The Whiteness of So-Called Progressivism in Settler Colonial Aotearoa: Virtue Signaling and the Erasure of Human Rights Violations in India

 

The Whiteness of So-Called Progressivism

Oct 11, 2026 

Progressive Foreign Policy and the 2026 Election, hosted by Te Kuaka and the New Zealand Fabian Society, Auckland, October 2026. The panel: Teanau Tuiono (Green Party), Vanushi Walters (Labour), Daniel Eb (The Opportunities Party). Source: NZ Fabian Society recording.

On a Friday evening in October 2026, four candidates from the parties of the progressive opposition spent three hours in Auckland building a principled foreign policy for Aotearoa. India is never mentioned. Neither is Hindutva, Modi, the BJP, the RSS, caste, Kashmir, Indian Muslims, Islamophobia, nor the free trade agreement with India that came into force eleven days later. That same week Indian police were detaining protesters in their thousands, cutting mobile internet in central Delhi, sealing Jantar Mantar and hauling in opposition chief ministers and journalists, against a youth movement demanding the resignation of a Chief Election Commissioner who has presided over the deletion of more than 133 million names from the electoral rolls. Amnesty International called it a blatant attack on the right to assembly, and the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva called on India to release immediately and unconditionally everyone arbitrarily detained. Labour's foreign affairs spokesperson, who sat on Amnesty's international board, stood on that stage and promised a human rights defenders programme, and no one in the room, including her, said the word India. Three months earlier she had stood beside Modi for a photograph and written that his visit marked a milestone in the partnership between "our two democracies."

What is missing

Read the transcript end to end and the shape of the omission is unmistakable. Throughout the progressive dialogue among three mainstream parties that claim the progressive tag on foreign policy, there's not a single mention of India. Nothing on the India-NZ FTA, human rights abuses in India, Hindutva, Modi, the BJP, the RSS, the Sangh, Hindu nationalism, caste, Dalits, Adivasis, Kashmir, Indian Muslims or Islamophobia. 

The free trade agreement, one of the most significant elements in New Zealand's foreign policy in 2026, is entirely absent from the conversation. The so-called progressive dialogue, replete with its performative human rights charade, has absolutely nothing to say on fascism or authoritarianism, words that attach to no government in Asia all evening except by implication to China. 

The word colonialism, in any form, about anywhere, is entirely absent, including the country they are standing in, and nobody says Zionism or settler colonialism while committing to sanction Israel. Te Tiriti surfaces once, as a mangled half-word inside a summary of another party's positions, in three hours on what an independent foreign policy for Aotearoa should be.

Against that, the roll call of what they do name runs a long way. Between them the speakers raise Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, Tonga, the Marshall Islands, the Cook Islands, Niue, Solomon Islands, West Papua, Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Ukraine, Finland, the Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Africa, South America, the United States and China, and they work through the Treaty of Rarotonga, the High Seas Treaty, the crimes against humanity treaty, the Dublin Declaration, the Arms Trade Treaty, the UN Charter, Article 109, the Human Rights Council, the ICJ and the ICC. They track the Wellington FBI office, Project Arcadia, Black Sky's launch permits, Chinese debt in Tonga, the HIV emergency in Fiji, nuclear waste in the Marshall Islands, the frigate tender and the mould in the houses at Linton. 

Nobody in that room was underbriefed and nobody was short of moral performativity. India sits inside their geography and outside their concern, and so does every word anyone would need in order to describe what India has become.

What was happening while they spoke

The silence would be easier to forgive if India had been quiet. India was the loudest human rights story on earth that fortnight, and the New Zealand state was in the middle of the closest economic embrace it has ever had with the government responsible. Progressive activists and collectives in Aotearoa, including the Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians have been raising consistently the awareness about the human rights abuses in India and the specter of Hindutva. 

Date	What happened
27 Apr 2026	New Zealand and India sign the free trade agreement in New Delhi. Todd McClay signs for New Zealand; Christopher Luxon attends.
11 Jul 2026	The Kia Ora Modi rally fills Spark Arena in Auckland. Outside, Khalistan supporters, Free Palestine protesters and anti-immigration activists holding "remigration now" signs are held back by police. Labour MPs are inside. Walters accompanies Chris Hipkins to a bilateral with Modi and posts a photograph of herself beside him, calling the visit a milestone in the partnership between "our two democracies."
24 Jul 2026	Amnesty International India's board chair, Aakar Patel, calls Delhi's invocation of the National Security Act against protesters "an affront to human rights": detention for up to twelve months, grounds withheld for fifteen days, no lawyer before the advisory board.
17 Sep 2026	Parliament passes the FTA's implementing legislation, 93 votes to 29. National, ACT and Labour vote for it. New Zealand First, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori vote against.
21 Sep 2026	New Zealand ratifies the agreement.
2 Oct 2026	Amnesty condemns a "blatant attack" on the right to assembly as the electoral-roll protests spread. The national president of the All India Students' Association, Neha Bora, is detained in New Delhi.
early Oct 2026	Protests run across most Indian states. More than 133 million names have been removed from the rolls since 2025; in West Bengal alone around 9 million, roughly 12% of the electorate. The Supreme Court demands transparent answers from the government.
the debate	Three hours of progressive foreign policy. India: zero mentions.
10 Oct 2026	Delhi is locked down. More than 2,000 detained in the capital and around 400 in Mumbai; mobile internet cut in the central business district; dozens of metro stations closed; Jantar Mantar sealed; Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal and Pinarayi Vijayan detained, along with five journalists including a Reuters reporter. The UN Human Rights Office issues a statement from Geneva the same day on mass detentions of demonstrators, protest leaders, civil society members, lawyers and journalists.
20 Oct 2026	The New Zealand–India free trade agreement enters into force.
7 Nov 2026	General election.

The protests are led in large part by young people, by the student unions and by the Cockroach movement that took the slur thrown at it and wore it. They are being met with mass preventive detention, communications blackouts and the National Security Act. This is the standard material of an Amnesty urgent action, and it was unfolding in real time, in the world's largest democracy, in the weeks when Aotearoa's progressive parties were asked on a public stage what a principled foreign policy would look like.

How the silence is built

The silence on India is part of the architecture of what passes as progressivism in settler colonial Aotearoa.

The Pacific frame comes first, and Teanau Tuiono states it plainly and states it well: "I'm team Pacific, not team China or team US. You know, I'm I'm even wearing the shirt people." Vanushi Walters makes a resilient and peaceful Pacific her first priority. 

Marco de Jong organises the questions around the Pacific Islands Forum, Rarotonga, deep sea mining, West Papua, militarisation. Daniel Eb reaches past the region entirely, to Finland and the Soviet Union, for his analogy. 

The Pacific is the correct priority for Aotearoa, and in this debate it also quietly sets the outer limit of the territory in which Aotearoa is understood to have relationships, obligations and complicity. Asia enters only as China, and China enters only as a security problem. South Asia does not enter. The same frame that makes Tonga's debt and Fiji's HIV crisis visible as our business turns the Indian Ocean world into somewhere we merely sell things to.

The register of international law does the second part. Walters builds her platform on it and her credentials are real: Amnesty's international board, the Human Rights Commission, community law, shadow attorney-general. She will recognise Palestine, sanction Israel, join South Africa's case at the ICJ, seek an advisory opinion on autonomous weapons, add gender apartheid to the crimes against humanity treaty, stand up a human rights defenders programme, advocate for democracy in Myanmar. Every item on that list is serious, and the list has a grammar. Violations are discrete events that states commit and that courts and treaty bodies afterwards name, which leaves a ready slot for Myanmar, where the adjudication has happened and the junta sits outside the circle of respectable partners, and no slot at all for India, where the violation is the ordinary working of an elected government whose trade minister Wellington has just signed with. Legalism can see a coup. It struggles with a popular ethnonationalist movement that takes a state through elections, courts, police and media, because such a movement never presents itself as a breach. It presents itself as a majority, and legalism has no instrument for a majority.

Designating a single Asian authoritarianism completes the job. China appears thirteen times, as missile testing in the Pacific, deep sea mining in the Cook Islands, debt in Tonga, the thing the GCSB and SIS are always eager to brief on, the pretext for the Wellington FBI office, the point of Project Arcadia. Tuiono's critique here is the sharpest thing in the transcript: the agencies are loud about China and mute about the United States, and an independent foreign policy has to be independent of both. What he does not ask, and nor does anyone else, is why the roster of Asian powers requiring scrutiny contains exactly one name. India is running a surveillance state, holding Kashmir under occupation, stripping Muslims of documentation and the franchise, detaining students in their thousands, and selling the whole arrangement to Wellington as fellow-feeling between democracies. It draws no scrutiny in that room because it has already been filed under democracy, and nothing in the evening's apparatus can move a country out of that file once it is in.

"This is who we are"

Walters ends her opening with a cadence worth slowing down over, because it tells you what the evening thinks foreign policy is for:

It will feel different to have a Labor government in place. It will feel different to have Labor in foreign affairs and it will feel like New Zealand because this is who we are. This is who we have been for decades. They have taken us down a path. We will come back.

The verb is feel, three times in three sentences, and the thing that will feel different is us. A foreign policy is being offered here as a restored sensation of national character, and the test it proposes for itself is whether the country recognises itself again. What Gaza will feel like, or Kashmir, or Delhi, does not enter the sentence. The grammar puts the audience in the position of the one whose comfort is being repaired, and puts the rest of the world in the position of the setting in which that repair takes place.

The pronouns carry it. "Our" attaches again and again to the speaker's own equipment and virtue, to our values and our approach and our principles, our policy, our commitment, our aid, our role, and to territory held in a kind of affectionate stewardship, where the Pacific becomes "our neighbourhood" and "our backyard and our front yard." What never arrives in three hours is our complicity, our arms, our money, our trade, our silence. Tuiono gets closest, and does it honestly, when he says of independence that "on the stage we do like to talk about us being independent, but in practice we aren't," the one moment all evening when the first person plural is turned against itself.

The modality is flatly declarative exactly where the stakes are lowest. Walters delivers her platform as an unbroken chain of we will: we will recognise, we will sanction, we will join, we will advocate, we will set up, we will protect peace, we will come back. The hedges arrive the moment anything would cost something. On defence she is "not the defence spokesperson," cannot "say where we would draw those lines" until Labour can "lift the hood," and on the frigates offers only that "it will be up for review." 

On Pacific debt, the one structural analysis she produces all night, she stops to say "I should preface this bit by saying this is not Labour policy." On the hardest question of the evening she says "I'm possibly not allowed to say any more at this stage." Certainty is reserved for commitments that cost nothing in Wellington; the conditional is wheeled out for anything a minister would have to defend in office. India needs neither, having never surfaced at all.

The lineage Walters recites is a settler pantheon: Peter Fraser and the UN Charter, Norman Kirk and the 1973 Springbok tour, David Lange and nuclear free, Helen Clark refusing Iraq. Tuiono adds the Springbok march down Queen Street, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, testing at Moruroa, and says "these things shaped the identity of us as a people" and "these are things that we should be proud of." These are real and the pride in them is earned. They also function here as a reservoir of moral credit to be drawn down in place of present-day action, and the governments in the list did other things too: Kirk's government began the dawn raids that Pacific families in that room remember, and the nuclear-free decade was also the decade of Bastion Point and the land march and the corporatisation that gutted Māori employment. A pantheon assembled without those details is a pantheon designed to be comfortable.

"We will come back" is the sentence that gives the game away, because coming back requires somewhere virtuous to return to. Settler nationalism's characteristic move is to locate the nation's goodness in the past, so that the present demands restoration rather than transformation, and so that the question of whether the country was ever what it remembers being never has to be asked. The word Tiriti is absent from three hours of foreign policy debate in a country whose only serious claim to an independent foreign policy runs through it. The identity being invoked is the 1985 one, plucky and small and nuclear free, not the 1840 one. A country that dates its character from Lange rather than from Te Tiriti has told you whose country it thinks it is, and it has told you why a movement like Hindutva cannot be seen from inside it: seeing Hindutva would require a foreign policy grounded in an analysis of power rather than in a memory of how good we felt about ourselves in the eighties.

Eb's contribution runs the same logic through a different idiom. His party's offer is "stability," an end to "this pendulum swing between the left and right blocks," and his model of successful resistance to a great power is Finland, which survived, in his telling, by making itself an "innovative conduit" passing Western technology to the Soviet Union. Finlandisation is being admired here as soft power. Under questioning he confirms the logic: his party would not oppose reinstating the oil and gas ban but would not introduce one either, because "the business case now no longer exists." Principle is converted into brand management and then into market timing, and the brand needs a stable, unembarrassing world to be marketed into. Naming the ethnonationalism of a partner the country has just signed a trade agreement with is precisely the kind of instability the offer exists to prevent.

Palestine without colonialism

Palestine is where the evening is at its best. All three parties will recognise Palestinian statehood and sanction Israel, Walters is already in touch with the lawyers running South Africa's ICJ case, Tuiono has a sanctions bill sitting in the biscuit tin, and fifty thousand people had marched in Auckland weeks earlier demanding exactly this. The word genocide is used four times without a hedge anywhere near it. For a mainstream political panel in a settler state, that is not nothing.

And across all of it the word settler appears zero times, colonial and colonialism and coloniality zero times, Zionism zero times. Apartheid appears once, attached to a gender apartheid clause in a treaty negotiation rather than to Israel. Palestine is admitted to this room as a breach of international law, a humanitarian catastrophe and a question of recognition, and never as a settler colonial project of the kind the people in the room are sitting inside. The omission buys something. Naming Israel as settler colonial opens a question about Aotearoa that a Fabian panel four weeks from an election has no appetite for, and it opens a second question about who else keeps that project running.

Trace that second question and you arrive at the hole where India should be. India is the largest buyer of Israeli arms and the state that has absorbed Israeli surveillance into its own occupation; Pegasus turned up on Indian journalists' phones, and doctrine moves between Kashmir and the West Bank in both directions. Hindutva's intellectual line has admired Zionism since Savarkar, and Indian government-aligned accounts were among the loudest global amplifiers of the assault on Gaza. Committing to sanction Israel without once naming the state that supplies its diplomatic cover in Asia and buys its weapons is a commitment whose circuit the room has declined to follow. Tuiono comes nearest, and gets there through space law rather than through Asia, when he asks whether a payload launched from Māhia that feeds IDF thermal imaging can possibly be in the national interest. The question is exactly the right one. Nobody asks it of the trade agreement that took effect eleven days later.

Vanushi Walters, and the credential that forecloses

Walters opens with what she calls her why, and it is a South Asian story. She is a Sri Lankan New Zealander. When she was twelve her mother told her about a journalist in Sri Lanka who spoke publicly about human rights, knew in 1990 that the secret police were coming for him, took a job with Reuters in Scandinavia, and was picked up the night before he was due to fly; his body turned up the next day on a beach outside Colombo. The transcript renders the name as "Richard Doya" and the account matches the abduction and killing of Richard de Zoysa in February 1990. From there she went to Amnesty International and onto its international board, then legal practice, the Human Rights Commission, community law, Greenpeace, the refugee council. She is now Labour's foreign affairs spokesperson and shadow attorney-general.

A brown South Asian body is therefore in the room, and it is in the room as biography. A death squad in Colombo thirty-six years ago authorises a human rights vocation, and the vocation then produces a foreign policy platform in which contemporary South Asia has no political existence whatever. The story travels to the podium, certifies the speaker's standing to talk about international law, and is retired; the region it came from is never consulted about its present. Credential is the word for what the brown body is doing in that sequence, and credential is what voice becomes when a settler party finds a use for it.

Follow the platform's own sentences and the foreclosure is everywhere in them. She will advocate for democracy in Myanmar, while India purges Muslim voters from the rolls by the tens of millions and her party says nothing. She will protect human rights defenders, while South Asia's human rights defenders sit in Indian prisons under the UAPA, Bhima Koregaon still unresolved, Kashmiri journalists held without trial. She will press for the rights of women and girls and for gender apartheid in the crimes against humanity treaty, and does not mention the Muslim women auctioned on Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai, or the sexual violence of Manipur. She says Labour "will not use racist comments" and "will not be divisive" in its trade relationships, a line aimed squarely at Winston Peters, delivered at an event where the trade relationship most saturated with state-sponsored racism never comes up. Each commitment is real. Each one stops at the border of the region her opening story came from.

The Amnesty connection is what makes this hard to file as oversight. Walters sat on the international board of the organisation that, thirteen days after the Kia Ora Modi rally, had its India board chair Aakar Patel describe Delhi's use of the National Security Act against protesters as "an affront to human rights," and that, in the days before she took this stage, condemned a "blatant attack" on the right to assembly and said Indian authorities were trampling on human rights in their crackdown on the electoral-roll protests. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have been documenting this for years and were documenting it that week. The United Nations went on the record too. On 10 October, the day after this debate, the UN Human Rights Office in Geneva said through its spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan that it was concerned by reports of mass detentions of demonstrators, protest leaders, civil society members, lawyers and journalists, insisted that restrictions on peaceful protest must meet strict tests of necessity and proportionality, called on India to show utmost restraint and to release immediately and unconditionally everyone arbitrarily detained, and asked the government to engage in meaningful dialogue on the concerns being raised. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the UN human rights machinery were therefore all saying the same thing in the same week, in the plainest possible terms, about the country nobody on that stage could name. A human rights lawyer does not need a briefing to recognise mass preventive detention, an internet blackout in a capital city and the arrest of journalists. She needs a reason not to mention them, and the reason is in a photograph taken three months earlier.

Jenny Salesa MP, posting from inside Spark Arena on 11 July 2026: "This is what around 12,000 people who are waiting to welcome Hon Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi to Aotearoa New Zealand at the Spark Arena looks like. The vibe was amazing." The post tags Vanushi Walters, Damien O'Connor MP, Priyanca Radhakrishnan MP and Arena Williams MP.

Her record belongs in the structure rather than in a file of personal indiscretions. Walters was at Spark Arena on 11 July 2026 for Kia Ora Modi, and she was not alone: Jenny Salesa's own post from the floor tags Damien O'Connor, Priyanca Radhakrishnan and Arena Williams alongside her, four Labour MPs inside an arena of twelve thousand welcoming a prime minister whose government the diaspora's anti-fascist organisers in this country have spent a decade documenting. Two months later Labour voted for the implementing legislation, with O'Connor explaining that "this is not the agreement that Labour would have negotiated" and voting for it anyway. Hindutva's own communication apparatus reads an appearance like that one exactly as it is meant to be read, as a brown progressive in the governing party conferring legitimacy, and the photograph keeps circulating long after the arena empties. The silence on the Fabian stage and the attendance at the arena are one thing. A party cannot name a movement it has been photographed blessing, and a spokesperson will not be asked about it by a room that has no vocabulary for the question.

Her trade paragraph contains the only moment in the whole platform where racism is named, and it is worth reading slowly. "We will treat them respectfully, which is not something I should have to say, but that is what it's become. We will treat our trade relationships respectfully. We will not use racist comments. We will not be divisive. It will be unacceptable in our government." The racism under discussion is New Zealand's, directed at a trading partner, and the reference is to Peters. So the entire anti-racist content of Labour's trade policy turns out to be a promise to be polite to India. 

Racism practised by the partner government, against its own Muslims and Dalits and Christians, has no place in the sentence and could not be fitted into it, because in this grammar India is a counterparty owed respect rather than a state open to assessment. The only anti-racist position available on India becomes deference to the Indian state. Hindutva's diaspora operation runs on precisely that equation, recoding criticism of Modi as disrespect toward Indians and therefore as racism, and Walters hands the equation over whole. Anti-racism ends up working for the free trade agreement.

Democracy appears once all evening, when she commits to advocating for it in Myanmar, and that single appearance tells you how the category is being used. Democracy is something other countries lack. India is assumed to have it, which is exactly the assumption that 133 million deletions put in question, and the question was being shouted in the streets of Delhi in the days around this debate. Luxon's government sold the agreement as a deal between the world's oldest and largest democracies, and Labour did not contest that framing; it voted for the bill. Whether Walters shares the framing is not a matter for inference, because she had already written it down.

Walters promises consistency in terms specific enough to test: "They will not be surprised at the positions that I take in a room. They will be consistent and human rights based." Lay her commitments against the severity of the violations they respond to and the pattern does not hold. Lay them against the size of the domestic constituency already mobilised and it holds perfectly. Fifty thousand people had marched in Auckland for Palestine, and she will recognise, sanction and join the ICJ case. Myanmar costs nothing, and she will advocate for democracy there. Killer robots, gender apartheid in a treaty still being drafted, a review of the UN Charter: no domestic price attaches to any of them. India carries a signed trade agreement, one of the largest migrant communities in the country, an organised wing capable of filling Spark Arena, and an election four weeks away, and it gets silence. What predicts her human rights positions is not what is being done to people. It is what saying so would cost. Human rights has become a professional idiom here, fluent and sincerely held and bounded exactly where the party's interests begin.

"Our two democracies"

Three months before the Fabian debate, Walters posted her own account of meeting Modi. It is the most useful document in this file, because it is not a photograph someone else took or a tag someone else applied. It is Labour's foreign affairs spokesperson, in her own words, describing the relationship she intends to carry into government.

Vanushi Walters's own post during Narendra Modi's visit to New Zealand, July 2026, tagging Chris Hipkins. Walters stands second from right, beside Modi; Hipkins second from left. The post is scored to a track Facebook labels "Indian traditional folk music."

Start with the four words doing the most work. "Our two democracies." Not a democracy under assessment, not a democracy in difficulty, but ours, held jointly, in the same first person plural she reserves at the Fabian debate for the things she is proudest of. The possessive binds Aotearoa and Modi's India into a single category and a single moral community. Two weeks after she wrote it, Amnesty's India board chair was describing Delhi's use of the National Security Act against protesters as an affront to human rights. By October the UN was asking India to release everyone arbitrarily detained. The category held through all of it, because categories of this kind are designed to.

The word is not decoration, it is a sorting instrument, and it sorts in advance of any evidence. A state inside the category has its conduct reclassified as internal affairs, to be handled by its own courts and its own voters, while states outside it get assessed, sanctioned and raised at the Human Rights Council. Once India is filed under our two democracies, the Special Intensive Revision becomes electoral administration, two thousand detentions in a day become policing, a communications blackout becomes public order, and the testimony of Indian Muslims and Dalits in Auckland becomes politics back home. Walters never has to deny anything. The classification performs the denial for her, in four words, in a caption, set to music.

The music is worth pausing on, because the post is scored, and Facebook records the audio as Indian traditional folk music. A generic folk track is laid under a meeting with a Hindu nationalist prime minister, and the caption opens with "a real pleasure." Pleasure here, the vibe at Spark Arena, and "it will feel different" on the Fabian stage: three statements of the same affective grammar, the register in which Labour's foreign policy operation describes India to itself. Hindutva's long project has been to render itself indistinguishable from Indian culture, so that opposing the movement reads as disrespecting the culture and, in a settler state, as racism. A caption that dissolves a bilateral with Modi into traditional folk music is that project working exactly as intended, on a human rights lawyer, in her own voice.

Set the post beside what she told the Fabians and the contradiction is not subtle. There she rejected Peters's claim that New Zealand must choose between its interests and its identity, and said the country "must hold both its identity and its interest together," which is "more ethical, but it's actually also better risk management." Her own post on India is interests alone. The relationship is "sound trade and economic policy" and "a long-term investment in New Zealand's future," and the free trade agreement is "another significant step." Identity, the thing she would not let Peters trade away, does not appear in the paragraph, and neither does a single qualifying clause. The test case arrived in July, the principle lost, and three months later she restated the principle on a stage as though it had never been put to the test.

The last sentence is the one the diaspora reads hardest. "Our people to people connections are also thriving, with Indian New Zealanders making an outstanding contribution across business, healthcare, education, science, public service, and the arts, enriching Aotearoa in countless ways." Indian New Zealanders appear as contributors, itemised by sector, valued for what they add to the host country. Settler multiculturalism has no purer statement available to it: a community rendered as an economic and cultural asset, undifferentiated, with no politics of its own, and then offered up as a reason to deepen the relationship with the government that is striking some of their relatives off the electoral roll. The community becomes the warrant for the partnership. Muslim, Dalit, Sikh, Christian and Kashmiri New Zealanders sit inside that sentence only as unnamed members of a body being thanked for its contribution, and being mentioned that way is not easy to tell apart from being erased.

This should be read not as one member's misjudgement, but as the platform of the New Zealand Labour Party. She is there to "accompany Chris Hipkins," which makes it the leader of the Labour Party and his foreign affairs spokesperson at an official bilateral, with the post tagging Hipkins himself. Labour voted the agreement through in September. Outside the arena on the same visit, police were holding back Sikhs who fear the Indian state, Palestinians whose cause Walters will take to The Hague, and far-right activists demanding remigration, three constituencies Labour claims to speak for or to stand against, all of them on the footpath while the MPs were inside. Nothing in the platform she delivered in October acknowledges that any of it took place. Her silence at the Fabian debate therefore records something other than a gap in her knowledge of India. It maintains a position she had already taken in public, in writing, under her own name, and has never withdrawn.

The community Labour went to find

A party that decides to engage the Indian community in Aotearoa has first to locate it, and the addresses available in Auckland are largely the ones Hindutva has spent thirty years building: the temples it has influence over, the cultural associations, the Hindu Council, the HSS, the youth wings, the business networks, the community media and the WhatsApp groups that carry an election message faster than any party can. Those organisations made themselves the door, and they did it patiently, through festivals and language classes and youth camps and grant applications, which is the ordinary work of any community body and is also, in this case, the work of building a political machine. A party walking through that door does not experience itself as endorsing anything. It experiences itself as showing up for a community, and the photograph taken on the way in does the rest.

Behind that door stands a particular India and not the others. Indian Muslims are not in Spark Arena. Neither are Dalit and Ambedkarite New Zealanders, nor most Sikhs, nor Indian Christians, nor Kashmiris, nor the Tamil left, nor the trade unionists, nor the students who came here on the visas the agreement expands and who will not say what they think while their families remain reachable in Uttar Pradesh. For a Dalit New Zealander whose parents left caste violence behind, the Indian community as constituted at that rally is the thing they emigrated from, reassembled under a New Zealand roof with four Labour MPs in the seats. For an Indian Muslim in Auckland watching relatives struck off the rolls in Bihar, the footage of those MPs cheering carries a precise message about where they sit in the party's map of the electorate.

The erasure runs twice over, and the second turn of it happens here rather than there. A Muslim voter deleted from an Indian electoral roll loses the franchise in India. A Muslim New Zealander then loses the standing to be heard about it in Aotearoa, because the settler state's multicultural apparatus has already handed the microphone for their community to the people who want them gone, and because the progressive parties take their reading of the community from whoever answers the door. Caste makes the problem concrete: caste is not a prohibited ground of discrimination under New Zealand law, so a Dalit worker in Auckland facing it has no way to describe the injury in terms the system will accept, and the Human Rights Commission that Walters once served has no category to put the complaint in. The injury is unspeakable in the legal register and unspeakable in the political one, and the people carrying it are then described as a community that has no issues. Walters's own formula for them, an outstanding contribution across business, healthcare, education, science, public service and the arts, is what having no issues sounds like when a party says it warmly.

These communities are not quiet. They organise, they publish, they petition, they turn up; they were on the pavement outside Spark Arena in July while the MPs were inside, and they have been documenting Hindutva in this country for more than a decade. The problem is not silence but the absence of anyone obliged to listen, which is a property of the listening apparatus rather than of the people trying to speak through it. A foreign policy debate convened explicitly to widen the democratic mandate for foreign policy, held four weeks before an election, in the week of the largest protest crackdown in the world's largest democracy, built a platform in which not one of them has an address.

The trade horizon that skipped India

Walters's trade paragraph is where the structure shows through most plainly. Labour will "look at the trade horizon in a decade's time and invest in our current partners," will "treat them respectfully," will "look at trade horizons including in Africa and South America," and will look to "weightless digital trade." A ten-year trade horizon for Aotearoa, delivered without the words India or free trade agreement anywhere in it. Africa and South America, with which this country trades comparatively little, are named as horizons. The agreement signed in New Delhi on 27 April, legislated on 17 September with Labour's votes, ratified on 21 September and in force on 20 October, the largest realignment of New Zealand's trade policy in a generation, is raised by no candidate, by the chair, or by anyone in the audience, eleven days before it took effect.

Compare that with how the evening handles every other economic relationship. Chinese debt in Tonga is named as a sovereignty problem. Eb names chequebook diplomacy as the thing militarisation follows. Tuiono tracks Project Arcadia's supercomputer, the Wellington FBI office, five eyes dependency, the price of interoperability, Black Sky's launch permits and the GCSB advice that arrives as a black page. These are people who follow a procurement chain to its political consequence, repeatedly, for three hours. 

The one chain nobody follows runs from a trade agreement with an ethnonationalist government, through Crown and council funding of that movement's affiliated organisations here, to the surveillance and harassment of Indian Muslim, Dalit, Sikh, Kashmiri and leftist communities in Auckland. Te Kuaka's own opening device, that foreign and domestic policy cannot be separated, is the exact instrument that would follow it, and it is pointed only at the Pacific.

The Greens voted against the agreement, and the terms of their opposition are their own indictment. Steve Abel told the House the party opposed the deal "on economic grounds, not racial ones," and worried aloud about the effect of cheap New Zealand butter on India's smallholder dairy farmers. Concern for Indian farmers is decent and the disclaimer is the point: the only party to vote no went out of its way to confirm that its no had nothing to do with what the Indian government is. 

Even the opposition to the FTA was conducted in a register engineered not to see Hindutva, which leaves the entire New Zealand Parliament, government and opposition together, without a single sentence about the character of the state it has just bound itself to.

Whiteness, and the refusal to witness brown politics

Two of the three candidates on that stage are people of colour, and the tangata whenua and Pasifika presence in the room runs deep. Tuiono speaks of his mother the cleaner and union delegate, his grandfather the railway worker who migrated from the islands, the Springbok tour march down Queen Street when he was six, Ponsonby and Grey Lynn before Pacific families were pushed out to South Auckland. Whiteness here is not a count of the bodies on the panel. It is the shape of the frame they are all speaking inside, which decides in advance which struggles register as politics and which register only as culture, and that frame works perfectly well, sometimes best, when brown people are the ones doing the talking.

Settler states have a long-established method for managing the political life of their brown migrant communities, and the method is multiculturalism. Communities get funded, consulted and celebrated as cultures, through festivals and heritage months and ethnic community grants and community liaison roles, and they are never engaged as holders of political positions about the states and movements they fled or fight. Crown money reaching Hindu Council of New Zealand and HSS NZ programmes demonstrates it precisely: the state can process Hindutva as Hindu culture deserving support, and has no apparatus whatever for processing it as fascism requiring a response. Progressive parties inherit that apparatus intact. When they want to be good to Indian New Zealanders they attend the festival, pose with the community leaders, and accept as representative whoever presents themselves as representative, which in Auckland means accepting the organisations that Hindutva has spent thirty years building.

Read the transcript on Indonesia and the double standard is unmistakable. West Papua is named repeatedly as a human rights crisis demanding UN access and PIF pressure; Walters cites the hundred thousand displaced and the escalation in extrajudicial killings, and Tuiono says it is raised with him constantly across the Pacific. No reluctance at all about naming a large Asian state's occupation of an indigenous people, so long as that people is Pacific and therefore inside the circle of kinship. 

India's occupation of Kashmir, the dispossession of Adivasi communities, the pogroms and the lynchings carry no such claim, because the brown diaspora of South Asia is positioned in this country as a culture to be included rather than as a people whose politics Aotearoa is implicated in. An indigenous struggle becomes legible to these parties when it is Pacific. A brown anti-fascist struggle elsewhere stays invisible even when the people carrying it are sitting in the audience.

The blindness also costs this gathering the thing it says it most wants. The evening is organised around the problem of the far right in power: Peters's racist outbursts, the Trump alignment, a coalition that reshaped foreign policy with no mandate, aid cuts, the inward turn. Hindutva is the most organised, best-funded and most electorally successful ethnonationalist movement on the planet, it has branches in this country, a media operation, charitable status and Crown grants, and it had twelve thousand people in Spark Arena in July while anti-immigration activists demanded remigration on the pavement outside. An analysis of the global far right that cannot see it has located fascism in white men and will go on being surprised by where it actually turns up. The same frame explains the absence of Te Tiriti from three hours of foreign policy debate in a country where Te Tiriti is the constitutional ground of any claim to independence, and the parties that cannot name Hindutva are the parties whose Tiriti commitments remain declarative.

What the diaspora is left holding

Dr. Arama Rata beautifully and powerfully closes the panel by saying the evening was "about exposing the limits of where our progressive politics are" and that "there's a lot of space to the left of what the policies are that we're currently being presented with." I very much agree with her, and the limit she has in mind runs along class and the military. Building further on the concept of the limit invites us to trace the erasure that runs along the colour line of the world, and it decides which brown people's struggles count as struggles at all.

For Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepali, Kashmiri, Dalit, Muslim, Sikh and Christian communities organising against Hindutva in Aotearoa, an evening like this one sets out the terms of their inclusion. Their presence is welcome as a story of origin, as a human rights biography, as a face on a list, as a community to be visited at the festival. Their analysis is not welcome, because the programme has nowhere to put it. They are asked to vote for parties that will sanction Israel and recognise Palestine, which they want, while those same parties fill four seats at the Modi rally, vote through the trade agreement, take their census of the community from Hindutva's own organisations, and stay silent while Delhi detains two thousand young people in a day. 

The ask is that they treat anti-fascism as something that applies abroad and stops at the Indian border, and what they are offered in return is representation without voice. Three hours of a progressive foreign policy debate, in the week of the largest crackdown on protest in the world's largest democracy, produced not one sentence they could take home.

Questions these candidates should be made to answer before 7 November:

•       Ms Walters, you wrote in July that Narendra Modi's visit marked a milestone in the partnership between "our two democracies." Do you still describe India that way, after 133 million deletions from the electoral rolls, two thousand detentions in Delhi in a single day, and statements from Amnesty International and the UN Human Rights Office?

•       You sat on Amnesty International's board. Amnesty says Indian authorities are trampling on human rights in their crackdown on the electoral-roll protests. What is your response, and why did none of it reach the Fabian stage?

•       You told the Fabians that New Zealand must hold its identity and its interests together. Your own account of the India relationship is trade and investment alone. Which of the two statements is Labour's position?

•       Will you name Hindutva as a far-right movement operating in Aotearoa New Zealand, in the same breath in which you name the Free Speech Union, Remigration NZ and Winston Peters?

•       Will you review Crown and local government funding to Hindu Council of New Zealand, HSS NZ and affiliated organisations, and apply to them the standard you would apply to any white ethnonationalist group seeking public money?

•       The agreement is now in force. What human rights mechanism attaches to it, and will you raise the SIR deletions, the CAA, Kashmir, the UAPA detentions of journalists and academics, and the anti-conversion laws with Delhi?

•       Will you extend the Israel sanctions logic to India's arms and surveillance trade with Israel, and audit which New Zealand launch, data and research partnerships feed that circuit?

•       Will you protect diaspora critics of Hindutva here from transnational repression, and does your human rights defenders programme cover them?

•       Mr Hipkins: you were in the room for that bilateral and your foreign affairs spokesperson tagged you in the post. Is "our two democracies" the Labour Party's description of Modi's India?

Sources

•       India: Concerns over mass detentions before and during protests — UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), Geneva, 10 October 2026, statement by spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan; also posted by @UNHumanRights

•       UN presses India over crackdown on voter-roll protests — TRT World

•       India: Authorities trampling on human rights in crackdown on electoral roll protests — Amnesty International, October 2026

•       India: Delhi police must facilitate right to peaceful protest amid lockdown-like restrictions in capital — Amnesty International, October 2026

•       India: Invoking of extraordinary detention powers amid Delhi protests is an ‘affront to human rights’ — Amnesty International UK, 24 July 2026, quoting Aakar Patel

•       India: Crackdown on peaceful protesters in New Delhi raises serious human rights concerns — Amnesty International, July 2026

•       Amnesty Decries ‘Blatant Attack’ on Right to Assembly Amid Crackdown on India Election Protests — Common Dreams, 2 October 2026 (133 million deletions; detention of AISA president Neha Bora)

•       India detains thousands, locks down Delhi to foil election chief protest — Business Recorder, 10 October 2026 (2,000+ detained in Delhi, ~400 in Mumbai, internet suspension, journalists and chief ministers detained)

•       What to know about nationwide protests in India over voter list changes — NPR via GPB, 6 October 2026 (SIR scope, Cockroach movement, West Bengal deletions)

•       Thousands welcome Modi at Auckland rally as protesters gather outside — 1News, 11 July 2026 (Kia Ora Modi at Spark Arena; Khalistan, Free Palestine and “remigration now” protests outside)

•       More than 10,000 expected to welcome Modi in Auckland — RNZ

•       India trade deal brings unlikely allies together in Parliament — Farmers Weekly (party votes; O’Connor and Abel quotations)

•       India free trade agreement edges closer after Parliament passes legislation — RNZ

•       New Zealand–India Free Trade Agreement — signing 27 April 2026, third reading 17 September 2026 (93–29), ratification 21 September 2026, entry into force 20 October 2026; to be replaced with MFAT and Hansard records

•       Vanushi Walters, Facebook post on accompanying Chris Hipkins to meet Narendra Modi, July 2026 (reproduced above; original URL and exact date to be added)

•       Jenny Salesa MP, social media post from Spark Arena, 11 July 2026 (reproduced above; original URL to be added)

•       NZ Fabian Society, Progressive Foreign Policy and the 2026 Election (video recording; header image above)

•       Te Kuaka and New Zealand Fabian Society, foreign policy debate transcript, supplied as The Fabian Society Debate and the Foreign Policy Agenda