Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

June 05, 2025.  The New Zealand Parliament voted today to suspend for 21 days two MPs, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, the co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori, and for seven days the youngest MP, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, who had performed the haka in the Parliament in protest to the racist and divisive Treaty Principles Bill. The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced by the right-wing ACT Party, is reflective of the Far-Right attack on New Zealand political economy, seeking to undo New Zealand's foundational document Te Tiriti O Waitangi. Fundamentally based on disinformation, the Treaty Principles Bill communicatively inverts the narrative of equality--reflecting similar far-right attacks on equity, dressed up as equality--being witnessed globally. In response to the introduction of the Bill (the first reading) in the New Zealand parliament, several Members of Parliament (MPs) expressed their opposition to the bill, with the Member of Parliament (MP) of Te Pati Māori Ha...

Figure 1: The Nakba that forms the infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism   I was recently approached for a leadership opportunity.  The person (Let's call them Sam) that approached me for the role stated in great depth how much they valued my commitments to social justice, de-westernizing knowledge systems, and building spaces for the Global South. The position was crafted with the descriptors of social justice, decolonization, and building community that felt appealing. In his initial email, Sam noted that I was one of the top candidates for their group. After some deliberation, I decided to explore the conversation to see where it would take me.  Sam was convinced that this opportunity is a great fit for my career, and one I would find challenging in a meaningful way. They shared with me the various resources that would be available for building architectures, programmes, and pathways dedicated to social justice.  By the third iteration of the conversation,...

Dear Dr. Parmjeet Parmar, You and I, both Indian origin migrants, migrated out of India in the 1990s.  Both of us, in the STEM disciplines, completed our graduate degrees abroad after migration.  You completed your Masters in Biochemistry in India, married, and moved to Aotearoa in 1995.  I completed my Bachelors in Agricultural Engineering in India, took the GRE and moved to the U.S. to pursue a master's on a scholarship.  You then completed your PhD from the University of Auckland in Neuroscience in 2003. I completed my PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 2001.  Both of us eventually found ourselves in this unique land in Aotearoa, where Te Tiriti offers a powerful global register for how to organize a settler colonial/postcolonial society.  Both of us probably had no awareness of Te Tiriti before migrating here.  New Zealand to most Indians is mediatized through visuals of cricket games broadcast on TV screens, stories of E...

Figure 1: The first Prime Minister of India Pdt. Jawaharlal Nehru with Mahatma Gandhi India's legacy in the anticolonial struggle inspires movements for sovereignty and against colonialism across global spaces. The anticolonial struggle that shaped India's consciousness in the twentieth century marked the nation as a global leader with a powerful story to tell.  Solidarity and inspiration India's story of resistance to colonialism inspired anticolonial struggles across the Global South. From across Asia to Africa to Latin America to the very seats of colonialism. The newly liberated nation emerged on the global landscape as a leader in how to do democracy. Developing a constitutional framework that engaged dialogically with the British constitutional structure and the cultural registers of pluralism reflecting its cultural diversity, India captured the global imagination, offering a powerful lesson on democracy by anchoring it in grassroots radical participation.  The story...

Figure 1: Example of a rape threat from Hindutva accounts online amidst the India-Pakistan tensions in 2025 Hindutva is an immoral ideology, constructing India as a Hindu nation modeled after Nazi Germany.  The production of the "Other" as a threat, as an immoral communicative act, threatens Hinduism at its heart. It perfects the art of communicative inversion, turning materiality on its head, that the ideology effectively seeds across the diverse registers of private, community, and public life. To the extent I am a victim, I can carry out the most immoral transgressions without being accountable. I have been wronged, the narrative goes, so I can legitimately discard the need for moral boundaries. References to the Hindu epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata, are drawn in to uphold this degeneracy. The ethical and reflexive journey of Hinduism as a faith tradition, critically interrogating its workings to build spaces for transformation, is framed as anti-Hindu, or Hinduphobic. Th...

Elsewhere I have argued that the hegemonic structures of neoliberal capitalism have thoroughly co-opted the language of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to uphold and perpetuate racial capitalism.  In this blogpost, I will argue that the circulation of DEI within infrastructures of power has upheld toxic communicative processes that have worked to consolidate elite control while at the same time erasing those at the margins.  Undermining agency of communities, planting doubts, spreading rumors, organizing in cliques etc. emerge as strategies for maintaining and perpetuating power. These toxic strategies are then rebranded as methods for organizing for justice, thoroughly capturing power while erasing openings for critique. Any critique is projected as unsafe, uncivil, and non-collegial. The gatekeeping of knowledge systems and resources has been placed in the hands of those with power in discursive spaces, while simultaneously keeping out communities at the margins. ...