publication called “Diamond India”. First 7 friends then 13 more joined to contribute and it was decided that the journal would combat communalism, casteism and corruption and spread the message of love, solidarity and humanity. On 14th January 2001 the first copy of Diamond India was published. The idea was to reach villages in which there were no other sources of information other than RSS publications. People were now getting to read two kinds of opinion and the Journal was beginning to be accepted as an alternative to the sangh narrative. An audio division of Diamond India was also opened up since cassettes were very popular in those days.The popularity of Diamond India soon came under the gaze of the sangh. The sangh found out that the entire team of Diamond India was in government employment .It was natural for the partners in Diamond India to be worried once the sangh started threatening them one by one. It was decided that while their financial contribution would continue, their names would be removed from the Journal. Now the entire responsibility of diamond India fell upon the author. Once he was sitting in the office and reading a newspaper when he saw that a public hearing had been organized by an organization of farmers and workers in Janvad village panchayat in Rajsamand. The public hearing had established that lot of rupees had been embezzled from village development works. The news item said that the first National Convention on the Right to Information was to be held the next day at the Subhash garden in Bevar. He decided to attend it .

The next day on 6th April 2007 he went to report on the first National Convention on Right to Information There were several speakers including a former speaker of the Lok Sabha, Rabi Ray, hindi journalist Prabhash joshi and chief minister of Rajasthan Ashok Gehlot.The next day he wrote a story of 12 pages covering the entire convention and sent 2 copies of it to the headquarters of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)  .The MKSS central committee decided that someone should go meet the writers of diamond India who produced this report and set up a working relationship that would be mutually beneficial. However the meeting did not take place at the time. It was an incident of communal violence soon after that brought this to fruition. In bhilwara district at the Asind Block headquarters there was a temple of the Gurjar Community with a 400 year old mosque called Qalandari Masjid . Inflamed by the RSS a mob of youth razed this mosque to the ground.The mosque was not a functioning mosque and it was present amidst the temple complex of Sawaibhoj Mandir. Gradually as hindutva politicized the Gurjar community, the mosque became a burning issue among the youth. They decided to destroy this already diminished place of worship on 27 July 2001. The mosque had been completely demolished and its rubble had been pushed into a deep pit which was being filled with water. He took a few pictures and came back to Bhilwara. When the news hit the media the Muslims raised their voice in protest, the whole country became aware of what had happened. But this incident was met with silence even from the secular sections nobody wanted to risk any kind of confrontation. A team of human rights organisations soon arrived at the location among which were some MKSS people.He explained to them how for so many centuries this ancient Mosque stood undisturbed and now it had been razed to the ground.The main person responsible for the vandalism of the mosque was very close to a leader of the Congress. Sometimes caste awareness is so strong that people forget all of other beliefs and ideology. It was also brought to notice that the extremists were now planning to prevent their annual festival, the urs at the Bariya Mazar also located in the premises of the temple. After demolition of the mosque, a yagana was conducted to purify the premises. Dalits were publicly insulted at the ceremony and despite all efforts at persuasion, were not allowed to sit around the sacrificial fire. The author himself was not at all in favor of Dalits participating in Hindu rites but it was also a test case to see if these people who claimed all Hindus were brothers would really permit Dalits to participate. The author decided to speak directly to the supposedly enlightened Khandeshwari Maharaj who had apparently stood on his feet continuously for years and had taken an oath to never utter a word. He had successfully excluded schedule caste from every yagna he conducted in the area. He angrily declared before the Baba that either Dalits will participate in the yagna or he is free to turn them into ashes. The net outcome of this controversy was that news of it spread far and wide an attendance at the yogana was very thin.

In 2009 at another yogana in the same Baba’s presence the same discrimination was again shown. He had an ashram built with voluntary labor from Dalits who also contributed financially but not one dalit couple was allowed to participate. The author proposed that at eight of the 108 firepots, Dalits  be permitted to offer sacrifice. This was rejected straight away and it was proposed that separate firepits would be constructed for them. And they will not be allowed to eat with the rest of the devotees. The author challenged the administration that they could not discriminate on a public land and invoked the SC ST Prevention of Atrocities Act against the organizers. Later the committee grudgingly agreed to allow Dalits to participate but by then the Dalits refused. Ultimately the yagana was held but on private land of some person . Add another yagna, a condition was laid that the Dalits  must eat cow dung in order to purify themselves if they wanted to attend the ceremony. The order visited the chief minister of the time Ashok Gehlot and raised the issue before him. The chief minister took up the issue with great sympathy and understanding. He made it clear that Dalits participation was mandatory but by this time Dalits refuse to participate again. The organizers were forced to declare it a private event.

The author says that he has no belief in rituals of Hinduism nor does he think the situation of Dalits will be improved in the slightest by their participation in such things. However if some Dalits wish to participate in such public events,it is their constitutional right and he would fight shoulder to shoulder with them to achieve it now and in the future. In a religion, animals are worshipped, cats and dogs are kept as beloved pets, they eat with their masters but Dalits cannot even be touched. They are not even considered humans but it is expected of them that they should prove their nationalism and praise the country.

The authorr was accused of taking money from Hindus and then writing against them. He started writing against communalism drawing attention to growing extremism in all religious communities and attacking the trend.

After the godhra train burning incident everyone was very disturbed and MKSS immediately issued a statement condemning the act and demanding strictest punishment for the perpetrators. On the following day of this incident began a targeted massacre of the Muslim minority in Gujarat. Various organisations of the sangh including the Gujarat government were all involved. More than 2000 Muslims were killed. It was not a riot it was a pre-planned and systematic massacre, an attempt to wipe out an entire community. The government termed it a justifiable reaction to Godhra. Questions were raised about the chief minister Narendra Modi even by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Maya kodnani one of Modi’s senior ministers herself participated in one of the massacres and was sentenced to prison. Many workers of the sangh, activist of the BJP, constables in police stations , administrative and police officials as well as lower ranks of administrations all participated in violence. The Hindu mobs had lists of Muslim  homes. Former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri was cut down and set alight by a bloodthirsty Hindu mob despite his phone calls for help to Modi and Sonia Gandhi. The saffron Taliban had taken over all police stations. They conducted mass rapes of women in public, sliced open the stomachs of pregnant women and pulled out the fetus at the tip of swords, swung them in the air before cutting them into pieces. Much of the violence had been conducted by dalits and Adivasis. The game plan of the right wing forces were successful, Muslims Adivasis and dalits died fighting each other. Thousands of Muslims were killed in the violence and hundreds of Dalits and adivasis died in police firing while those who instigated the violence remained safe.

Dalits attempt to prove themselves pure Hindus by taking a leading part in riots and violence against Muslims. The author wrote an editorial in Diamond India titled “Talibani Hindus, listen”. He wrote that every Dalit and Adivasi who has suffered casteist insult and untouchability sees caste Hindus as Talibanis, as cruel oppressors. The sanghis were enraged by the label of Hindu Taliban and he started getting threatening messages and an apology was demanded. He refused to do so.

Many people claim that sangh does not promote hatred against other religions. But the author says that from his own personal experience he can vouch that the sangh not only promotes enmity with the other people but even gives training in deadly weapons. He himself had received these trainings. The sangh is in fact a quasi military organization which promotes the arming and militarising of the Hindu community. The nation cannot forget the RSS workers who carried out bomb explosions in different parts of the country in 2006 in the name of Abhinav Bharat. How could a Hindu be so evil?

The author says that hearing the narrations of torture of the riots deeply unsettled him. He documented the gatherings of Bajrang Dal and VHP and recorded the public speeches of Praveen Togadia. Who openly incited violence against Muslims and distributed swards among Hindus. Since he was a doctor and his poisonous speeches were such a source of tension the Medico Friend Circle an Association of doctors made the demand that his medical degree be revoked. Medico Friend Circle claimed that when Gujrat was burning, he assembled doctors in his clinic and encouraged them to stay away from work thus keeping them away from hospitals where they were seriously needed by Muslim patients. The author presented all evidence before Ashok Gehlot and Togadia was taken into custody. This man who roared like a lion on the stage now had tears in his eyes. This is the reality of these people.

The author started challenging the organizations of the sangh in his writings demanding to know what their plans were for adivasis and dalits In the Hindu rashtra. Will they only be used to carry out violence, to die and kill in riots? While their own children study in English medium schools why give the children of the poor the slogan of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. Why was the sangh promoting a primitive talibani mentality? The author says that he wants to ask those Adivasis and dalits who wore the RSS uniform so proudly and who worked as their workers, has the RSS launched a single struggle against casteism and untouchability ?They oppose reservation in jobs in promotions and want to end prevention of atrocities act. The Hindu rashtra has no place for dalits and Adivasis.

The other quotes Babasaheb warning to Dalits of India, “If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will no doubt be the greatest calamity for this country. No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. It is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost”.

From March 2005, Bhilwara smouldered in the fires of communalism and trident distribution program started by the VHP. On one incident of saffron flag was found at the door of a building used for Eid namaz which angered the Muslim community who took out a silent procession. That very evening the Idol of vishnu was paraded in ceremonial procession. The two processions clashed and 11 shops and two houses belonging to Muslims were burned. The mobs organized to attack Muslim businesses places of worship and homes. Between 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM on 8 April 2005 some 25 Muslim men were picked up by the police thrashed mercilessly an arrested one had his beard bold and you another was offered urine when he asked for water. Sometime later at 5 temples nearby the number 786 considered auspicious in Islam was found written, green flags and bones of dead animals were also found. Hindus rose up violently against the Muslims and the situation remained tense for many days. Meanwhile the acts of sacrilege at the temples were traced to Shiv Sena leader Ramratan Jhanwar.When this conspiracy was exposed no remorse at the anti Muslim climate was expressed by the Hindu community.The atmosphere was so poisonous that it was not possible to even be seen with the Muslims. The author published a report called the “Approaching Footsteps of Fascism”. No sooner was the small booklet published that all hell broke lose. His printing press was raided and he was threatened with dire consequences; he faced a social boycott and for the next three years every time he had to travel he had to inform the police. Some renowned activists and journalists spoke in his favor and the National Human Rights Commission demanded explanations against the constant harassment. Yet not one single dalit organization or literateur raised a voice in his support. BJP realized that the attack on him had become a national issue of right to freedom of expression and off the human rights of a journalist.Hence this slowly backed off.

In September 2006 an issue arose among the Suliya Dalits of Kerada who were stopped from entering a temple to Chanduma Mata (which was built by their ancestors) by the Gurjar community. The gurjars also decided to pocket the entire income from the temple and launched a plan to sideline Dalit history. The author called a meeting of 40 dalit Families. The author says that he thinks it’s a waste of energy to fight for Dalits’ entry into any place of worship, the 33,00,00,000 gods and goddesses of Hinduism have not done a thing for Dalits. Not a single diety’s heart melted at their condition. But whatever the differences of opinion on religion, if the fundamental rights assured by the constitution are denied to them then that is simply unacceptable. On 18th November 2000, a meeting was called in which thousands of people from neighboring villages also turned up; the meeting declared that if the administration did not ensure entry of the lists in the temple by 12 December 2006, they would take matters into their own hands. The RSS took note, the VHP jumped into the matter and all the organisations of the sangh stood up against the dalits.This episode is an excellent example of the hypocrisy of the sangh which talks about harmony but works actively to prevent Dalits from fighting for their dignity. The sangh put forward their sold-out Dalits activists to discredit the actual struggle. They brought some Dalits on rent from outside who were taken up to the veranda of the temple and presented before the media and were made to claim that there was no discrimination against them.

The Dalits were not fighting for temple entry and worship but they were fighting for their right to equality.Eventually over 5000 Dalits and adivasi men and women entered the temple despite all opposition; it was a historic victory.Meanwhile the sangh could not tolerate the little assertion and they claimed that there was a conspiracy with Muslims and Christians to break the Hindu society.

On love jihad: During his days in shakha, the author had often heard that one of the main ambitions of Muslim men was to have sex with a Hindu woman and that Islam says it brings them a reward in heaven. They were told that Muslim students were only interested in attracting Hindu girls. The workers of RSS often lamented what do their Hindu women see in these Muslim men. The common view was that Muslim men eat meat while Hindu men are vegetarian. Non vegetarian food increases the libido where as the vegetarian diet of Hindu men reduces  sexual desire. Another theory was that the root cause of attraction is circumcision. Hindu women cannot resist this aspect of Muslim men. Various ways of countering this trap were discussed one of which was that Hindu men should be advised to make Muslim women fall in love with them and make them convert. Anyone who could lure a Muslim woman should be given rewards.

The author says that he’s embarrassed of these conversations and now believes that love is a jihad in itself. Falling in love and staying in love is nothing short of a crusade. As for the author himself, he was married the moment he was born and on becoming an adult had to start living with his wife. He loves his life partner beyond any dream. He says that even though she has not read any feminist literature or been part of any feminist organization but she’s outspoken in her feminist beliefs. She has been at the forefront of protests and political actions against atrocities. She is the real head of their household; she gave meaning to his life.

The order says that the sangh’s understanding of a worker was that a “Swayamsevak never really leaves”. His old acquaintances would ask with great sadness, “what went wrong how did we lose a worker like you?”. At the local level the sangh sold out Dalits acted as a shield for the RSS. They landed up wherever the struggles were going on to give a clean chit to casteist Hindus. The RSS opened their schools in their neighborhoods and drew them into their web of seductive words. They are now ready to sing the praises of the very system that oppresses them. According to the sangh, the root cause of caste oppression is the Muslim community. not the casteist Hindu. How cunning they are! RSS wants to free itself from any responsibility for the shameful caste discrimination and oppression and pass that burden onto Muslims thus pitting Muslims and Dalits against one another.

The relentless questioning of the sangh and its affiliates regarding the place of dalits and Adivasis led them to work seriously on these issues and to address them.In 2012, the sangh introduced the concept of harmony and the first step was why identify all the dissenting individuals and organizations. They were lured with promises of government jobs and money.The second task the sangh took up was the rewriting of literature of backward castes and presenting caste histories in the light of Hindu text that showed the brahminical system as noble and egalitarian,hence placing the entire responsibility for caste based evils on Muslim invaders. They even morphed doctor Ambedkar’s writing and made him appear as anti-Muslim and supporter of the Hindu rashtra. They started defaming progressive and left wing organisations that worked for backward castes and tribal rights by spreading rumors that they were funded by Christians abroad and were trying to destabilize the country. The whole point was to ensure that Muslims, Christians Dalits and adivasis should not come together. The sangh launched a campaign called “one temple, one cremation ground, one source of water”. If it will take everyone sitting together and eating together to make Dalits stay within the fold of Hinduism then let’s do it -seems to be the spirit of this campaign. They are also trying to look at Inter caste marriage positively since they understand the importance of keeping Dalits and adivasis in the fold.

The sangh is trying to win over Dalits and Adivasis with awards, rewards, posts and prestige. They understand that as long as the Dalits and Adivasis votes went to secular parties, it was impossible for the BJP to come to power.The sangh even approached the author for joining BJP but he flatly refused.

He refused to join politics completely, for which many friends even rebuked him. They must have felt this man is of no use to us if he doesn’t join politics. But even his activism earned him several enemies. Members of his family face life threatening attacks, false cases were slapped on him and the police, CID,CBI,IB all carried out multiple investigations against him. The sangh got so petty that they wrote anonymous letters accusing him of embezzlement of funds and also started sending letters from his name to his friends to incite enmity. The author did not give up; he has chosen to speak the truth and always stand up and fight the battle against injustice, oppression, exploitation and inequality.

 Long Live the Revolution.

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THOUGHTS:

Bhanwar Meghwanshi' s book, even though a one man's story is such an important to read in order to understand an entire insidious system in a parasitic relationship with the most oppressed people in the society. I like how he specifically keeps mentioning that the need to keep Dalits and  Adivasis in the fold of Hindutva is to use them as the cannon fodder against Muslims. The one-way intoxicating relationship between hindutva and OBCs, SCs , STs  is explained from several personal and anecdotal experiences. Plus his insights on the internal working of the RSS,  the tecahings, the whole system and even the general environment in the shakha, the casual talk between Sanghis are so important because the RSS heavily shields its internal activities from the media.

However I wish the author spoke in more detail about the dynamic between OBCs and Dalits. Even though the OBCs and SCs have been inducted into Hindutva in the name of a united Hindu front, the OBCs yet are found to be perpetrating crimes against SCs. How does that dynamic of harmony and hierarchy work between two oppressed groups and what is the way out. The author does point out that the basis of all this "harmony"is the creation of a common cause, against a common enemy, ie Muslims. I wish he also spoke about the need to counter Islamophobia as a means for awareness among OBCs, SCs and STs. If islamophobia is the weapon of Hindutva, isn't that mandatory to be countered? 

On that note, I do have one huge criticism of the work. The author repeatedly, repeatedly, keeps calling the RSS 'The saffron Taliban' or "The Hindu Taliban". The first time he did that, it caught the eye of RSS and they were enraged and I think this is why he keeps using this term- to incite the RSS by associating them to Taliban. But the problem is that RSS is not enraged due to Taliban's legacy of violence, they are enraged simply because the Taliban is considered Muslim. 

Forget, the implication, it would even be factually incorrect to say RSS is following Taliban since RSS is older than Taliban! If anything, Taliban would have learnt from RSS  lmao. Moreover despite Taliban's legacy, you cannot compare a group borne out of ashes and fury of one of the most devastating war and RSS that is plainly a bigoted supremacist movement formed to maintain an oppressive structure. 

Moreover when we say things like "Hindu Talibani" or " Hindu Pakistan" or "Hindu Shariah " , it implies that the standard of evil is always Muslim. It suggests the exact same narrative that has spread by westetn islamophobia and "war on terror". That the evil of western communities is because of influence of Islam and west doesn't itself possess the capacity to be evil. It sets a very Islamophobic response where in, even thought you are aware that victims of RSS are muslims, you still imply that their violence and bigotry is learnt from muslims. Let's stop this trend. Call a spade a spade. 

Apart from this, the biography excellently captures the author's anger and defiance in the face of opposition from one of the most dangerous organisations in the world. It is a tale of unending courage and revolution. 

Long Live the Revolution. 

Inquilab zindabad. 

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This newsletter is not based on any book. It’s a short analysis of antagonisms between Muslim communities and forms of western feminism weaponised as a facade.

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As a Muslim woman who claims to be a feminist, I have often encountered women of my own community not just being hesitant about accepting “feminism” but often being vehemently opposed to it. At first, I am guilty of accusing them of internalizing misogyny, being the “enabling patriarchy” and other similar feminist lingos that I learnt during my study of gender and related issues. Funnily enough, a term that escaped my eyes till very recently, something that made me reassess my stance and lend some slack to women of lesser privilege than I was something that basically defines the role of feminism for the majority of feminists around the subaltern world: Embedded Feminism.

The foundation of resentment among Muslim towards Feminism is the inherent “westernization” of the concept. I have heard various versions from women who actually believed they belonged behind the four walls to women who were earning more than males in their family, all rejecting feminism. Should the opposition to something foreign, a perceived nemesis be to such an extent that it debilitates your own position in society, I wondered. The funniest thing being, these women describing all the “ideas” of empowerment singularly they aspired to achieved or had achieved but refused to call it “feminism”. Is it just blind paranoia towards alien concepts and the dominant culture? Further prodding has opened an entirely new horizon of feminism meant for me and my likes that had been cleverly hidden, appropriated and vilified.

HISTORY/ SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

“The fights against terrorism are also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”,

touted The First Lady Laura Bush in the presidential address to the nation on 17th November 2001. What followed was a brutal military invasion of a nation and unprecedented butchering and carpet-bombing thousands of civilians with the intention of liberating the “women in cover”.

Embedded Feminism as coined by Krista Hunt refers to the co-option of feminist discourses in order to legitimize military intervention of the government or gentrification of marginalized spaces. In its best form, it is nothing but a propaganda technique aimed at the vilification of the subaltern by the hegemonic culture. At its worst, it is a legitimizing factor for genocide and imperialism.

Soon after the bombings of 9/11, the White House began to show unprecedented interest and unconditional solidarity with the Afghan women or “sisters in cover” as Bush liked to call. The presidential addresses began to be inundated with feminist rhetoric indicating a firm resolve to liberate the “veiled women” from the same Taliban that the US had acquiesced to till very recently. The magazines and the newspapers were loaded with images of obscure women in burqa and political statements were dotted with feminist quotations by mainstream feminist groups like the FMRF (Feminist Majority Front).

Similarly, in 2004, the US government after having stood by Saddam Hussain at the peak of his atrocities suddenly decided to champion the cause of Iraqi Women. The intention was validated by a few privileged “Women for Free Iraq” with the support of mainstream American feminist groups. The systematic political annihilation, breakdown of infrastructure and society was a sight to watch as western feminists cheered hoping to liberate women by reducing a nation already grappling with poverty, malnutrition, lack of education and terrorism to debris.

Initially advocating support to the US, it did not take long for Afghan and Iraqi feminists to realize you cannot bomb your way to a feminist revolution.

HONEST MISTAKE OR SAVIOUR COMPLEX?

The support of western feminist groups to their governments may be said to be coming from a good place in its intentions being positive and “charitable”. But to say so is to immensely downplay the class inequalities, cultural hegemony and pervading imperialistic ambitions of the dominant power that have been highlighted by the third feminist wave. The feminist movement isn’t in a vacuum outside class and racial inequalities. One of the greatest follies of the first wave of white supremacist feminism being recreated even now is to assume women to be a homogeneous entity whereby they share the same experiences by virtue of their gender. The virtual sisterhood or misplaced sense of solidarity often is appropriation, misrepresentation, and encroachment of spaces meant for the “other”, here, the subaltern.

As the burqa soon became the symbol of oppression of Muslim which the western feminists were determined to abolish. Amidst this misrepresentation of middle eastern feminism, the pivotal and primary demands of these very women were ignored. Their voices were subdued by the lamentations of white feminists. Political and cultural reasons responsible for repression of feminist voices were twisted by the western media to give a primary religious overtone for their own political gamblings. As Krista Hunt puts it,“Indeed the western media’s obsession with the burqa chose to exclude its utilization by Afghan feminists to smuggle schoolbooks and cameras to women’s groups.”

In fact, many activists spoke of the burqa allowing them the freedom to continue their work…Billaud writes that, for many women, the chadari increased their mobility while guaranteeing their anonymity, a precious asset in a volatile security environment. However western feminists and the western media tended to dismiss the idea that such appropriation of this garment could be in any way empowering or normalized.

Under these scenarios, Muslim women trying to bring attention to burning issues of security, sexual violence, education, malnutrition, poverty were conveniently ignored. Burqa, religion, and prohibition of nail paints became the objective definitions and pillars of oppression, the only ones that needed to be addressed. It was unanimously accepted by white feminists, as Gayatri Spivak puts it,

“White men needed to save brown women from brown men”.

How could the white men responsible for the oppression of white feminists empower brown women? The answer lies in the internalized and accepted cultural and moral superiority of the colonizers.

THE PREVAILING IMPRINT OF FEMINISM

A pivotal observation of the first wave of feminists, the suffragists and the reason for the disdain towards the same is being an organ of white supremacy. The earliest feminists were blatant racists, slaveholding and white supremacists.

The apparent feminizing revolution in the middle east led to a genocide of thousands, the annihilation of the entire nation and ultimately promoting hyper patriarchy, further deteriorating the position of women. The wrapper of feminism was used to sell the infamous War on Terror which was further legitimized and validated by western feminist circles. The problem with the misrepresentation and speaking over voices and ignoring cultural, racial-ethnic influences in the experiences of feminism is that the grassroots issues were ignored and the movement was reduced to symbolism with the main fight being waged against the identity of Afghan and Iraq women. This was ultimately used to spread paranoia in the society, as a cultural annexation by the west, or civil degradation.

he Taliban hadn’t invented the burqa nor the burqa was the primary concern of middle eastern feminists. The subjectivity in choosing to wear a modest garb was replaced by the objectivity of abandoning the symbol of oppression irrespective of the choice. This was in turn viewed by the Muslim women as an attack on their identity and free will, not just in the middle east but globally. Similar sentiments were fanned by religious fundamentalists who retaliated by forcing the hijab and burqa even more ardently. Amidst this tug of war of forced covering and forced uncovering, both in the name of protection, liberation, and empowerment, the essence of individual freedom of choice was long forgotten. Western feminism turned out to be no different than the preceding extreme politico-religious shackles imposed upon them. Despite claiming to be radically opposed to each other, either denied the right to self-determination to women.

As the crackdown on subaltern Muslim societies continues, it is only understandable that Muslim women cannot recollect any visions of feminism without the destruction it accompanies. Colonial feminism has become the hallmark of intervention and destruction. Not only were the physical aspects of destruction appalling but the intellectual and emotional degradation women was systematically achieved. Anyone opposing this supremacist imperialistic version of savior feminism was deemed brainwashed or having “internalized misogyny” hence invalidating all opposition. Eventually, embedded feminism has given rise to a climate of resentment in Muslim societies globally and is seen as a mode to promote western cultural supremacy without having the interests of the target groups at heart.

It is seen as a means of cultural imperialism and further alienation of rights, choice, and identity than already existing. Western feminism for these women is not an ally but instead, another nemesis imposed shackles, set of dictated terms to be fought. Another catch being, it was not presented as “western feminism” or “colonial feminism”; it was simply “Feminism”.

TRIPLE TALAQ BILL: A MANIFESTATION OF EMBEDDED FEMINISM

The overarching principle of Intersectional Feminism is that the experiences of women are defined by an overlapping structure of class, race, ethnicity, culture, geopolitics to name a few.   As wide as the gulf might be in the experiences of white women and women of colour, the differences don’t end there. The extensive social stratification within one community gives rise to a substructure imitating the global hierarchical superstructure. Similar imprints of cultural hegemony, subaltern narratives, embedded narratives, a feminist, in this case, saviour sentimentality can be found within a community as well.

Embedded Feminism isn’t restricted for the legitimization of militarisation but simply weaponizing feminism to further the state’s agenda. In this light, it certainly won’t be folly to observe the Triple Talaq Bill proposed in the Indian parliament as a not so subtle manifestation of the same. The narrative of saving “Brown women from brown men” is changed into “saving Muslim women from Muslim men” yet again.

It is no secret how the issue of triple talaq has been given momentum to grind political stones and polarise votes. It has been conflated as an instrument of empowerment for Indian Muslim women, and apparently the most urgent one.  A crisis. The reality-based on governmental data lies far from the hype created. According to surveys conducted by CRDDP (Centre for Research and Debates in Development Policy) based in Delhi Triple Talaq is almost a non-existing problem accounting for only 0.3% of the divorce cases. Despite the Supreme Court declaring the practice as “non Est”, invalid, unholding, the government pushes for a particularly troubling bill with unprecedented urgency. The urgency that is nowhere to be seen for around 50% illiterate Muslim women, for the lowest high school enrolment rates of any community in the country, for being the only community to show downward mobilization in intergenerational mobility index and many more. The Indian Muslim community wholeheartedly accepted the SC verdict of invalidating Triple Talaq, then why introduce a bill whose sole purpose is to “criminalise” Muslim men for something that isn’t even legally recognized anymore? The controversial bill seeks to imprison Muslim men for pronouncing tripe talaq for upto three years along with a hefty fine which resulted in an uproar in the community.

Why does the government seek to imprison men from a community that already have an unproportionable representation in prison and undertrials with respect to their population for something that is already “invalid” as per the highest court of the country. The sudden traction given to this issue of Triple Talaq in the name of empowering Muslim women has served only to vilify Muslim men, and dare I say it, seeks to erode the social fabric of Muslim households putting them at the mercy of a biased law and false accusations.

For among 2.37 million women categorized as “separated” in the country, 1.9 million are Hindu and 0.28 million are Muslims. The Muslim community realizes the intervention being planned in social structures and private affairs under the garb of charity and saviour sentiments and has been vociferous in their reproach for which they have been accused of misogyny. There is no denial of patriarchy in any community, Muslims being no exception, but the cunning manipulation of feminist rhetoric and blowing irrelevant problems out of proportions in order to achieve political gains and votes polarisation is something that cannot be ignored.

The community is stuck between the choice of barricading their social structures and downplaying a minor yet existing evil and that of acquiescing to foreign interference to save face knowing it will yield no results and is only a political gimmick. The resentment to intervention and infiltration is projected by the dominant power as resentment to progressive feminist ideals. Hence in a war waged by the hegemonic power, it is the feminists and subaltern pitted against one another thereby harming the interests of both.

Under the given scenarios, the subaltern is under no obligation to support an ideal that is associated with wreaking havoc and carefully manipulated to vilify them. Feminism in its supremacist form, non-intersectional form, embedded form, has been a pretty old political weapon to subjugate communities culturally. To enforce such communities to simply “forget and forgive” systemic physical, cultural, intellectual, moral denigration is nothing but a disregard of trauma and manifestation of supremacist mindset. The belief that your way is the only way and any deviations are uncouth, uncivilised, regressive is a clear imitation of colonialist tendencies.

Maybe they haven’t “internalised misogyny, maybe mainstream feminists have internalised supremacist feminism.

Intersectionality requires validation of experiences of women beyond simply the gender lens. Intersectionality requires feminists to be allies to other feminists who have varied experiences and allow them to lead their own battles. The make-believe universal sorority shouldn’t threaten alienation to subaltern narratives for being inconsistent with the popular feminist discourses.

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The new front in the War on Terror is the homegrown enemy, a domestic terrorist, that has become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed and at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8000 “Al Qaeda sympathizers”. Another operation included almost 300 children aged fifteen and under among potential extremists investigated. This book is a comprehensive critique of counter radicalization strategies. The writer looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly-configured, ill-conceived anti-extremism. It is an important and moving investigation of the costs of the war on terror for those who have been its targets, including the thousands of innocent Muslims who have been infiltrated and surveilled in the search for radicalized terrorists.

Introduction

If the war on terror was the stuff of high profile debates about war,torture and surveillance in the Bush years, under President Obama it became a matter of bureaucratic routine, undramatic and unopposed. Obama failed to take the United States in any fundamentally different direction and even effectively neutered any remaining opposition and made permanent what had been a state of emergency. The US military occupation of Iraq was stopped but the number of troops in Afghanistan trebled. The number of prisoners at Guantanamo was decreased but those who remained were slated for indefinite detention. The Patriot Act was renewed and the State Secrets doctrine was invoked to protect Bush era officials from prosecution for their torture policy. Extrajudicial killings saw a steep rise. Neoconservatives invented the terror war but Obama liberalism normalized it .

The terror war did not end after the killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2nd,2011. There was even little chance that this would be a moment to remember the hundreds of thousands killed around the world as a result of conflict between al Qaeda and western governments. Hillary Clinton announced that, “the fight continues”. CNN’s resident terrorism expert Peter Bergen said that, “there could be no end to the war”. A war that from the beginning had no clear limits or objectives could not now be concluded with the death of one man. The enemy was understood as more than a single individual or organization, it was a set of ideas namely, radical Islam that was defined vaguely enough to perpetuate an open ended unending global war.  Suddenly new threats of Muslim radicalization started emerging in other parts of the world like Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria and even Europe and US. President Obama intensified the fear that western Muslim citizens were also a threat. In 2011, White House published its new strategy to combat extremist ideology among American citizens. National Defense Authorization Act led to Guantanamo being kept open indefinitely but also codified the indefinite military detention without trial. The Obama administration’s domestic War on Terror borrowed heavily from counter radicalization practices Britain introduced after 7/7(On 7th July, 2005 were a series of attacks on London’s transport systems by alleged Islamists. 56 people including the 4 bombers were reported dead with hundreds injured). Ideas, analysis and policies travelled back and forth between Washington and London. Warnings were sent to and fro about what could happen when Islam was accorded too much tolerance in western democracies. This book argues that radicalization became the lens through which western societies viewed Muslim populations and how theories of radicalization make an unfounded assumption that Islamist ideology is the root cause of terrorism.

Samuel Huntington described Muslims as the ideal enemy that is a group that is racially and culturally distinct and ideologically hostile. Mahmood mamdani had identified such discussions as culture talk.The writer analyzes 2 main modes of thinking for waiting the War on Terror. The one common among Conservatives is what he calls the “culturalist” argument. It locates the origin of terrorism in Islamic culture’s failure to adapt to modernity and blames the background of Islam that apparently makes it inherently incompatible with western democracies. The other argument is popularized by the liberals which is known as the “reformist” argument. It identifies the root of terrorism not in Islam itself but in a series of 20th century ideologues who distorted the religion to produce a totalitarian ideology that is Islamism modelled on communism and fascism. The problem with both these approaches is that they neglect the role of social and political circumstances and advocate that merely an ideology in vacuum is capable of inciting political violence.

The writer argues that Islamophobia has assumed the form of structural racism. The constant War on Terror with its vast death tolls in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere could not be sustained without the racialized dehumanization of its Muslim victims. Imperialist violence must discover an ideology in order to maintain legitimacy. Cultural markers associated with Muslimness like dress, rituals, language etc turned into racial signifiers. This racialization of Muslimness is analagous to antisemitism which the US and UK have a long history with.

United States an UK government called a preventive approach to counterterrorism in which an attempt is made to identify individuals who are not terrorists now but might be at some later date.The idea is based on pre-crime and the model enables the state to presecute people(read:muslims) for absolutely no crime, if the government officials feel they might turn into a radical now or a decade later.  The FBI model says that there are four steps to turning into a terrorist: pre-radicalization,Identification, indoctrination and action. Some of the warning signs of first and second stage include growing a beard, starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing, becoming alienated from one’s formal life an increase activity in pro Muslim social group or political activism. Only the fourth stage involves criminal conduct. What this implies is that terrorism can only be prevented by systematically monitoring Muslim religious and political life, that there is no difference between a normal muslim life and that of a terrorist.When terrorism was attached to an ideology it brought constitutionally protected activities of large number of Muslims under surveillance. It led to large scale of wiretapping, collection of Internet communications data, closed circuit television cameras and other forms of electronic surveillance. Another methodology central to counter radicalization practices was using personal relationships within targeted communities themselves for intelligence gathering. Teachers, doctors and youth workers developed surveillance relationships with law enforcement agencies, informants are recruited from within the communities, surveillance becomes intertwined with the fabric of human relationships. The idea  gets popularized within the whole society that since Muslim population have been identified as precursors to terrorism, Muslims must have a special problem with radicalization, hence as good citizens, they must watch out for Muslims, must always view them with suspicion.

The planting of informants and agents among networks of political radicals is a practice dating back at least 125 years to the Russian tsars Secret police, the Okhrana and its special branch Scotland Yard. These intelligence services not only carry out massive surveillance but also disrupt political opposition, spread misinformation and even engineer violent crimes that would otherwise not have happened in order to convict the target community. The FBI’s COINTELPRO similarly thwarted constitutionally protected activism and counteracted political dissent during the 1960s, the targets of which included civil rights activist, black liberation activists, Puerto Rican independence activists, antiwar activists, and even students. Martin Luther was placed under intense surveillance and attempts were made to destroy his marriage and induce his suicide. The Black Panther Party was disrupted in various cities by using fake letters and informers to stir up violence between rival factions. During the 1960s apart from the phantasmagoric anticommunism from the conservatives, there was a characteristically liberal take on it . The liberal ideology believed that the portrayal of Russians as machinelike automatons bent on the enslavement of the free world was too extreme. Instead they were ready to admit Russians to the circle of humanity given they leave behind their political ideology, do not make explicit political statements or hold any political conversations among themselves. Earlier the clarion call was, “ The Russians are coming”. Now, it’s  “The Muslims are coming”.Similarly, Muslims are acceptable when they are depoliticized, silent about politics, particularly US foreign policy and domestic national security system. Peter King, chair of House of Subcommittee on Counter Terrorism explained that “political correctness should not get in the way of even wider surveillance of Muslim communities”. UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke of “draining the swamp inhabited by Muslims”. The then London Mayor Boris Johnson roared that “Muslims were suffering from the infection of Islamist virus and universities needed much tougher monitoring of Islamic societies” .The general idea was that there is only one reason responsible for the propagation of terrorism which is Islamist ideology whether in its true form or in its fringe, manipulated form. Absolutely no mention of social political context was made at anytime either in UK or US.

After Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 the debate was as always about the stereotypical image of Muslim terrorists giving rise to senseless terrorism, that had no clear objective besides violence and sadism and inherent savagery of Muslims. But funnily, an important detail was missed in the news reportings. The bomber while hiding from the police in dry dock port in Watertown, Massachusetts made his intention explicit. On the inside wall of the boat he wrote, “The US government is killing our innocent civilians. I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished,I don’t like killing innocent people, it is forbidden in Islam…but stop killing our innocent people and we will stop”. A very clear political intention was explicitly stated by the bomber yet the media instead focused on the bomber’s psychology and cultural background. Similarly after the Woolwich murder in Britain it remained taboo to suggest any connection between the killing of a British soldier and the killings by British soldiers in the villages of Helmand. The murderer stood there with a bloody knife and announced to the bystanders,  “The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers and this British soldier is one of them. We will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone; so leave our lands and we can all live in peace”. Again this detail was ignored by the media. One of the bystanders told the man that if he wanted to join a war he should have gone to an actual battlefield instead of committing such acts in the streets of London. But to the perpetrators there is a war taking place between western governments and an Islamic resistance at a global level. What is different about London streets that they need to be kept off war but the same does not apply to the streets of Baghdad and Mogadishu where every home, every corner has been turned into a warzone?

The US government has defined the whole world as a battlefield in its interpretation of the September 2001 authorization for use of military force, the basis for its use of drone strikes outside of recognizable areas of combat. The US government believes itself to be involved in a war with no geographical limits. If terrorism is defined as violence against innocent civilians designed to advance a political cause, then definitely the Boston bombings and the Woolwich murders are examples of terrorism but so would be the racist murders that occur in Britain and US. Between 1990 and 2010, 249 people died in incidents of far right violence in Europe whereas 260  were killed by jihadis. In the US, 348 people died by the American far right and 20 were killed by Muslim American citizens in the same time. Yet terrorism and far right violence are not considered to be the same, the former label applying only two Muslim perpetrators.

The labeling of certain violence as terrorism is also a racialized act. After the Boston bombings CNN immediately reported that the criminal was, “a dark skinned man” , thus giving a racial subtext to the entire discourse. On MSNBC it was reported that the suspects looked like “they were from Yemen or other parts like that”. BBC reported that they had a “Muslim appearance”. The default assumption remains that the term terrorist is reserved for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims. Despite that, among Muslims indicted or arrested for involvement and terrorism in US between 2001 and 2010, the majority of them were prosecuted not for violence but for expressive,political activism and charitable activities that the government considers material support for terrorism.The US government dedicates tens of billions of dollars a year to fighting  domestic threat of terrorist violence that is largely imagined. Between 2002 and 2011, 53 deaths were reported as a result of jihadi violence in UK. By the most modest estimates the loss of life in Afghanistan Iraq and Pakistan had been around 655000 which apparently doesn’t even come close to the definition of even violence, let alone terrorism. Nor does this figure as a legitimate reason for anger of muslim communities against western states.

Chapter one

As a liberal reformist argument on Islamist ideology has gathered pace ,the strain to get the most attention have been the Salafis. The Salafis are a tiny trend within Islam with less than 5% of British Muslims as followers. It is deemed to be very literalist and has the idea that the messages are infallable. They preach self rectification, a process of individual purification. The political oppression of Muslims was central to the Salafi discourse but interpreted as a punishment from God for failing to adopt the correct lifestyle. The Saudi aligned Salafis thought there was no point in engaging in political struggles until individual Muslims first corrected their own beliefs and practices. Speaking to Salafi members in Luton, the author was told that the Salafis warn people against revolution. The reason Muslims have these dictators is cause they are sinful so they need to change themselves and better themselves. According to them the solution to political situations lies in self rectification. However they support their comrades in Kashmir and Palestine and Chechnya , but they oppose any armed conflict in the British state as it is not a situation where Muslims are being massacred in large numbers. In Britain they support immigration to escape oppression, though a small number of young Salafis from Luton volunteered to fight in Bosnia and Kashmir. Britain services had secretly approved of  Muslim volunteers fighting Serb militia in Bosnia and Kosovo but after 9/11 the same Salafi networks came under greater suspicion who earlier earned political favors from the government.

The “issue” of British Multiculturalism: After World War Two when Britain had needed cheap labor to rebuild its infrastructure, British subjects from South Asian and Caribbean colonies were recruited. They were technically not immigrants but subjects moving from one part of britain’s multiracial empire to another. After the collapse of britain’s Imperial project in 1950s the people of color were left as a kind of historical anomaly. Both liberals and Conservatives did not want them there and the government hoped to avoid further influx by passing immigration laws to close the colonial open door. The people of color refused this false separation of immigration from imperialism by inventing the slogan,  “we are here because you were there”.  Around 1980s, England discovered that they need not bring Asian workers to do their work in the Mills and instead could transport the work for Asian workers in Asia itself. This left a huge number of South Asians in England jobless and were regularly targeted with hate crimes now that they were no longer found to be useful. Earlier generations of South Asian youth had made sense of these kind of experiences through a secular and leftist political framework but this was less true of the 1990s. The left had failed to provide any support or protection to the working class of people of color. In search for identity and belonging, a large number of South Asian news shifted to Islamic movements.

French scholar Olivia Roy argued that the notion of a globalized ummah is not the product of any specific Islamist organization but a broad social logical trend that has developed across Europe as a result of racism, migration and globalization. Young Muslims felt alienated because of racism and also from inward looking mosque life of their parents. The idea of identifying with a global ummah provided an attractive third alternative.Since the Muslim immigrants in United States came from a variety of countries, in order to build any meaningful solidarity they had to cut back on their cultural identities and move towards a new globalized Islam. The concept of ummah implying a global solidarity has always been central to Muslims but it found a renewed vigour for the young children of immigrants who were trying to make sense of alienation, racism and discrimination in Europe and US. It provided a new language for describing injustice and offered a way of filling the void opened up by the decline of the left by countering the globalization of capitalism not with a return to local tradition but with a transnational solidarity of its own. By stripping Islam of cultural acquisitions it was easier to establish a sense of belonging as a Muslim investment society. (The salafi strain attracted a small percentage of such young Muslims as the ideology emphasized on a non-cultural, globalised interpretation of Islam. To imply that the concept of ummah is invented and fostered only by Salafi Muslims is straight up misleading and untrue. )

After the 7 /7 terrorist attacks of London in 2005, intelligence analysts tried to explain this threat of  homegrown terrorism by claiming that the young Muslims had made a break with their parents pacifist Islam in favor of something called salafism or Islamism. Some indicators of the risk of radicalization were adopting a more globalized idea of Islam and leaving the congregation of ones parent’s mosque. In essence it was implied by British analysts that the unification under Muslim identity with their coreligionists around the world was in itself a national security risk hence Salafism came under the lens for proposing a common muslim identity instead of a cultural, regional or ethnic identity. Muslim solidarity often was a precursor to political activism which the UK and US government saw as a threat. David Cameron emphasized that Muslims must privilege their Britishness over their global alliance to Muslim and had to ignore the political histories of racism and the foreign policy practices of the War on Terror.

The American Muslim population is different from the UK and is less concentrated by South Asians. 20 to 30% of Muslims in US are African American who were brought to America with the Atlantic slave trade which originated from Muslim majority parts of West Africa. Organisations like the Moorish science temple in 1913, the Nation of Islam, Islamic Society in Detroit etc helped African Americans transcend racial classifications. Malcolm X identified his country of citizenship as Asia during the Korean War draft thus dismissing the racial subordination within the US.  Hence Ummah solidarity not only unified muslim political activism but also became popular in black power movements, many of whose activists drifted to Islam looking for a transnational solidarity with fellow black people. The initial Arab Americans coming to The United States Were employed in Ford auto factories. Like black workers, they were singled out for worse conditions in an attempt to divide the labor work along ethnic lines by Henry Ford. The growing resentment among the mostly working class due to exploitation as well as discrimination gave rise to identity and class struggle during the 1970s.

Post 1975 the US government selectively admitted immigrants from Asia and Middle East to make them into a model minority in the US against Blacks and Latinos. The finest brains with technical and professional skills were able to enter the US economy but after paying a price, that is, collective invisibility and loss of identity. Attempts to mobilize political support by Arab Americans or to support the Palestinian struggle were immediately subdued by the powerful Israeli lobby supported by the United States. In the 1980s around 5000 foreign nationalists were rounded in suspect of links to terrorism that was support for the Palestinian cause. During the 1990s campaigning in support of Palestine was increasingly in danger of being criminalized; it became the basis for prosecution of Muslim Americans for expressing an ideology. Post 9/11, government crackdowns on Muslims in the US, roundup of foreign nationals, intense surveillance and racial profiling saw a steep rise. Many suburban Arab Muslims who had completely depoliticised in order to be assimilated into the American society found that they had lost their status of model minorities. The best strategy they thought was excessive displays of patriotism and to go back to acting white. A 2011 Pew survey of Muslim Americans found that 44% Arab Americans displayed the United States flag at home, at the office or on their car. Arab Americans were right at the door of what is called “whiteness” in America, due to the influx of model minorities according to US immigration policies. The US Census Board even categorises Arab Amaericans as “Whites”. Many of them desired assimilation into the white America unlike black American Muslims who had never desired to be white and had no Fear of being deported. This sudden large scale villification of Arab Muslims made them see African American Muslims in a new light who had routinely opposed the structures of racism in the United States. Yet, despite the losses of civil liberties there was no mass movement building among the American Muslims to protest the war against terror, the excessive loyalty declarations revealed how insecure Muslims actually were in America. The dissonance between public patriotism and private anger at what was happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine was striking. Most Muslims started being apologetic than honest, hoping to avoid the appearance of being more antagonistic than moderate. Muslims were urged to prove their loyalty to the nation by leaving behind all sort of political ideology that did not sit well with the American dream.

The politics of anti extremism:

Coming to the culturalist argument about terrorism, the conservatives believe that Islamic culture is inherently antithetical to a modern secular containment. Extremism is credited to Islam’s inability to adapt to modernity. In the second approach called the reformist approach, extremism is viewed as a perversion of Islam’s message. Rather than the legacy of a premodern oriental religion, extremism is seen as a result of 20th centuries ideologues who transported Islam’s essentially benign teachings into an anti modern totalitarian political ideology hence blaming certain strains of Islam like Salafis, deobandi etc.  The problem with the reformist approach is still that it balmes certain ideologies (even if not the whole community) for terrorism. The reformist approach also blames models of communism and fascism for the clash of civilizations and advocates for amicability with a apolitical Islam, apolitical Russians etc that is compatible with western values. The  problem with both these narratives is that the concept of ideology is central to do both. They still find terrorism’s origin in the context of an ideology rooted in an alien culture. There focus on western states in co-producing that terror  is thereby obscured.

What are the major proponents of the culturalist theory? Bernard Lewis said that Islam had a unique structural problem with modernity at the root of is, what he calls, Muslim rage. Samuel Huttington backed up this argument by saying Islam has been pre programmed for fanaticism and terrorism is simply the product of a literalist reading of classical Islam. Hence Salafi ideology takes the center stage in the culturalist discussion for is emphasis on literalist interpretation of Islam. In July 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said,  “the Israelis have outpaced the Palestinians economically because culture makes all the difference”  hence ignoring the decades of military occupation, ethnic cleansing suffered by the Palestinians. Identifying a “Muslim problem” is similar to what W.E.B. Dubois called the “colour hair bone” arguments that posited black people as savages and having lower innate intelligence. Such condescending narrations claim to say that the problem is “their culture and not our politics”. The implication is that Islam cannot be compatible with any form of secular government or will always try to undermine the authority of the state when actually as Eqbal Ahmed pointed out, religious and political power in Muslim majority countries have been separate for at least 10 centuries whereas Christian societies had the church competing for power with the state for administrative purposes. Culturalist arguments have proved useful as the ideological ballast for US foreign policies.Neo-Conservatives presented the Middle East policy as a call for democratic transformation in fanatic Islamic societies. The backing of autocratic regimes for example in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan was the traditional method of restraining Islamic fanaticism according to US. Anti-Muslim culturalist were able to appropriate culturalist arguments that had been central to popular forms of racism like accusing African Americans of having weak family structures leading to unemployment than blaming the structural racism of United States. Several organizations, journalist works, magazines, even charities sprung up to deal with the threat of “islamization of United States”. Some of these societies receive donations of millions of dollars to spearhead campaigns against American Muslims. After 9/11 the US Justice Department detained thousands of Muslim, South Asians and Middle Eastern men through various initiatives. Many were deported, held without charge, had their lives and reputation destroyed. A race was created out of a religion by assuming that by virtue of an inferior cultural essence, Muslims were potentially violent. For culturalists, there is only one political act that Muslim can perform without suspicion: rejection of their own Muslim identity.

Coming to the reformists, after the human rights abuses of the United States in various Middle Eastern countries came to fore, several people started to have a second view of Muslim extremism by calling for selective acceptance of Muslims. They made three main points. First, they rejected the view that Islamic culture was inherently oppositional to western interests; they said it was not Islamic culture itself but the politicization of Islamic culture among an extremist minority. Reformist saw no threat in Muslims practicing their religion apolitically. The word Islamism  is usually used to label this political distortion of Islam, sometimes the term salafism was preferred. For the reformist the clash wasn’t  between civilizations, but between extremists and moderates within Islamic civilization itself; between good muslims and bad muslims. The second point that reformists made was that belief in  existence of certain ideology would inadvertently always lead to violence, no matter what. By this logic they shifted the blame of violence on ideologies instead of the political and social background in which terrorism emerges. Initially the word “totalitarianism” was used to define Islamist ideology so that it could somehow be linked to communism(to define which, the same term was used by US media. But later irony dawned upon USA l when they realized ‘totalitarianism’ implied state repression; whereas in current scenario the US government was the state itself and the enemy was in fact detached from the state. Hence the term “extremism” came into service. The term “extremism” was first used at the beginning of 20th century in British political discourse to refer to anti-colonial Indian militants who favored full independence as opposed to Indian National Congress whose demands were limited to administrative reform. Instead of analyzing political Islam in such a way that located its emergence within specific material circumstances, the only public discussion was of how its ideological content produced anti-western violence which basically only meant resentment to US foreign policy.

Reforming Cold War era techniques of combating communism by counterinsurgency and by recruiting the non- communist Left in an  ideological battle against Moscow, a similar plan was drafted to counter political Islam. Various think tanks like that of RAND Corporation argued for an ideological campaign in which the West’s good Muslim would be counterposed against bad Muslims. The political component of counterinsurgency included studying local political structures as a group of tribes whose leaders could be bought off to suit military and political agendas of United States. Therefore ethnic classification of these tribal sectors was is ancient. This strategy  was developed by the British colonial planners known as “define and rule”.  Uniliteralist talk of exporting democracy to Muslim countries was coupled with multiculturalist talks of winning over moderate Muslims in America to help isolate and defeat extremism. Extremism only meant acceptance of Muslim identity and resistance towards US politics.Not just in US but in France, Belgium, Netherlands , Britain and Germany ,the search was on for suitably moderate Muslim leaders who are both credible within communities and reliably loyal to western states to carry the state propaganda deep into the community. Paradoxically this led liberal states which otherwise proclaimed a secular separation of religion and politics to, in effect, endorse an official version of Islam. A number of terrorism laws such as the Terrorism Act of 2006 were passed in the British government under the garb of curbing extremism but actually criminalised perfectly legal activities such as distributing material, speaking publicly, running a website, records of Internet,  distributing pamphlets etc.

The third aspect of reformers program was to call for a public campaign to celebrate and promote the liberal values upon which they saw western society resting. But at the same time, Britain politicians repeatedly announced the public that multiculturalism had gone too far and now needed limit sets on it.  A White House paper published in August 2011 held up such initiatives as central to the US strategy: “Mainstream Islam” was to be officially recognized by the government, the better to counter terrorism. The strategy envisaged a web of surveillance and engagement by a range of professions that might interact with young Muslims. Government representatives started talking like religious leaders by lecturing on the true meaning of Islam to Muslim communities which essentially convinced people to give up political mobilizations and any anti-western sentiments arising due to violence in their home countries. For example the CIA director John Brennan gave a speech to Muslim students in 2010 February about, “jihad being a holy struggle to purify for a legitimate purpose” and how much he respected the faith from a personal point of view. At the time he said these words he was at the helm of the government’s drone program that was carrying out extrajudicial killings of Muslims in at least three different countries. The point here is not of hypocrisy but the way in which a paternalist multicultural respect for Islam is central to counter extremism strategy that seeks to reshape Muslim politics by both hard and soft power.

To the culturalists western Muslims can never be equal citizens. The equal citizenship of Muslims is in practice dependent on them being able to prove their allegiance to all western values; there is no place for muslim citizens who do not want to be accepted in the existing western system but  seek to change it or challenge fundamental assumptions of its foreign policy. Both culturalist and reformist argument debates whether literal Islam or political perversion of it is responsible for terrorism, hence in effect positioning Islam and Muslims as the problem, and not socio-political repression.

The roots of liberal rage

The war on terrorism makes ideology the root cause of political violence; it actually derives from Cold War theory of totalitarianism which presumed a similar direct causal connection between ideology and repressive practices of political control. The American Liberal Democratic capitalism positioned itself between the two extremes of right and left and claimed that the extreme right wing and extreme left wing are almost the same in practice. The American society was envisaged as politically tolerant and somehow free of their own ideological drives. The western slogan of political tolerance bestowed an aura of innocence on liberal states. Even when the barbarism of western civilization came to fore, it was told that, “the origin of our savagery lies in their culture” and that western civilization can be corrupted by the barbarism of others but does not give rise to any distinctive barbarism of its own(lmao ok).

The anti-communist lens of United States refracted third world nationalist movement making them appear communist pawns on the Cold war chess board rather than struggles for national self determination. A measure of liberal tolerance at home went hand in hand with brutal repression of third world movements for national independence like in Iran in 1953, in Iraq in 1963, Indonesia 1965 or full scale military violence in Vietnam. Domestic successes of liberal America were dependent on an illiberal foreign policy using state terror.

Both culturalists and reformists ignore the fact that terrorism is a mode of political action.  The classic islamophobic argument as put by Melanie Phillips is that, “terrorism arises from an interpretation of Islam which takes the words of Quran literally”. But in reality in the classical Islamic precepts are themselves too broad and too open to different interpretation to be a cause of violence themselves. Nor is there a centralized authority like the Vatican that can lay down an official interpretation of Islam. For example, it is convenient for Israeli army to claim that Hamas is immutably violent because of Islam, the truth is that Hamas’ political violence can only be explained in the context of the decades long Israeli military occupation. During the Cold War, scholars debated whether Islam would tend to support communism or capitalism and the western scholars had contended that Islam would tend to support communism due to their share in totalitarian tendencies. The fact is that Islamic text were used by both western governments and organizations like Hamas to bring up any sort of interpretation that they may like and that would fit their purpose, sometimes the purpose being in complete contradiction to each other. The state became the defacto theologian who could distinguish between false interpretation of Islam and an officially endorsed moderate Islam. The reformers to war on terror had become one in which governments tell believers what their religion really means and back that up with the power to criminalize alternatives that threaten western sovereignity.

The most concerning part to reformists is that western Muslims tend to empathize or identify with the victims of western state violence in other parts of the world. To be classified as moderate Muslims they must forget what they know about Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and instead align themselves with  the War on Terror; they are expected to constrain their religion to private sphere but then also speak out publicly against extremist misinterpretations of Islam( read as resentment to western US policy). They are supposed to see themselves as liberal individuals but also declare an allegiance to the national collective. They are meant to put their capacity for reason above their faith but not let the same critical thinking lead to criticisms of the West. A good moderate Muslim must publicly condemn using violence to achieve political ends whereas an extremist Muslim was one who condemned the governments use of violence to achieve political ends.No wonder moderate muslims are so difficult to find. Transnational ummah solidarity threatened western imperialism.

The western liberals fear that their multicultural societies have provided a fertile ground for Islamic extremism to grow and that they have been too lenient with Muslims. Writers like Martin Amis have advocated to make the Muslim community suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel, deportation, curtailing of freedoms, strip searching, discriminatory stuff until it “hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children”. What was once called to fight for freedom in western societies degenerated into a call to defend a liberal way of life from foreign enemies. Liberalism became a form of identity politics. The War on Terror offered a different glue to hold society together that is liberal values, held up as the cultural basis for western identity and universal standard of civilization. Liberalism became what is called by the Italian theorist Domenico Losurdo , “a tragic performative contradiction” that located the problem of radical political challenges in alien ideologies while ignoring the structural violence on which liberal society itself depended. The racialized “others” lived in a state of constant emergency within liberal states in which liberal norms were permanently suspended paradoxically in the name of defending the liberal way of life.

The myth of radicalization

After Ulrike Meinhof of West Germany's Red Army faction was found hanging In her prison cell in 1976 officials secretly removed her brain in the hope that neuropathologists might discover why she gave up her successful career as a journalist to cofound the far-left armed group. To state officials it seemed more natural that the source of her violence was located in brain deformities than in the political conflicts of post war Germany. Likeiwse Mau Mau Rebels captured in the 1950s by British Army in colonial Kenya were examined by psychiatrist J C Wells who claimed to find hard scientific evidence demonstrating that the uprising was not political but psychopathological. Post 9/11 similar discussions on the mindset and psyche of perpetrators were carried out and culturalist arguments prevailed. The governments began looking for a new discourse that could better guide their counterterrorism efforts. Terrorist violence was considered to be a product of how Islam is interpreted and hence the violence arising from non Muslim factions was not considered as terrorism at all. The reason behind such radicalization excuses the western governments and its allies and instead puts the blame on individual psychological or theological journeys largely removed from social and political circumstances . Government officials first in Netherlands and later elsewhere began to devise counter radicalization policies they hoped would predict violence by analyzing behavioral patterns within Muslim community.

Radicalization models developed by UK and US government agents propped out several reasons for the propagation of extremist ideology, none of which focused on social and political backgrounds. Walter Lacquer, a CIA insidee wrote in 2004 rejecting any linkage between poverty,political oppression and terrorism. He said that the answer to terrorism lied in a cultural-psychological predisposition as out of millions of people subjected to opression only about a few take up violence as a means of resentment. (He was basically asking why some people chose to stand up to western imperialism and injustices when millions were affected by the same).He says that the Muslim aggression can be credited too too much freedom given by European states to the Muslim newcomers. The term radicalization tends to merge a number of meanings: disaffection, youth alienation, radical dissent, religious fundamentalism, propensity to violence etc which ought to be kept analytically distinct. Unfounded and biased assumptions about the social and political history of Muslims in Europe are being introduced. The problem in such narrative is that there is no real reason to think that these radical religious beliefs are associated with terrorist violence. Out of several studies, no confirmed statistical evidence has been put forward to back these claims.

Another study by David Gartenstein Ross and Laura Grossman conducted in 2009 spoke of terrorism as a theological process after studying the radicalization of 117 homegrown jihadi terrorists.  The study focused on behavioral changes that homegrown terrorist went through as they radicalized. The changes included the adoption of a legalistic interpretation of Islam, viewing the western Islam as irreconcilable, expression of radical political views etc. The biggest problem with this study was that it did not include a control group of people who manifested the same indicators but were not involved in terrorist activities. Moreover in the definition of terrorism,no non-Muslim attacker had been included thus constraining the model of terrorism itself to only implicating Muslim communities. However the study also noted that the religious awakening was coupled with political awakening for the homegrown terrorist. Yet the writers conceded that political background is not a huge factor in radicalization without offering any evidence to support this assumption.

Another theological-psychological radicalization model was given by Marc Sageman who gave the theory of “bunch of guys”. Sageman was formerly a CIA operations officer specializing in Afghanistan where he ran uniliteral programs with Afghan mujahadeen for the US government. According to him friendship and social networks were integral to the radicalization process. He says that Islamic terrorism social movement was based to a great degree on kinship in which people with similar radical politics got together and conspired against western governments as a part of venting their anger and eventually became terrorist. He advocated the use of soft power methods to gentrify the Muslim community and infiltrate the youth with informants in order to control radical dissent by obstructing the formation of close kinship and trust within the community. Suspicion by Association has a long history of counterterrorism policing methods. The problem again with this theory is that it assumes certain ideologies to be inherently violent. That said ideology like the Salafis is already a predisposition to violence that only needs a friendship dynamic to activate it. A similar approach was favoured by Quintan Wiktorowitz who was appointed to White House's National Security Council credited with Obama Administration’s Counter radicalisation policies. The New York Police Department in 2007 published a radicalization model study that laid down certain behavioral changes in a radicalized terrorist: becoming alienated from one’s former life,joining or forming a group of like minded individuals, giving up cigarettes, drinking gambling and urban hip-hop gangster clothes, wearing traditional Islamic clothing, growing a beard,becoming involved in social activism and community issues were apparently all markers of potential terrorism. This study again does not have a control group of people who shows similar indicators but have not given in to terrorist tendencies. These subtle and non criminal activities are practiced by several Muslims who are far from being radicalized. Such a radicalization model puts completely innocent Muslims under surveillance and suspicions of the state since markers of terrorism have been directly linked to markers of Islam. An investigation by The Associated Press in August 2011 revealed that New York Police department’s intelligence division has considered every aspect of Muslim life around New York worthy of observation and infiltration. A secret team known as the Demographics Unit has dispatched undercover officers and informants to eavesdrop at popular locations within the Muslim community  to report incidents of hostility towards the United States.  Lists were compiled of every known Moroccan taxi driver, restaurants,  barber shops, meat markets etc and Muslims with traditional Arabic names were investigated. One of the architects of this surveillance program was CIA analysts Larry Sanchez who said that the methods were modeled on Israeli techniques used in the military occupation of the West bank. In 2012 a Muslim American student decided to end his relationship with NYPD and speak publicly about how he had been paid by the Department to spy on fellow Muslims and even bait them into making inflammatory statements against the United state which he would record and pass over to officials. It another case the NYPD sent an undercover officer to student rallies protesting against Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2009. The agent constantly used violent and provocative rhetoric in an attempt to incriminate those around him. He came across Algerian born Ahmed Ferhani with a history of mental health problems since the last 10 years and had required atleast 30 major psychiatric interventions in the last decade, and convinced him over a period of six months to buy weapons and blow up a synagogue. Eventually when he agreed after months of convincing and manipulation, he was caught by the FBI and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.The NYPD monitors nonviolent political groups such as African American communities and pro Palestinian group . During Cold War its Red Squads targeted communists, trade unionists, civil rights organizations and black radicals. Same tactics were directed at New York’s Muslim population. But we have seen that radicalization literature fails to offer convincing demonstration between theology and violence it has no statistical correlation between the supposed indicators of radicalization and terrorist violence. French sociologist Olivia Roy sees that the process of violent radicalization has little to do with religious practice while radical theology as salafism does not necessarily lead to violence. While Salafi vocabulary is used by certain groups to articulate their narratives, this by itself is no evidence that religious ideology is causing violence, it is merely providing a veneer of legitimacy to its followers.

In cases where American Muslims have carried out acts of violence, the perpetrators have spoken about political circumstances leading them to their actions rather than religious ideology. For example in February 2006 Faisal Shahzad,a Pakistani immigrant in New York was debating the question of how Muslims should respond to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He wrote to friends saying that Islam forbids the killing of innocent civilians but he could not see how peaceful protest would bring about any change. In 2009 Obama expanded the drone strikes campaign in Pakistan and killed 98 innocent civilians in Shahzad’s Pashtun homeland.By this time Shahzad had internalised ironically the western narrative that the killing of civilians could be justified as a part of a moral war. Few months later he tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. In his defence in the court he said the reason why he did not care about attacking innocent civilians was that the same people had selected their government that bombed his people and family. “The drones hit Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody they kill women children, they kill everybody”. he said. It was the war on terror’s own exact actions that a terrorist was mimicking for political reasons. A similar case is of Nidal Hasan, an army psychiatrist in the US military in 2003 . He felt like he was aiding the US military which was responsible for bombing innocent Muslims in the Middle East; he questioned whether the war on terror was actually a war on Muslims. He conducted psychiatric sessions with soldiers traumatized by their participation in the wars and requested that the military superiors investigate possible war crimes being committed by the American army. The request was declined. Two months later the US army told him he’d soon be deployed to Afghanistan shortly  . He could no longer contain the split between his two antagonistic identities and he entered the Fort hood deployment center and opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol fitted with laser side killing twelve US soldiers.

Since 2008 created Manchester Police has been one of the forces running an anti extremist project known as “Channel” which is a part of Britain’s Preventing Violent Extremism Program, that seeks to profile young people who were not suspected in any criminal activity but nevertheless  regarded as drifting towards terrorism. Between 2007 and 2010 around 1120 individuals were identified by the Channel project as potential radicals. Over 90% of them were Muslims which included children under even 12 years old. The preventing violent extremism program known as Prevent for short was launched by Tony Blair’s government in 2006. A partnership was forged between the domestic intelligence agency M15 and Prevent for large scale surveillance of Muslim communities. Modern Muslim leaders were to be brought into alliance with the government to secure western liberal democracy. With a budget of hundreds of millions of pounds each year Prevent became the government’s Islam policy. Authorities responsible for schools, universities, prisons, probation services, youth crime prevention and the arts were all drawn into the policy. Half the Prevent budget went to the foreign and Commonwealth Office to launch propaganda campaigns in Pakistan and Middle East to counter extremists’  characterization of UK as a place where Muslims are oppressed. Funding was allocated in direct proportion to the number of Muslims present in each area thus implying that the mere presence of Muslims was a rough and ready proxy for risk of radicalization. British Muslims became, in the imaginations of counterterrorism officials, not citizens to whom the state was accountable but potential recruits to a global insurgency. The extreme religious profiling mistook young Muslims as potential terrorist recruits rather than as informed dissenters who simply oppose the War on Terror. The government gave trainings to imams to identify individuals who show signs of misinterpreting the Quran (code word for religious awakening leading to political awakening and solidarity with global dissenting muslims). A state sanctioned version of Islam mostly Sufism was propagated.  In effect all forms of dissent against UK and US foreign policy was termed as extremism. Home office civil servants said that the key test of extremism was whether suspects were completely willing to condemn Hamas. The investigations of young Muslims included questions on foreign policy, their views on the presence of British troops in Afghanistan and a bunch of other questions on culture, identity and British values. Sellout community leaders were roped in to give the government’s message a Muslim face. Hence the government was practically cracking down on all safe space for Muslims for sensitive political discussions and any form of Democratic opposition. The Channel project actively collaborated with the CIA not only providing them with intelligence and methodologies but also providing sensitive information about civilians.

Any minority population that reduces its identity towards it is acceptable to others should fear for its rights(cough cough Indian Muslims cough cough). Prevent’s success rested on finding reliable Muslim partner organisations that could deliver the governments counter extremist message. Over the years the government facilitated the formation of a number of moderate Muslim organisations that could form an allegiance with the state. For example the Sufi Muslim council received at least 203000 pound of Prevent funding in 2008 and 2009 . The Quillam foundation, also in cahoots with the government received around a million pounds in its first two yrs of functioning with the prevent. The muslim leaders with narrow interests readily collaborated with the government and to secure favours from the state. Many of them were later recruited by US and even global think tanks like that of Google Ideas for its counterradicalisation policies.

Those working on the Channel project are bound by confidentiality agreements that prevent them from speaking openly. People were put into surveillance for even raising questions in class or being too politically opinionated . In 2008, the government published a toolkit to encourage the school teachers to contribute to the Prevent program by monitoring pupils for the warning signs of extremism. They were told that radicalization within Muslim communities can take place from the age of four. Young children were probed for having any political opinions that they may have caught from their parents, in this way making children subconsciously spy on their parents. The workers of preventive program were supposed to meet with young people and befriend them and relay their political opinions to the government officials. Channel project states that the data it collects are to be held until the subject is 100 years old. It provides a way to obtain data on the lives of those on the periphery of social networks already being investigated byM15. 90% of channel cases have been of profiling Muslims. For a state with a deeply unpopular foreign policy a generation of young people able to critically analyze what is happening in the world and organize themselves is perhaps a greater source of anxiety than terrorism itself.

When some young Muslims are alienated by their own society and see some of the wars the US and UK governments are fighting,they may come to believe the West is indeed at war with Islam. It is not because they have been brainwashed but because they read the news and concluded that the US government institutionally has a specific view of Islam that makes it more likely to use military violence against Muslim populations. Indeed there are  significant number of people within the US on national security itself who believe that the west is at war with Islam. In 2011 military officers undergoing training at the Joint Forces Staff college were told, “Islam has already declared war on the West and the United States specifically as is demonstrable with over 30 years of violent history”. A presentation by lieutenant Colonal Matthew a Dooley was leaked by the Wired magazine where he said, “taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary with the historical precedence of Dresden hiroshima Nagasaki being applicable to Mecca and Medina destruction. Islam must change or we will facilitate it self destruction”.

 The FBI claims that surveillance alone is unreliable because it risks missing crucial developments and hence adopted counterterrorism as its top priority. A more aggressive strategy has followed making use of provocation.  The FBI planted agents to test if a suspect can be pushed into criminal in situations carefully manufactured by the same FBI agents. An FBI undercover agent may spend months into manipulating young people into conspiring to commit acts of terror with the FBI supplying fake weapons, if the suspect agrees and gives in to the manipulation, it is considered to be sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the person was already going on a radicalization journey to become a terrorist. To be fair FBI solution was basically the question, “can someone who is not currently a terrorist be made into one by the FBI?”. Similar was the case of Antonio Martinez who had grown up in a Nicaraguan family and had later converted to Islam, which was one of the warning signs of radicalization in FBI's model and alerted them.  Martinez was befriended by an FBI informant who tried to provoke him into making radical statements over months while recording all their interactions in which the FBI informers part of the conversation was often found to be missing because of  “recording machine malfunction” apparently. After months of convincing, Martinez was suggested to carry out an attack on a local army recruiting centre in Maryland.Martinez asked the informer for a rifle but the undercover agent suggested that instead he could arrange to provide a car bomb. After three weeks the informer led Martinez to an SUV where he said the bomb components and a donation device was loaded. As soon as Martinez tried to detonate the bomb, FBI agents rushed in and arrested him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Martin’s story is far from unusual; in fact it is the textbook case of current FBI tactics in the domestic War on Terror. In the last 10 years post 9/11, the FBI had provided not only the plan but also the means and opportunity for the terrorist plot in order to provoke Muslim youth and then incriminate them. The FBI agents manipulated vulnerable people with mental health or drug addiction problems into conspiring in acts of planned violence that they would otherwise have had no intention of carrying out.

The FBI not only has its own informers  infiltrate the Muslim communities but also employs Muslim members to do their dirty job. Often Muslim immigrants convicted for petty crimes are offered the chance to avoid trial or to avoid deportation if they agree to work as an informant for the FBI. Similar was the case of Shahid Hussain who was arrested in December 2001 for running a fake drivers license scam . He was employed by the FBI to interact with locals at the mosque by posing as a wealthy businessman and to raise discussions on provocative topics like the war or terror or the US troops in Afghanistan. He interacted with poor Muslims and promised to pay them huge amounts of money if they agreed to indulge in criminal activities. One local Muslim name Cromitie was relentlessly pursued by Shahid to bomb two synagogues for over and year. Three other African American men were roped in, one of which was suffering from schizophrenia. The men kept denying Shahid and only agreed after months of manipulation , that too when they were in dire need of money. On May 20, 2009 Hussain drove the four men to Bronx where they were supposed to carry out the attack. Soon the FBI appeared and arrested the four men, while the news coverage showed the four as America hating terrorist dedicated to mass violence motivated by radical Islam. These provocative infiltration practices of the FBI are hardly new. The earlier government programs like COINTELPRO directed at African American activism used informants in 1940s and 50s to infiltrate the black power movement. The aunt of one of the black men convicted said, “I believe beyond a shadow of doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it and brought it to fruition”.

Philip Mudd who became the associate executive director of National Security Branch of the FBI in 2006, devised the program called “Domain Management” which involved producing electronic maps showing in detail where ethnic groups were clustered, cross referencing such information with database of financial transactions, charitable activities, jobs and so on. The FBI was  allowed to carry out all sorts of intense surveillance of Muslim communities for which it was given a huge budget. Of its 8.1 billion dollar budget, 4.9 billion dollar was allocated to intelligence and counterterrorism. The FBI was busy manufacturing and intercepting terrorist plots that it had itself planted to give the appearance of an efficient counterterrorism program(when I tell you Islamophobia is a multi-billion dollar industry…!). Similarly on May 15, 1970 the police shot Larry Ward who attempted bombing a real estate office that was accused of racial segregation. It emerged that Ward had been recruited to place the bomb by an FBI informant as part of the plan to undermine the Black Panthers. As of 2008, the FBI had at least 15,000 informants and a budget authorization of 12.7 million dollars only to manage them. There are also thought to be 3 times as many unofficial community sources of information. The Department of Homeland security even has a special route to permanent residents known as an S green guard which can be issued to immigrants who agree to work as informants for the FBI. The people who refused to become  informants face several pressures from the state, one of the most popular being a no-fly list whereby it greatly curtails their chances of escaping the country. In the two decades leading up to 2010, 348 people were killed by the American far right in United States which was a much smaller number than those killed by Muslim American citizens yet the FBI considers only Muslim Americans a special risk. Every two months the FBI announces another high profile arrest of a Muslim terrorist suspect keeping the US on his War on Terror footing and sustaining the multibillion dollar Homeland Security industry. The FBI has infiltrated groups of peace campaigners, pro Palestinian activists, environmental protesters and nonviolent anarchists.In 2011 when NATO forces began bombing operations in Libya the FBI drew up lists of Libyan residents in the US to be interviewed, every single one of them. The suspects which are often suspects just by virtue of their ethnicity or the religious beliefs are not allowed to have any lawyer at the time of investigation. The FBI even recorded the manner of talking and dressing of suspects and the  records contained comments against names such as “very progressive” or “very western in appearance and outlook”.

21st century Crusaders:

The elaborate program of the US and UK government  portray Muslims as aliens that can never be a full part of western societies has sown immense distrust, suspicion and bigotry in the common public against Muslims. Since the common public is also involved in surveillance programs of fellow Muslim citizens it is natural that they may view every Muslim with suspicion. It has given rise to hate crimes that are both targeted at individuals and at the whole community by vandalization of mosques or houses in Muslim neighborhoods. The FBI statistics on hate crimes has soared by 50% post 2010 which is actually believed to not even be half the actual number of incidents.

Islamophobia has become a multibillion dollar industry. It’s not just the right wing that can be accused of harboring islamaphobia as several people have come up claiming progressive and liberal political views while simultaneously opposing every single Muslim citizen. For example the English Defence League uploaded a video in September 2009 threatening Muslims to banish them from their country. They also burned the Nazi flag to show that they were not right wing extremists. They went on to show that they had both black and white members, Jews and LGBT members all united towards a common evil that is Muslims. They rode on the same high ground of liberalism that western government has awarded itself against the assumed savagery of Muslims. It appropriated the culturalist and reformist discourses of the official War on Terror.

Post war British fascism was not just about hating minorities but it also was a way of explaining their own social dislocations and degradation of the working class through a rival narrative to that of the Left. The immigrants were vilified and a Jewish conspiracy theory was propped up which said that the British ruling class was a mirage and the real power lay with a secret Jewish oligarchy that pulled the strings of international finance media and other world events. As David Edgar put it, “the far right blames the Jews for the Blacks”. As the War on Terror progressed the British far right proclaimed that Islam was now the number one enemy and to defeat it they were even ready for alliance between Western Europe and the state of Israel. Several far right groups across Europe joined to release a series of intimidating pamphlets and videos directed at the Muslim community. To the American islamophobes the protest of Europe far right seemed a welcome report against Islam. A famous islamophobic conspiracy theory was developed which greatly resembled the conspiracy theory about Jewish oligarchy. It was called the Euro-Arab axis or the Eurabia. It claimed that the European politicians had a secret plot with Arab nations to facilitate Muslim immigration, subjugate Europe and transform the continent into an Arab colony. No evidence was offered obviously. Simultaneously several other islamophobic campaigns and organizations sprung up in USA with massive funding and local support, for example, David Horowitz’s Discover the Networks, Israeli anti defamation League, Pamela Geller’s  Atlas Shrugged and many others which received donations of millions of dollars every year. With Obama occupying the post of president an image of him as a crypto Muslim was floated. To object to Obama’s presidential bid because he is an African American would have been transparently racist so he was accused of colluding with America’s enemies,that is, Muslims. The Obama campaign responded to such propaganda by calling it a smear campaign and eliminating Muslims from his campaign. Muslim activists volunteering to campaign from Obama were told to stay away. In November 2010, Obama visited India where he was supposed to visit the Sikh Golden temple . The temple rules required people to cover their heads with a scarf but the aides of Obama denied doing so in fear of giving rise to the possibility of photographs of him “looking Muslim”. In 2011, Center for Security policy launched a publication called “Sharia: The Threat to America”  officialized the culturalist argument that jihadist violence is rooted in Islamic text and  teaching and interpretations that constitute Shariah. An August 2011 survey found 30% of Americans believe Muslims in the US were seeking to replace the constitution with Shariah law. Just as anti semites viewed Jews as both an outcast subclass threatening the purity of the social body and also a secret class about society able to manipulate events to maintain its power, similar racist hypocrisy is observed about Muslims. The new conspiracy theorists ascribe to Islam magical powers to secretly control western governments while at the same time see in it a backward 7 century ideology whose followers constitute a dangerous underclass incapable of modernity or civilization. The Obama government has made no efforts to prosecute hate crimes against Muslims. A survey of voters in May 2012 found that 63% believe there was a conflict in the world between Islamic nations and western civilizations.

Dream not of other worlds:

The islamophobic narrative has also been popularized by popular culture and the entertainment industry. Films such as Zero Dark Thirty and Complicit consider the use of torture an acceptable topic of discussion. Shows like Homeland and 24 tend to show Muslims in a stereo typical monotonous characterization that is of terrorists. Almost all significant Muslim characters on any US television drama program happened to be terrorists where their violence is portrayed along with other aspects of Muslim life such as praying or reading the Quran.

The Sharia conspiracy theory has, in conjugation with flawed radicalization's models, generated a mood in which Muslim political organizations and expressions are inherently suspect. Good Muslims are implicitly expected to abandon Islamic political activism and the global solidarity it implies. Distancing oneself from political opposition to American foreign policy becomes the only way Muslims can be accepted in American culture. This position has been fostered by the hard part of the state criminalization ansoft part of government counter radicalization initiatives. The consequences that Muslims lose their freedom to shape their identity on their own terms and their only acceptable integration with America involves giving up affiliations with Muslims in other parts of the world. An important point to notice is that there is no fixed definition of extremism in the entire War on Terror or counter radicalization program. It ranges from full blown attacks to barely expressing solidarity with a social justice cause like a pro-Palestinian stance. Both of them are equally terrorist in the eyes of the US and UK counter radicalization program. The close coordination between US and UK counterterrorism is illustrated by the British government policy of revoking the citizenship of suspected Islamist terrorist while they are outside UK. Thus the people are not able to return to UK while it also paves the way for US actions against them.

Humor is often the way Young Muslims have found to cope with the totalitarian surveillance system monitoring their lives. Young Muslims started joking about dressing up for the camera and about FBI agents eavesdropping on their gossips. Hasan Elahi an artist, created a website that automatically documented every flight he took, every place he visited, every financial transaction, and  every meal he ate- a darkly humorous parody of the national security state's obsession with monitoring Muslim subjects.

The East German Stasi is estimated to have had one intelligence analyst for every 166 citizens. Currently it is estimated that the FBI has a spy for every 94 Muslims in the United States. This suggests that Muslims in the United States are likely to be exposed to the levels of state surveillance similar to that which the East German population faced. The 2011 leaking of some NYPD intelligence files revealed to several local Muslims that many of their close friends neighbors and other acquaintances were actually FBI aides. This sowed immense distrust within the community and imposes a strict form of self censorship where no one can trust anyone enough to express any political opinion. A society that has blocked a section of its population from shaping a process of political transformation is one that has hollowed out its democracy. The daily political discourse is completely stripped of any emotion, no one talks about radical changes or class struggles or discrimination or capitalism ; the problem is that we don’t have any politics. And so people’s repulsion at the existing state of things manifests itself in all crazy ways. Three months before the Boston bombing the accused Tamerlan Tsarnev stood up during the Friday prayer at his mosque angrily protesting the imam’s sermon. He was kicked out of the prayer service as mosque leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical views. The Tsarnev Brothers were said to be angry about US foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq possibly drawing parallels with their own experiences as refugees from Russia’s brutal wars of counterinsurgency. The heavy surveillance of Muslims has meant there is no room for mosques to engage with anyone to listen and to challenge problematic ideas or even to offer emotional support.

Radicalization in the true political sense of the word is the solution not the problem. Terrorism is not the product of radical politics but a symptom of political impotence. Leon Trotsky wrote, “the very fact of individual acts of terror is an invaluable token of the political backwardness of a country and the feebleness of the progressive forces there”. The question of terrorist violence carried out by extremist or ideological non state actors is inseparable from the wider background of state violence. Martin Luther King speaking in New York 1967 said that, “I have walked among the desperate rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems, I have tried to convince them that social change comes through nonviolent actions. But they asked and rightly so ‘what about Vietnam?’. They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems. I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today my own government”.

Review:

I sincerely have no criticism. Often reading about the war on terror or Islamophobia, I tend to see a slight “otherisation” of muslims by non-Muslim authors. Surprisingly, Kundnani makes passionate arguments that force you to humanize global Muslims instead of seeing them as an eccentric subject of study. This book is important more so because the topic of surveillance is an open secret for western governments which is kept under wraps for large extents. It is imperative to understand how surveillance is a form of political repression which inadvertently will give rise to political resentment. I am also glad Kundnani picks up the point of ummah solidarity that has often been a source of concern for states. I wish he had further elaborated in West’s hypocrisy in favouring Sufi muslims as the moderate strain when it was the Sufi sects of Afghanistan that had thwarted all attempts of US to collaborate against the Soviet. The Salafis of Saudi and Deobandis of Pakistan have been close friends of the West but were declared as terrorists within the west. Extremely important is to point out that no matter the number of issues with any ideology, religious fundamentalism does not translate into political violence. Kundnani repeatedly points out how blaming ideology, be it whole of islam or strains like salafism , or communism or black power movements place the onus of radicalization on the oppressed instead of the larger socio-political oppression meted out by the state.

Highly recommended read.

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Mahmud Mamdani’s book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War And The Roots Of Terror” answers the biggest question Americans have been asking themselves post 9/11, “How did this happen?”. The author brilliantly captures the history of politicizing of Christianity, Islam, its significance in contemporary politics, the foreign policies of imperialist powers and challenges major preconceived notions. He asks hard hitting questions about politics, violence, terrorism and the war on terror forcing readers to reanalyze the narrative presented by the mass media in control of the leading world powers.

Disclaimer: In the first part the book explains”Culture Talk” that is the cultural perceptions of Islam and political Islam as created by the West. The latter part of the book deals with US interventions in countries that were on the path of democratizing themselves or being influenced by nationalist ideas or coming under the influence of the Soviet Union. The book is not a historical account of events in US foreign policy but draws examples from the actions of the American government to show what led to the rise of political Islam. Precisely , to answer “ How did this happen?”. I will be breaking down the Cultural Talk and US interventions in Middle east and Afghanistan which form the crux of the story. I have deliberately skipped the portion discussing US interventions in African countries and those like Vietnam because they only constituted a passing portion in the book and barely discussed in detail. I will take up these topics in another newsletter in detail, insha allah.

CULTURE TALK

What constitutes political violence? Political violence in modern society is that violence that does not fit with the story of progress and modernization , hence, tends to be discussed in religious terms. What horrifies our modern sensibilities is not violence itself but violence that appears senseless, that cannot be justified by progress. By seeing the perpetrators of violence as either cultural renegades or moral perverts we are unable to think of any link between modernity and political violence.According to Max Weber, political modernity depended upon the state monopolizing violence. It was also the political prerequisite for establishing a civil society.The history of modern state can also be read as the history of race bringing together two kinds of victims of European political modernity. The internal victims of state an external victims of Imperial expansion. (For example, in the year of 1492 Queen Isabella conquered the city state of Granada, then seen as the last Muslim stronghold in western christiandom. It was also the year Ferdinand and Isabella signed the “edict of expulsion” designed to get rid of Jews in Spain. In 1499,the Spanish state gave its Muslim the same choice, convert or leave.)

Of the two main political devices of imperialist, rule ‘race’ was employed in South Africa and ‘bureaucracy’ in Algeria Egypt and India. The idea that imperialism had served civilization by clearing inferior races of the earth found widespread expression throughout the 19th century in Europe. It was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war applied among the civilized nation states (as decided by Europe itself) but laws of nature was set to apply to colonial walls and lower races . The European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa. Europe has never taken the blame for its savage modes of expansion and has instead put the onus on the colonized society for not rising up to the European standards to deserve a negotiation or even a “civilized war”. Similarly Germany observed laws of wars against other western powers but not against Russians who weren’t thought of as deserving enough of the same standing in the conflict. The first bomb ever dropped was on November 11, 1911 by Italy in Tripoli located in North Africa.

Speaking of modernity, if we contrast earlier depictions of Africans and contemporary talk about Muslims, we will see a marked similarity. During the Cold War Africans were stigmatized as the prime example of people not capable of modernity, by the end of Cold War Islam and the Middle East have replaced Africa as the hard premodern core in a rapidly globalizing world..

Mamdani writes that the tendency of the west and imperialist powers to focus on the radicalised community's background or ethnicity, race , even psychology is all a part of what he calls the “Culture Talk”. Culture Talk refers to imperialist powers' attempt to locate the reason behind the unrest, political violence, and explosive resistance within the community instead of looking for external factors that might have pushed a group towards radicalisation. Such cultularists narrations by imperialist powers assume themselves as modern and the target group (which used to be Africans, Communists, then Muslims) as premodern who cannot assimilate into the “civil society” of the West. This narrative assumes that certain cultures are predisposed to violence, savagery and crime inherently, be it due to their history or even genetic composition!

To pinpoint the exact time in history when Muslims became “The Enemy”, as written by Tomaz Mastnak was during the Crusades when the Christian society needed a common enemy in order to mobilise people for war and confrontation. Surprisingly similar sentiments are reflected in the modern writings of Samuel Huttington who claimed Islam was the enemy to establishing a social order in accordance to US. Similar sentiments were put forward by Bernard Lewis. Militant Christian animosity was initially aimed at all non Christians initially but later became focused on Muslims. The christian states declared a state of constant war against the “heathens” which is not very different to contemprary imperialist nations reiterating the “war against terror” which must be continuous.

Not just in terms of civilisation and societal norms, let’talk about science. According to Marshall Hodgson who made it his lifelong project to counter the west centric studies of Islam, said that the equation of the West with science had given rise to an absurdity whereas it was presumed that Arabic writing scientists in the classical age of Islam were simply marking time. They were simply assumed to be holding up the torch for centuries until it could be passed on to the West,the rightful owners. For example astronomics associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran reached Europe, Italy in particular in the 15th century through Byzantine Greek intermediaries. Research and history has been shown that Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last then surely the most noted follower of that Iranian school of thought.

The lacuna in the history of science points to a larger historical gap, the history of Andalusia-Arabic writing Spain, in the historical study of renaissance. Similarly the historical study of Africa was reduced to a racialized object, debased and redefined while being ravaged during the slave trade. The mainstream gloabal map being used even tiday shows Europe at the centre and has been accorded the status of a “continent” whereas much larger areas like the Indian subcontinent or east asia have been clubbed together as a homogeneous identity. The map is heavily distorted in proportion as well and Africa s seen in modern maps is shown much much smaller to its actual size. As Edward said put it, the orientalist histories portray the West as rational developed, humane and superior whereas the Orient as aberrant, underdeveloped and inferior. The Orient is seen as homogeneous incapable of defining itself and most often something to be feared for example the yellow peril, the Brown dominions, the mongol hordes etc.

Coming to the relation between religious power and it’s politicising, where does the terms “fundamentalism” come from? Fundamentalism is a term invented in 1920s protestant christian circles in order to differentiate itself from political Christianity. It was not a throwback to pre-modern times but it was a reaction within religion to its changing political circumstances.(It is important that readers leave behind all negative pre-concieved notions with regards to the word”fundamentalism” to help better understand the history and significance in its subjectivity). Fundamentalism as a religious phenomenon has to be distinguished from political developments. In this sense fundamentalism has never been a problem in Islam since mainstream Islam did not develop a religious hierarchy parallel to a secular state hierarchy as historical Christianity did(explained in next stanza). Religious fundamentalism is more like a countercultural movement instead of a political movement. The writer questions the widespread assumption that every political movement which speaks the language of religion is potentially terrorist. The nature of a political movement lies not in its language but in its agenda. During the onset of political Christianity after the Second World war, it gave right to diverse political movements like civil right movements on one hand and Christian- right movements on the other hand. Similarly political Islam during the Cold War gave rise to movements with diverse even contradictory political agendas . Fundamentalism is not a throwback to a pre modern culture but a response to an enforced secular modernity. Fundamentalism also emerged as a struggle inside religion not between religions as a critique of liberal forms of religion that religious Conservatives saw as accommodating an aggressive secular power. The writer questions the preconceived notions that all forms of secular liberal movements are deemed to be progressive and that all movement speaking the language of religion are inherently terrorist.

Coming to reformism and political Islam, long before political Islam appeared in the 20th century Islamic reformers had felt that colonialism was the key challenge facing contemporary Muslims. Several Islamic scholars like all Al Afghani (1839- 1897) questioned the contradictory impact of colonialism in which the colonized society were expected to follow in the footsteps and must imitate the social of the colonizer. He asked, if being modern meant free rein for human creativity and originality, how could a colonial society modernize by imitation ie colonisation? Forward looking Islamic thinkers began to confront western modernity and global dominance. Now it is important to understand what the word secular means. Secularism has been an important notion in Christian societies because there was a religious hierarchy parallel to the political power in Christian societies, often competing for power(mostly the church emerging as more powerful); hence it was necessary to separate the powers of the two. Islamic societies on the other hand had no such problems because Islam has no institutionalized religious hierarchy, it has a religious clergy but not one orrganized parallel to the hierarchy of the state or challenging the state (until late shi’ite society).Hence Islamic religious movements are not necessarily anti secular. Islamic societies were able to secularize within Islam since there was no religious hierarchy questioning the power of the state.Due to the competition between the church and the state, political Christianity in the United States was mainly the work of a fundamentalist religious clergy. Whereas political Islam was not developed by the religious clergy but political intellectuals with an exclusively worldly concern.

How has jihad been defined throughout history? Scholars of Islam distinguish between the two broad traditions of jihad that is the lesser jihad which involves direct conflict rebellionand resistance; and greater jihad, which is a struggle against weaknesses of self and about living a life of piety. Military action is only one possible manifestation of jihad . Rebellion and resistance against unjust rulers whether Muslim or not are considered an integral part of the lesser jihad. There have been only four widespread uses of jihad as a mobilizing slogan in modern Islamic history. The first was by the Kurdish warrior Saladin Ayubi in response to the conquest of the first crusade in the 11th century. The second widespread use of the armed jihad was in senegambia region of West Africa in late 17th century when the slave trade had become the principal business of European powers on the African coast. Among those who sold slaves were even Islamic rulers in the region. Militant Islam began as a movement led by Sufi leaders intent on unifying the region against the negative effects of the slave trade. Militant Islam found popular support for jihad against Muslim aristocracies selling their own subjects to European slave traders. Third time jihad was widely used as a slogan was by Mohammed Wahab who established the contemporary doctrine identifying with the House of Saud, wahhabism (present ruling family of Saudi Arabia). It was not a jihad against unbelievers, its enemies included sunni Muslims and ottoman colonizes whereas its beneficiaries were a newly forged alliance between the House of Saud and the new imperial power on the horizon Great Britain. The 4th widespread practice of jihad as an armed struggle was in Sudan when an anti colonial leader Mohammed Ahmed rallied against a Turko-Egyptian administration which was rapidly becoming absorbed into The British Empire. This battle for jihad was a battle against colonial occupation that was both Muslim and non Muslim.It is observed that an armed jihad was not known in the nine decades preceding the Afghan jihad funded by the United States in 1980s, the difference being this time being that the call for jihad was not made by Muslims but by the imperialist states. Of the four main contemporary Islamic intellectuals Mohammad Iqbal, Jinnah, Sayuid Qutb and Maududi, only Mawdudi was an unabashed advocate of creating and ideological Islamic state. In contrast, Qutb's thought was more society centric. Iqbal sought to constitute a pan-globe ummah for a borderless community beyond all nation states. Jinnah was a secular Muslim for whom Islam became a political identity in colonial India.

As such the question that we need to ask is not why a radical state centered train of thought emerged in political Islam but instead, ask how this thought was able to leap from the fringe to the mainstream of politics in large parts of the world. “Culture talk” that seeks political answers by analyzing the culture and background of the community sees fundamentalism as a resistance to modernity, whereas it has been pointed out that fundamentalism is as modern as modernity. That is, it is actually a response to modernity. Fundamentalism is more of an intra-religion countercultural movement that evolved as the concept of “western modernity “ evolved. Fundamentalism exists because modernity exists. (Please leave behing the negative connotations associated with “fundamentalism” and positive connotatitons associated with “modernity” , as fed by western media. )

Political Islam needs to be placed in the context of the Cold War. The writer questions the presumption that extremist religious tendencies can be equated with political terrorism. Terrorism is not a necessary effect of religious tendencies whether fundamentalist or secular. Rather terrorism is a born of political encounter. Terrorism needs to be understood as a modern political movement at the service of a modern power. As such the genesis of the form of political terrorism responsible for the tragedy of 9/11 can be traced to the late Cold War.

President Bush moved to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims. Judgments of good and bad Muslims refer to Muslim political identity and not to cultural or religious ones. If any Muslim wanted to be a good Muslim they were now under the obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a war with America against bad Muslims that were against America.

Towards the end of Cold War a concerted effort by seen by America to cast Islam in the role of an enemy civilization. Green peril, green standing for Islam, what is said to be far more dangerous than the red scales of communism.

AFGHANISTAN

After United States of America pitifully lost its bargain in Vietnam ,the trend was repeated in its humiliation when popular revolutions swept away 2 US back dictatorships one in Nicaragua and the other in Iran in 1979.At the end of the same year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Reagan administration in the United States did not take this invasion lightly and was determined to turn Afghanistan into Soviet Union’s Vietnam. Afghanistan,more than any other location was the high point of Cold War. There were 100,000 Soviet ground troops in Afghanistan at the height of the war.

The revolution of 1979 in Iran taught United States an important lesson. Before that, America saw the world in rather simple terms, that is on one hand was Soviet Union and militant third world nationalism, and on the other hand was political Islam. The former was considered the main enemy whereas the latter was considered as an unqualified pawn to be used in United States political adventures.The Iranian revolution showed the potential of political Islam to be a revolutionary force and carried potential to be anti-American imperialism. The more the Islamist regime in Iran thwarted all foreign influences and determined to act independently,the more America became desperate in its search for friends in neighborhood. Soon secular but brutal regimes like that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq were recruited as American allies. The forces of Saddam Hussein invaded Iran on September 20, 1980 .

Now, the United States had learned important lessons from its losses in Vietnam and other third world African nations. The first lesson was to carry a benign attitude towards the drug trade as a source of cash to carry out a clandestine war and the second lesson was to involve the entire neighborhood in the war : common Christian-right ministries, the network of secular conservative political lobbies and paramilitary mercenary outfits in the war effort. In early 1979 Iranian students had occupied the American embassy in Iran and held the Americans as hostage. CIA and state department documents ceased during the takeover revealed that United States had begun quietly meeting Afghan rebel representatives in Pakistan and had also started funding anti-Soviet groups in Afghanistan much before the actual Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. American intelligence services under president Carter began to aid the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union up to six months before the Soviet intervention. Coming to its ally, the Pakistani governments had a pathological distrust of Afghan nationalism. Pakistan was afraid that the growth of nationalist sentiments in Afghanistan would fuel separatist sentiments in its northwest front province which was occupied by Pashtuns. Days after the Soviet invasion, president Carter was on telephone with Zia, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, offering him hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid in exchange for cooperation in helping Afghan rebels against Soviet. A huge six year economy and military aid package elevated Pakistan to third largest recipient of US foreign aid after Israel and Egypt. The intelligence agencies of both the countries aimed to provide maximum firepower to the mujahadeen to recruit the most radically anti communist Islamist to counter Soviet forces. (In 1985, President Raegan introduced a group of Afghan men to the American media from the lawns of the white house as “ the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers”. The men were the leaders of the mujahideen).The aim was to bring fringe extremist Islamic groups which had little to no support socially, to the forefront with American help. America made sure these rebels flog to ISI run training camps in Pakistan where they were ideologically charged with the spark of holy war. The CIA began looking for volunteers from the global Muslim population. A network of recruitment centers were set up linking key points in the Arab world, Egypt and Saudi Arabia with Pakistan.They spread as far as Sudan to Indonesia to chechenia and Kosovo. The pro-American Arab governments looked the other way as local extremist made their way to Afghanistan facilitated by the USA. The CIA looked for a Saudi Prince to lead this crusade, but unable to find one, they landed to the closest influential figure they could find,ie Osama bin Laden. It is crucial to understand that Osama bin Laden came from a relatively influential and wealthy family as desired by the CIA. In 1986 Bin Laden worked as the major contractor to build a large CIA funded project which was the Khost tunnel, close to the Pakistani border which was a major arms depot and training facility and a Medical Center for the mujahideen.

(Why did United states choose to recruit Muslims into the war from around the globe? Several reasons, some as simple as the global muslim population being quite large and pretty united due to religious solidarity coming from the notion of the “ummah”.A deeper analysis would reveal further details on the Muslim-Christian antagonism since the crusades and the pitting of muslims as the common enemy, a theory put forward by leading European and American political scientists. To mobilize for any war, there must be a cause and there must be a common enemy. Before the Muslims, the communists occupied the centre stage hence USA fomented friendships with the fringe extremist groups to fight against the Soviet. Post the defeat of Soviet, the threat of communism was sufficiently bypassed and hence USA began its expansionist aims ahead in the middle east declaring factions and states as alliances and enemies as convenient to its imperialism.)

How did the United States recruit volunteers to fight its war? The CIA took cover behind legitimate charitable and religious Muslim organisations, and by forcing their agents into these spaces covertly, trying to influence and recruit impressionable young Muslims. CIA affiliates went dressed as fellow muslims from mosques to refugee centers all over the Muslim nations and even within USA, with the purpose of recruiting and fund raising for the Afghanistan jihad. Among the leading recruiters at the centers were Sheikh Abdullah Azzam and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, both having sustained records of collaboration with the CIA . The latter was convicted in the World Trade Center bombing of 9/11.

(Here it is important to note that the CIA wasn’t concerned with the legacy of the Islamic institutions they were approaching. Most of these organizations being infiltrated by the CIA agents were genuine religious organisation involved in common charitable and educational activities. All Muslim spaces were indiscriminately gentrified looking for every possible means of radicalizing impressionable civilians).

The core CIA plan was to integrate guerrilla training with the teachings of Islam and thus create Islamic guerrillas. Children as young as nine and 10 year olds were indoctrinated with the belief that they must fight in Afghanistan to reassert its independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow. The United States even prepared and published books that were to be taught in madrasas in Pakistan in order to create future recruits out of young children. A fourth grade textbook, for example had the question, “the speed of a Kalashnikov is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3000 meters from a mujahid And that mujahid aims at the Russians Calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead”. Such US sponsored textbook exhorted Afghan children to pluck out eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs and are still widely available in Afghanistan and Pakistan. By modest estimates during four years some 80,000 mujahadeen were trained with the help of CIA.

The CIA made sure to train the recruits with sophisticated fuses, timers and explosive automatic weapons, remote control devices for triggering mines and bombs etc many of which were later used by the volunteers in their own home countries. Post Afghan war, the key leaders of every major terrorist attack an almost every country turned out to have been veterans of that war. The US government participated in creating a monster by recruiting and training tens of thousands of civilian Muslims to be used as both the cannon and cannon fodder in America’s war.

How did America finance its jihad ? Through the drug trade. The Afghan Jihad had turn into the largest, longest and most expensive covert operation in the history of CIA and, American military aid to the mujahadeen amounted to 660 million dollars which was more than what Pakistan itself was receiving from Washington. Nearly 3 billion dollars aid for the mujahadeen were spent which was more than all other CIA operations in the 1980s combined. As such the American government raised the different steps in the drug economy beginning with peasant production. The mujahideen guerrillas were trained by CIA seize territory inside Afghanistan an ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. US officials refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies. Prior to the Afghan jihad there was no local production of heroin in the country or in Pakistan. By the end of the jihad the Pakistan Afghanistan Borders became the source of 75% of world’s opium worth multi billion dollars in revenue hence saving CIA a lot of the expenditure.

The Islamic world had not seen an armed jihad for nearly a century. But now the CIA was determined to create one in service of a contemporary political objective. Islamically the tradition of jihad as what is considered as the lesser jihad, the greater jihad has been self reformation. Moreover the concept of a permanent jihad is against the doctrinal tendencies of Islam and are considered heretical. Devoid of all consideration United States was determined to organize the Afghan jihad by uniting a billion Muslims worldwide in a made up holy war against the Soviet Union. The Afghan jihad was actually an American jihad. America provided all the aid possible to not only step up the recruitment of radical Islamists from around the world to come train in Pakistan and fight alongside the majority but it also actively gave birth to these radical fighters by constantly indoctrinating impressionable civilians and even children with violence and conviction to fight a “holy war for Islam” . Afghanistan was supposed to be an ideological battlefield.

The Afghan jihad had a deeper effect on Pakistan than it had on any other country outside Afghanistan. Withdrawal from aghanistan in 1989 did not change much for Pakistan. Central to the ISI’s impact on Pakistani society was the patronage of a number of fringe jihadi organization (which in reality were paramilitary forces that claimed the mantle of Islam, just a tactic that CIA had told them). Lashkar e Tayyiba, Harkatul Ansar, once propped up by USA to fight in Afghanistan were now wrecking havoc in Pakistan. The madrassas did not close after withdrawal from aghanistan. The post Soviet graduates of these schools were known as the second wave militants. They mostly recruited poor immigrants or refugees who were fed gruesome tales of cruelty towards Muslims in order to radicalize them.The students of this wave of radicalization were to go on to form what is now called as the Taliban. The rise in radicalism also inflamed secretarianism in Pakistan between Shia and Sunni sects. Moreover due to the US sanctioned drug trade, the number of officially registered heroin addicts in Pakistan rose from 130 in 1977 two 1.7 million in 1997. Even when the Afghan jihad was over its effects on Pakistani society were not.

It is imperative to understand the situations that led to the formation of Taliban. The CIA jihad made no effort to create a single united organization out of the several Afghan mujahadeen groups. The United States saw Islamist social reformation movements as a threat, so the counter plan was to promote exaggeratedly extremist, secretarian, antiShia doctrines. The United States could not find any ally in the traditionalist Islamic bloc in Afghanistan which were headed by the sufis. As such America was backing several extremist groups which originally had no support in the Afghan society, only to make sure to have a sustained jihad. With the Cold War being over(due to the fall of soviet Union in 1991), Pakistani army shifted its backing to Taliban that would reign in Afghani nationalist sentiments. The US also shifted its focus to oil. The Clinton administration in 1996 sought the support of Taliban to build a trans- afghan Pipeline from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. So how did this ragtag force that emerged in late 1994 with no influence suddenly grow so much that it became the master of ¾ of Afghanistan? Apart from generous support from Pakistan, the United States claimed to the world that they saw Taliban as the only hope to restore law and order in Afghanistan.

Taliban rose from the agony and the ashes of the war against the Soviet Union. It was composed of children born in cross border refugee camps of orphans and of sufficiently mutilated lives. The Afghan population turned to Taliban because they believed it would provide protection against the drug lords and help to restore law and order. Unfortunately the Taliban born out of a brutalized society was to brutalize it further . The Taliban reflect none of the major Islamist trends that were earlier prevalent in Afghanistan. They were not inspired by the social and political radicalism of the political Islam. Their ideology of Deobandi Islam was a Pakistani import facilitated by the United States. How did a movement that began in defense of women and youth could turn against both? It must be seen in triple context. 1st, the experience of being forced by foreign communist to adopt gender equity at their terms instead of letting the afghan society build its own social fabric through reformation by its intellectuals. Second, the combination of traditional male seclusion and militarism of the jihadi training enforced by the CIA and ISI. 3rd, Taliban leaders feared that their members would turn into rapists following the example of mujahideen and enforced strict rules on gender segregation, dressing and public conduct,however irrational and against the norm of Afghan society, to avoid that from happening,but in vain. Taliban turned out to be exactly what they had set out against.

Afghanistan is a diverse and pluralistic society, centralizing unitary agendas like Soviet enforced Marxism and CIA enforced islamization cannot appeal to it.

The US policy in Afghanistan now left the country and the whole world with tens of thousands of radicalised muslims under CIA patronage forced to fight the American war. Till now America had maintained enough distance from its proxy wars. The lesson from Vietnam was that America must not get directly affected by its own wars , hence multilateral proxies were propped up. As Kissinger put it, “Asian boys must fight Asian wars”. It did not matter if these wars were propped up by the United States. All that mattered was America must not be harmed in its own wars. The proxy war is Afghanistan was a depiction of muslim civilians being used as both the cannon and the cannon fodder for CIA’s schemes.

From proxy war to open aggression

Before 9/11 ,the Reagan administration forged proxy wars in countries where successful insurgencies were leading to militant nationalist regimes, which according to United States of America were nothing but Soviet proxies. After 9/11, America let go of proxy wars and entered high intensity direct warfare. In less than two years after 9/11, The United States moved from the invasion of Taliban ruled Afghanistan to that of Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. Whereas the Taliban had been accused as hosts of al Qaeda, there was almost no connection to the invasion of Iraq to that of 9/11.

To understand how Iraq became central to US foreign policy we must return to Iran of 1979. The Iranian revolution disproved the American notion that Islam was an anti-communist and anti-nationalist force. The Iranian revolution show the world that an Islamist regime could be nationalist an anti-imperialist. To contain Iranian nationalism the United States turned to Iraq.

The first phase of the alliance between Saddam Hussein and United States was when Iraq attacked Iran and United States supported Iraq outwardly. Actually US attitude towards Iraq and war was just a strategy to fuel and sustain a local conflict in order to weaken both sides. Once Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, the world saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam, the US also shipped 7 strains of anthrax to Iraq between 1978 to 1988 and training in the use of chemical and biological agents were provided to Iraqi military by US. The US military was advertising these weapons not only as less expensive but also as more humane(lol ok. I read somewhere they testified some of their weapons that burnt human body beyond treatment, were claimed to be kinder to the environment). Not only in terms of weapons, the United States also provided Iraq satellite imagery of Kurdish militias add Iranian troops so their actives could target both of them more effectively. The United States provided Iraq with aid worth 500 million dollars per year. In terms of political protection the United States blocked attempts to raise the topic in the UN Security Council.

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 ended the alliance between Iraq and USA. Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with United States.The United States launched a heavy aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity without regard to the collateral damage or principle of proportionality. The principle of proportionality under international law says that a reasonable proportionality exists between the damage caused and the military gain sought. Iraq was razed with little restraint, as it acts infrastructure was comprehensively targeted little thought was given to civilian casualties which were explained away as collateral damage. The bombardment of 1991 had effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq, electricity, water, drainage systems, agriculture ,industry, health care. The Bush government feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq .They were afraid that the Kurdish minority might take advantage of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow whose objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close US ally. On the other hand there was also the possibility that iraq’s majority Shia population which had religious and cultural ties to Iran would assert itself.

To justify its many war crimes and human rights abuse the narrative was spun that Iraq was a danger to the region, a danger to the world, close to possessing a nuclear device,. Round the Clock bombing began on December 16, 1998 and ended on December 19, US officials told the Wall Street Journal they would soon run out of targets, “We’re down to the last outhouse”.This mission was called operation Desert Fox. The bombing of Iraq ran parallel with an indefinite regime of econonmic sanctions. Virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the United Nations and subject to US veto. All exports and imports to Iraq were banned with exemptions for some medical supplies and food stuff which were also subject to several obstructions from the United States. A proposal was floated in the United Nation that Iraqi oil sales be used to purchase humanitarian goods. The aim of this proposal was to undermine the sovereignty of Iraq. Iraq and the UN finally came to the agreement on the “Oil for Food” program. This is how the deal went : Iraq was allowed to sell a set amount of oil over six months of net worth around 3 billion dollars but Iraq was not allowed to receive the revenue it earned. The United States and Britain required that the revenues go directly into a UN account from which 30% would be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who would use it to supply foodstuff and basic medicine for Iraq. But in practice, from the revenue from sale only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the rest was taken up for reparations and administrative costs.

The sanctions have a deadly impact on Iraq. UNICEF data showed that the rate of mortality more than doubled among children under five years. A conservative estimate of excess deaths among children under five was placed at a staggering 300,000 deaths. The Iraqi disaster was termed as the only instance of sustained large increase in mortality in a stable population of more than two million in the last 200 years!!! The total death just due to sanctions ranged between 1-1.5Million majority of them being children. Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during US atomic bomb blast. When questioned about these deaths Madeline Allbrite The US ambassador to UN said , “I think this is a very hard choice but the price, we think the price is worth it”. Econonmic sanctions were a weapon of mass destruction. As of September2001, the US had blocked nearly 200 humanitarian contracts and nearly a billion dollars worth of medical equipment contracts for Iraq.

The US even utilised radioactive elements like depleted uranium as ammunition. According to International Depleted Uranium Study team testifying to the European Parliament, in Iraq over 1.5 million soldiers and civilians most of them children have died of natural causes like leukaemia,cancer, birth defects and rare diseases. Vegetables, fish and meat in Iraq were also showing high levels of radiation contamination. Since depleted uranium is said to have a half-life of four and a half billion years it will continue to harm all forms of life in contaminated areas till the end of time.

Propaganda has been an integral part of war in modern times. A poll conducted in February 2003 showed that 72% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks when US intelligence actually had no evidence of this allegation. During the war no evidence was found either of a stockpile or the use of weapons of mass destructions.

Iraq was turned into an example of punishment that can be meted out to a regime that dares to go outside the framework of a US defined alliance. Iraq also presented a chance to redraw the political map of the entire Middle East region and to create a buffer Christian state. In April 2003 Israeli Major General Ya'akov Amidror said,”Iraq is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the Middle East, the Arab world and the Muslim world. Iraq will be the first step in this direction. Winning the war against terrorism means structurally changing the entire area”

The United States seeks to replace defiant regimes and intimidate others under the garb of democratization while simultaneously equating terrorism with Islam. Modern western imperialism has always believed that expanding domains were key to spreading the rule of law internationally. Democracy has become an imperial banner waved in the face of 3rd world nation nationalist regimes.

On Palestine

No one should be surprised that the United States is considering a solution for Palestinian national security in the occupied territories similar to that of Iraq. Israel has effectively choked economic life in the occupied territories and has dominated, expelled, starved, humiliated an entire population. Like the United States and Iraq, Israel has publicly refused to make a distinction between civilian and military targets. Israel claims that its purpose is to destroy the “infrastructure of terror” which only meant the destruction of “infrastructure of resistance”.

It’s so easy and comforting to think of the entire Palestinian society, Iraqi society, and hence Muslims as primitive, bloodthirsty terrorists after destroying the raw material and product of their intellectual, cultural, social, an economy activity. The racial branding of Arabs or Muslims in general fits well with the practice of collective punishment by the United States. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said of Palestinians, “They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in judeo Christian culture”. This islamophobic racism doesn't just stop at politics. The Journal of human immunology by American Society of histo-compatibility and immuno genetics contained a study that said Jews and Palestinians share a very similar gene pool and are not genetically separate. A year after its publication the article was removed from the website after much uproar from the readers. How could the civilized people of the land,the Zionists, share the same gene pool as that of the savage Muslim Palestinians?

(Will be covering the Palestinian conflict in detail with another book so keeping it short here. )

THE SUICIDE BOMBER

The issue of settler colonialism and suicide bombing has gained quite some mileage in the modern political conversation. The conversation revolves around two aspects of suicide bombing namely the cultural aspect and the political aspect. Cultural aspect of the conversation tends to ignore the political reality of the people engaging in militaristic resistance and it is more of a talk between the settlers discussing the lack of civilization among natives. The question hitherto becomes, what sort of people or civilization would partake in an act so ghastly as that of suicide bombing , instead of asking the question what sort of political terror made suicide bombing an inevitable response to oppression? The culture talk often becomes a code word for generalizing a group of people by ascribing to them a set of attributes in this case violence. It functions as a modern day counterpart of the race talk. The author says that we need to recognize suicide bomber first and foremost as a category of soldier. The only difference between a soldier and a suicide bomber is the sanction given by state to the former. Both the soldier and the suicide bomber are willing to sub-coordinate life, both their own and out of others, for objectives they consider higher than human life.

Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.

At the height of anti-apartheid movement in South Africa there was a raging debate going around a practice called necklacing. Vigilant youths would dip a used tire in gasoline place it around the neck of a suspected aparthied informer and set it alight. Winnie Mandela, the wife of Nelson Mandela declared on April 1985, “we have no guns, we have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol. Together hand in hand with her boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”. The president of African National Congress said, “ we are not happy with the necklace but we will not condemn the people who have been driven to adopt such extremes”.

In the debate over suicide bombing it is important to distinguish between its immediate and long-term effectiveness. It seems to give public evidence that the oppressed were capable of mustering a force to counter the spreading tentacles of settler occupation. So long as there was no effective political alternative it was difficult to discredit necklacing politically.

A moral discourse on suicide bombing is like a secular discourse on the lack of civilization among natives. On the other hand a political discourse on suicide bombings analyzes the reasons and forces the perpetrators to take responsibility that pushed natives to such extremes.

One needs to recognize that terrorism has no military solution. America’s bombing campaign in Afghanistan is more likely to be remembered as a combination of blood revenge and medieval type exorcism than as a search for solution to terrorism.Few would fail to notice the similarities between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official US response to it called the “War on Terror”. Both rally forces in the name of justice but understand justice as revenge.

Official America has learnt to distinguish between two types of terrorism- “theirs” and “ours” and has cultivated an increasingly benign attitude to ours. But then it turned out that “their” terrorism was born of “ours”. As said by Arundathi Roy,” Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI”. The co-conspirators in 1993 World Trade Center bombing included two other veteran of the Afghan jihad .The center exploded underground by a bomb which was made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, a formula taught in CIA manuals.

As long as we keep searching for answers of political violence and terrorism in cultural talk, we will eb satisfying the agenda of the imperialist regimes. When every single need , material or otherwise, of a community is effectively destroyed to smithereens, resistance and rebellion is to be expected. “But terrorism isn’t resistance”. The discourse on terrorism doesn’t demand a moral debate unless a moral debate is also held for the actions of countries like the USA. Imperialist, colonizing regimes stifle all forms of political expression and cut off the masses from the public view. The constant media siege in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine are only a few examples. The world is led to believe that terrorism is a moral, cultural or genetic problem and not a socio-logical and political mutation , derived directly as a result of occupation. Political terror is an inevitable response in the grip of terrible oppression. Cultural explanations ignore the specifics that fuel the conflict and excuses the powerful oppressive regimes of all responsibility.

What is the way out? A key lesson of the Vietnam War is that the anti war and anti imperialist movement inside the United States restrained American military power from being fully unleashed on the people of Vietnam. Successive US administrations have held the American press responsible for defeat in Vietnam. Even though in those days the media added a popular movement against the war, the press has tended to turn to official America more recently. With changing ownership of media giants several have been taken over by corporations based in the defense or entertainment industry, reinforcing the tendency to treat news as marketable entertainment.

When it comes to Middle East, Israel is the Achilles heel of American liberalism. It is easier to criticize American government than to criticize Israel in America. This can be credited to the extraordinary power of the Israel lobby in Washington and more recently to the growing weight of the Christian-right in the Republican Party. Trace of a public debate in America when it comes to Israel is nonexistent. Israel defies the international community consistently as it is backed by the world's sole superpower. The idea of a single judeo-Christian tradition is mainly a post Holocaust idea. This idea has been forged around the commitment to a shared “civilizing mission”,in which, “civilization” understood as a settler product , must be brought to natives. Zionists see Palestinians as interlopers, squatters without a right grounded in a biblically sanctioned civilized history. This strikes a chord with the American mission of civilization. At the height of Aparthied in South Africa, they claimed to be the only democracy in Africa just like Israel today claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East. There’s a high resemblance between the zionist project in Israel and Islamist project in Central Asia, both funded by United States. In both cases American patronage has been key to turning religious identities into political ones. It must be understood that fundamentalism in religion does not automatically translate into political terrorism. Rather only when a righteous perspective, religious or secular, is integrated into a ruthless an ideologically intolerant political project does it provide the language that fuels terrorism.

We need to recognize different routes to terrorism.The main one being an imperial scheme for undermining political support of leftist nationalist governments or simply governments considered as belonging to a hostile camp. For there would not have been the global political environment of impunity which was critical for the development of terrorism by other routes, unless there was a strategic embrace of terror by the superpower.

America has a habit of not taking responsibility for its actions and looking for moral pretexts for inaction.The American establishment reinstated that Islam is a political and not simply a religious or cultural identity and was determined to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims based on their support for America. The global jihad, or more rightfully the American crusade was just a strategy weaponizing the Muslim population against themselves and America’s opponents. The political ambitions of America were wrapped in curtains of Islamic holy war. If it were indeed an Islamic holy war why do we know of no one inspired by Osama bin Laden for religious reasons? Bin Laden is a politician, just like Bush, those who embrace him do so politically, just like Bush. America promoted two different religious wars over the past quarter century one Islamist and the others Zionist.

There is no denying the global character of American power before which the network known as al Qaida can only be described in the diminutive. The war in Vietnam teaches us that in order to end all such wars,the struggle will have to be waged as a mass movement inside each country, particularly the democratic countries and specially in the United States and Israel. America needs to recognize the legitimacy of nationalism in the era of imperialism and learn to live with it. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it.

Fin.

REVIEW

Okay, first of all major impressed how Mahmud Mamdani forces you to leave your preconceived notions behind. The book will be incomprehensible to any reader who carries with them the mainstream notions/meanings of words commonly thrown around these days like fundamentalism or secular or radical Islam or modernity. The western mass media has forcefully attached positive connotations with words like secular and modernity which were/are imperialist Christian societies while associating disparaging terms to define Islam or other third world mass movements.

Next up, I absolutely love that Mamdani dedicated one-third of the book to discuss the “Culture Talk” , about how the perceptions came to be formed in the first place. Political gaslighting (cough Shekhar Gupta cough) is very common by crypto-islamophobes or western-imperialism apologists wherein they insinuate that global islamophobia is imaginary.Mamdani traces the animosity and the positing of a “Muslim enemy” through history and also links it with modern politics. I also love he doesn’t just back his arguments with data and news but makes convincing, passionate arguments. He has a very rare non-otherising mode of referring to oppressed communities. It is extremely difficult to express solidarity with societies where terrorism has taken a foothold. Mamdani forces you to see, it could very well be me and you who would have been radicalized under such circumstances. He deosn’t patronize, he brilliantly spins the narrative the western media has comveniently ignored. A deranged behavior is a normal reaction to a deranged environment. In this case, the political environment .

Okay, time for some criticism. I wish Mamdani had done a better analysis of US intervention in African countries and Vietnam instead of just making passing refrences in a few pages. Also, I would have loved to read some more on Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim countries that faced the brunt of this radicalization of its civilians in masse due to sustained efforts of US and European countries. Eventually when the US’s purposes ended, obviously there was no rehabilitation for the thousands of men radicalized, the thousands of children indoctrinated . Post cold war, major terrorist attacks in muslim countries conducted by people who were recruited in the Afghan jihad made use of techniques taught by the American military. The impoverished, third world muslim countries were not only left to deal with their civilians radicalized by the USA but also faced international condemnation for harbouring terrorists, something in which they had no role to play.

Next, I also wish Mamdani had focused better on Muslim countries that acted as allies to US at some point, namely Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arab. Especially in the case of Pakistan, I wonder why he doesn’t discuss how the country has been forced into a relationship of economic dependence which is then used to compromise its sovereignity. The war on Terror took a huge toll on Pakistani society as well and USA exploited the country to its max, leaving barely any chances to leave the web, to pretend Pakistan was an equal stakeholder in the “Afghan Jihad” is definitely incorrect (Not saying Mamdani implied that, but it would have been better if he had discussed these points).

And lastly, I wish the language was simpler lol. It wasn’t a tough read per se, but it could have been further simplified. This is definitely not for beginners. Please do some elementary reading on Cold war and the war on terror before picking this book (if you’re going to).

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(also, Death to America J)

Also listen to this if you haven’t already. Turn on the captions.

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Also, join my fangroup for fangirling over this whole legend. Here is his Wikipedia page if you don’t already know who this superhero is.

"This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog."

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Hanan.

THE FEAST OF VULTURES

By JOSY JOSEPH 

Subheading: The hidden business of democracy in India. 

This book has been written by an investigative journalist Josy Joseph who is credited with probing several cases of scams and corruption some of which are the 2G scam,the Commonwealth games scam, The adarsh apartments scam etc. This book mainly focuses on the levels of middleman or  intermediaries in India’s politics and business world. In order to get any work done in here you must have separate contacts, middleman or intermediaries who can guide you to the right men and get your work done or who will facilitate your work ,or will convince the concerned official to take up your cause.Otherwise what could have taken years to accomplish, with the right contacts you can get it done in a matter of few days. 

PROLOGUE 

In the introduction the author basically talks about the number of instances he has come across various cases of corruptions and how he recognizes several scams, for example he talks about the Commonwealth games that were held in 2010 and the government spent around for 50k crore on the various aspects of  not just the game but also preparing the city of Delhi for the income of tourists.One of the companies that played a critical role in getting the city ready for the games was called Jubilee sports technology private limited whose promoters claimed to be living in a village called karalla. The author went to this village to investigate about owners of the company and new place to say he discovered that this was a fictitious company. Over the years almost every major financial transaction in India has been made by fictitious shareholders and proxy directors through shady deals it this country it is okay to do practically anything use fake promoters accept bribes, commission murders, intimidate media manipulate the public and grab power. 

To put it in simple words the author is attempting to write about the structure of India’s functioning: how do you get a job done in India how do these middle men function what are the various tributaries that you must traverse in order to get even basic jobs done. 

He also speaks about how several times he has been asked by employees and lawyers of several huge firms to withdraw his investigation or withdraw his inquiry into their suspected mal- practices; he has been enticed with offers of job, money , personal favors and literally everything he could think of. 

Moving on, he talks about how India’s middle men came to occupy the center stage in various governmental and  bureaucratic process. He refers to the period before 1990s infamously known as the license Raj. Before liberalization India was a socialist state that practiced import substitution and state monopoly. People were supposed to get state permission to even buy a vehicle to start a business. The economic growth was just about 3.5%. With the bankruptcy and international shame staring in the face India was supposed to liberalize its economy in 1991. The author says that India transformed from a socialist economy to a thriving market economy in a matter of few decades. The only constant that remained was the presence of middle men who got the work done in the socialist economy and he was still getting the work done in the liberalized economy. 

 Initially the author talks about anecdotal stories of common people trying to get their job done through the labyrinth of Indian government institutions and bureaucracy . The author visits a village called Hridyachak in Bihar to interview a man called Mohammad Anwar Hussain who was instrumental in getting a road Constructed to the village. After a complicated delivery of his sister at a hospital 15 kilometers away from his village that did not have a road connecting it . Anwar was determined to get the construction started. He met with several ministers including the union minister; he was eventually told that the road to his village cannot be built. Because it was already built on paper. The route that was sanctioned to be built to his village would link his village through several other villages thereby making a distance of three kilometer equivalent to 18 kilometer. After a lot of grinding Anwar was finally able to get the construction done in the year 2010. The author wants to point out how desperation forces people to maneuver through the impossible labyrinth of Indian institutions. Several people who did not have the same tenacity have picked up arms in a left wing insurgency in several parts of India against the government. The author also points out that a huge part of public funds goes into meeting the fees demanded by the middleman who facilitate the work of common people and billionaires alike; it's just about finding the right middle man for you and being able to satiate him. 

It should be kept in mind that a significant portion of various black economy is composed of the fees that is paid to these middle men. It’s not just the rich paying from their own private pockets to grind their own mill but a huge amount of public money also goes into convincing government officials and middle men to get their jobs done which can include anything from issuing a license to building toilets mandated under government schemes. Over 56% of Indian population does not have access to electricity, out of the remaining we do not know the extent of electricity that is actually provided to them; for example for a village to be marked as electrified under government reports, it is required do have power supply to only 10% of its households. 66% of rural residents do not have access to critical medicines, 31% have to travel more than 30 kilometers to avail themselves of any health care, 28% of Indians in urban areas corner 66% of India’s available hospital bed. A recent survey by National Institute of education planning found that over one lack of India’s elementary schools had only one classroom. The government has launched several schemes to eliminate open defecation, to provide food to rural household or to clean India. Barely a fraction of the funds meant to take these schemes to completion reach the intended beneficiaries. The situation is found to be worse for minority communities and dalits, mahadalits and tribals communities and among those, of women.  Even though 85% of rural women are engaged in agriculture only 13% of them own land. The possibilities of theft of public money are immense, sometimes the stipulated pension does not reach the old of vulnerable communities while other times the grain meant for midday meals of school children is vastly less than the amount stipulated by the government. 1.7% of India’s GDP is invested into the social sector Which itself is not much in comparison to neighboring countries but even this amount does not fully reach the intended demographic. In 2009 a Planning Commission of India found that only 16 paise out of ₹1 reached the targeted poor in the distribution of subsidized food items through public distribution systems. The remaining 84 paise went to pay salaries and as leakages and bribes and commissions for the countri’s bloated government.  

SECTION 1 

Moving on, the author has divided the types of middleman/ intermediaries working in the Indian government institutions into several chapters. One of them is Abhay Narain Rai who is the spokesperson of the local arm of the Congress party in the district of Bhilha. The poor of the district do not rush off to government offices and police stations to deal with their grievances, they go to Rai. According to estimates it will take about 320 years to dispose off the over three crore cases pending now in Indian courts. As such, people like Rai Are instrumental in getting the pettiest of works done like admitting a family member into a hospital to acquiring a fair wage. A wide held belief is that The Indian government is active only up to the district level. Below that in order to get any work done you’re supposed to identify middle men who will be your gateway to government or even your rights. The lack of scrutiny and the unscrupulous power over the local population enables these middle men to partake in immense corruption. It can be well believed that the government is aware of the functioning of such intermediaries at the local level and the deflection of funds but they have no incentive to improve the conditions since these middle men act as the government’s link to the common people and act as ducts through which democracy flows during elections to the lowest levels in India. In elections, middlemen being in contact with the local population are able to steer their votes towards a particular candidate.  The candidate would offer cash and kind to the voters and generally spend millions of rupees in order to win elections but at no personal loss since the monetary investment is recovered by the candidate using the public money once they are elected to the office. 

 After having a glimpse of small middle men that are only a local influence within their area, the author takes us to a relatively larger image of intermediary. This is about Indira Gandhi's typist Rajendra Dhawan. He started working for her in 1962 and was beside her till the day she was assassinated. Naturally he was in possession of several secrets of the Gandhi family and was aware of every tiny detail of her day.  

He was replaced by Vincent George when Rajiv Gandhi took to office in 1984.It is also interesting to know how middle men are known by their alliances. Vincent George paid heavily for his loyalty to the Gandhis when the next Prime Minister Narasimha pursued him and his family in several cases related to money laundering and connections with the underworld . To the Gandhi family the rise in assets of George were pardonable at least, if not facilitated at best. 

 A similar person who was not so discreet as Dhawan and George was M O Mathai , a confidant of Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote a book called ‘Reminiscence of the Nehru age’ which is now out of print. He has written about several salacious details that are almost unbelievable. For example he was entrusted with the responsibility of asking a minister to resign because of his public affair with a woman became a media scandal. He wrote about how the mistress was silenced with money and the Prime Minister was aware of the plan. He also wrote about how at a reception hosted by Indian High Commissioner V K Menon  attended by the them British prime minister Clement Atlee, Nehru invited raised eyebrows from the guests because he stood in a corner chatting with lady Mountbatten all the while and how he was entrusted with the responsibility of making it clear to him how embarrassing an unfavorable it appeared. This just shows to the extent of candour shared by people in close proximity with high powers.  Mathai's other book My Days with Nehru contain stories of petty details in the most towering figures in Indian politics, from the elopement of Nehru's sister with a Muslim Man, Syed Hussain to him being told to burn several of Mahatma Gandhi's letters in possession of the Gandhi family . Despite going as far as writing about Indira Gandhi's decade long sexual affairs which the publisher refused to publish, Mathai was fortunate enough to die a peaceful death.  

Let’s move to one of the most lucrative areas for middlemen. 

The arms business is known to be one of the most flourishing business for middlemen. The Indian military accounts for almost 50% of Israel’s foreign military sales. India has placed over rupees 60,000 crore worth of orders with Israel's defence and space form starting in 1999. Professional middlemen manage and manipulate huge contracts, run large offices, hire retired government officers and other such experts to manage the arms business system. They play a critical role in sustaining many Indian political parties. The middleman or intermediary is actually a legitimate function in any modern economy, they ensure that a company's  views are heard and understood by the decision makers.The United States of America has a flourishing lobbying industry and several economies officially permit lobbying with the government. India has no recognized lobbying industry formally but influential middle men are an essential ingredient in any major government contract. Nobody pretends this is a secret. 

Before 1990s most of India’s purchases were from the Soviet Union,after the kargil conflict India went back to the global arms market with such a vengeance that by 2012 it had become the world’s largest importer of arms. In 1987 a Swedish newspaper broke a story alleging that artillery manufacturer Bofors had paid bribes to people in several countries including India to secure a 1500 crore contract with the Indian army. Many firms in the United States, Israel and Europe including Russia have come to depend on Indian orders to sustain their profits. It is said that in the corridors of ministry of defense most official speak of a certain Mr sudhir Chaudhry with reverence. He is known for his immense ability to swing arms deal worth billions of dollars. 

In December 2007 a European firm was just a few days away from signing a deal to supply helicopters to the Indian military. But a few months later Finmeccanica of Italy ended up winning a lucrative contract to supply the same 12 helicopters. It was later revealed that the Italian company had paid several million euros to a network of people including a former chief of the Indian Air Force to secure the contract. The CEO of the company Giorgio Zappa had made an interesting confession in 2012 who claimed that the only reason they were exposed was because Chaudhury, their reliable agent in India was replaced by a bunch of other middlemen in the deal. Had Choudhary handled this deal, they’dhave never been caught! 

In 2011 the web news portal Tehelka posted secret recordings of military officers civil servants and politicians to show that Chaudhry was involved in fixing major defence deals. The BJP government began a witchhunt against Tehelka.  

Another extremely esteemed middleman is Admiral Nanda who served as the chief of naval staff in March 1970 and also led India in the 1971 Bangladeshi war. In 1987 The German firm HDW who were then supplying diesel submarines to the Indian Navy had confirmed to the Indian ambassador in West Germany that they had paid a commission to Nanda and some others to secure the submarine deal. The Nanda family is known to have several number of assets in some of world's most infamous tax havens. Mauritius has been the biggest source of foreign direct investment to India for years and is a favorite tax haven for people like Chaudhry and Nanda whose businesses have significant investments from Mauritius. Over 2000000 crore of global wealth is based or hidden in locations that provide secrecy to the owners of the real wealth and negligible tax liabilities. The CBI maintains a classified list of 'Undesirable Contact Men' with whom the government is not supposed to do business and with whom officials are not allowed to entertain. When the agency circulated the list of ministers and senior officials in 2012 there were 23 people on it including sudhir Chaudhry on the top and just below him was Suresh nanda. 

Despite this the CBI exemplifies India’s appalling failure when it comes to tracking high level corruption. In 2012 vigilance commissioner R. sri Kumar Cited an internal study to say that CBI’s  conviction rate in corruption cases was a shocking 3.96%. The CBI analyzed 264 corruption cases in which 698 people were accused including four 86 government officials. Just eight out of the total accused were convicted after 26 years of investigations and trial. 

In May 2014 Narendra Modi announced its first significant decision that was the constitution of a special investigation team to look into black money. Ironically one of the first case that has come before the team is that off the Adani group promoted by Gautam Adani one of Modi's closest associates. The Adani group allegedly took out over 5000 crore through tax havens using inflated bills for the import of power equipments from South Korea and China. If the Adani case reaches its logical conclusion the group will have to pay a fine of 15,000 crore. The officer heading the enforcement Directorate against Adani was raided by the CBI which accused him of possessing disproportionate assets. The two senior most officers in Mumbai were forced out of agency. Meanwhile there is no end insight of the case as high ranking officers keep getting demoted or transferred. 

 Insiders and the outlaws 

At another instance, the author regards his encounter with a diplomat of a country who was frantic about a multibillion dollar deal that was being pushed between the Government of India and her country. Not that the deal was itself bad news but what alarmed her was the sudden interest of a number of prominent personalities into the deal including a billionaire who was hoping to do a part of the deal a high profile PR executive and various other outsiders. This just shows that not just Indians but also everyone conducting business in India is aware of the self interest of the middle men, yes even billionaires can be middleman. The middle men tend to hold a leverage on the client an open until the deal is secured they do not reveal their prices and may threaten to call off the deal in case the demands are not met. They are the most crucial cogs in the system the ones who stitch up the final pieces in a deal. These intermediaries tell the professional middle men and companies involved in a deal how to pay where to pay who should benefit and in what proportion. The word is final. 

One such case was the Bofors case of 1987 in which the Swedish arms company paid bribes to secure an artillery contract with the Indian army. One person to receive major commissions was Mr. ottavio Quattrocchi , an Italian man in Delhi, who was also the representative of Snamprogetti, an Italian engineering company , part of the oil and gas giant Eni. In the early 1960s when Mr Q initially came to India, there were very few Italians in New Delhi, the most prominent of them being Sonia Gandhi and family. Their close association since then is no secret. It was found that the Indian army secured a contract with Bofors for Howitzer guns even though several other better options were present in the priority list. Apart from being able to pull contracts like this, Mr Q is said to have swung some 60 projects worth 300 billion dollars between his company Snamprogetti and India during the time he was active. The Bofors scandal was caught by the media and it cost the Congress party dearly and CBI moved to impound Mr Q but he fled India in July 1993. His accounts in SBI were freezed and remained so until the Congresss government came back in power and suddenly his accounts were defreezed and the amount was cleared in 2009. 

A similar case is of Robert Vadra who had ammassed crores in a matter of few years thanks to the benevolence of DLF,one of India’s biggest construction companies.In October 2012 it was revealed that Vadra's assets had swollen from 50 lakh rs to 300 crore in the last few yrs.  

The deal was simple: DLF sold land and properties at very low rates to Vadra , in turn DLF received favours from the Congress government at the state level. Vadra would buy cheap land meant for agricultural purposes, get a clearance from the government (Congress) easily to transform the land for commercial uses and then resell the land to DLF at very high prices. The DLF hence got hold of difficult to procure land sites and Vadra got his Money.  

This just shows the nature of an intermediary's position. Not even the son-in-law of perhaps the most powerful family can be kept from the temptation of the lucrative business that is of middlemen in India.  

SECTION 2 

This is the story of India’s first private airline The East West Airlines and its managing director Thakiyiddin Abdul Wahid also known as Taki . He was murdered on the evening of 13 November 1995. The Bombay police and the Indian intelligence were convinced that the airlines was involved financially with Dawood Ibrahim The underworld criminal accused of masterminding 13 blasts in Bombay in 1993 killing 257 people. A young Taki worked for an Arab man from Bahrain and provided him laborers from India. Being the labor exporter he was learning the intricacies of the airline ticketing business which soon led him to start his own business named the East West Travel and Trade Links Private limited. The business grew briskly by 1985 the company had four offices in Bombay alone and was beginning to spread this operation across India. The company had sought to secure the right to become Gulf air’s exclusive general sales agent in India considering over 75% of all Gulf air tickets were sold by them in India. They paid 50 Lac bribe to the representative of Gulf air and woke up to the Morning News that the Gulf air has appointed jet air , a small time travel agency as its exclusive GSA for India. This was an announcement of rivalry between Taki and Naresh Goyal , the owner of jet air .

Being a student leader of the Congress , Taki had immense connections within the party and was soon able to befriend the powerful secretary of the Gandhis, Vincent George. Thus the most powerful family of India became the middle men of the Thakiyuddin Family business and helped to facilitate their various deals. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi the family lost its most important patron.It was also the time of Gulf War which resulted in a hike in oil prices. Several airlines had shut down in USA and thus were were selling off their fleet of Boeing 737s at cheap rates. It was as if God was themselves preparing to get East West Airlines off the ground. The airline started with a total investment of just 35 crore. The only paperwork required was an airline operating permit everything else could be negotiated. They realized they had overlooked a clause in India’s import regulations which stipulated that a 33% countervailing duty would be assessed on the total value of any aircraft brought into the country. Since they were India’s first private airlines they hosted a bunch of important celebrities and politicians. Taki was able to get 125 members of parliament for the abolition of countervailing duty including almost all MP’s from kerela which eventually led do the scraping of countervailing duty altogether. By the end of 1992 the revenues of the airlines were around 130 crores while its counterpart, the government run Indian airlines suffered a loss of about rupees 150 crores . The employees of Indian Airlines went on a strike asking for better salaries and work environment. The then prime minister Narasimha Rao was known to be abrasive towards the Gandhi family and their alliances and naturally wasn’tfavourable towards Taki. Despite this ,he along with Scindia approached East West airlines asking them to increase the number of planes in their fleet and run as many flights as possible in order to break the back of the protesting employees of Indian Airlines.  On the other hand naresh goyal's Airways took to the Sky in may 1993. 

By mid 1993 the income tax Department the Department of Revenue intelligence and other agencies accused East West airlines of having alliances with Dawood Ibrahim.In 1992 a rival gang murdered Daoud ibrahim’s brother in law Abraham Parker. Dawood Ibrahim took revenge by shooting off members of the rival gang at a hopsital where  a nurse and 2 patients lost their lives as well. In December 1992 the babri Masjid was demolished at Bombay witnessed bloody communal riots which claimed over 900 lives. The serial bomb blasts of 12 March 1993 killed 257 people in which the police blamed Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon. The Times of India published a report claiming that East West travel division had issued tickets for the memon family to escape from India. Despite denying all the accusations in every possible way the airline suffered massive losses. It took several public offering to the Bombay Stock Exchange to exonerate their name. In late 1994 the company placed order for a new fleet of airplanes from the Malaysian airlines. A few days later the Directorate general of Civil Aviation said that the company was required to submit 3 copies of the aircraft manual. The demand was ridiculous and Boeing refused to comply. East West airlines could neither convince the government nor the Malaysian airlines to budge. A week later Malaysian airlines terminated the contract. A few weeks later the same aircraft landed in India as part of Jet Airways fleet. It was clear that Naresh Goyel had much better contacts in the parliament than what Taki had. In order to venture into new investments the East West family began looking for an equity infusion. Emirates, UAE's New airline signed a memorandum of understanding to invest in East West provide aircraft maintenance and other forms of support. As this news reached media suddenly the government in New Delhi announced that no foreign airline could invest in Indian aviation companies and that any airline with Equity investors would have to share their ties. It was more than clear that the Jet Airways would do anything to sabotage East West plans, noone except Taki saw how this had been planted by Naresh Goyal.  

The murder of Taki was a foregone conclusion for the Bombay police. They were convinced that another don Chota Rajan who had recently split with Dawood Ibrahim was responsible for the murder. Rajan became the Hindu don and found secret admirers and supporters in the Indian security establishment. The  police did not bother to ask any statements from the family and had already made up their mind set ; the death fitted well with the pattern of underworld rivalry. The main allegation against East West was that they provided tickets to the family of Memon to flee India, which was proved false by the police. But the Times of India splashed the news on its front page despite the clarification and caused immense damage to the airlines.  

Around 2003, the RAW intercepted a call between Chota Shakeel who was known to be an aide of Dawood Ibrahim and one of his men in Mumbai confessing to killing of Taki. The intercepts proved that Chota Rajan who had accepted the responsibility of Taki's murder was actually lying and it was Dawood's gang that had killed him. We do not know why Dawood Ibrahim had animosity against Taki but atleast one thing is clear, the allegations against East west about colluding with Ibrahim were all false. Interestingly, by 1999, several irrefutable links between Jet Airways' Naresh Goyal and Dawood Ibrahim had emerged which were even quoted in the parliament. 

Despite repeated efforts, there was no salvaging the East West airlines and they frequently faced the wrath of Goyal and his political connections. The last East West flight touched Bombay in June 1997.  

Naresh Goyal had friends in all the right places to the top. Investigation Bureau chief  K P singh said that there were evidences that Jet Airways owner appeared to have earned his wealth through smuggling another illegitimate means and that the airlines was probably investigated for foreign exchange regulation act violations. They were also accused of purchasing union leaders and exploiting political connections. There is no documentation as to how Naresh Goyal came upon his initial fortune and his NRI status helps him dodge all investigations. Singh added that from inputs procured from research and analysis wing They were convinced that goyal had earned his wealth through smuggling and other illegitimate means. As of 2015 all the cases against naresh goel were very much open. Despite overwhelming evidence the authorities haven’t been able to take any action against him. 

SECTION 3 

October 2012 was a busy time for the Mallya family. The young Siddharth Mallya was having a TV  debut hunting for Kingfisher Calendar girl while the father Vijay Mallya was preparing for his Formula One team’s participation in the South Korean Grand Pitt. Meanwhile, the employees of Jet airways made news for protests or suicides over non-payment of salaries. Mallya's group was a multinational conglomerate of over 60 companies with an annual turnover of rupees 45,000 crore by 1998. Vijay Mallya had even embarked on a political career around 2002, he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from his home state of Karnataka as an independent candidate. Until a couple of decades ago Indian industrialists preferred to send proxies in legislatures to do their bidding. The new class seeks direct access to the highest class of power. Mallya was nominated to the parliamentary committees in Civil Aviation defence and industry.Next year he launched Kingfisher airlines while being on the parliamentary committee on Civil Aviation.  

Mallaya isn’t alone. Industrialists brazenly occupy post on committees that have the power to influence the sectors they work in. Rahul Bajaj the leader of Bajaj group, one of the biggest companies in automobile industry, got up in parliament to ask the finance ministry what steps it had taken to ameliorate the problems faced by the automobile industry in 2008. 

Parimal Nathwani a group president of Reliance Industries limited has been a member of the upper house since March 2008. This gujarati man won an election from Jharkhand and is widely seen as the troubleshooter for his boss, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani. In 2009 when upper house was discussing the availability of natural gas at competitive prices for power generation, he got up to defend the reliance group in the parliament. 

Kalpatru Das an MP from Orissa whose family has vast business interest in mines, sat on the Select Committee that scrutinized the new mining bill in 2015. Vijay Darda whose family owned the marathi newspaper Lokmat the Hindi newspaper Lokmat samachar and the English newspaper Lokmat times was a member of a committee that dealt with media regulations. Chnadrapal Singh Yadav from Uttar Pradesh sat on the standing committee on chemicals and fertilizers when he was the chairman of a fertilizer company in 2015. Rajeev chandrashekhar who has major interests in the financial sector was a member of the consultative committee for the Ministry of Finance starting 2009. In 2009 union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss had suspended the production of cheap vaccines for poor children because he wanted to help some private companies close to him. Over 30 ministers wrote to the government a few years ago suggesting that it replace the freshly cooked midday meal served to students with packaged biscuits; they were backed by the biscuit manufacturers welfare Association. According to a 2010 study by national social watch coalition, 128 out of 540 three members of the then lok sabha are businessmen with known or potential conflicts of interest with respect to the parliamentary proceedings they were participating in. 

Congress Spokesperson Abhishek Sunghvi who is also a lawyer appeared in the court to defend telecom companies against accusations of defrauding the public exchequer; then he would  go to the parliament to defend the Congress government. Noone found it troublesome that he is batting for both the sides in the same conflict . 

In 2009, Arun Jaitley gave legal opinion to TATA group in his private capacity and harshly criticised the UPA government move to levy higher royalty from TATAfor extracting coal.  

Patrick French in his book called India : a Portrait , pointed that every single member in the Lok Sabha below the age of 30 belong to a family with powerful political connections. He found that the family links help some 28.6% of all MP’s of the 15th Lok Sabha.For those between 30 and 40 the figure stood around 65%. 

Vijay Mallya was nominated to the parliamentary standing committee on chemicals and fertilizers while being the chairman of Mangalore chemicals and fertilizers one of India’s biggest fertilizer manufacturers. In 2016 Kingfisher airlines went bankrupt owing over $9000 crore to Indian public sector banks. Vijay Mallya slipped out of India on a diplomatic passport which was issued to him as a member of parliament. Mallya's softer side can be seen om his website www.mallyainparliament.in Where he frequently post poems mostly patriotic in nature. 

A LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN 

The author is interacting with Harihar Patel in Chattisgarh's Gare having some of the richest coal deposits in india. The blocks were allocated to private mining companies like the Jindal group. The place has been subject to illegal mining practices by private firms ever since India began liberalizing its mining sector in the face of immense opposition from the natives. The natives have been routinely harassed by government officials and the police and even subjected to physical violence by the state and the hitmen of these private companies. Patel says the fish in the rivers are dead, animals are dying, people suffer from various stomach ailments ever since the mining work started. The agrwal community is a huge player in the mining business of chhatisgarh.  

Several agarwal families migrated to chhatisgarh during the British rule. Om Prakash Jindal,an agarwal himself but not a migrant,  set up a small sponge iron plant in 1980s in Raigarh. Today Jindal group is valued at 1,20,000 crore. The Agarwals in the mining business were pitted against the Agarwals who had migrated to Chattisgarh and made it their home. Ramkumar Agarwal and Ramesh Agarwal petitioned against the Jindal group on behalf of the tribal communities of the region . India’s first Private sector mega power project is now running just outside Gare village and is inching towards the capacity to produce 3400 MW of electricity.In its free time the Jindal Groups sends out hitmen to harass activists. Junior Jindal Introduce the American practice of waving the national flag at his factory premises. He was told to pull down the flag by government officials since it was against the flag gold of that time. The flag court permitted private citizens to hoist the national flag only on two days in a year Independence Day and Republic day. He approached the Delhi High Court and union government announced that Indian citizens were free to flag the national flag on all days.  Soon Jindale was nominated by the Congress in 2004 as its candidate from  kurukshetra.He is among India’s most powerful CEOs and his alma mater the University of Texas renamed his School of Management after this famous aluminous whose group was now valued at about 24,000 crore. 

In 1998 ram Kumar Agarwal was heading to a court in Haryana with a group of protesters where O P Jindal had filed a case against them. Neither the protest not the affected businesses were in Haryana. It was just that Jindal was a politician with immense clout in that state. In 1990s Jindal group began construction of a dam within the city limits for the industrial consumption when activists had been trying to get a dam constructed for agricultural purposes for years. They organized a huge protest at the end of which most activists found themselves in jail. 

Another activist Ramesh Agarwal won a court case to block Jindal from opening a second coal mine near Gare. A few months later he was shot at by masked gunmen who he believes were sent by the Jindals. 

In 2014CBI initiated a criminal case against the Jindal group for pocketing cheap coal and producing electricity at low cost and selling them at very high rate. 

In September 2014 The Supreme Court struck down the allocation of 214 coal blocks including those belonging to Jindal group and Vedanta.  

A large amount of India’s mineral deposits lie in stretch across the ecologically sensitive and biodiversity rich central region of the country. The plants operating in these area often switch off their pollution control devices to save on electricity. As per estimates by the American Association for the advancement of science in 2016 the 55 lack deaths caused by air pollution in 2013, over half were in India and China. Between 2013 and 2015 around 2510 square kilometers of very dense and moderately dense forests were wiped out and 2254 square kilometers of moderately dense forests have now turned into non forest lands.Most of these are victims of unscrupulous liberalization. 

The rich and powerful not only managed to get areas that are far away from the mainstream view such as ecologically rich forest reserves and sensitive ecosystems but also have access to property that may already be owned by the lesser citizens of the country. Mr Ambani the richest man in India has a home in Mumbai that is 170 meter tall an estimated to be of worth over Rs 1,50,000 crore. Across his home is a row of small shops that are being bought by Ambani for prices up to 4-5 crores so that the poor hawkers and shopkeepers do not spoil the view from his home. What few people know is that before Ambani bought the land an orphanage stood on the plot until about 15 years ago. About 60 Muslim children lived in an old building which was a  property of the wakf. There used to be a graveyard before the orphanage came up. Over a century ago the plot belonged to Sir Currimbhoy Ebrahim  A rich trader who started an orphanage on the plot. Official records showed that the property was owned by the trust set up by him for the orphanage. There was a dispute on the ownership of the plot between the trust and the wakf. As the issue dragged on the ambanis bought the plot for rupees 21 crore From the Trust which was at least 25 times lesser than the actual price of the plot. The wakf board has filed a case against this deal and has called it null and void, there is no final closure even today and to be honest no one expects a closure anytime soon. 

In 2005 Mukesh Ambani and Anil Ambani had parted ways. The younger brother Anil Ambani got the telecom business. The investigation agencies said Anil’s group has propped up proxies to bypass restrictions against monopoly and cross ownership and was an active participant in the 2G Scandal.  In May 2010 the Department of telecommunications opened its auction site for allotting 4G spectrum. A little known Internet service provider infotel broadband services private limited with an annual turnover of just 18 Lac and one subscriber started bidding aggressively across India. Infotel agreed to pay rupees 12847 crore for a national license.That was 71,000 times the company's annual turnover. Within hours of the close of bidding infotel was taken over by Mukesh Ambani hence being a direct competitor to his brother Anil Ambani despite their agreement that they will not interfere in each others businesses. 

Gujarat based Adani group led by Gautam Adani has yet another strategic success story that parallels modi’s decade long role in Gujarat. As Narendra modi’s campaign picked pace Indian investigative agencies stumbled upon a massive illegality perpetrated by the Adani group of funneling some rupees 5468 crore out of India using inflated power equipment bills. The chartered helicopter used by Modi throughout his election campaigning is a generous gift by the Adanis.  

A report by the center of media studies in March 2014 had estimated that political parties spent about rupees 30,000 crore in the general elections of 2014. But at the end of campaigning the political parties declared a total spend of less than rupees 2000 crore all combined. The BJP said it had spent a paltry rupees 700crore and Congress just rupees 500crore. 

REVIEW: 

To be honest, it’s the writing that didn’t work for me. I was expecting much more from the book since crony capitalism in India is an open secret. I’m surprised the author couldn’t dig deeper and the fact that he was slapped with a legal notice from the Adani group and a 1000 crore defamation suit by Jet Airways only shows how unchallenged these businessmen are. 

I found the book quite lukewarm, quite withholding in its criticism of India’s free market economy that enabled the accumulation of such wealth. Tbh even though the author accepts this large scale crony capitalism accelerated post the 90s liberalisation period, he fails to critique it enough. 

Another thing is that I found the blurb and the title, subtitle misleading in some ways? I was expecting  to see the “business of democracy in India”. I expected to see how Businesses affected politics and democracy. Instead what we got was how businesses just manipulate the rules that are concerned with their companies. It is no secret how businessmen hold the power to sway votes and make sure their desired candidates win and do their bidding. There was very little coverage on that. The airlines conflict was also more about mutual rivalries than actual involvement of the government officials. Granted, the author said it is very difficult to find information on such topics which is true. Despite that, more emphasis could have been placed on how this nexus between the biggest business power and political powers are affecting the common man.  

The writing could have been more hard hitting , it rather felt resigned to me. And not to question the integrity of the writer, but I wished there was more research put into the book and more people were named than keeping many players anonymous. Though yes we understand the consequences of such an action, I feel nameless information is pretty useless.   

The latter half of the book was definitely better than the first half. I like the amount of data and statistics given. I also like that he did mention several big names which is great to read upon further.I hope he will come back with an upgraded or a second book on the same topic which is more politician centric than business centric.  

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Hanan.