Category: Uncategorized

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

This was in 1993. It was a blistering midsummer afternoon. I remember two chettans (big brothers in Malayalam) arriving at our house, drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, stumbling into the living room where my father, the tailor, worked. One of them had an especially long earlobe.

They asked him two things. First, the mundane: “Can you stitch wicket gloves?”—the kind the wicket-keeper uses to catch a fast-moving cricket ball without injuring the fingers. They claimed no ordinary tailor could do it, so they had come to “Josettan.” My father, flattered by their “soaping” and intrigued by a technical challenge, nodded. “Doable. Now next?”

The second request was more loaded. “We want you to stitch us the RSS uniform,” one of them said. “We go to the shakha, but they won’t give us the uniform. We love it. How much would a new one cost? If that’s difficult, could you alter old ones from some shakha elders?” My father paused. He asked them a few questions, they answered. Then he exhaled, shook his head, and finally said what I still remember: “Spare me, please. I won’t have enough manasamadhanam (peace of mind) if I do this. They just broke that mosque in Ayodhya, and …” He trailed off.

After they left, my father, who always voted for the Left and voted for Congress in the general election the previous year because he was “sad” that Rajiv Gandhi, “a good man”, was assassinated, turned to me and said, “Avoid that company, okay? I don’t know who’s right or wrong, but this is not something for you.” I carried that moment with me.

This slice of memory popped into my mind a few days ago, not ONLY because Frontline was putting together a superb issue on the RSS centenary, but also because I had just interviewed Madhav Agasti, the Mumbai-based tailor. For the uninitiated, Agasti is, most recently, the author of the memoir Stitching Stardom; he once tailored the iconic outfit of Mogambo in the 1987 cult film Mr. India. Our conversation wandered across many things, but it pulled me back to how fabric and clothing accrue meaning, how clothing functions in society, culture, politics, polity. And that took me back to the RSS.

Uniforms like the khaki shorts and white shirt of the RSS, especially after 1992, carry weight beyond their seams. We now know that the RSS originally modelled its uniform on the khaki attire of the British colonial police and the Indian Imperial Police. When K. B. Hedgewar founded the Sangh in 1925, he adopted khaki shorts, a khaki shirt, and a black cap to instil discipline, unity, and a martial aura among volunteers. Khaki was cheap, available, and practical for daily drills. In my own experience, the first time clothing carried such a blunt political message was in those RSS uniforms—and it is from that memory that I turn to Mark Twain’s observation.

Mark Twain once said that “clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” But history shows something deeper or more sinister: garments make movements, nations, revolutions. Wearing a uniform transforms a person into a symbol. That transformation is deliberate.

Frontline for more

by SARAH KHALIL

TikTok US was sold for $14bn to pro-Israel billionaires and Abu Dhabi royals, sparking fears of censorship of content about Gaza

TikTok’s future in the US has finally been settled after years of legal battles, congressional hearings, and behind-the-scenes negotiations.

Under a new $14 billion deal brokered by President Donald Trump, the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, has been forced to spin off its US arm into a separate entity controlled by a consortium of American billionaires and Gulf royals.

On paper, the deal is about national security and data privacy; however, in practice, it appears to be about power and control of one of the most influential platforms for young people in the world, and how it will shape political narratives, particularly on Israel. 

TikTok’s role in broadcasting images of Israel’s war on Gaza and the way that has shifted American public opinion has been central to the pressure campaign that forced this sale.

The new owners include some of the most prominent pro-Israel billionaires in the US, alongside a fund run by Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.

Why is TikTok being sold?

The legal framework dates back to 2024, when Congress overwhelmingly passed a law requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok’s US operations or face a nationwide ban. The Supreme Court upheld the law in January 2025.

Lawmakers presented the TikTok crackdown as a national security matter, citing fears that China could access sensitive data, but some observers said it was about controlling narratives on Israel following the start of the Gaza war in October 2023.

The platform has been flooded with videos showing indiscriminate Israeli bombardment of the enclave, civilian casualties, especially children, and Gaza solidarity marches around the world – for the first time, raw Palestinian voices were reaching tens of millions of young Americans in real time.

By October-November 2023, members of Congress were explicitly targeting TikTok over its Gaza coverage, with Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and Representative Mike Gallagher calling for banning the app, citing pro-Palestinian and “anti-Israel” content.

House Republicans, including Cathy McMorris Rodgers, demanded transparency from TikTok over alleged “antisemitic and pro-Hamas” content.

The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that anger over Gaza videos was one of the key drivers of the new push to ban TikTok. Senator Hawley explicitly pointed to “anti-Israel content” as a reason to outlaw the app.

In September 2024, a detailed summary of lawmakers’ accusations circulated in Washington, alleging TikTok’s algorithm was “biased against Israel”.

What are the terms of the deal?

Trump signed an executive order in September 2025 outlining the divestiture. Under the deal, ByteDance will retain less than 20 percent ownership, while American investors will control just over 65 percent.

Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX together will hold about 45 percent.

All US user data will be stored domestically on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure. Oracle will also license TikTok’s recommendation engine, cutting off Beijing’s access.

New Arab for more

by MARYAM ASLANY

Far from being a relic of the past, peasants are vital to feeding the world. They need to be supported, not marginalised

In 2007, the United Nations released a State of the World Population report noting that human life on Earth was quietly passing a tremendous benchmark. In 2008, the proportion of people residing in the countryside was falling – for the first time in history – below 50 per cent. Today, just 42 per cent of humanity lives in the countryside.

For many city dwellers, the urbanisation of our species is natural and inexorable. Extrapolating from past trends, they imagine a future in which the great majority has abandoned the land, leaving it bucolic, automated and empty. In the process, they predict – with some relief! – the imminent extinction of an ancient character: the peasant.

That word is avoided in polite conversation; in many languages, it is used as a term of abuse or contempt. Because peasants themselves are seen as an embarrassing vestige, the antithesis of ‘progress’. Whether Right or Left, Western thinkers have taught that, in order to become modern, societies have to get rid of their peasants. While Adam Smith looked forward to peasants giving way to landowners (for then ‘the land … would be much better improved’), Karl Marx foresaw their replacement by modern socialist management. It has been taken for granted that agriculture will eventually be monopolised by large capital and machinery, and cities will absorb the majority of the human population.

Even in industrialising Europe, the process was not exactly like that. Yes, the traditional countryside was largely destroyed between the 18th and 20th centuries – but the resulting exodus was far greater than could be absorbed by urban factories. Sixty million Europeans had to escape, instead, to the New World. But, in any case, Europe plays a unique role in capitalist history, and it is wrong to extrapolate from it. Other regions have followed other paths.

In large parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia, urbanisation is slowing. Most of those who will enter factories have already done so. Those who value the securities of village life, meanwhile, have little appetite for urban slums, isolation and hypercompetition. Therefore, while humanity was urbanising at a rate of 1.06 per cent per year between 1950 and 1970, that rate has now dropped to 0.74 per cent, and it will fall to just over 0.6 per cent by 2030. Since the world population has tripled since 1950, absolute rural numbers remain greater than ever before. By my calculations, as many as 2 billion people live in the countryside of Africa, Latin America and Asia, where small family farms dominate. After 300 years of ‘modernisation’, in short, peasants still constitute as much as one-quarter of our species, vastly outnumbering assembly-line workers, miners, office drones or taxi drivers.

Aeon for more

by DARCIE PRICE-WALLACE

In August 2025, 161 Tibetan Buddhist nuns from religious institutions across India and Nepal – a record number – gathered at the Dolma Ling Nunnery in northern India to take various levels of the “geshema” examination. These exams are in preparation for one day receiving the geshema degree, comparable with a doctorate in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. The nearly four-week gathering was especially notable because until 13 years ago it was completely unavailable to women.

Now, thanks to a greater emphasis on women’s education in recent years, Tibetan Buddhist nuns are increasingly becoming teachers and abbesses. In monastic institutions and in Buddhist centers around the world, nuns are taking on leadership roles and being acknowledged for their religious scholarship, including the geshema degree.

As a scholar of religious studies and gender, I study the changing roles of women in Buddhism. While nuns were long respected in Tibetan Buddhist culture, they were historically not granted access to the same educational or leadership opportunities as monks. But that has changed, in part due to the crucial role played by the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso.

He encouraged nuns to become advanced degree holders as part of his broader goal to increase gender parity. “Biologically there is no difference between the brains of men and women and the Buddha clearly gave equal rights to men and women,” he said in 2013. In addition to nuns reciting prayers and performing rituals, he emphasized they should study classic Buddhist texts, something traditionally reserved for men.

Such guidance has helped challenge historical misconceptions about women’s intellectual abilities that undermined women’s prominence in Buddhism. Indeed, nuns are now teaching philosophy within their own nunneries at home and abroad, becoming principals of their institutions, serving as role models for other nuns and the laity, and entering long retreats – a staple of Buddhist contemplative activities on the path to awakening.

The Conversation for more

by MADELEINE WATTENBARGER & AXEL HERNANDEZ

The women of the Mazatecas for Freedom collective carried glowing torches along the seashore as they began their march to the federal courthouse in Boca del Río, Veracruz. On September 2, they set up a protest camp in the coastal city to demand an end to the judicial torture the Mexican state has subjected them to for over a decade.

Together with a handful of children and supporters of their cause, they lit torches to show the Mexican state, the judiciary, and local powerbrokers from Eloxochitlán that their fight for freedom is stronger than ever. 

Community organization and collective care have undergirded the long struggle for freedom fought by the Mazatecas for Freedom, a collective of Indigenous women from Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón, Oaxaca, who are relatives of 21 political prisoners released after years of struggle. 

They have been rallying for over a decade against the criminalization of their community. Now, they face intensified persecution and had to move their protest to another state after their cases were assigned to judges in Veracruz.

After securing the release of the last political prisoners from their town in June 2024, the collective announced its intention to fight for the right of return of 14 people displaced from their homes in early 2025. Then, on March 30 of this year, the Oaxacan high court issued over 200 arrest warrants against 56 Mazatec Indigenous people, including some of those previously imprisoned and released.

Eight women, most of them elderly, are now on the list of Eloxochitlán residents facing imprisonment.

The town, whose approximately 4,000 inhabitants grow corn and coffee, has historically been governed through community assembly under usos y costumbres (customary Indigenous practices). Families participating in this autonomous system are face harassment and false accusations for opposing the abuses of former municipal president Manuel Zepeda, who operates a stone and sand mine on the bed and banks of the Xangá Ndá Ge River.

Zepeda’s family has strong ties to the political power structure in Oaxaca, a state in which Indigenous self-government remains strong, despite attempts by political parties and extractive companies to usurp community control.

Zepeda was the first municipal president in Eloxochitlán to have the backing of political parties, unlike previous local leaders whose legitimacy came out of their history of community service. Since the process of criminalization began, his daughter Elisa Zepeda has risen through the ranks of party politics, and now serves as a representative of the Morena Party in Oaxaca’s state congress.

Ojala for more

by ARUNDHATI ROY

The US leaves Afghanistan humiliated, but now faces bigger worries, from social polarisation to environmental collapse, says the novelist and essayist.

3 Sep 2021 – In February 1989 the last Soviet tank rolled out of Afghanistan, its army having been decisively defeated in a punishing, nearly decade-long war by a loose coalition of mujahideen (who were trained, armed, funded and indoctrinated by the American and Pakistani Intelligence services). By November that year the Berlin wall had fallen and the Soviet Union began to collapse. When the cold war ended, the United States took its place at the head of a unipolar world order. In a heartbeat, radical Islam replaced communism as the most imminent threat to world peace. After the attacks of September 11th, the political world as we knew it spun on its axis. And the pivot of that axis appeared to be located somewhere in the rough mountains of Afghanistan.

For reasons of narrative symmetry if nothing else, as the US makes its ignominious exit from Afghanistan, conversations about the decline of the United States’ power, the rise of China and the implications this might have for the rest of the world have suddenly grown louder. For Europe and particularly for Britain, the economic and military might of the United States has provided a cultural continuity of sorts, effectively maintaining the status quo. To them, a new, ruthless, power waiting in the wings to take its place must be a source of deep worry.

In other parts of the world, where the status quo has brought unutterable suffering, the news from Afghanistan has been received with less dread.

The day the Taliban entered Kabul, I was up in the mountains in Tosa Maidan, a high, alpine meadow in Kashmir, which the Indian Army and Air Force used for decades to practise artillery and aerial bombing. From one edge of the meadow we could look down at the valley below us, dotted with martyrs’ graveyards where tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who had been killed in Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination are buried.

In India, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist group, came to power cunningly harnessing post-9/11 international Islamophobia, riding a bloody wave of orchestrated anti-Muslim massacres, in which thousands were murdered. It considers itself a staunch ally of the United States. The Indian security establishment is aware that the Taliban’s victory marks a structural shift in the noxious politics of the subcontinent, involving three nuclear powers: India, Pakistan and China, with Kashmir as a flashpoint. It views the victory of the Taliban, however pyrrhic, as a victory for its mortal enemy Pakistan, which has covertly supported the Taliban in its 20-year battle against the US occupation. Mainland India’s 175m-strong Muslim population, already brutalised, ghettoised, stigmatised as “Pakistanis”—and now, increasingly as “Talibanis”—are at even greater risk of discrimination and persecution.

Most of the mainstream media in India, embarrassingly subservient to the BJP, consistently referred to the Taliban as a terrorist group. Many Kashmiris who have lived for decades under the guns of half a million Indian soldiers, read the news differently. Wishfully. They were looking for pinholes of light in their world of darkness and indignity.

Just International for more

In October 2023, Beirut-based journalist George Azar loses contact with his friend and fixer in Gaza, Raed Athamneh. They had created an unbreakable bond over 20 years, covering news stories together. Unable to reach Gaza this time, George helplessly watches the horrific events unfolding on screens, traumatised by the escalating war.

He tries to make sense of the news coming out of Gaza by meeting with other journalists in Lebanon who have also experienced Israeli bombardment. Each day, George faces mounting anxiety when he does not hear from Raed, who is struggling to survive the genocide.

Locked Out, Locked In is a documentary film by George Azar and Mariam Shahin.

Youtube for more (Thanks to Razi Azmi)

by JEFF COHEN

Suspending Jimmy Kimmel is not Disney’s first action aimed at currying Trump’s favor.

As corporate media accelerate their censorship of comedians and journalists, we must realize that we got to this dire situation because of old-fashioned, bipartisan corruption in Washington. The problem didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It began long ago, especially in the 1980s and ‘90s when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations.

And, of course, those corporations were big political donors to both parties. Enormous mergers were approved. Anti-trust laws were ignored. Federal Communications Commission rules were changed, and caps on mega-ownership relaxed or eliminated.

Today, a handful of amoral conglomerates control our information and media system – conglomerates that care a lot about profit-maximization and very little about free expression and the right to dissent, especially when expression and dissent interfere with their profits. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the process of conglomeration. It was sheer corruption – and Trumpian censorship is the result.

This week’s “indefinite” suspension of comedian and Trump critic Jimmy Kimmel by ABC/Disney over remarks about right-wing exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s murder might seem abrupt. It wasn’t. It came after an unprecedented threat from Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr to go after ABC stations and, perhaps more importantly, because of two powerful companies that blossomed over the years thanks to political decisions made in Washington. Those two companies – Nexstar Media and Sinclair Broadcast Group – each own or operate roughly 200 TV stations across the country, including many ABC affiliates, and they acted before Disney by saying they’d be removing Kimmel’s program from their ABC stations.

This is why President Bill Clinton is so important to the story. Working hand-in-hand with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Clinton pushed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act – a major, corrupt piece of legislation largely written by corporate lobbyists and hardly debated in Congress. It passed the U.S. Senate 81 to 18. (With little media coverage of this corporate-friendly bill, a consumer group approached CNN to try to buy ad time to warn the public, but CNN refused.)

Prior to the 1996 law, a company could own only 12 TV stations nationwide. Not 200. Besides helping today’s TV giants Nexstar and Sinclair, the law helped Rupert Murdoch grow his media company. A conservative Texas-based company, Clear Channel, owned about 50 radio stations before the law – and quickly grew to more than 1,000 radio stations after caps were loosened.

Sinclair is as Trumpian as any media company around. You may remember when Sinclair in 2018 ordered its local TV anchors across the country to read the same pro-Trump script about “one-sided news ” and “fake stories.” If not, watch the this 90-second video. Sinclair had intervened in the 2004 election in favor of President Bush by running a “documentary” bashing the Democratic nominee John Kerry. This week, Sinclair demanded that Jimmy Kimmel apologize to Kirk’s family and donate to Kirk’s political organization.

LAProgessive for more

by ANA PALACIO

China’s dual history of influence and subjugation may prove to be a valuable asset in adapting the international order to new realities. As a founding member of that order, China is well-positioned to balance the demands of power with the imperative of inclusion.

MADRID – Russia and China are often portrayed as partners in a quest to weaken and even destroy the rules-based international order. In reality, however, it is only Russian President Vladimir Putin who seeks that goal. Chinese President Xi Jinping, by contrast, wants to lead the way in reforming the international order, thereby establishing China as its heir and future custodian. After all, Xi reminds the West, China helped establish the current arrangements.

While World War II came to Europe in 1939, it began in Asia two years earlier, when a clash between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing escalated into full-scale war. By that point, China had already been resisting Japanese forces largely alone for eight years, since Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria. As Japan expanded its campaign of conquest, China continued this fight, sustaining massive losses. Through determination and sacrifice, China earned its place in WWII’s “Big Four” (with the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States). At the Cairo Conference of 1943, Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Nationalist leader, joined US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as an equal. The resulting Cairo Communiqué called for Japan to relinquish the Chinese territories it had seized and established China as a principal architect of the postwar settlement. Chinese delegates attended the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, where the International Monetary Fund was created and the groundwork for the World Bank was laid. At the San Francisco Conference of 1945, China became the United Nations Charter’s first signatory. And in the debates that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P.C. Chang distinguished himself by insisting that any universal framework must reflect not only the principles of Western individualism, but also Confucian notions of community, duty, and precedent. At one point, then-Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights Eleanor Roosevelt later recalled, Chang “suggested that the Secretariat might well spend a few months studying the fundamentals of Confucianism!”

Project-Syndicate for more

(Episode 77) (20/9/2025) I first landed on American soil in 1983 at the age of 33 and instantly fell in love with the country. I spent nearly four years in a small university town in Ohio with my wife and son, studying for my doctorate in history as well as teaching. The more I saw of the country and its people and came into contact with its high educational standards, work ethic, and its rich social life, the more my fascination grew.

My wife and I made many friends. In two road trips, we travelled from the east coast to the west coast of this vast country. I have visited the US for short periods a few more times since then, including as recently as in January last year. On one such trip, my wife and I drove about 10,000 km through 20 states. The more I saw the more I understood why much of the rest of the world is captivated by America, the beauty and bounty of the land matched by the opportunities it offers its people, why, given a chance, tens of millions of people from all around the world would like to make the United States their home.

But overseas, the US has been guilty of many a transgression, to put it mildly. By far the least comprehensible has been Washington’s unquestioned “iron-clad” support for Israel’s apartheid regime, its numerous acts of discrimination and oppression of the Palestinian people, usurpation of Palestinian land, and aggression against its neighbours. But I will return to this in a moment.

Youtube for more