The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The anti-national Every word in a political vocabulary has an owner, and you can tell who owns a word by watching which way it points. In India the word anti-national points in one direction only. It points at students, at Muslims, at farmers on a highway, at professors, at comedians, at anyone who suggests that a citizenship law which sorts people by religion might not be a good idea. It never points the other way. It has never once, in a decade of nightly use, been aimed at anyone with access to the Prime Minister's office. This is what I have spent years calling communicative inversion. A thing is renamed as its opposite, and the renaming is broadcast until it hardens into common sense, and then the common sense does the work that arguments used to do. Propaganda is renamed journalism. Stenography is renamed patriotism. And the people who are being stripped of their papers are renamed as the enemies of the country whose papers they are being stripped of. The inversion is not...

  The label arrives first Six years is a long time to be held for something you have not yet been charged with. Umar Khalid has been in a cell since the thirteenth of September 2020. Sharjeel Imam since August of the same year. In all that time no charge has been framed against them. There has been no trial. There has been no verdict. There has been a chargesheet running to hundreds of pages, and there have been bail hearings, and there have been adjournments, and there have been judges who reserved their orders and judges who delivered them, and there has been the slow administrative hum of a system doing something that looks from a distance like law. But there has been no trial. They have simply been kept. The keeping is the point, and the keeping is the sentence, and the sentence was passed long before either of them saw the inside of a courtroom. It was passed on television. This is the part that gets lost when people write about India's political prisoners as though the pr...

  Go Back, Godi Media They came too, of course. Not by train or by bus, but in white vans with dishes tilted up at the monsoon sky, in convoys that parked where the police told them to park, in windcheaters with logos stitched over the heart. The cable was unspooled. The lights were rigged. Somewhere in a studio in Noida, an anchor sat under make-up waiting for the feed to come up so that the evening's outrage could be assembled and served hot at nine, the way it has been served every night for a decade. They had done this a hundred times before. They had come to the protest not to find out what was happening but to collect the pictures they already had captions for. They had the script in their pockets. Foreign hand. Foreign funds. Urban Naxal. Tukde-tukde gang. Anti-national. Somewhere in the deck there was a graphic with a Pakistani flag on it, and somewhere else a retired general ready to explain how the CIA had organised the queue outside a coaching centre in Mukherjee Nagar...

  The Republic of the Swept They told the young of India they were vermin. Thirty-six days later, a minister of the republic was gone, and a generation had remembered its own strength. On Saturday afternoon, at Jantar Mantar in the heart of New Delhi, a thirty year old man climbed to a microphone and screamed the same sentence twice. We have done it. We have done it. Then Abhijeet Dipke did something no victory rally in the history of Indian politics has thought to do. He read out, one by one, the names of the students who had died by suicide after the examination leaks, and dedicated the win to the dead . Hours earlier, Dharmendra Pradhan had resigned as Education Minister of India , announcing his departure on X even as police were still firing tear gas at the young people demanding it. Thirty-six days separated that resignation from a single question posted online. What if all cockroaches came together? On Saturday the movement's account posted the answer beneath the origina...

  The 56-Inch Chest and the Empty Chair Twelve years, three terms, one and a half billion people, and not a single follow-up question Let us begin with the inventory, because the inventory is impressive. Narendra Modi has a 56-inch chest. He told us so himself, back when he was still auditioning, and the measurement has been doing heavy lifting ever since.  He has filled Wembley and a stadium in Houston. He has been beamed by hologram into dozens of villages at once, a man so committed to being seen that he learned to be in four places simultaneously before the technology was really ready.  He once wore a suit with his own name woven repeatedly into the pinstripes, in case anybody in the room lost track of whose suit it was. He has an app.  He has a stadium named after him, which he inaugurated, presumably while wearing the suit. He has stared down two nuclear-armed neighbours. He has flattened an opposition, hollowed an election commission, and turned a national ...