by B. R. GOWANI

Humble being

Modi has cultivated a persona of a humble being who was selling tea in a railway compartment from where he rose to the top post. In May 2015 interview, the Time magazine asked him as to “what influences him?” According to Time, before replying, he “chokes and tears up:”

“This touches my deepest core. I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life … I decided that I would not live for myself but would live for others.”

The fact is, Dhruv Rathee, a social media activist and YouTuber, points out in his video, that Modi was from a middle class who wore suits and such clothes .

On democracy, Modi told Time magazine, the US and India should work together to strengthen “democratic values all over” the world. Answering whether he would want autocratic power like Chinese leader, he said “democracy” “is in our DNA,” and he would prefer “democratic values” over “wealth, power, prosperity and fame.” He further said his administration “will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.” His and his government’s philosophy is “Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas“, which essentially means, “Together with all, progress for all”.

Modi is a master bullshitter. He further added:

“Religion and faith are very personal matters. So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the Constitution of India.”

Nine years later, Modi’s party was planning to change that “holy book”‘s secular nature and turn India into a Hindu theocracy by winning over 73% seats. The opposition charged that Modi’s election slogan of “ab ki baar, 400 paar,” that is, in 2024 election Modi’s party wants to win over 400 seats out of total 543 seats, in order to have enough power to change the constitution. In June 2024, Modi visited Samvidhan Sadan (Old Parliament House) and paid respect to the Indian constitution placate opposition’s fear. Anyway, Modi’s party didn’t perform well in the election; with only 240 seats it had to rely on allies to form a government.

Modi’s party BJP didn’t get enough seats to change the constitution but its agenda to make India a “Hindu Rashtra” or Hindu Nation is being implemented through other means.

Unlike Trump, who uses his oral member all the time, Modi knows when to use it and when not to, who to hug and who to avoid, from whom to accept and from whom to refuse.

Modi always hugs foreign leaders, even if they’re reluctant, such as Trump, but refused to accept a cap (worn by many Indian Muslims) from a Muslim leader in India.

Minorities

Modi who belongs to RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), a communalist paramilitary group, became Chief Minister of Gujarat in October 2001. In less than five months, he strengthened his position by presiding over a pogrom in which more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. For Modi, there was no looking back. The next stop from chief minister-ship was the premiership. In May 2014, he became India’s Prime Minister. Now most Muslims, Christians, and other minorities who had some rights has been turned into second or third class citizens, or non-citizens nationwide.

A Muslim student activist Afreen Fatima describes the plight of Muslims in these words in July 2022:

“Ever wondered what is it like to be a Muslim in the undeclared Hindu state that is India? To be constantly humiliated, demeaned, and brutalized? To have your soul destroyed by the state? And sometimes, your home, too?

“From our faith and history to our eating habits and clothes, the Hindu supremacists ruling India today have spared nothing in their campaign against our community. During the eight years of Narendra Modi’s government, they have taken a sledgehammer to our country’s secular foundations by routinely finding ever newer ways of targeting us. Last month they brought a bulldozer to my home.”

In May of that year, on live TV, a BJP national spokeswoman Nupur Sharma spoke disparagingly of Islamic Prophet Muhammad. There were protests in many Indian cities. Fatima’s father was illegally arrested, without any warrant, her mother and sister were picked up in the middle of the night and spent more than 35 hours at police station. None of them were involved in the protests, Fatima informs Al Jazeera TV in an interview. Their house in Prayagraj (erstwhile Allahabad), Uttar Pradesh, was demolished in what is known in India as “bulldozer justice.” (Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and its Chief Minister is Yogi Adityanath, a roguish politician.)

Javed Mohammad, Fatima’s father, was released after 21 months.

No action was taken against Nupur Sharma until Iran and Arab Gulf monarchies protested. BJP now had to take some action; they just suspended her from the party.

Many other means are used to harass, malign, and humiliate Muslims. Just one example: Muslim women’s vocal opposition to Modi’s anti-Muslim policies saw his followers create an app “Sulli Deals” where Muslim women were auctioned off.

According to India Hate Lab, 2025 saw 13% increase in hate speech events compared to 2024 — more than 88% of them targeted Muslims. (See the full report here.)

Muslims in Gujarat

Last year in April and May, a “mega demolition drive” was undertaken by the Gujarat government against what they called illegal Bangladeshi settlements in Ahmedabad’s Chandola Lake area.

At least 12,000 houses were razed, including that of Mumtaz who lamented:

“Everything that I bought with my hard-earned money, and the home I raised my children in, doesn’t exist anymore.”

South Asia has a joint family system. Besides, these houses belonged to very poor people. At the minimum, if you count five persons per house, 60,000 people were turned homeless by the communalist government. What was people’s fault? Their Muslimness.

One of the victims Sarkari Bano said:

“After our homes were stolen from us, landlords would quote us three times the rent, knowing our vulnerability.”

She further added:

“Humein 20 saal peeche kardia hai, yateem, bewa, gareeb sabse chhatt chheen li”

“They have pushed us 20 years back. They’ve robbed roofs  from widows, orphans and the poor).”

Prior to demolition in one of the areas, Bengali Vas, 457 men were accused of being from Bangladesh who had entered India illegally. They were paraded for 4 kilometers.

It’s nine months since Saiyed Minhajuddin lost his house. He has to keep passports and ration card in his scooter because there is no safe place in the room he and his wife are renting.

“You know they called me ‘Bangladeshi’, dragged my wife away, calling her a Bangladeshi too. Our passports saved us.”

Several cities in Gujarat have seen houses and shops belonging to Muslims and their mosques and shrines being destroyed.

Muslim shrines are one place which Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, and Muslims visit for the fulfillment of their wishes and intermingle with people of other faith. But when the government demolishes them, a dual purpose is served: a Muslim shrine is gone and so are the interfaith-mingling.

The other factor, besides communalism, is capitalism. A social activist Kaleem Siddiqui, who devoted his time and efforts to help the people who lost their homes in Chandola, pointed out the link between the AMC (Ahmadabad Municipal Corporation) and the builder lobbies:

“A communal narrative was created to kick people out of their homes, using allegations like Bangladeshi, drug peddling etc. [and] Chandola was emptied.”

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by PALLAVA BAGLA

The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in what is now northwest India and Pakistan.

One of the greatest mysteries of India is how and why the flourishing Indus Valley Civilisation disappeared. Now, researchers from IIT Gandhinagar propose that it was a series of extended droughts that forced the people of the region to abandon the urban cities of Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Rakhigarhi and Lothal.

The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, flourished between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago in what is now northwest India and Pakistan, and was one of the world’s earliest urban societies. So advanced that cities had drainage systems and the metal craft so advanced that beauties like the ‘Dancing Girl’ were crafted 5,000 years ago.

Renowned for its advanced cities, water management, and trade networks, the IVC’s decline has long puzzled archaeologists and historians. Recent research led by Vimal Mishra of IIT Gandhinagar and colleagues provides compelling evidence that successive, severe droughts played a central role in the civilisation’s gradual disappearance. An eleven-page research paper in the journal ‘Communications Earth and Environment’ suggests it was water scarcity that killed the flourishing civilisation.

Climate Change and Water Scarcity

The Indus River was the lifeblood of the civilisation, supporting agriculture, trade, and daily life. However, historical climate records, called paleoclimate records and climate simulations, reveal that the region experienced significant hydro-climatic variability, driven by changes in both the Indian summer and winter monsoons. Using high-resolution climate models and geological proxies (such as cave stalactites and lake sediments), researchers reconstructed rainfall and river flow patterns over thousands of years.

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by HUMBERTO BASILIO Ed. ANDREA THOMPSON

Lime granules trapped in ancient walls show Romans relied on a reactive hot-mix method to making concrete that could now inspire modern engineers

Ancient Romans built arched bridges, waterproof port infrastructure and aqueducts that enabled the rise of their empire and that are still standing—and often still used. They did so with a type of cement that is far sturdier than what is used today, but exactly how Roman cement was made was something of a mystery. Now researchers have found proof of an explanation they had proposed in 2023 that could offer insights into how to build longer-lasting concrete today.

In his first-century B.C.E. work De Architectura, Vitruvius, one of the most famous architects of the Roman Empire, described Roman cement as being made with what we today call slaked lime, or hydrated, heated limestone. But based on the discovery of the makeup of chunks called “lime clasts” found at a previous excavation in Pompeii, Massachusetts Institute of Technology environmental engineer Admir Masic and his colleagues proposed in a 2023 paper that ancient builders instead used a process called “hot mixing.” In this method, highly reactive quicklime (dry heated limestone) is mixed with volcanic ash and water, setting off a chemical reaction that produces heat and gives the material self-healing capabilities.

To reaffirm his discovery, Masic and his team returned to Pompeii in 2024 and visited a house that was under renovation when Mount Vesuvius erupted, freezing the place in time. “I literally felt like I was a worker in 79 C.E.,” Masic says.

Inside one of the rooms, among stones, roof tiles and tools, the researchers found large piles of dry, premixed mortar ingredients—a blend of volcanic ash and granules of quicklime—waiting to be hydrated and applied to walls, Masic says.

Scientific American for more

by VIJAY PRASHAD

Iran is in turmoil. Across the country, there have been protests of different magnitudes, with violence on the increase with both protesters and police finding themselves in the morgue. What began as work stoppages and inflation protests drew together a range of discontent, with women and young people frustrated with a system unable to secure their livelihood. Iran has been under prolonged economic siege and has been attacked directly by Israel and the United States not only within its borders, but across West Asia (including in its diplomatic enclaves in Syria). This economic war waged by the United States has created the situation for this turmoil, but the turmoil itself is not directed at Washington but at the government in Tehran.

There are reports—such as in the mainstream Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in October 2025 about Israeli “influence operations aiming to install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran”—that Israeli intelligence has a role in the protests, and the United States has openly told the protestors that it would bomb Tehran if the violence by the government increase. Last year, protests took place in twelve South Pars oil refineries, where five thousand contract workers in the Bushehr Gas Refinery Workers Union marched with their families on 9 December in Asaluyeh to demand higher wages and better working-conditions. When the workers took their struggle to the National Parliament in Tehran, where they called for an end to the contract work system, the Israelis and the United States took advantage of these sincere protests to attempt to transform a legitimate struggle into a potential regime change operation.

To understand what is happening, here are six points of historical importance that are offered in the spirit of discussion. Since 1979, Iran has played a very important role in the movement beyond monarchies in the Arab and Muslim world, and it has been an important defender of the Palestinian struggle. Iran is no stranger to foreign interference, going back to the British control of Iran’s oil from 1901, the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention that divided Iran into spheres of influence, the 1921 coup that put Reza Khan on the throne, the 1953 coup that installed his son, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi to the throne, and then the hybrid war against the Iranian Revolution from 1979 to the present. Here are the six points:

1. The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 overthrew the rule of the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi, and due to the strength of the religious clergy and its political formations resulted in the creation of the Islamic Republic in April 1979 with the Constitution of the Islamic Republic coming into effect in December 1979. The other currents in the revolution (from the communist left to the liberals) found themselves largely sidelined and even—in some cases—repressed. The March 1979 protests on International Women’s Day in Tehran followed the restrictions on women’s rights (particularly against the compulsory hijab policy), which forced the government to accept the demands of the protests—but this was a short-term win, since in 1983 a mandatory hijab law was passed.  
2. The Revolution followed the military coup of Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan in 1977, the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan (August 1978), the establishment of the Yemeni Socialist Party (October 1978) that took the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen into the Soviet sphere and that led to the North-South war in Yemen (February-March 1979), and the capture of power by Saddam Hussein Iraq in July 1979—the entire region of south-western and central Asia catapulting in political somersaults. Some of these developments (Pakistan, Iraq) offering advantages to the United States, and the others (Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen) being counter to US objectives in the region. Very quickly, the United States attempted to press its advantages by trying to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.  
3. The pressure by the United States on these processes led to a war-like situation in all three countries: the US and its Gulf allies urged Iraq to invade Iran unprovoked in September 1980, starting a war that lasted till 1988; the Gulf Arab states urged North Yemen to invade South Yemen after the assassination of Salim Rubaya Ali (a Maoist who was negotiating the merger of the two Yemens); finally, in Afghanistan, the US began to fun the mujahideen to start an assassination campaign against cadre of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen saw their social projects narrowed by the attacks they faced from outside. Afghanistan crashed into over forty years of terrible violence and war, even though the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan remained in place for eighteen years; the Marxist government in South Yemen remained until 1990, but it was a pale shadow of its own expectations; Iran, meanwhile, saw its Islamic Republic survive a harsh sanctions policy that followed the end of the war by Iraq (in 1988).  
4. The Islamic Republic faced several important, consecutive challenges:   The most important came from US imperialism, which not only fully spurred Iraq’s war, but supported initiatives by the former Iranian elites to restore their rule and supported Israeli attempts to undermine the Islamic Republic (including direct attacks on Iran, sabotage operations, and assassinations of key figures from the science professions and military). It is the United States and Israel that have been systematically trying to erode Iran’s power in the region with the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in 2020, the harsh attack on Hezbollah during the Israeli genocide and the assassination of Syed Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, and the overthrow of the government in Syria in December 2024 with the installation of the former al-Qaeda chief as President in Damascus.   The old Iranian elites, led by the Shah at first till his death in 1980 and then his son, so-called Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, joined with the Europeans and the US to restore their rule. It is important to know that while the Shah had sat on the Peacock Throne from 1941, he was forced to accept a democratic government from 1951 to 1953 – which was overthrown by Western intelligence services and then the Shah was encouraged to exercise absolute rule from 1953 to the revolution of 1978-79. The Shah’s bloc has consistently wanted to return to power in Iran. While the Green Movement of 2009 had a very small monarchical element, it represented the dominant classes who wanted political reforms against the more plebeian presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is telling that the United States has ‘chosen’ the Shah’s son, who lives in Los Angeles, as the figure of this uprising.   Limitations to the republic’s transformative social agenda were present as it tolerated sections of the old elite, allowing them to hold their property, and therefore allowing the formation of a stratified class system that benefited sections of these property owners and an emergent middle class. After the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in June 1989 and the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the government adopted large parts of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment policies, which —one way or the other—remained in place for decades (the policy was driven by Mohsen Nourbaksh, who was the Minister of Economic Affairs from 1989 to 1994 and then head of the Central Bank from 1994 to 2003). The economy was not organised along socialist lines in 1979, but it had built a strong role for the state and for public planning due to the needs of the war economy and due to the commitment to Islamic social welfare. Nourbaksh could not totally dismantle the state, but he conducted currency and banking reform as well as he did cautiously integrate Iran into the global economy. The class divergence and the difficulties of life for the majority of Iranians increased due to the combined impact of the US-European sanctions regime, the military threats by the US-Israelis (that has led to high military spending in Iran—still at around 2.5 percent of GDP it is much lower than the 12 percent of GDP during the reign of the Shah), and to the neoliberal policies pursued by the increasingly neoliberal finance ministers of the government (such as Ali Tayebnia from 2013 to 2017 and Ali Madanizadeh from 2025). It was this limitation of the Islamic Republic that has led to cycles of economic protest: 2017-2018 (around inflation and subsidy cuts), 2019 (around fuel price hike), 2025 (by bakers), and 2025-26 (soaring inflation and the collapse of the Iranian rial).

South Asia Journal for more

How a Khoja Family Helped Wire the Empire: The Chinoys and the Making of Cosmopolitan Capitalism

by DANISH KHAN

Bombay’s Chinoy family pioneered India’s international wireless communication and shaped cosmopolitan capitalism in the colonial era.

In the crowded economic history of colonial India, the spotlight is often trained on a familiar cast: the Parsis of Bombay – Tatas, Wadias, Godrejs; the Marwari financial giants of Calcutta like the Birlas; and Hindu industrial houses. These communities unquestionably shaped the contours of Indian capitalism. Yet this focus obscures the contributions of other groups who played pivotal roles in connecting India to global circuits of technology, finance and communication.

One such story is that of the Chinoys, a Khoja Ismaili Muslim business family from Bombay. Their rise from the China trade to the helm of India’s international wireless communication network illuminates a distinctive moment in India’s economic history – one in which indigenous capital, imperial technological ambition and flexible, cross-community partnerships came together to produce what we may call cosmopolitan capitalism.

This story not only unsettles the notion that Gujarati Muslim traders were confined to Indian Ocean commerce; it shows how local entrepreneurial families could position themselves at the centre of the empire’s most advanced technological systems.

The Chinoys: a family emerges

Like many Bombay merchant families, the Chinoys began in maritime trade. Their patriarch, Meherally Chinoy, started in the mid-nineteenth century as an apprentice to the Khoja merchant prince Jairazbhoy Peerbhoy. Through repeated voyages to China and Japan, he built a reputation for commercial acumen and established both capital and credibility. His sons consolidated and expanded this base.

The Wire for more

Partners in Empire: Indigenous business, imperial technology, and the Indian Radio Telegraph Company

by DANISH KHAN

Abstract

This article examines the introduction of the beam wireless system to India as part of the Imperial Wireless Chain, which enhanced communication links between Britain and India. It attributes the pioneering role in establishing the beam wireless service and laying the foundation for commercial radio broadcasting to a Bombay-based Ismaili Khoja family—the Chinoys—who secured necessary patents from Marconi and established the Indian Radio & Telegraph Company (IRTC). Departing from prevailing scholarship that frames Gujarati Muslim trading communities of Khojas, Bohras, Memons and groups such as Sindhis and Chettiars primarily as migrant transnational merchants (unlike Marwaris and Jains), this study foregrounds their role in a strategic, technology-driven infrastructure sector. It traces how the IRTC, born from colonial Bombay, created an unprecedented alliance of Parsi, Hindu and Muslim capital, exemplifying the city’s distinctive model of cosmopolitan capitalism.

Introduction

In colonial India, Bombay was an important centre of trade and finance. Unlike the other two Presidency towns of Calcutta and Madras, where Europeans dominated, members of various Indian trading communities occupied a crucial position in Bombay’s commercial world. Foremost among these groups were the Parsis, who were considered pioneers of the cotton industry and enjoyed good relations with the British. The other communities who were present in Bombay and were active in various lines of trade were the Arabs, Banias, Bhatias, Bohras, Khojas, Jains and Memons.¹ While the majority of the members of these communities were small traders, the involvement in the China trade had enabled the transformation of some of them to big capitalists.By the mid-nineteenth century, these capitalists started investing in cotton mills, facilitating the development of a vibrant cotton industry in Bombay. Several of them had also prospered due to obtaining military and government contracts, which allowed them to move to different sectors. The existing scholarship on business communities such as Parsis and Marwaris and business groups such as the Tatas, Wadias, Birlas, Bajajes and Godrejes identifies them closely with the internal economy of colonial India. On the other hand, the Gujarati Muslim business communities of Khojas, Bohras and Memons, along with Sindhis and Chettiars, have been examined as migrant groups involved heavily in external trade.²The article begins with a discussion of the Chinoy family and provides the background to their rise and importance. I use archival records and family history to narrate how beam wireless service came to India and started operations in order to demonstrate that a Khoja family firm became a source not only for introducing new technology but also for facilitating a joint venture cutting across communities. This article thus advocates an approach which goes beyond Parsi and Hindu trading groups in narrating the development and growth of capitalism in colonial India.As far as family firms are concerned, the general trend has been that Muslim groups find a place in works pertaining to Indian Ocean trade, but in the context of inland trade and industry, the focus has remained on Hindu groups.³ This article studies the introduction of the beam wireless service in India to illuminate the dynamics of a successful Khoja Ismaili family firm of the Chinoys.⁴ Operating the beam wireless service in India was a prestigious and crucial project and showed the confidence and reliance the government placed upon this family. A factor behind the success of this endeavour was the involvement of other prominent capitalists engineered by the Chinoys. However, they could not replicate the success of beam wireless service in their other venture, radio broadcast, which required bigger investment and a larger setup.The scholarship on radio communication and the British Empire has revolved around the role of the pioneer Guglielmo Marconi and his company, the various twists and turns in the development of the Imperial Wireless Chain,⁵ technological improvements and the competition for dominance among the European colonial powers.⁶ Much less is known of the companies that were established to construct and manage stations in the colonies and dominions to establish wireless radio communication with London. Reciprocal stations were required to complete the Imperial Wireless Chain. In the case of India, as this article recounts, a private enterprise was the most favoured option to establish and manage the wireless stations.⁷The credit for the introduction of the beam wireless service in India goes to two brothers, Sir Rahimtoola Chinoy (1882–1957) and Sir Sultan Chinoy (1885–1968). Their father, Meherally Chinoy (1829–1907), had started as an apprentice in the firm of Jairazbhoy Peerbhoy, a famous Khoja merchant prince, in the mid-nineteenth century. Meherally Chinoy made several trips to China and Japan, making substantial money for his employer and for himself as commission.⁸ He rose to become a partner in the firm and, in time, married his employer’s cousin. Though not involved in local politics, Meherally Chinoy had become a well-known name in Bombay’s trading world by the time of his death in 1907.⁹

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by DAMILARE DOSUNMU & TESSIE WAITHIRA

An unemployment crisis has created fertile ground for companies to step in with opaque systems built on WhatsApp groups, middlemen, and bargain-basement wages.

• Chinese AI companies are quietly tapping into Kenya’s young workforce, hiring students and recent graduates to label thousands of videos a day.
• The work is done through opaque networks of middlemen and WhatsApp groups that operate like digital factory floors.
• Kenya’s weak labor protections and soaring youth unemployment have made it a hot spot for cheap AI labor, prompting officials and unions to warn of a new form of digital colonialism as the government rushes to draft regulations.

It’s 3 a.m. in Nairobi, and Ken’s laptop and phone glow in the dark. On one screen, waves crash against a beach in a video, and on the other, a woman stretches into a yoga pose. He has watched each clip several times, trying to decide whether or not it’s in slow motion.

His phone buzzes. In a WhatsApp message, a teammate informs him that she has already labelled 2,200 video clips that day, 200 short of her daily goal. “Are you close to the target? I am so sleepy, I think I will continue tomorrow,” she says.

Ken, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, fearing loss of work, is among the young Kenyans quietly fueling China’s artificial intelligence ambitions from Nairobi. For as little as 700 Kenyan shillings ($5.42), the workers — mostly university students and recent graduates — spend around 12 hours a day labeling thousands of short videos for China-based companies.

Kenya has long been a data labor hub for U.S. tech giants like Meta and OpenAI. Rest of World’s reporting shows that in recent months, Chinese AI firms have been moving in, but with less transparency.

“Chinese AI firms have quietly become some of the world’s largest buyers of human-labeled data. What distinguishes their expansion isn’t just scale, but opacity — a low-visibility supply chain stitched across East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East,” Payal Arora, professor of inclusive AI culture, media, and culture studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Rest of World. “Unlike the U.S. firms that are increasingly scrutinized, the Chinese operations often operate through layers of subcontractors, making accountability far harder to trace. … The lack of transparency means we know far less about labor conditions, wage structures, or worker protections than we should.”

Rest of World reached out to some of China’s largest AI companies to inquire if they outsource data labeling work to Kenya and how they connect with workers in the country, but did not receive responses.

Over the past decade, U.S. tech companies have relied on Kenyan workers for back-end tech work such as data labeling. Companies including Meta, Google, and OpenAI work with outsourcing firms like Sama, CloudFactory, and Turing in Kenya. These arrangements have led to a series of complaints about low pay, toxic office culture, and the traumatic nature of work without mental health support. In recent years, companies have faced public protests and several court cases in Kenya as local workers challenge how Silicon Valley employers treat them.

China, which is challenging the U.S.’ dominance in global AI, is tapping Kenyan workers for similar assignments. Unlike American companies, however, Chinese firms tend to outsource work more informally.

Rest of World spoke to 10 annotators who said they work for Chinese companies, based on the nature of the content they annotate. A few team leaders said they have met their Chinese managers over calls. None of the annotators knew the names of the companies behind the projects. They only knew the middlemen: third-party companies or agents.

Rest of World for more

by SANDY ENGLISH

After officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested protesters who blocked ICE Gestapo forces from leaving a garage in New York City’s Chinatown late last month, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mayor-elect, took to social media (with a week’s delay) to comment on the incident. He advised immigrant workers of their rights—the need for a judicial warrant for ICE to enter private dwellings (that ICE routinely violates), the right to film ICE, etc.

But before the video clip is two-thirds done, Mamdani tells viewers not to “impede their investigation, resist arrest or run” and follows up with political pablum directed to his supporters, that he will as mayor “protect, support and celebrate our immigrant brothers and sisters.”

The essential political content of the video is, however, that the NYPD will arrest anyone who interferes with ICE operations. The intended audience of the video is the NYPD brass and the Trump administration. The video seeks to reassure them that a Mamdani government will uphold ICE operations in the city. It is worth noting that since Mamdani met with Trump in November, he has not posted a single item on social media criticizing Trump.

The pact between Trump and Mamdani has a concrete—and chilling—meaning: Mamdani will allow the work of the repressive apparatus of the state in the city, in this case primarily the NYPD, to continue unimpeded.

This is the significance of his reappointment of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the pioneer of one of the most sinister mechanisms of repression aimed at the working class, the NYPD’s mass surveillance tools.

Tisch is not only a scion of an ultra-wealthy family that has played a prominent though largely behind-the-scenes role in New York City politics for the last 50 years. She has also devoted her career to designing and implementing a pervasive spying infrastructure known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS).

According to the watchdog group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), thanks to DAS, “formed through a public-private partnership with Microsoft, what was once the subject of dystopian imagination is now an everyday reality for New Yorkers. DAS uses cameras, license plate readers, and radiological sensors to create a real-time surveillance map of New York City. This system partners with privately-owned CCTV cameras throughout New York City and instantly compares data with multiple non-NYPD intelligence databases. DAS video files are stored for at least one month, and metadata and license plate data are stored for at least five years—possibly indefinitely.”

STOP has also noted that data from credit cards and their place and time of use on the OMNY system (the MTA’s fare payment system) in New York subways and buses could be harvested by the NYPD. The state agency that manages the subway system, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), allows the NYPD to collect this data without a warrant.

WSWS for more

by PRABHAT PATNAIK

According to a report in the Times of India (November 23), the United States has asked European countries to restrict immigration in order to preserve “Western Civilization”. Many in the Third World would find the term “Western Civilization” laughable, especially if it is used in the sense of denoting something precious and worth preserving. The atrocities committed by Western imperialist countries against people all over the world over the last several centuries have been so horrendous that using the term “civilization” to cover such behaviour appears grotesque. From British colonialism’s unleashing  famines in India that killed millions in its rapacious bid to raise revenue from hapless peasants, to Belgium’s king Leopold’s unspeakable brutality against the people of what used to be called the Congo, to German extermination camps in Namibia that wiped out whole tribes, it is a tale of horrible cruelty inflicted on innocent people for no reason other than sheer greed. It is not surprising in this context that Gandhiji, when asked by a journalist what he thought of “Western Civilization”, had wryly quipped: “that would be a very good idea”.

But let us ignore all this cruelty and focus only on the material advance achieved by the West. This material advance itself has been achieved on the basis of an exploitative relationship that the Western imperialist countries had developed vis-à-vis the Third World, a relationship that left the latter in such a state that its inhabitants today are desperate to escape it. Western prosperity is not a separate and independent state achieved through Western diligence alone; it has been achieved through a process of decimation of the economies of countries from which the immigrants are fleeing. What is even more striking is that Western imperialism not only wants to stop the inflow of immigrants; it wants to prevent, even through armed intervention, any change in the societal structure in the immigrants’ home countries that could usher in development that stops this inflow of immigrants.

My argument might of course would be dismissed as hyperbole. After all, Western economies have been characterized by the introduction of remarkable innovations that have dramatically raised labour productivity which in turn has made possible an increase in real wages and the real incomes of Western populations. It is this innovativeness that distinguishes the West and that is lacking in the Third World; it constitutes the differentia specifica between the two parts of the world, the root cause of their divergent economic performances owing to which migrants are seeking to move from one part to another.

Two things about innovations however must be noted. First, innovations are typically introduced when the market for the commodity that would come out of the innovation is expected to expand, which is why innovations do not get introduced during Depressions. Second, innovations do not on their own raise real wages; they do so only when there is a tightness in the labour market that arises for independent reasons. For a very long period in history, the expectation about market expansion for Western products was generated by the seizure of Third World markets. The Industrial Revolution in Britain which started the era of industrial capitalism could not have been sustained if colonial markets had not been available where local craft production could be replaced by the new machine-made goods. The other side of Western innovativeness therefore was deindustrialization of colonial economies that created massive labour reserves there.

Even in countries where innovations were introduced, labour reserves were also created because of technological progress, but these reserves got reduced owing to large scale migration of labour to the temperate regions of settlement abroad such as Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where they massacred and displaced the local tribes from the land they had occupied and cultivated this land.  Within the innovating countries therefore tightness was introduced into the labour market through such large scale emigration, because of which real wages could increase alongside innovations that raised labour-productivity.

People’s Democracy for more

by PATRICK BOND

The U.S. now assumes leadership of the G20 until the Miami summit ends on December 15, 2026 – but not without having lost some crucial soft power. In the wake of Donald Trump’s farcical attacks on the host of last week’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, might the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (plus Egypt-Ethiopia-Indonesia-Iran-United Arab Emirates) BRICS bloc – maybe alongside some annoyed Europeans – finally stand up straight, and boycott the Florida meeting? 

After all, a process of shifting power relations – symbolic and real – is supposedly underway. At the University of South Africa in Pretoria on November 20, two days before G20 leaders met, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs gave a viral speech in which he castigated Trump – as the equivalent of a four-year old throwing tantrums – and proclaimed that U.S. power

“is fading. It’s fading in part because of the BRICS. Because the BRICS are saying we don’t need to be under the thumb of a US empire. That’s what President Lula said when he was hosting the BRICS this summer. And Trump put on a tariff on Brazil because he didn’t like a court proceeding against the preceding president who had tried to make a coup. And so he put on a penalty tariff and President Lula said, ‘We don’t need an emperor and we’re not going to succumb to this kind of pressure.’ So the BRICS, of which you are an esteemed member … have 46% of the world population. Thank you. And 41% of the world GDP. And they can look at the G7 and say, ‘Who are you?’ And that’s what they’re doing. So this is the new phase of geopolitics.”

Sachs’ rhetoric is certainly pleasing, but in a manner reminiscent of a too-brief sugar high. Looking more closely over the past six months, the (aspiring) multi-polar world has provided many examples of the opposite process, suggesting the BRICS’ threat to U.S. imperialism is in fact, fading. Read on if you are worried that Sachs vastly hypes the BRICS, by not digging deeply enough, dialectically, into the devils in the details. Read on if you are worried that the BRICS’ ruling elites can and do behave in neoliberal subimperialist – not anti-imperialist – ways.  

“We collapsed the ambitious agenda we had about revitalizing the Global South” 

In the most obvious two examples of Trump appeasement syndrome evident in late November, first, there was no punishment whatsoever – e.g. climate taxes (such as a ‘carbon border adjustment mechanism’ on U.S. exports) – announced against his withdrawal from United Nations climate talks, which were hosted from November 10-22 by Brazilian President Lula da Silva in Belém. 

Z Network for more