The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Kindness That Silences: Naming the Racism of New Zealand First Three times. In the House of Representatives, the elected heart of this country's democracy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs told a sitting Member of Parliament to go back to his own country. Three times. Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan was born in Tianjin and has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand since the mid-1990s. He has spent more of his life here than many of the people who cheered the remark online. Winston Peters looked at him across the chamber and said, "I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country," and then, warming to it, told the House that where Xu-Nan comes from they lie like a flatfish, that this thing we have here is called democracy, unlike what you are used to. When Xu-Nan and Ricardo Menéndez March objected, Peters told them to show some gratitude for being in New Zealand. Shane Jones, his deputy, added that Xu-Nan should know his place, and annou...

  The Garland and the Lawbook: Hindutva, the BJP, and the Making of a Rape Culture On the morning of August 15, 2022, the seventy-fifth anniversary of India's independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood at the ramparts of the Red Fort and asked the nation to pledge respect for its women. Hours later, eleven men walked out of the Godhra sub-jail in Gujarat. They had been serving life sentences for gang raping Bilkis Bano, then twenty-one years old and five months pregnant, and for murdering seven members of her family, among them her three-year-old daughter Saleha, whose head was smashed against a rock as her mother watched. Outside the jail, the men were garlanded. They were fed sweets. Their feet were touched. The Gujarat government had granted them remission under a policy it had no jurisdiction to apply, a fact the Supreme Court would confirm in January 2024 when it quashed the release, ruling that the state had usurped powers belonging to Maharashtra. By then the men had ...

  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 ...

  Why I Write These days, not always, but sometimes, I sit down to write and I worry. About the fresh bout of targeting. The fresh round of abuse. The fresh set of complaints filed with my employer, and the messages that say they will kill me, end me in New Zealand, or have me deported. These anxieties are real, and they have a documented basis. Only the other day, a school venue where I was scheduled to give a talk was doxed by white supremacists, set on by a member of the Free Speech Union Council. As I get older, it honestly gets tiring.  The writing must still be done. The writing is often about things that are difficult to hold. The organised targeting of Muslims. The machinery of settler-colonial forgetting. A bill that arrives in Parliament carrying the language of definition and clarity while doing the work of erasure. I write, send the piece out, and then get on with the day, because the writing is only ever a small thing set against the size of the structures it na...