by AMEL BOUBEKEUR

In France’s 2026 local elections, colonial-era racial anxieties were used to undermine political representation & frame wins as threats, writes Amel Boubekeur.

The 2026 municipal elections revealed something new in France. Candidates from immigrant backgrounds were no longer just symbols of republican inclusion. In a remarkable number of cities, they were winning.

Notably, Bally Bagayoko was elected as mayor in the commune of Saint-Denis – situated in the suburbs of Paris – in the first round. His supporters, celebrating at the town hall, chanted, “We are all the children of Gaza.” The following morning, a journalist asked Bagayoko on national TV whether Saint-Denis had elected a mayor or a Gaza proxy.

During the same programme, a fabricated quote about him calling the commune “the city of Black people” was also repeated. But Bagayoko had actually described it as “the city of kings and living people.”

A local electoral result had immediately been placed within a geopolitical context.

We’ve heard it all before

Indeed, the script was predictable. Muslim voters, we are told, have driven the Gaza genocide into local politics. Identity has replaced class. Communalism has entered the polling booth. Local democracy has been overshadowed by foreign conflict.

What this reading overlooks, of course, is the larger redeployment at play. Gaza did not simply enter municipal politics randomly. Over the past two years, a geopolitical conflict has increasingly acted as a local screening process that determines who can represent whom, on what terms, and at what cost.

For decades, the representation of France’s banlieues relied on delegation. Parties chose minority candidates, vetted them internally, and presented them as proof that the Republic could incorporate difference on its own terms. These areas could be governed because they were not expected to develop autonomous political voices. Their role was to be represented, not to redefine representation.

La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) disrupted that arrangement. Not because it stood outside electoral calculations, it did not, but because it created a channel through which working-class suburbs with large communities from immigrant backgrounds could express themselves and be heard, without relying solely on the old gatekeeping structures of traditional parties, municipal notables, and diversity brokers.

What unsettled the French political landscape in March was not only that candidates from immigrant backgrounds won, but also that they seemed less dependent on the traditional system of delegated representation.

New Arab for more

by TOM DANNENBAUM, REBECCA HAMILTON, ADIL AHMAD HAQUE, OONA A. HATHAWAY, & GABOR RANA

The United States and Israel initiated strikes on Iran over one month ago, on February 28, 2026. The attack was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter. The conduct of the war, and statements of U.S. officials, also raise serious concerns about violations of international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes. We have written the below statement together with over 100 U.S.-based international law experts, to detail our profound concerns about the war. The letter is signed by international law experts across the United States, including senior professors; leaders of prominent international law associations, non-governmental organizations, and legal clinics; former government legal advisors; and military law experts and former Judge Advocates General (JAGs).

Letter of over 100 international law experts on Iran war

We, the undersigned U.S.-based international law experts, professors, and practitioners write to express profound concern about serious violations of international law and alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel, and Iran in the present armed conflict in the Middle East.

Due to our connection to the United States, our focus here is on the conduct of the U.S. government, but we remain concerned about the risk of atrocities across the region including the continuing risks posed by the Iranian government to Iranians through violent crackdowns on dissent, and to civilians across the Middle East through Iran’s ongoing unlawful strikes on civilian infrastructure using explosive weapons in densely populated areas.

One month has passed since the United States and Israel launched strikes across Iran. The initiation of the campaign was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter, and the conduct of United States forces since, as well as statements made by senior government officials, raise serious concerns about violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including potential war crimes.  

We collectively affirm the importance of equal application of international law to all, including countries that hold themselves out as global leaders. Recent statements from senior U.S. government officials describing the rules governing military engagement as “stupid” and prioritizing “lethality” over “legality” are profoundly alarming and dangerously short-sighted. These claims, particularly in combination with the observable conduct of U.S. forces, are harming the international legal order and the system of international law that we have devoted our lives to promoting. 

The war, which is costing U.S. taxpayers between $1-2 billion each day, is imposing significant harm to civilians in the region, has resulted in the loss of hundreds of civilian lives across the Middle East, and is causing serious environmental and economic harms.

We write to express our concern about 1) jus ad bellum, or the decision to go to war, 2) jus in bello, or the conduct of hostilities, 3) rhetoric and threats from senior U.S. officials and their allies, which portend further abuses, and 4) the decimation of civilian harm mitigation structures within the U.S. government as a part of U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s “gloves off” approach to warfare. 

1. Jus ad bellum concerns: The strikes launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026 clearly violated the United Nations Charter prohibition on the use of force. Force against another state is only permitted in self-defense against an actual or imminent armed attack or where authorized by the UN Security Council. The Security Council did not authorize the attack. Iran did not attack Israel or the United States. Despite the Trump administration’s varied and sometimes conflicting claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat that could ground a self-defense claim. Many international law experts have concluded that Israel and the United States’ actions violate the UN Charter, including the President and President-elect of the American Society of International Law, and the President of the American Branch of the International Law Association; UN Secretary-General António Guterres also condemned the attacks as undermining international peace and security.

2. Concerns about violations of international humanitarian law: The laws of armed conflict constrain the conduct of hostilities of all parties to the ongoing conflict. We are concerned that these fundamental rules may have been violated, including in the context of reported strikes on civilians and civilian objects such as political leaders who have no military role, oil and gas infrastructure, including South Pars, and water desalination plants. On March 19, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned strikes on energy infrastructure, noting their “disastrous” impacts for civilians. 

We are seriously concerned about strikes that have hit schools, health facilities, and homes. The Iranian Red Crescent reports that “67,414 civilian sites have been struck, of which 498 are schools and 236 health facilities.” A report by leading civil society organizations found that at least 1,443 Iranian civilians, including 217 children, were killed by U.S. and Israeli forces between February 28 and March 23. 

Just Security for more

by KELLIE B. GORMLY

Jermain Wesley Loguen opened his home to fugitives fleeing the South. He publicized this work openly, risking arrest or even re-enslavement

Twenty-six years after he escaped from slavery in Tennessee and fled north, the Reverend Jermain Wesley Loguen received a letter at his home in Syracuse, New York, from the woman who still considered herself his owner. He had run away from Sarah Logue’s plantation in 1834, taking a mare named Old Rock with him. Now, Logue was in desperate need of money—and she planned to get it from Loguen.

In her February 1860 letter, Logue wrote that she “had determined to sell you.” A potential buyer had already made an offer, but Logue believed she had a better idea: She wanted Loguen to send her $1,000 (nearly $40,000 today) as compensation for her losses. In return, she would release her claim on him. Because of Loguen’s escape and horse theft, Logue claimed, she’d been forced to sell two of his siblings, Abe and Ann, as well as 12 acres of land. She hoped to buy back the land with the money sent by Loguen.

If Loguen refused, Logue warned that she would arrange for his sale to a different enslaver. “You may rest assured that the time is not far distant when things will be changed with you,” Logue wrote, adding, “You had better comply with my request.”

Smithsonian Mag for more

by MADLEN NIKOLOVA

Bulgarians will go to the polls for the eighth time in five years later this month, after a massive wave of protests brought down Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s right-wing coalition at the end of last year. Demonstrations broke out in November in response to the proposed 2026 budget, which sought to hike social security contributions and taxes, increase salaries for the police, defence agencies and judiciary while leaving rank-and-file administrative workers, teachers and hospital staff with pay rises hardly covering inflation. The budget was also the first to be denominated in euros, Bulgaria having been approved to join the Eurozone last year, which inflamed popular anxiety about inflation. The protests peaked on 10 December, when more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, with tens of thousands more turning out across almost all regional cities. The next day Zhelyazkov – having been in power for less than a year – announced his resignation on live television, minutes before a scheduled parliamentary vote of confidence.

The protests were lazily described as another ‘Gen Z revolt’ by the liberal media, while some on the left dismissed them as orchestrated by the opposition coalition, the centrist PP-DB. Yet they unleashed political energies that far transcended the nominal organizers: the PP-DB’s approval ratings are around 15 per cent; an estimated 71 per cent supported the protests. Surveys revealed, moreover, that they were not confined to angry youth. Many participants were middle-aged, animated by concerns for a dignified old age for their parents, affordable healthcare, education for their children, and profoundly distrustful about how the higher taxes – raised from wages already strained by inflation – would be spent given widespread corruption.

NLR for more

by SHOBHITA THAKUR

As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of disciplined distance; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing.

As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of discipline d distance ; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing. But some time ago, I watched a video of Sonam Wangchuk speaking after his release from detention, and that distance quietly collapsed.

What I saw was not an activist, not a figure of resistance, but a human being carrying the visible weight of care. His face was drawn, marked by fatigue; there was a faint, almost fragile smile, the kind that seems less an expression of ease and more an act of endurance. I could see a thousand quiet wounds etched across his face. And yet, there was dignity, an unbroken composure that did not harden into hate, nor dissolve into despair. He spoke gently, almost tenderly, as though the very thing he was fighting for, his mountains, his home, still required softness to be protected. What stayed with me was not what he said, but how he remained: unbitter, without rage, still capable of care and love. It is difficult to understand how someone can move through such strain and not be altered into something unrecognizable to love. And perhaps that is where the unease begins, not in his suffering, but in ours. In how easily we receive such moments, process them, and move on, as though they belong to the ordinary rhythm of things.

As though this quiet erosion of the human spirit, this demand that love must endure struggle to justify itself, is somehow normal. His suffering did not turn into hatred; it remained, stubbornly, a form of love. And in that persistence, something about the rest of us, our ease with forgetting, our fluency in indifference, the quiet coldness of the human heart feels far more unsettling. Why is it that those who love hardest, feel deepest, think most clearly and remember, like elephants, with a quiet and unrelenting fidelity are the ones the world turns against? They are the ones who are made to suffer, to be broken, to be silenced, jailed, even erased.

As though memory itself were a threat, and love, when it refuses to fade, becomes something the world must discipline, its hunger to possess, to command; because a world that can inflict and endure violence often cannot bear the persistence of memory, nor the clarity of those who refuse to forget. Orhan Pamuk is someone who has a deep love affair with his city, Istanbul; his words carry the power of visuals. He has captured memories and emotions of himself and of his city and his people in ways no historian ever could, not just recording the past but inhabiting it. There is something quietly disconcerting about a novelist needing protection. Pamuk was not inciting violence; he was naming it, speaking about histories his country preferred to leave unspoken.

The Statesman for more

Russia Today (RT) correspondents Steve Sweeney and Ali Reda Sbaity were attacked while reporting on southern Lebanon. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.

Youtube

Israel rocket strike on British Journalist Steve Sweeney

This is the moment our member and dear comrade Steve Sweeney was almost killed by the Israeli Zionists, acting hand in glove with US and British Imperialism.

Steve has been reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His news pierces the imperialist-Zionist Propaganda. Here he was making an on-the-ground report in Lebanon.

There can be no doubt that this was 100% premeditated and targeted at Steve, in line with the Israeli policy of murdering journalists to kill the evidence of their atrocities.

It is almost certain that our “Labour” prime minister @Keir_Starmer, and “Labour” foreign secretary @YvetteCooperMP and Armed forces minister @JohnHealey_MP, and other cabinet level “Labour” ministers were aware of and green-lit the assassination attempt.

Make no mistake, comrades. We are at war. And the Labour Party is the enemy running the imperialist murder machine. They walk among us. Anyone who supports Labour is the enemy of the British workers.

Youtube

by B. R. GOWANI

US has become too big and dangerous for the world

The United States has become too big for the world. It was in August 1945 that the US under President Harry Truman terrorized the world, and particularly the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in japan, when it exploded the atom bombs and killed over 200,000 Japanese. More than 80 years later, now it is Donald Trump who is terrorizing the world especially, Iran.

On April 1, 2026, Trump wrote on his Social Truth site:

“We are going to hit them [Iranians] extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong.”

On April 5, 2026, Trump wrote on his Social Truth site:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Doomsday warning

On March 7, 2026, at 7:06 AM (EST), US President Donald Trump issued a doomsday warning to Iran:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

A sadist pronouncement. The threat to nuke Iran. In less than 11 hours.

No country should have this kind of monstrous power.

Will he or will he not?

About four hours before the expiry of Trump’s threat of annihilating the entire Iranian civilization, someone called me and said that Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had asked President Donald Trump to extend the deadline, and requested Iranian leaders to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. He wanted to know my thoughts.

I said it’s probably Trump who, looking for a way out of the Israel ‘s war he got involved in, had perhaps asked Sharif to tweet such a request. Well, it turned out that my guess was correct.

In his enthusiasm, Sharif retweeted it without realizing that the first sentence needed to be deleted.

Sharif’s edited tweet:

“Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in near future. To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture. We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region.”

The deleted sentence with explanation has been posted by investigative journalist Ryan Grim on his X account:

“Oh, this is unbelievable. The edit history on this tweet shows that Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif originally copied and pasted everything he was sent, including:

“*Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X*”

Now, obviously, Sharif’s own staff don’t call him “Pakistan’s PM,” they would just call him prime minister. The U.S. and Israel, of course, would call him “Pakistan’s PM.”

Would be funny if the fate of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance.”

Is Pakistan the right mediator?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes. Pakistan is the right mediator for a number of reasons:

• Pakistan has overly good relations with the US.
• It has good relations with Iran.
• Its relations with China <1> is very good too.
• With the GCC countries, except the UAE <2>, Pakistan is on good terms.
• Turkey is another major country in the Middle East which is close to Pakistan.

As mediator, Pakistan conveyed messages to and from Iran and the US. It then kept China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in the loop by informing them on developments.

No. Pakistan is not the right mediator for one major reason:

Mediators should have enough power to exert on parties involved in the negotiations to abide by the final decision.

Pakistan cannot say anything reasonable to Trump because their relation is that of a master and a subject.

Not only that, there was no guarantee that there won’t be an attack on the Iranian delegation returning back to their country. The US and Israel are famous for back stabbing.

Once the meeting between Iranian and US leaders was over on April 13, the Iranian delegation had to be escorted by roughly a couple dozen Pakistani air force planes because of danger to their lives from Israel and the US!

The world’s two most violent states neither listen to anyone nor respect any global body so it is impossible to expect any meaningful resolution unless Trump himself decides that there is no winning this time around and that it is time to call it quits — from the Strait of Hormuz saga.

Notes

<1> An article in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s NDTV (New Delhi Television) had this heading: “China Didn’t Just Quietly Buy Iran’s Oil. It Funded Its Wartime Economy” by Columnist Anushree Jonko.

(Adani is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friend and political supporter.)

Jonko then quotes Max Meizlish of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD):

“Iran just wouldn’t be able to fight this war without the years of support that it has received from China.”

Meizlish is a pro-Israel and anti-Iran warmonger who instead of accusing Israel and the US of waging war against Iran, is blaming Iran for attacking Israel, the US, and the US bases in the Gulf.

Who has imposed sanctions on Iran? The US. Is it legal for the US to do that? No. But it does it anyway.

Under such heavy illegal/inhumane sanctions, Iran is naturally going to do business with any country that it can do business with. To imply that by buying Iran’s oil, China supported Iran’s war is preposterous. Besides, Iran didn’t start the war, it is Israel/US who initiated it.

<2> In Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on March 18, foreign ministers of 12 countries from Pakistan, Middle East, and Central Asia had a critical meeting on the ongoing US/Israel war against Iran. The UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait wanted to criticize Iran only and not the US and Israel, the countries which started the war. Iran’s counterattacks also targeted the Gulf countries because they had US military bases which have been used in the past to attack Iran and were also being used this time. The draft included condemnation of Iran only because the UAE wanted no criticism of Israel or the US; it craved Iran’s defeat “by any means necessary.” Pakistan wanted to include denunciation of Israel too. Turkey and Lebanon came on Pakistan’s side. The meeting would have failed but for Saudi Arabia’s efforts in convincing the UAE to include Israel too.

Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir wrote in Urdu newspaper Jang that a Gulf country, of course, the UAE, said that for what Iran is doing to us, Iran should be nuked. Turkey’s and Pakistan’s foreign ministers told the delegates that war is not the solution to any problem.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar addressed everyone gathered there:

“With atom bomb, the entire Iranian nation cannot be eliminated. Once Israel is done with Iran, it will head toward Gulf countries one by one because Netanyahu wants to create Greater Israel.”

After a long debate and arguments, the new draft included Israel’s condemnation.

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

A tale of two Mantos

by AJMAL HUSSEIN

Now that the Indian biopic Manto (2018, directed by Nandita Das) has been released in theaters (but banned in Pakistan by Pakistan Censor Board) and is available for streaming, the inevitable comparisons to the Pakistani biopic, also called Manto (2015, directed by Sarmad Sultan Khoosat) have become the topic du jour.

Both films are based on the life and work of Saadat Hasan Manto, a giant of Urdu literature whose trailblazing path was strewn with controversy and personal tragedy. In United India, he lived mostly in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spent his professional career shuttling between Bombay and Lahore. After partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he moved with his family to Lahore where he spent the last eight years of his life.

The ongoing animosity between India and Pakistan means that both countries begrudgingly own the writer, because it is hard to pin him down as either Indian or Pakistani. One can imagine Manto having the last laugh on this superficial conundrum because he always belonged to humanity.

The Pakistani version seems to be more mindful of this division than the Indian version, in terms of the portion of Manto’s life depicted. It only shows the writer’s life in Lahore, and does a poor job of that; there is hardly anything of Lahore to be seen in the film, specifically of the 1940s and 1950s.

This is an odd decision on the part of the filmmakers and indeed questionable, since filming in Lahore should not have been difficult. Manto’s house still stands in Laxmi Mansions, but it isn’t shown in the film. There is also a major anachronistic blunder in the scene where a modern-day Mercedes car is shown in the 1950s era. Period detail is an area where the Indian version excels.

Sarmad Khoosat, in addition to directing, plays the title role in his film, whereas Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Manto in the Indian film. Siddiqui’s portrayal is nuanced and grounded, as befits an actor of his caliber. Khoosat puts in a game attempt, and is sometimes remarkably close to his Indian counterpart. However, he gets carried away in some scenes which reek of overacting. Also, his narration and diction are problematic at times.

Khoosat’s physical appearance is more in line with Manto’s Kashmiri ethnicity than Siddiqui’s. However, the former is much too bulky and healthier for the role whereas the latter is more suitably lean. Akbar Subhani, a Pakistani actor who has previously played Manto better (on television and theatre) than either of these two, is cast in a minor role in Khoosat’s film, and one feels it would have been a better casting choice to have him reprise the role.

The Indian version acknowledges the presence of other literary personalities and showbiz celebrities in Manto’s life, much more so than the Pakistani version. We get to see Ismat Chugtai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Munshi Premchand, Ashok Kumar, Jaddan Bai, Nargis, K. Asif, etc. Manto’s best friend was an actor-singer called Shyam, and he is given much screen time here, but the actor playing him does not rise above amateur level.

The portrayal of Ashok Kumar is also rather wooden, which is a shame and unfortunate irony, considering the real life actor was an accomplished and hugely popular presence in Indian cinema.

The Pakistani version does make Noor Jehan, the legendary singer, actress and director a part of its story, whereas the Indian version completely ignores her. Saba Qamar brings glamour and spark to her depiction of Noor Jehan, but is a little too hammy.

Manto’s wife Safiya was a very supportive and soothing presence in his turbulent life, and so both movies give her character ample screen time. The actresses in both versions do justice to their respective portrayals of Safiya. The bit parts in both movies are a mixed bag, with some strong and some weak performances.

Theatre Wallay for more

Manto, review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42

Before the film, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) displayed categorises the language of the film as Hindi/Urdu. Saadat Hasan Manto wrote short stories and films in Urdu and there is some Hindi in the film, mainly spoken by others. Among the most controversial of Urdu writers, Manto has been the subject of rediscovery over the last decade or so for reasons unknown. Whatever the reasons, Nandita Das has made a compelling and eminently watchable biopic.

It comes on the heels of a Pakistani biography made in 2015 and Mantostaan, which filmed four of his short stories in 2017: Thanda Gosht, Khol Do, Assignment and Aakhiri Salute. We did not get to see the Pakistani film while the Indian outing, directed by Rahat Kazmi, received mixed reactions. Manto was his surname, and not his pen-name, as some might think. He was born in 1912 in Ludhiana but the family had a home in Lahore, while they moved to Mumbai as well.

His parents and his infant son were buried in Mumbai, but he had migrated to Lahore after living for many years in Mumbai, a city he loved dearly. Facing hostilities against the Muslim community, he was forced to leave much against his wishes. Not that he was a devout Muslim—a confirmed alcoholic, his only claim to Islam might have been the numerals 786 (denoting Bismillah—in the name of God) that he wrote before starting any story, and the prayer visits he made to his mother’s grave. Manto hated his late father. Muslim scholars and clerics roundly condemned his writing, often finding them un-Islamic and obscene. He died in Lahore, in 1955, aged 42, mainly as a result of alcohol abuse. All this is chronicled in the present film.

Writer-director Nandita Das’s Manto is not a true biopic, for it does not tell us too much about the personal life of the man and his family. It begins when Manto is already an established writer in Mumbai’s film industry of the mid-1940s and takes us through to his death, a decade later. Along the way, we meet many of his friends and publishers, including Ismat Chughtai (also condemned for writing stories considered obscene, including one on lesbianism), Shyam Chaddha (popular hero Shyam, who died early, like Manto but before him, after falling of a horse during shooting), Ashok Kumar (the boss at Bombay Talkies, who pooh-poohed Manto’s fears when the latter told him about repeated threats to kill him and other Muslims employed at Bombay Talkies) and many more. Ismat stood by him and the two were tried by a court in Lahore, for publishing obscene material. She stood by him all through, when the poet laureate of Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’, a leading light of the Progressive Writers’ Association, refused to consider his obscene work as literature at all. (The film ends on Faiz’s poem, in a tribute of supreme irony).

From the Bombay (now Mumbai) of 1946, the action shifts to Lahore, in 1948, where Manto follows his wife Safia and daughter Nighi, who had left earlier, to attend a wedding. In this city of refugees, just an hour away from the Indian town of Amritsar, he is shunned and prosecuted, and finds very little work. His drinking increases with frustration, though some more his greatest works were written there, where he learnt about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, an event that stunned him, just as partition itself had left deep scars on his psyche. These anxieties were developed into an all-time great short story, Toba Tek Singh, about madmen being exchanged between India and Pakistan, and a village which is in both Hindustan and Pakistan and, therefore, neither here nor there.

It was a sentence uttered in an unguarded moment by Shyam (remember Dillagi and the song ‘Too mera chand’ sung and picturised on him?), whose family had lost a member to the riots in Lahore and the rest of them had managed to escape to India, that finally made Manto decide to quit India. Shyam had said that he could have killed Manto in a fit of rage had he been around when the rioters attacked his family. Shyam used to nurse and humour Manto a lot. He did regret his statement, but the two met only once afterwards, when Shyam visited Lahore for a film’s release.

Film Festivals for more

So What Do We Do About Manto, Who Was Neither Indian Nor Pakistani?

by HARISHCHANDRA THORAT

In our quest to define Manto, we arrive at the same results as we have while getting to the bottom of our current political crises.

Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 in a village in Ludhiana district, Punjab, then part of the British Empire. He lived in the cities of Amritsar and Aligarh for a while, before moving to Mumbai. After the partition, he migrated to Lahore in Pakistan. He died there, somewhat prematurely, in 1955.

The government of Pakistan posthumously awarded him the Nishaan-i-Imtiyaaz, a prestigious civil award, in 2012. Manto is, therefore, a transnational entity.

He is known as a Punjabi writer, even though he hasn’t written much in Punjabi. He wrote in Urdu, so he is an Urdu writer. It doesn’t seem like he took religion very seriously – he is still known as a Muslim writer. In his youth, he was a member of the Indian Progressive Writers association. The latter had a distinct leftward lean. So Manto could be called a Marxist writer too. 

Something which is important from the point of view of his cultural and literary identity – and which is a point of contemporary controversy and relevance- is that his family has roots in Kashmir. After being displaced from Kashmir, his ancestors moved to Punjab. Manto was proud of his Kashmiri roots. His family lovingly maintained the distinctiveness of Kashmiri culture. In a letter to Pandit Nehru, he does mention their shared connection to Kashmir.

‘To be Kashmiri is to be beautiful,’ he wrote. 

So what do we do about Manto? In which identity do we bracket him? If we call him Indian, he was Pakistani too. If we call him Punjabi, he was Kashmiri as well. His being ? leftist comes in the way of trying to capture his identity as a ‘Muslim’ writer, on the basis of his religion. Punjab, Kashmir, the alleys of Mumbai and being a Mohajir in Lahore; all these dichotomous ?aspects were united in his character. Manto, as a writer, can be connected to all of these things, but not to any one of them.

Contemporary politics does not get along with such complex identities – formed of elements which are often conflicting but complementary. It prefers to state questions of identity in a simplistic, crude, rigid and politically convenient ways. To it, identity is something without any ambiguities, an easily identified uniform. Such a uniform would allow, for example, to demarcate a writer into two categories – ‘ours’, or ‘theirs’. This is exactly what has happened to Manto. 

Recently, an English translation of one of Manto’s books came to my attention. The book is Why I Write. The translator and editor of this translation is Aakar Patel. It includes Manto’s discursive prose. Mr. Patel writes about Manto in the preface of the book.

The preface begins by stating that Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indian trapped in Pakistan. Mr. Patel next goes on to say that Manto’s ‘identity didn’t come from religion and it came only partially from geography. It came mainly from his belonging to our culture, about which he wrote with great skill.’ By ‘our’ culture, Mr. Patel of course means ‘Indian’ culture, which is, of course, different from ‘Pakistani’ culture. Patel concludes that Manto was a great Indian writer; he wrote in an Indian language, for an Indian audience and about the Indian experience. 

Mr. Patel unambiguously puts Manto’s writings in the category of Indian literature and in doing so, excludes the place of Pakistan in the formulation of the notion of Indian literature. Before Independence and Partition, about 70 years ago, there was no nation called Pakistan. So the difficult question of what to do about the literature from the region now in Pakistan, before the nation existed, whether to call it Indian or to call it Pakistani, does not seem to occur to Patel.

Does political partitioning lead to cultural partitioning too, if so, what exactly is its process, these questions too do not bother Mr. Patel.

He also forgets that a national identity is an artificial construct, not a natural one. His scheme of classification is simple – writings are either Indian or Pakistani.

The Wire for more

by KEVIN REED

Another devastating round of job cuts has just opened in the tech industry with the layoffs announced by Block and eBay, one in which corporate executives are openly and explicitly justifying mass sackings as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.”

On February 27, Block, formerly the financial services company Square, announced that it is eliminating more than 4,000 jobs—nearly 40 percent of its workforce—and cutting headcount from over 10,000 to just under 6,000.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey made a point of tying the destruction of jobs directly to AI, bragging that “the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company.”

Dorsey insisted that this was not a response to crisis, but a strategic “structural change,” writing to shareholders that Block is “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes.”

The company expects hundreds of millions of dollars in restructuring charges in the first quarter alone, with most of the layoffs completed by mid?year, meanwhile its stock price surged on the news and Wall Street celebrated the enormous cut to labor costs.

Almost simultaneously, eBay announced that it will cut approximately 800 positions, around 6 percent of its global workforce, in yet another restructuring aimed at “realigning” staffing with “long?term strategic priorities.”

This is the third round of job cuts since 2023 at the massive global online marketplace, coming just days after its $1.2 billion agreement to acquire Gen?Z–focused resale platform Depop, as part of a multi?year effort to “consistently” reduce headcount while ramping up AI investments across its marketplace and internal operations.

Local reports are saying that managers, researchers, data scientists and software engineers are being hit heavily and that the restructuring is directed squarely at the core technical and professional layers whose work is being increasingly automated or offshored.

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