Caste privilege "Made in India"

The shiny advertising slogans of "Make in India" tell the story of a modern India, a rapidly growing IT sector, the rising knowledge management industry, and the burgeoning private industry feeding India's growth story.

The convent-educated, MTV-watching, Nike-wearing twenty-something is the face of this new India.

Aspiring. With dreams of the Big Apple. The pulse of the nation's imagination.

Promising in his appeal as the digitally skilled workforce of the new India, the twenty-something presents the image of a global cosmopolitanism.

Technologically-savvy, social media-adept, YouTube-conversant.

The gloss of modernity is a well performed facade, however.

The Domino's, Levi's, and Coldplay obfuscate the casteism that pervades the everyday being of this twenty-something India.

Rituals of touch, codes of purity, and practices of boundary-marking define his inner life.

He follows the rituals spelt out by his parents. Participates in the customs of caste that mark his privilege. Talks down to the lower caste domestic worker who spoon-feeds him and does all his chores.

At school or at work, he makes casteist jokes.

He then turns around and bemoans how it is so difficult to be upper caste because the lower castes get all the quotas.

He complains how there is no such thing as casteism in India. How it is a Western ploy to orientalize India.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Libertarianism, the Free Speech Union, and the Life of Disinformation

The rise of the far-right globally is intertwined with the globally networked power of libertarian think tanks, funded at the base by the global extractive industries . In this blog post, through an analysis of the disinformation-based campaign I have personally experienced since October 2023 mobilised by the communicative ecosystem of the Free Speech Union (FSU), I will attend to the lifecycle of disinformation in libertarian networks, arguing that the disinformation ecosystem is invested in upholding both white supremacy and extractive capital. The FSU’s investment in disinformation I argue that the FSU is invested in producing and circulating disinformation. In response to my analysis of the hypocrisy of the Free Speech Union (FSU) that positions itself as a champion of free speech in Aotearoa while one of its co-founders, council members and spokespersons David Cumin (who is also one of the key actors representing Israel Institute of New Zealand) actively targets the freedom of a...

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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