Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Reflecting on my baba in gratitude. As a young boy, I would look at my baba in wonder. My baba, ever-so-brave, prepared to place his body on the line for the various struggles of the Left that spoke to him in his youth. My ma would tell me the story behind my name, an alias baba took up in doing resistance work. In the years of the emergency in the 1970s, this resistance work placed his body, and the bodies of many union organisers in the line of risk. The risk of losing a job. The risk of being incarcerated. The risk of being made to disappear. In those years, the party would place the trust him to place his body in the struggle, to offer safety to party leaders, to offer safety to landless peasants laying their rightful claims on land they had been denied across generations, to offer safety to comrades needing a passage amidst right-wing repression. As a long-term union worker and party worker, my baba spent so much of his life in working-class struggles, in the organizing of landles...

Courtesy: Getty Images A Washington Post story published on June 2, titled "Google’s plan to talk about caste bias led to ‘division and rancor’," documents the resistance put up by employees at Google identifying themselves as Hindu protesting the platforming of a pedagogy-based lecture by the dalit rights activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan.   What is powerful about the story is the complicity of the infrastructure of Google in de-platforming the event and in targeting the organizer of the event at Google, Tanuja Gupta, who worked as a senior manager at Google News.  The disinformation campaign organized by Hindu employees targeting Soundararajan called her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. I am very familiar with these tropes, rooted in disinformation, that are increasingly being deployed by Hindutva adherents to target critics of Hindutva.  Over the course of the past year, in response to my scholarship on Hindutva and the support of CAR...