By now, the world has heard the recording of George Floyd pleading, “I can’t breathe … Mama, I love you” as a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, held his knee down on the 46-year-old African American man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.Chauvin knew Floyd. Both worked security for the same night-club and had 'butted heads' in the past. There may be more to this story. Were drugs being distributed in the night-club or its vicinity? These are matters which have to be thoroughly investigated.
Since this killing, cities and towns all across America have erupted in mostly peaceful protests.But protests have also been violent. Who gains by this? Donald Trump. A year ago, he targeted Biden for his '94 Crime Bill which Trump claims is responsible for the discriminatory policing and sentencing African Americans face. The 'peaceful protests' have effectively killed off the lockdown which means Employment will bounce back by November thus strengthening Trump's prospects for a second term. The 'woke' Left has smoothed Trump's path for him. Similarly, LBJ was not able to reap the benefits of his Civil Rights and 'Great Society' reforms. Nixon took the White House.
These protests are the most widespread and serious the nation has experienced since the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968.And benefit only the Republicans.
I am moved to write this piece because rather than focus on the explicit violence of Floyd’s killing and the undeniable violence of the US police, spraying the protesters with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets, the media and so many conversations on social media, are characterising the protesters as violent. While it is true that there has been looting and property damage, and also some violence on the part of protesters – which is wrong and unfortunate – the majority of protesters have been remarkably peaceful.There is nothing remarkable in peaceful protesters being peaceful. What is remarkable is their stupidity in not seeing that it would give rise to violence and that this violence would help Trump.
A recent paper by Devi & Fryer shows that where 'viral violence' causes calls for Police reform, crime goes up because the Police stop doing their job. This leads to a backlash towards the status quo ante. By contrast, 'Pattern or Practice' reform, based on consent decrees, is effective in reducing both crime as well as police brutality.
I am a human rights activist.A shit one. You have achieved nothing. You are merely a 'virtue signaller'.
I bring social justice issues into my Hindu community spaces, and bring a progressive and inclusive Hindu voice and presence to the struggles of our time.In other words, you tell stupid lies about Modi.
As such, I tend to claim “ahimsa” – non-violence – as one of my ideals.Because you'd look stupid claiming to be Rambo.
Ahimsa, to me, is always gentleness of thought, word and deed; a willingness to seek connection and resolution rather than conflict, an openness to engage in dialogue.When have you ever been gentle and kind to Modi or upholders of Hindutva? Never. You tell stupid lies about them. Why be a member of something called 'The Coalition against Fascism in India'? Mussolini and Hitler died long ago. Nobody wants to be a Fascist in India because those few who know what the word means also know that Fascism failed spectacularly. An autocrat can be assassinated- as the history of the Gandhi dynasty amply demonstrates. To wield power safely you must do so by legal and democratic means. If you make honest mistakes, the public will forgive you. If you lose an election, you might still return to power when the other side messes up. Authoritarians get assassinated or strung up like Mussolini, Bhutto, Saddam or Gaddafi.
There is the line in the Upanishads, “Atithi Devo Bhava.” Be one for whom the guest (one you do not know) is god.This is nonsense. The guest is someone you know is worthy of honor. She is not some nameless hooker or thief. What the Taitriyya Upanishad says is matrudevo bhava, pitrudevo bhava, acharyadevo bhava, atithidevo bhava. Mother, father, Acharya and honored Guest are all people known to deserve the highest respect. This not to say that an unknown person not suitable to be a guest or preceptor is not worthy of worship. To a spiritually advanced person, God may be worshipped in the form of serial rapist or murderous thug. But this is not a Scriptural teaching. It would be better for you to beat and chase away any such person who tries to enter your house.
To truly achieve this, to truly see the divine in a rapist or a murderer, someone filled with hate: for me, this has always been the lofty aspiration of ahimsa.Then why not start with Fascists? Why not worship White Supremacists? Why not do Puja for Officer Chauvin?
What is ahimsa?Non-violence by thought word and deed. Violently denouncing Trump or Modi is not ahimsa. It is merely a self-defeating type of stupidity.
Today, I am challenging myself to think through what “ahimsa” is in the face of tyranny and state-sponsored murder. Am I capable of seeing the divine in Officer Derek Chauvin or the Hindu mobs that lynched Muslims in India while chanting “Jai Shri Ram,” or those who killed a 12-year-old Dalit girl in Nepal last week and left her hanging from a tree?Who cares? There is nothing divine in this stupid type of histrionic virtue signalling.
Am I capable of seeing the divine in the heads of state of the two countries I call home? And since I cannot, what is ahimsa for me?It is talking worthless shite as an exercise in personal vanity.
I went through a training in non-violent resistance organised by the Poor People’s Campaign a few years ago.It was useless.
We were divided into activists and police. I was an activist. As the police came to arrest us, we knelt down, linked arms and sang. We sang even as our human chain was forced apart and we were dragged away by the police.Has this lady been spending a lot of time in jail for protesting various injustices in her neighborhood? No. So this 'training' just fed her vanity. I may undergo training in 'twerking' but this does not mean I become the equal of Beyonce. The fact is, even if this lady is arrested charges will be dropped or only a minimal fine will be imposed. Why? This silly sausage doesn't get that East Indians aren't 'Black' in the same way as African Americans. Her ancestors were not kidnapped and sold into slavery. They were simply too stupid to rule themselves and so preferred to pay a handful of Whites a lot of money to run their country for them. Still, this lady's delusion isn't particularly dangerous. We should be thankful she isn't calling herself Pocahontas and prancing around with a tomahawk.
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ‘round,
Turn me round, turn me ‘round.
Ain’t gonna let nobody, turn me ‘round.
I’m gonna keep on a walkin’, keep on a talkin’,
Marching up to freedom land.
By contrast, look at Urooj Rahman who was arrested along with an African American fellow lawyer for chucking a Molotov cocktail at a police car. Rahman is of Pakistani Muslim origin. The book will be thrown at her because she is bound to have a cousin or a nephew who is on the Terrorist watch list. Who knows? There probably already are Islamic State cells seeking to recruit nutters on the basis of the George Floyd (whose real name will be claimed to be Shabbaz Mohammad) killing.
The Poor People’s Campaign was launched by Martin Luther King Jr. months before he was assassinated. Today’s Poor People’s Campaign is a continuation of King’s legacy. It is a fusion movement prioritising the three interconnected pillars of the original Poor People’s Campaign –So, the thing has been around for 50 years. Has it achieved anything? No. It helps some people feel they are important. But those people aren't important. They are stupid.
systemic racism, poverty, the war economy -– along with the fourth pillar of ecological devastation.
Just as King, inspired by, among others, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in India, advocated nonviolent resistance as the path to justice for all, the Poor People’s campaign includes as one of its fundamental principles, “The Campaign and all its Participants and Endorsers embrace nonviolence. Violent tactics or actions will not be tolerated.”Not tolerating violence does not mean violence won't happen. A credible threat of violent retaliation, however, does have that effect.
Six days after the lynching of George Floyd, Poor Peoples Campaign co-chair William Barber gave a Sunday sermon. In it, he did not address the violence on the part of protesters, at least not directly. Instead, he affirmed the moral disruption represented by the massive protests. “Thank God people are in the streets,” he said.Trump should thank God for people like the Rev. Barber. The Left can no longer demand lockdown enforcement. Thus employment can rise back frictionlessly and so Trump wins in November.
He described the diversity of the protesters who have taken to the streets because they “recognise that what they saw may have happened to a black man, but in fact it happened to all of us.” And he described the protests as a collective cry of “I can’t breathe” in the face of multiple interlocking injustices compounded most recently by the coronavirus pandemic. And Barber goes on, “More than 100,000 people have said, “I can’t breathe,” as this disease choked them to death.”So, bye bye to lockdown. Even if African Americans are at higher risk from COVID, they must get back to work because if they aint working they be looting and, as Trump says, when the looting starts the shooting starts and the 88 percent of the population which is not African American feel safer. Moreover they get to say 'how come Obama didn't fix the problem. He had 8 years. Why did he fritter away his political capital on the Iran deal rather than help his own people?'
When a question was asked about the violence of the protesters, Barber shifted the focus back to the violence of the police officer, and the violence of poverty.
Cool!
On Martin Luther King Day in 2013, I had the fortune of seeing musician and activist Harry Belafonte speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Belafonte recounted how his dear friend, King, visited him in New York before heading on to Memphis, the city where he would be killed. In their last conversations, King spoke of his heartache that so many cities were burning.Dr. King had no political power. Nothing was his fault.
Gandhi, too, was heartbroken by the violence he could not prevent.Gandhi had great political power. He said 'I know which of you Congressmen have been involved in killing innocent Muslims'. He could have made sure charges were filed against those people. At the least, he could have insisted they be expelled from the party. Instead he did collected some money and moved on. There was huge ethnic cleansing in Delhi while he was alive and it continued after he was killed. Gandhi has 'command responsibility' for genocide.
As an independent India was born on August 15, 1947, Gandhi was nowhere to be seen in the festivities. Saddened by the partition of the country and the immense rioting and violence throughout the subcontinent, he was fasting and praying in Kolkata. He was not secluding himself in despondence; rather, he was intentionally and energetically trying to intervene in the violence – some would argue, successfully.This is nonsense. Birla and other 'Hindustanis' spent a lot of money so that the Muslims- who had started the riots- ended up having their throats slit. Calcutta was saved from joining Pakistan. But Birla & Co did not want Muslims to leave Calcutta. They were good workers. But they had to be taught their place. Gandhi, who was the paid agent of the Hindu mercantile class, provided the necessary moral camouflage.
But it is this 'natural response' which has proved so providential to the Republicans time after time.
“No one wants to see their community burn,” William Barber writes. “But the fires burning in Minneapolis, just like the fire burning in the spirits of so many marginalised Americans today, are a natural response to the trauma black communities have experienced, generation after generation.”
Just as Barber, though committed to nonviolent resistance, does not denounce the violence that has marred some of the current protests, there were moments when King and Gandhi similarly made room for – or perhaps conceded to – the inevitability of violence.King had no power. His people were a small minority without wealth or influence. Gandhi had a lot of power. But he ended up doing what he was paid to do.
King’s words from his 1953 speech, “The Other America” are often quoted:The Watts riots enabled Reagan to become Governor of California. Student protests got him re-elected. If people are 'unheard' because they are assumed to be violent thugs, they don't get heard when the assumption is confirmed. Others quietly vote for the guy who will keep those savages in their place.
“I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. In the final analysis, the riot is the language of the unheard. What is it that America has failed to hear? In a sense, our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our winter’s delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these occurrences of riots and violence over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
The reason African American economists and jurists focus so much on 'minute particulars' and develop data-driven models is because, unlike this stupid woman, they genuinely have skin in the game. No-drama Obama was doing a lot to tackle the underlying problem though, no doubt, with hindsight he should have gone apeshit on this issue in his second term. At the time we thought Hilary had a lock on the White House and so Obama's careful spade-work would bear fruit in a sunnier economic climate.
Gandhi, when talking to Bengali relief workers in the aftermath of dreadful communal violence and riots in 1946, he said, “Use your arms well, if you must. Do not ill-use them” … “It is the privilege of arms to protect the weak and helpless.”Gandhi was being silly. The majority was bound to slaughter the minority. The few who had some guns still got massacred.
And though King and Gandhi gave the world the discipline of nonviolent resistance to injustice, both were assassinated.But King had no power and Gandhi had plenty. King was assassinated because he represented a potent challenge to the status quo. Gandhi was assassinated because he was a nuisance. It would have been very easy for Sardar Patel to roll up the amateurish conspiracy against him. Tellingly, it was an American, not an Indian, who caught and disarmed the assassin, Nathuram Godse. This was despite the fact that there had been an attempt on Gandhi's life the previous day. An Indian Sociology professor who had housed the culprit went running to Morarji Desai with the story of the conspiracy. Desai threatened to arrest him. Thankfully, the official inquiry cleared his name.
This is not to say that their efforts to build non-violent resistance failed – India was born as a secular nation and the United States enacted the Civil Rights Act in large part thanks to their efforts and sacrifices.The cow is sacred only to Hindus. Yet 'cow protection' is a Directive Principle of the Constitution. The 'Devanagari' script has sanctity for Hindus. Yet 'India that is Bharat' adopts it as the official script. India is only as 'secular' as Hinduism is 'secular'. It is a different matter that the States are free to promote whichever Religion the majority of its people favor.
because spreading COVID is the need of the hour
I have been wrestling with my own competing feelings: unequivocal support for everyone taking to the streets;
reserving the term “violence” for state-sponsored racism and murders rather than protesters, some of whom might be looting or destroying property (which I simply don’t care about right now, when the real issue is protecting people’s lives); and my deep sadness that people have been injured, even killed, in some of the demonstrations.This lady is an immigrant to America. If it goes down the toilet, she can always move somewhere else or return to India. Her struggles with herself represent the stupidity of a virtue signaller with no skin in the game.
And I can’t get out of my mind that we are in the midst of a pandemic; that there is no doubt that the protests will cause an uptick in coronavirus cases and deaths; and that the communities which will be most impacted will be the most marginalised, as always.How to resolve all these competing imperatives? The answer is simple. Proceed on the basis of objective truth. Rely on the work of actual economists- like Devi & Fryer- and actual jurists and sensible politicians. Don't gas on about your own commitment to ahimsa or twerking or anything else you think might make you look cool and hip to whatever it is the kids are down with nowadays.
In the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, and the ensuing protests, some cities imposed curfews, the US President Donald Trump as well as some state governors alarmingly engaged the National Guard, and there were egregious incidents of police brutality towards protesters. The world watched as the nation convulsed in crisis.What the world watched was the unravelling of lockdown. Poor people can defy it by claiming to be fighting Racism and Slavery and Nazism and so forth. So the Left will have to shut the fuck up. This means the Economy picks up where it left off. Equities have already rallied in the States. The virtue signallers have once again made Democracy safe for uber Capitalism.
Nonsense! India, for the first time in its history, has a Head of Government from a 'Backward' Caste. Modi has known poverty. His family could not afford to send him to College. But he rose by his own merit. He is the first Prime Minister who obeyed Mahatma Gandhi's call 'to all thinking Indians' to 'refrain from marriage, or marriage was unavoidable, to refrain from conjugal intimacy.' Calling Modi authoritarian is foolish. He embodies delegation and collective responsibility. That is why we don't see cabinet reshuffles or Ministers or other officials being scapegoated. By contrast, Trump hires and fires senior officials all the time. Remarkably, this chaotic style of management has reinforced his grasp on the levers of power. But will this trend continue if he gets a second term and becomes a 'lame duck'?
My two homes, India and the United States, are in the grips of authoritarian leaders who care not for the dignity and human rights of minorities.
Both democracies are under threat.Repeatedly saying so won't make it true. The fact is we can't predict who will the next elections in either country. But we can predict that this lady and her ilk won't have any effect at all on the outcome.
Yesterday, I got a call from a friend of mine who participated in the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi. This friend is a young Muslim Indian man. These protests were against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, citizenship laws which, in unison, could potentially render all of India’s 200 million Muslims non-citizens and stateless.An absurd lie. Some poor Muslims in India may have believed this story. But as time goes by they will be able to see they have been cheated. Gandhi cheated the Indian public by saying 'khaddar and Nai Talim (Basic Education) and Ahimsa will make us safe and provide for our wants'. Khaddar was a money pit. Nai Talim, as Zakir Hussain confessed, was a fraud. Ahimsa did not make the Nation safe. The Army did.
My friend was agitated, asking, “Are you safe? Is this a civil war in America?” He also asked, “What about corona?”I recall, during the 'hoodie riots', a young gentleman in India emailed me asking if I was safe from Cameron's thugs. Over a billion Muslims had been killed.
He has seen news about the violence, the rioting, the looting taking place in many cities across America. I explained that most protests are peaceful. I said that I, too, was worried about the protests leading to a spike in the virus, but there was little one could do to keep people off the streets at this breaking point of public tolerance, after yet another gruesome, filmed lynching of a black man by the police.Shaheen Bagh led to Congress and the Left losing its deposits in the Assembly Elections. The BJP gained seats. Had the riots happened before the Elections they would have done even better. If Shaheen Bagh comes back to life, the BJP will be very happy. Protesting against an imaginary threat has two results
My friend then gently and patiently told me about the Shaheen Bagh protests, which started in Delhi but inspired peaceful protests all across India. He said that the protests were peaceful because that was the only way they would be effective. If they were violent, the state would crush them immediately. He said that they were led by women, mostly Muslim women. When coronavirus appeared, the protesters followed social distancing protocols. Finally, when the state required that public groups be small, the protesters gathered in small groups, but made sure the large group of protesters were represented symbolically by their shoes.
Even when Shaheen Bagh was attacked with bombs and gunfire, the protesters did not resort to violence. They finally had to end the protest because of the lockdown imposed, but they vow to return once the virus scare passes. “Shaheen Bagh zinda hai,” he said. Shaheen Bagh is alive.
1) people feel the imaginary threat can be made real without any great repercussions. The 'Overton window' has changed. The pandemic has caused the BJP to demand 'One Nation, One Ration Card' to solve the problem of migrants. This dovetails with a Nationality Register. If Muslims are kept off it, what can they do? Shaheen Bagh themselves into starvation? To eat they will have to work.
2) Muslims come across as a bigoted bunch who oppose non-Muslims gaining refuge from Islamic persecution. This consolidates the Hindu vote. Caste based dynasts will have to join the BJP if only to fight their cousins.
This brave satyagraha was a gift to the BJP. It was a nuisance to local people- but they voted for the Aam Aadmi Party.
Of course, such brave satyagrahas may not be possible as India continues its repression of its minorities and anyone who raises their voice.
The Shaheen Bagh protesters and all anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protesters are currently being hounded and targeted by the police simply because they exercised their constitutional right to dissent.No. The police is hounding them because police officers were killed and shitheads like this lady continue to bad-mouth the police on the basis of their testimony.
Sandeep Pandey, a Gandhian peace activist, shared a video message about the arrests of the critics of the regime that are rampant in India.But it has already happened in India! The government has already reaped the benefit! Hatred of Muslims in Delhi has reached a height unknown since Partition. Communities are self-segregating as never before.
He ends on a cautionary note, “What is happening in the United States should remind the [Indian] government that if it will be vindictive towards people, then people can also come onto the street and make it very difficult for the government.”
And for me, I guess there are two aspects to ahimsa.The first consists in talking worthless shit. The second consists in writing worthless shit.
There is ahimsa as a life-goal: to be an ocean that refuses no river, to see the divine in everyone and everything, and to know that we are not liberated until everyone is liberated.You can do this while employed as the Commandant of a Death Camp. Mystical bollocks can be talked by a homicidal maniac just as well as it can be talked by a paralytic beggar.
But there is also the urgent ahimsa of this moment: naming unequivocally the true Himsa, the true violence – that of the state; that of systemic oppression of minorities – and holding space for what Barber calls the “collective gasp of life” of those who are in its chokehold.So, this urgent ahmsa consists of telling stupid lies. Why not channel David Icke and say 'all Republicans and Sanghis are shape-shifting lizards from Planet X' ? The Rev. Barber is an African American clergyman. His oratory is part of a long and venerable tradition. He has 'skin in the game'. His spiritual services are valuable to his parishoners. But this lady and her fellow Hindus dedicated to telling stupid lies about Human Rights have no parish. They are self-publicists merely.
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