The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  You Do Not Mess With Academic Freedom On a March evening in 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was walking home from dinner with his wife in New York when plainclothes agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody. Khalil, a Palestinian activist and a recent graduate student at Columbia University, held a green card. He had helped lead campus protests against Israel's military assault on Gaza, and for this the Trump administration sought to deport him, invoking the foreign policy provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. He spent more than one hundred days in detention. He is free now, though still fighting removal, and he has gone on the offensive in the courts, filing suit under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 against Trump officials and against private organisations, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar among them, alleging a coordinated campaign to punish him for his advocacy. Sit with the details of that evening. A man returns from dinner with ...

  Why Are You Here Chanting "Jai Shri Ram"? The Contradictions of Diaspora Hindutva A procession winds through a street in Melbourne. A rally fills a park in Edison, New Jersey. A stadium in Auckland rises to its feet. The chant is the same everywhere: Jai Shri Ram. In India over the past decade, this invocation of Ram has been remade from a devotional greeting into the war cry of Hindu majoritarianism, shouted at lynchings, painted on bulldozers, hurled at Muslims as a demand for submission. Underneath the footage circulating online, a local commenter reaches for the oldest line in the nativist playbook: if you love India so much, why are you here? Why don't you go back? The question is racist. It casts the Brown immigrant as a perpetual outsider, welcome to write code and pay taxes but never to belong, and it carries a particular hypocrisy in settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, nations built on the dispossession of ...

Beautiful Chaos as Alibi: What The Spinoff's Modi Coverage Performs Mohan J. Dutta The Spinoff's account of Narendra Modi's Auckland visit is labelled analysis, and that label is the first thing to examine, because what the piece delivers is not analysis but atmosphere: a colour diary of pōwhiri protocol, motorcades, translation earpieces and arena euphoria, written with genuine craft and almost no critical function. The entirety of Modi's record, the stoking of Hindu nationalism, the jailing of critics and journalists, the treatment of Muslims and other minorities, is dispatched in a single subordinate clause, wedged after his 70 percent approval rating and the description of India as the largest democracy on earth. One clause, and the ledger is considered balanced for the remaining two thousand words of spectacle. Consider what the piece then does with that spectacle. Modi is introduced as a global political rockstar; the crowd's screaming is compared to a O...

  Whose Terrorists? The Question Beneath New Zealand's Security Talk with India Mohan J. Dutta Among the announcements that accompanied Narendra Modi's visit to Auckland was talk of deeper cooperation on counter-terrorism, the kind of line that passes through a joint statement sounding unimpeachable, because who could be against fighting terrorism. The question that should stop New Zealand before it signs anything is quieter and more consequential: whose definition of terrorism would we be cooperating with? India's answer is written into its statute book. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country's principal anti-terror law, has been deployed against journalists, students, academics and human rights defenders, people whose offence was reporting, organising or dissenting. Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who had spent his life with Adivasi communities, was arrested under the Act and died in custody awaiting trial. Under the same legal arc...

  Jai Shree Ram in Auckland: Two mainstream NZ parties, the Kia Ora Modi Event and Mainstreamed Hindutva Mohan J. Dutta On a winter evening in Auckland this week, under a palm tree on a street outside the arena where the Prime Minister of India was being celebrated, a group of men raised a saffron flag bearing the bow and arrow of Ram and the words Jai Shree Ram. They chanted as they waved it, one of them wearing the Indian tricolour like a shawl, and by morning the photograph had travelled proudly through the digital veins of the diaspora. It deserves a longer look than it got, because if a liberal democracy wants a single test for the arrival of Hindutva in its public square, that slogan is the test. Figure 1. Demonstrators outside the Kia Ora Modi event, Auckland, July 2026, with a saffron Jai Shree Ram flag. Jai Shree Ram was once a greeting exchanged between pilgrims, and it has been remade into a war cry: the chant that rolled through the streets of Leicester in 202...