The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  The Mandate Far-Right Politicians Do Not Hold Your election to Parliament does not authorise you to govern the academy. By Mohan J. Dutta The architecture of an electoral mandate in a parliamentary democracy is narrower than its loudest advocates pretend. A vote conferred at a general election authorises the governing coalition to legislate within the constraints of the rule of law, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, the Treaty of Waitangi, and the suite of statutes that condition Crown power. It does not confer a roving warrant to remake every institution of public life in the image of the governing party. It does not, in particular, transfer to ministers the right to dictate what scholars may research, what courses universities may teach, what speakers institutions may host, or which academic voices the Crown will tolerate in public debate. That distinction, between democratic authority and democratic overreach, sits at the centre of the present crisis. Across Aotear...

  The Language of Balance: How the Far Right Hollows Out Democracy from Within There is a particular kind of political theatre playing out across the democratic world, and it requires a careful eye to read. Watch what the far right says, and then watch what it does. The two will rarely be the same. A movement that has spent decades organising against the very idea of pluralism now speaks fluent democracy. A movement whose foot soldiers march in the streets calling for the cleansing of the nation now legislates from cabinet rooms, draped in the vocabulary of fairness, balance, and freedom. The extremism has not gone anywhere. It has merely learned the password. This is the communicative inversion at the heart of the contemporary far-right project, and it is the secret of its success. The street-level violence of the Proud Boys, the dogwhistles of Hindutva cadres, the muttered grievances of settler colonial nostalgists in Aotearoa New Zealand — these have not been disavowed by the ...

  A thousand little chips — David Seymour, the board, and the slow capture of public broadcasting Mohan J. Dutta In 2023, when then-Cabinet Minister Kiri Allan raised concerns about RNZ's treatment of Māori staff, David Seymour reached for the language of constitutional caution. Ministers, he said, had to be "absolutely critically cautious about even the perception of interfering with media." "Nobody loses their democracy all at once," he warned. "It's always a thousand little chips." Three years later, he is the one swinging the axe. As shareholding minister for both RNZ and TVNZ, and now Deputy Prime Minister, Seymour has used an interview on The Platform — a venue that traffics in disinformation, anti-Treaty grievance, and imported far-right culture-war content — to attack RNZ's editorial decisions, denounce the appointment of John Campbell to Morning Report as something that should have been "out of the question," and signal t...

  The Pink Petal of the Saffron Flower: On Shobhaa De's "Closet Bhakt" Confession So Shobhaa De is "a bhakt of her own beliefs." How charming. How original. How utterly, depressingly familiar. Reading her latest column in The Print — that breezy little victory dance over Mamata Banerjee's defeat in Bengal, complete with the obligatory ellipses and the obligatory Yay and the obligatory martyr-pose about being trolled — I felt something I have not felt in a while. Not anger, exactly. Not even disappointment, because to be disappointed you must first have expected something. What I felt was a kind of weary recognition. Because we have read this column before. We have read it for forty years. Only the political object of affection keeps changing. In the eighties, it was the glamour of Bombay's high society. In the nineties, it was the giddy promise of liberalisation. In the noughties, it was the page-three carousel of designers and starlets and royals. And ...

  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...