The Margins Review · Culture-Centered Approach

  Whose Terrorists? The Question Beneath New Zealand's Security Talk with India Mohan J. Dutta Among the announcements that accompanied Narendra Modi's visit to Auckland was talk of deeper cooperation on counter-terrorism, the kind of line that passes through a joint statement sounding unimpeachable, because who could be against fighting terrorism. The question that should stop New Zealand before it signs anything is quieter and more consequential: whose definition of terrorism would we be cooperating with? India's answer is written into its statute book. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country's principal anti-terror law, has been deployed against journalists, students, academics and human rights defenders, people whose offence was reporting, organising or dissenting. Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who had spent his life with Adivasi communities, was arrested under the Act and died in custody awaiting trial. Under the same legal arc...

  Jai Shree Ram in Auckland: Two mainstream NZ parties, the Kia Ora Modi Event and Mainstreamed Hindutva Mohan J. Dutta On a winter evening in Auckland this week, under a palm tree on a street outside the arena where the Prime Minister of India was being celebrated, a group of men raised a saffron flag bearing the bow and arrow of Ram and the words Jai Shree Ram. They chanted as they waved it, one of them wearing the Indian tricolour like a shawl, and by morning the photograph had travelled proudly through the digital veins of the diaspora. It deserves a longer look than it got, because if a liberal democracy wants a single test for the arrival of Hindutva in its public square, that slogan is the test. Figure 1. Demonstrators outside the Kia Ora Modi event, Auckland, July 2026, with a saffron Jai Shree Ram flag. Jai Shree Ram was once a greeting exchanged between pilgrims, and it has been remade into a war cry: the chant that rolled through the streets of Leicester in 202...

  The inside of Sacred Heart Church in Narayanpur village in the Bastar district of India’s Chhattisgarh state, which was attacked on Jan. 2 following a conflict between indigenous people following animist religion and those following the Christian faith. (Photo: supplied) Churches Under Siege: Hindutva and the Assault on Christian Life in India This post signals the release of a new CARE working paper on religious freedom in India and the lived experiences of Christian communities under Hindutva. On Christmas Eve in 2025, a mob stormed Magneto Mall in Raipur, tearing down festive decorations and intimidating staff, using a state-wide bandh as cover to attack the visible presence of Christians in public life. Days earlier, in Kanker district in Chhattisgarh, a dispute over the burial of a Christian tribal man turned into an organized riot. Mobs attacked the grieving family, burned down a home and three church buildings, and clashed with police. A family seeking to bury its dead b...

  Solidarity is our weapon: what the US courts are teaching us about defending academic freedom On the morning of 8 July, sitting in my study in Palmerston North while on leave, I read the Eleventh Circuit's ruling striking down Florida's Stop WOKE Act. The judgment landed in my inbox alongside the usual traffic of a life under attack: media queries about Hindutva, updates from a union colleague on strategies of resistance to attacks on the scholarship of whiteness, the residue of a coordinated harassment campaign traced to a Free Speech Union Council member.  I read Judge Britt Grant's words twice. A state that forces an official government line into a college classroom, the court held, imposes exactly the "pall of orthodoxy" that a free society cannot tolerate. A district court had earlier called the law "positively dystopian."  I have spent three decades building the culture-centered approach, listening to subaltern communities from Santali villages...

    "I Feel Unsafe" Is Not an Argument There is a sentence that has learned to end conversations. It arrives in a committee room in the late afternoon, or in an email marked confidential, or in a complaint that has passed through three offices before it reaches you. Someone has made a claim. Someone else, rather than answering the claim, says they feel unsafe, and the room rearranges itself around the words. What was an argument a moment ago becomes a matter of management. Chairs are pulled back. Voices drop. The inconvenient question is folded away, gently, the way you fold away something that has embarrassed everyone by being said. I have watched this happen many times now and have come to understand it as a small ceremony of our age. And it needs to be called out for what it is: a strategy for suspending argumentation. I begin by acknowledging that feeling is real, and I am not in the business of doubting anyone's interior weather. But a feeling is not a verdict, an...