Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  Beneath the rhetoric of liberation and security lies the violent logic of far-right ideology, now mainstreamed into the architecture of American and Israeli statecraft.   March 9, 2026 When the first bombs fell on Tehran in the early hours of February 28, the language from Washington and Tel Aviv was grimly familiar. Iran was an existential threat. Its nuclear ambitions imperiled civilization. The Iranian people yearned for liberation. The strikes, we were assured, were precise, intelligence-driven, surgical. Within hours, over 165 schoolgirls lay dead in the rubble of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab. Their textbooks were pulled from the wreckage alongside severed limbs. The liberators had arrived. What is unfolding across the Middle East is not, as its architects insist, a defensive operation or a humanitarian intervention. It is an act of violent extremism — white supremacist in its civilizational logic, far-right Zionist in its territorial ambitions, and catastrop...

At the glittering India AI Impact Summit 2026 held in New Delhi, what was pitched as an ode to India's rapid technological advancements turned into a memefied fiasco . A private institution from Greater Noida, Galgotias University, seen in the public sphere as closely aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) , displayed "Orion", a robotic dog that they claimed had been created by their Centre of Excellence.  Professor Neha Singh told the state-run broadcaster DD News during a viral interview about the robot as an exemplar of indigenous innovation, claiming, "You ⁠need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University. She went on to share that it is "mischievous" and has the ability to transform itself. However, social media detectives quickly revealed the truth - Orion is the Unitree Go2, which is a commercially available robotic dog made in China that can be purchased for approximately $2,800. It is...

My commitment to anticolonial work has been forged in the fires of the Global South, where colonialism's scars run deeper than borders.  They have been shaped by my ancestors who committed to resisting the terror of the colonial apparatus, often at great personal cost. One of my grandfathers took the pledge of anticolonial struggle, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's non-violent resistance to Britsh colonial terror. For decades, I've wielded words as weapons against oppression—dissecting Hindutva fascism, white supremacy, far right Zionism and the settler colonial machinery that devours lives from Palestine to Aotearoa.   But since October 8, 2023, when I dared call the breach of Gaza's apartheid wall a "powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance," I've become prey.   Not for celebrating blood—God, no; I condemned the civilian horrors, the rapes, the kidnappings, rooting my analysis in Fanon's rupture of power and Gandhi's non-violent ethos. The very ...

I have long argued that the Free Speech Union New Zealand is part of a much broader global far-right movement organized around the far-right construction of free speech—one mobilized to protect and safeguard one particular kind of speech (largely white supremacist, misogynist, patriarchal speech that targets down on minorities) while framing women, gender diverse communities, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and Black communities as threats.  This movement constructs the narrative of "woke culture" as existential danger while systematically erasing the discursive registers for those at the margins.  Free speech is constructed as a feature of Western civilization and migrants, women, gender diverse communities are constructed as perennial threats to this rhetorical construction of free speech. The FSU's recent response to my critique, and the toxic ecosystem it cultivated in reply, demonstrates this far-right infrastructure operating openly, without pretense. This isn't a...