Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  The difficult conversation we need now: Anti-Māori racism in the upper-caste, upwardly mobile Indian community The same Indian community organisations that mobilised quickly around a haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition have been almost entirely silent on the sustained anti-Māori political project advanced by ACT MP Parmjeet Parmar. Mohan Dutta argues that this asymmetry is not accidental — it is what the model minority script trains us to perform, and it is time for our community to have a much harder conversation. There is a particular asymmetry in how anti-racism is being performed in Aotearoa right now, and the haka–apology cycle around Che Wilson and Parmjeet Parmar throws it into sharp relief. The same Indian community organisations, lobby groups, and outlets that have mobilised quickly and articulately around the haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition — securing an emailed apology from Wilson, a follow-up apology from Te Pae K...

The invitation arrives in polished, reasonable tones: Dr. Peter Boghossian, philosopher, former Portland State University professor, and host of "Conversations with Peter Boghossian," extends an offer for dialogue. "No dogma. Just dialogue." The podcast promises candid, intellectually rigorous exchanges with dissidents and public figures on divisive issues—free speech, institutional decay, cultural conflict, radical Islam, migration, and the excesses of "wokeness." Guests range from evolutionary biologists to French lawyers discussing whether "truth" itself has been branded "far-right." The format appears open: questions, rapport-building, Socratic probing via "street epistemology" techniques adapted from Boghossian's earlier work challenging faith. It frames itself as a bulwark against polarization, a return to Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and mutual understanding in a world fractured by identity politics. Ye...

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

  David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, a key driving force in the targeting of academics critical of Israel Zionist Extremism and the Threat to Academic Freedom in Aotearoa New Zealand In the landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand's higher education, the university is legally mandated to serve as the "critic and conscience" of society. This role is not merely a professional privilege; it is a democratic necessity. However, this mandate is increasingly under siege by external political actors who seek to weaponize inflammatory rhetoric to police the boundaries of scholarly inquiry. A recent public statement by David Cumin of the Israel Institute of New Zealand—calling me a "terror justifier" and demanding an apology for my appointment to the National Counter Extremism Research Centre—offers a visceral case study in what I consider to be the rise of Zionist extremism as a direct threat to academic freedom. The Context: Why This Centre Exists and Why My A...