Democracy promises that power belongs to the people. What the record shows is that power belongs to whoever is organised.

You have the right to vote. A right is not the same thing as power. Power is the ability to make something happen, and voting is one tool for that, a fairly blunt one, easily outmanoeuvred by anybody willing to do the work of organising.

One word needs defining before we go further. In this piece, “minority” does not mean an ethnic, religious or racial minority, the people this publication usually writes about defending. Here it means something close to the opposite: a small, tightly organised group that punches far above its numeric weight. Two hundred lobbyists on a single industry payroll. A few thousand officers with a chain of command. Sixty men who can get a permit. “Majority” means the millions who outnumber that group a thousand to one, and who are scattered, exhausted, and almost never act as one body.

So this is not an article about identity. It is about arithmetic, and about the fact that two hundred people rowing in the same direction will out-move two hundred million rowing in two hundred million different ones.

Hold onto one image for the rest of this piece. A fist beats fog. Fog is everywhere, and in total mass it dwarfs any fist. But fog has no shape and nothing to swing with. A fist is small by comparison, five fingers and a wrist, and it is concentrated, and concentration is what lands the blow.

Why the Many Stay Scattered

Picture a village that needs a bonfire lit. Everyone benefits once it is burning. Nobody wants to be the person who spends an hour hauling logs while the others stand around the fire pit with cold hands, waiting for somebody else to do it. That is the whole problem in one image. When a benefit arrives whether or not you personally paid for it, the individually sensible move is to let someone else pay. Multiply that by a million people and the fire never gets lit, not because nobody wants warmth, but because everybody is waiting.

Economists call this the free-rider problem. You do not need the term to recognise it. It is why your building never fixes the broken lift, though every tenant complains about it separately.

The costs on top of that are real and easy to miss from the outside. Organising is a bet with unclear odds, and nobody knows in advance whether it will work or blow back on them. Losing a shift’s pay to attend a meeting hurts more than the hoped-for raise feels good, even when the raise is worth more, because that is simply how people weigh losses against gains. Those who have tried before and watched nothing change stop volunteering, which is not laziness but experience; “we did this in 2019 and nothing happened” is a rational conclusion. And organising eats time and mental bandwidth that people running on empty do not have. A single parent working two jobs has no free evening. A man with a portfolio has a staff whose job is to attend meetings on his behalf.

Who Actually Does the Organising

There is a comfortable story about the people who build movements of hatred, and it is wrong. The story says they are the desperate and the uneducated, men with nothing left to lose who fall for simple slogans because nobody taught them better. It is a reassuring story because it implies a remedy. Educate people, lift them out of poverty, and the problem dissolves.

The evidence does not support it.

By 1936, forty-five per cent of German physicians had joined the Nazi Party, a higher proportion than any other profession in the country, above lawyers and above businessmen. Doctors were seven times more likely to join the SS than other employed German men. Since roughly sixteen per cent of German physicians were Jewish and obviously did not join, the share among the rest was higher still. Medicine, the most selective and most credentialed profession in Germany, was the most thoroughly Nazified institution in it. Eight of the fourteen men who sat at Wannsee to plan the extermination held doctorates.

Genocide is not a mob phenomenon. It requires transport schedules, budgets, legal theory and paperwork, which is to say it requires precisely the professional class.

The contemporary research points the same way on a second count. The core constituency for far-right movements is not made up of people who are already at the bottom. It is people who perceive that they have something to lose and are frightened of losing it. Status threat rather than destitution. Falling prestige, insecure housing, the sense of sliding down a ladder you were promised you could climb. Inequality drives this, but through threatened position, not through empty pockets. A man with nothing is usually too consumed by survival to build anything. A man whose grip is slipping is the one who marches.

This matters for the argument, because it means the fist is rarely a mob. It is usually a committee. And it means that the strategy many families adopt as protection, staking a generation’s savings on getting a child into medicine or law, buys income but does not buy safety. The professional class is not a refuge from hierarchy. It is frequently where hierarchy is administered, with credentials as the instrument.

The Fist in Practice

New York, from the 1870s to the 1930s, was governed by Tammany Hall. The machine ran the city not through superior policy but through relentless, granular organisation. Precinct captains knew every family on their block by name, knew who had lost work and who needed a doctor and who needed a word with a judge, and delivered coal in winter in exchange for votes. Reformers had the better arguments and, on paper, the numbers. They lost for sixty years, because Tammany was a fist and the reform movement was a debating society. One arrived at your door with a sack of coal. The other posted you a pamphlet.

In Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, home to roughly a million and a half people, close to a quarter of the city, trafficking organisations have functioned for decades as the effective government in territory the state cannot hold. The Brazilian state outnumbers any single gang by every measure available, in police, budget and weapons, and still loses the ground back within months of every raid. Residents are not choosing gang rule out of affection. They are accepting a permanent fist over an occasional fog that arrives for an operation and vanishes for a year.

India’s constitution declared every citizen equal regardless of caste in 1950. Three quarters of a century later, land, local courts and village power across enormous stretches of the country still run through upper-caste networks that are organised, socially enforced and prepared to use violence. Dalit communities, numerically vast and legally equal, remain subordinate in much of rural India, because equality under a law means nothing when the people enforcing it locally are the people the old arrangement benefits.

Money follows the same rule. After the Citizens United ruling in 2010 opened American politics to unlimited outside spending, the 2024 election cycle consumed about fourteen and a half billion dollars across some eleven thousand political groups. A hundred billionaire families supplied two point six billion of that on their own, one dollar in every six spent by every candidate, party and committee in the country. Among the super PACs backing presidential candidates, donors writing cheques of five million or more provided more than three quarters of the money, up from just under two thirds four years earlier. One person, one vote is the design. In practice a hundred families are the fist and a hundred and fifty million voters are the fog it moves through.

And where armies hold real power, elections continue without deciding much. Pakistan’s military has repeatedly taken power by coup, most recently in 1999. Egypt holds elections the military-aligned government is built to win. Thailand has dissolved elected parliaments through coup after coup whenever civilian politics threatened to actually govern. In each case the population outnumbers the officer corps by thousands to one, and it changes nothing, because a few thousand men with a command structure move faster than a hundred million with a ballot.

Whose Speech Counts

The clearest recent demonstration of all this came from two countries that describe themselves as liberal democracies.

In August 2025, the National Socialist Network marched through Melbourne chanting “Australia for the white man.” Around fifty of its members then stormed Camp Sovereignty, a sacred Aboriginal site, where they are alleged to have assaulted several people. Victoria Police had moved the group off the Flinders Street station steps at quarter past four and then stopped watching them. The attack came at about five.

In November, roughly sixty members of the same organisation gathered outside the New South Wales Parliament with antisemitic banners, chanting Nazi slogans. That rally had been formally approved by NSW Police. Neither the commissioner nor the state government had been told it was happening, an omission the force later attributed to an internal communication error. The Premier called the gathering despicable and said there needed to be a clear line between free speech and hate speech, which was true, and which arrived after the permit had been issued.

Sixty men got a permit. That is the fist. The far larger number of people in Sydney who would have objected had no mechanism at all, because objecting is not a permit application and disgust is not an organisation. That is the fog.

Britain ran the same experiment ninety years earlier. When Oswald Mosley announced that his Blackshirts would march through the Jewish East End of London in October 1936, a petition carrying a hundred thousand signatures asked the government to stop it. The government let the march proceed and assigned seven thousand police officers to accompany it. When residents put barricades across the route, it was the residents the police baton-charged, not the fascists. The state was not neutral between the man who came to intimidate a community and the community itself. It gave him an escort and treated them as the disturbance.

What happened after that belongs in a later section.

Meanwhile in the United States, a different set of people were discovering what their speech was worth. More than three hundred student visas have been revoked, the overwhelming majority belonging to people who took part in pro-Palestinian protest. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate holding lawful permanent residency, was arrested outright. The justification came from a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act allowing removal where a person’s presence carries “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” language broad enough to mean whatever the office holding it needs it to mean. Court filings later showed that government lawyers had privately expected the policy to fail constitutional review, since most of the conduct being punished was protected speech. It proceeded anyway, which tells you the aim was never to win in court. The aim was to make speaking expensive enough that fewer people speak.

None of this is a departure from American practice. The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 made political belief a ground for exclusion. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 detained thousands and deported hundreds, Emma Goldman among them, essentially for the content of their speeches. The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 handed the government standing authority to expel people on ideological grounds and it was used that way for decades. The instrument is old. What is new is the confidence with which it has been picked back up.

Put the two countries side by side and the rule becomes legible. The state is not deciding whether speech is permitted. It is deciding whose speech counts as speech. Men marching under a swastika are handled as public order, something to be permitted and routed and policed from a distance. A student writing about Gaza is handled as immigration, something to be removed. The line being drawn is not between expression and incitement. It is between people understood to belong and people understood to be here on sufferance, and the second group learns, at the moment they say something inconvenient, that the rights they thought they held were conditional on their silence.

And Then People Stop Appearing in the Record

There is a stage past removal, and Florida has been demonstrating it.

In July 2025, roughly eighteen hundred people were held at a state-run immigration detention facility in the Everglades, a place its own promoters nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. By late August, an investigation found that around eight hundred of them no longer appeared in ICE’s online detainee locator, the public database that exists precisely so that a family or a lawyer can establish where a detained person is being held. A further four hundred and fifty appeared only as an instruction to call ICE for details. Two thirds of that facility’s population, some twelve hundred people, had become untraceable through the system built to trace them. One attorney reported he could not locate eleven of his own clients. Families could not establish whether the person they were looking for had been deported, transferred, or was still inside the building. State officials attributed the gap to database error. In April 2026 four members of Congress wrote to the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General demanding an investigation into the locator system itself.

Advocacy organisations have begun using a particular phrase for this, and it is worth understanding why rather than treating it as rhetoric. Enforced disappearance, under the international convention that defines it, has three components. A person is deprived of liberty by agents of the state. The state then refuses to acknowledge the detention or conceals what has become of them. And the person is thereby placed beyond the protection of the law. A clerical error corrected within a week does not meet that standard. A pattern in which twelve hundred people cannot be found by their own lawyers, and the official answer is a telephone number, engages the second and third elements directly, whatever the intention behind it.

The same opacity attends the removals themselves. In January 2026, twenty people holding withholding of removal or protection under the Convention Against Torture, which are formal legal findings that a person would face persecution or torture if sent home, were deported to Ethiopia, Eritrea, Mauritania, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Chad. In April, at least fifteen people from South American countries were flown to the DRC, which the International Rescue Committee ranks seventh in the world for risk of humanitarian catastrophe. People routinely learn they are being sent to a country they have never seen while the aircraft is already in the air, on around twenty-four hours’ notice, with no guaranteed opportunity to speak to a lawyer first. As of June, three of them could not be accounted for at all.

This is what the fog looks like from the inside. Not a majority outvoted, but individual people subtracted one at a time from the record that was supposed to make them findable, through an administrative process that no election reaches and no court was asked to approve. A vote is not a defence against this. There has never been a ballot paper with the detainee locator system on it.

The Machinery

What allows all of this is not conspiracy. It is a set of arrangements in which nobody with the power to intervene is obliged to.

Discretion does most of the work. Australia’s Migration Act permits cancellation of any visa held by any non-citizen, including someone brought to the country as an infant, on grounds broad enough to accommodate almost any judgment an official cares to make. A rule that permits anything permits selection, and selection follows whatever prejudice is sitting in the chair. Australia has form here: the dictation test that enforced the White Australia Policy was, on paper, perfectly neutral, since an applicant could be asked to write fifty words in any European language. Officials simply chose the language so that the people they wanted excluded would fail.

Money does the rest, legally. Federal lobbying in the United States reached a record four point four billion dollars in 2024. Pharmaceuticals and health products led the field, as they have every year since 1999, spending close to two hundred and ninety-four million in that year alone and more than six billion since, while Americans pay nearly three times what thirty-three other countries pay for the same medicines, and more than four times over for brand-name drugs. Oil and gas put one point nine billion into federal lobbying between 1998 and 2016, about a hundred million a year, across precisely the decades in which climate legislation kept failing to pass.

And when the 2008 collapse destroyed household wealth across the world, exactly one banker went to prison for it. A managing director at Credit Suisse served thirty months for mismarking bond prices. He was the most senior Wall Street figure charged in connection with the crisis, and no chief executive of any major bank was charged at all. None of this broke any rules. The fist does not need to break the rules it wrote.

When the Fog Won

It has happened. Not often, and never cheaply, but it has happened, and the pattern in every case is the same: the fog stopped being fog.

Cable Street is the cleanest example there is. The barricades held. The police could not clear a route through Aldgate or through Cable Street itself, and after hours of fighting that left around a hundred and seventy-five people injured and a hundred and fifty arrested, they told Mosley his march through the East End could not go ahead and sent him to the West End instead. Jewish residents, Irish dockworkers, trade unionists and communists who agreed on very little else had spent weeks preparing for that single afternoon. They beat the fascists and they beat the seven thousand police who had been sent to protect them. The state had chosen a side, and the fog beat both.

Workers who individually had no leverage built unions that could stop a factory, and won the weekend, the shorter week and the end of most child labour over decades of sustained cost. Colonised populations who individually could do nothing built non-cooperation broad enough to make imperial rule too expensive to keep, and many died proving it. The American civil rights movement turned a legally powerless minority into a force the federal government could not route around, through sit-ins and boycotts and marches that people were beaten and jailed for joining. In 2020 and 2021, India’s farmers occupied the roads into Delhi for more than a year and forced the repeal of three farm laws. More than seven hundred of them died over the course of it, from cold, from illness including Covid, from state violence and from suicide.

What those wins required, every time: a shared identity strong enough to override the instinct to let somebody else carry the log. Visible early victories, to prove the thing was not hopeless before asking people to bet everything. Real structure, with leaders and discipline and a plan, rather than a shared grievance. A willingness to absorb genuine cost. And leverage that actually hurt, a strike that stopped production or a blockade that stopped movement, rather than a march that stopped nothing.

The Story and the Record

The story is that everybody votes, the majority decides, and power belongs to the people.

The record is that whoever funds the loudest campaign tends to win regardless of what most people wanted, that whoever can obtain a permit can march, that whoever the state considers a guest can be removed for speaking, that some of them then cease to appear in the database that was built to find them, and that the majority is handed a tidy explanation for why all of this is still democracy.

Call it what it is. A fist wearing a majority’s clothing. The costume is votes and rallies and turnout drives. Underneath it sits the same few thousand donors, officers, officials and party bosses who were going to get their way regardless of how the fog voted.

Questions Worth Sitting With

When did you stop believing your vote changed anything, and what happened just before that?

Why is it so difficult to organise with people who want precisely what you want?

In your town, who is the actual fist? The developer, the party boss, the factory owner, the police union, somebody else? Would you have named the same person five years ago?

Name the last time a vote you cast changed something material in your life. If you cannot, what does that tell you?

What would it take to turn the fog around you into a fist, and who is the first person you would call?

This Is Part of an Ongoing Series

This piece is not a closed argument. It is one chapter in a longer investigation into how power sustains itself, across institutions, across centuries, across whatever symbol people are asked to hand their judgment to next.

More pieces are coming. Each follows the same mechanism into different territory.

Subscribe to Khoj to get the next piece when it publishes.

Khoj means “search.” This is searching for how power actually works.

Truth is burning. Investigating what power would rather bury. Accountability, human rights, and the record minorities are rarely given the pen to write.

Sources

Every figure in this piece comes from the material below. Where an account is disputed by the authorities involved, that dispute is stated in the text rather than buried here. Readers are invited to check all of it.

On who joins these movements

Why did so many German doctors join the Nazi Party early?, and Nazi Medicine: The Downfall of a Profession — the forty-five per cent figure, the SS comparison, and the share of German physicians who were Jewish

The Role of Doctors and Nurses, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The Participants: The Men of the Wannsee Conference, Jasch and Kreutzmüller, and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum — eight of the fourteen attendees held doctorates

Threats to social status and support for far-right political parties, Washington Center for Equitable Growth — the finding that support concentrates among those who fear losing position rather than those already at the bottom

Rising inequality is driving Europe’s far-right surge, ECPR, and Income Inequality, Ethnonationalism, and Radical-Right Voting, Socius

On concentrated power

2022 Census: favela and urban community populations, IBGE, and Rio Favela Facts, Catalytic Communities

The 2024 cycle cost political groups $14.7 billion, Bloomberg

Megadonors Playing Larger Role in Presidential Race, Brennan Center for Justice — the super PAC concentration figures

Billionaires Buying Elections, Americans For Tax Fairness — one dollar in six

On the two rallies and the marches

Activists accuse NSW of double standards after neo-Nazi rally, SBS News

Australian neo-Nazi attack on sacred Indigenous site a worrying trend, Al Jazeera

Statement of concern: policing of the March For Australia and counter-rallies

The Battle of Cable Street, London Museum; Historic UK; and TIME on the eightieth anniversary — the petition, the seven thousand officers, the casualties, and the fact that the march was turned back

On removal for speech

Targeting non-citizens for deportation on the basis of their speech is unconstitutional, Knight First Amendment Institute

Crackdown on students with visas and green cards sets up First Amendment showdown, CBS News

American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, Immigration and Human Rights Law Review

On the missing detainees

Where Are the Detainees? Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz prisoners disappear from ICE database, Democracy Now

Investigation claimed at least 1,200 detainees dropped off the grid, Snopes — including the state’s response that the gap was a database error

Detainees missing from ICE database, Project Censored

Letter from Senators Warren and Luján and Representatives Escobar and Underwood to the DHS Inspector General, April 2026

Third Country Deportations Tracker, and Third country removals, explained, International Rescue Committee

On the machinery

When can a visa be refused or cancelled under section 501?, Australian Human Rights Commission

Record $4.4 billion spent on lobbying in 2024, and Pharmaceuticals and health products lobbying profile, OpenSecrets

Prescription drug prices in the US are 2.78 times those in other countries, RAND Corporation

Former Credit Suisse managing director sentenced to 30 months, US Department of Justice, and Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis, Better Markets

On the farmers

Confronting State Violence: Lessons from India’s Farmer Protests, Smita Narula, Columbia Human Rights Law Review — the death toll and its causes

This is not a complaint about India made from outside it. Every law invoked here is Indian. Every judgment cited was written by the Supreme Court of India. The Constitution being asked for is the one already in force. Sovereignty is not the question — the question is whether a state honours the rules it wrote for itself when the people asking are young, poor, and in the minority.

I. What happened

On 15 May 2026, hearing what he later called a frivolous petition, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, said there are “youths who are like cockroaches, who do not get any employment… they go on to become media, social media and RTI activists and start attacking the system.” He later said he had meant holders of fake degrees, and that people were taking it “too sentimentally.”

The next day, a 30-year-old Dalit communications strategist named Abhijeet Dipke founded the Cockroach Janta Party. Within 78 hours it had three million followers. It now has more than twenty million.

The grievance underneath it was arithmetic. NEET coaching runs ₹1.5–2.5 lakh a year, and ₹3–5 lakh in Kota with lodging; by one Tamil Nadu estimate, more than 95% of government-school aspirants cannot afford coaching at all. Families borrow. Families sell jewellery. Then this year’s NEET-UG paper leaked, and investigators traced it to a family in Jaipur — Dinesh Biwal, a local BJP youth-wing leader, his brother Mangilal, and Mangilal’s son Vikas, all arrested — with reporting that multiple members of that one family had cleared NEET across several years despite modest academic records. The exam had two gates. One legal and ruinous. One illegal and priced in lakhs.

In the 46 days between the exam’s cancellation and the re-test, 11 to 13 NEET aspirants died by suicide — one entry in a five-year pattern of roughly 93 NEET-linked deaths since 2021, nearly 40 of them in Kota alone. If this reaches anyone who needs it: iCall 9152987821, AASRA 9820466726, Kiran 1800-599-0019.

20 July. More than 10,000 people marched from Mandi House toward Parliament. Before they set out, Delhi Police imposed a prohibitory order under Section 163 BNSS, the successor to the old Section 144 CrPC. Once they walked anyway, police applied Sections 189, 190 and 223 BNS. Then tear gas, then lathi charges — including by officers in plain clothes, whose identity Delhi Police confirmed only after the ambiguity itself became a public controversy, and which they defended as lawful. A 36-second video showed Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba slapping a woman near the Parliament complex; Delhi Police said he had “lost his cool” and removed him from Jantar Mantar duty. Official figures, revised upward, put more than 200 police personnel and more than 60 protesters injured; CJP says 150 of its people were hospitalised. Around seventy were detained. Metro stations were shut, roads sealed.

Across those days the Ministry of Home Affairs suspended mobile internet around Jantar Mantar five times from 17 July.

And the site itself was under machines. Delhi Police deployed four Facial Recognition System units, the Ikshana surveillance van with 360-degree cameras and automatic number-plate recognition, and officers wearing AjnaLens AI spectacles combining facial recognition with thermal imaging — equipment first used at the 2026 Republic Day parade. Police said the purpose was identifying criminals who might infiltrate. CJP said police were “live-scanning peaceful protesters.”

Twenty days into a solidarity hunger strike, Sonam Wangchuk was taken by police to a government hospital on 18 July, a year after the same state had branded him a traitor and jailed him under the National Security Act over Ladakh. The Delhi High Court later moved him to a private hospital.

Then came the words. BJP leaders called the movement a “cross-border influence operation” and demanded an NIA probe; a UP BJP leader called it a “foreign-funded bid to target Sanatan.” Dipke was subjected to organised caste abuse online after disclosing he is Dalit. On 26 July, BJP IT Cell chief Amit Malviya — the political figure with the most Alt News fact-checks against him in 2025 — condemned attacks on journalists and then, in the same post, published a grid of sixteen named journalists, watermarked TROLLS, asking 727,000 viewers what their “common thread” was.

On 25 July, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. The students had won.

Then, on an explicit assurance from the Centre that no punitive action would follow, CJP stood its national agitation down — in its own words, “in good faith.”

What followed instead:

Delhi. An FIR at Kartavya Path police station invoking thirteen charges (Business Standard counts fourteen), including Section 109(1) BNS — attempt to murder — alongside rioting, unlawful assembly, assault on public servants and damage to public property. All seventy detainees were released; the FIR remains open.

West Bengal — BJP, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari, in office since 9 May 2026 after the BJP took 207 of 293 seats and Adhikari defeated Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur. Eleven arrested. Ten of them Muslim. Seven criminal cases.

Assam — BJP, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Six arrested, most Muslim, for attempting a solidarity gathering. Three of them for starting a WhatsApp group — charged under Section 61(2)(b), criminal conspiracy; Section 353(1), public mischief; and Section 152 BNS: acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India. The provision that replaced sedition.

Uttar Pradesh — BJP, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. Mohammad Junaid, a Muslim volunteer filmed distributing free food and water at Jantar Mantar, says Delhi Police picked him up, blindfolded him, questioned him overnight and left him in Mussoorie. UP Police from Masoori station searched his family’s home in Nahal village; his father Mustafa was taken; the family says bank passbooks and PAN cards were seized; relatives were picked up in Meerut. Police deny the allegations. Police also acknowledge questioning his relatives. Everyone was released by 26 July. No authority has stated why any of it happened.

Bihar. During a 25 July bandh, a constable in Siwan — named as Abhishek Patel, an SIT jawan — was filmed firing an AK-47 at a student protest; three students were reported injured; he was suspended and departmental proceedings opened. In Jehanabad, police fired 20–30 rounds, which the District Magistrate says were aerial. In Katihar, two were injured in police firing. Protesters there pelted stones and damaged police and railway property; at least fourteen police were injured. Khoj is not naming Bihar’s Chief Minister: sources conflict on who holds the office, and this publication does not name a sitting head of government on conflicting sources.

II. The law, in plain terms

The right to gather. Article 19(1)(b) of the Constitution guarantees the right to assemble peaceably. India has been bound by the ICCPR since 1979 — Article 21 for assembly, Article 19 for expression, Article 17 for privacy. The UN Human Rights Committee’s General Comment 37 explains what this requires: an assembly is presumed lawful, and the state must justify restricting it. It also holds that collecting participants’ data in ways that intimidate or deter them is itself a violation.

Delhi Police reversed the presumption. The prohibitory order came before the march. Everyone who walked was unlawful on paper before they had done anything.

The right not to be scanned. In K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), nine judges held privacy to be a fundamental right under Article 21, subject to a three-part test: legality, necessity, proportionality.

Facial recognition at Jantar Mantar fails all three. Legality — no statute authorising police facial recognition at protests has been cited, and India has no law governing the technology. Necessity — scanning every face at a designated protest site is not required to find a few suspects. Proportionality — the system cannot separate the person police want from the nineteen-year-old beside them, so everyone is scanned to find anyone.

And the one law that might have applied has a door in it. Under Section 17(2)(a) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, the Central Government may exempt any instrumentality of the State from the whole of the Act by executive notification, on grounds including sovereignty, security and public order. India passed a data protection law and reserved the power to switch itself out of it. NITI Aayog — the government’s own policy body — recommended that law enforcement not be exempted from data protection oversight. Section 17 does not honour that recommendation.

The shutdowns — and this is the sharpest violation in the record. In Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020), the Supreme Court held that internet suspension must be necessary, proportionate, and made by an order published with reasons, so citizens can see and challenge it.

The MHA suspended mobile internet five times in eight days. The Internet Freedom Foundation states that no suspension order was published — not by the MHA, the Department of Telecommunications, the Delhi government, or Delhi Police.

That is not a contested question of degree. It is a government failing to comply with a binding judgment of India’s own Supreme Court — in the capital, against citizens who were subsequently charged with attempting murder. And the head of that Court, asked to view footage of what happened during those blackouts, said the court did not have time for such videos.

Force. Both Indian law and General Comment 37 require force to be necessary and proportionate. The honest record must be stated: protesters breached the Parliament cordon; 200+ police were injured; reporters from Times Now, ABP and Republic were assaulted by people in the crowd and women journalists were sexually abused, for which there is no justification whatsoever; there was stone-throwing and vandalism in Bihar.

None of that alters the legal position, because proportionality is not a reward for good conduct. A crowd that throws stones may lawfully be dispersed. It does not thereby become eligible for an AK-47, for 20–30 rounds, for lathis swung by unidentified men, for a senior officer slapping a woman on camera, for attempt-to-murder charges against unnamed students, or for the successor to the sedition law applied to a group chat about an exam. The right survives the stone. That is what distinguishes a right from a privilege.

Equality. Discrimination in how law is enforced engages Article 14 — equality before the law — and Article 15, which forbids discrimination on grounds of religion. These are not aspirations appended to the Constitution. They are its first substantive guarantees.

III. The asymmetry of consequence

This is the part that is rarely printed, and it explains most of what happened.

For defying the Supreme Court, the remedy is contempt. Under Section 12 of the Contempt of Courts Act 1971, contempt carries up to six months’ simple imprisonment, or a fine of up to two thousand rupees, or both. And the same section provides that the accused may be discharged, or the punishment remitted, on an apology made to the court’s satisfaction — an apology that cannot be refused merely for being qualified or conditional, if offered in good faith.

So the total exposure of a ministry that ignores a constitutional judgment five times in eight days is two thousand rupees, discharged on a conditional apology. Less than one month of NEET coaching.

For the officer filmed striking a woman, ordinary criminal law applies; no uniform confers immunity. What followed was a transfer out of Jantar Mantar duty. No prosecution has been announced. For the constable who discharged an AK-47 at students: suspension and departmental proceedings. Not a charge.

For the students, Section 109(1) — attempt to murder. For three men with a group chat, the law written for enemies of the nation.

The remedies available to citizens are real but slow. High Courts can quash FIRs. Constitutional courts can award compensation for violation of fundamental rights, a line running from Rudul Sah through Nilabati Behera. A public interest litigation is before the Delhi High Court over the disproportionate use of force and the surveillance, with the Lamba footage cited in it.

IV. What Khoj infers, and on what basis

Everything above is reporting. This section is reasoning, and it is marked so that readers can weigh it for themselves.

A lawful assembly was placed under real-time biometric identification. A government then gave its word that peaceful participants would face no punitive action, and a movement of twenty million took that word and went home. The charges came anyway — the gravest in the capital, the most extreme in Assam. And in the two states that disclosed who they had kept, the answer was Muslims: ten of eleven in West Bengal, most of six in Assam, and in Uttar Pradesh a Muslim volunteer whose father was taken from his home.

Muslims are a substantial minority in Bengal and Assam, but no honest reading treats ten of eleven as a reflection of who happened to attend. That ratio does not arise from neutral selection applied to a general student movement — one founded by a Dalit man, over a medical entrance exam, whose constituency was every family that had sold something to pay for coaching.

The innocent explanations deserve stating. Muslims may have been over-represented among those specifically organising solidarity gatherings in those two states. Those arrested may have been organisers rather than a cross-section. Policing habits differ by state. Khoj cannot exclude any of these — because no authority has published who was arrested, on what grounds, or how any of them were identified.

That is the point at which absence stops being a gap and becomes the finding. Nobody in authority has said how anyone at Jantar Mantar was selected. Nobody has said why facial recognition was trained on a lawful assembly, or under what legal power. Nobody has explained what an attempt-to-murder charge is meant to establish against unnamed students, or why a WhatsApp group engages a statute written for threats to national sovereignty. Nobody has said why officers from two states arrived at one Muslim volunteer’s family home, why his father was taken, or why everyone was let go days later without charge.

Khoj’s inference is this: a crackdown aimed at a movement of millions was narrowed, in its lasting legal consequences, onto a minority — and the machinery that made such narrowing possible was pointed at the crowd before a single charge existed.

What would change this conclusion is entirely within the state’s power to supply. Publish the arrest figures with a breakdown. State the legal basis of each FIR. Disclose whether facial recognition was used to identify anyone later visited by police. Until then the pattern stands as recorded, and the silence around it is the state’s choice, not Khoj’s assumption.

V. There is a version of this in which a state met disorder with force and the law took its course. That is not what the record shows.

The record shows a court that reached for an insect instead of an inquiry. A ministry that switched off a city’s internet without publishing a reason its own Supreme Court requires it to publish. A police force that declared a march criminal before it began, scanned every face in it, sent unidentified men with sticks into it, and filed attempt to murder afterwards. A government that gave its word and broke it inside forty-eight hours. And a set of arrests that fell, wherever the state let us see, on the same community.

Against all of that: eleven to thirteen teenagers who did not survive an exam that had already been sold; a Dalit man abused for his caste for building something out of an insult; a volunteer whose contribution was food; and twenty million young people who won the only thing they asked for and were charged for asking.

None of this requires India to be judged by anyone abroad. It requires India to be held to Puttaswamy, to Anuradha Bhasin, to Articles 14, 15, 19 and 21 — its own law, written by its own courts, binding on its own government. That is what sovereignty means when it is worth having: the rules apply to the people who wrote them.

The students kept their side of the bargain. They went home when they were asked to.

— Khoj

Sources

Every allegation here is drawn from published reporting by the named outlets and from the texts of Indian judgments and statutes. Khoj has originated none of them.

The charges and the crackdown: Deccan Herald — 13 charges including attempt to murder · Business Standard — attempt to murder among 14 charges · Al Jazeera — police attack Cockroach activists · ThePrint — plainclothes lathi row, police say deployment lawful · ThePrint — slap video, Additional DCP removed · Devgan.in — BNS Section 189

Surveillance: The Tribune — facial recognition and AI surveillance vehicles at Jantar Mantar · ThePrint — Delhi Police’s surveillance tools at Jantar Mantar · Outlook — facial recognition vans spark privacy concerns · Tech Policy Press — shutdowns and pervasive surveillance · DPDPA Section 17 text · Lawctopus — government surveillance vs privacy: DPDPA exemptions

Shutdowns: The Week — blanket blackout, no order · The Week — MHA’s fifth internet cut since 17 July

The arrests and the assurance: Outlook — CJP seeks withdrawal of FIRs and immediate release · Outlook — “no protester under detention,” CJP calls off PHQ protest · The Tribune — CJP alleges crackdown in Assam, Bihar, West Bengal · Dawn — CJP demands release of detained protesters · Siasat — Assam police arrest 3 Muslim men over CJP protest bid

Junaid: ThePrint — CJP volunteer Mohd Junaid claims police detained members, cops deny · Scroll.in — UP Police accused of detaining Muslim man’s family for serving food

Bihar: The Week — Bihar cop seen firing AK-47 at protesting students, suspended · ThePrint — Bihar students clash with security forces; police use bullets, batons

The exam and the deaths: ThePrint — NEET fiasco pushing lakhs of families into poverty · ThePrint — Rajasthan BJP youth member and brother in CBI net · Outlook — 13 reported suicides after NEET paper leak · Medical Dialogues — 93 NEET-linked suicides in five years

The CJI, the discrediting, the journalists: The Wire — the Chief Justice called them cockroaches · The Wire — court doesn’t have time for videos of police excess · Outlook — BJP leader says protest targets Sanatan · ThePrint — Dipke faces caste attacks · Amit Malviya’s journalist-grid post on X · Newslaundry — reporters caught in Jantar Mantar’s anger

The law: Contempt of Courts Act 1971, Section 12 · Britannica — Suvendu Adhikari, 2026 West Bengal election

The day after the students won, someone came for the people who had filmed it.

On 26 July 2026 — one day after India’s Education Minister resigned and handed the Cockroach Janta Party its first real victory — the head of the BJP’s national information operation sat down and wrote a post about journalists.

It began decently. “What happened to some journalists at the protest was unacceptable,” Amit Malviya wrote of the reporters heckled and assaulted at Jantar Mantar. “A few were targeted, and women journalists, in particular, were subjected to vile sexual abuse. There can be no justification for that.” He went further, and criticised the habit of writing off any inconvenient reporter as “godi media.” He wrote that “it is time to stop reducing every journalist to a political label simply because they hold a different worldview.” He wrote that “if media independence is the standard, it should apply consistently to everyone.”

Read that far and you would think you were reading a defence of the press.

Then came the last line.

“Incidentally, someone sent me the picture below. What do you think is the common thread between the people in it? And who else do you think belongs in the frame, or doesn’t?”

Underneath sat sixteen photographs in a grid. Sixteen working journalists, caught mid-report — microphones up, cameras rolling, several of them standing in front of the police barricades at Jantar Mantar. Under each face, a name and an employer printed in gold. Ajit Anjum. Shyam Meera Singh. Tanushree Pandey. Samdish Bhatia. Independent reporters, YouTube channels, small digital outlets. Sixteen people, named and photographed and handed to a very large crowd as a riddle.

In the corner of every panel, small enough to miss, was the watermark of whoever had originally assembled it: TROLLS. And in four of the sixteen panels, the word “journalist” is misspelled — Journaliist. Nobody proofread it. Nobody needed to. This was the artefact that a party office-holder with 855,000 followers chose to put in front of the country.

By the afternoon of 27 July, the post had been viewed 727,000 times, with 939 replies and 1,100 reposts. The numbers were still climbing.

Notice what isn’t in it. There is no accusation. That is the craftsmanship. What do you think is the common thread? contains no claim a fact-checker can test and no sentence a lawyer can sue over. It just sets sixteen named faces in front of a crowd and lets the crowd finish the thought. In the same post that called the targeting of journalists indefensible, sixteen different journalists were quietly set out to be targeted — the condemnation and the invitation arriving together, in one breath, from one account, on one afternoon.

Most people in India have never heard of the man who wrote it. That is more or less the job.

Who he is

He is from Prayagraj. He studied business at Dayalbagh Educational Institute and took a postgraduate diploma in finance at Symbiosis International University, and for the first stretch of his working life he was a banker — ICICI, Calyon, HSBC, and finally Bank of America in Bengaluru, where until 2012 he was Vice President of Global Treasury Sales. A man who spent his thirties selling treasury products to corporate clients.

He drifted into BJP circles in 2009 through a forum called “Friends of BJP.” In 2015 he was handed the party’s IT Cell. Today his title is in-charge of the BJP’s National Information & Technology Department; he also co-runs the party’s West Bengal operation and sits on its National Executive. He has never stood for election to anything. He has posted more than 176,000 times.

His decade in the chair maps precisely onto the decade in which the BJP became the most dominant force in Indian political social media. He is, in plain terms, the man responsible for what the governing party’s version of reality looks like on your phone.

The record

Alt News, one of India’s most established fact-checking outfits, publishes an annual account of who spreads the most political misinformation in the country. In 2025, the name at the top of that list was Amit Malviya’s — twelve separate fact-checks against him in twelve months. Boom Live has published seven of its own. And according to Alt News’s own reporting, the pattern after a debunking almost never varies: the post stays up.

It goes back years. In January 2020, as women occupied Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, he shared a video insinuating they were being paid to sit there. A joint Alt News–Newslaundry investigation found nothing behind it. Two days later he posted a photograph of an elderly man eating a meal and offered it as “proof” that protesters were being handed ₹500 and free biryani. One man. One plate of food. Presented as an organised payment scheme.

Around the same time he amplified a claim that anti-CAA protesters had chanted pro-Pakistan slogans; Alt News established they had been chanting “Kashif saab zindabad” — the name of a local AIMIM politician. He announced that the Nobel laureate economist Richard Thaler had praised demonetisation, leaving out the part where Thaler was considerably less impressed. In 2017 he circulated old photographs in a way widely read as a smear on Jawaharlal Nehru’s private life; the women in them turned out to be Nehru’s sister and his niece.

And in 2020, Twitter itself — the platform, not a fact-checker — stamped one of his farmer-protest posts “manipulated media.”

The specific technique in the journalist grid also has a history. In December 2023, after the Parliament security breach, he posted photographs of one of the accused, Neelam Azad, at various demonstrations, labelling her an “andolanjeevi” — Modi’s own coinage for people who make a living out of protesting — and tying her to Congress. Photographs of a person at protests, offered as evidence of what kind of person they must be. Two and a half years later, the same method, sixteen faces at a time.

The legal record, both directions

Police in at least four states have booked him, and if you read the charges together, one word keeps surfacing. Not fraud. Not corruption. Provocation.

Tamil Nadu police booked him in September 2023 over what they described as deliberately pushing “fake news” about a speech by Udhayanidhi Stalin — after a clarification had already gone out — under sections covering provocation to riot, promoting enmity between groups, and intentional insult. In May 2024 he was named in a Karnataka FIR alongside BJP national president J.P. Nadda over a post alleged to have intimidated Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe voters. In May 2025, Karnataka police booked him again — provocation and intentional insult, over the claim that Congress kept an office in Turkey. Those proceedings were later stayed. In West Bengal he was booked for circulating a video of a woman being publicly flogged, after the woman herself complained. A state minister filed a separate complaint over his remarks about Mamata Banerjee. The Youth Congress has sued him in a civil matter, alongside Arnab Goswami.

And in October 2020, during the Hathras case — a young Dalit woman dead after an alleged gang rape — the National Commission for Women formally notified him for posting material that identified her. Revealing a sexual assault victim’s identity is a crime in India. He was one of three public figures notified; Congress’s Digvijaya Singh and the actor Swara Bhasker had done the same thing. All three were told to take it down.

Now the case that runs the other way, which belongs here just as much.

In October 2022, The Wire published an investigation claiming Meta had given Malviya special “XCheck” privileges — the power to make Instagram posts vanish on request. The documents were fabricated. Meta denied it flatly. The Wire pulled the stories, apologised to its readers, and its own internal review found that one reporter had been the only person to meet the supposed sources and verify the supposed documents. The Wire then filed a police complaint against its own former employee for forgery. Malviya filed an FIR against The Wire’s founders and editors for cheating, forgery, defamation and criminal conspiracy, and Delhi Police searched the founders’ homes.

Khoj prints that because it happened. A record that only runs one way isn’t a record, it’s a case for the prosecution. Amit Malviya has genuinely been the victim of fabricated journalism — and that is worth sitting with, not skating past. It does not cancel twelve fact-checks in a single year, or FIRs in four states. But reporting the second and hiding the first would be precisely the offence this piece is about.

He is not one man with a phone

The bigger thing here isn’t a personality. It’s an institution, and people with no stake in Indian party politics have been studying it for years.

Swati Chaturvedi’s book I Am a Troll traced the IT cell back to 2007 and described roughly 300 workers using methods built to inflame sectarian feeling and move misinformation. Researchers have estimated that on some trending topics, close to a fifth of all Indian Twitter traffic originates from the BJP IT cell. Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project has profiled India in its global survey of state-linked “cyber troops.” Academics at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton’s Digital Witness Lab have mapped the party’s WhatsApp networks and keep arriving at the same finding: material too toxic for official party channels gets routed into WhatsApp instead, where hate speech and false claims circulate underneath the reach of anyone who might hold them to account. A HuffPost India investigation documented the Association of Billion Minds — an in-house consultancy set up by Amit Shah — running organised misinformation campaigns.

Two things Khoj will not quietly skip past. The researchers themselves are careful to say there is no established causal proof that WhatsApp misinformation actually changes how people vote; that remains genuinely open, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. And The Wire’s 2022 “Tek Fog” investigation — which alleged a covert app used to hijack Twitter trends and swarm women journalists — was never able to show that the BJP directed its use, only that users from a Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha domain had accessed it. Given the same outlet’s collapse on this exact subject a few months later, Khoj files Tek Fog as an unresolved allegation, not a finding.

What’s left standing after all of that is still substantial: a professional, well-funded information operation with a long documented history of putting false claims into circulation, run by the most fact-checked political figure in the country.

What he did with it, in July

Through the protests, Malviya was one of the government’s busiest voices. He called the movement “something deeply sinister,” arguing the slogans had little to do with education and pointing at the repeated references to Nepal and Bangladesh — two countries where youth uprisings had recently brought governments down — as evidence of the real intent.

He asked publicly why the movement raged about Uttar Pradesh’s paper leak but had nothing to say about Punjab or Karnataka, which made the whole thing selective, and therefore political, and therefore not really about the students at all. He wrote that the leadership shared “an umbilical cord” with the Aam Aadmi Party.

And then, the day after the students won, he posted the photographs of the journalists.

Sixteen names, written down properly

The graphic was built to make sixteen people look suspicious. So Khoj will do the reverse, and print all sixteen — not as a riddle, but as a list of people who turned up at Jantar Mantar and did the job.

Tanushree Pandey. Aaryan Mishra, The Red Mike. Saurabh Dwivedi. Gajendra Singh. Shyam Meera Singh, Strike Originals. Ajit Anjum. Sarthak Goswami. Priyanshi Sharma, Peek TV. Sharad Sharma. Kavya Karnatac, KK Creates. Bablu Saini. The Molitics India team. Abhinav Pandey, News Pinch. Samdish Bhatia. Medha Yadav, Jist News. Harsh Yadav.

Most of them are independent, and that word is doing real work in this story. No network legal department behind them. No proprietor with a minister’s number saved. Several of them are one person, a microphone and a YouTube channel. The “common thread” the question was fishing for isn’t a paymaster. It’s that they stood in front of the barricades and filmed what was happening while it was happening — at a protest where uniformed and plainclothes police beat unarmed students, and where the Chief Justice of India would later say the court did not have the time to watch the footage.

Somebody had to make that footage exist before anyone could refuse to look at it. These sixteen were among the people who did.

They were not the only journalists hurt that week, and this is where Khoj has to be straight with you. Reporters from Times Now, ABP and Republic were heckled, shoved and assaulted by people in that crowd, and women reporters were subjected to sexual abuse. Malviya was right about that, and there is no justification for it. A movement that spent seventy-one days demanding accountability doesn’t get an exemption from it. Both things are true at once, and the standard has to hold in both directions: a reporter should be safe from the crowd and safe from the party. Neither the students nor the state gets to decide which journalists count.

So to all of them — the sixteen in the grid, and the ones who were assaulted covering the same days — Khoj offers the only thing one small publication can offer another. Your names, spelled correctly, and the record that you were there.

There is a version of this story where a party official simply argued with a protest movement, and that would be ordinary politics, and none of it would be worth writing down. That isn’t what the record shows. What the record shows is a decade-long, independently documented habit: an accusation shaped so it can never quite be pinned down, aimed at people with less power than the person aiming it, from an account large enough that the aiming is the whole of the act.

Sixteen journalists are in a frame tonight, names printed underneath, in front of 727,000 people, because a man with 855,000 followers asked a question he will never have to answer for.

Khoj exists to put a name and a paper trail on the machinery that usually gets to work without one. This is the name. This is the trail.

— Khoj

Sources

Every allegation in this piece is drawn from published reporting by the named outlets below. Khoj has originated none of them.

Alt News — Political misinformation in 2025: who shared the most

Alt News — How the ringmaster of BJP’s propaganda machinery weaponises misinformation

Scroll.in — Amit Malviya’s fake news fountain: 16 pieces of misinformation

The Wire — How BJP’s chief propagandist circulates misinformation

ThePrint — Twitter flags Malviya’s farmer protest tweet as manipulated media

Tribune India — Neelam Azad an andolanjeevi: BJP links Parliament protester to Congress

Free Press Journal — NCW notices over the Hathras victim’s identity

Deccan Herald — Tamil Nadu police book Malviya over Udhayanidhi Stalin speech

Deccan Herald — Malviya and Arnab Goswami booked over false information on Congress

Deccan Herald — Malviya booked over Bengal public flogging video after victim’s complaint

Newslaundry — FIR against The Wire’s editors after Malviya’s complaint

Boom Live — The Wire apologises to readers after pulling its Meta-XCheck reports

Newslaundry — From godi media taunts to assault: the reporters caught in Jantar Mantar’s anger

Scroll.in — Editors Guild: biased reporting cannot justify attacks on media persons

Pulitzer Center — Inside the BJP’s WhatsApp machine

Oxford Internet Institute — Global Cyber Troops country profile: India

Scroll.in — BJP supporters have their own app to hijack Twitter trends (Tek Fog)

ThePrint — Jantar Mantar protest: BJP smells foreign funding

Wikipedia — Amit Malviya

To every student still standing at Jantar Mantar, and every one of the twenty million who carried this movement from an insult to a resignation letter: Khoj wishes you courage — not the kind that never feels fear, but the kind that keeps showing up anyway. You were called something less than human, and you answered with more humanity than the people who said it.

On 15 May, a Chief Justice looked at India’s jobless youth and called them cockroaches. On 25 July, seventy-one days later, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned — in his own words, “in the larger interest of students,” so the country’s youth would not stay “trapped in a web of confusion.” He handed the letter to Prime Minister Modi himself and posted the news on X. It is, by CNN’s own description, the first real concession this government has made to any protest movement in years.

It should not have taken this long, and it should not have cost what it cost to get here. Eleven to thirteen students did not live to see it. A senior officer slapped a woman on camera before it happened. A hunger striker was carried into a hospital before it happened. A Dalit founder was abused online, by name, before it happened. None of that is undone by a resignation letter. But the resignation is still real, and it is still theirs.

A mammoth doesn’t fall to a single blow. It falls because something small enough to be ignored keeps coming back, in numbers too large to keep dismissing as an insult. Twenty million people built a movement out of a word meant to make them feel small, and on 25 July, one of the three names on their list of demands stopped being in charge of the exam that broke their families.

Two demands remain. Whatever comes next, you’ve already proven what happens when the people with nothing left to lose refuse to stay quiet. Khoj will keep counting.

— Khoj

Sources:

CNN — India’s education minister resigns after days of “Cockroach” youth protests

Al Jazeera — India’s education minister resigns after weeks of “Cockroach” protests

The Week — Dharmendra Pradhan resigns as education minister, hands letter to PM Modi

Republic World — Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns amid NEET paper leak protests

Some patterns don’t start with a single insult. They’re already documented, in plain government language, long before a Chief Justice ever reaches for the word “cockroaches.”

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is not, on paper, a part of the Bharatiya Janata Party. But the BJP’s own institutional roots trace directly back to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951 as RSS’s political wing — and RSS remains, in the words of mainstream reporting on it, the party’s “ideological backbone,” supplying volunteers, leaders, and the surrounding network of affiliated organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. That relationship is uncontested.

The ideological roots run deeper, and further back, than most coverage of any single protest ever reaches. RSS’s second chief, M.S. Golwalkar, authored the 1939 text long treated as the first systematic statement of the Sangh’s ideology, “We or Our Nationhood Defined.” In it, Germany’s “purging” of Jews is described as “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by” in how India should treat its own minorities. Historians have traced further contact between early Hindu nationalist leaders and Italian Fascism, including direct links to Mussolini, and India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called these organizations fascist from the outset — a judgment confidential Congress assessments echoed after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 by a former RSS member, the event that led to RSS’s brief ban. RSS itself later disowned Golwalkar’s text specifically, while rebuilding its public legitimacy — a fact worth holding alongside the historians who argue the ideology it described never fully left the organization’s bloodstream.

What’s also on the record, from bodies with actual standing to say so, nearly a century later: the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent federal advisory commission, has named India a “Country of Particular Concern” for seven consecutive years running, and in its 2026 report specifically recommended sanctions on RSS and India’s intelligence service, RAW, for “their responsibility and tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.” Separately, the Congressional Research Service — Congress’s own nonpartisan research arm — has linked RSS and the wider Hindutva movement to what’s been called “Saffron terrorism,” including the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing that killed 68 people. India’s government has rejected the USCIRF findings as “motivated and biased.” For fairness, it’s also worth noting the CIA’s own classification drew a distinction — labeling two sister organizations, VHP and Bajrang Dal, as “militant religious outfits,” while calling RSS itself merely “nationalist.” No formal US terrorist designation of any kind exists for RSS. RSS has, notably, hired Washington lobbyists specifically to manage this scrutiny.

That is the backdrop. Here is where it meets the cockroaches.

When the 20 July crackdown drew a wall of criticism — tear gas, lathi charges, a senior officer caught slapping a woman on video, 150 of the movement’s own people hospitalized — a separate controversy broke alongside it: unidentified men in plainclothes were seen beating protesters with lathis, and their identity was unclear enough to raise public suspicion. Only once questioned did senior Delhi Police officers confirm these were, in fact, their own officers, deliberately deployed without uniform — and defend the deployment as “lawful.” No footage has surfaced showing protester-side violence. Footage has surfaced showing the opposite.

By then, the government’s own story had already run out of road. It had tried “foreign conspiracy” — BJP leaders demanding an NIA probe, floating George Soros funding claims. It had tried religion — a UP BJP leader calling the protest a “foreign-funded bid to target Sanatan.” Neither held. That is the moment RSS’s own official publication, Organiser, stepped in with a different story — recasting the crackdown as police facing a “coordinated attack” from the crowd. A government that had run out of narratives of its own reached for the one institution that has always supplied its language, its volunteers, and its ideological cover since 1951 — not unlike a younger sibling, out of arguments of its own, turning to an older one to finish the fight. RSS did not need to send anyone to Jantar Mantar to play that role. It only needed to publish, at the exact moment its ally needed a different sentence than the one the footage was already writing.

This is the throughline, and it doesn’t require guessing who is or isn’t secretly organizing anyone. An international religious-freedom body has, in its own words, flagged the ecosystem this government sits inside for “tolerance of severe violations of religious freedom.” That government’s own police force, when caught using deniable, unidentified force against unarmed students, only admitted whose force it was under pressure — and called it “lawful” rather than explaining it. A Chief Justice, shown footage of the same crackdown, said the court “did not have time” for it. And when the government’s own excuses failed, its ideological parent supplied the next one. None of these needed to be coordinated with each other to add up to the same thing: when the people with power are shown harming the people without it, the instinct, across the judiciary, the police, and the wider political ecosystem, is to obscure, reframe, or wait out the scrutiny — never to simply answer for it.

Khoj’s mission starts exactly here — not in assigning a conspiracy where the evidence doesn’t reach, but in the plain, documented fact that the instinct to protect power from scrutiny is consistent, cross-institutional, and older than this year’s protests. Human rights are not violated only in the moment a baton lands. They’re violated in every institutional reflex that follows, built to make sure nobody has to answer for it.

Sources:

The Diplomat — The RSS at 100: the pan-Hindutva force behind Modi’s BJP

The Caravan — The RSS and MS Golwalkar’s undeniable links to Nazism

The AIDEM — A forgotten document: the ideological roots of the RSS and unspoken Nazi continuities

Ullekh NP — RSS’s militant structure modelled on Mussolini’s Blackshirts: Marzia Casolari

Hindutva Watch — Fascism, Nazism shaped Hindu nationalism of RSS, Hindu Mahasabha

Cambridge Core — Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva (2025)

The Wire — USCIRF urges sanctions on RSS, RAW

UCA News — India rejects US religious freedom report as “motivated and biased”

Congress.gov — CRS report, India: Religious Freedom Issues

Dawn — CIA classifies two Hindu groups as “militant religious outfits”

Prism Reports — RSS hires US lobbyists for congressional influence campaign

ThePrint — Lathi-wielding plainclothes cops in Delhi protest crackdown spark row; police say deployment lawful

Organiser — Mob rule on Delhi’s streets: police face coordinated attack, vandalism and tear gas

Al Jazeera — Police attack Cockroach activists as thousands march on parliament

ThePrint — Slap video, Additional DCP removed from Jantar Mantar duty

There is a version of power that doesn’t need to shout. It just doesn’t look up.

The Chief Justice of India is, on paper, the single most trusted seat democracy has to offer. It exists to be the last check when every other institution fails — the one chair where a citizen with nothing is supposed to stand level with a citizen with everything. That is the job description. It is not what the last few months have shown.

There is a pattern worth naming plainly, because once you see it, it explains almost everything else that follows: power in India, when it meets people with no leverage, tends to do one of two things. It postures, or it compresses.

The posture is the performance of fairness without the substance of it. On 15 May 2026, the man in that chair looked at a generation of jobless young people and reached for the word “cockroaches” instead of an inquiry into why they had no jobs. When the backlash came, there was no reckoning — just a claim that the media had misquoted him, and a suggestion that people were taking it “too sentimentally.” Weeks later, shown video evidence of police beating the same students his own word had set upon, he said the court did not have time for such videos. Around the same time, on the subject of Rohingya refugees, his bench wondered aloud whether “intruders” deserved “a red carpet welcome while citizens faced poverty.” A Class 8 textbook that dared mention judicial corruption drew his personal objection.

The posture doesn’t stop at one chair. A police force declared a march unlawful before a single protester had gathered, under a prohibitory order issued in advance — then, once people showed up anyway, applied unlawful-assembly charges to make the batons that followed look like enforcement rather than what the footage actually showed: a senior officer, Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba, slapping a young woman near Parliament, and being reassigned rather than charged. A government called a protest over a stolen medical exam a “foreign conspiracy” and “a bid to target Sanatan,” rather than answer for the theft itself. Each of these wears the appearance of due process, security, or faith, while the substance underneath is empty.

The compression is what happens to the people on the other end of the posture. It is a family selling its jewellery to buy one honest shot at a fair exam, only to learn the shot was never fair to begin with, because someone with more money bought the answer key. It is a teenager who does not survive the gap between those two facts — one of the eleven to thirteen who didn’t, in the 46 days after this year’s exam was cancelled. It is a Dalit founder of a twenty-million-strong movement, abused online for the simple act of naming his own caste. It is a hunger striker, already once jailed and branded a traitor for a different fight, forced into a hospital bed for holding this one. Compression is what posture looks like from below — rarely a boot on the neck, more often a slow, bureaucratic narrowing of room to breathe, to speak, to be believed.

This is not unique to one judge, one police force, or one government. It is the shape power takes, generally, whenever it is more convenient to look like it’s protecting people than to actually do it. And it is worth being fair about the record where fairness is due: this same chair has, at other moments, ruled against government power too — striking down the Electoral Bonds Scheme, pausing sedition prosecutions nationwide. The posture is not the whole of the man or the institution. It is a habit that surfaces, reliably, in exactly the moments when the people asking for accountability have the least power to demand it back.

Khoj exists because that gap — between the posture and the person being compressed by it — is exactly where minorities and the powerless are pushed hardest and heard least, in India and everywhere else this pattern repeats. Recording it, plainly and with the receipts, is the smallest thing owed to the people on the compressed end of it.

Sources: (unchanged from before)

The Wire — CJI clarifies “cockroach” remark

The Wire — CJI says court doesn’t have time for videos of police excess

PTC News — CJI Surya Kant says “don’t take it so sentimentally”

Tribune India — ex-judges, lawyers write to CJI over Rohingya remark

News on Air — CJI objects to judicial corruption reference in NCERT textbook

Devgan.in — BNS Sections 189/190, unlawful assembly

ThePrint — Slap video, Additional DCP removed from Jantar Mantar duty

Outlook India — BJP leader says protest targets Sanatan

ThePrint — Dipke faces caste attacks after revealing Dalit identity

Free Press Journal — Key judgments by Justice Surya Kant

Want me to open a new Substack draft and type this one in, same as before?

Kanakpriya spent four years of her life on one exam. Her father took loans to pay for it. Her mother sold her jewellery. This is not a rare story in India — it is the ordinary cost of trying to become a doctor if you are not already born close to the top. Multiply Kanakpriya by the more than 95% of government-school aspirants who, by one estimate out of Tamil Nadu, cannot afford coaching at all, and you start to see the shape of what NEET actually is: not a test of who deserves a seat, but a test of what a family is willing to bankrupt itself to attempt.

This year, that sacrifice was sold out from under them. Investigators traced the leaked NEET-UG paper to a family in Jaipur — Dinesh Biwal, a local BJP youth-wing leader, his brother Mangilal, and Mangilal’s son Vikas, all arrested. Reporting found that multiple members of this one family had cleared NEET across several years “despite modest academic records” — a repeat pipeline running through people with ruling-party connections, while families like Kanakpriya’s got one honest shot and had to make it count.

Peel back one more layer and the apathy stops looking like apathy. It looks like design.

A paper doesn’t leak by accident, and it doesn’t leak downward. It leaked to a family that had already cleared the same exam multiple times on connections rather than marks. One level up, in the government’s own induction data, the same shape repeats: LBSNAA — the academy every IAS, IPS, and IFS officer trains at — shows that in recent intake years, more than half of new recruits had fathers already working in government service: 60% in 2014, 57% in 2015, 55% in 2016, 57% in 2017. The institutions that compile this data call it a story of “merit” — children of government employees, they argue, simply grow up closer to the exam culture. Maybe. But that argument only works if you’ve never had to watch the door from the outside. For everyone who has, the number reads the way it looks: the same families keep walking back through the same door, generation after generation, while everyone else is told to try harder.

Neither of these is a coincidence sitting next to the other. They are the same mechanism, operating at two different altitudes — a system that already knows how to route its own advantages back to the families who hold them, quietly, year after year, whether the door is a medical seat or a civil service rank. That is the real reason no one in power rushed to protect the students who noticed. It was never that the system failed to see a generation being cheated. It’s that the system was never built to see it — because the people with the authority to fix it are, disproportionately, the people it was already working for.

Into this — the debt, the theft, the quiet design of it — stepped a sentence from the country’s Chief Justice. On 15 May 2026, Surya Kant described unemployed young Indians as “like cockroaches” who “attack the system.” He later said he’d meant something narrower. It didn’t matter. A 30-year-old Dalit strategist, Abhijeet Dipke, built the Cockroach Janta Party the next day. It now has more than 20 million followers — not because an insult was clever, but because an entire generation recognised, instantly, who was actually being called vermin, and who never would be. The chief justice didn’t need to conspire with the Biwal family to protect the same structure they both, in different ways, benefit from. He only needed to reach for an insult instead of an inquiry — and the system did the rest on its own, the way it always has.

Some of the students who lost their shot at that exam did not survive losing it. In the 46 days between the exam’s cancellation and its rescheduled re-test, 11 to 13 NEET aspirants died by suicide. It is one entry in a five-year pattern — roughly 93 NEET-linked suicides since 2021, climbing every year, Kota alone accounting for nearly 40 of them. These were teenagers. If this number reaches anyone who needs it: iCall is 9152987821, AASRA is 9820466726, Kiran is 1800-599-0019.

Here is the part worth sitting with. The students who took an insult and turned it into the largest youth movement India has seen in years are the same students who spent everything they had, honestly, on a system rigged against them twice — once by cost, once by theft. The people who bought their way past both gates never had a name thrown at them. No chief justice called the Biwal family cockroaches. That word was reserved for the ones who had nothing to buy their way past anything with, except courage.

And courage was met with a legal trap set before it even moved. Delhi Police first imposed a prohibitory order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) — the modern replacement for the old Section 144 CrPC — before the 20 July march began. Once protesters walked anyway, police invoked Sections 189 and 190 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), criminalizing “unlawful assembly,” plus Section 223 BNS for disobeying a lawful order. In effect: the state declared the gathering unlawful in advance, so that anyone who showed up was already, on paper, a criminal — the cover written before the tear gas and lathis came out.

Then the batons were raised: tear gas, lathi charges, some officers in plain clothes. A widely shared 36-second video showed Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba — not a constable, a senior officer, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police for North East district — slapping a woman protester near the Parliament complex. Delhi Police admitted he had “lost his cool” and removed him from Jantar Mantar duty. It’s a rare instance of footage actually forcing an admission — though only as far as a reassignment. No disciplinary or criminal proceeding against him has been announced.

To every officer who raised a cane against a girl young enough to be a daughter, a son barely out of childhood: you will go home tonight to your own children. Look at them before you decide this was duty. Some of you will rise tomorrow and bow before a goddess — Durga, Kali, the very idea of protection given a female form and a place in the home — and ask her for safety, for prosperity, for the well-being of the family you’d die for. Ask yourself, in that moment, what it means to fold your hands to a goddess at dawn and raise a baton against someone’s daughter by afternoon. The uniform was issued to you as a promise to protect the people you’re now paid to break. A conscience does not clock out for a shift.

Delhi’s own injury count: close to 180, split as 118 security personnel and 60 protesters, with 70 detained. Before the march even reached the barricades, authorities had suspended metro services, sealed roads, and disrupted mobile internet across parts of the capital — a city switched off in advance, to meet a march that hadn’t happened yet.

Twenty days into a hunger strike held in solidarity, Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly taken to a government hospital on 18 July by the same police force that, a year earlier, had already branded him a traitor and jailed him under the National Security Act for a different protest, in Ladakh, that also turned deadly under contested circumstances. Delhi High Court later ordered him moved to a private hospital; his condition has been reported stable.

When force alone didn’t quiet it, came the discrediting, from three directions at once. BJP leaders called the movement a “cross-border influence operation,” demanded an NIA probe, floated George Soros funding claims. A UP BJP leader called it a “foreign-funded bid to target Sanatan” — turning an argument about a stolen exam into an accusation of attacking a religion. Dipke, meanwhile, has faced a wave of caste-based abuse online since telling the public he is Dalit. Foreign conspiracy, religious insult, caste attack — aimed at the same twenty million kids, from three different directions, in the same few weeks.

On 21 July, CJP leadership announced they would suspend further marches through Delhi’s streets — not retreat, in Dipke’s words, but protection: “We will not march again because the police will hurt the youth again.” Hundreds are still camped at Jantar Mantar, and say they intend to stay until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns.

None of it started with them. A family sold what it owned so a child could sit an exam meant to be fair. That exam was sold, twice over, to people who needed it least, and the same pattern of inherited access sits one floor up, in who gets to run the country at all. Some of the students who lost out did not live to protest it. The ones who did were met with tear gas, a slap caught on camera, and a campaign to paint them as foreign agents, blasphemers, or fools acting on caste grudges — anything except what the record actually shows them to be: the only people in this entire story who did everything right, and paid for it anyway.

One footnote closes the loop tighter than anything else in this story. Asked in a later hearing about video evidence of the crackdown his own remark had indirectly set in motion, the Chief Justice reportedly said the court did not have time for such videos. The man who called them cockroaches did not, in the end, have time to watch what was done to them.

They were called cockroaches by a system that has never once had to sell anything it owned to get where it sits. History has a way of remembering who actually deserved the name.

Tribute, by Khoj

To the 11 to 13 families who lost a child in those 46 days, and to every name inside the wider count of 93 — Khoj offers what a publication can honestly offer, which is not enough, but is offered anyway: condolences. No exam, no seat, no ranking was ever worth what it cost you. You should not have had to prove that with your children’s lives for anyone to notice.

And to the ones who are still here, still camped at Jantar Mantar, still posting under a name a Chief Justice meant as an insult: Khoj wants this on the record — this generation did something worth naming properly. As this is being written, they have not stopped. CJP’s own leaders count 150 of their people hospitalized — more than double the official figure — some seriously hurt, for the offence of walking toward their own Parliament. That is not history yet. That is Tuesday.

They stood next to each other across religion, caste, belief, and colour — a Dalit founder building the movement’s name, a hunger striker from Ladakh carrying his own history of being called a traitor for a different fight, twenty million followers who never once needed to share a faith or a caste to recognise the same insult landing on all of them — and none of the wedges thrown at them from three directions at once, foreign conspiracy, religious accusation, caste abuse, managed to split them apart. That refusal to be divided is not a small thing. It is the one weapon the system that faced them did not have an answer for.

If this generation of “cockroaches” has anything to teach the rest of the world, Khoj believes it is this: wherever minorities are being pressed smaller, told to be quieter, called something less than human by the people meant to protect them — the answer on record, from Delhi’s streets in the summer of 2026, is that you do not have to let the insult divide you to survive it. You can let it become the name you march under instead.

— Khoj

Sources:

ThePrint — NEET fiasco is pushing lakhs of families into poverty: https://theprint.in/the-fineprint/neet-fiasco-isnt-just-about-broken-dreams-its-pushing-lakhs-of-families-into-poverty/2160783/

ThePrint — Rajasthan BJP youth member and brother in CBI net, family members cleared NEET repeatedly: https://theprint.in/india/neet-leak-rajasthan-bjp-youth-member-brother-in-cbi-net-4-of-their-kin-passed-the-test-last-year/2929942/

ThePrint — 50% of IAS/IFS recruits are children of government servants: https://theprint.in/india/governance/50-ias-ifs-recruits-are-children-of-govt-servants-but-this-is-a-story-of-their-merit/479040/

The Wire — CJI clarifies “cockroach” remark: https://m.thewire.in/article/law/the-chief-justice-called-them-cockroaches-history-knows-where-that-language-leads

Outlook India — 13 reported suicides after NEET paper leak: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/13-reported-suicides-after-neet-paper-leak

Medical Dialogues — 93 NEET-linked suicides in 5 years: https://medicaldialogues.in/state-news/delhi/neet-pressure-93-neet-linked-sicides-reported-in-5-years-14-cases-in-2026-171450

Devgan.in — BNS Section 189, unlawful assembly: https://devgan.in/bns/section/189/

ThePrint — Slap video, Additional DCP removed from Jantar Mantar duty: https://theprint.in/india/slap-video-at-cjp-protest-delhi-police-admits-additional-dcp-lost-cool-cop-removed-from-jantar-mantar/2994053/

Al Jazeera — Police attack Cockroach activists marching on parliament: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/20/police-attack-cockroach-activists-as-thousands-march-on-indian-parliament

Washington Post — Cockroach movement vows to keep demanding reforms, 150 hospitalized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/07/21/india-cockroach-party-protest/8bd7b6ce-84e0-11f1-9cec-0fb26676f07e_story.html

WION — Government blames Wangchuk for Ladakh violence: https://www.wionews.com/india-news/indian-government-blames-sonam-wangchuk-for-violence-in-ladakh-protest-provocative-mentions-of-arab-spring-nepal-genz-protest-1758734937453

Outlook India — BJP leader says protest targets Sanatan: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/up-bjp-leader-says-delhi-protest-foreign-funded-bid-to-target-sanatan-gets-slammed-by-oppn-2

ThePrint — Dipke faces caste attacks after revealing Dalit identity: https://theprint.in/feature/cockroach-janta-party-dalit-abhijeet-dipke-caste-attacks/2937920/

“I didn’t take my courage from a massacre. I took it from two people who refused to look away — and that’s what lets me speak the truth behind the lies.”

Gerard Wathen came to Amritsar in 1915 to run a Sikh college, and ran it the way few Englishmen of his class ever ran anything in India — with his coat off, literally, carrying baskets of rubble on his own head so that no student watching him could believe he thought himself above the work he asked of them. His wife, Melicent, an artist, kept a diary of their life there, the ordinary and the uneasy both, in the careful hand of someone who noticed things before she understood why they mattered. Between them, over nine years, they built a life inside a Sikh institution that neither of them was born into and neither of them owed anything more than a posting’s worth of loyalty to. They gave it far more than that.

In April 1919, it was Melicent who read the danger first — not from any official warning, but from the same quiet instinct that had made her a careful diarist all along. On the evening of the eleventh, two days before anyone in Amritsar knew what was coming, she took their children and left. She would not learn what happened in the walled garden at Jallianwala Bagh until a letter reached her a week later, in her husband’s hand — the same hand he used for college ledgers, now carrying a number no ledger should have to hold.

Gerard had stayed. On the thirteenth of April, soldiers walked into that garden — a crowd of families gathered for the Baisakhi festival, children weaving between adults, husbands standing close to wives, old men glad of the sun — and fired for ten minutes without warning, blocking the exits a crowd would run to before they ever raised a rifle. People went into the garden’s single well rather than stay in the open air; a hundred and twenty bodies were later pulled from it. In the days that followed, Gerard did something that has never made it into any official history: he intervened, quietly, to help stop his own government from dropping bombs on Amritsar and on the Golden Temple — sparing the city a second catastrophe that would have left far fewer people alive to even dispute its numbers.

Then he did the second thing, the one this piece exists to tell you about. The official death count, from the men who had done the shooting, was 294. Wathen didn’t need a tribunal to know that couldn’t be right — he had walked those streets, and he knew what twenty thousand gathered people looked like. It would take Indian relief workers going door to door, counting families too frightened of martial law to come forward on their own, to push the figure to 379 — a number that, in the words of the men who set it, was simply as high as they were willing to go.

Five days after the massacre, before that number had even finished hardening into fact, Wathen wrote his own account. Twenty thousand present. One thousand and forty-two dead.

Everyone around him was walking the other way. Comfort sat on that side — the easy, unspoken kind that comes from agreeing with people who share your accent, your childhood, your church. Silence would have cost Wathen nothing. A quiet nod toward the smaller number would have kept his place among his own countrymen, some of whom, within the year, would raise £26,000 through a London newspaper to call the man responsible for the killing a saviour, with Rudyard Kipling personally contributing ten of it. Wathen had built nine years of his life inside a world that would have forgiven his silence completely. He chose not to be forgiven for it.

He did not write his number to take a side in a quarrel between races. He wrote it because it was true, and because somewhere underneath the uniform of his own certainties — Cambridge, the Indian Education Service, every inherited assumption about who governed whom — he still knew the difference between a fact and a convenience, and picked the harder one. A hundred years later, a historian working back through hospital ledgers and burial records would land close to where he’d stood alone in 1919 — five to six hundred dead at an honest minimum, some two thousand casualties once the wounded were finally counted without flinching. No official record, British or Indian, ever broke that toll down by age or sex; there is no ledger anywhere that says how many were children. That silence isn’t an accident — it’s the shape of what a government decides is beneath counting, once it has already decided how high it’s willing to go.

Neither Gerard nor Melicent had to care what happened to Punjab once their posting ended. They could have gone home to England, as eventually they did, and let Amritsar become someone else’s grief. Instead, one stopped a bomb, and the other stopped a lie, and between the two of them they were, for a handful of days in April 1919, simply two people who saw cruelty up close and refused to look away from it. That is a rarer kind of courage than the kind we usually build monuments to — not standing up to an enemy, but standing against your own people, for the sake of others who could never repay you and had no power to make you do it.

I sat in the classrooms they helped build, in the college they gave nine years of their life to — Year 11 and 12, a hundred years after they carried the rubble that raised it. This is owed to both of them, from someone who walked the ground they left standing.

— Khoj, with gratitude to Gerard and Melicent Wathen

Editor’s note: The events and figures above are documented — Wathen’s tenure and letter, the 294-to-379 progression, Melicent Wathen’s diary and departure, the well, the Morning Post fund, and historian Kim Wagner’s revised casualty estimate. The festival-crowd scene is reconstructed from contemporaneous descriptions of who gathered that day, not a verified eyewitness account of named individuals.

Sources: Jallianwala Bagh massacre (Wikipedia); The Week, “Jallianwala Bagh @100”; Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale, 2019); “Fear and Loathing in Amritsar” (Itinerario, Cambridge Core); Gerard Anstruther Wathen (Wikipedia); The Tribune, “A century later, remembering Khalsa College’s gutsy Principal”; Hunter Commission (Wikipedia).

Introduction

Religious institutions are humanity’s oldest system for extracting wealth while appearing to serve it. For 2,000+ years, they’ve perfected a single mechanism: convince people that suffering is sacred, that powerlessness is virtue, that surrendering agency is salvation.

This is not accident. This is architecture.

This article explores how religious institutions work psychologically to disempower vulnerable people, and how this disempowerment serves institutional interests. Understanding this mechanism is essential because religious institutions are still active, still extracting wealth, still stripping agency—now with modern efficiency through televangelists, megachurches, and digital spirituality.

Part 1: The Psychological Mechanism — External Locus of Control

How It Works

Religious teachings share one universal message: outcomes are determined by divine will, not individual action.

The teaching:

• “God has a plan for you”

• “Trust in God’s timing”

• “Everything happens for a reason”

• “Surrender your will to God’s will”

The psychological impact:

These statements create what psychologists call external locus of control — the belief that life outcomes are determined by forces outside oneself (God, fate, luck) rather than by one’s own actions.

Research by psychologists Rotter, Lefcourt, and others shows that people with strong external locus of control experience:

1. Learned helplessness: After repeated experiences of powerlessness, people stop trying. Their brain learns: “My effort doesn’t matter.” Over time, this becomes neurological—the prefrontal cortex (decision-making) atrophies; the amygdala (fear/anxiety) becomes dominant.

2. Reduced self-efficacy: The psychological belief in one’s ability to solve problems diminishes. A person facing crisis thinks: “I can’t solve this; I can only pray.”

3. Psychological dependence: When external forces control outcomes, the person becomes dependent on those forces (and the institutions representing them) for validation and direction.

4. Impaired problem-solving: Under stress, a person with external locus of control is less likely to analyze problems, generate solutions, or advocate for change. They’re more likely to pray, wait, and accept.

Real Neurological Cost

When someone is repeatedly told “God controls your life,” their brain structure actually changes:

• Prefrontal cortex shrinks: This is where rational decision-making happens. With repeated messages that decisions don’t matter, this area becomes less active.

• - Amygdala enlarges: This is the fear center. With repeated messages about divine judgment and the need for submission, anxiety increases.

• - Stress hormones increase: Chronic uncertainty about outcomes (because “God’s plan” is unpredictable) keeps cortisol elevated, damaging immune system and cognitive function.

A person raised in high-control religious environments literally has different brain structure than someone raised with sense of personal agency. This is measurable through fMRI scans.

The Exploitation Cycle

Here’s how the mechanism becomes self-perpetuating:

Stage 1 - Childhood:

Child is taught: “God controls everything; you control nothing.”

• Child’s prefrontal cortex is still developing (doesn’t fully develop until age 25)

• - Child’s neural pathways are plastic—they’re forming around this message

• - Result: Child develops external locus of control as baseline

Stage 2 - Adolescence/Young Adulthood:

Person faces first major crisis (poverty, illness, rejection, loss)

• Person’s instinct: “I will solve this through my action”

• - Religious teaching: “No, surrender to God; pray”

• - Outcome: Sometimes things improve (by chance), sometimes they don’t

• - Person’s brain learning: “My effort was irrelevant; God chose the outcome”

Stage 3 - Adulthood:

Person faces repeated crises

• Each time, institutional message: “Don’t solve; surrender”

• - Each time person surrenders instead of acting, they miss learning opportunity

• - Brain literally doesn’t develop problem-solving neural pathways

• - Result: Person genuinely cannot solve problems effectively; feels they don’t know how

Stage 4 - Institutional Dependence:

Person is now psychologically dependent on institution

• Cannot trust own judgment

• - Cannot solve problems independently

• - Needs institution to interpret reality (“Father knows best”)

• - Will comply with institution’s demands to maintain psychological security

The institution has successfully created a dependent population.

Part 2: The Financial Extraction — From Donations to Exploitation

Historical Pattern: The Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834)

The Spanish Inquisition is not ancient history; it’s a case study in how religious institutions extract wealth under guise of spiritual authority.

The setup:

• Catholic Church controlled Spanish society

• Wealth was concentrated in Jewish and Muslim communities

• Church positioned itself as defender of Christian purity

The mechanism:

• Accusations of heresy (being secretly Jewish or Muslim)

• Torture to extract “confessions”

• Seizure of all property and assets

• Execution or exile

• Wealth transferred to Church

The scale:

• 3,000-5,000 executed

• Hundreds of thousands tortured

• Millions of euros equivalent in property seized

• Church became one of Spain’s wealthiest institutions

The psychological aspect:

• Church framed it as “saving souls” not stealing

• Victims were told their suffering was deserved (heresy)

• Population was taught: “Support the Church or face heresy accusations”

• Result: Religious authority went unchallenged for 350+ years

The lesson:

Religious institution + political power + accusations nobody can disprove = wealth transfer mechanism

Colonial Conversions (16th-20th Centuries): Religion as Colonization Tool

Christian missionaries colonized entire continents under banner of “saving souls.” The actual mechanism was wealth and resource extraction.

How it worked:

Phase 1 - Conversion:

• Missionaries arrive in colonized territory

• Teach: “Your gods are false; Christian God is true”

• Exploit psychological need for authority: “We know truth; you don’t”

• Result: Converted population believes missionaries are spiritual superiors

Phase 2 - Land Seizure:

• Church declares: “This land is now Christian property”

• Converted population has been psychologically taught: “Christian authority is absolute”

• Population doesn’t resist because they’ve surrendered psychological autonomy

• Result: Church/Crown owns land; indigenous people own nothing

Phase 3 - Resource Extraction:

• Church demands “tithes” (10% of production)

• Church demands “donations” for churches, cathedrals

• Population is psychologically taught: “Giving to Church is sacred”

• Result: Wealth flows from colonized people to colonizers

Real example - India:

British colonizers used Christian missionaries to psychologically pacify population:

• Taught Indians: “British rule is God’s will”

• Taught: “Resistance is sin; submission is virtue”

• Taught: “Your culture is backwards; Christian civilization is superior”

Result: Psychological colonization preceded military colonization. By the time resistance began (1857), population had been psychologically convinced of their own inferiority for 100+ years.

The psychological cost:

Entire populations developed external locus of control regarding colonial rule. They believed they couldn’t resist because:

1. Resistance was sin (religious teaching)

2. Colonizers were divinely ordained (religious authority)

3. Their own judgment couldn’t be trusted (psychological dependence created through missionary conversion)

Colonization lasted 200+ years because psychological disempowerment prevented resistance.

Part 3: Modern Exploitation — The Prosperity Gospel

The Prosperity Gospel is religion’s 21st-century evolution: explicit commodification of spirituality, where wealth becomes the measure of godliness.

The Theology

Core teaching:

• Wealth = blessing from God

• Poverty = punishment from God or lack of faith

• To become wealthy: “plant seeds” (donate to church/pastor)

Church promises: “God will multiply your investment”

The Psychological Manipulation

1. Hope exploitation:

• A person in poverty is desperate for change.

• - Pastor says: “God will bless you; send $1,000 as seed offering”

• Desperate person thinks: “This might be my way out of poverty”

• Person borrows money, donates

• Result: Deeper in debt; pastor has extracted wealth

2. Guilt inversion:

When promised wealth doesn’t materialize:

• Pastor says: “You didn’t have enough faith; you didn’t plant big enough seed”

• Person blames themselves: “I failed God”

• Result: Person donates more to “fix” their faith

• Pastor profits from person’s failure

3. Survivorship bias:

• Sometimes person experiences coincidental improvement (job promotion, inheritance, accident settlement)

• Pastor claims: “See? God blessed your seed offering”

• Person’s brain links donation to improvement (even if unrelated)

• Result: Person becomes convinced of pastor’s spiritual power

4. Psychological ownership transfer:

Person’s success is attributed to:

• Pastor’s prayers

• Seed offering

• God’s blessing

• NOT to person’s own work

Result: Person loses sense of agency in their own success.

Real Examples

Benny Hinn - $42 Million Net Worth

Benny Hinn is one of Christianity’s most successful prosperity preachers. His mechanism:

1. Mass events: Holds crusades with 10,000+ people

2. Emotional manipulation: Uses music, lighting, testimonies to create emotional highs

3. ”Seed offerings”: Asks for financial donations during heightened emotional states

4. ”Healing” performances: Claims to heal diseases (most don’t actually recover)

5. Follower testimonies: Showcases people who claim improvement (survivorship bias)

Result: Hinn has accumulated $42 million while his followers remain poor.

Documented cases:

• Followers have donated entire life savings

• Followers have gone into debt based on promises

• Followers have postponed medical treatment (“God will heal through Benny’s prayers”) and died

• Hinn has faced zero legal consequences

Why? Because followers have surrendered psychological autonomy to him. They cannot objectively evaluate his claims because they’ve been taught: “Doubting the man of God is sin.”

Kenneth Copeland - $300 Million Net Worth

Copeland represents the evolved version—mainstream acceptance of wealth accumulation through religion.

He owns:

• Multiple private jets

• Multiple mansions

• Media empire

• International ministry

When criticized for wealth:

• Copeland says: “Flying commercial is spiritual suicide” (implying private jets are spiritually necessary)

• Followers accept this because they’ve surrendered judgment

• Result: Wealth extraction justified through spiritual language

Dera Sacha Sauda (India) - Ongoing Exploitation

Indian spiritual leader Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh:

• Convicted of rape (2013) and murder

• Still commands millions of followers

• Followers continue donating billions annually

• Followers defend him: “He’s spiritually above legal law”

Result: Conviction changed nothing. Psychological dependence overrides legal reality.

Part 4: The Psychological Pattern — Suffering as Sacred

The genius of religious institutions is convincing people that suffering is meaningful, that powerlessness is virtue, that exploitation is sacred.

How This Works

Real scenario:

A single mother works two jobs, still cannot afford rent, still cannot afford healthcare for sick child.

Non-religious interpretation:

“The economic system is exploiting me. I need better wages, cheaper housing, universal healthcare. I should organize with other workers.”

Religious interpretation:

“God is testing my faith. If I stay faithful, God will provide. My suffering purifies my soul. Heaven rewards the suffering. I am blessed to suffer like Jesus.”

The psychological result:

• Instead of anger at exploitation → acceptance as spiritual test

• Instead of organizing for change → praying for divine intervention

• Instead of demanding justice → accepting suffering as virtue

• Person’s energy goes into spiritual acceptance, not material change

The Mechanism: Cognitive Dissonance Reduction

Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance reduction. When reality contradicts belief, the mind must resolve the contradiction.

The contradiction:

• Belief: “God loves me and wants me to prosper”

• Reality: “I’m impoverished and suffering”

How mind resolves this:

The mind cannot accept: “God abandoned me” or “Religious teaching is false” (too destabilizing)

Instead, mind accepts:

• “I deserve suffering because I’m not faithful enough”

• “My suffering is a test of faith”

• “Suffering purifies the soul”

• “Heaven will reward my suffering”

Result: Suffering becomes integrated into worldview as meaningful, even sacred.

The Institutional Benefit

From institution’s perspective, this is perfect. The suffering person:

• Does not organize

• Does not demand change

• Does not question institution

• Continues to donate to institution even while suffering

• Teaches others that suffering is spiritual

Institution profits while person’s suffering is reframed as virtue.

Part 5: Child Abuse & Institutional Immunity

Religious institutions have systematically abused children while using religious authority to suppress accountability.

The Pattern

The Catholic Church - Documented Abuse:

• 1950s-2020: Systematic abuse of altar boys and vulnerable children

• Abusers: Priests, nuns, religious teachers

• Victims: Thousands across continents (Ireland, Australia, USA, Canada, etc.)

• Institutional response: Cover-up, shuffling abusers to different parishes, suppression of investigations

Why it worked:

1. Religious authority: Priest is God’s representative → child cannot report without disrespecting God

2. Psychological manipulation: “This is how priests show love” / “Don’t tell or God will punish you”

3. Institutional immunity: Church claims authority over spiritual matters, exempt from secular law

4. Victim silencing: Survivors told: “If you report, you betray the Church and sin”

The scale:

• Official investigations found 2,500+ cases in Australia alone

• Actual cases likely 10x higher (many never reported due to psychological trauma)

• Criminal prosecutions: Extremely few (most settled as civil cases or ignored)

Psychological Impact on Victims

Abuse survivors face compounded psychological harm:

1. Trauma from abuse: PTSD, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction

2. Spiritual betrayal: The institution that was supposed to protect became the abuser

3. Institutional silence: Speaking up met with further abuse and isolation

4. Delayed justice: Decades passed before institutions were forced to acknowledge

5. Ongoing institutional denial: Church still minimizes abuse, protects abusers in some cases

Why does institution survive?

Despite documented abuse, the Catholic Church still:

• Has 1.3 billion followers

• Controls $10+ billion in annual revenue

• Influences policy in multiple countries

• Faces minimal criminal consequences for cover-ups

Because followers have surrendered psychological autonomy to institution. Psychological dependence overrides logical evaluation.

Part 6: The Contemporary Digitization — Spirituality as Subscription

Religious exploitation has moved online. Digital platforms allow spiritual commodification at unprecedented scale.

TikTok Spiritual Influencers

New model: Young creators monetize spirituality through:

• “Prayer subscriptions” ($5-50/month)

• “Spiritual guidance” DMs ($20-100/session)

• “Divine readings” (tarot, numerology, astrology)

• “Manifestation courses” ($50-500)

The psychology:

• Young people face anxiety, depression, uncertainty

• Traditional institutions feel outdated

• Digital “spiritual guides” offer accessibility and relatability

• Followers develop parasocial relationships (feeling personal connection to influencer)

• Followers willingly pay for “spiritual services”

The exploitation:

• Most influencers have no training, no accountability

• Promises (“I’ll manifest you wealth/love”) are unverifiable

• Followers in crisis are vulnerable to manipulation

• Young people developing external locus of control (“I need spiritual guidance to make decisions”)

The scale:

• Millions of TikTok followers

• Billions of dollars flowing to unaccountable creators

• Zero regulation

Part 7: Why This System Persists

Religious institutions persist despite documented exploitation because:

1. Childhood Conditioning

• Most people are indoctrinated as children

• Child’s developing brain is shaped around external locus of control

• Adult questioning feels like betraying parents, culture, identity

• Psychological cost of leaving is enormous (family rejection, identity loss)

2. Institutional Protection

• - Religious institutions claim exemption from secular law in many contexts

• Tax exemptions mean institutions don’t fund public services

• Political influence protects institutions from accountability

3. Psychological Dependence

• - After years of external locus of control, people cannot imagine autonomous decision-making

• Leaving institution feels like losing foundation of reality

• Psychological cost of recovery is high

4. Community Benefit (Real But Limited)

• - Religious institutions do provide community, support, meaning

• This real benefit makes exploitation harder to see

• “The Church helped me during crisis” (true) → “Therefore the Church deserves my unconditional loyalty” (false conclusion, but psychologically compelling)

Part 8: The Cost — What Religious Institutions Extract

From Individuals:

• Agency: Belief in external locus of control prevents independent decision-making

• Wealth: Tithes, donations, “seed offerings” drain resources

• Time: Hours in worship, prayer, religious community that could be spent on personal development

• Critical thinking: Taught not to question authority; taught faith is virtue, doubt is sin

• Sexual autonomy: Many religions control sexuality; survivors experience shame, dysfunction

• Physical health: Some avoid medical treatment in favor of prayer; some die from preventable illness

• Mental health: Religious trauma, sexual abuse, guilt, anxiety, depression

From Communities:

• Collective power: Religious identity divisions prevent class consciousness (“We’re Catholics vs. Protestants” instead of “We’re workers vs. owners”)

• Resources: Wealth extracted flows upward, not to community members

• Intellectual development: Critical thinking discouraged in favor of dogma

• Gender equality: Most religions teach male superiority; women remain subordinate

• LGBTQ+ inclusion: Many religions condemn LGBTQ+ people; survivors face family rejection, suicide risk

From Society:

• Scientific progress: Religious dogma resists scientific advancement (Galileo forced to recant heliocentrism; evolution still rejected; vaccines opposed)

• Social progress: Religious institutions oppose women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive autonomy

• Economic justice: Religious teaching about accepting suffering prevents economic organizing

• Political consciousness: Religious identity used to mobilize people against their own interests

Toward Recovery: Reclaiming Psychological Agency

Understanding this mechanism is the first step toward recovery. True recovery doesn't start with action; it starts with sight. You cannot dismantle a trap until you clearly see the gears that make it move.

Reclaiming agency means:

1. Recognizing external locus of control: “I’ve been taught that I can’t trust my judgment. But I can learn to.”

2. Recovering critical thinking: “I was taught doubt is sin. But questions are how I learn reality.”

3. Trusting own experience: “I was told my suffering was sacred. Actually, I deserve better. My voice matters.”

4. Collective consciousness: “I was isolated by religious identity. Actually, I’m part of larger working class with shared interests.”

This is psychological work. Leaving high-control religious institutions is comparable to recovering from psychological abuse. It requires:

• Time

• Support from others on similar journey

• Grieving the loss of belief system

• Rebuilding identity separate from institution

• Learning decision-making

• Rebuilding trust (in self and others)

Discussion Questions

1. Personal reflection: Do you have external locus of control in any area of your life? How did it develop?

Community: How does religious identity divide working people from collective action?

Extraction: What wealth has flowed from your community to religious institutions? Where did it go?

Agency recovery: What would reclaiming personal agency look like in your life?

Institutional accountability: Why do religious institutions face less accountability than secular institutions?

What’s Next in This Series

Article 2: Political Systems

How politicians weaponize religion (and the psychology behind it) to mobilize voters while ignoring religious teaching.

Religious disempowerment doesn’t exist in vacuum. Politicians exploit the external locus of control that religion creates.

Khoj means “search.” This is a search for truth obscured by institutional narratives.

Truth is burning. Investigating what power would rather bury. Accountability, human rights, and the record minorities are rarely given the pen to write.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Sikhs made up roughly one to two percent of India’s population. In the British Indian Army, they made up 22% of it — 35,000 of the 161,000 troops at the war’s start, a recruitment ratio more than ten times their share of the population. The British had spent the decades since the 1857 rebellion classifying certain groups as “martial races” and recruiting them accordingly. Punjab, and Sikhs specifically, were the centrepiece of that policy.

The casualty numbers that followed were not proportional. They were catastrophic. At Neuve Chapelle in 1915, Sikh regiments lost 80% of their men; three regiments were reduced to just 16% of their original strength.

15th Sikhs marching into billets, Le Sart, France, 24 July 1915. British Library / public domain.

Gallipoli itself makes the comparison unavoidable, because Indian and Australian troops were fighting the same campaign, against the same guns, at the same time. Roughly 60,000 Australians served across the eight-month Gallipoli campaign; about 8,700 died — a death rate of roughly 14.5% of those who served. Some 16,000 troops of the Indian Army — Gurkhas, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus together — served alongside them, fighting in key actions including Gully Ravine, Gully Spur and Sari Bair; roughly 1,600 died. Zoom into a single unit and the disparity sharpens further: the 14th Sikh Regiment went into the Third Battle of Krithia on 4 June 1915 with 15 British officers, 14 Indian officers, and 514 men — 543 in total. By the end of that one day, 12 British officers, 11 Indian officers, and 371 men were dead or wounded: roughly 73% of the unit, gone in a single attack. By 6 July, after further fighting, the battalion — which had started the campaign at full strength and received reinforcements along the way — was down to two officers and 117 men. Australia’s Gallipoli losses were real and devastating, and nothing here is written to diminish them. But set next to the numbers, the 14th Sikhs didn’t suffer alongside the Anzacs at Gallipoli. They were nearly erased by it. Some Indians didn’t serve in separate Indian Army units at all — a small number enlisted directly into the Australian Imperial Force itself, among them two Indian-Australian soldiers counted among the very first Anzac casualties of the war.

Indian gunners near the Australian 1st Battalion’s camp, White’s Valley, Gallipoli, May 1915. Australian War Memorial C02073 / public domain.

On the Western Front alone, in just fourteen months, the Indian Corps suffered 34,252 casualties, the large majority of them Sikh and Punjabi troops. Roughly 8,000 Sikh soldiers from Punjab never came home from that war.

Here’s what they were told they were fighting for. On 20 August 1917, with the war still grinding on and Indian troops dying by the thousands, Edwin Montagu stood in the House of Commons and made a promise on behalf of the British government: the “gradual development of self-governing institutions” in India, with a view to eventual self-government within the Empire. Nearly 1.5 million Indians had served. More than a million had deployed to actual battlefronts. The declaration was explicit about why it was being made now.

Here’s what they got instead. On 18 March 1919 — four months after the Armistice — the British government passed the Rowlatt Act, extending wartime emergency powers into peacetime: detention without trial, political trials without juries. Every single Indian member of the Imperial Legislative Council voted against it. It passed anyway.

Less than a month later, on 13 April 1919, in Amritsar — the Sikh holy city — a crowd gathered in a walled garden called Jallianwala Bagh. It was Baisakhi, one of the most significant days in the Sikh calendar: pilgrims visiting the Golden Temple, farmers and traders in town for the seasonal fair, families out celebrating. The crowd was predominantly Sikh, with Hindus and Muslims alongside them. Colonel Reginald Dyer marched troops to the garden’s single exit and ordered them to fire into the crowd without warning, without an order to disperse first, directly into the thickest parts of the crowd, until the ammunition ran low. Estimates of the dead range from 379 to over 1,500. More than 1,200 were wounded, 192 of them seriously.

Dyer was removed from active command. He was not imprisoned, court-martialled, or otherwise held to account under British law. Instead, a British newspaper, the Morning Post, launched a public fund praising him for “saving the empire” — and raised over £26,000, worth millions today, from ordinary British citizens who wanted to reward him for it.

The second betrayal came a generation later, and this time it reached Australian soil directly. Roughly 89,000 South Asian personnel died serving the Allied cause in the Second World War; 28 South Asians received the Victoria Cross, five of them Sikh, including Nand Singh for leading an assault on Japanese trenches in Burma. Sikh units fought at Tobruk, at El Alamein, at Kohima. And on 3 March 1942, Flying Officer Man Mohan Singh — a Sikh aviator who, in 1930, had become the first Indian to fly solo from England to India — was at the controls of a Catalina flying boat with No. 205 Squadron when nine Japanese Zeroes attacked Broome, Western Australia. He survived the initial explosion. He couldn’t swim, and drowned in the harbour along with 87 others killed in the same raid. He’s commemorated on the Darwin Military Museum Memorial Wall. A Sikh serviceman died in Australian waters, defending Australian territory from direct attack — not a statistic from some distant front, but a death on the ground this country stands on.

When independence finally came for India in 1947, it arrived with Partition — and the line was drawn straight through Punjab, splitting the Sikh homeland itself in half. The Rawalpindi massacres alone killed 7,000 to 8,000 Sikhs and Hindus in weeks; 80,000 more fled the district by the end of that April. Across Punjab and Bengal combined, death toll estimates for Partition run from 200,000 to over a million. Twelve to eighteen million people were displaced — the largest mass migration in human history.

And in Australia, specifically — the same Commonwealth these soldiers had bled and drowned for — the reward was a closed door, not an open one. Federation in 1901 brought the Immigration Restriction Act, the formal start of the White Australia Policy, the same year the Sikh population in Australia stood at roughly 6,500–7,000. By the 1911 census, restriction had already pushed that number down to under 4,000. During the First World War, the most that changed was a decision to “deal as generously as possible” with applications from Indians who had already lived in Australia before the war and wanted to return — not new immigration, not a reward, just a slightly softer door for people who’d already been let in once. The Second World War opened a narrow practical gap, not a grateful one: wartime conscription of Australian men created labour shortages on banana farms around Woolgoolga, and Sikh workers filled it because someone had to, not because the country was thanking them for Tobruk, Kohima, or Broome. The White Australia Policy itself wasn’t fully dismantled until 1973 — more than half a century after the first war’s sacrifice, thirty-one years after Man Mohan Singh drowned defending the Western Australian coast.

There’s a deeper irony sitting underneath all of it. The land the White Australia Policy was designed to keep demographically “white” was never ceded by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who held it first — a fact Australian law itself didn’t formally reckon with until the 1992 Mabo decision overturned terra nullius, the founding legal fiction that the continent had belonged to no one before 1788. So the policy wasn’t defending a white claim to the land in any legal sense that predates the claim itself. And when that land actually came under direct attack in 1942, the policy had nothing to say and nowhere to stand. It didn’t stop the bombs, and it wasn’t a white pilot in the air that day defending the coastline. It was a Sikh one. The doctrine built entirely around who was allowed to belong here went quiet exactly when belonging was being paid for in blood, by someone the doctrine said didn’t qualify.

And the “door stayed shut” wasn’t about English, or about who’d been loyal to the Commonwealth — the numbers prove that directly. Starting in 1947, just two years after the war Sikh soldiers had died fighting, Australia signed formal assisted-migration agreements with Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, Turkey, and Yugoslavia — none of them Commonwealth countries, none of them English-speaking populations. Under the Displaced Persons Program alone, Australia accepted 170,000 non-British migrants between 1947 and 1953 — equal to roughly 2.2% of the country’s entire population at the time (7,580,820 as of the 1947 census), absorbed in just six years through a single deliberate scheme. The largest groups after the British themselves were Italian and Greek. Between 1946 and 1960, migration added 1.2 million people to Australia — equal to roughly 16% of the country’s 1947 population — more than a third of all population growth in that period.

And when you check what Italy and Greece actually were to Australia during the wars, the comparison gets sharper still. Italy was not a wartime ally of Australia — it was the enemy. At the Battle of Bardia in January 1941, Australia’s 6th Division attacked Italian positions and took more than 40,000 Italian prisoners; days later, the same division captured Tobruk from Italian forces. Australians only faced Rommel’s Afrika Korps afterward, when Germany intervened to save its collapsing Italian ally. Greece, meanwhile, was a country Australia bled to protect, not one that fought for Australia: roughly 17,000 Australians were deployed to defend Greece against the German invasion in 1941, and the campaign was a disaster — about 39% of that force killed, wounded, or captured, 646 dead on the mainland alone, more than 5,000 taken prisoner, 3,000 more left behind on Crete. In neither world war did Italian or Greek troops fight alongside Australians in the same battles under the same command, the way Sikh soldiers did at Gallipoli, on the Western Front, and in the skies over Broome.

Run the comparison the other direction and it doesn’t just fail to balance — it inverts. There is no documented instance, in either world war, of Greek or Italian forces fighting or dying to protect India or South Asia. The only military history connecting Greece to India at all is Alexander the Great’s invasion in 326 BCE — a conquest, not an alliance, nearly 2,250 years too early to be relevant. Indian troops, meanwhile, didn’t just fail to receive Italian sacrifice — they were the ones fighting and dying to help defeat Italy. Indian divisions fought the Italian Army directly in East Africa, capturing the mountain fortress of Keren; across North Africa in the same theatre as Bardia and Tobruk; and then inside Italy itself after its surrender, including the 1943 Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the war’s bloodiest engagements. Indian soldiers helped defeat and then liberate the very country that received mass Australian immigration access two years later — while the soldiers who did the liberating were kept out for another twenty-six years.

The immigration minister running the postwar program said the reason out loud, and it wasn’t about who had served. Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, coined “populate or perish” as the slogan for the very scheme that brought in the Italians, Greeks, and displaced Europeans — and in 1947, defending it to critics, he was explicit: “We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us.” Historian Lachlan Strahan’s assessment of the slogan is blunt: it was “an admonition to fill Australia with Europeans or else risk having it overrun by Asians.” The first displaced-persons group selected, Baltic refugees, were nicknamed the “beautiful Balts” in the press at the time — chosen first specifically because they were fair-skinned and fit the government’s own stated aesthetic preference. Calwell held this position for the rest of his life; his 1972 memoir still argued non-European people shouldn’t be allowed to settle in Australia.

And the people pushing hardest against that community’s descendants today never paid any of the costs this piece just documented. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price claimed Indian-Australians “vote for Labor” using data that doesn’t exist.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. CC0 / Wikimedia Commons.

Pauline Hanson has called for a return to a “monocultural society.”

Senator Pauline Hanson. CC0 / Wikimedia Commons.

Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor blamed migrants for a housing crisis that got worse, not better, when migration collapsed to near zero during COVID

Peter Dutton. CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons.

The organisers of March for Australia — coordinated in part by an actual neo-Nazi group — called for “remigration” while one of their own was recorded saying “we need f***ing violence.”

Angus Taylor. CC BY 2.0 / Stuart Hay, ANU Photography.

None of them stormed a beach at Gallipoli, lost 73% of a battalion in a single afternoon, or drowned off Broome defending this coastline from Japanese bombers. The community they’re targeting already paid the entry fee, in blood, more than a century ago. The people telling them they don’t belong haven’t paid anything at all.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Parliament or organised rallies — it’s still landing in letterboxes. In July 2026, leaflets reading “No Curry in Kurri” were distributed door-to-door across Kurri Kurri in the NSW Hunter region, pushing “remigration” and “preserving culture” — material believed linked to the far-right Australia First party. Local Labor MP Dan Repacholi condemned it directly: “Racism is not welcome in Kurri, it is not welcome in the Hunter, and it will not go unchallenged,” calling his community “stronger than hate and division.” No one has been identified or charged over the distribution. It’s a smaller incident than a national rally or a Senate speech, but it shows the throughline clearly: the same rhetoric — remigration, cultural preservation, a name-your-own-town slur — that organised the “mainstream” rallies is still being printed on flyers and put directly into people’s letterboxes, more than a century after the first Sikh soldier died for the empire that would eventually run this country.

We’re going to let the sequence speak for itself. A community that was roughly 2% of the population and supplied over a fifth of the army. A death rate at Gallipoli far above the Australians fighting the same campaign, and a single Sikh battalion nearly wiped out in one day. A promise of self-government, made explicitly in exchange for that service. A massacre of the war’s own veterans and their families, on their own holy day, in their own holy city, less than a year after the guns fell silent — followed by a public reward for the man who ordered it. A second war, a Sikh airman drowning in Australian waters defending Australian soil, and a homeland split in half as the reward for finally winning independence. And in the Commonwealth country he died defending, a door that stayed formally shut until 1973 — while a defeated wartime enemy and a nation Australia had sacrificed to protect were both actively recruited by the hundreds of thousands, for reasons the immigration minister himself put in writing. Whether that’s a pattern or a coincidence repeated seven times is not something we’re going to resolve for you.

This is the tenth piece in Khoj’s series.

Sources:

Sikhs in the British Indian Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhs_in_the_British_Indian_Army

Indian Army during World War I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_I

Indian Army during World War II: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Army_during_World_War_II

Australian War Memorial — Gallipoli fatalities: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/gallipoli/fatalities

14th King George’s Own Ferozepore Sikhs at Gallipoli — IWM: https://livesofthefirstworldwar.iwm.org.uk/community/4269

Man Mohan Singh (pilot) — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Mohan_Singh_(pilot)

Jallianwala Bagh massacre — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre

Britannica — Jallianwala Bagh Massacre: https://www.britannica.com/event/Jallianwala-Bagh-Massacre

Rowlatt Act — Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/Rowlatt-Act

Partition of India — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

1947 Rawalpindi massacres — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Rawalpindi_massacres

Sikhs in Australia — history and migration: https://sheppartoninterfaith.org.au/?p=2546

White Australia policy — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy

Post-war immigration to Australia — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-war_immigration_to_Australia

ABS — 1947 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia: https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2109.01947?OpenDocument=

Battle of Bardia — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bardia

Australian War Memorial — Greek campaign, 1941: https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/greek_campaign

National Museum of Australia — Ending the White Australia policy: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/end-of-white-australia-policy

The Australia Today — “No Curry in Kurri”: https://www.theaustraliatoday.com.au/no-curry-in-kurri-labor-mp-dan-repacholi-condemns-racist-leaflets-targeting-indian-migrants/

He was born here. He speaks only English — no accent to explain, no other language at home. He is, by every measure that’s supposed to matter, a second-generation Australian. None of that mattered to the ticket officer who sold him a seasonal travel pass and, as an aside, mentioned it would still be valid if he handed it to someone else “when you go home.”

He was already home.

The story comes from research by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller, a linguist at Macquarie University who has spent years studying how migrants and their children actually experience daily life in Australia — not the policy debates about them, the lived texture of it. The ticket officer’s comment, she notes, was the “benign” end of what this man dealt with; he also copped racist insults shouted from passing cars. Two very different registers of the same message: you don’t belong here, no matter what your birth certificate says.

Researchers have a name for this: the perpetual foreigner effect. It doesn’t require an accent, a visa, or even a memory of anywhere else. It just requires not looking like what “Australian” is assumed to look like. Piller’s research, drawing on interviews with more than 130 migrants, includes Eva, originally from Chile, describing it after nearly two decades as an Australian citizen: “You feel it most of the time. In the silly things.” Not the big, dramatic incidents — the accumulation of small ones.

And the accumulation has a measurable cost, not just a felt one. A cross-sectional survey of 1,139 Australians from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds found nearly two-thirds — about 64% — had experienced at least one discriminatory incident in the previous twelve months. Overall, 17.5% scored in the high or very-high range for psychological distress. But among those facing frequent discrimination, that jumped to 42.3%. The relationship wasn’t flat, it was a dose-response curve: people with a medium level of discrimination exposure had 3.49 times higher odds of severe psychological distress than people with none. People with high exposure had 14.93 times higher odds. The specific settings that hurt most: shops and stores, and workplaces and government offices — the exact everyday places where a comment like the ticket officer’s happens.

Here’s the number that frames why this matters at scale, not just individually: migrants make up roughly 30% of Australia’s population. A third of the country was born overseas. A quarter speak a language other than English at home. This isn’t a small, easily-ignored group being asked “where are you really from” — it’s a substantial share of the country being quietly informed, in ways ranging from a ticket-counter aside to a shout from a car window, that citizenship and birthplace don’t buy you the same “Australian” a new arrival from the UK gets handed on landing.

And it’s not a one-off finding. Western Sydney University’s Challenging Racism Project — the country’s largest ongoing study of this, surveying over 12,500 people — found that 79.3% of Australians themselves acknowledge racism exists here. Roughly a third of people report experiencing it on public transport, at work, and in education, each measured separately. Nearly two-thirds expressed discomfort with Muslim Australians specifically; over half with people of Middle Eastern background; over 43% with African Australians. These aren’t fringe numbers from an edge case. They’re describing something close to a national default setting.

We’re not going to tell you how to feel about a stranger telling a citizen to go “home.” The research is the research: a linguist’s fieldwork, a national survey with 12,500-plus respondents, a dose-response relationship between discrimination and psychological harm measured across more than a thousand people, a direct quote from someone twenty years into citizenship still noticing “the silly things.” What we’ll say is that “where are you really from” isn’t a question about geography. It’s a test, and the fact that some Australians never stop being asked it — no matter how long they’ve lived here, no matter how many generations — is the actual finding. What that means for the country asking it is yours to sit with.

This is the ninth piece in Khoj’s series.

Sources:

Australian Academy of the Humanities — “Being treated as a migrant in Australia,” Prof. Ingrid Piller: https://humanities.org.au/power-of-the-humanities/being-treated-as-a-migrant-in-australia/

Perpetual foreigner — background concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_foreigner

Western Sydney University — Challenging Racism Project, 2015–16 National Survey: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/challengingracism/challenging_racism_project/our_research/face_up_to_racism_2015-16_national_survey

Mental health impacts of racial discrimination in Australian CALD communities — cross-sectional survey: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4412110/

Corrective Services NSW employs 10,610 people. Their own 2024–25 Annual Report includes a workforce diversity table most departments don’t bother publishing: 11.6% of CSNSW staff report that their first language as a child was not English — against a stated benchmark of 23.2%. Roughly half the target. The department’s own report flags a data-quality dispute on top of that: the figure submitted to the Premier’s Department, using a different methodology, comes out even lower — 5.2%. Whichever number you use, it’s well under half of where the benchmark says it should be.

Corrections Victoria runs a comparable system — 3,509 custodial officers, 3,405 FTE. Their equivalent annual report doesn’t publish a CALD figure at all. We checked both official documents directly. It isn’t there. What Victoria does publish is a workforce-wide turnover rate that nearly doubled in two years: 10.9 per 100 FTE (2022–23) → 12.6 (2023–24) → 18.1 (2024–25). Eighty-eight per cent of workplace injury claims in the department occur specifically in custodial operations — so whatever is driving that turnover spike, custodial staff are carrying most of it.

So where in the process does the gap actually open up? Both states run applicants through a real assessment centre, not just a resume screen. Victoria’s own recruitment material confirms it: after an initial 25–30 question situational-judgment screen and a video interview, candidates face an assessment centre with a role play, a group activity, a written literacy test, and a problem-solving exercise. NSW’s process is similar in structure, if less detailed publicly.

Here’s what the actual research says about that kind of testing — and it doesn’t point in one clean direction. Situational judgment tests, the type used at these assessment centres, show mixed results internationally: some studies find they cause less bias than pure cognitive tests, and in at least one medical-residency selection study, underrepresented candidates did better on the situational test than the cognitive one. Other research finds the opposite — persistent performance gaps that get worse the more a test relies on fast verbal processing under pressure, and shift depending on whether it asks “what would you do” versus “what should you do.” Separately, general research on cultural bias in testing is consistent on one point: assessments built on idioms, colloquialisms, and culturally specific scenarios measure familiarity with the dominant culture as much as they measure the actual skill.

And then there’s a finding that complicates the tidy version of this story. A rigorous Australian government trial — over 2,100 Australian Public Service employees across 15 agencies, run as a randomised controlled experiment — tested blind (de-identified) CVs against named ones. The result ran against the obvious assumption: minority candidates were more likely to be shortlisted when their names were visible than when the CVs were fully blind. The researchers’ own conclusion was that de-identification doesn’t reliably help diversity, and that bias in Australian hiring may be doing more damage at other stages of the process than at the resume stage. That doesn’t cancel out the Monash and ANU findings from earlier in this series — those compared an ethnic name against an Anglo name, not a visible name against no name at all. Both results can be true simultaneously. But it means the fix isn’t as simple as “remove the names,” and anyone telling you it is hasn’t looked at the Australian data.

So has either state actually changed the test itself in response to any of this? No — what’s changed is the money, not the method. Victoria now offers new recruits who apply after 1 May 2025 a $5,000 sign-on bonus, plus up to $10,000 in relocation support for the Geelong region tied to the new Western Plains Correctional Centre. An earlier bonus structure paid $8,000 in staged instalments — $4,000 at six months, $4,000 at twelve — deliberately timed so people don’t take the money and immediately leave. Victoria’s Prison Workforce Strategy, launched October 2024, introduces a new “Competency Framework” and commits to “a consistent and evidence-based approach to recruitment” — but the strategy document doesn’t specify what, if anything, changes about the actual assessment format. The government’s own official response to the Cultural Review stops at general language about “training and support… regarding diversity and inclusion in recruitment and selection” — no commitment to redesign the test itself. The role play, the group activity, the written test: as far as the public record shows, unchanged.

What we can’t tell you, because no one has published it: whether the assessment-centre role-play stage specifically disadvantages non-English-background applicants in Australian corrections recruitment. We looked. It isn’t tracked, and no media investigation has produced it either. What we can tell you is what the two departments’ own numbers show — one state with a measured, undershot diversity target, one state that doesn’t measure it at all, a national research record on hiring bias that’s more complicated than either side of this argument usually admits, and two departments responding to a documented racism and retention crisis with signing bonuses rather than a redesigned test.

This is the eighth piece in Khoj’s series, and probably the most honest one about where the evidence runs out.

Sources:

CSNSW Annual Report 2024–25, Volume 1: https://correctiveservices.dcj.nsw.gov.au/resources/policies-and-publications/annual-reports.html

DJCS Victoria Annual Report 2024–25: https://www.justice.vic.gov.au/annual-reports/annual-report-2024-25

Corrections Victoria — prison officer recruitment process: https://www.justice.vic.gov.au/careers/prison-officer-careers/prison-officer-recruitment-process

PM&C — unconscious bias in APS shortlisting: https://www.pmc.gov.au/beta/projects/unconscious-bias-australian-public-service-shortlisting-processes

Subgroup differences in situational judgment test performance — meta-analysis: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232818876_Subgroup_Differences_in_Situational_Judgment_Test_Performance_A_Meta-Analysis

Victorian Government response to the Cultural Review: https://www.vic.gov.au/victorian-government-response-cultural-review-adult-custodial-corrections-system

March for Australia was pitched as an ordinary protest about immigration numbers. That’s not what the people running it were saying when they thought only their own audience was listening — and it’s not who they turn out to be, once you check the public record.

Bec Freedom, the pseudonymous national coordinator who organised the Sydney rally, was recorded saying: “We need violence, I’m sorry, but we need fucking violence.” She apologised only after journalists confronted her with the recording — not before it surfaced. Her real identity has never been established in credible public reporting, and we’re not going to speculate on it here — unmasking a pseudonymous figure without verified sourcing isn’t journalism, it’s guesswork with someone’s safety attached.

In a separate recorded livestream, Freedom laid out the actual strategy: soften the language in stages until it sounds acceptable. “Protect Australian heritage” first. Then “protect European culture.” Then, eventually, “protect white heritage.” The point, in her own words, was that each version tests better with a mainstream audience than the one before it.

The organisational side is where the public record gets specific. ABC News Verify and The Age found that members of the National Socialist Network — Australia’s most prominent neo-Nazi group — worked as marshals and speakers at rallies branded as ordinary community protests. That group’s leader, Thomas Sewell, personally addressed the Melbourne rally in August, and his own court history is a matter of public record, not allegation: in March 2021 he assaulted a Channel Nine security guard outside the network’s Melbourne office, repeatedly punching him in the face after he fell. Sewell pleaded guilty to violent disorder over that incident in August 2023 and was sentenced that October to one month and seven days — already covered by time served on remand. In 2025 he was charged with 25 further offences, including violent disorder, affray, assault, and discharging a missile; he was committed to stand trial in the County Court in March 2026, and that case remains unresolved — charged, not convicted, and we’re stating it that way deliberately. Separately, in June 2026, he was sentenced to a community work order over an unrelated 2024 stunt outside the Chinese Consulate.

NSN member Zachery Hook organised the Canberra leg of the rally outright. At a later Sydney rally in January 2026, attendees carried signs supporting a jailed NSN member. Organisers actively pointed attendees toward the White Australia Party — reported as the NSN’s political arm.

Hugo Lennon, the Melbourne organiser (online alias “Auspill”), is where the “protecting ordinary Australians” framing runs into its own contradiction: reporting describes him as heir to a wealthy property-development family who built an online following as a far-right influencer. When he took the stage in Melbourne, the crowd chanted “Heil Hugo.” He has no documented criminal record that we could find — worth stating plainly, since the point of this piece is precision, not maximal accusation. He was more recently removed by Victoria Police within minutes after heckling Prime Minister Modi at a Melbourne hotel, but no arrest or charge has been confirmed from that incident either.

The rally’s own website initially referenced “remigration” — mass deportation of non-white immigrants — and “the great replacement” before those terms were quietly deleted from public view.

None of this was funded by a single traceable pot of money we could find — no institutional backer, no disclosed donor list. What amplified it instead was attention, supplied for free by people with enormous platforms: Elon Musk retweeted inflated attendance claims (150,000, against a police estimate of roughly a third of that nationwide) and separately posted “remigration is the only way.” Alex Jones retweeted a claim of half a million attendees. Tommy Robinson and Jack Posobiec both gave the rallies high-profile online support.

So here’s the actual shape of it, checked against what’s provable, no more and no less: a rally marketed as mainstream concern about immigration numbers was coordinated in part by a person recorded calling for violence and workshopping how to disguise white nationalist language, staffed in part by an actual neo-Nazi organisation whose own leader has a real assault conviction and a pending 25-count criminal case, fronted in Melbourne by the wealthy heir of a property family, and amplified globally by some of the internet’s largest accounts — for free. Whether the tens of thousands of ordinary attendees knew who was actually running the event they showed up to is a separate question, and probably a fair one to ask them.

This is the seventh piece in Khoj’s series, and it deepens what article three already reported: the flyer’s numbers didn’t hold up, and neither does the claim that this was simply a grassroots immigration protest.

Sources:

Wikipedia — March for Australia, organiser documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Australia

Wikipedia — Thomas Sewell court record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sewell_(neo-Nazi)

The New Daily — Sewell sentencing, June 2026: https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/crime-news/2026/06/30/thomas-sewell-sentenced

The Conversation — how the rallies were amplified online by the global far right: https://theconversation.com/how-australias-anti-immigration-rallies-were-amplified-online-by-the-global-far-right-264269

NRI Affairs — Hugo Lennon at Modi’s Melbourne hotel: https://www.nriaffairs.com/hugo-lennon-modi-melbourne-protest-2026/

Treasury has a model for this. It’s called FIONA — Fiscal Impact of New Australians — and it does something the political debate never bothers to do: it actually runs the numbers on what a person costs and contributes to the country’s budget over their lifetime, government service by government service, tax dollar by tax dollar.

The finding, straight from Treasury’s own modelling: a migrant contributes on average $127,000 more to federal and state budgets over a lifetime than a member of the general population. For skilled migrants specifically, the lifetime net fiscal contribution is $319,000.

The mechanism isn’t mysterious, and it isn’t about migrants being “better” than anyone born here. It’s about who paid for childhood. An Australian-born 25-year-old has had 25 years of publicly funded healthcare, 13 years of publicly funded schooling, and whatever else the state spent raising them to working age — all of it paid before they’ve earned a dollar of tax revenue back. A skilled migrant who arrives at 25 already educated, already trained, already healthy, skips straight to the paying-tax part of the ledger. Australia gets the working years without having paid for the childhood ones. Treasury’s own documentation is explicit about this: age at arrival is one of the two main drivers of fiscal impact, alongside labour market performance.

Run that logic forward and the cost of reversing it becomes a real number, not a guess. Modelling on cutting skilled migration by 135,000 over four years puts the loss at $34 billion in tax revenue, net of the government services those migrants would have used, over their lifetimes in Australia. Australia’s international student pipeline alone is projected to convert into roughly 130,000 skilled migrants entering the workforce after graduation — Deloitte Access Economics estimates that adds $8.7 billion to GDP.

None of this is about which twenty-five-year-old is a better person. It’s an accounting fact: one of them arrived pre-paid for by another country’s schools and hospitals, and the other didn’t. Treasury ran the numbers because budgets need real numbers, not vibes. The political rhetoric — “cut migration, it’s a drain” — doesn’t survive contact with the department’s own modelling. What you do with that contradiction is up to you.

This is the fifth piece in Khoj’s series. A crime-rate comparison for this same age bracket is coming — but only once there’s data specific and current enough to stand behind, not before.

Sources:

Treasury — the lifetime fiscal impact of the Australian permanent migration program: https://treasury.gov.au/publication/p2021-220773

The Conversation — how simple changes to skilled migration could add billions a year: https://theconversation.com/how-simple-changes-to-australias-skilled-migration-program-could-add-billions-a-year-to-the-economy-285140

International Education value report — Australian Government: https://internationaleducation.gov.au/research/research-papers/Documents/ValueInternationalEd.pdf

On 31 August 2025, rallies branded “March for Australia” hit every state and territory capital — Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, Hobart, Darwin, Townsville. Police estimated more than 50,000 people turned out nationwide. Promotional flyers circulated ahead of the marches singled out one migrant group by name: “More Indians in five years than Greeks and Italians in 100,” citing the Indian-Australian population’s growth from roughly 423,000 to 845,800 between 2013 and 2023, framed as cultural displacement. At the Sydney rally, an Indian-origin man was shoved while attempting to speak from the stage.

Three days later, on 3 September 2025, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price sat down with ABC’s Patricia Karvelas on Background Briefing. Asked about migration policy, she said:

“And only because there’s been large numbers, and we can see that reflected in the way that the community votes for Labor at the same time.”

Pressed on whether she was suggesting the government was deliberately importing Labor voters, she continued:

“Labor like to be able to ensure that they’re going to allow those in that would ultimately support their policies, their views, and vote for them as well.”

The backlash was immediate. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called on her to apologise. She didn’t. She called the remarks “clumsy” but maintained she had “nothing to apologise for.” Days later, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley removed Price from the Coalition frontbench — her own party’s leadership judged the comments indefensible enough to cost her the job, even without an apology forcing the point.

Australia’s Human Rights Commission president, Hugh de Kretser, put it plainly: “These attacks on migrants must stop.” The NSW government convened community groups to address the rising hostility directly.

What the numbers actually say, checked against the claims:

“1,500 migrants arrive every day” (~457,000/year) — misleading by conflation. That figure counts gross arrivals and departures, including temporary visa holders and students cycling in and out repeatedly, each crossing counted again. Actual net overseas migration: 536,000 (2022–23 peak) → 446,000 (2023–24) → projected to fall into the 300,000s. The number was already dropping before the rally happened.

“More Indians in five years than Greeks and Italians in 100” — technically true in raw headcount, misleading without scale. ANU demographer Peter McDonald’s math: post-WWII Greek and Italian migration ran at roughly 0.2% of Australia’s population per year for 25 years. Recent Indian migration runs at roughly 0.22% per year — essentially the same proportional rate, compared across two wildly different population bases to manufacture a scarier-looking number.

“This is replacement, plain and simple” — not misleading, false, and traceable to a specific source. This is “great replacement theory” language, the same framework cited by the Christchurch mosque shooter. The mundane explanation: India has high English proficiency, which makes more applicants eligible under the skilled-migration points system Australia itself built.

“The majority is with us” (53% think migration is too high) — accurate but selectively quoted. Same Lowy Institute poll, same year: 69% of Australians said cultural diversity has been positive for the country. Citing one number and dropping the other turns “concerns about volume” into “opposition to diversity” — two different claims, only one supported by the data.

And the one that settles the rest: Australia’s electoral roll does not collect ethnicity data. At all. It’s a secret ballot system — the certified voter list holds name, address, date of birth, and gender, nothing else. No government body, including the Australian Electoral Commission, publishes voting statistics by ethnicity. Price’s claim about how “the Indian community votes” isn’t just unsupported by evidence she didn’t cite — there is no dataset in existence that could have produced it.

Context the flyers and the rally left out: India became Australia’s largest overseas-born migrant group in June 2025 — 971,020 Indian-born residents as of that count. Vasan Srinivasan, president of the Federation of Indian Associations of Victoria, responded to the moment this way: “Ninety-nine per cent of Indians who come here come with skills.” On the people driving the rhetoric, he was direct: “It’s not the majority of Australians. It’s a very small section.”

We’re going to let those numbers and quotes sit next to each other without telling you what conclusion to draw. A flyer campaign singled out one country’s migrants by name, using a comparison that doesn’t hold up once you check the scale. A sitting senator made a claim about that same community’s voting habits that no data source could have generated. Her own party decided the comments didn’t hold up either. Whether that’s unrelated data points or one story — that’s for you to decide.

This is the third piece in Khoj’s series — one event, sourced and dated, no embellishment. The first showed what’s said when no one’s supposed to be listening. The second showed what happens before the interview even starts. This one shows what happens when it’s said out loud, on the record, by someone with a national platform — and what happens when you check it against the numbers.

Sources:

SBS News — fact-checking March for Australia’s claims: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/fact-checkers-assess-march-for-australia-immigration-claims/8yorv67wp

SBS News — Liberals distance from Price’s remark: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/liberals-distance-themselves-from-prices-indian-migrant-remark-as-backlash-grows/f4471dxhb

SBS News — how the migration debate is reshaping life for Indian-Australians: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/australia-migration-debate-impact-indian-community/x4odvgt98

Business Standard — anti-immigration rallies target Indians: https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/australia-violence-as-anti-immigration-rallies-target-indians-125090100672_1.html

Australian Electoral Commission — enrolment data fields: https://www.aec.gov.au/enrolling_to_vote/enrolment_stats/

Yu Hung was four when she came to Australia from Taiwan. In her mostly white Brisbane school, her parents suggested she go by “Judy” — easier for teachers, easier to fit in. It backfired. The English name read as old-fashioned and made her stand out more, not less, and every roll call still produced what she calls an “ethnic pause” before someone attempted her real name anyway. By university she’d had enough of explaining the mismatch and went back to Yu — her legal name, the one on her documents, the one that “exists.”

“You prefer that name,” she says now, “because you can’t pronounce my name.”

That’s a school story. It doesn’t stay one.

Monash University, 2025 — Dr. Mladen Adamovic and Professor Andreas Leibbrandt ran the largest resume audit of its kind in Australia: 12,000 resumes sent to 4,000+ real job ads. Three identical applications per job — one with an English name, two with non-English names — across six ethnic groups: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Indian, and English. Every applicant, regardless of name, was described as born in Australia, educated in Australia, and with Australian work experience. That detail matters: it removes the standard excuse. This wasn’t about overseas qualifications or “cultural fit” or unfamiliar degrees. Same résumé. Same schooling. Same country of birth. Only the name changed.

For leadership roles, English names got a 26.8% callback rate. Non-English names got 11.3% — a 57.4% reduction, for the exact same paper qualifications. For non-leadership roles, the gap was 45.3% fewer callbacks.

This isn’t a new finding, either. Back in 2009, ANU researchers Alison Booth, Andrew Leigh, and Elena Varganova ran a similar experiment across Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney and found the same shape: to land the same number of interviews as an applicant with an Anglo-Saxon name, a Chinese-named applicant had to send 68% more applications, a Middle Eastern-named applicant 64% more, an Indigenous-named applicant 35% more. Sixteen years and a much larger sample later, the number moved, but the pattern didn’t.

And the “we just can’t find the local experience” story doesn’t explain the rest of the picture either. More than 600,000 permanent migrants in Australia are currently working below their qualification level, despite persistent shortages in engineering, teaching, health, and trades. Overseas-trained doctors face a second, separate licensing process even after clearing the visa’s own skills assessment — and in 2016, 41 medical specialties were deliberately removed from the skilled migration list. If the qualifications genuinely weren’t recognisable, that’s a credentialing problem with a fix. If the qualifications are fine and the name on the CV is what’s doing the work, that’s a different problem entirely — and the data says it’s the second one.

It shows up again at the very top. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Leading for Change research found 97% of Australian chief executives are Anglo-Celtic or European background. Among ASX 200 CEOs specifically: 72.5% Anglo-Celtic, 23.5% European, 4% non-European. Australians with non-European or Indigenous backgrounds make up roughly 24% of the population — and about 5% of senior leaders.

We’re not going to tell you what to call this. Maybe it’s unconscious. Maybe some of it isn’t. The resumes were identical; only the names moved, and the callback rate moved with them, twice, sixteen years apart, at a scale of 12,000 data points. What you decide that means is yours to decide.

This is the second piece in Khoj’s series. The first showed what gets said to people once they’re already in a job nobody local wanted. This one shows what happens before they even get the interview.

Sources:

Monash University — resume callback study: https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/study-confirms-english-sounding-names-get-more-call-backs-from-job-applications-than-ethnic-names

SBS Insight — Yu Hung’s story: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/article/yu-went-by-an-anglicised-name-for-almost-two-decades-until-it-became-exhausting/rsmavlsbc

ANU / RSSS — 2009 resume audit study: https://cass.anu.edu.au/news/minorities-find-it-harder-get-jobs-rsss-research-study

AHRC — Leading for Change: https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/race-discrimination/publications/leading-change-blueprint-cultural-diversity-and-0

Somewhere on an Australian highway, a truck driver keys his CB radio to share a traffic hazard. The channel exists for exactly that — road conditions, breakdowns, safety calls between strangers who happen to share a lane. It is also, according to an ABC News investigation, where some drivers say things like this to their Indian-born colleagues:

“A good Indian is a dead Indian.”

“We’re going to kill all the fucking male Indians, drown all the fucking kids and we’re going to sell all their women into fucking slavery.”

“There’s a civil war coming. We’ll kill the male Indians.”

The recordings were captured undercover and broadcast by ABC News. One driver, Pippal Singh, recorded threats himself while driving between Melbourne and Adelaide — the CB radio doubling as both his tool and his exposure. Every Indian-origin driver ABC spoke to said they had experienced racism on the job. Jaswinder Boparai was spat on at a South Australian truck stop while speaking Punjabi to his wife on the phone. Narinder Singh was mocked for wearing a turban and told to “go back” over minor workplace mistakes. Many of these drivers are already Australian citizens. They’re filling a shortage the industry itself says it cannot cover locally — Australia was short an estimated 28,000 heavy vehicle drivers as of 2024.

Some now avoid the radio altogether, cutting themselves off from the shared safety channel their job depends on, because using it means listening to strangers discuss killing people who look like them.

No one has been charged. Identifying an anonymous voice on a shared CB channel, drivers told ABC, is close to impossible. Since July 2023, the Australian Human Rights Commission has logged 12 complaints from the trucking sector — just two from people identifying as Indian or Sikh, a number that likely undercounts a problem drivers describe as routine but unreportable.

This pattern isn’t unique to Australia — it’s the same playbook seen abroad. In the United States, a 2025 analysis by the Network Contagion Research Institute found anti-Indian posts on X nearly tripled year-on-year, driven overwhelmingly by H-1B visa politics — 24,000+ posts, 300 million+ views, with just a handful of accounts responsible for over 10% of all likes. A separate US-focused study by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found the same dynamic: a small number of highly active accounts manufacturing outsized “support” that looks organic but isn’t. Different country, different visa program, same mechanic — a minority of loud accounts making hate look like majority opinion.

What we’re not going to do here is tell you how to feel about it. The quotes are the quotes, captured on tape, broadcast by a national public broadcaster, linked below for anyone who wants to verify them directly. Whether targeting a stranger’s family for death and slavery over a public radio channel is defensible as “just an opinion,” or where free speech ends and incitement begins — that’s a judgment for you to make, not one Khoj is going to make for you.

What Khoj will keep doing is showing up with the next one. This is the first in a series — each piece anchored to one verifiable event, one set of sourced facts, no embellishment. Racism against minorities being routine in Australia isn’t an accusation. It’s a pattern, and patterns are made of individual, documented events. This was one of them.

Sources:

ABC News — “The racism problem plaguing Australia’s truck driving industry”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcb0KvDzf3A

Indian Weekender NZ, reporting the ABC investigation: https://www.indianweekender.co.nz/news/a-good-indian-is-a-dead-indian-indian-truck-drivers-reveal-shocking-racist-abuse-in-australia

NCRI — “From Policy Drift to Purity Grift” (US data, cited as international comparison): https://networkcontagion.us/reports/from-policy-drift-to-purity-grift-how-a-small-network-hijacked-the-immigration-debate/

CSOH — “Anti-Indian Racism on X, July–September 2025” (US data, cited as international comparison): https://www.csohate.org/2025/09/16/anti-indian-racism-on-x-july-september-2025/