It was still dark outside when Umar Khalid sat down to make the farewell video. He had stayed up all night at a close friend’s apartment, where he had just celebrated his 33rd birthday, blowing out candles and cutting a chocolate cake. Now he sat on the couch stiff with tension, dark circles under his eyes, his face tinged a sickly yellow. He had been smoking nonstop for hours and eaten so little that he was feeling unwell. His friend was seated on the ground nearby, his phone ready to record.

“If you’re watching this video,” Khalid said, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”

It was September 2020, on a hot, stuffy morning in Delhi. Seven months earlier, in late February, a wave of sectarian violence had ripped through the Indian capital. Amid mass demonstrations against a restrictive citizenship law that targeted Muslims, a mob goaded by a local leader clashed with Muslims in the area. Over the next four days, violence swept through predominantly Muslim neighborhoods; at least 53 people were killed and 14 mosques gutted.

The timing was noteworthy: U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day after the riots erupted. While Trump and Modi hugged and lavished each other with praise, Delhi’s northeastern district burned.

As the violence unspooled, Khalid was halfway across the country in the eastern state of Bihar. He was headlining a protest where he told the audience seated cross-legged before him that many Hindu supremacists “have nurtured the dream that Muslims will leave the country, that they will go to Pakistan.”

“They have spread hate to make it happen. They have nothing but hate. But we will respond with love,” he said. “They are trying to provoke us. They are trying to start a riot. They are saying, ‘Shoot them.’ What are we saying? We are saying, ‘There is no better place in the world than India.’”

The secular activist rose to national prominence giving powerful speeches criticizing Modi and his far-right political party for leading a campaign of repression previously unseen in independent India. Khalid has compared Modi to India’s British colonizers, whose centuries-long stranglehold was enabled by policies that pitted religious and ethnic groups against each other, fueling mutual suspicion and resentment. A target of the Modi government since he was a university student, Khalid was now among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest the prime minister’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

Khalid was among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest Modi’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

In March, Amit Malviya, the social media chief of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, tweeted a video of a speech Khalid had given ahead of Trump’s visit in which he urged protesters to fill the streets and tell the U.S. president that Modi was dividing India and mocking Gandhian values of nonviolence. Malviya described Khalid’s audience as “largely Muslim.”

“Was the violence in Delhi planned weeks in advance by the Tukde Tukde gang?” he wrote on Twitter, using a pejorative to refer to the BJP’s political critics. This single tweet was turned from a question into a statement and reported as fact by cable news channels aligned with Modi. It soon became the basis for accusing Khalid of masterminding the riots.

The Covid-19 outbreak and the government’s nationwide lockdown forced an end to the demonstrations, as well as Khalid’s speeches at protest sites. Exhausted, Khalid and his partner of 10 years, Banojyotsna Lahiri, went to visit her family and unwind.

In April, while Indians were ordered to stay in their homes, the Delhi police began arresting student leaders and activists who had participated in the citizenship protests, charging over a dozen high-profile activists with a slew of offenses, including murder, sedition, and, not long after, terrorism. News of the arrests put Khalid on edge. Lahiri recalled, “There was crazy tension in the air.”

In August, Khalid received a phone call from the Delhi police. The summons was couched as a request for help with the police’s investigation into the riots, but Khalid knew his turn had come.

Over the next few weeks, Khalid was called in twice for questioning. He knew the interrogations weren’t intended to establish the facts; they were a sham to make it seem as if the officials were doing their job. He was fully aware of how this would end.

He decided to record the video, telling his close friend to release it at a press conference when the police finally made their move.

“They are silencing me,” Khalid said, staring into the smartphone camera. “They are putting me behind bars. But they also want to imprison you — with lies. They want to frighten you into silence. I’d like to end with an appeal: Don’t be afraid. Raise your voice up against injustice.”

Three days later, on September 13, the police called Khalid to the office of the city’s counterterrorism unit. This time, they didn’t let him leave. Nearly three years on, he remains in jail without a trial date.

The Modi government has made a habit of hounding anyone who criticizes the prime minister’s efforts to transform the world’s largest democracy into a majoritarian police state. Since Modi came to power in 2014, his government has wielded the law to target every kind of critic on every platform, from students expressing opinions on social media to human rights activists investigating atrocities. In March 2023, a court in Gujarat — where Modi was born and had a long political career before becoming prime minister — convicted the leader of India’s main opposition party, Rahul Gandhi, of defaming Modi. The decision led to Gandhi’s disqualification as a member of Parliament and jeopardized his eligibility to contest Modi in national elections next year. Though the Indian Supreme Court has since suspended the conviction, the move was the clearest sign yet that India is now an elected autocracy.

Two decades-old laws have been Modi’s favorites for suppressing dissent and removing his critics from public life: the colonial-era sedition law and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a so-called anti-terror law. Khalid is among the few Indians who have been charged under both.

Between 2014 and 2020, more than 7,000 people were charged with sedition, according to a database published by Indian news site Article 14. The UAPA accounted for more than 8,000 arrests between 2015 and 2020, according to a study by the Indian human rights nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

“These laws were already on the books — what we are seeing now is malice,” said journalist Aakar Patel. “This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

“This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

When I visited Delhi late last year, even mere conversations about the state — or “the regime,” as many called the Modi government — were steeped in fear. People wanted to communicate with me through secure messaging apps. When we met, it was at places such as a park at dusk, where they could not be recognized or overheard. A transcriptionist based in India later declined to work on this piece for fear of being implicated in journalism that was critical of the government. The culture of pluralistic debate that inspired economist Amartya Sen to coin the term “the argumentative Indian” has been all but wiped out.

Despite India’s divisive and unstable political environment, Modi remains very popular among voters and is almost certain to win a third term next year. The BJP has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build a cult of personality around him. His face is everywhere, from front-page newspaper ads to Covid vaccination certificates. A satellite launched into space in 2021 carried a photo of Modi. Despite being only 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Modi towers over the Indian people in giant cardboard cutouts that have popped up all over the country.

The purpose of this symbolism is not lost on Indians. It is a loyalty test. Long after Independence Day last August, gas stations, homes, and even street vendors in Delhi continued to fly the Indian tricolor. One woman told me that as a personal act of resistance, she had decided not to display the flag. Then she heard that gangs of Hindu vigilantes were roving the area, noting down the names and addresses of those who refused to fall in line. She went up to her terrace and raised her flag.

Growing Up Muslim in India

Last fall, two years after Khalid was arrested, I spent time with his family in Delhi. Their elegant apartment was full of books and photographs. A maid worked in the open-plan kitchen while one of Khalid’s younger sisters chatted with a cousin. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, brought out a tray filled with snacks and served tea. At first, Khalid’s parents were politely reserved. But when his mother, Sabiha Khanam, a soft-spoken woman who wears a hijab, sat down next to me, she planted her feet firmly on the ground as though determined not to hold back.

“My son had a bright future,” she said. “He could have moved abroad, bought a nice house, a nice car. It was all within his grasp. But he said, ‘I only want to live in India.’” She shook her head. “And he’s the one they call a terrorist?”

Khanam’s parents moved from the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Delhi when she was a child; she grew up among a large extended family helmed by her father, a sales tax officer with the city government. Ilyas came from an activist family: His paternal grandfather had been a freedom fighter with the Muslim League and after independence joined the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a movement to establish Islamic fundamentalism in India that later moderated its views because they were so unpopular among Indian Muslims. Khanam and Ilyas met as members of Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, launched in 1977 to offer Muslims moral support and camaraderie in a nation that was often openly antagonistic toward them.

The friction around the acceptance of Muslims as Indian can be traced back to the Partition of 1947 and the division of British India along religious lines: Hindu- and Sikh-majority regions remained inside independent India, while Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims. Though 35 million Muslims chose to stay in India, the Hindu supremacist groups that mushroomed in the run-up to Partition — namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideology’s mothership and the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary force, which Modi joined as a child — viewed them as an even greater threat after the subcontinent was split.

Since then, despite being India’s largest minority religious group, the country’s more than 200 million Muslims have been systematically underrepresented and discriminated against in virtually every area of public life, from education to employment to housing. SIMI impressed upon members the need to uplift the community through education and job training; the group came to be known for its cadre of educated Muslims, including Ilyas, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.

By the time Ilyas became SIMI’s national president in the 1980s, Khanam was in charge of the Delhi women’s wing. “When it was time to marry,” Ilyas told me, “I wanted someone related to the movement. So I married her.” Was it a love marriage? I asked. “No, no,” he replied, looking offended. “Not at all.” Khanam burst out laughing. “Not for me either,” she said.

When their first child was born in 1987, Ilyas and Khanam named him after their favorite religious figures: the second caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab, who is regarded as the father of Islamic jurisprudence, and the seventh-century military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid. Khanam took her son everywhere she went, including to religious gatherings.

To his parents’ disappointment, Khalid showed no interest in Islam. In his late teens, he declared himself an atheist. If Khalid had a religion, it was cricket. His dream was to play for India, like his hero Irfan Pathan. Khalid was an all-rounder with a special gift for fast bowling, and he gained a reputation for trash-talking opponents. Doted on by his family, the eldest child and only boy out of six kids, Khalid grew up self-confident and resilient. But starting in his late teens, he became preoccupied with the abject state of his neighborhood. 

Khalid’s home was in Zakir Nagar, a Muslim area of the capital known for being overcrowded and unsanitary. Dangerous coils of electric wires hung over the streets, and the pungent combination of sewage, livestock, and exhaust fumes lent the area its signature smell. “We [can’t] get pizzas delivered, you don’t get internet, you don’t get home loans,” a teenage Khalid had said about his neighborhood in a student documentary.

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’”

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’” said Anirban Bhattacharya, the friend in whose apartment Khalid recorded his farewell video. Khalid would come to realize that even privileged Muslims would rather raise their families in a ghetto than in a religiously mixed area, where their Hindu neighbors might turn on them.

Khalid’s political consciousness developed as he grew into adulthood. In 2008, when he was 21 and studying history at Delhi University, a police inspector and two young Muslim students who police described as terrorists were killed in a shootout near where Khalid grew up. The Batla House encounter — named for the area where the incident took place — remains controversial. Police have used so-called encounters to mask extrajudicial killings and support official narratives about threats to national security, including in Kashmir, where Indian security forces frequently claim they’re defending themselves in gun fights that kill civilians active in the region’s independence movement.

The police used the Batla House encounter to increase surveillance of Muslims in the area; stop-and-frisk became routine. For Khalid, it was a seminal moment in his understanding of how security agencies violently target Muslims, regardless of whether they commit a crime.

“I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

“I was in the kitchen, and he came over and rested his head on my shoulder,” Khanam told me. “I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

The stereotyping and ostracization of Indian Muslims had increased since September 11. Days after the attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Eager to please a powerful ally, and with its own ax to grind, the Indian government, which was then also run by the BJP, banned SIMI, declaring it a terrorist organization.

Ilyas and Khanam had long left SIMI. In 1985, Ilyas started working for a media company; Khanam launched a boutique selling hijabs and organized literacy classes for adults from disadvantaged backgrounds. But the stigma of having once belonged to SIMI haunted the couple: The anti-terror law the BJP used to crush SIMI was the same one that, years later, it would deploy against Khalid.

Modi’s Reign of Terror

The Indian government’s determination to stamp out terrorism didn’t extend to Hindus, and by the early 2000s, Hindu extremist groups had been linked to numerous deadly attacks on Muslims, including the bombing of a train connecting India to Pakistan, a blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, and another blast at a mosque near Mumbai at the end of Ramadan.

The most notorious episode of Hindu terror in India’s recent history occurred under Modi’s watch in 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat. After a train full of Hindu pilgrims caught fire, killing 59 people, Modi declared the incident a “terrorist attack” and had the charred bodies put on display at the state capital. According to Human Rights Watch, Hindu mobs immediately responded to the dog whistle with a frenzy of bloodletting that lasted three days and left at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead as police either stood by or participated in the violence. Despite accusations of complicity from several domestic and international human rights groups, Modi was reelected in a landslide victory later that year and became Gujarat’s longest-serving chief minister.

In 2005, after an investigation by the Indian government concluded that the train fire was an accident, the U.S. State Department denied Modi a visa to speak at Madison Square Garden in New York under a law that prohibits the entry of foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The Obama administration lifted the ban after Modi became prime minister.

Related

Hindu Vigilantes Work With Police to Enforce “Love Jihad” Law in North India

As India’s top elected official, Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors. The Modi government has empowered local right-wing officials and Hindu vigilantes to make life for many Indian Muslims not just difficult, but unbearable. Muslims have faced economic boycotts of their businesses and bulldozers destroying their homes after officials arbitrarily deem them illegal constructions. Several states have adopted laws that target Muslims, including criminalizing the slaughter of cows, possession of beef, and interfaith marriage.

Few Hindu vigilantes who have lynched dozens of Muslims have been arrested — even though many of these crimes were committed in public, captured on video, and shared online.

“Towards what end?” said Patel, the journalist. “Exclusion. Apartheid. To say, ‘We don’t want you.’ This is ideological. [Hindu supremacists] genuinely hate these people.”

Even punishments for past wrongdoing can be reversed at the government’s whim when the victims are Muslim. In August 2022, 11 Hindu men convicted of gang-raping their Muslim neighbor during the Gujarat riots walked free after an intervention from the government. Bilkis Bano was five months pregnant at the time of the attack. The men killed her 3-year-old daughter by smashing her head to the ground, as well as 14 other family members, including female relatives who were also sexually assaulted. They had been sentenced to life in prison, but a review committee decided to release them. A BJP politician on the committee told an Indian news outlet that the men were “honest people. … Their behavior in prison and the behavior of their family is very good.”

Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors.

In a statement released by her lawyer, Bano said the decision left her “bereft.” “I trusted the highest courts in our land. I trusted the system, and I was learning slowly to live with my trauma,” she said. “The release of these convicts has taken from me my peace and shaken my faith in justice.”

From the bold-faced discrimination and subjugation of Muslims emerged a vocal opposition to Modi and his Hindu supremacist agenda. In response, the government has used a legal dragnet to sweep up his critics and stifle dissent.

When it was first passed in 1967, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was only applicable to organizations; the Islamic State and Al Qaeda were later banned under the law. When Modi came to power, his government amended the UAPA so individuals could be accused of terrorism and detained for up to six months without formal charges.

“Every country has counterterror laws, but the UAPA does not meet international standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “Is Umar Khalid really comparable to the 9/11 terrorists? And if not, the government is undermining the entire principle of a legislation that is meant to protect the public from extremely brutal acts.”

Like Khalid, many Indians who have been charged under the UAPA are public figures who have spoken out against injustice and command widespread respect for their work. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest with Parkinson’s disease, was among 16 prominent human rights activists arrested on terrorism charges in 2018, accused of engaging in a Maoist plot to assassinate Modi. Swamy had moved to a remote area of eastern India about three decades earlier to live among Indigenous communities under threat from mining corporations, including Adani Group — owned by billionaire coal tycoon and Modi confidante Gautam Adani — that was permitted by the government to expand its mining operations on Indigenous forest land.

In prison, Swamy was deprived of a straw and sipper he needed to drink water. His requests for bail on medical grounds were denied multiple times. When he died of cardiac arrest in 2021, he was still awaiting trial. A U.S.-based digital forensics firm later found that the computers owned by Swamy and at least two other activists had been infiltrated by a hacker who planted evidence that was used to arrest them.

Related

As D.C. Fêtes Narendra Modi, His Political Prisoners in India Are Forgotten

When courts do grant bail in UAPA cases, it is under conditions that force once outspoken activists to exist as half-citizens. Safoora Zargar, one of the student leaders arrested after the citizenship protests, was granted bail two months later because she was pregnant. However, she was forbidden to leave Delhi without permission from the court and had to call the investigating officer on her case every two weeks. Zargar told me that her lawyers advised her not to speak publicly “just to be on the safe side.” Though she hasn’t given speeches since her release, she still attends protests and is active on social media, a decision she said she makes at “great personal risk.”

Modi’s critics have also been charged under an anti-sedition law introduced during British rule to imprison freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi. According to Article 14’s database, from 2010 to 2021, 149 people were charged with sedition for making “critical and/or derogatory” remarks against Modi; the maximum penalty is life in prison.

Notably, young people are the most vulnerable to sedition charges. From 2015 to 2020, most of the people arrested for violating this law were under the age of 30.

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country,” said Ganguly, “because from these students will emerge a democratic space with a variety of political opinions and a diversity of political thought that will enrich any democratic process.”

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country.”

Last year, in response to nine petitions challenging its constitutionality, the Supreme Court suspended the law, asking the government to stop issuing sedition charges or punishing those already charged while the terms of the law are reassessed. The Law Commission of India, which is under the government’s purview, has argued not only that the sedition law should be reinstated, but also that the punishment should be more severe.

Despite the high-profile nature of many of the arrests, they rarely result in widespread protest, in part because the arrests are often the culmination of a media campaign in which government critics are vilified as anti-Indian. By the time these dissidents are imprisoned, the tide of public opinion may have turned against them.

Indians are so consumed by Modi’s brand of politics that they overlook the lack of jobs for young people and any real hope of a promising future, Harsh Mander, a human rights advocate who himself has been targeted by the government, told me. “They are persuaded by the idea of scapegoats, and they are willing to accept anything — hunger, joblessness, even bodies decimated by Covid floating down the Ganges — because they are preoccupied by something else: hatred.”

Khalid became one of Modi’s targets in 2016, when he and a group of fellow graduate students who had spent most of their adult lives with their noses stuck in books were branded enemies of the state.

“Creating a Witch Hunt”

I met Khalid in May 2016 while reporting on the events that had led to his arrest and those of other student organizers accused of sedition at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Khalid, who had recently been released after nearly a month in jail, invited me to tea at the same outdoor café where, three months earlier, he and other students had held a vigil for a Kashmiri man accused of terrorism and hanged after a botched trial — an annual demonstration that the media blew up overnight into a national news story.

The JNU campus — like cinemas, malls, and other public venues in Delhi — had private security personnel at the entrance. When I arrived, there were also police officers in their trademark khaki uniforms, extra security introduced after the vigil. The air buzzed with the sound of walkie-talkies.

Once through the gates, I was transported from the crowded street full of potholes to broad, spotless vistas, lush greenery, and the unvarnished brick structures that the architect CP Kukreja had left exposed to match the red soil upon which they were built.

It was morning, and the café was full of students. Khalid was sitting at a table talking to a friend. He wore a kurta with jeans and stout sandals, a shawl thrown around his neck and shoulders. Though he appeared gaunt, Khalid was full of energy, his eyes intent, his speech fast. Between his fingers rested a Navy Cut cigarette, his favorite brand, which he bought in packs and smoked one after the other.

Khalid was working on his history Ph.D. at JNU, a liberal arts institution known for fiery intellectuals who have gone on to mold global ways of thinking, becoming political leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and renowned novelists. Here, Khalid was introduced to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leo Tolstoy, and studied Karl Marx, whose vision for a stateless, classless society he came to believe was the best solution for a country as unequal as India. Khalid’s doctoral research focused on an Indigenous community’s struggle to maintain control over their land. He was so sure he wouldn’t leave India that he had never applied for a passport.

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with. He loved films and pestered friends to watch them with him, offering a play by play. He was also known as a prankster with what some have fondly described as “a cringeworthy sense of humor.”

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with.

“In the milieu in which I’ve grown up, I’ve known people who have been arrested on false charges,” he told me during our meeting, referring to people he’d met through his parents’ activism. “I know of people who have been brutally tortured or forced to sign false confessions or spend years in prison before being acquitted of all charges. I only spent 24 days in jail. That’s nothing compared to some.”

On the evening of February 9, 2016, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students marked the 2013 execution of a Kashmiri shopkeeper, Muhammad Afzal Guru. Though he had denied aiding the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament that killed nine people, Afzal Guru was sentenced to death based on what novelist and activist Arundhati Roy described as a “pile of lies and fabricated evidence.” For many, including the JNU students, Afzal Guru’s case represented a confluence of injustices: the use of capital punishment, the unfair treatment of Muslims by India’s criminal justice system, and state repression of Kashmiris. Past events to commemorate him had been held on campus without incident, so the students were taken aback when a TV crew showed up.

Members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad also came out. Since Modi’s election, ABVP and other Hindu supremacist student groups have increasingly acted as proxies for the BJP on college campuses. They rejected the existence of caste-based discrimination and used claims of “Hinduphobia” to deflect criticism. A month before the JNU event, members of ABVP at the University of Hyderabad had targeted a doctoral student who was Dalit, a member of India’s lowest and most disadvantaged caste. Rohith Vemula was subsequently suspended for fighting caste discrimination on campus; after the university upheld the decision, he hanged himself.

At JNU, ABVP had prevented the screenings of two documentaries critical of the BJP. But among most students, the group wasn’t despised so much as dismissed for being on the wrong side of history. Khalid referred to ABVP’s joint secretary as bhai, or brother. Another member of the group was Khalid’s neighbor, and Khalid often stopped by his place to bum a cigarette or a lighter.

At the event commemorating Afzal Guru, ABVP members heckled the organizers. “He who speaks of Afzal will die Afzal’s death,” they shouted.

The students replied with a call-and-response chant borrowed from India’s feminist movement: “What do we want?” “Freedom from hunger! Freedom from casteism!”

The scene was chaotic, but no one was hurt, and by the time the students were back in their rooms, many had already chalked up the evening as just another unpleasant encounter with India’s emboldened right wing.

The next day, however, #shutdownJNU was trending on Twitter. Confident that they had nothing to hide, Khalid and other student organizers responded to media requests for interviews. This proved a costly mistake. That evening, Khalid appeared on Times Now, a cable news channel known for its right-wing bias, as part of a panel discussion about the vigil.

“You are more dangerous to this country than Maoist terrorists,” screamed Arnab Goswami, the channel’s editor-in-chief at the time. “Someone is going to name you as anti-national, and I’m naming you as anti-national tonight.” Khalid, struggling to get a word in over Goswami’s berating, responded with a bewildered smile.

Over the next few hours, other cable channels adopted the same rhetoric, describing the students as pro-Pakistan and secessionist while running clips from the event on a loop. Khalid, with his Muslim name, was singled out. The channels labeled him the event’s “mastermind” — foreshadowing the accusations that would lead to his imprisonment years later — and falsely claimed that he had visited Pakistan. They called him a sympathizer of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization, an accusation the media claimed was based on an Indian government report. The government later denied the report’s existence, but none of the news outlets issued a retraction.

“The regime wants to portray young Muslims as people influenced by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Muslim fundamentalism,” Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist and writer who is a close friend of Khalid’s, told me. “By selecting Umar for persecution, the government sent out a signal to people like him.”

Within days, Modi’s home minister, the cabinet official responsible for national security, tweeted that he had ordered Delhi police to “take strong action against the anti-India elements” at JNU. The rhetoric ignited a public frenzy. Mobs of furious people converged outside the university gates, where they had to be held back by riot police. Fearing they would be lynched, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students fled the campus.

The mainstream media’s dependence on state support has enabled the Modi government to put political pressure on journalists, and as a result, most news outlets have yielded their independence. Veteran journalist Ravish Kumar — who coined the term “Godi media,” or lapdog media, to describe pro-Modi news outlets — has direct experience of what happens when news outlets resist falling in line. NDTV, where Kumar worked as managing editor, was subject to repeated raids by the income tax department before Adani, the billionaire businessman, bought the channel last November. On the day the buyout was made public, Kumar resigned.

“I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.”

As the mobs hunting the JNU students spread across the city and beyond, Kumar watched from the window of his apartment. “The atmosphere was terrifying,” he told me. “I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.” The next day, Kumar ran a black screen on his prime-time show, telling viewers, “This darkness is the picture of television today.”

The police issued wanted notices and warned border authorities not to let the students leave the country. On February 23, Khalid and Bhattacharya returned to campus prepared to be arrested. Bhattacharya referred to what happened next as being “pulled into a social experiment.”

The Delhi police charged Khalid, Bhattacharya, and three other students with sedition. Bhattacharya, an upper-caste Hindu, told me that prison authorities were baffled by his presence: “Khalid getting embroiled in these things one can understand, but why are you here, Bhattacharya sahib?”

Prison guards never spared an opportunity to taunt Khalid: “If you have to fight, why don’t you fight for reform in Islam?” He distracted himself in jail by rereading a favorite book that Lahiri, his partner, brought him on a visit, Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

When the two friends were released on bail nearly four weeks later, the JNU administration fined them for holding the vigil. Most of their fellow students, however, welcomed them back as heroes, a response observers declared a “Student Spring.”

On the night of his release, Khalid gave a speech attended by thousands of people at an open-air courtyard christened Freedom Square.

“Friends,” Khalid said when the cheers died down, “I don’t know how to put my feelings into words. Things happened so fast that even now I haven’t been able to make sense of them. I think about them every day and wonder, ‘What happened?’” The crowd roared. Khalid took a beat and switched from English to Hindi, his tone becoming serious.

“But the one thing that’s crystal clear,” he said, “is that if the government, the RSS thought that by profiling some of us, by creating a witch hunt, that they could break us and destroy our movement and unity and courage, well, they were delusional. Today, as I stand before you, I feel even stronger than I did, and this is a huge victory for our fight.” 

“What do we want?” he shouted. “Freedom!” the crowd screamed back.

“It was very clear that students would play a vital role against the authoritarian regime,” Bhattacharya told me. “And it was evident from the way the government moved that they believed the attack on JNU was going to silence students in this country for some time to come.” But for Khalid, this was only the beginning.

As we chatted at the café a few months after his release, Khalid was constantly interrupted by well-wishers. He politely stopped talking to respond to the “hellos” and “how are yous.” I got the feeling that after the initial shock had worn off, Khalid had accepted that his life would be very different — and that he would embrace his new role as an act of citizenship.

“People are listening to us,” he told me. “Our task is to foreground questions that haven’t been highlighted.” His immediate goal, he said, was to bring together students, activists, Indigenous communities, and trade unions in a broad-based “anti-fascist front.” For a moment before the pandemic hit, his vision of popular resistance became a reality. But it cost him his freedom.

“How Much Has the Country Changed?”

Khalid’s powerful campus speeches gained national attention, and soon, he was getting invited to share his message all over the country.

But some were bent on keeping Khalid from the podium. On August 13, 2018, while he and Lahiri were waiting for chai at a tea stall outside Delhi’s Constitution Club where he was scheduled to speak, a tall, beefy man lunged at Khalid and threw him to the ground. Lahiri and some others hurled themselves at the assailant, but he shrugged them off and pointed a gun straight at Khalid. “The man’s face was blank,” Lahiri told me. Suddenly, he ran away, tossing the gun.

When police retrieved the weapon, they discovered six live rounds. “You’re a very lucky man,” an officer told Khalid. “He pulled the trigger, but the gun somehow jammed.” The alleged assailant and an accomplice were later arrested but released on bail. The next year, the assailant was backed by a political party with Hindu supremacist ties to run in a local assembly election, which he lost.

The assassination attempt convinced Khalid that the only place he would be safe was in a Muslim neighborhood. Khalid stopped taking public transport, friends recalled, and he wouldn’t travel alone. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. “Earlier, the threat to his life was hypothetical,” Lahiri said. “Now it was real.”

But Khalid was undeterred from his mission to rally the masses against Modi. During a Facebook Live event with the human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in January 2019, he told viewers that Modi’s regime was based on “jumlebaazi” and “nafrat,” the Hindi words for false promises and hate, respectively, adding: “His government is run on lies.”

He also continued to face hurdles on campus. The JNU administration refused to accept Khalid’s Ph.D. thesis, effectively preventing him from receiving his degree. The Delhi High Court intervened, and after a successful thesis defense in August 2019, Khalid found himself at a loose end. He thought about applying for a postdoctoral research fellowship, but he didn’t exclude the possibility of becoming a politician.

“It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

“Earlier, his ideas were evolving within a university campus,” Bhattacharya told me. “Now the canvas was much larger. It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

Bhattacharya said Khalid wanted to shape how Muslim youth facing second-class citizenship envisioned their futures. “He was frustrated that the community was reduced to saying, ‘Humko bas jeene do’ — ‘Please let us just live,’” he said. “Muslims were being lynched, so of course safety was important, but he was also trying to broaden the idea of citizenship to include other rights. He wanted people to live in full bloom.”

On the second anniversary of Khalid’s imprisonment in September 2022, I went to a public park in central Delhi to meet Lahiri, Khalid’s partner. It was dusk when I arrived; a human-made lake glittered in the dwindling light, and birds of prey surveyed the grounds with sharp-eyed interest. Though Lahiri was only a few minutes late, she was very apologetic. She explained that she lived in Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood about 40 minutes away, near where Khalid grew up. She had remained there so that he would one day have a familiar place to come home to. 

Lahiri, a 39-year-old research scholar focused on minority rights, was born in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, to a biology teacher and a chemist who were members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of India’s long-established left-wing political parties. Lahiri was a student at JNU when she first met Khalid while counseling students harassed by police in the aftermath of the Batla House encounter. When Khalid enrolled at JNU the following year, the two reconnected. He and Lahiri helped co-found a group called United Against Hate after Khalid’s 2016 arrest to address the rising mob violence against Muslims.

“We were, like, very hot-headed radicals and all that,” Lahiri told me with a laugh. “Politics was and continues to be the cornerstone of our relationship.”

Less than a year into Modi’s second term, the government passed a citizenship law that signaled to Indian Muslims that they were no longer welcome in their own country. The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, would make it nearly impossible for Muslim migrants to become citizens in India. The law was twinned with a planned nationwide campaign to force people already living in India to prove they belonged there.

Mander, the human rights advocate, called the citizenship law the first of its kind in India’s history to target one community. “It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution,” he told me.

“It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution.”

The potential impact of the plan was already playing out in the northeastern state of Assam, which is controlled by the BJP. The state, which shares a border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has long been depicted by the right as a hotbed of illegal immigration. As a part of the citizenship drive there, the state’s 33 million residents, many of whom are poor, illiterate, or itinerant, had to produce documents certifying their date and place of birth. The cruelty of this laboratory experiment became clear when 2 million people, including many Muslims, were struck off the citizenship rolls.

Declared “foreigners,” many were sent to detention camps within existing jails. In January 2023, news reports said that detainees would be transferred to India’s first immigration detention center as more such camps sprouted, creating the fearsome specter of a country where Muslims are kept in cages.

Protests started in Assam and quickly spread to the rest of the country. In several cities, the peaceful gatherings, known as the anti-CAA protests, were led by students on Muslim-majority campuses. They recited the preamble to the constitution, which mandates a secular state. They unfurled the national flag and shouted slogans such as “Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying,” and “Asking questions isn’t anarchy; abusing power is.”

Days after the law was passed, police unleashed their arsenal on student protesters at Jamia Millia Islamia, a renowned Muslim university in Delhi. CCTV footage showed police in riot gear storming the glass doors of the library, where students were engrossed in their work, and thrashing them with hefty bamboo sticks. One student was so badly wounded that he lost his left eye. In a hearing calling on the Delhi High Court to investigate the violence, a lawyer representing injured students said the police fired 452 tear gas cannons.

Lahiri told me she could hear the firepower from her and Khalid’s apartment: “I felt like I was in a war zone.”

The Indian government imposed an internet blackout to try to stop the protests. Still, they continued. So many hundreds of people were detained in Delhi that the police sought permission from the city to convert a sports stadium into a temporary prison.

As the protests and police violence raged, about 100 women sat down to block a main road in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh. Their sit-in lasted through the night into the morning and kept going. Every day, more and more people from all over the city joined them. “Hum Dekhenge,” or “We Shall See,” by the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, became their anthem:

Underneath our feet — we the governed.
The ground will echo like a thumping heartbeat
And the sky over the heads of the rulers
Will echo with the sound of thunder.

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” Lahiri told me. “I haven’t seen the Paris Commune, but I’ve seen Shaheen Bagh.”

Shaheen Bagh inspired sit-ins across the country, and Khalid was deluged with speaking invitations. From December 2019 to February 2020, he spoke at almost 70 sites.

“Seventy-two years after independence, Muslims are still being told to prove that we are patriots,” he told a crowd of protesters in Mumbai on December 27. “Even today we’re told, ‘You got Pakistan, what more do you want? You’ve divided the country once, now what do you want?’ To them I’d like to say, ‘We’re not Indians by chance. We’re Indians by choice.’’’

“The fact of us being here is proof of our patriotism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not our leader, is not our leader. Mahatma Gandhi is our leader. … Narendra Modi said, ‘I feel happy seeing [Muslims] wave the flag.’ Mr. Modi, the flag has been in our heart, and in our hands, since 1947. It took you people more than 50 years to raise the tricolor at the RSS headquarters. We don’t need a certificate of patriotism from you.”

“He spoke very bravely, very charismatically,” said Mander, who sometimes shared the podium with Khalid. “He was by then a political leader with significant clout.”

The moment of mass resistance was short-lived. On February 23, 2020, Kapil Mishra, a Delhi BJP leader known for his hateful rhetoric, incited his followers to forcibly remove women from their protest sites if the police did not take action.

“Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal?” he asked at a gathering of BJP supporters. “We will have to teach them a lesson.”

The next day, Mishra’s followers started attacking protesters with guns, swords, spears, and stones. The violence quickly expanded to target any Muslim regardless of their involvement in the demonstrations, as the mob destroyed cars and threw petrol bombs at shops, homes, mosques, and madrasas. Lahiri, who was in Bihar with Khalid at the time, told me her phone exploded with messages from friends in Delhi reporting “horrible violence.”

Related

Trump Praises Modi’s India, as Muslims Are Beaten on the Streets and a Mosque Is Defiled

The next day, Trump landed in India. While Trump was fêted by Modi in front of 100,000 people in a stadium in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, and lunched with the prime minister on leg of lamb, mushroom curry in saffron gravy, and date halwa, 53 people, mostly Muslims, died, and more than 500 were injured. Many Delhi police officers either stood by or attacked Muslims themselves, in a display reminiscent of the Gujarat riots 18 years earlier. The deputy commissioner of police had stood beside Mishra during his speech and was later seen shaking hands with members of the mob.

When police began investigating the violence, they focused not on the perpetrators — many of whom had been caught on camera or identified by their victims — but on the protesters. Nearly 2,500 people were arrested, including 17 high-profile activists who had galvanized the anti-CAA protests as organizers and speakers. Modi had described the protests as a “conspiracy against the country,” and the activists were charged with conspiracy, as well as sedition and murder.

“Claiming that the violence was a conspiracy by the left and Muslim activists to create an insurrection to force a regime change is fantastical,” said Mander, who was investigated as part of the crackdown but not charged.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers. A month after many of the arrests, the charges against Khalid and the 17 other activists were updated to include offenses under UAPA.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers.

Khalid was detained on September 13, 2020. In October 2022, the Delhi High Court rejected his appeal for bail, declaring that the charges against him were “prima facie true.” As proof, they pointed to the fact that Khalid was in a WhatsApp group set up by a student activist who had also been charged with conspiracy and was still in prison.

The court’s decision affirmed what human rights defenders have said all along about India’s terror law: that the charge is the punishment.

“There’s no evidence that Umar Khalid was engaged in violence,” Ganguly of Human Rights Watch said. “So on what grounds is UAPA being used against him? Simply because he made statements the government disliked?”

Khalid refused to let his imprisonment take away his voice. In a letter published by The Wire, an Indian news site, Khalid wrote: “On Independence Day, in the evening, I sat outside the prison cell with a few others. We saw kites flying high above our jail compound and reminisced about our childhood 15th August memories. How did we reach here? How much has the country changed?”

He spent most of his time in jail alone because he’d grown weary of trying to convince fellow inmates that what they read about him in the newspapers was not true.

“Now, the sight and sound of people and traffic during my visits to court make me irritable and anxious. Far from the madding crowd, the tranquility of jail is starting to become my usual,” he wrote. “I wonder, am I getting used to captivity?”

A Taste of Freedom

One Friday afternoon in December, Lahiri was startled awake from a vivid nightmare. It was bitterly cold in Delhi, but she was soaked in sweat. Before she could process her dream, she realized she had only three minutes to log into her video call with Khalid. She couldn’t miss it, or he would worry. He would think that now she was in danger.

Lahiri sat up in bed and reached for her phone. When she joined the call, she saw an empty chair, and her face in the small top-right window peering anxiously down at the screen. She felt a pinprick of anxiety. Would the sound work? Would the internet connection be stable? Would he even come? Until Khalid sat down and smiled at her, she could never be sure the call would happen.

After five long minutes, Khalid finally appeared. He affectionately commented on her hair, disheveled from the nap. “Why are you looking like this?” he laughed.

She told him about her dream. In it, the police allowed Khalid to visit JNU to meet his friends, and many students gathered to get a glimpse of him. How happy they were! But then the police, threatened by the growing crowd, chased them away, and suddenly, members of the ABVP, the right-wing student group, emerged from the fog to lynch him.

Khalid burst out laughing. But when he saw that Lahiri wasn’t amused, he reassured her. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “It’s not real.”

“I should be consoling him,” she told me later, “not the other way around. But he does more of the consoling.”

The two saw each other via video once a week. Khalid was also entitled to a mulakat, or in-person meeting, every week at Tihar jail, where he is imprisoned. His family and friends divided the dates to ensure that he always had a visitor.

Bhattacharya told me that visiting his friend in jail evoked a range of emotions from grief to guilt. After being arrested for sedition at JNU, he had stepped back from activism; his case is on hold while the law is under review.

“I come to the office, I have a drink with a friend, go for fieldwork, go to eat out, buy new clothes,” he said. “Of course, there barely passes a day when I don’t think, ‘When will he come home?’ or ‘He would’ve done this,’ or ‘He would’ve loved watching this film,’ or how he is so irritating. But the clock of life hasn’t stopped for me — the way it has for him.”

Tihar is considered one of India’s progressive jails, offering inmates counseling services, yoga classes, and sports facilities. But it is also overcrowded, with more than 13,000 prisoners crammed into a space built for 5,000. When Khalid first arrived, prison staff put him in a cell by himself instead of the army-style barracks typical of Indian prisons. Under the pretense of safety, he was locked up 24 hours a day; after 30 days, Khalid approached the Delhi High Court for relief from “practically a sort of solitary confinement.” The court granted his request, and since then, he has followed the same routine as the other prisoners, who include an Olympian charged with murdering a fellow wrestler.

Sometimes, Khalid can’t help but shake his head at how he ended up here. “Kabhi kabhi, I feel like I have never even hurt a person,” he told Lahiri during another call. “I have never even, you know, injured a person. And here, there are people accused of multiple murders — and we are together, in the same space.” 

With his parents, Khalid is less ruminative and more of a jokester. On a recent call with his mother, he quipped, “The other prisoners tell me, ‘We’re here because we killed someone, but you’re here because you did a Ph.D.’”

When Khanam asked, “And how are you, my son?” Khalid responded, “Very well, you tell me.”

“Very well? Are you on holiday in Switzerland?” Only from Khalid’s lawyer did Khanam learn that her son was strip-searched prior to every court appearance.

Khalid has tried to make the most of the past few years awaiting trial. Under the tutelage of the Olympian, he started lifting weights. He also returned to his first love, cricket, and took up badminton.

Without a phone or social media to distract him, he reads constantly, borrowing books from the prison library and asking friends and family to send more. Lahiri estimated that he’s read nearly 200 books while incarcerated. He recently finished Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey Through Modern India” by sports journalist Pradeep Magazine. He has filled dozens of notebooks with musings on prison life and published five articles, including a review of a graphic novel about Shaheen Bagh and an obituary for the Indian historian Ranajit Guha.

After Lahiri recounted her dream, the conversation quickly moved to lighter topics. They joked about how they had missed two “dates,” a pun on Khalid’s court dates that had recently been canceled. Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

The jail imposed a strict 15-minute time limit for video calls, but Khalid often begged for more. Two minutes, please, he asked the police officer in charge. But ultimately, it was time to go.

“Chalo ab jaana hoga,” he told Lahiri — Now I really have to go. “Bye,” he said, “I love you.”

“Bye, I love you,” Lahiri replied. He disappeared. The screen was now filled with just her face.

This past winter, a Delhi district court granted Khalid a week’s bail to attend his sister’s wedding. The family had planned three celebrations: a haldi, mehendi, and nikah. The court set strict conditions: Khalid could only leave his parents’ house for the nikah, the Islamic marriage ceremony. He couldn’t talk to the media or the public. Still, Lahiri recalled wistfully, “It was wonderful.”

All his closest friends came to see him, often staying past midnight. “He’s a chatterbox, so most of the time, we were listening,” Bhattacharya told me.

For the first 48 hours, Khalid didn’t sleep. He met his twin nieces, who were born while he was in prison. He ate pizza. He rested his head on his mother’s lap and closed his eyes as she gently stroked his hair. “Ammi, I’ll only eat non-vegetarian food,” he warned her, tired of the prison menu of rice and dal.

Sometimes he went up to the roof of his parents’ apartment building to look over the city. When would he walk the streets again as a free man?

On the day of the nikah, Khalid wore a bespoke black sherwani, a traditional knee-length jacket, over white trousers. Lahiri and his friends stood protectively around him — he was under as much scrutiny from guests as the bride herself. He was overwhelmed, Lahiri told me. Although he enjoyed the festivities, it was impossible to forget that he was on borrowed time.

“This will be over soon,” he said again and again.

An entourage of family and friends accompanied Khalid back to Tihar. When they arrived at 5 p.m., sympathetic staff told them that since the prison gates didn’t close until 6, they could hang around for another hour. The group drank chai from a street vendor, but no one spoke much. Khalid wore black trousers and a warm sweater and carried a small duffle bag with items he was allowed to take in: fresh clothes, a second pair of reading glasses. When it was time to go, he raised his fist, a wide smile on his face.

Back inside, Khalid fell into a deep depression. “If you taste freedom for seven days, the ‘unfreedom’ becomes stark,” Lahiri told me. A few weeks later, he was back to what had become his normal routine. 

Khalid periodically appears before a judge for a bail hearing over whether he must remain incarcerated, with the next one scheduled for August 9. Eventually, a trial date will be set, said Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, adding that the charges against Khalid are unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

“There’s no evidence that he’s engaged in anything that could be considered a violent act against the state,” she told me. “He’s never wielded a weapon. In fact, he’s been targeted and attacked. At some point, a judge will overturn the charges, but by then, he would have spent many years in jail.”

While they wait and hope that day comes sooner, Khalid and Lahiri will keep competing to make each other laugh. The joy they are still capable of feeling, Lahiri told me, is their resistance.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to him. How can we when the whole thing is a farce?” she said. “But it can’t go on for eternity. It will come to an end, and until it does, we must be happy. Because if we are not, they win. So we’ve decided to be happy just as things are. And no one can take that away from us.”

Correction: August 7, 2023
A previous version of this article stated that the Delhi High Court rejected Umar Khalid’s appeal for bail in October 2020. This happened in October 2022.

The post Umar Khalid Challenged Modi’s Anti-Muslim Agenda. India Accused Him of Terrorism and Locked Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

“The Administration strongly opposes the Yemen War Powers Resolution on a number of grounds, but the bottom line is that this resolution is unnecessary and would greatly complicate the intense and ongoing diplomacy to truly bring an end to the conflict,” read White House talking points circulated privately. “In 2019, diplomacy was absent and the war was raging. That is not the case now. Thanks to our diplomacy which remains ongoing and delicate, the violence over nearly nine months has effectively stopped.”

The White House’s claims that its diplomacy is working, however, are undercut by its own political moves and the reality on the ground. President Joe Biden’s envoy for the conflict has consistently sided with the Saudi coalition against the Houthi movement that controls much of the country. And though a ceasefire during the spring and summer provided a respite in civilian casualties due to bombings, the ongoing Saudi blockade and economic warfare against Yemenis perpetuates the humanitarian crisis in the country — which the United Nations has deemed the worst in the world.

Without taking an even-handed approach to the conflict in search of a political solution and the mitigation of the humanitarian crisis, the Biden administration’s machinations can hardly be considered good-faith efforts at diplomacy, critics of U.S. policy in the conflict said.

“There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever,” Jamal Benomar, the U.N. special envoy for Yemen until 2015, told The Intercept. “There’s been no political process, no negotiations, or even a prospect of them. So an all-out war can resume at any time.”

“There’s been no diplomatic progress whatsoever. There’s been no political process, no negotiations, or even a prospect of them.”

The divisions in Yemen — with the Saudi coalition controlling southern oil fields and ports, and the Houthi-led government controlling territory in the north that houses some 80 percent of the country’s 30 million residents — are only growing more entrenched. Instead of asking concessions of its allies in the Saudi coalition, the administration’s one-sidedness has contributed to the breakdown of diplomacy.

Though violence has not returned to earlier levels since the expiration of the ceasefire in October, fighting continues along some of the war’s frontlines. The Houthis have warned that their restraint won’t last long amid the current impasse and continued blockade of fuel imports; if the embargo is not eased, they said, they will reciprocally blockade a nearby waterway crucial to the global oil markets. The situation is only growing more explosive.

“There’s been a lull in the fighting, but since there was no concerted effort to move the political process forward, the lull is a temporary one and all sides are preparing for the worst,” said Benomar. “The situation is extremely fragile because Yemen has fragmented now and you have different areas of Yemen under the control of different warlords.”

Truce

The largely diplomatic push cited by the White House in opposing the Sanders war powers resolution — a so-far ineffective push that gives Saudi Arabia room to maneuver — follows a pattern it has held since early in the administration, when Biden pledged to work toward ending “offensive operations” to the Yemen war, and Saudi Arabia engaged in its most aggressive bombing campaign under the rubric of “defensive operations.”

Under such conditions, progress toward a treaty has remained elusive. While the Houthi movement has steadily gained territory — and political support in the country — the Saudi-backed government and other allied militia groups maintained control of oil-rich areas and ports in the south, enabling the punishing blockade. Biden balked at calls to pressure Saudi into easing the blockade when it sparked the worst fuel crisis in Yemeni history. Instead, when administration officials have commented, they have avoided naming the Saudis, calling instead on “all parties” to allow unhindered import of fuel.

As the blockade continued and the fuel crisis worsened, the Houthis attacked the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in late January 2022 in two separate attacks, with one reaching a U.S. military base. In March, the Houthis targeted a storage site belonging to the Saudi national oil company, marking the second boldest attack against Saudi oil facilities. Instead of convincing the Saudis to deescalate, the Biden administration pledged to defend Riyadh and Abu Dhabi against what they’ve called the “terrorist” attacks.

Yet the threat to the global oil supply was becoming clear, a risk the White House was uninterested in running amid both a midterm election and a war between Russia and Ukraine. A week after the attack on Saudi’s oil infrastructure, the United Nations, backed by the U.S., managed to have all parties agree on a truce that would allow for talks on a settlement to the yearslong conflict. “The Saudis accepted the truce after belatedly realizing that they were losing in an expensive quagmire,” said Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA analyst and Brookings Institution senior fellow, in an email. “Biden’s team helped get them to that point along with a lot of help from the UN and Oman.”

The two-month truce allowed for a halt to all Saudi airstrikes and ground fighting and an ease on fuel imports to north Yemen, in return for a halt to Houthi missile and drone strikes on Saudi Arabia.

No Renewal

The ceasefire largely held up and kept getting renewed until October 2, when the Houthi government refused to renew it again.

The Houthi government laid blame with Riyadh and the U.S. for avoiding the issue most important to the Houthi-led coalition: monthly salary payments of the state employees. Since 2016, the Saudi-backed government relocated the Central Bank of Yemen to territory it controls, accusing the Houthi government of diverting the bank’s funds to the war effort, a charge international observers and aid groups found baseless. The Saudi-backed government promised to keep the bank’s policy of paying all public servants, estimated at 1 million employees who support around 10 million others, but it broke its word, denying millions of Yemenis their only source of income.

The Houthi-led coalition put the salary payment issue as a condition to renew the deal, but the Saudis agreed only on paying workers in the health and educational sectors. The Houthis maintained that the revenues from oil exports in areas under the Saudi-backed government, which would account for nearly 70 percent of Yemen’s budget, should be allocated for the pay of all public servants. No Biden-led diplomacy — intense, delicate, ongoing, or otherwise — could persuade the Saudis to stop diverting Yemeni public-servant money back to Riyadh.

Little progress has been made on the question of paying public servants. The U.N. Security Council, Britain, the European Union, and the U.S. called the Houthi government demand to pay all public servants “unrealistic” and “maximalist.” During a congressional hearing in December, Biden’s Yemen envoy Tim Lenderking blamed the Houthi government for the current impasse, slamming “the last-minute Houthi demand that the Yemeni Government divert its limited oil export revenues to pay the salaries of active Houthi combatants.”

What the U.S. deemed unrealistic has in fact been a demand of Democrats on Capitol Hill. What Sanaa demanded as a condition to renew the deal wasn’t impossible or even unrealistic. A group of 16 senators — along with many aid groups — called on Biden in May 2021 to end the Saudi blockade. While the Biden administration angled to keep the blockade as leverage in negotiations, the senators said the embargo “must end today and be decoupled from ongoing negotiations.”

For critics, the Biden administration’s stance — considering the payments to Yemeni public servants too great a cost for establishing a new ceasefire — isn’t a serious approach to ending the war.

“These demands benefit ordinary Yemeni workers, not the Sana’a government itself,” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, referring to the Houthi government in the capital of Sana’a. “What’s ‘unrealistic’ and even cruel, however, is to continue denying millions of public servants their salaries for multiple years and to derail ceasefire negotiations because of a humanitarian, not a political or military, demand.”

Diplomacy to Nowhere

The relative calm in fighting and a halt to bombing witnessed since April has been rare. Its impact on the most vulnerable, however, has been small. Much of the Yemeni suffering has been caused by the blockade and other economic warfare tactics, not the bullets and bombs.

The status quo leaves the Houthis little incentive to maintain a truce that delivers misery to the population it governs without any serious concessions around the blockade or payments to public-service employee payments. In return, the Houthi government has offered to cease its bombings of Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners. Saudi, emboldened by White House support, agreed on only easing restrictions on fuel imports.

Late last month, Omani negotiators were back in northern Yemen, urging the Houthis to sit down with the Saudis to discuss both issues. Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the Houthi movement’s leader and the one calling the shots, rejected the offer as another Saudi bid to evade addressing the economic crisis first, which he and his aides stressed should be decoupled from any other issues being negotiated. The Houthi message was simple, according to a source briefed on the talks: Pay the salaries of all public servants, lift the blockade on the northern port of Hodeidah and Sanaa airport, and then the parties can sit together to negotiate other terms.

The Saudis and the Emirates, however, seem unlikely to budge. So far, they have only granted concessions in the face of violence directed at Abu Dhabi and at Saudi oil fields, not through Biden-led negotiations.

That may be the dynamic at the heart of the White House’s opposition to the Sanders war powers resolution: Without U.S. support for its warplanes, the Saudis would be effectively grounded, perhaps emboldening the Houthis, who are poised to relaunch strikes and send global oil markets spinning to win an end to the blockade. So far, Houthi attacks intended as warnings have dissuaded tanker captains from offloading millions of barrels of crude oil that would have otherwise benefited the Saudi-backed government.

Facing the reality of the Houthis escalating their attacks, the Biden administration could dig in and refuse to meet reasonable Houthi demands while fending off congressional opposition to the war. Or the White House could pressure the Saudis into a genuine end to the war. In fighting the Sanders resolution, the White House has chosen to dig in. The Biden administration diplomacy is “ongoing,” but it’s not clear it’s going anywhere — making a resurgence of violence now seem inevitable.

The post Biden’s “Diplomacy” in Yemen Means Taking Saudi Arabia’s Side — and Could Spark All-Out War appeared first on The Intercept.

Last month, Moore, a political newcomer, and his running mate, former state Del. Aruna Miller, held a high-dollar fundraiser at the home of Jasdip “Jesse” Singh, the founder of Sikhs for Trump. The event was co-hosted by one-time Trump adviser Sajid Tarar, who founded Muslims for Trump and delivered a prayer for the then-candidate at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Singh and Tarar have strong connections to the current Republican governor, serving on his commission for South Asian issues.

The fundraiser was also organized in part by Dr. Sudhir Sekhsaria, a local allergist who referred to himself at the event as one of the campaign’s “finance chairs” and has given at least $12,000 to Moore and Miller since January. Sekhsaria had previously helped Miller as treasurer during her unsuccessful congressional run in 2018, soliciting thousands of dollars in donations from people affiliated with Hindu nationalism.

“It’s a very profitable method to tap into the Hindutva sectors of the community.”

Adapa Prasad, the national president of the group Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the U.S. outreach wing of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, also attended the fundraiser. The group, which Sekhsaria has also been linked to, was required in 2020 to register in the U.S. as a foreign agent.

A spokesperson for Moore and Miller’s campaign did not say how much money it raised from last month’s event, but the local news site Next TV reported a total haul of more than $100,000.

The fundraiser in Maryland for Moore and Miller appeared to be the latest instance of Hindutva, or a Hindu nationalist political ideology, creeping into American politics. As the global far right gathers power, Indian policy issues and Hindutva-affiliated money have increasingly shown up in U.S. elections. In Maryland, the combination of cozying up to allies of both Trump and Modi has raised questions among local activists and South Asian Americans as to what interest they might have in helping Democrats take back the governor’s mansion.

“We see this as a stepping stone for more folks with these right-wing connections to come into office,” said Gayatri Girirajan, a member of Peace Action Montgomery, a local chapter of the grassroots peace organization that has been advocating for transparency and accountability around the Moore campaign’s affiliations. “These are people who have a lot of influence, community power, money, and lobbying power to put policies in place that would have a significant effect on marginalized communities.”

Donors who are prominent members of groups associated with the U.S.-based Hindu right have funded Democratic politicians in recent years, including backing former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii; former Texas congressional candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni; and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill.

A spokesperson for the Moore campaign told The Intercept that the campaign is happy to accept support from people across the aisle, and that its success depends in part on bringing Republicans into the fold. They also said Sekhsaria is not employed by the campaign.

“In order to win elections, you have to build a broad coalition, and that often includes people who’ve previously supported Republicans,” the spokesperson said. “These donors have given to many Democrats here in Maryland and across the country, including every Democrat currently running for statewide office.”

Neither Singh nor Sekhsaria responded to requests for comment. Tarar confirmed that he is the founder of Muslims for Trump, but did not respond to other questions.

Tapping into the resources of the small but wealthy and well-connected part of the Maryland South Asian community can be the key to political success, said Girirajan, a Maryland resident who grew up in the local Hindu community.

“It’s a very profitable method to tap into the Hindutva sectors of the community,” she told The Intercept. “If you are able to really appeal — whether you truly believe the ideology or not — there’s so much money in Maryland, particularly among the upper-caste Hindu community.”

Ahead of the Maryland gubernatorial Democratic primary in July, Peace Action Montgomery launched an effort to raise awareness about Miller’s financial ties to people involved in right-wing Hindu politics, said Susan Kerin, the chapter’s chair.

In an email shared with The Intercept, a constituent contacted the Moore campaign to express concern about Miller’s ties to the Hindutva movement. Brian Adam Jones, the campaign’s director of communications, replied and asked whether similar requests were being made of other candidates in the primary, particularly John King, whom Jones claimed “has accepted thousands of dollars from BJP supporters.”

King, who served as education secretary under President Barack Obama, had been alerted about a donor with Hindutva connections and in June gave their donation of $1,500 to civil rights organization Muslim Advocates. The campaign condemned the Hindutva movement in a statement and pledged to not take money tied to it. (King did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.)

In response to local efforts urging the Moore campaign to disavow its relationships with right-wing Hindu affiliates and for Miller to return donations from them, the campaign added a page to its website in July to lay out “the facts” about Miller’s record on supporting Muslim communities and religious freedom.

“Aruna Miller has a clear record fighting for religious freedom and supporting the Islamic community in Maryland and abroad,” the site says. “There is not one dollar in this campaign that has anything to do with the Hindutva movement or international politics.”

The webpage also notes that some of the donors in question are major givers to Democrats like President Joe Biden and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and suggested that the focus on Miller had to do with her identity: “We refuse to accept that these donations are somehow only nefarious when they are in support of an Indian-American woman, the only immigrant in this race.”

“Our ask is return the money and really assure us that these people will not have access in any way, shape, or form to the administration.”

Two months after the Moore campaign put out the statement, Moore and Miller held the fundraiser at Singh’s house. A week after the fundraiser, on October 3, Moore and Miller met with leaders from several Muslim councils across the state. According to a summary of that meeting shared with The Intercept, the candidates told attendees that the campaign reviewed its donations and said that none came from members or sympathizers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the umbrella organization of Hindu nationalist groups.

That’s hard to believe given the fundraiser at Singh’s house, Kerin said. In the remaining weeks leading up to the election, she added, Peace Action Montgomery is renewing its efforts for the Moore campaign to acknowledge their concerns.

“Our ask is return the money and really assure us that these people will not have access in any way, shape, or form to the administration,” she said.

Moore’s selection of Miller as his running mate gave pause to some local activists and members of the South Asian community in Maryland. The activists were concerned about Miller’s record of accepting donations from individuals connected to U.S. Hindu nationalist groups, namely Sudhir Sekhsaria. At last month’s fundraiser, Miller singled out Sekhsaria as instrumental to her political career.

“I would not be here today if not for your love and your encouragement of me from day one when I first ran for public office,” she said to Sekhsaria, according to a recording of the event on YouTube.

Miller got her start in politics as a delegate for Maryland’s 15th District, where she served for almost nine years. In 2018, she ran for Congress to represent Maryland’s 6th District but lost in the Democratic primary.

Sekhsaria, his wife, and his medical practice have given thousands of dollars to Miller’s campaigns, according to campaign finance disclosures. While Sekhsaria has contributed to other major Democratic candidates like Biden and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., he has contributed more to Miller’s congressional campaigns than to any other federal candidate since 2002 — giving $10,200 in total.

While treasurer of Miller’s congressional campaign, Sekhsaria helped put together a fundraiser for Miller in Houston, which was attended by several people affiliated with right-wing Hindu activities in the U.S., including key organizers of “Howdy, Modi,” the massive 2019 rally that celebrated the close relationship between the Indian prime minister and Trump. Sekhsaria has also organized events for the Overseas Friends of the BJP, as well as Ekal Vidyalaya, a nonprofit that runs schools in India that reportedly spread a Hindu nationalist agenda in their curriculum; Sekhsaria and his wife pledged $30,000 at an Ekal fundraiser in 2018.

The potential influence of Hindutva money in U.S. politics has grown in recent years where there are sizable South Asian American communities. Politicians like Gabbard, Krishnamoorthi, and Kulkarni have been criticized by South Asian constituents and progressive groups for deflecting questions about their affiliations with people associated with Hindu nationalist groups and accepting their financial support.

While Miller has recently tweeted against the BJP’s anti-Muslim policies, she was also quoted at an Overseas Friends of the BJP event referring to Modi as a “rock star” ahead of his appearance at Madison Square Garden in 2014. The website of Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy nonprofit with reported ties to the U.S. Hindu right, also features a statement from Miller from 2017 in support of the group’s efforts to implement a revisionist version of Indian history into California textbooks.

Since launching her lieutenant gubernatorial campaign, Miller has distanced herself from praise of Modi. After the “rock star” comment resurfaced in May, just ahead of the primary, Miller wrote in a tweet that she had attended the Overseas Friends of the BJP event “a decade ago, before any authoritarian action he took as Prime Minister. I have stood for the rights of Muslims in Maryland and abroad for my entire career, and that will continue.”

The post Is Hindu Nationalist Money Making Its Way Into Maryland’s Governor Race? appeared first on The Intercept.

Identity Theft Registries

Amazon requires that certain information be provided when setting up a registry. For a wedding registry, Amazon requires the first and last names of both partners, the wedding date, the number of guests attending, and a mailing address. The default share setting is to make the registry searchable not only on Amazon but also via the third-party wedding planning website The Knot. This has led to confusion from Amazon wedding registry users over how The Knot received their registry details. Similarly, when creating a baby registry, Amazon asks for a first and last name, expected due date, whether the baby is the parents’ first child, and a mailing address. The default visibility setting is also set to public and to appear on pregnancy and parenting websites The Bump, What to Expect, and Baby Center.

Anyone can search for a public registry (even without an Amazon account) with just a name or further specifying a date and location. In addition to the list of desired products, wedding registries show the names of both partners, the event location, and the event date. Baby registries return either the name of the upcoming baby or the names of the parents, their city and state, and the expected due date.

At first glance, only wedding registries for weddings happening between 2020 to 2032 and baby registries with due dates between 2020 to 2023 can be searched for. However, there are ways to bypass the date restrictions to access registries from years prior. In the case of multiple results, wedding and baby registries display the top 100 matches, and if no date parameters are entered, search results may contain entries outside the default date ranges. For example, even though Amazon only lets you select dates from 2020 onward, if you don’t specify an exact range when searching a common name, you could get results from, say, 2008.

Perhaps the more critical vulnerability in Amazon’s date range search, however, is that the fields can be modified using the developer tools functionality available in browsers like Chrome and Firefox. A cursory search with modified date fields brought up wedding registries dating as far back as 2004, and baby registries dating back all the way to 2006. So someone could discover the details of a registry set up for a present-day 16-year-old. Who knows how this information could be weaponized in two years, once such a teen becomes a legal adult?

(Widely) Shared Secrets

Knowledge-based authentication, known as KBA, is a form of identity authentication favored by service providers such as financial institutions that relies on shared secrets: information that is only known to you and your bank, email provider, or other service. For example, if you lose the password to your bank account, you can regain access by entering information that most people likely don’t know about you, like your mother’s maiden name or your date of birth.

Security questions like this have been around for a while. Banks have used mother’s maiden name as a form of identity authentication since at least 1882. But today these so-called secrets are inevitably shared much more broadly than account holders anticipate, resulting in harrowing cases of identities getting stolen with personal details used for authentication.

Using multiple Amazon registries could reveal massive amounts of information not just about living people but even of a baby yet to be born. A wedding registry would show the mother’s maiden name, and a birth registry would list the projected date of birth, location, and either the expected child’s or the parents’ names. Should the baby not be born on their expected due date, there’s always the Amazon birthday gift registry to crosscheck. The location and date of the birth can, in turn, be used to deduce a partial Social Security number.

Using newborns for identity fraud is not a new phenomenon. The practice of adopting a deceased baby’s identity was popularized in Frederick Forsynth’s 1971 novel “The Day of the Jackal,” in which an assassin trawls small parish graveyards to locate a dead child whose identity he could assume in order to apply for a passport in their name.

While the technique of taking over the identity of a dead child is still used today, Amazon’s public baby registries have made it far easier to target those who haven’t been born yet. Identity thieves no longer need to peruse musty county registrar offices for birth certificates when they can just search for registries online.

Privacy Measures

While there are copious other ways to find personal information sprinkled throughout the internet, such as on social media profiles and genealogy websites, your Amazon registry doesn’t need to be another.

Because Amazon registries are public by default, users have to manually toggle the privacy settings either to “shareable,” which makes a registry accessible only via a direct link, or “private,” making it visible only to the creators. Another option to mitigate data exposure is to fudge the expected due date, so Amazon doesn’t display the actual date.

Also take into account that alongside the treasure trove of personal information public registries afford identity thieves, the products themselves pose an additional security risk. Anyone could browse a gift registry to see which products have known vulnerabilities to exploit, such as baby monitors that allow remote access to their video feeds.

Once a registry’s purpose has been served, there’s little reason not to delete it, rather than leave it lingering for 16-odd years, as some users have inadvertently done. While a wedding registry is straightforward to delete, Amazon’s steps for deleting a baby registry are unclear, with step one cryptically instructing to “Go to your .” Perhaps the best preemptive solution is not to use a faulty, privacy-eroding service in the first place.

The post Amazon’s One-Stop Shop for Identity Thieves appeared first on The Intercept.

So Schilling applied to receive federal rental assistance through her state. When they owed nearly $3,000 last year, the couple applied and received rental assistance to get caught up, so she assumed that she could do it again. If they had been able to get what they owed the second time around, their landlord would have let them stay. This time, though, the assistance did not come through. “There was none,” she said. Their landlord moved to evict them.

“People are going to lose their housing, evictions are going to go up, which means the rate of homelessness is going to go up.”

In May 2021, the Treasury Department announced that states would get another $21.6 billion in federal rental assistance. It was the second tranche of money made possible by the American Rescue Plan, intended to cover the back rent tenants owe after suffering financial hardship during the pandemic.

Two states, Arkansas and Nebraska, outright refused to accept that second round of money, leaving struggling renters without any help to stay housed.

Both Republican governors said that the help wasn’t necessary in their states. But their statements stood in sharp contrast to conditions on the ground. Arkansas and Nebraska residents were still struggling to make rent — and continue to do so, with no more federal help on the horizon.

“We definitely needed it,” said Mike Hornacek, the CEO of Together Omaha, an organization that was subcontracted by Nebraska to distribute federal rental assistance. “People are going to lose their housing, evictions are going to go up, which means the rate of homelessness is going to go up.”

In March, Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts announced that his state would turn down its share of the money. “[A]t a certain point, we must acknowledge that the storm has passed and get back to the Nebraska Way,” he said in a statement at the time. “We must guard against becoming a welfare state where people are incentivized not to work and encouraged to rely on government handouts well after an emergency is over.”

A month later, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson followed suit, claiming that the state had $6.7 million in remaining funds from the first round of rental assistance. Community activists, however, haven’t been able to tap the remaining funds, if they do still exist, and the state Department of Human Services stopped taking applications in April. “No one new can apply,” said Neil Sealy, executive director of the Arkansas Community Institute. “There’s just a lot of stuff that they said was there that just isn’t there.”

In the absence of rental assistance, evictions have been shooting up in Arkansas. By May, they had reached the highest rate in five years. As of June 30, there were 3,832 unlawful detainer evictions filed in the state this year, which doesn’t account for evictions filed under the state’s criminal statute or in small claims court. Sealy said, “It’s higher than it’s ever been.” And cases are moving forward.

In Pulaski County, which includes Little Rock, tenants only have five days to respond to an eviction summons to stave it off, so many people end up losing their housing quickly.

Samantha Schilling was one such fast-moving case. Schilling got the eviction summons only about three days before she had to file a response; she turned it in late, and the eviction moved forward. Four weeks later, the couple was locked out. They were told that the sheriff would arrive at 11 a.m., but a team of three was at her door at 9:30. Her family only got about 10 or 15 minutes to gather their belongings before they were forced to leave, grabbing necessities like a few outfits and medications, leaving behind most of their clothes and all of their furniture and appliances.

“It all happened really fast,” she said. After they left, the house was broken into and over $3,000 worth of their belongings were stolen, including her son’s brand-new set of bagpipes. They were given one day after that to go back, but they had to leave many of their belongings behind because they had nowhere to take them.

Instead of living in her family’s home of the last four years, Schilling, her fiancé, and their two sons, ages 10 and 11, are now living out of a Motel 6. Her family is getting some help from the American Legion to pay for the hotel room, but it’s still difficult to live there. The family cat is staying with a friend. Her sons both have mental health issues, including ADHD, and sometimes struggle to get along. “Keeping them occupied has been a real task,” Schilling said. One of her sons becomes destructive when bored. “It’s hard. It weighs on me greatly.” They sold their car to try to cover rent, and now her fiancé can’t get to his job at Dollar General. He’s trying to get a new job with a car dealership down the road.

“Last year we had to rely on the funds to get caught up. And this year we just don’t have them because [the governor] is not accepting them,” Schilling said. “It’s made me so mad that honestly I really just want to go over to the governor’s mansion and just post up.”

In explaining his decision to reject the federal money, Hutchinson cited Arkansas’s economic recovery. “Our economy has returned. There are jobs aplenty out there, and we have existing programs in place for rental assistance that were pre-pandemic,” he said. “We are back working to the same extent pre-pandemic, and we have the same opportunity moving up the economic ladder, so we need to move back to the same rental assistance we had before.”

Adrian Toston, a resident of Jacksonville, a suburb of Little Rock, just spent months out of work when orders for the home goods she was delivering dried up. Losing her income meant losing her car, and she had to file for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. “It’s been very, very tough,” she said. She’s been single parenting her two daughters, ages 12 and 5, since getting divorced in 2020.

She tried desperately to find another job and even got an offer at Amazon, only to find out that when the company ran a background check, a long-ago arrest for misdemeanor unauthorized use of a vehicle was incorrectly categorized on her record as property theft. “They see property theft, they’re not going to hire you,” she said. It wasn’t until another employer ran a background check and told her about the issue that she was able to file the paperwork and get it fixed. “It’s just been one thing after another,” she said.

When her previous work started to dry up in January, Toston applied for rental assistance, but she was declined despite her and her landlord sending in all the requested paperwork. She had to submit a second application, but despite calling every week for months to find out what was happening, she was declined again for supposedly failing to respond to an email she says she never got. “By then the government had already declined the rent relief,” she said. When she called to try to explain how much she needed help, she was told that the funds had run dry. “I was so devastated.”

Her landlord began the process of evicting her as soon as her second application was denied. She owes $3,500 in back rent, although she has been able to scrape together $1,500. She’s hoping that her landlord might let her work out an arrangement in which she can work toward paying it off. Her rent is $526 a month, and she worries that with rents rising so quickly she won’t be able to find anything else that affordable in her area. Not to mention that her daughters love their apartment, where they have their own bedrooms.

“It’s not that I’m not trying to work or anything,” she said, but without some help, she knows she may very well lose her apartment. She’s started moving her things out so she and her daughters can stay with her mother in her two-bedroom apartment until Toston can find another place. “My girls, they are not ready for that,” she said. “It’s going to be tough.”

There are many more like Toston in Arkansas, Sealy, of the Arkansas Community Institute, said. “We’ve had two years of pandemic economic problems,” he said. People who lost jobs early on are still in a financial hole, as are people who have gotten Covid-19 and had to quarantine without pay. “Even if you are working, you still have a huge debt burden.” Now, rising costs are burdening families too.

“The requests for help and the amount of funds that we’re still distributing is at a level that’s equal to or potentially higher than what we’ve seen during the peak of the pandemic.”

“If the trend continues, we’ll have just a huge number of people who will have that eviction mark,” Sealy said. That will make it harder for them to find housing, which is already challenging with rising rents, little availability, and high application fees. “Every day that goes by that we don’t have [more rental assistance], the number of people without stable housing increases.”

The need for rental assistance is just as high in Nebraska. “The requests for help and the amount of funds that we’re still distributing is at a level that’s equal to or potentially higher than what we’ve seen during the peak of the pandemic,” said Together Omaha’s Hornacek. “It hasn’t slowed down at all.” In fact, his organization distributed over three times as much rental assistance in the second quarter of this year than it did in the first, helping over 800 people in those three months alone. Low-income people were hit especially hard by the pandemic, he noted, and many haven’t recovered yet. And just as some were getting back on their feet, they’ve had to deal with soaring inflation.

Since January, Together Omaha has distributed over $5 million in aid from the first round of federal assistance, and all five of the organizations handing it out in Omaha gave about $8 million in May alone. But the first round of money is only available through September 30 — Hornacek doubted it would last that long.

“Not having access to those extra funds, in my opinion, is going to do a lot of harm to our community and those we serve,” he said. “We’re still going to be asked to do what we’ve been doing,” helping people who can’t afford their rent, “yet there’s no funding for us to be able to do it.”

Ricketts’s rejection of the funds, he said, felt like “a slap in the face.”

The post Renters in Arkansas and Nebraska Face Eviction After Governors Refuse Federal Rental Assistance appeared first on The Intercept.

Shukla, a father and drug store owner, relayed the information he received from one of the woman’s male relatives to the head of the far-right Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Bareilly district. Pawan Arora immediately phoned a senior state police official.

“We have just got information that a Muslim boy has run away with a Hindu girl. Take her number and put it on surveillance immediately,” Arora said. “No case has been registered yet, the information has just come in. I thought I would tell you. We need to be active — they may leave the city.”

Arora called Shukla back and instructed him to tell the woman’s family to file a complaint at the local police station that she had gone missing. Shukla advised the family not to accuse the man of forcing her to flee, which she could dispute if the case ended up in court. He also told them to stop calling her — if she decided to turn off her phone, the police could lose her location.

Shukla described the woman as an educated 27-year-old schoolteacher from a well-respected, upper-caste family, and that the man was unfit to be in a relationship with her.

“Her parents have a big house and gave her every comfort. Why would she go with a Muslim who is a munshi to some lawyer?” he said, using the Hindi word for bookkeeper, which is considered a lowly job. “Do your parents raise you to shame them in their old age?”

According to Shukla, the woman would never choose to be with the man unless he had “brainwashed” her. It was up to self-appointed saviors like Shukla to rescue her.

“We have to get the woman back in our control,” he said. “We have to save her and Hindu society.”

In under 12 hours, Shukla and the police tracked down the couple and returned the woman home.

For decades, Hindu nationalist groups in India have operated extralegally to foil interfaith relationships, in part by spreading a baseless anti-Muslim conspiracy theory they call “love jihad”: that Muslim men pursue Hindu women to convert them to Islam and eventually outnumber India’s Hindu majority.

In November, Uttar Pradesh began to enforce the Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, 2020, a law that ostensibly prohibits religious conversions by force, fraud, or marriage. While the law does not explicitly ban marriage between Hindu women and Muslim men, Hindu vigilantes in the state have wielded it to lead unencumbered “love jihad” investigations in collaboration with the police, often using violence and manipulation, with the ultimate goal of cementing India as a Hindu supremacist nation. The vigilantes pursue alleged cases of “love jihad” despite the national government’s insistence that such a crime does not legally exist.

In January, we met with several grassroots leaders of the VHP, its youth wing Bajrang Dal, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mothership of Hindu nationalist organizations including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some of the men told us they agreed to be interviewed only because one of the reporters has a Hindu last name; given the intensity of their anti-Muslim hate speech, we were cautious to avoid revealing that the other reporter was Muslim.

The vigilantes typically learn about an interfaith relationship through local informants and then call the police to request cellphone surveillance of runaway couples. After a woman is found, Hindu hard-liners often give “counseling” to convince her to leave her Muslim partner. If she refuses, they resort to emotional blackmail, often from her parents, or threaten her and her partner with violence. In some cases, the hard-liners arrange for the woman to marry a Hindu man who might also be affiliated with right-wing groups.

The Hindu right’s state-sanctioned crackdown on “love jihad” has been devastating for its victims, who have little recourse under a law that reinforces social taboos in India around exogamy. According to a Pew Research Center report from last month, 67 percent of Hindus said it’s very important to prevent Hindu women from marrying outside their religion, and 76 percent of Muslims opposed Muslim men entering interfaith marriages. Amid the deadly second wave of Covid-19 in India, it has become even more fraught for couples to seek refuge.

“This law has created a lot of fear and panic. It doesn’t mention the word ‘love jihad,’ but we know it is targeting one community,” said Asif Iqbal, co-founder of Dhanak of Humanity, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that advocates for the welfare of interfaith couples. “They have done this to divide communities. They have succeeded.”

Codifying Conspiracy Theories

Of India’s 1.2 billion people, 966 million are Hindu and 172 million are Muslim, according to the most recent census data. Muslims are India’s largest minority community and comprise the third-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan.

The Hindu right has long peddled the dangerous myth that Muslims are taking over India. There were 300 million more Hindus than Muslims in 1951, and the gap increased to over 800 million by 2011, said S.Y. Quraishi, author of “The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning, and Politics in India.” This squares with census data that shows that Muslim population growth hit a 20-year low in 2011. “There is no evidence of Muslims overtaking Hindus in India,” Quraishi said.

But facts and figures make no difference to the men who say their goal is to transform India into a Hindu rashtra — a Hindu country — in part by stopping marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men.

“If one daughter from our community goes to their community, that means there will be 10 terrorists in their community. If she has 10 children, they will be terrorists,” said Rajesh Awasthi, a 44-year-old father and VHP leader in Shahjahanpur. “We will lose out on one family, and they will gain 10 families.”

The men we spoke to repeated the same false narratives about the tactics that Muslim men use to target Hindu women: that Muslim men masquerade as Hindu using Hindu names and religious symbols; that Muslim women befriend Hindu women to introduce them to their “jihadi” brothers; that Muslim shopkeepers, especially those who run mobile phone shops, keep an eye on Hindu women in the area; that local mosques give young men money to pursue Hindu women and reward them for successfully marrying and converting her — the higher her caste, the more money he receives.

Some of the hard-liners claimed that Muslims seek employment as drivers and cooks in Hindu households, often working for lower wages than their Hindu counterparts, so they can lure women in the family.

“They are savages. They only want to expand Islam,” Awasthi said. “They get close to the women in our homes and then they carry out ‘love jihad’ in our homes to convert them. That is why they work for less. They get money from elsewhere. They will wait for three years to convert one Hindu girl.” He advised that Hindus should not employ Muslims in their homes.

Such unfiltered anti-Muslim views were once considered on the fringe in India. But since Modi’s rise to power in 2014, Hindu nationalism has gone mainstream.

The Hindu right established its foothold in Uttar Pradesh starting in the 1980s, when a BJP-led movement to build a temple in Ayodhya culminated in the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu activists in 1992, triggering one of the deadliest communal riots in India’s history. Last year, Modi attended the groundbreaking ceremony for the temple that Hindu nationalists had agitated for decades ago.

The 2017 election of Yogi Adityanath, a far-right monk and longtime proponent of “love jihad,” as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh has emboldened Hindu vigilantes to target Muslims — who comprise about 20 percent of India’s most populous state — with impunity, including for allegedly slaughtering cows.

“Respected Modi ji and Yogi ji have come to us like gods,” said Awasthi, using an honorific after their names. “Since the governments of Yogi ji in UP and Modi ji in India, Hindus are proud.”

Police Cooperation

We witnessed VHP leaders call police officers to inform them about couples on the run, demand surveillance of their mobile phones, and exchange updates on their whereabouts.

The right-wing group has a vast network of informers in cities and villages throughout the state: in schools, colleges, buses, coffee shops, gyms, hotels, cinema halls, courts, and coaching centers for after-school tutoring. In smaller cities and the hinterlands, where the VHP and Bajrang Dal have considerable influence, Hindus will inform on women in their own families. Even marriage officials in some Hindu communities will inform a woman’s parents.

“The better network we have, the better chance we have of finding out what the girl is saying,” Ashish Baliyan, a 23-year-old Bajrang Dal leader in Bijnor, told us. “In every school, in every class, we have our boys.”

In Hardoi district, we spoke with Bajrang Dal leader Pawan Rastogi, a 34-year-old father and businessman as he worked with police officers on a case involving a Hindu minor.

“The work that the VHP and Bajrang Dal workers used to do on its own now has the full support of the police.”

Rastogi said he was coordinating with the inspector of the police station in Shahabad, where the family had registered the complaint. He dispatched two teams of Bajrang Dal workers: one to follow the couple based on surveillance information he claimed he got from the police, and the other to gather information about the Muslim man.

“The work that the VHP and Bajrang Dal workers used to do on its own now has the full support of the police,” he said.

“All information is exchanged. We do all our work with the help of the public,” said sub-inspector Ram Sukhari Singh, as Rastogi stood next to her inside the police station.

While discussing the case with another VHP leader over the phone, Rastogi said that the Hindu family had to discipline the girl when she was found and force her to say she had been taken to a mosque where she had been pressured to convert.

The men who coordinate operations against “love jihad” are very careful about when to request that a case be registered under the anti-conversion law. If the Hindu woman appears likely to defend her partner before a judge and assert that the relationship is consensual, they are slow to invoke it. But if the woman is passive or her family is fully cooperating with the vigilantes, they are quick to use it.

While the law provides cover for their activities, the vigilantes often prefer to take matters into their own hands.

“Saam, Daam, Dand, Bhed”

Sanjay Shukla, who had helped find the 27-year-old Hindu woman in Bareilly the night before, was determined to give her “counseling.”

“She is very strong and fat. She speaks in English. She is a very shrewd girl,” he said, while scrolling through photos of the woman that her family had shared with him on WhatsApp. “I know that I’m going to wrestle with a snake, but I’m also determined. It is important to move quickly, or the situation can go beyond my control.”

Hindu vigilantes involved in “love jihad” operations described “counseling” sessions in which they use violent and coercive tactics to prevent a Hindu woman from continuing her relationship.

Awasthi, the VHP leader in Shahjahanpur, told us about a violent “counseling” session he gave to a Hindu woman who was involved with a Muslim man.

“When the girl said, ‘I will go with him,’ I gave her one punch and she started bleeding in the mouth. I pray to Lord Hanuman and I get strength from him,” he said. “My punch is such that I don’t need to hit anyone a second time.”

“As soon as the girl cries, she breaks, and we know that she is in our control.”

“I told her that I will throw tezaab on you,” he continued, referring to a cleaning chemical used in “acid attacks” against women in South Asia. “I will cut off your nose and I will get the Muslim encountered” — killed by the police extrajudicially. Awasthi told us he has four criminal cases pending against him, including for attempted murder.

The vigilantes often enlist the woman’s parents in their efforts, pressuring families to file police reports and telling them what to say.

Awasthi told us that he and other vigilantes instruct parents how to lie, threaten, and emotionally blackmail their daughters into ending their relationships, including by pretending to faint or have heart attacks. He shared an elaborate scheme in which he replaces a bottle of poison with a harmless blue or yellow liquid and then gets the parents to drink it and pretend they must be rushed to the hospital.

“As soon as the girl cries, she breaks, and we know that she is in our control,” he said. “We watch the girl for two or three months. We take away her mobile phone so that she can only speak with her family. It has never taken more than three months to bring a woman under our control.”

For Muslim men they suspect of committing “love jihad,” the hard-liners dole out similar punishments that Shukla called “saam, daam, dand, bhed” — persuasion, bribery, punishment, blackmail.

Sumit Khanna, a middle-aged father and VHP leader in Shahjahanpur, told us about how he and a group of other Hindu men beat a “big and strong and illiterate Muslim boy” with a plastic pipe after spotting him sitting with a “small and thin Hindu schoolgirl” in the neighborhood.

“That plastic pipe is so strong that it won’t break even if a truck goes over it. We threw him to the ground and hit him a lot. There was no place on his body that had not turned red. He was admitted to the hospital for 20 to 22 days, but his family did not complain to the police,” he said. “We told the teacher at her coaching center and her parents were informed. They stopped her studies in order to save her.”

“They Have Ruined My Future”

As of January, 14 of the 17 cases lodged under the anti-conversion law involved relationships between Hindu women and Muslim men. Since then, local reports of similar arrests have also emerged. The men face a prison term of one to 10 years — the maximum sentence is in cases involving a minor or a woman from a “scheduled caste,” the official government designation for the lowest rung of India’s caste system.

Owais Ahmed, a 21-year-old resident of Sharif Nagar village in Bareilly district, was the first person to be arrested under the law in December after the father of a Hindu woman accused him of trying to convert her. In the order granting bail to Ahmed, Bareilly district court Judge Suneel Kumar Verma wrote that there were no material facts in the initial police report to support the allegation. The woman had had an arranged marriage and moved away from their village months before the criminal complaint was filed.

At the time of the complaint, Ahmed had been planning to make a second attempt to join the Indian Army. “I’m disqualified because of this fake case against me,” he said. “They have ruined my future.”

Some runaway couples have been able to appeal to courts for help. The Allahabad High Court in Uttar Pradesh has granted protection to hundreds of couples against harassment from police or their families, and the Delhi High Court has set some couples up in safe houses in the national capital.

Some couples seek refuge in cities like Delhi and Bangalore in the hopes of getting married under the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which permits civil marriage between people of any religion, but recently provisions in the law have been used to harass couples.

Despite efforts to protect interfaith couples, other states have moved to effectively legalize “love jihad” as a criminal offense. In addition to Uttar Pradesh, three more BJP-ruled states — Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and, most recently, Gujarat — have reenacted their anti-conversion laws with more stringent provisions. These laws, along with a similar one passed in Uttarakhand in 2018, have been challenged in the Supreme Court of India.

At a Zoom press conference organized by Dhanak of Humanity in February, a young Jain woman from Madhya Pradesh shared the challenges she and her Muslim husband have endured since getting married.

The couple had run away to Delhi in 2019, where, after the woman gave a police statement that she got married of her own free will, the Delhi High Court granted them protection if they stayed in Delhi. However, without a stable source of income and friends in the city, the couple returned to Madhya Pradesh where they are now living in fear. The woman said they did not disclose that they are an interfaith couple to their landlord.

When people back home learned of their relationship, “the Jain community got the shops of the Muslims emptied out, and they were taking out rallies saying that ‘we want the girl,’ even though I had given a statement in Delhi,” the woman said.

During the call, two men interrupted as other couples shared their stories, using expletives and anti-Muslim slurs to threaten them.

“I have taken a photo of everyone here,” one of the men said.

The number of young interfaith couples running away from home has risen after the new “love jihad” laws were passed, Asif Iqbal of Dhanak said, as they now fear imprisonment for who they choose to be with.

Dhanak has helped hundreds of couples find safe havens and navigate the judicial system. The group does not get involved in how a couple decides to get married, whether in a religious ceremony or through the Special Marriage Act, and it does not encourage conversions to any faith.

Amid the devastating second Covid-19 wave in India, Iqbal said it has been almost impossible for the group to do its work. Iqbal himself was hospitalized with Covid-19, and many other staffers fell ill.

Despite the pandemic, Dhanak has managed to eke out some support for couples. The group recently found a lawyer to help submit a letter to the Delhi police seeking protection for an interfaith couple from West Bengal who fled because the Hindu woman’s family was forcing her to marry another man.

“They are completely uprooted,” Iqbal said. “We try telling them to get jobs first, but you know how young couples are. They are in love. They don’t listen.”

Anti-Conversion Politics

Laws against religious conversion have been around since the 1960s under state governments ruled by the opposition Congress Party. In the decades since, Hindu nationalist groups campaigned against Christian missionaries who they claim persuade India’s most marginalized groups, Dalits and Indigenous Adivasis, to convert by giving them free medical care and education. Christians are 2.4 percent of the Indian population, and while some Dalits convert to escape the caste system, widespread forced conversion is unfounded.

In the past year, BJP politicians have given teeth to the spate of “love jihad” laws in their public threats to imagined perpetrators.

“I warn those who conceal identity and play with our sisters’ respect,” said Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister, a month before the state’s law went into effect. “If you don’t mend your ways, your ‘Ram naam satya’ journey will begin” — invoking a chant said during Hindu funeral processions.

The national government has maintained an arm’s length from the “love jihad” conspiracy theory and the violent acts that are carried out in its name. It has told the Indian Parliament that there are no laws acknowledging the existence of “love jihad” and ruled out passing a national anti-conversion law, stating that related offenses are a state matter.

The lack of government intervention on “love jihad” serves the BJP’s interest in maintaining power in part through its acolytes, who help shore up the Hindu vote across castes and keep tensions between Hindus and Muslims inflamed.

The national government has maintained an arm’s length from the “love jihad” conspiracy theory and the violent acts that are carried out in its name.

Though the RSS has long been an upper-caste clique, its local leaders are very vocal about how they “rescue” Hindu women of all castes from “love jihad,” particularly Dalits. Their intention is to preserve the Hindu identity of lower-caste people and drive a wedge between Muslims and members of Hindu castes who have not harbored the kind of bigotry and resentment against minorities that India’s upper castes have.

The men we interviewed railed against Hindus mingling and working with Muslims, in effect advocating the social and economic sanction of the minority community.

They used degrading language when speaking about Indian Muslims, the treatment of Muslim women, and their consumption of beef.

Five young Bajrang Dal leaders who were working with Pawan Rastogi to find the Hindu minor told us that while they welcomed the “love jihad” law, they would rather it explicitly ban Hindu-Muslim marriages.

“It would save us from all this hassle,” said Jitender Rathore, who had returned from the Muslim man’s village without any new information about him and vowed to find more the next day. “We want such a law to be enforced in the entire country.”

The men believed that it is only a matter of time before the Indian Constitution is amended to establish India as a Hindu nation. Our mentions of secularism, enshrined in the Constitution, invited smirks from almost everyone we met.

“The word secular is wrong,” said Rastogi. “The Constitution will change either today or tomorrow. This will be a Hindu rashtra.”

Married Off

Once a Hindu woman is “saved” from “love jihad,” the vigilantes may move quickly to arrange her marriage at the parents’ request or to prevent her from running away again.

When families are poor or from a marginalized caste, the hard-liners make all the wedding arrangements, including in the scenario that a Muslim woman is marrying a Hindu man in what is known as “ghar wapsi,” or “reconversion,” based on the right-wing belief that all Indians are descended from Hindus regardless of religion.

The woman’s “biodata” — which includes her photo, age, and caste — is posted on multiple WhatsApp groups populated with VHP and Bajrang Dal members, Awasthi said. Potential suitors start coming in almost immediately, many of them young men working for Bajrang Dal.

The hard-liners seek out a Hindu suitor who is twice the size of the woman in height and build, and who can provide for her. They look for someone with brothers who can fight the Muslim man and his male relatives if he tries reaching her again, and sisters or sisters-in-law who can keep her distracted.

Awasthi said that the vigilantes could get a woman married in a matter of days. If she is a minor, he said they find a match for her to marry when she turns 18. He told us that he had stopped over 100 interfaith marriages and arranged 11 marriages of Hindu women into Hindu families.

“I got a call from her parents saying she needs to be married now. I said, ‘Send her photo and biodata on WhatsApp,’” he said about an 18-year-old in a “love jihad” case he was working on. “Within an hour, I had WhatsApped them with the photos of four boys. They chose one. She was married in 36 hours.”

Shukla had failed to convince the Hindu woman in Bareilly to pursue a similar future. He told us that he had given up on the case, calling the woman too “headstrong,” and that he did not get enough support from her family to ensure that she would break off her relationship.

“I think that she will go back to the Muslim boy,” he said. “We can stop talking about this case now.”

The post Hindu Vigilantes Work With Police to Enforce “Love Jihad” Law in North India appeared first on The Intercept.

Most global media coverage has attributed the ongoing crisis to two key causes: the Indian government’s mismanaged pandemic response and Big Pharma. Over the last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right government engaged in superspreader theatrics rather than disaster mitigation. Meanwhile, by upholding patents on Covid-19 vaccines, pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Europe have denied low- and middle-income countries the ability to produce lifesaving vaccines, creating a system of global vaccine apartheid that devalues non-Western lives.

Amid the censure of the Modi government and Big Pharma, India’s health care capitalists have gone largely unnoticed. Aided at each step by the government’s free-market approach to vaccine distribution, India’s very own Big Pharma has used the pandemic to strengthen market shares, grow profits, and place vaccines behind a paywall unscalable for most people in a country riven with dire systemic inequalities.

“The Indian vaccine ‘market’ is held in a vise-like grip of a vaccine duopoly,” journalist V. Sridhar, who has written about the country’s vaccination failures for the Indian magazine Frontline, told me in a message. “What else would you call this duopoly but vaccine barons?”

Almost all of India’s vaccine supply comes from the country’s two largest vaccine producers: Serum Institute of India, led by CEO Adar Poonawalla, and Bharat Biotech, run by founder Krishna Ella. While both companies have repeatedly advertised their vaccines as the cheapest in the world, they seldom mention that those vaccines are also the world’s most profitable. For each dose sold to private hospitals, Serum makes profits of up to 2,000 percent — what Poonawalla might consider “super profits” — and Bharat Biotech up to 4,000 percent. In comparison, based on the estimated cost to make one dose, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s profit margins are 650 percent and 500 percent, respectively.

“Disasters are a fabulous business,” journalist P. Sainath writes in his recent piece on India’s widening wealth inequality. “There is always money to be made in the misery of the many.” India’s Covid-19 disaster is no exception.

The Prince of Profit

Poonawalla is one of India’s premier pandemic profiteers. He is the 40-year-old son of India’s eighth-richest man, from whom he inherited the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. Among Western progressives, generics are often discussed as a public health solution to Big Pharma profiteering. Generics manufacturers like Poonawalla, however, are still businesspeople working for profit, not humanitarians motivated by the public good.

Pune-based Serum makes 1.5 billion doses of various vaccines every year and sells them across 170 countries. Poonawalla sees Serum, with its sizable production capacity, as “almost designed for [a pandemic],” and the company has seized on its “once-in-a lifetime opportunity.” In June 2020, Serum entered a partnership with British-Swedish company AstraZeneca through which Serum could produce the Oxford University vaccine in exchange for royalties. With the resulting vaccine — known in India as Covishield — Serum captured 90 percent of the country’s vaccine market share. The company also committed up to 200 million doses for export to the global vaccine-sharing initiative COVAX.

Despite Serum’s lucrative licensing agreement with AstraZeneca, Poonawalla has been one of the loudest voices decrying global vaccine inequality and Western Big Pharma. In March, Poonawalla objected to U.S. President Joe Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act, which stipulated that U.S. companies manufacturing vaccine raw materials must prioritize U.S. government contracts. Poonawalla criticized the move and in April tweeted at Biden to “lift the embargo.”

Recent analysis notes how Poonawalla’s demand for raw materials “placed him at the heart of several heroic imaginations.” This was especially true once India’s Covid-19 surge became front-page news in April. Indian, global, and even socialist media picked up and amplified Poonawalla’s rebuke, pointing to U.S. hoarding of raw materials as a humanitarian concern right alongside India’s pressing need for oxygen and personal protective equipment. As activist and humanitarian pressure to release the raw materials mounted, Biden removed export restrictions on bags, vials, filters, and other materials. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the U.S. had agreed to release “specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine.”

The spokesperson was mistaken, as was much of the global media. Poonawalla went on the record multiple times to clarify that his request was not for Covishield or indeed for any vaccine approved to inoculate Indians. Since January, Serum has had the capacity to produce around 5,000 doses of Covishield per minute. Rather, the raw materials Poonawalla sourced from the U.S. were for a new Covid-19 vaccine Serum is producing in commercial partnership with U.S. company Novavax. Poonawalla was able to benefit from activist outrage to secure vaccine raw materials that would do nothing to mitigate India’s public health crisis. Serum declined to comment on the record for this piece.

Media coverage has facilitated Poonawalla’s enterprising use of the gray zone between humanitarianism and commerce during the pandemic. While Serum has always emphasized its “philanthropic philosophy,” the company’s founding family has mostly been known for their ostentatious wealth — be it their majestic farmhouse where they hosted Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; their luxury car collection that includes a one-of-a-kind Batmobile; or the refurbished aircraft that houses Poonawalla’s office.

But ever since Poonawalla became an early investor in the AstraZeneca vaccine, news stories have praised him as a “vaccine prince” — a risk-embracing entrepreneur with a moral mission. The media’s acceptance of how Poonawalla presents himself explains how easily he has been cited as an advocate for global public health rather than as a billionaire CEO advancing his company’s commercial interests. Journalistic sympathy for Poonawalla often comes at the cost of fair reporting. For instance, the media’s portrayal of Serum’s vaccine exports as a charitable “bid to protect the world” obscures the fact that Serum is charging poorer countries up to $7 for the same vaccine dose that the European Union is getting from AstraZeneca at $2.

Westward Expansion

Poonawalla has been cast in news coverage not just as a disinterested advocate of public health, but also as a decolonial challenger to Big Pharma seeking to “save the world from coronavirus — and then radically remake the international pharma landscape.” Poonawalla’s supposed desire to transform the global pharmaceutical industry is extrapolated from his opposition to vaccine patents, especially as calls to “free the vaccine” from intellectual property restrictions have found salience in Western leftist circles.

“We’re seeing a new system of vaccine apartheid coming into place,” says Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, an initiative that campaigns to remove Covid-19 patents. Many public health experts agree that a temporary waiver of the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, provision is a necessary first step toward increasing vaccine production and access and creating a more competitive pharmaceutical industry worldwide. With sustained pressure from activists, last month the Biden administration signaled its support for a temporary TRIPS waiver, a measure initially proposed by the governments of India and South Africa.

On the surface, Poonawalla has echoed activist concerns about pharmaceutical patents. But his fight against patents is not the same as activists’ fight for a people’s vaccine. Poonawalla’s interest in a TRIPS waiver comes from his admitted intention to poach competitors’ shares in Western markets. “Though we’re already in 165 countries, I will also expand our global reach: pushing into Europe and the United States — markets that we’ve never been able to enter as we’ve been blocked by Big Pharma,” he told GQ India last year. “These are the new and final frontiers.”

Serum has expanded into those frontiers. In 2012, the company acquired Bilthoven Biologicals from the Netherlands government and since then its European presence has only grown. In May, as Covid-19 ravaged India and the country’s vaccine supply dried up, Poonawalla sequestered himself in his $69,000-a-week rental mansion in London as the British government announced that Serum would invest over $330 million in the U.K. to create a new sales office, expected to generate business worth over $1.4 billion. If the clinical trials mentioned in the announcement are any indication, the vaccines developed as part of this deal might target European markets.

Serum’s global ambitions illuminate Poonawalla’s real problem with Big Pharma. It is not that Poonawalla is against the commercialization or patenting of lifesaving drugs; rather, he opposes Big Pharma insofar as it blocks his own access to Western markets. This is why, while campaigning against the hoarding of U.S. raw materials or supporting calls to waive U.S. drug patents, Poonawalla had also been working with then-President Donald Trump to escape the “stupid rules and regulations” that prevented him from selling his products in the U.S.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s viral surge that enriches Poonawalla.

If these restrictions — raw material embargoes, patents, regulatory requirements — were waived for Covishield in Western markets, even at a price as high as $10 a dose, Covishield could easily outcompete the more expensive Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines while making a considerable profit. By undercutting competitors’ prices for Covid-19 vaccines, Serum could both expand its operations and trigger a race to the bottom, pushing other producers to consolidate or outsource to lower their prices. Back in 2016, Poonawalla had diagnosed that the pharmaceutical industry was experiencing “the lull before the storm” of acquisitions or mergers. If it succeeds in using the pandemic to break into Western markets, Serum could find itself riding the coming tidal wave of pharmaceutical industry consolidation.

The TRIPS waiver might become yet another humanitarian response to India’s coronavirus surge that enriches Poonawalla. The waiver could enable Serum to keep profiting from the AstraZeneca vaccine without paying royalties. Serum may also be able to develop a replica of the vaccine, the patent for which it could hold within India even as global patents are suspended. Several of the experts I interviewed saw the probability of such a vaccine monopoly emerging.

Poonawalla has done little to dispel these fears. Even as he stresses that Serum’s production capacity must increase to vaccinate the world’s poor, Poonawalla also maintains that there is no need to bring other manufacturers into the vaccine market to help increase supply.

Serum’s primary goal isn’t to equitably vaccinate the world or break down monopolies; it is to corner new markets while maintaining dominance within India. Without curbs on Serum’s power, the removal of global patents would not result in “freeing” the vaccine, only freeing streams of profit.

Immunity for Sale

Serum is not the only Indian company engaging in vaccine profiteering. Bharat Biotech, which developed Covaxin with public funds, has been charging Indians exorbitant rates for each shot — up to about $5.40 for states and about $16 for private hospitals — despite founder Ella’s early assurance that the vaccine would cost less than a bottle of water. Bharat Biotech has also been expanding commercial Covaxin exports despite India’s recent export restrictions.

Unlike Serum’s Covishield, Covaxin is not restricted by any Big Pharma patent. The Indian government controls part of Covaxin’s intellectual property rights, yet Bharat Biotech inexplicably monopolized production until a month ago, when the government finally greenlighted manufacturing of the vaccine in its own production facilities. Bharat Biotech declined to comment for this piece.

Throughout the pandemic, the Modi government has refused to curb pharmaceutical profiteering. Despite using taxpayer money to provide clinical trial support and sizable production advances to Serum and Bharat Biotech, the government has failed to ensure affordable vaccines for India’s people. Until May, the central government had procured all the doses for $2 each — a price at which the vaccine companies are reported to have made between 188 percent to 500 percent in profits. But they wanted more.

“When you’ve got low supply and high demand, what happens to the price? It skyrockets,” Poonawalla has said in describing how U.S. drug companies insulate themselves from competition with generics. Yet Poonawalla essentially politically engineered the same reality in India.

“By self-admission, India’s monopolistic vaccine producers were deeply unhappy with the ‘normal profits’ they earned at the regulated prices,” R. Ramakumar, a development economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, told me in a message. “They lobbied to ‘free’ prices. Not surprisingly, vaccine prices more than doubled, even tripled and quadrupled, over just one week.”

Do you have a coronavirus story you want to share? Email us at coronavirus@theintercept.com or use one of these secure methods to contact a reporter.

The Indian government enabled the rise in prices with its “liberalized” vaccine distribution policy, deliberately manufacturing a seller’s market. Starting May 1, the central government stopped procuring and distributing all the country’s vaccines as it and almost every other government in the world had been doing up until then. Instead, the central government began buying only half of the vaccine supply, leaving India’s 28 states and private hospitals to compete for the remaining doses on the private market — at prices set by the vaccine companies. The Indian health ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists. With a quarter of the country’s vaccine stock reserved for private hospitals, and vaccine producers vocalizing their preference to sell to those hospitals at higher prices, India’s vaccination drive was designed to favor private-sector monopolization.

The resulting inequalities have been stark. Private hospitals have outcompeted cash-starved states: In May, just nine hospital chains had cornered 50 percent of all doses. While India’s states pledged to vaccinate people for free, private hospitals voiced no such intention. Absent price caps, most of India’s impoverished population has either been paying exorbitant amounts to get vaccinated at private hospitals or waiting for government hospitals to acquire scarce doses.

By distributing vaccines through the open market, the Indian government fractured its citizens’ collective buying and bargaining power, giving up all leverage to capitalists.

“Imagine if the vaccine is sold at $10 to a family of four and they each need two doses,” health journalist Vidya Krishnan says. “How are they going to be able to afford it?” The average person in India makes an estimated $50 a month. Add to the mix the Modi government’s disastrous economic policies from prior years, and vaccination becomes unattainable for most Indians.

India’s vaccination plan for almost one-fifth of the world’s people has been so alarming that even the country’s judiciary and Modi’s own allies have joined journalists, opposition politicians, and medical experts in asking: Why no price standardization or price ceiling? Why not go back to centrally procuring vaccines instead of making states compete? Why not, as Krishnan asks, use the decades-old public vaccination system that was used to eradicate polio? Why not, as experts I interviewed suggest, waive patents within India and issue compulsory licenses so that more than two big companies could make vaccines?

In response to months of public outcry, last week Modi announced a partial reversal of his vaccine distribution “experiment.” Starting June 21, the central government will procure 75 percent of the country’s total vaccine stock directly from the companies, which it will give to state governments to distribute to their residents for free.

The change reverses one of the most politically controversial aspects of the previous policy but still leaves plenty of room for profiteering. A quarter of India’s vaccine stock will remain reserved for private hospitals and, consequently, for the rich. Even with price caps at private hospitals, vaccine manufacturers’ rates of profit will reach over 1,000 percent. As Yogesh Jain, a founder of the rural health care nonprofit Jan Swasthya Sahyog, wrote on Twitter, India’s vaccination capabilities will remain “publicly provided, and privately guzzled.”

The Modi government has tweaked India’s profit-centric vaccine policy, but as Ramakumar says, what is needed is an overhaul. Instead of using the powers at its disposal on behalf of the people, the Indian government continues to privilege profit over lives.

Profiteering as the Public Good

The failures of India’s vaccination drive are reflective of the country’s overall pandemic response, characterized by the government’s strong support of private profiteering. India’s Supreme Court has repeatedly suggested that the central government has the power to speed up the manufacturing of oxygen and other essentials by investing public funds, which Indian cities like Madurai and states like Kerala have done successfully. But not only did the central government do nothing to increase its critically low oxygen capacity, it also allowed India’s industrial oxygen exports to rise by over 700 percent over the course of 2020 instead of redirecting oxygen production to medical needs. Unsurprisingly, the stock of oxygen corporations like Linde India shot up even as countless people gasped to death.

“The government of India has withdrawn from the central social responsibility of an enlightened welfare state,” Ramakumar told me. “It has also opened the floodgates for a vulgar form of predatory capitalism to take over the stage amid the raging human tragedy.”

Poonawalla has claimed that “even God” couldn’t have foreseen the gravity of the crisis, but India’s pandemic disaster was long foretold. Things did not have to play out this way. India could have had medical supplies, PPE, testing kits, and vaccines ready if public health dictated production and distribution, rather than profits. Wherever vaccines have been administered on a mass scale, it has happened because at key moments of reckoning, public health advocates challenged the profit motive. But in India, profiteering itself masquerades as the public good.

In India, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent. 

Pandemics often exacerbate preexisting sociopolitical dynamics, argues Nivedita Saksena, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. India’s current situation is no exception. With a public health system that has been starved of funds for decades, and no viable alternative to for-profit health care, India’s Covid-19 pandemic was bound to become an opportunity for profiteering.

India’s big businesses have even managed to use aid from abroad to make money — which is why private hospitals sold airlifted oxygen cylinders to desperate patients, why vaccine raw materials from the U.S. are being used for disaster profiteering, and why a global patent waiver will likely strengthen the power of Indian Big Pharma.

To win a world where human life is truly valued above profit, we must realize that the small handful of very wealthy people who stand in the way of the public good are dispersed across the world — as much in Pune as in New York City. Their numbers are growing, as is their power within their home countries. In India alone, 38 new billionaires were minted in the past year, while the combined wealth of the country’s 140 billionaires went up by 90.4 percent. During the pandemic, Poonawalla’s net worth rose by 85 percent in five months, as tens of millions of Indians descended into poverty. This is not a coincidence, as P. Sainath writes, in “a year when hundreds of millions of Indians were hungrier than they’d been in decades.”

“A wealth ‘surge’ usually rides on a misery surge,” Sainath says. The swelling wallets of India’s health care elites are directly linked to the bodies in the streets. Until we eliminate the profitability of misery, India’s nightmare has no end in sight.

The post India’s Vaccine Makers Are Pandemic Profiteers, Not Humanitarians appeared first on The Intercept.

What the testimonials leave out is the exorbitant interest rates American Web Loan charges its borrowers. According to documents from a federal class-action lawsuit filed against the company in late 2017, American Web Loan’s average interest rate for its $300 to $2,500 offerings was more than 560 percent. Almost two-thirds of customers have managed to pay back their loan — plus around $472 million in interest — but many have been unable to shoulder the additional debt.

In 15 states the interest rates charged by American Web Loan were illegal; in others where payday lenders can register with the state to seek exemptions, the company never has. American Web Loan claimed it could charge sky-high rates because it was owned by a Native tribe, the Otoe-Missouria. The tribe’s sovereign status meant that the business would have immunity against state usury laws and civil suits. However, a judge ruled that American Web Loan had no claims to tribal sovereignty because it actually belonged to the tribe’s business partner, Mark Curry, who’s made a career out of predatory lending.

“If anything, he’s controlling the tribe. The tribe isn’t controlling him. And he’s continuing to do that,” Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr. said to American Web Loan’s attorney during a 2019 hearing. “The tribe’s being, in effect, paid a royalty for your client to wear – what is it they call it? – the ermine cloak of sovereign immunity? That’s all it is.”

The case, which reached a preliminary settlement agreement in April, generated extensive discovery about American Web Loan’s business dealings over the last decade and provides an unprecedented look under the hood of a major “rent-a-tribe” operation, a once-popular financial services model among payday lenders and their Wall Street and Silicon Valley investors. (Lawyers for Curry and American Web Loan declined to comment on the record; the preliminary settlement agreement prohibits all involved parties from speaking to the press.)

In 2009, Curry approached the chair of the Otoe-Missouria, John Shotton, to set up an online lending company under the tribe’s jurisdiction. Behind the scenes, court records reveal that Curry and his labyrinth of companies handled almost every aspect of American Web Loan’s operation. As loan repayments began and the company became flush, Curry reaped millions in profits and began seeking out investors to grow the business.

Amid federal and state crackdowns on “rent-a-tribe” operations starting in 2013, Curry eventually arranged with Shotton to sell the companies that ran American Web Loan to the Otoe-Missouria. The $200 million deal allowed Curry to continue running the business in the background and saddled the tribe with insurmountable debt — just like what happened to many of American Web Loan’s customers.

“Tribes have to make money, but doing it at the expense of the public gives tribal sovereignty a bad name,” said Nathalie Martin, a University of New Mexico law professor who has written about alliances between payday lenders and Native tribes. “When you use your sovereignty for these types of things, it could be seen as weakening and cheapening that sovereignty.”

Left/Top: John Shotton, chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, in Red Rock, Okla., on Nov. 4, 2014. Right/Bottom: Mark Curry speaking at San Jorge Children’s Foundation in 2017. Photos: Zeke Faux/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Wikipedia

Setting Up Shop

By the time he met the Otoe-Missouria leadership, Curry had already made a name for himself in the payday lending industry. The 53-year-old native of the Kansas City area — home of online payday lenders — specialized in “rent-a-bank” arrangements, in which lenders made pacts with federal banks based in states with no interest rate caps to shield themselves from state lending laws. His companies, Geneva Roth Ventures and Geneva Roth Capital, had partnered with banks in Utah to loan money to borrowers nationwide through the website Loan Point USA. But as regulators banned or fined Curry’s “rent-a-bank” operation in at least seven states, he began searching for a new venture.

What he came up with appeared in a presentation to potential investors in American Web Loan: the sovereign nation model.

Shotton, then the 32-year-old chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, saw in American Web Loan a new revenue source. About 40 percent of the Otoe-Missouria, a tribe of roughly 3,000 members based in tiny Red Rock, Oklahoma, lived below the federal poverty line. At the time, four casinos had been the tribe’s economic engine; its members received quarterly payments of around $700 from gaming, according to the tribe’s newsletters. But that revenue had come under threat from new establishments across the border in Kansas.

Curry and the tribe’s leaders went into business, a relationship that was first reported by Bloomberg News. The Otoe-Missouria council created American Web Loan as a tribal corporation, but it was the lender in name only. Despite Curry’s claim that he was just a consultant for the company, slides from the investor presentation attached as exhibits in court filings show him as CEO of all the companies behind it, with “100% Ownership or Control.” MacFarlane Group, his successor to Geneva Roth, ran the lending operation, and he signed a service agreement with American Web Loan, he would later testify, that his companies would handle practically every aspect of business operations: lead generation, follow-up communications, loan processing, money transfers, software management, customer support, credit reporting, and collections.

The tribe’s contributions were largely cosmetic: It appointed a nominal head to write out the loan checks, according to the tribe’s then-vice chair, and set up a call center in Red Rock and a consumer finance regulatory body whose ordinances would create the impression of oversight. Only six out of 50 American Web Loan employees were from the tribe, and they all worked in the Red Rock call center. (Shotton later testified that the company had hired an additional four tribal members.)

American Web Loan told borrowers that their loans were governed by tribal law — not federal law or the laws of their home state. They had to enroll in automated bank transfers to get the money; the first repayments would often be automatically deducted from the registered account two weeks later. Ironically the Otoe-Missouria’s own members could not borrow from the tribe’s lender — charging members such astronomical interest rates is illegal under the tribal criminal code.

The Otoe-Missouria’s own members could not borrow from the tribe’s lender — charging members such astronomical interest rates is illegal under the tribal criminal code.

“The way we look at it at the tribal level is we developed our own code, developed the rules around lending,” Shotton said when asked about American Web Loan’s interest rates in court in 2019. “We’re very protective in a fair way. We have great consumer protection.” (Tribal council leaders and other members did not comment for this story.)

Curry’s companies carried the ultimate financial risk and reward: His company American Web Loan Holdings LLC purchased a loan from the lender at a small premium about two weeks after it was established. The company kept 99 percent of the loan portfolio, while the tribe retained 1 percent — a fair split, according to Curry, since both sides had agreed. From February 2010 until September 2016, Curry testified that his firm’s share of the profits amounted to around $110 million. In comparison, the tribe only received about $8 million.

Expanding the Empire

In 2011, American Web Loan’s first full year in operation, the amount of loans the company disbursed rose 71 percent, from $35 million to $59.7 million, according to the class-action complaint. Over the next three years, Curry sought financing of at least $110 million from private equity firms, hedge funds, and other investors. He made the pitches with the help of at least two investment banking firms including Middlemarch Partners, which is named in the 2017 lawsuit for its role in helping finance the allegedly illegal operation. Curry’s MacFarlane Group spent $15 million annually on marketing, which, according to a 2013 Middlemarch presentation to potential investors filed as an exhibit in the complaint, made it and its clients “among the largest acquirers of leads in online consumer lending.”

An early investor was a $470 million hedge fund called Medley Opportunity Fund II LP, which provided American Web Loan Holdings with a loan of almost $23 million in late 2011. Brothers Brook and Seth Taube, who ran the fund and were also named in the lawsuit, were familiar with the payday lending industry, previously investing in a payday store chain. (Lawyers for Medley and Middlemarch did not return requests for comment.)

The Taubes were not passive investors. As part of their credit agreement with American Web Loan Holdings, Medley required monthly, quarterly, and annual financial statements, plus weekly reports “providing in reasonable detail fees earned and default percentages on loan portfolios.” Curry also had to furnish the documents he had signed with the tribe’s leadership to establish American Web Loan; if they were ever changed without Medley’s consent, the fund could terminate the loan it had made to Curry’s American Web Loan Holdings.

American Web Loan became one of Medley’s top performers. But in at least one of Medley’s investor presentations, it was referred to only as “Online Consumer Finance Platform” while Medley’s 15 other investments were named. Because its identity was hidden, Medley’s investors, some of which were public employee pension plans, would not see that a payday lender was in the fund’s portfolio. Of all the companies listed, American Web Loan boasted the highest cash yield (15 percent) and gross contractual return (25.6 percent).

American Web Loan had emerged as a massive and complex lending enterprise: American Web Loan Holdings was the borrower, and another 30 companies — all of them fully or partially owned by Curry — appeared in its corporate structure and provided different lending functions, according to Medley’s credit agreement. All but two had the same primary place of business: a nondescript single-story office building outside Kansas City. Companies like “Dinero” and “Chieftain” were listed as holding loan portfolios; based on other presentations, as well as their curious names, these entities might have been intended to mask the identities of investors outside of Curry’s web of businesses, according to the complaint, since the Medley loan only accounted for part of the venture capital Curry was seeking.

With Medley’s backing, Curry luxuriated in American Web Loan’s explosive growth. According to real estate records, he purchased a $1.8 million mansion in the Las Vegas suburbs. In late 2012, he moved to Puerto Rico, where he created SOL Partners, a firm that provided Spanish-language call center services to the payday lending industry, and a private family foundation that supports programs for Native causes and cultural preservation, according to its website.

By 2013, SOL Partners joined MacFarlane Group to manage the key lending functions of American Web Loan and provide capital, according to the Middlemarch presentation. Despite the Otoe-Missouria’s limited role in American Web Loan, in the presentation the tribe appears in the middle of Curry’s lending empire — a linchpin onto which Curry would later fasten his entire legal defense.

Crackdown on Tribal Lenders

The Otoe-Missouria is among dozens of tribes that entered into dubious arrangements with online payday lenders beginning in the mid-2000s. Elsewhere in Oklahoma, for instance, the Modoc Tribe and the Miami Nation partnered with Scott Tucker, a former race car driver and payday lender who later became a subject of the Netflix series “Dirty Money.” Together with his attorney, Timothy Muir, and the Santee Sioux of Nebraska, they created a multibillion-dollar payday operation in which the tribes appeared to be in control. Many tribes created multiple lending websites; the Otoe-Missouria Tribe also established two other lending companies — Great Plains Lending and Clear Creek Lending — that targeted different customer bases than that of American Web Loan.

It wasn’t long before federal and state regulators started looking into tribal lenders. In early 2013, the Justice Department began investigating online payday lenders and the third-party payment processors that handled their bank transactions. In August, the New York State Department of Financial Services sent cease-and-desist letters to 35 online lenders, 11 of which were purportedly tribal-owned or affiliated — including American Web Loan and Great Plains Lending. The department also sent letters to 117 state and nationally chartered banks as well as Nacha, the administrator of the automated clearing house network through which electronic financial transactions are processed, asking for help in “choking off” the online money transfers that the lenders depended on.

It wasn’t long before federal and state regulators started looking into tribal lenders.

The Otoe-Missouria, along with the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians based in Michigan, sued for an injunction against that state department in New York federal court. According to courtroom testimony, the tribes’ legal fees were paid from the membership dues of the Native American Financial Services Association, an industry lobbying group Curry helped create.

The lawsuit became one of the first tests of the legal framework behind “rent-a-tribe” operations. In their complaint, the tribes invoked their sovereign immunity and challenged the department’s authority to impose state laws on tribal businesses.

In response, New York’s attorney general wrote that his state’s usury statutes indeed applied to financial transactions between tribes and New York consumers “when those transactions have significant and injurious off-reservation effects — as is the case here, given the crippling debt that payday loans cause to New Yorkers.”

The Southern District of New York ruled against the tribes. On appeal, the Second Circuit upheld the decision, concluding that the tribes hadn’t provided sufficient evidence to prove that their internet loans should count as on-reservation activity.

The Otoe-Missouria’s troubles only escalated from there. In a one-year period beginning in February 2013, the Federal Trade Commission received 461 complaints against American Web Loan and Great Plains Lending — second only to lenders affiliated with the Miami Tribe.

In early 2015, Connecticut’s Department of Banking fined Shotton $700,000 and Great Plains Lending and Clear Creek Lending a combined $800,000 for making loans to Connecticut residents that violated the state’s interest rate cap. Shotton filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in Oklahoma against Connecticut regulators, but the rulings were upheld in Connecticut two years later.

Up until then, the masterminds behind the tribal lenders had largely avoided legal scrutiny. This changed in 2016, when Tucker and Muir were arrested on federal racketeering charges tied to their $3.5 billion “rent-a-tribe” operation. Prosecutors described their ownership arrangements with the three tribes — the Miami, Modoc, and Santee Sioux — as shams.

Tucker and Muir were convicted and sentenced to nearly 17 years and seven years in prison, respectively, sending shockwaves through the online payday industry. The tribes accepted non-prosecution agreements, admitted in court to overstating their roles to help Tucker and Muir elude state laws, and forfeited their proceeds: $48 million from the Miami and $3 million between the Modoc and Santee Sioux. The tribes’ cuts of the profits were reportedly 1 percent of the revenues — the same as the Otoe-Missouria.

It was around the time of the arrests that Curry began talking to Shotton about selling the tribe the companies behind American Web Loan.

“The Tribe Owns the Business”

Despite the state legal battles and mounting consumer complaints, American Web Loan’s business hadn’t suffered. From 2013 until September 2016, American Web Loan Holdings brought in revenues of almost $670 million, and Curry himself was receiving an average of $18 million a year, according to courtroom testimony. Shotton claimed in his 2019 testimony that the company was valued at $340 million.

Curry’s name never appeared on court documents in the New York case, and Shotton wrote in his sworn declaration that the Otoe-Missouria wholly owned and operated its lending companies. As the walls appeared to be closing in on tribal lenders, Curry and Shotton agreed that the tribe would buy American Web Loan’s infrastructure for $200 million — an amount the tribe did not have.

According to court records, Curry sold MacFarlane Group to the tribe through seller take-back financing: Companies owned by Curry would loan about half the $200 million to the tribe, and the tribe would pay the rest over a five-year consulting deal with Curry’s SOL Partners that it wouldn’t be able to get out of regardless of SOL’s performance. This arrangement allowed Curry to pay less taxes on the sale, he later testified, and the tribe to make fewer interest payments.

The tribe now had to pay about $4 million to Curry every month for the next five years.

On September 8, 2016, the Otoe-Missouria formed a new entity called Red Stone to purchase MacFarlane, American Web Loan Holdings, and Bullet Hole, Curry’s software company. According to court records, Red Stone borrowed about $95 million, plus 10 percent interest, from three of Curry’s new companies, all of which were created a week later. The remaining balance of roughly $100 million would be paid through SOL Partners. The management team continued to operate out of the same corporate offices; the tribe had to pay Curry rent for the MacFarlane Group office he owned in Las Vegas.

The Otoe-Missouria council approved the deal in a special session on September 21, 2016, with five in favor, one abstaining, and one absent. The tribe now had to pay about $4 million to Curry every month for the next five years.

Curry and Shotton denied in court that the acquisition was meant to give the appearance of ownership to the tribe and shield Curry from liability. After six years in business, Shotton claimed that the tribe had been ready to buy MacFarlane Group, to which he said it had “outsourced” certain operations.

Shotton spoke about the unusual financing structure in a 2018 deposition: “The tribe didn’t care. The tribe wants the business in five years. They want to be in control of everything.” Yet in court the following year, he insisted that “the tribe owned and operated the business from day one.”

In an email Curry sent to Shotton in July 2016, he wrote, “It was more clear that the tribe owns the business and not me.” Curry also noted that the tribe still “gets the same as what was originally contemplated. The tribe will have everything they need to run the business.”

American Web Loan 2.0

The “new” American Web Loan chose not to do business in states where regulators had challenged its practices, including Connecticut and New York. According to court documents, the tribe’s cut would come out of a pool of money that also paid for operating expenses and the monthly loan repayments to lenders owned by Curry. The tribe would receive 3.6 percent of the revenues, up from 1 percent. Shotton and the tribal council decided to put half of the profits in the tribe’s general fund and the other half in its economic development authority to help fund its cattle-ranching company and a new propane business. The tribe’s first draw in 2017 was $6 million, an amount that was scheduled to increase by $1 million annually until the loan was paid off.

About a month after the deal was approved, Curry’s chief marketing officer sent him an email, dated November 3, 2016, about how the tribe’s debt posed “challenges” to revenue generation, according to courtroom testimony.

“We’re in a bit of a catch-22,” the email read. “AWL must generate specific EBITDA to support and fund the note” — referring to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or the company’s profitability. “On paper, it seems obvious that we need to push rates higher to drive EBITDA; however, consumer demand for higher rates is uncertain.”

After the merger, American Web Loan raised its interest rates beyond 700 percent. According to the class-action complaint, direct-mail solicitations were made to look like a check payable to the recipient, enticing them to follow up on their “pre-approval” for a loan: “Get $1,500 in as little as 1 day!” Some borrowers claimed that they had not been told the rate or the total payment they would owe, saying they got a copy of their loan agreement only after receiving the money.

Curry denied in court that the company’s skyrocketing interest rates were connected to the Otoe-Missouria’s debt to him. “I believe there was a shifting of the credit bands that we used,” he said. “I don’t believe that it was a wholesale shift up.”

The new Trump administration soon calmed the alarm over Tucker and Muir’s case and began to pave the way for Curry to plot American Web Loan’s comeback. In mid-2017, the Justice Department ended its Obama-era investigation of online payday lenders. The following year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dismissed a lawsuit against a group of tribal-affiliated lenders. “The federal became totally denuded in every single way,” said Martin, the law professor.

Curry set out to double or triple the size of American Web Loan’s loan portfolio in three to four years, according to the complaint. Middlemarch Partners, the firm that had previously helped him find investors, sent out a solicitation in 2017 seeking up to $90 million for Curry’s “top-five fintech company.” There was no mention of the sale to the Otoe-Missouria.

A Sword and a Shield

In 2018, Curry, American Web Loan, Middlemarch Partners, and Brook and Seth Taube of Medley Opportunity II Fund faced a class-action lawsuit for racketeering in Virginia federal court. By the time the preliminary settlement was reached last month, the class included 606,318 people who took out 1,055,376 loans from American Web Loan between January 1, 2012, and June 26, 2020, plus an unspecified number of individuals who borrowed money during the two years before that period when the company did not retain records.

Evidence in the case has shown that Curry did not actually hand over ownership of American Web Loan to the Otoe-Missouria but that he did appear to shift financial and legal risk from himself to the tribe.

Despite Shotton’s testimony that American Web Loan retained Curry as part of a “short-term transition,” Curry remained as CEO of the company four years after the loan deal and maintained control over day-to-day operations.

American Web Loan’s new board of directors — made up of Shotton, Curry, two of Curry’s associates, and two tribal members — met for the first time on November 8, 2016, in Oklahoma City, according to courtroom testimony. The board voted to appoint Curry as the head of the company and to pay each board member $5,000 per monthly meeting. They later raised it to $7,500. Seven months into the lawsuit, the board — which still included Curry — approved Curry’s request to pay his legal fees.

The board’s first meeting also included a request to the Otoe-Missouria council — on which Shotton and American Web Loan board member Ted Grant also served — to pass legislation to give Curry and the other non-Native board members tribal immunity, which was granted the following month.

In its loan agreements with Curry, the tribe had already waived its own sovereign immunity, and any change in tribal law or tribal government action against American Web Loan would lead to default. Curry claimed in court that he had no idea who wrote these provisions into the contracts.

In 2019, Morgan, the judge in the case, seized on the immunity request as evidence of Curry’s motive to retain control of the company and protect himself from liability — even if it came at the tribe’s expense. “He wants to use sovereign immunity as a sword and a shield,” Morgan said from the bench.

Curry did not actually hand over ownership of American Web Loan, but he did appear to shift financial and legal risk to the tribe.

Based upon well-established legal tests, Morgan ruled that American Web Loan was not a tribal business because Curry controlled virtually every part of its operation and that his and American Web Loan’s claims to immunity were invalid. As a result, the judge said the case could head to trial to take up the legality of the lending operation. The defendants claimed that tribal immunity applies to American Web Loan, Curry, and SOL Partners and that their lending activity was not subject to any state laws or regulations.

As for the Otoe-Missouria’s role, Morgan said, “The tribe benefits, up until now, in a very small way, but a very steep price is paid by the victims.”

Shotton and the other two board members from the tribe, all of whom were indemnified from the lawsuit, earned far more from the monthly board meetings than the Native company employees. Around the time the council granted Curry immunity, Shotton had asked him for a $25,000 bonus for himself and the other board members, according to courtroom testimony.

The parties in the lawsuit initially reached a settlement agreement more than a year ago, but after a handful of American Web Loan consumers objected in part to the inadequacy of its debt relief, Morgan rejected it in November. Per the terms of that original preliminary settlement, Curry resigned from the board and as CEO last June. In October, he signed an affidavit stating that the tribe’s loan payments to him would be suspended until the settlement went into effect, at which time the loan would end.

Morgan, who had ordered the parties back to mediation, gave temporary approval to a modified agreement last month. A final settlement hearing is scheduled for July 9.

The borrowers’ cash award will be $86 million, minus $18.5 million in attorneys’ fees — about a quarter of which will come from Curry and the rest from what American Web Loan would have given Curry as debt payments and consulting fees. Any outstanding debt the consumers owe to American Web Loan will be canceled, as well as close to $218 million worth of loans held by a trio of third-party debt buyers. Curry agreed to leave American Web Loan in all managerial and operational capacities on or before December 28, 2020.

American Web Loan is still in business, though it has agreed to change some of its practices. The company will modify its loan agreements to state that it will comply with applicable federal laws and to include the full cost of a loan. The company will also stop requiring borrowers to accept automatic bank withdrawals.

Without federal intervention, American Web Loan and other tribal payday lenders can continue exploiting borrowers’ financial needs to turn a profit. Right before last November’s election, the Treasury Department issued a rule change that would pave the way for the return of “rent-a-bank” operations that Curry made his name from.

“He went from doing the same thing with banks to applying the same theory to the Indian tribe,” Morgan said during a hearing. “He’s just in it to make the money.”

The post How a Payday Lender Partnered With a Native Tribe to Bypass Lending Laws and Get Rich Quick appeared first on The Intercept.

Upon his arrival, police immediately took Ahmed to another station nearby; his cellphone was confiscated at the gate. He was brought to a holding room where he noticed four other young people. After exchanging a few nervous glances and hushed whispers, the five youths realized they knew each other — not in person, but through social media.

They were meeting for the first time at Cargo, a counterinsurgency police complex known for its history as a torture site. Since August, the facility in Srinagar, the capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, has allegedly been used to interrogate and torture young Kashmiri social media users who have been critical of the Indian government’s repressive policies implemented in the region since last year.

Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, a group of human rights organizations, reported in August that police had made complaints against more than 200 users of social media platforms and virtual private networks, deploying surveillance technology to trace and summon them to police stations under anti-terror and detention laws.

Ahmed and the young people he met at Cargo are among the more than two-dozen men and women, mostly students, who spoke to The Intercept about their experiences in police custody for their social media posts. Some of them had been contacted by the cyber unit and asked to sign a nonbinding agreement at a local police station to refrain from criticizing civil authorities or the armed forces on social media. Others recounted that they were sent to Cargo, where they were thrashed, verbally abused, and threatened with imprisonment or death.

The recent police crackdown on social media is part of a sharp escalation of censorship efforts under India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi since August 2019, when the government unilaterally decided to revoke Jammu and Kashmir’s semiautonomous status previously guaranteed under the Indian Constitution and divide the state into union territories under its direct control.

The posts under police scrutiny, mostly shared on Twitter and Facebook, were explicitly political: They questioned India’s actions against Kashmiris leading up to and following the dissolution of the region’s special status, as well as human rights violations perpetrated by Indian security forces and the media’s silence on such abuses. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

The victims said that police confiscated their phones and returned them days later, after officers had used login information extracted during interrogations to access their social media accounts. Since being released from custody, many of the victims said they no longer post political content online or they have deactivated their accounts to avoid being summoned again.

There have been few reports outside Kashmiri and Indian media about the recent crackdown. After publishing a story on the issue for Indian news site Article 14, Kashmiri journalist Auqib Javeed was summoned in late September to the cyber police headquarters. He later claimed that he had been assaulted and detained at Cargo for five hours — a treatment similar to what the social media users described.

The intimidation of social media users and journalists is meant to silence criticism, said Gowhar Geelani, a journalist and author who himself has been booked by the cyber police under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, a controversial Indian anti-terror law. “It is part of a larger crackdown and criminalizing of opinions.”

Inside the Interrogation Room

Considered the world’s most heavily militarized zone, Kashmir was put under an unprecedented military lockdown by the Indian government last August. Cellular services and digital communication lines were blocked without any prior notice — resulting in the longest internet shutdown ever recorded in a democracy. The Indian government restored internet access, including to social media sites that were previously banned, in March, but only at slow 2G speed.

The restrictions on internet access have come in tandem with increased surveillance in the region, said Devdutta Mukhopadhyay, associate counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation, an internet advocacy group based in India. “Some examples we have seen in the past year are WhatsApp group administrators being made to register with district authorities, ban on VPN services, and additional verification requirements for prepaid mobile internet users,” she said.

Some Kashmiris, in the spirit of the decadeslong rebellion against Indian rule, have taken to social media to air their frustrations with the government — but not without consequences.

“They yelled and shouted, ‘Who is giving you money to post all this?’ One officer slapped and kicked me.”

After spending more than three hours in the holding room, getting fingerprinted and photographed, and handing over his banking information and other personal details, Ahmed was taken to an interrogation room where several officers were waiting for him. “They yelled and shouted, ‘Who is giving you money to post all this?’” he said. “One officer slapped and kicked me.” One of the officers pushed a file toward him containing screenshots of his posts from Twitter.

“I was asked to unlock my phone and one officer started scanning it,” Ahmed said. “Another officer asked for the passwords of my email and social media accounts.” The officers pulled up Ahmed’s Twitter account on a desktop computer and started questioning him about his more recent tweets. Some of the posts sought accountability from the police and the Indian army for human rights violations, such as extrajudicial killings of civilians in staged gunfights, while others seemed more benign.

“One officer asked me why I had congratulated Kashmiri photographers who won the Pulitzer Prize this year,” said Ahmed. “They asked me why I quote selective poets and poetry in my tweets.”

Another college student who spoke to The Intercept also said that a police officer confiscated his phone while he was detained at Cargo and looked through photos of his mother and siblings.

“He abused them and threatened that they will also be treated like me,” said Bilal, whose name has also been changed for fear of retaliation.

Bilal and two other victims told The Intercept that officers had proposed they become informants and snitch on other social media users police were monitoring, in exchange for their release. They were told that they would otherwise be jailed or killed in a staged gunfight.

Bilal was baffled by the offer to become an informant, saying that he never thought his tweets would land him in a situation in which the police would ask him to become a spy.

“They would leave me alone for hours to decide,” he said. However, he was eventually let go with a warning that next time he would be booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Track and Trace

Kashmir’s cyber police force was expanded shortly after the August lockdown last year, with the intention of curbing cybercrimes. Since then, the unit has grown into a sophisticated surveillance operation, equipped with advanced technology for tracking down Kashmiris, including more recent monitoring of those who contracted Covid-19 during the pandemic. Tahir Ashraf Bhatti, the head of Cargo who is also in charge of the cyber force, was awarded a medal from the Indian government on Independence Day for his department’s work.

Bhatti told The Intercept that the cyber unit opens cases mostly for complaints regarding financial fraud and “cyberbullying” — the latter of which has been used as justification to summon social media users for anti-government posts. He denied that people were being summoned or tortured for expressing their political views online.

The cyber unit has grown into a sophisticated surveillance operation, equipped with advanced technology for tracking down Kashmiris.

Bhatti himself has been accused of assaulting at least one social media user in custody. The victim told The Intercept that he was summoned to the cyber police station in August after he had mocked Bhatti on Twitter. He was taken to Cargo where Bhatti used a leather belt to beat him repeatedly for three days on the same part of his body. “If I tell you the spot they hit, they would get to know my identity,” he said. Bhatti denied this incident took place.

Bhatti declined to go into detail about what kind of surveillance technology the cyber force uses to collect information on Kashmiris who live both in the region and abroad. Multiple people told The Intercept that despite using VPNs to stay anonymous on social media, the police were still able to find out who they were.

“It takes us half an hour to pinpoint location and details of a user,” Bhatti said. He showed The Intercept a WhatsApp conversation, in which a senior officer had asked him about an individual’s location and address, and if they had a past record. “My team did it in minutes,” he said.

That team is composed of 40 tech-savvy cops, Bhatti said, while the more challenging cases are outsourced to private companies, which he did not specify.

Gone Quiet

While much of the cyber unit’s internal operations remain shrouded in secrecy, its actions have had a noticeable chilling effect on social media activity in Kashmir. Many accounts have vanished, while others have gone silent or no longer post political content.

Shefali Rafiq, a 22-year-old journalism student who is active on social media, said she has become more cautious about what she posts. “There were some profiles I would eagerly follow,” she said, “but they have either deactivated their accounts or they no longer write critical posts.”

Three social media users said they have noticed suspicious activity on their accounts since being released from police custody, such as likes or retweets they did not make, or following and unfollowing other accounts.

Those who had been summoned said they have lived in fear since their encounters with the cyber police. After being called in for interrogation four days in a row, Ahmed said he was finally let go on the condition that he would stop criticizing the Indian government and security forces online, and report to the station whenever he was called in. Since his release, Ahmed said he has experienced panic attacks and a lack of appetite. He has not been able to bring himself to post on social media like he used to.

“At times I write a long post and at the end, I delete it and cry,” he said. “My phone haunts me.”

The post “My Phone Haunts Me”: Kashmiris Interrogated and Tortured by Cyber Police for Tweeting appeared first on The Intercept.

But for some Asian American voters, the decision has become more complicated. Though Kulkarni went to great lengths to court the quickly growing voting bloc in the Houston suburbs during his 2018 run against Republican Rep. Pete Olson, his efforts to cultivate a diverse coalition of supporters have gone awry among Indian Americans in the district. Kulkarni’s attendance last year at a rally headlined by India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Trump, in addition to allegations that his political career was launched with the aid of individuals ideologically connected to Hindu extremist groups in India, have cracked open deep-seated political divisions among Muslim and Hindu communities that were largely unified around his 2018 campaign.

“Our board is very mixed about how they feel about Sri,” said Munira Bangee, president of Houston Muslim Democrats.

A recent survey showed that U.S.-India relations ranks among the least important issues for the Indian American electorate, but Kulkarni’s ties to members of U.S. Hindu nationalist groups that are connected to violent, anti-Muslim activity in India have caused him to lose some of his 2018 supporters. A few have gone as far as backing Kulkarni’s Republican opponent — although Nehls himself has also been courted by pro-Modi groups and individuals during the race.

The seat in Texas’s 22nd District opened up after Olson, having defeated Kulkarni by 5 percentage points in 2018, announced his retirement last year. Kulkarni’s field operation in the diverse district — the majority of residents in Fort Bend County are people of color, and 17 percent are voting-eligible Asian Americans — includes contacting voters in 27 languages, up from 13 last cycle. Kulkarni’s domestic political positions hew mainly to the center. While he advocated for Medicare for All in 2018, his current platform favors a public option and states that he opposes efforts to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare. He has said that he is against defunding police departments and does not mention signature progressive Democratic issues, such as a Green New Deal, in his platform. His 2020 campaign has a host of endorsements from moderate Democrats, including the Blue Dog PAC, the political arm of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, as well as from a couple progressive groups like Indivisible and environmentalist organization the Sierra Club.

Though District 22 was once a Republican stronghold, the race for the open congressional seat is neck and neck, with the latest internal Democratic poll showing Kulkarni with a slight lead. In part because of the DCCC’s significant investment in flipping the district, Kulkarni’s fundraising has far surpassed Nehls: $4.5 million to $1 million.

Kulkarni did not directly answer questions from The Intercept about his connections to members of Hindu nationalist groups operating in the United States. In a statement, he said, “Unfortunately, our opponent’s campaign has attempted to sow division in our district, by inflaming tension in our faith communities, including the Hindu and Muslim communities. We absolutely reject such divisive tactics. In a district as diverse as TX-22, the only way to achieve true representation is through strong coalitions which include every community.” Nehls did not respond to a request for comment.

“Like a Father to Me”

The past two years in India have been marked by an alarming escalation of political and sectarian conflict instigated by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Under the BJP’s rule, India’s religious minorities, particularly Muslims, and Dalits and Indigenous groups, have faced violence and disenfranchisement.

Modi enjoys support in the U.S. from a like-minded segment of the Indian American public, including a Houston-based nonprofit connected to people affiliated with Hindu nationalist organizations across the U.S. that planned last year’s “Howdy, Modi” rally. He also has vehement opponents, however, including some who were appalled by Kulkarni’s appearance at the rally and the candidate’s acceptance of at least $60,000 in campaign contributions from members of U.S.-based Hindu nationalist groups and their family members.

At the center of the controversy over Kulkarni’s donors is Ramesh Bhutada, the national vice president of the U.S. wing of the Indian Hindu nationalist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS. In the 1970s, Bhutada helped establish Houston’s first chapter of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization under the RSS umbrella that is set up in the U.S. as a nonprofit with a stated aim of doing service work and fostering community among Hindus living in America. Bhutada has also been active in political organizing for Modi’s election campaigns, as well as organizing and fundraising for the campaigns of several U.S. politicians, notably Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, who has drawn her own criticism for ties to Hindu nationalist groups and been a vocal supporter of the Modi government. Both Bhutada and his son Rishi were involved in organizing “Howdy, Modi.”

Bhutada and his relatives were reportedly involved in an effort that raised a total of $45,000 to jump-start Kulkarni’s 2018 campaign. Kulkarni himself has indicated that Bhutada was instrumental in getting his political career off the ground: After winning the Democratic nomination in the 2018 primary runoff, he said in a victory speech that Bhutada “has been like a father to me on this campaign.” Bhutada and his wife Kiran have donated a total of $29,000 to Kulkarni’s 2018 and 2020 campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

Speaking to The Intercept, Rishi Bhutada said that he and his father first met Kulkarni in 2018 after he happened upon an Indian name while researching District 22’s Democratic primary candidates. The younger Bhutada is on the boards of Hindu American Foundation, a controversial D.C.-based advocacy organization that invited Kulkarni to its 2018 gala, and Hindu American PAC, a political action committee that donates to politicians it deems represent Hindu American interests, including $22,500 to Kulkarni since 2018.

Rishi Bhutada said he and his father were impressed by Kulkarni’s commitment to building diverse coalitions in the district, as well as his positions on domestic policy issues like climate change and gun violence.

“Sri was really pioneering something different, where he was strongly pushing outreach to every immigrant community in the district: Indian American, Pakistani American, Chinese American, Nigerian Americans, everybody,” said Rishi Bhutada, who has donated $20,200 to Kulkarni along with his wife Shradha. “So we really thought, OK this guy is trying something new and is possibly the best candidate that the Democrats have had in this district since Nick Lampson. He’s got a shot and we really believed it.”

The Bhutadas began activating the Hindu American community to support Kulkarni, asking them to donate and volunteer for his campaign. Among them were several individuals who helped organize “Howdy, Modi” and who are leaders in U.S. affiliates of the Hindu right. Their connections and contributions to Kulkarni were first reported in August by independent journalist and activist Pieter Friedrich, who has been at the helm of an online campaign against Kulkarni and these donors.

These ties, not much noticed in 2018, have become highly contentious in Kulkarni’s current campaign, in large part due to his attendance at the Modi rally. “The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event caused a lot of tension between communities,” said Shakeib, a voter in District 22 who asked to be identified only by his first name, citing fear of online harassment. “On the one hand, we had 50,000 people that came to the event, and on the other side, we had a huge protest happening. I haven’t seen that kind of mass protest before in 25 years living in Houston.” Shakeib has not yet decided who he will vote for, telling The Intercept that he hopes Kulkarni will condemn the RSS and consider returning the controversial donations in order to rebuild trust with the Muslim community before Election Day.

People were tipped off to Kulkarni’s attendance at the event after Harris County District Clerk Marilyn Burgess, a Democrat, posted a photo on Facebook posing with Kulkarni inside NRG Stadium in front of American and Indian flags. The photo set off a heated conversation within the Houston Muslim Democrats’ private Facebook group, Bangee said, over why he attended an event celebrating the right-wing Indian prime minister.

Kulkarni addressed the group later that week, saying that he went “not as an endorsement of any specific figure or policy, but as a show of respect for the Indian-American community and especially the volunteers who worked hard to organize the largest collection of Indian-Americans in America’s history, many of whom were also volunteers on our campaign last year, and who worked alongside people in this forum to register and get out voters last year.” He said this was his same rationale for attending Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s speech during the Islamic Society of North America convention in Houston the month prior.

Kulkarni went on to say that he had spent more than 60 hours last September in private discussions with various stakeholders on the Indian government’s unilateral decision to revoke Kashmir’s partial autonomy and lock down the Muslim-majority region last August, an action that caused international alarm amid reports of an internet shutdown, extrajudicial detentions, and human rights abuses.

In the weeks leading up to the November election, the online campaign against Kulkarni has painted him as effectively a stooge for Hindu nationalists in the U.S. — criticizing his close ties with individuals like Ramesh Bhutada and his apparent hesitance to disassociate himself from right-wing Hindu groups in the U.S. Late last month, Kulkarni lost the endorsement of Emgage, an American Muslim political action committee that had supported his 2018 run but decided to refrain from endorsing any candidate in the District 22 race this year after facing pressure to distance itself from him.

“The unfortunate thing is that when these attacks against Sri started, his response didn’t go far enough to give people comfort that he was disassociated from the views being attributed to him online,” said Wa’el Alzayat, CEO of Emgage Foundation. “He also didn’t clearly disassociate himself from potential supporters who held those views, or were tied to organizations accused of extremism abroad.”

Crisis Control

Kulkarni has tried to manage the controversy over his candidacy that has been raging for the past several months. In response to criticism, he has given a handful of interviews in which he professed that he and his campaign have no connections to foreign organizations or ideologies, including the RSS. His campaign added to its website that “it does not accept support from any foreign entities, nor is it connected to or influenced by any foreign organizations, such as RSS, [the Chinese Communist Party], or their affiliates.” At a private meeting of board members of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston earlier this month, Kulkarni, a former U.S. Foreign Service official, was captured on video telling assembled guests that as little as two years prior, he had been unaware of the existence of the RSS and would have thought it was an acronym for Real Simple Syndication, a popular web feed.

After Emgage’s decision not to back his campaign this September, Kulkarni posted a “letter to the Muslim community” on his website, lamenting that the group had been pressured by “nefarious actors” to renege on its support for him and vowing that if elected to Congress, he would oppose measures by the Modi government to strip the citizenship of Indian Muslims — an issue of serious concern to Indian Americans whose friends and families in India would be gravely endangered by such a move.

“I want to make it clear that I am, and always have been, an ally to the Muslim community,” Kulkarni wrote. “My goal throughout all of this is to serve as an intermediary between our many different communities to spark dialogue and understanding in the hopes of creating real change that can help people.”

Kulkarni has made a final push with the Muslim community, including visiting several mosques during the early-voting period that began on October 13. He also made one last appeal on Facebook to the Houston Muslim Democrats: “For all those who want true representation in TX-22, please don’t listen to the conspiracy theories and propaganda. Look at our record and the choice is clear. We need all of your support and we need it now.”

Though some skeptical voters were appeased by Kulkarni’s letter, for some Indian Muslims in the Houston area, his response was too little, too late, after months of apparent equivocating about the Modi government’s discriminatory policies. Those who spoke to The Intercept said that in the worst case, Kulkarni’s remarks appeared to be merely an attempt to salvage his dwindling base of Muslim supporters while also retaining his funding streams from individuals connected with the U.S. Hindu right.

“People are still not happy, his base is still falling,” Shakeib said. “What people are now asking him is that he should condemn what’s going on in India, he should condemn the RSS, and he should return funding he’s gotten from these executives.”

Hindutva Money in Politics

Over the last few years, the potential influence of Hindutva money in U.S. politics has become a wider concern within the South Asian American diaspora. Members of the U.S. Hindu right could leverage their funding and leadership in their communities to influence how elected officials respond to the deteriorating political situation in India, including by obstructing congressional censure of the Modi government, said Raju Rajagopal, co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights, a progressive Hindu American advocacy group. Rajagopal, who co-moderated a virtual town hall with Nehls last month, said that as a lifelong Democrat, he would never ask voters to back a Republican and that he has heard from some Democrats in the district that they may abstain from voting in the race.

As a hub of Hindu nationalist activity and the second-largest Indian American population in the country, Texas has also become one of the main states where voters are paying more attention to Hindutva money in politics. Even as Kulkarni’s conflict is largely intra-Democratic, Texas Republicans have sought to capitalize on the dynamic. In a series of since-deleted tweets on September 25, Olson referred to contributions to Kulkarni from his major Hindu donors as “big time money from Nazi sympathizers,” despite the fact that Olson himself received $4,000 from Ramesh Bhutada in 2009 and 2011. During the 2018 race, Olson was caught on video referring to Kulkarni as a “liberal, liberal, liberal Indo-American who is a carpetbagger.” While Kulkarni was in the crowd at “Howdy, Modi,” Olson was part of the event’s congressional delegation and shook hands with the Indian prime minister on stage. Olson did not respond to a request for comment.

On a national level, Republican Hindus last December launched Americans4Hindus, a Super PAC created in response to what its founders perceive as leftist, anti-India sentiment within the Democratic Party, particularly from Indian American politicians like Reps. Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal, who have sharply criticized Modi over his government’s human rights abuses. Several members of the group have been involved in pro-Modi and pro-BJP organizing, including its co-chairs, Romesh Japra and Raj Bhayani.

The group has endorsed Trump, as well as a number of congressional candidates, including Nehls, who attended an A4H Zoom call during the week of the Republican National Convention. In September, Nehls and his brother, who is running to succeed him as sheriff, participated in an in-person event co-hosted by A4H and Hindu Congress of America, another right-wing group.

Switching Sides

Among Nehls’s Hindu American supporters in the district is Bangar Reddy, a Fort Bend County resident for 25 years. He previously donated $1,000 to Kulkarni in June 2019 after he said he attended a meet-and-greet with the candidate at the home of Jugal Malani. Malani is the chair of the nonprofit that organized “Howdy, Modi,” and, with his wife and son, has donated $18,300 to Kulkarni’s campaigns. But Reddy, who was a transportation coordinator for the event, thought that Kulkarni should have been a more active participant.

Reddy ran in the district’s Republican primary and, after losing, joined Nehls’s campaign as outreach director. Referring to Kulkarni as a leftist and a socialist, Reddy told The Intercept that he disagreed with the candidate making statements on Indian politics that Reddy perceived to be critical of the Indian government.

“Over a period of time, things have changed. Sri has become more far left, pandering to every community and promising everything,” Reddy said. “The ‘Howdy, Modi’ event was a litmus test that proved he’s neither for Indian Americans and doesn’t have a solid agenda.”

In addition to Nehls’s military and police service, Reddy told The Intercept that the sheriff has established himself as a familiar face in the district and built rapport with different communities. “Everybody knows him, and over a period of time he’s grown a good relationship with the Indian American community,” he said.

Last August, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh visited the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office for the Hindu holiday Raksha Bandhan; HSS chapters across the U.S. are known to visit police and fire departments, as well as local elected officials, during this holiday.

Nehls has shown himself to be uninitiated on many issues that are driving divisions in District 22. During the September virtual town hall co-hosted by Hindu and Muslim progressive groups, Nehls repeatedly expressed that he did not know enough about the Muslim ban or India’s Citizenship Amendment Act, which excludes Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority countries from receiving expedited citizenship.

As Election Day nears, Indian Muslims, and others who have become invested in the issue, are torn over who to vote for. Following the Islamic Society of Greater Houston meeting with Kulkarni, an ISGH board member came out in support of Nehls, setting off further discord in the community as the board president tried to quell rumors about the organization endorsing any candidates, which it cannot do as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

But others say they will bite the bullet and vote for Kulkarni. “Everybody’s a staunch Democrat and some are willing to look beyond his funding and support him,” said Bangee of Houston Muslim Democrats, who lives in the neighboring 7th District. “They’ve held fundraisers and phone banked and donated … because a Democrat is better than a Republican.”

Update: Oct. 30, 2020
This article has been updated to clarify Ramesh Bhutada’s history of political organizing and fundraising. 

The post How Sri Preston Kulkarni’s Run for Congress Got Tangled Up in Indian Politics appeared first on The Intercept.

The internal tension came to a head earlier this month, when a bipartisan resolution, introduced by Progressive Caucus co-chair Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., with 65 co-sponsors, failed to be scheduled for a markup in the House Foreign Affairs Committee as planned. Committee Chair Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., originally promised to bring the resolution up for debate, but after he met with Indian government officials, the resolution never made the schedule.

To mitigate a groundswell of scrutiny emanating from Congress, the Indian Embassy has launched a full-court press of lobbying initiatives.

“I am very disappointed that the resolution was not put on the markup calendar,” Jayapal said in a statement to The Intercept on March 3. “I worked with Rep. Steve Watkins to make our resolution bipartisan, and we worked with the Committee to make changes so that the resolution could move forward quickly at this critical time in India, where violence against religious minorities and journalists has claimed more than 40 lives in the last week.”

The Indian government has deployed an arsenal of lobbying tactics to hinder the House resolution’s momentum since its introduction in early December — expending a disproportionate amount of resources and manpower to prevent the House from taking an official stance on Kashmir. The resolution’s passage would be a symbolic blow to India’s international reputation, which has suffered under the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s rapid-fire implementation of controversial policies widely seen as stepping stones to transforming the country from a secular democracy into a Hindu supremacist state.

After hearing concerns about the resolution from the Indian Embassy and other Foreign Affairs Committee members, Engel proposed edits to the language with the intention of “advancing a measure through the committee with a clear path to passage on the House floor,” his office said. But Kashmiri American advocates told The Intercept that the latest changes uncritically accept talking points from the Indian government and its supporters about Kashmir’s history and the current situation. Despite Jayapal agreeing to those edits, Engel did not include the resolution in the first markup of the year, as promised. Hindu American Foundation, a pro-India advocacy group, took credit in a newsletter for stalling deliberations after putting out a call to action to pressure members of Congress against supporting the resolution.

The postponement of the resolution is the latest wrench the Indian government and its supporters have thrown to quell the political backlash in the U.S. against India — likely out of fear that the country’s hard-fought bipartisan relationship could become compromised. To mitigate a groundswell of scrutiny emanating from Congress, the Indian Embassy has launched a full-court press of lobbying initiatives in Washington.

That lobbying campaign has included scores of meetings between embassy officials and U.S. lawmakers, the hiring of a Washington-based lobbying firm, and previously unreported emails to congressional offices that contain misleading information about the latest developments in Kashmir and the intentions behind the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA. The Indian Embassy did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

Hindu American Foundation, known among progressive and minority South Asian American groups for using intimidation and the spread of misinformation to counter their advocacy work, has been at the forefront of reinforcing the embassy’s efforts — deterring members of Congress from taking critical positions on India and masquerading as a liberal representative of the Indian American community.

“If I could describe the Indian lobby, it’s very aggressive but not super sophisticated,” said a co-founder of Americans for Kashmir, a Kashmiri American-led policy organization based in Washington, who asked to not be named for fear of reprisal. “They seem to act with the intention to inflict blunt force trauma versus to have more nuanced conversations.”

Seizing the Narrative

Since Modi’s landslide reelection in May, the Indian government has instigated an alarming escalation of political and sectarian conflict. The government has insisted that scrapping Kashmir’s special status, and incorporating its part of the region into India as union territories, was necessary for Kashmir’s security and for Kashmiris to gain equal rights and economic opportunities. Since August, Kashmir has suffered more than $2.4 billion in losses, and thousands of people have been detained, some under the Public Safety Act, which permits detention for up to two years without charge.

Daily protests and communal and police violence erupted across the country following the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act on December 11, which excludes Muslim migrants from Muslim-majority countries from receiving expedited citizenship. Last month, the protests morphed into an anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi that coincided with Donald Trump’s first presidential visit to India.

“All of a sudden, the BJP government after winning reelection moved with a real urgency and clarity of purpose in enacting some very controversial, pro-Hindu majoritarian policies,” said Milan Vaishnav, director and senior fellow of Carnegie Endowment for Peace’s South Asia Program. “I think that took a lot of people in the United States, and in Washington in particular, by surprise.”

“All of a sudden, the BJP government after winning reelection moved with a real urgency and clarity of purpose in enacting some very controversial, pro-Hindu majoritarian policies.”

The abrogation of India’s constitutional Articles 370 and 35A, which conferred Kashmir its semiautonomous status and decision-making powers, sparked concern from dozens of Republican and Democratic lawmakers in August; Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a strong rebuke, calling India’s actions “unacceptable” when he spoke at the Islamic Society of North America convention, and for the U.S. government to support “a U.N.-backed peaceful resolution that respects the will of the Kashmiri people.” India and Pakistan have fought over the region since 1947, when both countries gained independence from British rule.

The House Subcommittee on Asia’s October hearing on human rights in South Asia became a flashpoint for rising tensions between India and the U.S. Congress, as Democrats questioned why India would impose a blockade on internet access and prevent foreign journalists and government officials from visiting Kashmir if the situation on the ground was returning to normal. Panelist Aarti Tikoo Singh, a former Times of India journalist who justified the abrogation as a means of defending Kashmir against the “Pakistani terror state,” clashed with Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who earlier in the hearing said that “the situation in Kashmir is part of an overall Hindu nationalism project” and told Tikoo Singh that “the press is at its worst when it is a mouthpiece for the government.”

In the wake of the torrent of criticism at the hearing, the Indian Embassy hired Cornerstone Government Affairs to lobby House Democrats in particular, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, who was the Indian ambassador to the U.S. until the end of January, told India Abroad, a news outlet that caters to Indian American communities. According to filings made under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the Indian government has paid the firm $120,000 for its services in the past three months. (Cornerstone’s contract with India lasted through the end of February; it is not yet public whether it has been renewed.)

A Cornerstone senior consultant, Democratic political operative Paul DiNino, is helping the group carry out its work for India. DiNino is deeply embedded with the Democratic Party; he has been a political fundraiser for several Democratic senators and worked as the national finance director for the Democratic National Committee during the Clinton administration, as well as a deputy chief of staff for former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

According to FARA filings last month, on behalf of the embassy, Cornerstone lobbyists have contacted members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — which also held a hearing focused on Kashmir in November.

Shringla explained the Indian government’s hiring of Cornerstone, saying that direct engagement with members of Congress is the embassy’s “highest priority.”

As ambassador, Shringla held a marathon of face-to-face meetings with dozens of lawmakers after August 5, meeting some — like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — more than once. Prior to the October subcommittee hearing, he and other Indian diplomats briefed several Foreign Affairs Committee members and other congresspeople on Kashmir in a closed-door meeting.

Shringla held a marathon of face-to-face meetings with dozens of lawmakers after August 5, meeting some — like Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — more than once.

Shringla also met with Republican lawmakers Reps. Francis Rooney, R-Fla., Pete Olson, R-Texas, and House India Caucus co-chair George Holding, R-N.C., who subsequently defended India on the House floor. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., hosted a farewell breakfast for Shringla before he left his position. In his new role as India’s foreign secretary, Shringla recently met with a congressional delegation in New Delhi that included Holding and Rep. Ami Bera, D-Calif., chair of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific.

Indian American Muslim Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, has led the campaign on Capitol Hill to inform members of Congress on the fallout of the CAA in India and appeal to them to publicly address it. The Indian Embassy caught wind of the group’s activities and tried to intervene by asking members of Congress to meet with them or showing up at their offices, said Sana Qutubuddin, national advocacy coordinator for the council.

“The Indian Embassy has been trying to meet with everybody we’re meeting with, people who they think their understanding of India has been compromised,” Qutubuddin told The Intercept. “They’re trying to maneuver around us and suffocate our ability to effectively advocate for these issues.”

The embassy had scheduled a meeting with Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin’s human rights and foreign affairs staffer in late February, Raskin’s spokesperson Samantha Brown told The Intercept, but canceled the day of due to a scheduling conflict with the Justice Department.

Prior to hiring Cornerstone, India contracted the Podesta Group from 2010 to 2017 for a total of $4.7 million, according to FARA filings. The Podesta Group shuttered at the end of 2017 after its work with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort came to light during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

The Indian government also has a longstanding relationship with BGR Group, a lobbying firm known for its Republican connections; that contract, which has been active since 2005, was renewed on January 1 for $175,000 through the end of March. BGR’s disclosures show that the firm works on “U.S.-India relations,” but does not detail specific issues.

The Indian Embassy has also circulated several emails, obtained by The Intercept, to congressional staffers to share heavily biased updates on Kashmir, as well as to explain the scope of the Citizenship Amendment Act — including information that has been challenged by news reports and human rights groups.

On January 10, the Indian Supreme Court ruled the indefinite internet restrictions in Kashmir — which had been in effect for almost six months — an “arbitrary exercise of power” against Kashmiris’ freedom of speech and expression, and ordered the government to review them. On January 27, Vasudev Ravi, a second secretary for the embassy, sent an email to congressional offices that read, “Internet services have resumed in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir on mobile devices (date) and on fixed line broadband connections” as of two days prior.

This wasn’t true; several news outlets reported at the time that significant restrictions on internet access were still in place. Kashmiris were only able to visit about 300 government-approved websites, among them sites for news, entertainment, and search, but excluding social media, on a low-speed 2G connection — in effect making it difficult for people to even get online. On March 4, Indian authorities issued an order to temporarily restore full internet access — for about two weeks, and still at slow speeds.

A second secretary for the embassy wrote that “there has been no incident of major violence. Not even a single live bullet has been fired. There has been no loss of life in police action” in Kashmir. This wasn’t true.

In a January 2 email, Ravi wrote that “there has been no incident of major violence. Not even a single live bullet has been fired. There has been no loss of life in police action” in Kashmir. Violent standoffs between police and protesters, torture, and civilian deaths, have been well documented by multiple news outlets and human rights groups. Jammu Kashmir Coalition Civil Society and Associated of Parents of Disappeared Persons have documented at least six killings by Indian security forces between August 5 and December 31. The email also stated that there was “no restriction on media/journalists” in the region and “all mainstream newspapers are being printed,” but local reporters have been struggling under the lockdown: forced to work at a crowded media center with unreliable internet connection while facing intimidation and threats from security forces.

In another email sent as the Citizenship Amendment Act moved through parliament, Ravi dissected a New York Times article from December 9 that addressed the potential negative impact the bill would have on Muslim migrants — that it would deprive them a pathway to naturalization — and 200 million Indian Muslims who risked detention or deportation if they were not able to prove their citizenship under a proposed nationwide registry. Ravi pulled out several lines from the article, referring to its claims at times as “hyperbolic,” “polarizing,” and “completely false and without any basis.” The assertions in the Times article, he wrote, “stoke fears among Muslims and reinforce the myth that the legislation is anti-Muslim.” As The Intercept has reported, the CAA and an India-wide register of citizens, which has already been instituted in the state of Assam, could actually work together to explicitly target Muslims.

Ravi wrote in another email about the CAA that the law is “non-discriminatory; does not alter the secular nature of the country” — even though it omits Muslims, among other religious groups, and does not cover migrants seeking refuge from neighboring regions that do not have a Muslim majority, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Tibet.

Obstacle Course

Shringla told India Abroad in January that while most members of Congress have been receptive to the embassy’s persistent outreach strategies, there remained some who “don’t have a full understanding of the situation or they don’t want to have that.” He named Omar, Jayapal, and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., as members of Congress who have been particularly resistant; the latter two have introduced separate resolutions denouncing India’s actions in Kashmir.

Americans for Kashmir first worked with Tlaib to put out a resolution in November that sought support for Kashmiri self-determination, a key demand for many Kashmiris since a U.N.-mandated plebiscite in 1948 never came to fruition. A spokesperson from Tlaib’s office said her resolution, which has no co-sponsors, sought “to help highlight and end the human rights abuses in Jammu and Kashmir and recognizes that Kashmiris have a right to self-determination. She remains deeply concerned about the dangers they are facing. Her goal is to get legislation moving in the House to address these issues.” They said Tlaib would “continue to work to bring this issue to the House floor.”

The Kashmiri American advocates then pivoted to work with Jayapal on a separate resolution, which has faced several roadblocks from the Indian government, Engel’s office, and parts of the Indian American diaspora.

Jayapal scheduled two meetings with Shringla prior to introducing the resolution, both of which the Indian Embassy canceled. Two sources who worked on the resolution said that before Engel agreed to sign off on it, he required a Republican co-sponsor and watered down the original language — a characterization Engel’s office disagreed with. Jayapal introduced the resolution with Watkins, a Republican representative from Kansas, as a co-sponsor on December 6.

Jayapal scheduled two meetings with Shringla prior to introducing the resolution, both of which the Indian Embassy canceled.

The resolution was originally anticipated to be included in the Foreign Affairs Committee’s December 18 markup, but was postponed after Cornerstone sent a letter on behalf of Shringla to Engel and committee Ranking Member Michael McCaul expressing concern over the Kashmir resolutions, with a white paper of updates on the ground. The letter had been circulating online days after it was sent. “I firmly believe that mutual respect for each other’s institutions, such as the independent judiciary and the democratic processes that express the will of the people, would be undermined by Resolutions such as H:745 and H:724,” Shringla wrote, using the reference numbers for Jayapal’s and Tlaib’s resolutions, respectively. The Americans for Kashmir co-founder said it was unusual for the embassy to refer to specific legislation in its outreach efforts.

Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who was visiting Washington that week, asked to meet with Foreign Affairs leadership the same day the markup was supposed to happen. Jayapal was added to the list of attendees and urged to hold off on advancing the resolution until meeting with Jaishankar, the Washington Post reported. Upon learning that Jayapal would be present, the minister asked for her to be excluded; when Engel refused, the minister abruptly backed out of the meeting, a move that was criticized by many Democratic presidential candidates. Jaishankar later told Indian reporters that he didn’t think Jayapal’s resolution was “a fair understanding of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir or a fair characterization of what the government of India is doing, and I have no interest in meeting her.”

Despite the cancellation, Jaishankar still met with other members of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Asia subcommittee, namely Democratic Reps. Ami Bera and Brad Sherman and Republican Reps. Francis Rooney and Ted Yoho, as well as Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, R-Id., and Ranking Member Bob Menendez, D-N.J. In January, Menendez sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urging him to press the Indian government to reverse the CAA. Offices for those officials did not respond to requests for comment.

While Jayapal’s resolution spent several weeks in standstill, Cornerstone met with Engel in person on January 15 to discuss Jammu and Kashmir. At the end of February, Engel’s office alerted Jayapal’s staff that a markup was planned for early March but that several more edits to the resolution were necessary. In addition to an amendment on the CAA and a proposed national register of citizens, Engel’s office said the chair intended the measure to reflect the changing circumstances in India without any duplicate or extraneous language, and to ensure it would pass with bipartisan support. Engel’s office said it had no record of the meeting.

Advocates said some of the changes, which are not yet reflected in the resolution text on the House website, are informed by materials the Indian Embassy has circulated to congressional offices. They also noted an additional reference to the mass displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, a minority Hindu community, from 1989 to 1990 — a highly contentious issue in Kashmiri history. Hindu American Foundation leadership had denounced Jayapal for omitting Pandits from the resolution when it was first introduced. HAF and Kashmiri Pandit groups have held congressional briefings since August on Kashmir, one of which Engel attended.

Related

The Silencing of Kashmir: Arundhati Roy on India, Modi, and Fascism

“In line with the viewpoint of many nations, HAF’s position is that the issue is one that is internal to India and should be resolved as peacefully and and expeditiously as possible,” wrote Suhag Shukla, Hindu American Foundation’s executive director, in an email. “We would also urge American lawmakers to not gloss over the impact of terrorism on both Indian and American interests in peace and stability in the region.”

The advocates said they thought the edits marred the resolution’s intentions to hold the Indian government accountable and decentered Kashmiri Muslims’ struggle.

When the resolution was not included in the March 2 markup notice, Engel at first gave reassurance that he would include it at the last minute in order to stave off opposition.

Meanwhile, Hindu American Foundation — members of which had informally met with Jayapal in December — sprung into action to spike the resolution. The group’s Public Policy Director Taniel Koushakjian circulated an email on March 2 that he had noticed Jayapal’s resolution was “gaining momentum” when he was on Capitol Hill the week prior. He urged recipients to help stop “Jayapal and her allies” from convincing Engel to include the resolution for markup, sharing a link to predrafted emails to send to Congress against the “bad, anti-India, anti-Hindu resolution.”

The Monday before the markup, Engel told Jayapal that he would not include the resolution due to concerns from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Kashmiri American advocates said. Hindu American Foundation took credit for blocking the resolution; Koushakjian claimed in a newsletter that more than 2,500 emails were sent to Congress in the first 48 hours of the campaign. “You spoke. Congress listened,” Koushakjian wrote. “But we can’t stop, because our opponents aren’t going to stop, either. We won today, but that doesn’t mean victory is guaranteed tomorrow.”

Engel’s office confirmed that it had heard concerns from other Foreign Affairs Committee members, as well as the Indian Embassy, which it said was expected given that India was against the resolution. “Our office hears from virtually every embassy in Washington on resolutions like this,” Engel spokesperson Tim Mulvey told The Intercept.

“Chairman Engel has repeatedly refused to even bring the resolution up for debate,” Americans for Kashmir, along with 13 South Asian American and anti-war groups, said in a statement. “We are deeply alarmed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s posture of stonewalling and inaction.”

Engel, known for his hawkish stance on foreign policy, is facing uncertain reelection prospects this year. The 16-term incumbent is facing two progressive challengers in New York’s 16th District in the Democratic primary in June.

Diaspora Infighting

In recent years, Capitol Hill has become a microcosm of the glaring political differences within the South Asian American community, as identity-based groups have wrestled with one another to influence policy and perspectives on India and the diaspora. While Muslim, Dalit, and Kashmiri activists have worked to raise awareness among lawmakers on the injustices their communities confront in the U.S. and India, right-wing Hindu Americans and India interest groups established a dominant presence to wield outsized influence in Congress.

Congresspeople who have taken critical positions on India have also faced backlash in the form of angry messages online and over the phone, as well as demonstrations outside district offices and town halls from Indian Americans who threaten that the community will retract their support.

Last May, Equality Labs, a South Asian American human rights group, partnered with Jayapal and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to hold a congressional briefing on caste discrimination in the U.S. based on a report that examined how the Indian caste system maps onto the diaspora. Before the briefing, Shukla said Hindu American Foundation had a phone conversation with Jayapal’s chief of staff and sent an email to him, Jayapal, and Khanna, stating that the group condemned caste-based discrimination and asked to attend the event “to learn and find ways for common ground,” with “no intention of disturbing” it. Neither office followed up with details, Shukla said.

Khanna withdrew from the briefing at the last minute due to “pressure from many influential Hindu groups.” Jayapal remained the event’s sole sponsor.

Capitol Hill has become a microcosm of the glaring political differences within the South Asian American community.

“I look forward to attending future briefings from those groups,” Khanna told The Intercept. “If they have another briefing, I would be happy to attend.” Khanna said he had spoken about issues regarding the caste system with the Indian ambassador and other high-level officials. “I have spoken out very clearly against right-wing nationalism and will continue to do so.”

Hindu Americans gathered outside a town hall hosted by Khanna in October, to protest a tweet he wrote under a story on Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s ties to Hindu nationalists, in which he called for Hindu American politicians to “reject Hindutva,” or Hindu nationalist ideology. More than 230 Hindu and Indian American groups and individuals, including Hindu American Foundation, sent Khanna a letter criticizing the tweet, as well as his statement on Kashmir, and asked him to withdraw from the Congressional Pakistan Caucus, which he had recently joined.

“I have no plans to remove myself from the Pakistan Caucus,” Khanna said at the time. “I am also a proud member of the India Caucus, and have been supportive in Congress of strengthening the U.S.-India relationship, including our defense ties. I will continue to work toward peace on the subcontinent, which requires a willingness to hear a diversity of voices on the issues at hand.”

In August, when Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., wrote to Pompeo expressing concern about India’s actions in Kashmir after hearing from his Pakistani and Kashmiri constituents, the backlash he received from Indian American constituents prompted him to hold a meeting with them and apologize for not consulting them first. He later went to “Howdy, Modi,” a political rally in September for the Indian prime minister held in Houston, attended by Trump and more than 50,000 Indian Americans, as part of a bipartisan congressional delegation and has since co-sponsored Jayapal’s resolution.

From Washington, Hindu American Foundation has backed the Indian government on Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act, according to activists, with an emphasis on minority Hindu communities from Muslim-majority regions.

Related

Trump Praises Modi’s India, as Muslims Are Beaten on the Streets and a Mosque Is Defiled

By threading the needle between claiming to be a minority group subject to “Hinduphobic” hate violence and a representative for the Indian American community, Hindu American Foundation has gained access and influence in advocacy and policymaking spaces on Capitol Hill, said Lakshmi Sridaran, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, a racial justice and domestic policy organization.

“They’re a very disruptive force with a lot of power,” Sridaran told The Intercept. “They are entering progressive spaces and using harmful analysis and policy recommendations against the communities that are actually impacted by real violence.”

HAF collaborates with Democrats who are either Hindu or politically connected to the Hindu American community. Last year, its board members made donations to Khanna, Bera, Gabbard, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Sherman, who was named the organization’s “Friend of the Community,” among others — as well as to a Hindu American political action committee, of which board member Rishi Bhutada is listed as treasurer. In 2018, Hindu American PAC donated $2,500 to Jayapal.

Shukla said in an email that the political work of Hindu Americans has been increasingly dismissed as malicious.

“This out-of-hand discrediting of Hindu perspectives is becoming a form of intolerance that would not be accepted if it was directed at other minority faith communities in the United States,” she wrote.

Though the fate of Jayapal’s resolution hangs in the balance, the Indian government’s lobbying apparatus shows no signs of abating its counteroperation to influence Congress and thwart progressive advocates.

Qutubuddin said the Indian Embassy has underestimated the ability of Muslim and Kashmiri organizers, through raising awareness and sharing their stories, to make an impact on the next steps Congress takes on India.

“The embassy is spending so much money to counter the voices of stakeholders,” she said. “We’re all from impacted communities; we were raised here but our families are there.”

The post India Lobbies to Stifle Criticism, Control Messaging in U.S. Congress Amid Rising Anti-Muslim Violence appeared first on The Intercept.

Modi gushed profusely about Trump — the president was warm, friendly, energetic, “full of wit.” “You introduced me to your family in 2017,” Modi said, referring to his trip to the White House that summer, “and today I have the honor to introduce you to my family.”

While most Indians in the U.S. identify as Democrats and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party enjoy significant popularity in the diaspora — and the joint appearance opened up the potential to confer some of that support on Trump.

“You enrich our culture, you uphold our values, you uplift our communities, and you are truly proud to be American. And we are proud to have you as Americans,” Trump told the largely Indian American audience. “We thank you, we love you, and I want you to know that my administration is fighting for you each and every day.” He promised to “take care of our Indian American citizens before we take care of illegal immigrants that want to pour into our country,” but neglected to mention that about half of the nearly 4.5 million Indians in the United States are foreign-born, and a growing number of Indian migrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Thousands gathered at NRG Stadium for the “Howdy, Modi” event, including members of both the Indian and American governments. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

With the words “Shared Dreams, Bright Futures” on the large screen behind them, and American and Indian flags flanked on either side of the stage, Modi and Trump presented their twin agendas around border security and counterterrorism. “Both India and the United States understand that to keep our communities safe, we must protect our borders,” Trump said, as he promised to help India defend against “radical Islamic terrorism.”

On the face of it, the blockbuster “Howdy, Modi” event was the Indian American diaspora’s extravagant welcome to the Indian prime minister for the first time since his landslide reelection victory in May — complete with flashy musical and dance numbers. But beneath the cultural gloss, it was essentially a political rally for two nationalist world leaders, organized by a nonprofit with Hindu nationalist links.

For decades, a network of American groups affiliated with Hindu nationalist organizations in India has embedded itself in the diaspora by holding cultural and religious events, lobbying Congress, contributing to political campaigns, and acting as a mouthpiece for Modi and the BJP. Since the early 2000s, these groups have worked to expunge Modi’s once-tarnished reputation in the U.S., enlisting the Indian American community, about half of whom are Hindu, and U.S. lawmakers to defend his increasingly authoritarian agenda and whitewash his complicity in human rights abuses.

“Howdy, Modi” corralled not just Trump and tens of thousands of Indian Americans, but also a delegation of U.S. politicians, including Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who appeared on stage to shake hands with Modi in tacit support of his government’s Hindu nationalist agenda.

Behind the Spectacle

The fanfare surrounding the Indian prime minister’s visit was jarring in light of recent moves by Modi and the BJP that have had calamitous consequences for Muslims in India. In August, more than 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — were excluded from a government citizenship list in Assam and given 120 days prove that they are not living illegally in India. Eleven detention camps, each of which can hold at least 1,000 people, are reportedly being built in the state. On the other side of the country, Modi’s government unilaterally revoked Kashmir’s semiautonomous status and decision-making capacity, established in Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, jolting the Muslim-majority region with mass arrests, a communications blackout, and violent clashes with security forces.

Meanwhile in Houston, the prime minister fiercely praised the Indian Parliament’s action. “Article 370 had deprived people of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh of development. Terrorist and separatist elements were misusing the situation. Now after abrogation, people there have got equal rights,” he said. The crowd, and even some journalists in the press box, cheered and stood to clap.

“‘Howdy, Modi’ is a blatant celebration of the destruction of democracy and a complete disregard for human rights,” said Sana Qutubuddin, an organizer with the Alliance for Justice and Accountability, a coalition of progressive South Asian American groups.

Behind the event was Texas India Forum, which has direct links to members of U.S.-based Hindu nationalist groups affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a fascist paramilitary organization that espouses the notion that India should be a Hindu state and its minorities second-class citizens.

The nonprofit is registered to the residence of Houston employment lawyer Amit Misra, a coordinator of the Hindu Education Foundation — the education wing of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the international branch of the RSS. The Hindu Education Foundation is known for its role in lobbying against using the term “South Asia” rather than “India” to describe the modern-day region that stretches from Pakistan to Bangladesh, and for objecting to middle school textbooks that explicitly link the caste system to Hinduism. (Texas India Forum did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The chair of the “Howdy, Modi” organizing committee, Jugal Malani, is the brother-in-law of the national vice president of the HSS and an adviser to the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of USA, an education nonprofit whose Indian counterpart is affiliated with an RSS offshoot. Malani’s nephew, Rishi Bhutada, was the event’s head spokesperson and is a board member of the Hindu American Foundation, known for its aggressive tactics to influence political discourse on India and Hinduism. Another spokesperson, Gitesh Desai, is president of Houston’s chapter of Sewa International, a service organization linked to the HSS. The event was also backed by more than 600 “welcome partners,” including groups with Hindu nationalist ties.

Modi began fostering ties with Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. to help build sympathy within the Indian American community after the U.S. rejected his visa application in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots, during which Hindu mobs unleashed terror on Muslims after the community was blamed for a train fire that killed Hindu pilgrims. Women were raped, homes and mosques destroyed, and up to 2,000 people were killed. Modi, who at the time was chief minister of the state, was accused of overseeing the violence.

Demonstrators gathered outside the stadium to protest Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda and his recent actions in Kashmir. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

Among the thousands who demonstrated across from the venue on Sunday were progressive South Asian Americans and their allies who oppose Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.

“There’s a presence of so many religious and cultural minorities — Dalits, Indian Christians, Indian Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs — because we’re standing up for our kin who are facing great deals of oppression and atrocity at home, and we won’t be silenced in the face of that violence,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, an activist with the Alliance for Justice and Accountability.

While Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. have developed the community infrastructure and connections to organize such massive events as “Howdy, Modi,” Soundararajan explained that they represent only a sliver of the South Asian American community.

“They’re a small, well-organized group that is trying to use money to show that they have power,” she told The Intercept.

Political Dissonance

The Democratic Party has fractured over its position on India in recent weeks. Several progressive Democrats, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have spoken out against Modi’s actions in Kashmir, while others in the party have been unwavering in their support. Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has most pointedly criticized Hindu nationalist ideology and was denounced by Indian and Hindu groups in response.

Nonetheless, there were six Democrats among the 21 lawmakers who joined Modi on stage. Even New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, who faced severe criticism in August for a letter he wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing concerns over Kashmir, attended, waving and pressing the palms of his hands together when his name was called. In response to the outrage generated by his letter, Suozzi had called a community meeting of his Indian American constituents and apologized for not consulting them before sending it.

Also present were Hoyer, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y.; Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill.; and Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who last year attended the World Hindu Congress, an event known for giving a platform to Hindu nationalists, including RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green’s name was announced, but he had put out a statement the day before that he would not attend “Trump’s photo-op.” Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., was also originally scheduled to appear. Her spokesperson did not respond to a question about why she pulled out.

With Modi standing behind him, Hoyer recited a quote from Mahatma Gandhi on democracy as “something that gives the weak the same chance as the strong.” He said that the U.S. and India provide “an equal opportunity to dream and work hard to make that dream come true.”

“I’m proud, as all of you are, that the U.S.-India relationship remains bipartisan, both Democrats and Republicans working to bring the two nations closer in pursuit of that goal and our common principles,” he said.

When asked if Hoyer’s presence at the event could be seen as supportive of Hindu nationalism, his spokesperson pointed to the representative’s reference to India’s efforts to secure the vision of Gandhi and the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of the country as “a secular democracy where respect for pluralism and human rights safeguard every individual.”

But under Modi, India’s founding ideals have been desecrated as far-right Hindus have become emboldened by the administration, and hate crimes against Muslims and other minorities have skyrocketed.

“Howdy, Modi” attendees show their support for the Indian prime minister. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

Links to Modi and Hindu nationalism can even be found in at least three Democratic presidential campaigns. Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has received large donations from individuals involved in Hindu nationalist groups, including Malani and the Bhutada family, since the start of her political career. Joe Biden’s Asian American Pacific Islander national vote director, Amit Jani, is a Modi supporter, and his father was a co-founder of the Overseas Friends of the BJP.

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s policy director Sonal Shah was a former national coordinator of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, and her father was a former OFBJP vice president. Buttigieg’s campaign spokesperson said that Shah had “helped raise money for earthquake victims in 2001” with VHPA and pointed to a statement she made when she was on Barack Obama’s transition team that she “would not have associated with VHP of America” if she could have known the role its Indian counterpart would have in the Gujarat riots.

Related

Tulsi Gabbard Is a Rising Progressive Star, Despite Her Support for Hindu Nationalists

Activists pointed out the tensions between Democrats appearing at a Modi event while the party as a whole decries Trump and his xenophobic immigration policies. Soundararajan questioned the conflicting political messages of liberal lawmakers who associate with Hindu nationalism.

“If the Democrats are serious about being the resistance, does justice end at the border?” she asked. “Can we afford to be progressive domestically but fascist abroad?”

In September, right when Congress came back in session, the Hindu American Foundation held a Senate briefing on Kashmir to push its perspective on the repeal of the constitutional articles that ensured Kashmir’s autonomy and the history of the region.

“I’m not sure how many staffers attended, but [HAF was] already there to counter the narrative that’s been emerging from the media and activists, saying that everything is fine and the media is just exaggerating,” said Hafsa Kanjwal, a Kashmiri American history professor at Lafayette College.

Republicans, of course, experience no such contradiction. Apart from the Texas senators, GOP lawmakers on stage included North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, and Texas Rep. Pete Olson, who wore a kurta, or traditional Indian tunic, to the event.

At times, the Republican agenda has intersected with the interests of right-wing Hindu lobbyists. The Republican Hindu Coalition, founded in 2015, has recently taken up the cause of building Trump’s border wall, with founder and Modi supporter Shalli Kumar offering to raise $25 million for the project. Kumar has also named Steve Bannon as an honorary co-chair of the coalition (a title he shares with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich). Kumar reportedly accompanied the former Breitbart executive chair, who has been involved in the construction of a private border wall, to fundraise at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Diaspora Diplomacy”

Houston has been a hub of Hindu nationalist activity in the U.S. since at least the late 1970s, when its HSS chapter was founded. Years before Modi was even a contender for prime minister, the Houston chapters of the HSS and the OFBJP were mobilizing from thousands of miles away to get him elected. Ramesh Bhutada, the HSS vice president, played a prominent role, organizing a 700-person phone-banking campaign for Modi, said Pieter Friedrich, a South Asia affairs analyst who has documented Gabbard’s ties with Modi and American Hindu nationalists.

At “Howdy, Modi,” the Indian prime minister thanked those who participated in the 2019 elections; the OFBJP organized phone banks to call Indians and ask them to vote for Modi, and some nonresident Indians even went to their home states in India to campaign and vote in the election.

Hindu nationalist organizations have historically portrayed themselves as liberal social and religious groups that denounce bigotry and uphold equality, Friedrich told The Intercept, while developing and maintaining close ties with Hindu nationalists in India who are openly hateful and violent toward minorities. In 2014, South Asia Citizens Web released a report showing how the network of Hindu nationalist groups in the U.S. had funneled millions of dollars to their counterparts in India since 2001.

“Hindu nationalists in America have utilized their minority status to protect themselves while supporting a majoritarian supremacist movement in India,” Friedrich said.

The Indian government has historically been disengaged with the Indian diaspora. At the time of India’s founding, Nehru adopted a policy of “active disassociation” from the diaspora, choosing not to intervene in another country’s sovereignty, writes Sreeram Chaulia, a professor at India’s Jindal School of International Affairs.

Migration from India was also seen as a “brain drain” of skilled and educated Indians that contributed to the underdevelopment of the country. Modi has turned this narrative on its head by framing the diaspora as a shining representative of India on the world stage that generously gives back to its homeland.

The BJP has strategically deployed “diaspora diplomacy” to recruit India’s overseas community to support its agenda and counter negative press coverage. In the 1980s, the BJP was the political voice behind a campaign to build a Hindu temple on land where a mosque already existed. The campaign’s supporters claimed that the Babri mosque was on a holy site that was considered the birthplace of a Hindu deity.

Attendees show their support for Modi and Trump. Photos: Todd Spoth for The Intercept

The Overseas Friends of the BJP was formed right before the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindu nationalist groups razed the mosque in 1992, igniting deadly intercommunal violence that killed at least 2,000 people. The OFBJP was tasked with damage control in the U.S. It has since mobilized to lobby congressional officials and campaigned abroad for Modi’s bids for prime minister. With the help of American Hindu nationalists, Modi periodically connected with the diaspora through videoconferences from 2007 to 2012, Friedrich writes in his article, while he was banned from entering the U.S.

“It is in the best interest of the BJP to nurture the Indian diaspora. They are our biggest soft power,” Vijay Chauthaiwale, head of the BJP’s foreign affairs cell, told Indian news site News18 ahead of “Howdy, Modi.” “PM Modi has been interested and extremely committed to make this diaspora an informal ambassador of his development agenda. They represent the Indian local community. For the BJP, it is important to nurture them along with the local community.”

Modi became prime minister in 2014 and with that, his U.S. visa was finally approved. A five-person committee connected to American Hindu nationalist groups organized a grand welcome for him at Madison Square Garden in New York City that was similar in magnitude to “Howdy, Modi.” He expressed his gratitude to an audience of about 20,000 Indian Americans, describing them as “my countrymen who, having settled here thousands of miles away from India, have increased India’s honor and pride.”

Five years later in Houston, Modi remained committed to cherishing his relationship with the Indian American community, despite the many miles of land and ocean between them.

“Today, you may be far away from your homeland,” he said, “but your homeland’s government is not far from you.”

Correction: September 25, 2019, 4:38 p.m.
A previous version of this story stated that Rep. Linda Sánchez, D-Calif., attended “Howdy, Modi.” She was originally scheduled to appear, but she was not present at the event.

The post The Network of Hindu Nationalists Behind Modi’s “Diaspora Diplomacy” in the U.S. appeared first on The Intercept.

It was such a direct challenge to the lucrative churn of the criminal justice system that the National Police Association filed a bar complaint against Rollins in late December, days before she was sworn in, specifically in response to her pledge to not prosecute certain low-level crimes.

Yet people are still being prosecuted, according to observers from the Boston-based oversight group, CourtWatch MA, as well as the local American Civil Liberties Union.

Rahsaan Hall, director of the Racial Justice Program for the ACLU of Massachusetts, says Rollins’s “do not prosecute” list, which includes 15 types of offenses, has not had any effect on conviction rates, because the cases are still being prosecuted, just in different ways. He described the turn to diversionary programs, suspended sentences, and no incarceration for the offenses as, at best, a different approach than what the district attorney promised voters would be her approach to crimes like drug possession, standalone resisting arrest, and being a minor in possession of alcohol.

“We see a significant number of these cases still being prosecuted and the ADAs are still making bail requests,” said Hall.

In early February, Rollins said that changing over to non-prosecution was “a process” but one that was “partly in place.”

The early tenure of Rollins, at once attacked by police as too soft on crime, and challenged by reformers as too soft on the police, underscores the tightrope that the new wave of progressive prosecutors are walking as they challenge a deeply entrenched system on behalf of a movement with little patience left.

Despite the backsliding, Rollins’s office has been strong in pushing back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement encroachment into city courtrooms, Hall said, and working on community engagement.

“There are challenges of coming in with these progressive views and developing policy,” said Hall. “There’s some deference given to allow people that come into organizations to bring in staff, establish policies, but deference only extends so far.”

While the complaint looks unlikely to go anywhere, the fact that it was filed at all reveals a hostility from police in general to Rollins’s programs and plans.

“The NPA bar complaint says we’re doing something right,” said Rollins. “They’re scared, because I meant what I said.”

Rollins, with her election victory, joined other district attorneys in the nation like Andrea Harrington — who won her election the same night as Rollins on the other end of the state in Massachusetts’s western Berkshire County — and Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, in a small but growing movement to change the way the system affects the people at its mercy at the institutional level.

The elections of both Harrington and Rollins showed a desire on the part of Massachusetts voters for criminal justice system reform, Jonathan Cohn, co-chair of the Issues Committee of Progressive Massachusetts, told The Intercept. But, Cohn said, community oversight is essential to ensure that victories at the ballot box actually translate into real reforms.

“Voters in Berkshire and Suffolk County and other counties across the country showed that they want their district attorneys to be a part of the solution instead and want to see an end to the systemic injustices that plague our criminal legal system,” said Cohn. “With Rachael Rollins and Andrea Harrington now in office, it is important for the public to now work to hold them accountable to their campaign promises and empower them to do so.”

The institutional limitations district attorneys face are serious. But there is a clear mandate from voters to change the system. Rebecca Kavanagh, a public defender in New York City who frequently comments on criminal justice reform issues, said in an email that she thinks deflecting the call for reform would be a mistake.

“In the past when prosecutors have pursued harsh criminal justice policies, it has been easy to understand, if not justify, because tough-on-crime rhetoric is what got them elected,” said Kavanagh. “When reform prosecutors win office promising radical change and then things seem to continue as before, that is much more difficult to comprehend.”

The role of district attorney in the criminal justice system is part of a problem that has affected America for centuries, said Boston-based criminal defense attorney Carl Williams — a former lawyer with the Massachusetts ACLU — and that begs the question of whether it can be reformed at all.

“There are two ways to look at it,” said Williams. “First, you can think that despite some problems or missteps, the car is still in good condition and you can polish it up to make it shiny again. The secondary analysis holds that the system is rotten to its core.”

Williams told The Intercept that he buys more into the second analysis and called the criminal justice enforcement structure a system of social control that, if maintained, will continue to guarantee bad outcomes for the poor and people of color.

“Right now, people are being put through the grinder,” Williams said, “That must stop.”

“If promises were made, and the changes aren’t being made in the commonwealth, it calls into question whether or if the changes will happen,” said Williams. “Or is this just the same old, same old with some new talking points around it?”

Rollins, who was elected in a landslide with over 72 percent of the vote, told The Intercept that she welcomed being observed by CourtWatch. “I’m happy people spend time out of their day to hold me accountable,” she said. “I have the ability to take away people’s freedom. Any day when your liberty is taken away is a major decision that impacts your life.”

Atara Rich-Shea, an organizer with CourtWatch, told The Intercept that she was pleased Rollins was welcoming the group’s unofficial oversight. But, Rich-Shea said, just being open to accountability isn’t enough — especially if Rollins is shifting from declining to prosecute to a “soft prosecution” approach to certain crimes.

“When progressive candidates become officials, the status quo is easier,” said Rich-Shea. “Community accountability is essential to make real change; it bolsters their seemingly radical promises.”

Over in Berkshire County, Harrington has had an easier ride than Rollins. That’s in part due to the sparsely populated but large geographic layout of the Berkshires and the fact that the county lacks the kind of cohesive criminal justice reform movement found in Suffolk. Thus far, Harrington says she’s concentrating on how to put into place the social safety nets and programs that she believes will reform criminal justice in the Berkshires. Harrington acknowledged that it’s an uphill battle, and that putting her plans into place may take longer than some of her supporters had hoped — though she has unveiled a plan to end cash bail in the county.

“I think a lot of the work is structural change,” said Harrington. “We need to get money into the system for programs that help people.”

But Harrington, unlike Rollins, feels that she has to be more cautious in how she raises these issues within her community, because her election was more divisive. “She’s able to be very outspoken,” said Harrington of Rollins. “I have to bring people together.”

Rollins was one of five competing for the Democratic primary, after which she faced a disorganized independent in the general election. But Harrington was up against two opponents in her primary, making for a closer and more personal race. The incumbent Harrington unseated also ran a write-in campaign against her in the general, muddying what likely would have been a clear walk to the win. Rollins, on the other hand, cruised to victory in November with a clear mandate.

The changes both district attorneys are trying to implement are unpopular with the old guard, including law enforcement. Other reform candidates often face similar opposition: Krasner, who has made headlines for his progressive reforms in Philadelphia, has had a frosty relationship with the city’s police. Krasner told The Intercept that the pushback he’s received has come from the Fraternal Order of Police, rather than officers in the department itself. That’s because FOP members are mostly older, retired officers — overwhelmingly white Republicans who don’t live in the city. Of the 25,000 FOP members, Krasner said only around 6,800 of them are active duty, giving the older, more conservative members outsized influence.

And then there’s the money.

“They all are affected financially, directly, by decisions we make,” said Krasner. “This is true of the police, correctional officers, and other criminal justice institutions.”

If the district attorney’s office were to decriminalize marijuana, for example, then officers wouldn’t be paid to go to court to defend marijuana arrests. And the demand for correctional officers would decline with lower incarceration rates and the closure of prisons and jails.

“We’re dealing with a systemic incentivization for arresting people for everything to go to court and make money,” said Krasner.

Judges, too, can act as barriers to reform. Krasner argued that judges belong to an older, more conservative culture that’s different than the culture now seen in Philadelphia, particularly since his election in 2017.

“The hands of the past love to tie the hands of the future,” Krasner said.

The post Progressive DA Rachael Rollins Hasn’t Stopped Prosecuting Petty Crimes, Despite Pledge. Police Are Still Furious. appeared first on The Intercept.

From February to March, Gucci, Versace, and other luxury brands at autumn/winter fashion week dressed mostly white models in hijab-like headscarves. Around that time, two women filed a civil rights lawsuit against New York City related to an incident in which the NYPD forced them to remove their hijabs for mugshots.

Gap, a clothing brand known for its all-American ethos, featured a young girl in a hijab smiling broadly in its back-to-school ads this past summer. Meanwhile, children were forced to leave a public pool in Delaware; they were told that their hijabs could clog the filtration system.

Muslim women and Muslim fashion currently have unprecedented visibility in American consumer culture. Yet women who cover are among the most visible targets for curtailed civil liberties, violence, and discrimination in the anti-Muslim climate intensified by Donald Trump’s presidency.

By selling modest clothing or spotlighting a hijabi in an ad campaign, the U.S. clothing industry is beckoning Muslim women to be its latest consumer niche. In order to tap into the multibillion-dollar potential of the U.S. Muslim consumer market, large retailers have positioned themselves as socially conscious havens for Muslims, operating on a profit motive rather than a moral imperative.

Many Muslim women, especially those who grew up post-9/11, may find inclusion as consumers to be a reprieve from everyday Islamophobia. However, the representations circulated by retail companies are reductive of Muslim-American identity. Certain Muslim women who conform to expectations of patriotism and consumption are granted visibility, while others, like black Muslim women, are erased from the narrative of Islam in America. Meanwhile, Muslims whose labor is exploited overseas are disappeared from corporate conscience.

The Muslim Consumer Market

In February, Macy’s became the first U.S. department store to sell a modest clothing line, called the Verona Collection. Macy’s was widely praised as “inclusive” and “taking diversity very seriously.” Refinery29 raved, “It’s great to see Macy’s really taking the steps to champion the causes it says it believes in.”

Macy’s debuted the Verona Collection shortly after the retailer announced that several stores would close in 2018 (more than 120 stores have shuttered since 2015). A week before the launch, Macy’s stock hit its lowest point of 2018. But soon after the announcement, things seemed to be looking up for the flailing company. A business analyst said, “At this time for investors the new clothing line should be treated with cautious excitement for what it may mean for the company moving forward.”

Macy’s financial instability when starting to sell hijabs and modest clothing calls into question the motive behind suddenly catering to Muslim consumers. Why now?

“It feels like a way of generating publicity by putting out an inclusive image, trying to make themselves seem more relevant,” Sylvia Chan-Malik, author of “Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam,” told The Intercept. “But perhaps that’s cynical, because I know a lot of Muslim women who were very happy about it. I just don’t know what the intentions are.”

In addition to Nike, Gap, and high-end designers, there are several recent examples of the U.S. retail and fashion industry courting Muslim women who dress modestly. In 2016, New York Fashion Week presented its first all-hijab runway show from Indonesian designer Anniesa Hasibuan. That November, CoverGirl brought on hijabi beauty blogger Nura Afia as its latest brand ambassador. This past May, H&M released a modest clothing line leading up to Ramadan.

Since the early 2010s, multinational Western companies have catered to Muslim consumers after marketing consultants identified them as an influential demographic with growing spending power. According to the latest Thomson Reuters State of the Global Islamic Economy Report, Muslims worldwide spent about $254 billion on clothing in 2016, which was predicted to increase to $373 billion by 2022.

Western retailers have mostly concentrated their Muslim outreach to foreign consumers. Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and DKNY are among the brands that have sold Ramadan capsule collections or stocked modest clothing exclusively in their Middle East outlets. This past summer, MAC Cosmetics put out a glamorous makeup tutorial for suhoor, the pre-dawn meal during Ramadan, targeted at women in the Gulf region.

Consumer research on the U.S. market revealed a similar opportunity for profit. In 2013, Ogilvy Noor, the “Islamic branding” division of advertising company Ogilvy, estimated American Muslim spending power to be at $170 billion. DinarStandard and the American Muslim Consumer Consortium reported that Muslim-Americans spent $5.4 billion on apparel that same year.

Ogilvy Noor has determined that Muslim millennials are driving consumption with their collective belief that “faith and modernity go hand in hand.”

“If I was to pick one person who represents the cutting edge of Muslim futurists, it would be a woman: educated, tech-savvy, worldly, intent on defining her own future, brand loyal and conscious that her consumption says something important about who she is and how she chooses to live her life,” explained Shelina Janmohamed, vice president of Ogilvy Noor, who is Muslim. “The consumers these brands are targeting are young, cool and ready to spend their money.”

Ogilvy Noor’s approach inches toward essentializing who young Muslims are, which can then be monetized by corporations. The staggering economic power of the Muslim market is the determining factor in retail efforts to tap into it — less so a response to what Muslims could actually benefit from. But for many young Muslim women, consumer visibility can signal mainstream recognition and belonging, regardless of corporate intention.

“Maybe I’ll Feel More Safe”

While retailers are ultimately incentivized by profit, clothing and cosmetics brands are also providing more options for women who choose to cover, as well as fulfilling some hijabis’ desires for representation, said Elizabeth Bucar, author of “Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress.”

“Muslims are a large part of the American population today — they’re visible,” Bucar, an associate professor at Northeastern University, told The Intercept. “They’re running for office, they’re our co-workers, they’re our neighbors, and, from a retail point of view, they are also consumers.”

Many Muslim women celebrate, and actively participate in, efforts to acknowledge them as consumers. Muslim beauty and fashion bloggers on Instagram and YouTube promote brands to hundreds of thousands of followers. Verona Collection designer Lisa Vogl and model Mariah Idrissi are among those who have found commercial success in collaboration with large brands.

In September, the de Young Museum in San Francisco opened the first major museum exhibition on contemporary Muslim fashions, signaling that Muslim women’s clothing is a legitimate topic of interest in the U.S. “We wanted to share what we’ve been seeing in Muslim fashion with the larger world in a way that could create a deeper understanding,” the de Young’s former director, Max Hollein, told the New York Times.

Consumer visibility can also signal a step toward the inclusion of Muslims as American in politically hostile times, particularly for the generation who grew up during the war on terror, when most representations have cast Muslims as foreign terrorists and a threat to national security.

“It’s incredibly validating on an individual level to Muslim women who wear the scarf, who have to struggle with the comments and the vitriol and the violence that they encounter every day,” said Chan-Malik, an associate professor at Rutgers University. “It’s almost a very practical sense of relief, like, ‘Oh, if this becomes more normalized, maybe I’ll feel more safe.’”

That increased representation is meaningful to some Muslim women cannot be ignored. However, who gets to be seen and how exposes the underlying logics of capitalism that flatten visibility into which Muslim women are the most marketable.

The “Hijab Fetish”

The market homogenizes Muslim women, collapsing tremendous diversity into a product that can be easily digested. “Certain kinds of representation and visibility are privileged, while others are rendered undesirable,” write Duke University associate professor Ellen McLarney and University of North Carolina associate professor Banu Gökariksel. “Muslim identities unpalatable to the sensibilities of the market are excluded, often leading to further marginalizations at the intersections of class, race, and ethnicity.”

This is evident in how the fashion and beauty industries grant visibility to certain Muslim women. Writing about the “hijab fetish” in consumer culture, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described how representations of Muslim women in advertising conform to “an image of an over-filtered, hot, bourgeois, fair-skinned hijabi woman, whose highlight is ‘on fleek’.”

In fact, most Muslim women in the U.S. do not always wear a headscarf in public; one-fifth of American Muslims are black; almost half of Muslim-Americans reported incomes under $30,000 last year; and many American Muslims identify as queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming.

Despite the fact that black Muslim women are largely absent from mainstream consumer culture, said Kayla Wheeler, an assistant professor at Grand Valley State University, the women of the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple laid the foundation for Muslim fashion in the U.S decades ago.

“The Nation of Islam tried to use clothing to give black women a new respectable identity that they had been denied by white supremacy, so they could … push back against stereotypes of black women as promiscuous or asexual or not real women or humans at all,” said Wheeler, who researches black Muslim women’s fashion.

Somali-American model Halima Aden and Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, along with designers Nzinga Knight, Eman Idil, and Lubna Muhammad, are among the few black Muslim women who have been given visibility in the fashion industry.

Black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks.

Wheeler said that black Muslim women’s headscarves can be racially distinctive in wrapping styles and fabrics — nuances that are obscured among the commercial images of predominantly Middle Eastern and South Asian women. Meanwhile, black Muslim women are triply vulnerable in the U.S. to racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic attacks (last month, a white man pulled a gun on a group of black Muslim teenagers, including headscarf-wearing girls, at a McDonald’s in Minnesota).

“Black Muslims are not seen as sympathetically as brown Muslims,” Wheeler told The Intercept. “Everyone faces Islamophobia, but when you add anti-blackness and suspicions about black Islam not being real Islam, they become not only a foreign threat, but a domestic threat.”

Corporate posturing to marginalized groups — what University of Denver law professor Nancy Leong describes as racial capitalism — has long been a business practice to persuade minority groups to become brand loyal and liberal consumers to buy products as a political statement.

A still from a L’Oréal Paris advertisement featuring Amena Khan.

In January, L’Oréal Paris announced its “unique and disruptive” hair care ad campaign, featuring model and social media influencer Amena Khan. In the ad, she wore a pale pink hijab, with a pink blazer, in front of a pink background. Within a week, Khan left the campaign after her tweets criticizing Israel for its attack on Gaza in 2014 were surfaced. In a statement, L’Oréal Paris agreed with her decision to step down, saying that the company is “committed to tolerance and respect towards all people.”

Brands “want the face, but they don’t want the complex politics or the identity or the voice behind it,” Hoda Katebi, a political fashion blogger and community organizer, told The Intercept, pointing to her own experiences with brands that have approached her to collaborate or model their clothing. “Once a Muslim woman asserts her agency, they’ll strip that away.”

The fetishization of the hijab descends from decades of stereotypical images that have been used to fortify imperial projects in the Middle East and Islamophobic policies and attitudes at home. U.S. meddling in Muslim-majority countries and the war on terror have been the political backdrops against which retailers and advertisers have commodified Muslim women and their clothing.

The Veil and U.S. Empire

The representation of Muslim women and the veil in U.S. consumer culture has historically shifted alongside the agenda of U.S. empire. The veil, which encompasses myriad forms of head covering, has been attributed multiple, often contradictory, meanings: empowering, oppressive, threatening, fashionable, subversive.

For decades, the myth of imperial benevolence has informed U.S. foreign policy, alongside feigned concern about Muslim women and their material conditions, which has advanced agendas that benefit the political and economic elite.

The veil became fetishized in the U.S. during the Iranian women’s movement after the 1979 revolution, Chan-Malik told The Intercept. Women mobilized for a week of protests after Ayatollah Khomeini, who replaced the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi, established compulsory veiling, rather than allowing women to choose whether to cover.

The U.S. media focused on the chador as the symbol of oppression that the “poor Muslim woman” was forced to suffer under the ayatollah’s rule, Chan-Malik writes in her book. “Women’s rights became a rallying call that could be employed by the United States to explain the ills of the Middle East and the ‘terror’ of Islam.”

The images produced and circulated during this time established an American Orientalism that continues to inform ideas about Muslim women as oppressed and in need of a U.S. savior.

In her book “The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture,” University of Texas at Austin professor Faegheh Shirazi lists pre-9/11 marketing strategies based on Orientalist stereotypes, which were used to sell cars, computers, perfume, and even soup: “the mysterious woman hiding behind her veil, waiting to be conquered by an American man; the submissive woman, forced to hide behind the veil; and the generic veiled woman, representing all peoples and cultures of the Middle East.”

In the wake of 9/11, the burqa became the most visible symbol of the Afghanistan War, weaponized to serve the Bush administration’s imperial agenda. In her infamous radio address, first lady Laura Bush claimed that the Taliban would “threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish,” a harrowing detail suggesting that even beauty products were subject to tyrannical policing. The unveiling of Afghan women would come to represent their “freedom,” as well as their transformation into consumers.

After the Taliban fell, the U.S. beauty industry acted as an arm of empire and seized the opportunity to export Western products and techniques to Afghanistan. Marie Claire and Vogue magazines, joined by beauty companies like Paul Mitchell and Estée Lauder, funded the humanitarian-inflected “Beauty Without Borders,” a beauty school in Kabul meant to teach women how to perform salon services, despite the fact that salons had already existed. American shampoo and makeup became tools to liberate Muslim women.

By the early 2010s, the veil was still viewed with suspicion when worn by Muslim women, but had otherwise become an edgy, often sexualized, commodity. “Burqa chic” in fashion magazines and runway shows played upon the veil’s shock value, McLarney writes. Jeans brand Diesel released an ad in 2013 featuring a topless, tattooed white woman wearing a niqab, and non-Muslim celebrities, including Rihanna, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, toyed with wearing veils as if they were costumes. Capitalist manipulation, McLarney writes, had transformed the veil “from emblem of utter dehumanization to expression of fashion, protest, and even personal freedom.”

Muslim women’s clothing has acquired new significance under the Trump administration, which tacitly endorses the exclusion, hatred, and criminalization of Muslims. Trump’s call for a Muslim registry and a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” on the campaign trail, which manifested as the de facto Muslim travel ban, set the tone for his approach to U.S. Muslims.

In response, liberals have turned the Muslim woman into a feminist icon. The stylized image of a woman wearing an American flag as a hijab, created by street artist Shepard Fairey, hovered above crowds at the Women’s March as a symbol of multicultural inclusion and political resistance. However, as many have pointed out, the image distorts the history of state violence and injustice against Muslims in the U.S. and abroad — and the American feminist movement’s complicity in that. The poster’s conspicuous presence at anti-Trump demonstrations also invoked how Muslim-Americans are rendered visible in ways that can be harmful to the community.

The Politics of Visibility

The selective visibility of hijabis reinforces a false binary between “good” and “bad” Muslims, upholding liberal, flag-waving Muslims as tolerable and benign without rectifying deeply entrenched perceptions of Muslims as terroristic and fanatical. While most Americans do not personally know a Muslim, Pew Research Center reported that Muslims are regarded with the most negativity among religious groups. A recent study also found that terror attacks with an alleged Muslim suspect receive 357 percent more media coverage.

“People love good, patriotic Muslims who don’t threaten whiteness, who don’t challenge the historical and systematic violence that this country is built upon,” said Aqdas Aftab, who wrote about the hijab and capitalism as a fellow for Bitch Media.

As Muslim women are increasingly embraced in consumer culture, Nazia Kazi, author of the book “Islamophobia, Race, and Global Politics,” said that Muslim men are still regarded as “sexually frustrated, violent, inherently patriarchal figures” — stereotypes that materialize in the ongoing criminalization of Muslim men.

Muslims in the U.S. have been monitored via state-sponsored policing and surveillance, Kazi writes in her book, as well as through “everyday curiosity, concern, and watchfulness.” When it comes to Muslim women, she writes, observation turns into “voyeuristic fascination.”

“Muslim women, specifically those who wear hijab, are a unique source of curiosity and sympathy and bigotry and Islamophobic assumption,” Kazi, an assistant professor at Stockton University, told The Intercept.

That bigotry has increased in the Trump era, when flagrant Islamophobic rhetoric and policies have coincided with a reported increase in discrimination and abuse against Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 17 percent increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents from 2016 to 2017, a trend that continued into 2018. This year alone, there have been numerous reports of hijabis being harassed, verbally abused, pushed in the subway, and assaulted by having their hijabs pulled off.

Kazi called the approach that retail companies have largely taken to address Islamophobia “leveraging hypervisibility,” or harnessing the heightened scrutiny of Muslims to highlight the most exemplary. That has the effect of rendering invisible “just how devastating Islamophobia is for the most marginalized among Muslim women around the world,” she said.

The clothing industry, for example, magnifies visibility of certain Muslim women, while hiding others from public view — those whose labor is exploited in garment factories overseas.

The global production of fast fashion depends on sweatshop labor to bring the latest runway trends to clothing racks. Gap and H&M use factories in Muslim-majority countries that have been accused of gender-based violence and labor abuses. Nike, notorious for its decadeslong dependence on sweatshop labor, also uses factories in predominantly Muslim countries.

“Who will hold them accountable for underpaying, overworking, and harassing their vulnerable employees when the same companies are being lauded for being inclusive and liberal?” Aftab said.

Muslims who applaud the commercialization of the hijab should be cognizant of the exploitation of Muslim garment workers, as well as how large corporations are taking away from small, Muslim-owned businesses, said Katebi, who organizes a sewing cooperative for refugee women in Chicago. That includes companies like Haute Hijab and Sukoon Active, which have been making modest clothing and activewear for years.

Increasing Muslim representation is not just an ineffective strategy for fighting Islamophobia, but a dangerous one, Kazi said, as it misunderstands Islamophobia as an individual bias, rather than a structural apparatus.

“The hypervisibility of Muslims is undeniably linked to the political climate,” she said. “So while the public is casting this gaze over Muslims in the U.S., what falls out of the conversation are political histories, regional inequality, the histories of white supremacy and race.”

Muslim women are at the forefront of pushing such issues into mainstream political discourse, particularly in electoral politics and grassroots organizing. Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, who next month will become the first Muslim women in Congress, ran on progressive platforms that included a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All,” and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Katebi described her vision for systemic change: those who make art and those who do politics partnering with impacted communities to secure material gains. “Our liberation,” she said, “is not going to come from multibillion-dollar, capitalist corporations headed by white people.”

Freedom and justice, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, will be won at the polls and on the ground — not in the checkout aisle.

The post Marketing the Muslim Woman: Hijabs and Modest Fashion Are the New Corporate Trend in the Trump Era appeared first on The Intercept.

Researchers also have a warning for renewable energy evangelists and techno-optimists, concluding that it is a fantasy to believe that the economy can grow at a torrid pace — as measured by GDP — while simultaneously reducing or eliminating greenhouse gas.

That’s because the “P” in GDP — production — necessarily requires energy inputs, which means more burning of fossil fuels unless and until the shift is fully made toward clean energy. That’s not a case for despair, though: By allocating less than half of what world governments spend annually on fossil fuel subsidies to mitigation efforts, we can prevent the above dystopia and improve millions of lives in the process — especially compared to what’s coming our way if we don’t.

As COP24 gets underway in Poland, the Institute for New Economic Thinking has released two working papers from prominent economists backing up the increasingly dire warnings from climate scientists. In “Economic Growth and Carbon Emissions,” Enno Schröeder and Servaas Storm find empirical evidence that economies can’t continue to grow their GDPs exponentially and bring down carbon emissions in line with the targets set in the Paris Agreement. In moving toward the latter, though, world governments can “improve overall welfare by redistributing income (and growth) between countries and income groups,” the authors told me via email.

In order to grapple with the harsh reality of economic growth and climate change, Schröeder and Storm argue, governments need new ways of measuring welfare and well-being that don’t rely on GDP growth. (Bhutan, for instance, measures “Gross National Happiness,” but there are other options as well.)

Looking at data from the International Energy Association and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development between 1971 and 2015, they dismantle a popular notion that carbon emissions can be “decoupled” from economic growth. Traditionally the two have moved together; greater wealth leads to greater energy use and fossil fuel consumption, and economic downturns reduce both. Yet studies in the last few years — including by the World Resources Institute — have appeared to indicate that a number of countries, mostly in the Global North, managed to grow their GDP while simultaneously limiting emissions. Hailing similar results, former U.S. President Barack Obama wrote in a 2017 Science piece that “this ‘decoupling’ of energy sector emissions and economic growth should put to rest the argument that combating climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”

While Schröeder and Storm find the decoupling story to be the case for territorially bounded production emissions — those generated within a country’s borders — including consumption-based emissions paints a very different picture. “Even if we find evidence suggesting a decoupling of production-based CO2 emissions and growth, consumption-based CO2 emissions are monotonically increasing with per capita GDP,” they write. “Faster growth will either mean emission targets will not be met (at all), or alternatively will require even faster technological progress and structural change,” the authors elaborated by email.

“In the global climate talks, people avoid talking about the issue how much global economic growth is possible or consistent with these 1.5 degrees emission pathways. It is the hot potato no one dares to touch,” they added.

In a similar vein, Gregor Semieniuk, Lance Taylor, and Armon Rezai wrote “The Inconvenient Truth about Climate Change and the Economy,” using a macroeconomic model to argue that while theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios largely assume steady economic growth, they undercount potential emissions by ignoring the historic relationship between higher GDP and increased energy usage, which — in a fossil fuel-based energy system — means more greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere. “If world output goes up to 3 percent per capita, energy use would go up by 3 percent per capita, and they didn’t get a hold of that,” Taylor said of the IPCC modeling.

Still, authors of both papers were clear that stymying GDP growth would not entail reducing quality of life. “This does not mean an across-the-board reduction in standards of living,” Schröeder and Storm added. While GDP growth has traditionally been seen as a proxy by economists for economic prosperity, the papers each point out that it’s a poor metric, calling out the “rather loose link between GDP and welfare or standards of living.”

“The big investments in mitigation have the potential to create new, meaningful and decently paid jobs, reducing unemployment and underemployment,” they said in their email. “There are many opportunities for increasing standards of living if only one cares to look beyond GDP.”

Such a scale of mitigation — in line with the Paris Agreement — is entirely possible, if politically treacherous. “It is still possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees (or 2 degrees),” Storm and Schröeder told me. “There is still time to act (12 years or a bit longer); engineers and earth systems scientists tell us that technical solutions exist, people are creative and can make progress under stress. As Will Steffen put it” — referencing an interview the scientist gave to The Intercept — “a wartime-like effort could work.”

Taylor and company assert that spending 6 percent of global GDP on mitigation — the equivalent of around $2.24 trillion each year on mitigation efforts — could limit emissions to just the level already baked in, around 1.3 degrees. As they point out, in “absolute terms, these outlays are large but comparable to other forms of spending.” Referencing a 2017 study from the International Monetary Fund, for instance, direct and indirect subsidies to fossil fuel producers already amount to $5.3 trillion per year. Mind, the IMF calculations cast a wide net in terms of what they consider a subsidy, including the unpaid social cost of carbon and local health impacts. Such spending is also roughly comparable with what world governments spend on the military ($1.74 trillion), itself — in the case of the U.S. — a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.

That spending, they write, will be “large but lying within the range of macroeconomically feasible reallocations,” in line with the fact that there is “no geophysical reason we can’t limit the global temperature to 1.5-degree,” per the co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 3, Jim Skea. Taylor says the results of his team’s research are “guardedly optimistic,” cautioning that “there are possibilities, but the window is closing.”

As the the IPCC report and National Climate Assessment have made uncomfortably obvious in recent weeks, doing nothing could be leagues more disastrous, with financial losses potentially doubling those caused by the Great Recession by 2100. Taylor and his colleagues map out what they call a “causal loop” that includes the historical tie (“positive feedback”) between rising greenhouse gas emissions and rising economic productivity, as well as a looming negative feedback whereby those rising emissions trigger a global depression if allowed to continue unchecked. “Net emissions go up for nearly a century and then trail off in the wake of an output collapse,” researchers find. Taylor noted the risk that a crescendo of climate impacts threatens a “real destruction of physical capital. … Suppose you get a Category 5 hurricane going up the Houston ship channel. That will hit output directly.”

“Complications notwithstanding,” he and his co-authors conclude, “unless this loop is severed, it will inevitably lead to worldwide economic collapse.”

The narrative put forth in these two papers stakes out a kind of middle ground between the doomsday accounts that crop up around new climate reports and the techno-optimism common among some climate advocates — that the renewable energy revolution is already upon us, or at least waiting to be unleashed by a few clever market tweaks. “In the end,” former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Der Spiegel, “capitalism is a wonderful thing. It really does drive people to do what’s in their own interest. And that is often good with regard to climate change.”

Schröeder and Storm — along with advocates of the Green New Deal, which is being backed by a growing number of politicians and civil society groups in the U.S. — warn against both. “[O]ptimism can lead to self-deception: we make plans and show good intentions, but in actual fact do not (yet) act. But then clearly one can be pessimist as well, when looking at the limited achievements in decarbonization in the past, at the still low level of penetration of renewable energy in the global energy mix and at the lack of political support and political will to decisively act,” they write, referencing the dangers of falling into what economist Albert Hirschman called the “‘futility trope’ — the idea that policy will not work, because it is too late or the problem is too big.”

The stakes are indeed dire, and barring an enormous, economy-wide course correction, the decades ahead could be every bit as miserable as the most doomsday scenarios suggest — and that the latest IPCC report and National Climate Assessment spell out in painfully clear detail. But the corrective that the Green New Deal and related efforts asserts is that that fate is hardly inevitable — and eminently avoidable. It won’t be easy, but it’ll certainly be easier in the long run than failing to act at the scale of the problem.

The post Unhinged GDP Growth Could Actually Destroy the Economy, Economists Find appeared first on The Intercept.

Since 2010, a group called No Labels has embodied a particular approach to politics and policy in Washington, D.C.; it’s one that insists the real problems are partisanship, divisiveness, and incivility, and that if only sensible centrists from both parties could be brought together under the right conditions, the halcyon days of the past will return.

Yet curiously, the sensible solutions so often proposed by No Labels and its ilk have an uncanny likelihood of benefiting one particular element of our nation’s political economy: the superrich, or more precisely, the finance industry.

A new report on Monday from the Daily Beast adds a sweeping array of details to what many long knew or suspected about this movement, which allegedly wants to remain above the fray: It’s funded by the barons of hedge funds and private equity.

Far from remaining aloof from politics, No Labels has consistently been swooping down into the fray in recent years on behalf of Republicans and conservative Democrats. The House Problem Solvers Caucus, which was produced and is funded by No Labels, made headlines recently in its quest to hold up Nancy Pelosi’s speakership bid unless she supported their “Break the Gridlock” rule changes.

But the full suite of reforms would have just ended up benefiting the GOP; after all, it’s not like the Problem Solvers Caucus pressed for these rules when Paul Ryan was up for the position. Selectively tying the hands of Democratic leadership in the wake of a Democratic rout in the midterms isn’t balanced governance, it simply helps the right.

While it was easy to see through the Problem Solvers Caucus’s (failed) ploy to undermine Pelosi, last week saw another effort to push conservative ideology under the guise of pragmatic bipartisanship. A working group consisting of experts from Opportunity America, the Brookings Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute (supposedly liberal- and conservative-leaning counterparts in the think tank world) released a policy report on solutions for the working class. It was touted as a “bipartisan plan of action” developed in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Ostensibly representing the “liberal” side of the working group as one of three Brookings fellows is Bill Galston — one of the co-founders of No Labels and the organization’s most public Democratic face.

In a glowing write-up, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks commended the report’s authors for establishing a “broad left/right agenda that 70 percent of Republicans and Democrats could support” and called for the “return of the chastened establishment.” So what, exactly, are the ideas that the bipartisan working group proposes?

In exchange for rather uncontroversial and moderate policies — like expanding the earned income tax credit for childless workers; making the child and dependent care tax credit refundable; and more funding for career education and training — the working group recommends adding work requirements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and promoting marriage. They have also put forward proposals to “reform unemployment and disability insurance to promote work,” including forcing unemployment insurance beneficiaries to pick up their checks at unemployment offices and cracking down on disability insurance claimants.

Many of these policies are debunked right-wing ideas that have continuously been given the veneer of credibility from the “centrist” think tank establishment. Take, for example, adding work requirements to SNAP. The efficacy of work requirements has long been debunked: When the same conditions were added for welfare recipients in 1996, employment did not increase in the long term. That’s not to mention the fact that most low-income people receiving benefits who can work are already doing so.

Or take the report’s focus on promoting marriage through the “success sequence,” which is the idea that all young people should first get a college degree, then marry, then have children in order to ensure a successful life. Many have long criticized the success sequence because not only is it impossible to enforce, but it doesn’t even make for good policy. (Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project often points out that having multiple incomes in a household is what cuts poverty, not marriage.) As academic critics told The Atlantic, the sequence has mainly been used to push conservative personal responsibility narratives, which are then used to undermine spending on social programs:

Critics of the sequence within academia, like Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, argue that government promotion of marriage doesn’t lead to more marriages. Instead, they say, many sequence enthusiasts want to restigmatize out-of-wedlock births. By doing so, they aim to put the responsibility for poverty on the impoverished just as Krauthammer implied back in the early ‘90s, thus justifying cuts in government support while ignoring the role of late-20th-century American-style capitalism in pushing families into financial insecurity.

It’s possible that these “bipartisan” policies are simply a bad deal, the result of concessions between the working group’s liberals and conservatives. But the report specifically makes sure to point out that their proposals were the result of “more than horse trading” and that they were truly “grounded in common values.” So what, exactly, are these values?

The authors’ shared principles include the “centrality of work,” a “renewal of norms” (mainly the norm that people should work), and more “expectations” from employers to take “voluntary corporate action” to support the working class (an idea that is radical in its delusion). They also vow to “do no harm” — meaning that all their remedies for the working class are budget neutral.

This last point, the adherence to deficit-neutral spending, is certainly something that both sides of the aisle have pushed. But it’s a fearmongering tactic that ends up being used to justify a right-wing agenda of cutting social programs for the poor and working class. As economist Stephanie Kelton explained in the New York Times, the debt and deficit “serve as body armor to politicians who would deny resources to struggling communities or demand cuts to popular programs.” A “centrist” think tank class that refuses to put forward policy ideas that increase spending will only serve to bolster the conservative agenda.

Perhaps the parts of the report that best reveal the veneer of the working group’s bipartisanship are the policies that the authors write off from the start: free college and universal basic income. The first idea, they argue, fails to target the working class and the latter, they say, “devalue[s] work.” Yet there is no similar condemnation of radical right-wing policies — like, say, the $1.5 trillion Trump tax cut for corporations, which the authors merely say is “beyond our remit.” This is despite the fact that the regressive bill is going to deepen inequality between low-income workers and the wealthy, something that should surely be within the purview of a report on the working class.

The Problem Solvers Caucus is the most noxious and obvious recent example of pragmatic bipartisanship that ends up benefiting the GOP. But think tanks like the Brookings Institution have long given credence to conservative policies — which end up being disastrous for the working class — under the guise of working across the aisle.

Elite think tanks fail to come up with genuinely useful bipartisan proposals because their definition of the partisans involved only includes other elites within their own circles. Indeed, there is overlap between the Daily Beast’s list of donors to No Labels and the donors that the Brookings Institution named on its 2018 annual report: Howard Marks, co-founder and co-chair of Oaktree Capital Management, is listed as having given between $100,000 and $249,999 to the think tank; and the foundation of Andrew Tisch, co-chair of Loews Corp, gave between $250,000 and $499,999. The Walton Family Foundation gives to Brookings, while Christy Ruth Walton is a donor to No Labels.

But if the benchmark for a bipartisan policy is that a significant chunk of both parties, along with independents, support it, No Labels and its fellow travelers would have a lot more ideas to work with if they looked at the preferences of voters rather than politicians. All of a sudden, policies they’d written off — free public college, “Medicare for All,” and even a jobs guarantee — reveal themselves as genuinely bipartisan solutions to genuinely intractable problems.

That it apparently didn’t occur to Brookings or American Enterprise Institute to prioritize the interests of people over those of the elite tells you precisely who these so-called centrist solutions are intended to benefit. If you need even more precision, here they are specifically, courtesy of the Daily Beast:

• Josh Bekenstein, CEO of Bain Capital, who gave $250,000 in 2015.

 

• John Douglas Arnold, head of Centaurus Advisors, LLC, who gave $200,000 in 2017.

 

• John Catsimatidis, president, chairman, and CEO of Gristedes Foods, who gave $100,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Douglas Durst, president of the Durst Organization, who gave $10,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Carl Ferenbach, co-founder of Berkshire Partners LLC, who gave $20,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Former Rep. James Charles “Jim” Greenwood (R-PA), who gave $15,000 in 2016.

 

• Kerry Healey, former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, who have $25,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• George Hume, president and chief executive of Basic American Foods, who gave $25,000 in 2017.

 

• Ted Kellner, a Milwaukee business executive, who gave $20,000 in 2017.

 

• Franklin Pitch Johnson, Silicon Valley venture-capital pioneer, who gave $25,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Howard Marks, co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, who gave $125,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Nelson Peltz, founding partner of Trian Fund Management, who gave $500,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Marc J. Rowan, co-founder of the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, who gave $150,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Andrew Tisch, co-chairman of Loews Corp., who gave $62,500 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

 

• Christy Ruth Walton, a Walmart heiress, who gave $25,000 in 2017.

 

• Eric Zinterhofer, founding partner of Searchlight Capital Partners, who gave $50,000 in 2016 and was labeled a “reoccuring donor.”

The post Here’s a Better Name for No Labels: Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2018/12/04/no-labels-funding-private-equity/feed/ 0 225654 Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., left, and former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., R-Utah, co-chairs of No Labels, arrive for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on June 17, 2015. Donald Trump,Tom Reed,Josh Gottheimer Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., left, and Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., right, co-chairs of the House Problem Solvers Caucus, listen as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting at the White House on Sept. 13, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/24/reality-winner-prison-eating-disorder/ https://theintercept.com/2018/11/24/reality-winner-prison-eating-disorder/#respond Sat, 24 Nov 2018 13:00:57 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=218397 The NSA whistleblower is one of a countless number of incarcerated people living with mental illness.

The post Reality Winner Battles an Eating Disorder Behind Bars appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> In August, Reality Winner stood before a federal judge, ready to accept a plea bargain of more than five years in prison for sharing classified information with journalists. Surrounded by dozens of reporters, attorneys, and activists who have followed her case, the whistleblower told the court something deeply personal that she had not even shared with her closest family members before her arrest.

Winner struggles with depression and bulimia.

“I try to be optimistic, and then they just surprise me and I’m just like, I signed a plea deal to get help.”

Weeks later, Winner made a distressed phone call from a crowded Oklahoma county jail that she called a “filthy warehouse.” She questioned why she gave up her right to a trial in a bid for stability and medical treatment, even if it was in prison, where her bulimia has gotten more severe. “I keep saying it can’t get worse,” Winner said, through tears. “I try to be optimistic, and then they just surprise me and I’m just like, I signed a plea deal to get help.”

In the run-up to arriving at her final prison assignment, Winner spent 16 months in various jails — bouncing between county jails across three states, where she was at times held in isolation or not allowed to go outside for weeks, as she was transferred to prison after sentencing. In mid-October, she was finally transferred to a federal medical center in Fort Worth, Texas, a facility designed for female inmates with special mental health or medical needs, where she will serve the remainder of her time.

Winner’s sentence is the longest of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists’ sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for “mishandling classified information.”

With her move to prison, Winner’s determination to seek treatment will likely be crucial in an institution known for perpetuating, rather than alleviating, mental illness.

Of the approximately 2.3 million incarcerated people in the U.S., the former National Security Agency contractor is among the many who languish behind bars despite needing intensive medical care. Though the Bureau of Prison Statistics does not collect data on inmates diagnosed with eating disorders, a 2017 report from the agency said that incarcerated people showed “serious psychological distress” three to five times more, as a percentage, than the general U.S. population. Incarcerated women are acutely affected: Two-thirds of those included in the survey by the Bureau of Prison Statistics reported a history of mental health problems.

Winner’s record sentence means that her young adulthood will be spent between two institutions where her body has been subject to frequent scrutiny that few ordinary citizens face: the military and prison. But her eating disorder began well before her secretive work in the NSA and the U.S. drone program, and the illness was not an unfamiliar one in her household. Being thrust into the public sphere by the political nature of her high-profile arrest turned what had been a private struggle with mental illness into something Winner would have to recount to friends and strangers alike in an increasingly desperate attempt to seek relief.

Bulimia is an illness in which individuals binge on food and then engage in compensatory actions, such as excessive exercise or regurgitation. “The disorder is a constant struggle for me and even now is the most pressing internal challenge in my day-to-day survival,” Winner told the federal judge in August. She said that without proper treatment, she fears that bulimia could become her “only coping mechanism” to handle the stress of incarceration.

Eating disorders are sometimes misunderstood as a conscious decision or picky eating, said Sondra Kronberg, a clinical nutrition therapist in Long Island, New York, when in fact they can have lethal consequences. “It is the mental disorder with the highest rate of death and mortality,” said Kronberg, who is also a spokesperson for the National Eating Disorders Association.

Winner’s older sister Brittany Winner said that eating disorders and a focus on thinness “runs in the family.” For Reality, the condition collided with many of the daily hardships of the American carceral state, such as the strip searches that she was subjected to when she left for court hearings, which she dreaded.

“It’s hard for people who haven’t obsessed over eating to understand what that is like.”

Because she keeps a vegan diet, Winner experienced severe anxiety in jail about finding appropriate foods, something that earns little sympathy from those who see it as a choice to follow a fad, her sister said. “It’s hard for people who haven’t obsessed over eating to understand what that is like,” Brittany Winner said.

Reality Winner’s friends and family describe her as a woman whose professional and personal lives have a common thread of idealism and high self-expectations, traits she has maintained even while incarcerated. A friend from her CrossFit gym challenged Winner to do 5,000 pushups in a month — which she finished in 19 days, while in jail. Winner’s environmentalism and opposition to animal cruelty motivate her strict vegan diet, elusive in jail where — only thanks to the generosity of a church — she ate fresh fruit and vegetables about once a month.

“It is a priority for her that she eats clean and that she has a clean conscience,” said Brittany Winner. “I think it’s about doing the best that she can.”

The downturn in Reality Winner’s health while in custody was the second chapter of her illness. When Billie Winner-Davis pulled Winner’s medical records after her arrest, she learned that her daughter had been diagnosed with bulimia years before, in her early 20s, while working on a drone program at Fort Meade, Maryland. At the time, Winner worked 12-hour days translating the intercepted communications of terror suspects; she would eventually receive a commendation for aiding in “600 enemies killed in action.”

During that time, Winner shared vague but dark worries with her mother about the anxiety she felt over her work.

“You really hope that all of your information is correct when you are watching a screen and you watch somebody go poof,” Winner-Davis recalled of her daughter’s concerns.

The prevalence of eating disorders in the military doesn’t come as a surprise. A Defense Department study published in June notes that “several factors could increase risk” of military personnel developing the disorders, such as regimented lifestyles and strict regulations on personal fitness and weight, which include measuring waistlines as part of fitness tests. The already “relatively high rates of mental health disorders” among service personnel, combined with exposure to trauma, also put them at increased risk for eating disorders, the report added.

An estimated 5 to 8 percent of servicewomen are diagnosed with an eating disorder, an incidence rate 11 times that of their male counterparts, according to the report. The study called for additional research on the topic, as women make up a “rapidly” growing demographic in the armed forces.

Winner went from being an low-profile veteran to a newsworthy name when she was arrested by federal authorities. She was widely reported as the source for a June 2017 article in The Intercept on an NSA report detailing phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials. The Intercept received the document anonymously; The Intercept’s parent company First Look Media has contributed to Winner’s legal fund through the Press Freedom Defense Fund since learning of her arrest.

The secretive nature of her former employment followed Winner as she went from being a trusted security state insider to incarceration while subjected to a gag order. She was denied bail after government attorneys claimed that she was a flight risk capable of harming the country should she await trial outside prison. The government argued that she held “very valuable information in her head,” which she could leak if released. By making that argument — and winning with it — the government ensured that this nonviolent offender would be held in a small county jail for well over a year before any treatment for her eating disorder could happen.

Winner tried her best to maintain her plant-based diet during the months of confinement before she had been found guilty of a crime. She often made meals of peanut butter and chips. On other days, she “celebrated” getting black-eyed peas or white potatoes, according to Winner-Davis, while others in detention ate biscuits and sausages.

Her cellmates in Lincoln County Jail, the small Georgia prison where Winner spent her first 15 months behind bars, would watch in awe as she used a table in their common area like a StairMaster for up to two hours. Winner was allowed outside on most days for a mere 30 minutes, which she spent running barefoot in circles around the small jail yard. Diet and exercise, her mother said, are her mechanisms to curb “self-harming” tendencies. (Asked about Winner’s diet while in custody, the Lincoln County Jail referred The Intercept to the U.S. Marshals Service. Lynzey Donahue, a U.S. Marshals spokesperson, declined to comment.)

“One doesn’t choose to have an eating disorder. They can choose what to do to get better. Obviously, there’s not a lot of choice around that in prison.”

Treatment for an eating disorder is more involved than meeting a patient’s criteria for what they will eat, and appropriate treatment would likely address whether insistence on dietary restrictions is part of one’s eating disorder, said Kronberg, the therapist. However, the first part of treatment for an illness that is “serious and deadly,” she said, is getting well-nourished.

“One doesn’t choose to have an eating disorder. They can choose what to do to get better,” said Kronberg. “Obviously, there’s not a lot of choice around that in prison.”

Whether a prisoner eats a nutritious meal — or even three daily — is the luck of the draw. The infamous former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio bragged that he served meals just twice a day. On the other hand, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy recently touted his move to spend more on prison food — from a daily average of $2.95 per person to $3.25 — as both a practical and moral choice. In California, the state Senate faced little opposition to a new bill that guarantees prisoners plant-based diets; it passed unanimously in May.

These disparities persist despite incarcerated people’s legal rights to adequate, nutritionally balanced meals, said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project. For example, a federal law passed in 2000 provides strong protections for incarcerated people who seek special meals for religious reasons. Nonetheless, Fathi said he is “amazed” by how many facilities will “fight tooth and nail” to resist offering common diets, such as halal, kosher, or vegetarian.

“The reality is you are never going to save significant amounts of money by cutting corners on food,” he said. “If you want to save money on incarceration, the only way to do that is to lock up fewer people.”

Winner’s transfer to the Fort Worth federal medical facility is already bringing her some relief, said Winner-Davis. The Bureau of Prisons told The Intercept in an email that its units serve “no-flesh” entrees at every meal, fresh fruits daily, and fresh vegetables “frequently.” Winner-Davis said her daughter has seen a psychologist and is exercising regularly.

Whether Winner will continue to rely on her own ad hoc methods to treat her bulimia or start a new chapter under reliable professional care will become clearer over the coming months. Winner, who will soon turn 27 in prison, will begin to discover if her plea deal with the government brings her the relief she bargained for.

“It just shouldn’t be this hard to just survive the system,” Winner said.

The post Reality Winner Battles an Eating Disorder Behind Bars appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2018/11/24/reality-winner-prison-eating-disorder/feed/ 0 218397 https://theintercept.com/2018/08/24/tom-carper-delaware-primary-environment/ https://theintercept.com/2018/08/24/tom-carper-delaware-primary-environment/#respond Fri, 24 Aug 2018 19:39:29 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=206744 Carper, running for re-election against Kerri Harris, is using his environmental record to prove his progressive bona fides. But it makes the opposite case.

The post Tom Carper Touts His Environmental Record, but a Closer Look Suggests It’s Not So Clean appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> Tom Carper is known as one of the most conservative blue-state Democrats in the Senate — a reliable hawk with close ties to the finance, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries and a voting record to match. His list of legislative accomplishments includes approving the Iraq War, a scale-back of Dodd-Frank’s post-2008 era regulations on the financial sector, and a consistent, 40-year bank-friendly record.

Now facing a challenge from his left in a Democratic primary — Air Force veteran and community organizer Kerri Evelyn Harris — he’s eager to tout his progressive credentials. Carper’s weapon of choice? His environmental record.

As Carper rose through the ranks of the Senate, his decision to prioritize his climb up the ladder of the Environment and Public Works Committee over his position on the Banking Committee has left him with the institutional support of national environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters, or LCV, and the National Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.

In narration over dramatic music, a recent ad from the Carper campaign, titled “Fierce,” highlights the Trump administration’s push to expand offshore drilling. “Sen. Tom Carper has a simple message for Trump,” a female narrator intones, adding Carper’s response: “Over my dead body.”

That message may not be so simple after all. While Carper has opposed offshore drilling in Delaware, he’s voted four separate times in support of drilling off the coast of Virginia (2007), on the Outer Continental Shelf (2003), and in the Gulf of Mexico (2001, 2006).

Donald Trump’s support for offshore drilling, meanwhile, didn’t stop Carper from voting to confirm Rick Perry to be head of the Department of Energy. (Carper did oppose Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.)

He also voted repeatedly in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. (He later stated that he only backed the project because Republicans had promised to in turn deliver their support for geothermal and offshore wind capacity in exchange, and said that he pulled his backing once they failed to deliver.)

This Senate term alone, Carper has accepted $163,468 from energy and natural resources companies, along with $73,510 from agribusiness corporations. That’s more than his opponent, Harris, has raised in total.

A spokesperson for the Carper campaign declined to comment as to whether he had spoken with these donors about his votes on issues that impact their industries, or whether he had changed his position on offshore drilling since his earlier votes in favor of the practice.

Like more than 1,000 candidates this cycle, Harris has sworn off donations from fossil fuel companies, and corporate donations more generally. “Regardless of where you look with his policy decisions, we are seeing that his policies reflect his allegiance to his donors,” Harris told me by phone. “It’s not just Senator Carper. The majority of Congress has come to the belief that in order to get elected at that level, you have to accept funds from large corporations. And when the choice is between the people and corporations, they choose the corporations.”

Asked about his record on offshore drilling, Harris said Carper is a “’not in my backyard’ kind of person. He doesn’t seem to realize,” she added, “that we have one planet, and we’re affected by everything that happens negatively to this planet. When we’re looking to keep below 2 degrees Celsius of warming — that’s all we have to do to devastate our earth — there is no room for saying ‘not in my backyard,’ but it’s OK over there.”

As Harris alluded to, when it comes to carbon emissions, the planet is indifferent as to whether they originate in Virginia or China or Delaware — one of the lowest-lying states in the union. According to a 2015 analysis by Oil Change International, fully developing just the world’s already-known oil reserves would be nearly enough to push the United States past the 1.5 degree warming target outlined in the Paris Agreement. Harris supports a Green New Deal involving massive investment in sustainable infrastructure, and transitioning the U.S. off coal, oil, and gas by mid-century.

How strong environmental protections are in Delaware also hinges on precisely whose backyard we’re talking about. A 2017 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the industrial corridor in the north of the state, where much of Delaware’s black and Latino population lives, health risks from pollutants are much greater.

While a spokesperson for Carper reiterated his commitment to expanding renewable energy and curbing carbon dioxide emissions, calling climate change “the greatest environmental threat of the 21st century,” she declined to comment as to whether Carper believes that the U.S. should transition off of fossil fuels.

Still, the League of Conservation Voters waded into the Democratic primary to hand Carper their endorsement. Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president of government affairs, told me that Harris did not seek her group’s endorsement, and that the idea of endorsing Carper had been floated long before she entered the race “because he is an environmental leader who has done has done so much to fight back against Donald Trump and Scott Pruitt’s myriad assaults on the environment and public health.”

Harris, she noted, also began to look like a more viable contender thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset win in New York in late June. That said, the LCV endorsement was announced on July 17, several weeks after Ocasio-Cortez’s election and endorsement of Harris. Asked whether candidates’ campaign contributions are considered in deciding on criteria for the endorsement process, Sittenfeld said that while the organization has been having conversations on the subject, “to date we have not made that a dealbreaker for us,” and that they instead focus largely on the candidates’ records. The Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund endorsed Carper as well, in January.



Insurgent, left-leaning candidates haven’t fared well with endorsements from green groups overall, which in several cases have backed the establishment opponents of more progressive candidates who — like Harris — have sworn off donations from fossil fuel companies and run on ambitious climate and environmental platforms. The Sierra Club in Michigan backed Gretchen Whitmer against Abdul El-Sayed — who ran on a detailed environmental justice plan — in that state’s gubernatorial primary. In New York, the Sierra Club backed incumbent Joe Crowley against Ocasio-Cortez, whose platform includes support for a Green New Deal and transitioning entirely off fossil fuels by 2035. The Sierra Club has not waded into the Delaware Senate primary.

Neither has Climate Hawks Vote, a more progressive environmental group. “Carper has been good about traditional old school pollution even though his climate record is decidedly more miKXLed,” wrote political director R.L. Miller in an email, making a reference to his support of the Keystone XL pipeline, and adding that the group “almost never” endorses a candidate if they won’t pledge to reject fossil fuel money.

The Sierra Club is agnostic on the question of campaign contributions. “When we consider supporting candidates, we look at their record as a whole from where they stand on protecting our lands and wildlife to stopping toxic trade deals and advancing clean energy to tackle the climate crisis,” Sierra Club National Political Director Ariel Hayes said via email. “We have no litmus test — we have to weigh the positive and the negative in each specific instance in order to determine who is best positioned in the long run to work alongside us to protect the environment, climate and public health.”

Asked about how LCV decides to weigh into primaries, Sittenfeld said that “when we think about getting involved in a primary, we historically have a high bar for doing so. In general, we look for where is there a really clear material difference between the candidates who are running.”

Decisions on endorsements are made at the national level by LCV’s national political committee after candidates fill out a questionnaire on a range of issues, from conservation to voting rights. After an endorsement is decided on, the group will send out a press release and support the campaign on its social media sites, as well as making a PAC contribution; for this cycle, LCV is Carper’s largest non-corporate donor. Depending on the race, they’ll also recruit volunteers to knock doors and phone bank for LCV-endorsed candidates, although Sittenfeld said that was “not happening” in the primary.

Unlike LCV endorsements, most Sierra Club endorsements happen mainly at the state level. “Our endorsements originate from the ground up. The process differs between federal and state specific races, but in both cases, it is driven from the grassroots level up. We also do not endorse in every race,” Hayes said.

Sittenfeld noted, as well, that LCV communicates regularly with Carper on a number of issues — as it does with most all of the candidates it supports — and has cultivated its organizational relationship with him mainly since he become the top-ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, or EPW, in 2017. Given his reputation as a centrist, she says, “I think people were really nervous,” but added that LCV has been “extremely pleased” by his willingness to go after the Trump administration “and efficacy in doing so.”

It’s not as if Carper doesn’t boast an impressive set of environmental credentials. As chair of the Senate’s Environment and Public Workers Committee, Carper — alongside Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, helped lead the charge on Capitol Hill to investigate Scott Pruitt’s myriad conflicts of interests and challenge his policy priorities, sending 70 oversight letters to Pruitt from his EPW post. He sparred publicly with Kathleen Hartnett White as she sought to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has been credited with her eventually withdrawing from that nomination process.  In 2002, he introduced one of the first bills to cap greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the Clean Air Planning Act, and has been a reliable proponent since that time of increasing fuel efficiency standards, as well as preserving and extending tax credits for clean energy. Since Trump took office, he’s been one of the loudest voices calling out the administration’s climate and energy policy.

Carper certainly isn’t alone in having a mixed-bag record on environmentalism. Many Democrats — even self-styled climate champions — are in a kind of collective denial about the scale of changes needed to actually take on the climate crisis — and the conflict with polluters that will almost certainly entail. In part because climate change has been such a back-burner issue in American politics — and because Republicans have been so reliably obstinate on the issue — presenting a foil to the GOP isn’t exactly hard. Compared to outright Republican climate denial, proposing tax credits for clean energy and common-sense regulations looks an awful lot like resistance. Compared to the physical realities of climate change, not so much. Of course, incentivizing renewables and pushing for moderate emissions reductions is better than nothing. Yet it’s wildly out of synch with the kinds of changes that science demands — as one researcher put it to me recently, a “wartime footing” involving the rapid decarbonization of the world’s economies.

But it’s not as if there aren’t proposals nearly this ambitious on the table, even in the Senate. Harris has said she would support Merkley’s “100 by 50” Act, to transition the U.S. entirely off fossil fuels by 2050. Carper has not spoken in support of that legislation, and his spokesperson declined to comment when pressed. She also hopes that future climate bills will include plenty of input from the communities that stand to be hardest hit by climate impacts, and give them a seat at the table. “Until we have more voices involved in the environmental justice fight helping drafting that type of legislation, my concern is that in the name of advancing economically, we’re still going to step on communities of color and low-income white people,” she said.

Speaking in favor of placing more stringent regulations on polluters, Harris told The Intercept that “the truth is that a business has one job and that’s to make money. They’re going to cut out any expenses that they can,” she said. “Sometimes it costs you money to be good stewards of the environment. If you’re not told you have to do it, the majority of companies are going to say, ‘Let me make my bottom line work for me and the government will clean up the rest.’ We don’t have time for the government to clean up the rest.”



Carper’s donors may hope he sings a different tune. Among his biggest campaign contributors has been the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant. Blackstone also finances the energy company PBF Holding Company LLC, which opened a refinery in Delaware City earlier this year. At the ribbon cutting ceremony for the facility — which mainly processes crude oil from Latin America — Carper called the reopening of the facility a “huge win for the state of Delaware,” appearing alongside Blackstone President and COO Tony James, who said that “saving this refinery is what private equity is all about.”

Several other banks that have contributed generously to Carper’s campaigns are major financiers of fossil fuel infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including Bank of America, Citibank and JP Morgan Chase — Carper’s biggest donor over the course of his Senate career, having given him $147,279 since 2002.

Carper is also a member of the bipartisan Senate Chicken Caucus, formed at the behest of the National Chicken Caucus to advocate in Congress’s upper house on behalf of the poultry industry — the source of one of Delaware’s longest-running public health crises.

When the town of Blades reported that their drinking water was contaminated in February, state officials were quick to respond, with Gov. John Carney personally delivering water bottles to residents. Carper — along with fellow Democratic Sen. Chris Coons and Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester wrote that “access to safe and clean drinking water is an absolutely essential and basic human necessity, and we are extremely troubled by the situation in Blades.” No such statement came when the residents of Millsboro — an unincorporated, largely African-American town 20 miles south of Blades, where the median income is around $20,000 below the state average — first reported that their groundwater was being contaminated by chemicals sprayed indiscriminately by the chicken manufacturer Mountaire Farms some 20 years ago. Mountaire was also the fifth-largest contributor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Residents and advocates familiar with the situation in Millsboro have likened their situation to a “mini-Flint” and have been attempting to bring attention to the issue for well over a decade. Nitrate levels in the drinking water there are six times the legal limit. State and federal inspectors first found evidence of the pollution in 2003, but very little has been done since.

“Some of the wells are deep enough that it took 30 years to contaminate,” Harris said of the situation in Millsboro, and Sussex County more generally. “At what point did our state and national governments say enough is enough? The hard truth is they still haven’t. We have people dying and being born with birth defects because of the poisoned water we have here.”

Carper has accepted around $20,000 from corporate PACs linked to chicken industry companies, including from the National Chicken Council. Christine Brennan, the spokesperson from Carper’s campaign, declined to comment when asked about the situation in Millsboro.

Though largely silent on what’s happening there, Carper has gone explicitly to bat for the chicken industry at the federal level. This February, he co-sponsored legislation (the Fair Agricultural Reporting Method Act, or FARM Act) to exempt agricultural producers from reporting waste emissions under the federal Superfund law, a move Brennan described as an effort to “provide certainty for chicken farmers regarding EPA’s reporting requirements for animal waste emissions.”

Climate and environmental politics have long had a kind of apolitical sheen to them, of the sort found in corporate greenwashing campaigns, Davos, and vendors dotted around U.N. climate talks. For years, climate issues been siloed off from more traditional venues for left policy like labor and economic justice fights. As Carper’s career helps show, there’s a throughline between his storied alliance with the banking sector and his reticence around embracing a climate agenda. Figuring out that link isn’t overly complicated: Just follow the money.

Given how loudly money talks in Washington and the mounting reality of climate change, you might think that politicians accepting money from the same corporations that are wrecking the planet would be automatic grounds for green groups to turn down their endorsement requests, if not throw their backing behind more progressive opponents. The fate of the planet, after all, depends on it. At least for now, you’d be mistaken.

Top photo: Sen. Tom Carper, D-DE, leaves the weekly Senate Democrats’ policy lunch in the Capitol on June 14, 2016.

The post Tom Carper Touts His Environmental Record, but a Closer Look Suggests It’s Not So Clean appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2018/08/24/tom-carper-delaware-primary-environment/feed/ 0 206744 KERRI Kerri Evelyn Harris, Democratic candidate for the United States Senate from Delaware, prepares to walk in a parade celebrating Delaware City Day in Delaware City, Delaware on July 21, 2018. US-CLIMATE-PROTEST Indigenous leaders and climate activists disrupt business at a Chase Bank branch to protest funding tar sands development and projects like the Keystone XL pipeline, in Seattle, Washington on May 8, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/12/andrew-cuomo-donations-ice/ https://theintercept.com/2018/07/12/andrew-cuomo-donations-ice/#respond Thu, 12 Jul 2018 16:24:39 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=198937 Since 2011, Cuomo has accepted at least $807,483 from luxury landlords who rent space to ICE and Customs and Border Protection, a new report says.

The post Andrew Cuomo’s Biggest Donors Rake in Millions From ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> Andrew Cuomo has a glaring conflict of interest when it comes to the politics of abolishing ICE. Luxury landlords across the state collect millions in rent from the agency — money they have turned around and funneled to Cuomo’s political campaigns, according to a new report by the New York-based watchdog group Public Accountability Initiative.

Cuomo, meanwhile, hasn’t joined other New York politicians — from likely incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to 2020 hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — in calling to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement, instead telling NY1 recently that the agency “should be a bona fide law enforcement organization that prudently and diligently enforces the law.”

Looking largely at publicly available data from the General Services external lease database, PAI researchers have documented extensive financial ties from Cuomo donors and members of his inner circle to ICE and Customs and Border Protection — the main agencies tasked with carrying out America’s increasingly brutal immigration policies. Since his first run for governor in 2011, PAI found that Cuomo has accepted at least $807,483 from companies, individuals, and the relatives of people who rent space to federal immigration authorities, and furnished many of them with positions in state government.

Rob Galbraith, PAI’s senior research analyst, told me by phone, “We saw that a lot of people were investigating the private-sector actors benefiting from immigration policy. We found that there is a significant overlap [between] those actors and the landlords and real estate interests that have close ties to the Cuomo administration.”

Cuomo’s primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon, who has called for abolishing ICE, wrote in an emailed statement that “while its reprehensible that Governor Cuomo has profited from ICE’s existence, it’s hardly surprising. … Many have been bewildered by the Governor’s continued support for ICE as its atrocities mount and so many other New York leaders have called for ICE’s abolition. Now we have an explanation: the Governor won’t call to abolish Trump’s rogue deportation force because his donors don’t want him to.”

In Manhattan, the iconic Starrett-Lehigh Building — co-owned by RXR Realty and Blackstone Group — has for 16 years been home to an ICE Homeland Security Investigation field office, which pays $12.4 million a year to lease part of the sprawling property overlooking the Hudson River, which bills itself as “a place to create, to influence and to succeed.” ICE’s fellow Starrett-Lehigh tenants include period-proof underwear brand Thinx and the offices of Martha Stewart’s multifaceted lifestyle brand.

The agency that handles leasing for federal agencies is the U.S. General Services Administration. Asked about standard procedures for federal agency leasing, GSA Regional Public Affairs officer Alison Kohler said over email that GSA “leases space from private entities when it is the best solution to meet the space requirements of GSA’s federal agency customers.”

In the case of the Starrett-Lehigh Building, GSA — using eminent domain or “condemnation” — relocated federal immigration enforcement offices there after 9/11, when the World Trade Center offices of several agencies that would eventually be consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security were destroyed. “GSA used its condemnation authority for immediate occupancy, and then executed a 10-year lease in November 2002 with renewal options. GSA exercised one option in 2013,” Kohler said.

“The Governor won’t call to abolish Trump’s rogue deportation force because his donors don’t want him to.”

Top executives at both RXR Realty and Blackstone, which acquired its stake in the building in 2015, have close ties to the Governor’s Mansion.

The chair and CEO of RXR Realty is Scott Rechler, whose family has donated at least $613,000 to Cuomo’s various runs for office. In exchange, Cuomo appointed Rechler to the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a post he held from 2011 to 2016. In 2017, Cuomo tapped him again, this time for a seat on the board of the notoriously dysfunctional Metropolitan Transportation Authority that he still holds. A New York Times investigation found that Rechler and several other Cuomo appointees continued to give to the governor after taking their state jobs, despite a 2007 executive order from former Gov. Eliot Spitzer that sought to prohibit such arrangements. On top of his government posts, Rechler is also a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, an influential trade lobby for developers in the city whose other members have also given generously to Cuomo.

In a statement over email, Rechler said, “While I have the utmost respect for the career professionals at the Department of Homeland Security and within ICE, as an American, I do find certain federal policies set by the current Administration relating to immigration, including family separation, to be disturbing and inhumane. It is my hope that we rethink our nation’s approach to immigrants and immigration more broadly.”




Private equity giant Blackstone Group is helmed by Trump booster Stephen Schwarzman, but the company has a bipartisan workforce. Senior Blackstone advisor William Mulrow, who does not work in the company’s Real Estate division, helped form a PAC to raise money for former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s prospective foray into national politics in 1987, and in the early 2000s, served as vice chair and chair of the New York State Democratic Party. In the midst of a lucrative career on Wall Street, he left Blackstone in 2015 to serve as Andrew Cuomo’s secretary and top adviser. He returned to the private equity firm in April 2017 after leaving his job at the governor’s office, and is now chair of Cuomo’s re-election campaign, responsible mainly largely for courting new, big-dollar donors.

Mulrow was featured in a New York Magazine profile of his Wall Street fraternity, Kappa Beta Phi, performing one-half of what author Kevin Roose calls a “bizarre two-man comedy skit,” in which he was “dressed in raggedy, tie-dye clothes to play the part of a liberal radical,” with his counterpart “playing the part of a wealthy baron. They exchanged lines as if staging a debate between the 99 percent and the 1 percent.” In 2012, Cuomo appointed Mulrow as chair of the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the State of New York Mortgage Agency, just after his stint from 2005 to 2011 as a senior executive at Citibank Inc., one of the architects of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Mulrow’s office did not agree to provide a statement on the record.

Upstate in Buffalo, 726 Exchange Street houses offices and a Port of Entry for CBP, which pays $1.42 million each year for the roof over its head to a shell company (an LLC) of Western New York real estate mogul Howard Zemsky’s Larkin Development Group. Zemsky and his wife, Lesley, have given $125,000 to Cuomo. In 2015, Cuomo nominated him to be the CEO of Empire State Development and commissioner of the New York State Department of Economic Development, making a total salary from the state of $1 a year. Kohler says that CBP — via GSA — had a prior lease with the Zemsky-owned LLC, and that GSA then “executed a follow-on lease through the Other than Full and Open Competition procurement method,” as opposed to a competitive bidding process. That lease became effective in 2015.

According to the New York Times, all of Lesley Zemsky’s $95,000 in donations to Cuomo were given after her husband’s appointments. Zemsky himself stopped donating to Cuomo after taking those positions, though that didn’t stop Cuomo from bringing him along to an at least $1,000-a-seat fundraiser for his campaign last summer, attendees to which very likely included executives at companies that Zemsky has the power to award contracts and tax breaks to through his controversial upstate development plans. To fortify the pair’s friendship, Zemsky paid an estimated $5,000 last summer to charter a private plane for Cuomo to and from Buffalo to officiate his daughter Kayla’s wedding. “Obviously, I am not going to ask him to come across the state at taxpayer expense, so I provided transportation,” Zemsky told the New York Daily News.

After publication, Jason Conwall, spokesperson for Empire State Development, emailed the following statement:

The CBP lease dates back more than a dozen years and the location was selected through the General Services Administration’s standard procurement process. The CBP is one of more than 20 tenants in the same building in Larkin Square, an area of Buffalo that has experienced an incredible economic turnaround because of Mr. Zemsky’s redevelopment efforts. Mr. Zemsky’s record and ethics are beyond reproach, and for the past four years he has served as a public servant for the salary of one dollar. To allege or insinuate any impropriety would be categorically false and irresponsible to print.

On whether Zemsky and Cuomo have spoken about immigration policy, Conwall wrote, “Mr. Zemsky serves as the Governor’s chief economic advisor.”

Another Western New York landlord, Uniland Development, collects $1.95 million per year from ICE and $562,756 from CBP in rent, in Buffalo and Cheektowaga, respectively. Uniland and the family that controls it,  the Montates, have altogether donated at least $39,500 to Cuomo’s campaigns. Both of these properties, GSA writes, were obtained via a competitive bidding process for a federal contract that Uniland won.

The PAI report goes on to list several other ICE and CBP lessors that have given to Cuomo in smaller amounts. Researchers also note that Cuomo attended a $5,000-a-plate fundraiser in a private box at Mets stadium for the lobbying firm Constantinople & Vallone, which represents private prison and immigration detention center contractor GEO Group.

Staff from Cuomo’s offices did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment. A spokesperson for ICE refused to comment on leasing, directing us to submit a FOIA request. A spokesperson from CBP referred us to GSA.





As national attention has gravitated toward the southern border, Cuomo has ramped up his rhetoric around immigration. In a New York Times op-ed, he called the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” and family separation policies “a human tragedy and a threat to our values,” stating that “New York will not remain silent. Our state has always served as a beacon of liberty and opportunity for the world.” He also mentioned his announcement earlier in the week that New York would file a multiagency lawsuit for family reunification.

Cuomo’s critics say he could be doing much more — starting with forsaking his conflicts of interest on the issue. Javier H. Valdés, co-executive director of Make the Road Action, which organizes in immigrant communities around the state, said Cuomo “should return these campaign funds immediately.”

“It’s deeply concerning that while Andrew Cuomo continues to say he stands with immigrants — and even mistakenly claims he is an immigrant and undocumented — that he is also continuing to hold campaign cash from those profiting from ICE and CBP,” referencing a statement the governor made in April.

As governor, Cuomo has very little say over the future of ICE, a federal agency. Valdés and other immigration rights advocates around the state, however, argue that he could help ensure more undocumented New Yorkers stay out of its facilities.

Among the biggest demands from immigrant rights’ groups is for the state to pass legislation allowing undocumented New Yorkers to obtain driver’s licenses — something that 12 other states already do. The dangers of the policy became apparent last month in the case of 35-year-old delivery driver Pablo Villavicencio Calderon. Attempting to deliver a pizza to an Army base at Fort Hamilton, Calderon presented his IDNYC, meant to provide undocumented city residents with a form of identification in dealing with various agencies. Military police at the gates of the base refused to accept the ID and demanded a driver’s license. Calderon didn’t have one and in response, the officer on duty called ICE to take him into custody. He now faces deportation.

“It’s deeply concerning that while Andrew Cuomo continues to say he stands with immigrants … he is also continuing to hold campaign cash from those profiting from ICE and CBP.”

Driving while undocumented presents other dangers, as well. Getting pulled over is often a premise for local law enforcement to call on ICE and trigger deportation proceedings, something that’s all the more likely when a driver can’t get something as simple as a new license plate because they don’t have a license. Unlicensed driving is a particular concern for immigrant communities in rural and suburban areas, where — absent robust public transportation — cars are one of the only ways to access work and schools.

It was former Gov. George Pataki who issued a 2001 executive order to restrict licenses only to New Yorkers who could prove they were in the country legally. Cuomo’s critics argue that he could use the same powers to roll back the decision. “ICE is now routinely using minor traffic violations as justification to tear apart families. Cuomo should restore access to driver’s licenses for all New Yorkers, regardless of status. He has the authority to sign a driver’s licenses executive order today to immediately protect immigrant communities,” Valdés told The Intercept over email.

Make the Road and other groups also argue that Cuomo could leverage more political capital to pass the New York state DREAM Act, which would give undocumented students access to the same financial aid and in-state tuition available to U.S. citizens. He’s added it as a line item to the state’s annual budget in the past, but Republican control over the New York state legislature — thanks to the Independent Democratic Caucus, a group of rogue Democrats who caucus with Republicans — has left the measure as one of many progressive priorities that pass through the Assembly only to languish in the Senate.

For now, the question is whether Cuomo’s donations from ICE and CBP landlords will continue to languish in his campaign’s coffers.

Update: July 12, 2018, 3:10 p.m.
This piece has been updated to include comment from a spokesperson for Empire State Development received after publication.

Top photo: Gov. Andrew Cuomo departs after speaking to the press during the New York Democratic convention at Hofstra University on May 23, 2018 in Hempstead, N.Y.

The post Andrew Cuomo’s Biggest Donors Rake in Millions From ICE appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2018/07/12/andrew-cuomo-donations-ice/feed/ 0 198937 MCALLEN, TX - JUNE 23: A Guatemalan father and his daughter arrives with dozens of other women, men and their children at a bus station following release from Customs and Border Protection on June 23, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. Once families and individuals are released and given a court hearing date they are brought to the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center to rest, clean up, enjoy a meal and to get guidance to their next destination. Before President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that halts the practice of separating families who are seeking asylum, over 2,300 immigrant children had been separated from their parents in the zero-tolerance policy for border crossers (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Former Christie Aide Bridget Kelly Testifies In Bridgegate Trial Scott Rechler, left, leaves after testifying at the Bridgegate trial at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Federal Courthouse on Oct. 20, 2016 in Newark, New Jersey. Immigration ICE Protest Protesters chant slogans outside a Federal court in New York during a demonstration calling for the abolishment of ICE on June 29, 2018. https://theintercept.com/2018/05/27/identity-politics-book-asad-haider/ https://theintercept.com/2018/05/27/identity-politics-book-asad-haider/#respond Sun, 27 May 2018 15:30:20 +0000 https://theintercept.com/?p=189867 A new book, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” grapples with the shifting relationship between personal identity and political action.

The post How Identity Politics Has Divided the Left: An Interview With Asad Haider appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> Identity politics has something for everyone — but not in a good way. In her 2016 election campaign, Hillary Clinton invoked “intersectionality” and “white privilege” as a shallow gesture of allyship to young liberal voters. Richard Spencer and members of the “alt-right” refer to themselves as “identitarians” to mask that they are, in fact, white supremacists. And for some “woke” people, wearing a shirt that says “feminist” and calling out celebrities for being vaguely “problematic” is the extent of political participation.

What was once intended as a revolutionary strategy to take down interlocking oppressions has become a nebulous but charged buzzword co-opted across the political spectrum. A new book, “Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump,” undertakes a rigorous analysis of race politics and the history of race in the United States to grapple with the shifting relationship between personal identity and political action.



In “Mistaken Identity,” Asad Haider argues that contemporary identity politics is a “neutralization of movements against racial oppression” rather than a progression of the grassroots struggle against racism. Haider, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, puts the work of radical black activists and scholars in conversation with his personal experiences with racism and political organizing. He charts out the process through which the revolutionary visions of the black freedom movement — which understood racism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin — have been largely replaced with a narrow and limited understanding of identity.

Identity, he argues, has become abstracted from our material relationships with the state and society, which make it consequential to our lives. So when identity serves as the basis for one’s political beliefs, it manifests in division and moralizing attitudes, instead of facilitating solidarity.

“The framework of identity reduces politics to who you are as an individual and gaining recognition as an individual, rather than your membership in a collectivity and the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure,” Haider writes. “As a result, identity politics paradoxically ends up reinforcing the very norms it set out to criticize.”

The concept of identity politics was originally coined in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a group of black lesbian socialist feminists who recognized the need for their own autonomous politics as they confronted racism in the women’s movement, sexism in the black liberation movement, and class reductionism. Centering how economic, gender, and racial oppression materialized simultaneously in their lives was the key to their emancipatory politics. But their political work didn’t end there. The women of Combahee advocated for building coalitions in solidarity with other progressive groups in order to eradicate all oppression, while foregrounding their own.

By grounding his critique in specific histories and material relations, Haider takes a multi-pronged approach to exploring just how sharply identity politics has veered from its radical roots.

Through his involvement in organizing against tuition hikes and privatization, Haider describes the missteps of movements that falsely separate economic and racial issues into identity-based “white” issues and “POC” issues. His examination of “white privilege” reflects on the development of the white race, codified in 1600s colonial Virginia by the ruling class to justify economic exploitation of Africans as slaves and preclude alliances between African and European laborers following Bacon’s Rebellion.

In his chapter on “passing,” Haider attempts to understand the case of Rachel Dolezal as an example of “the consequences of reducing politics to identity performances.” He examines the work of novelist Philip Roth, as well as the political transformation of poet Amiri Baraka, who embraced black nationalism in the 1970s and later renounced it for Marxist universalism. Finally, Haider explains how Donald Trump’s election was foreshadowed through the rise of neoliberalism in electoral politics decades before. Through the work of British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, he draws careful comparisons to how the U.K.’s Labour Party managed economic crisis and moral panic in the 1970s, which paved the way for Margaret Thatcher to take power.

Haider’s short book concludes with the paradox of rights as the end goal of mass movements. Instead, he calls for a reclaiming of an “insurgent universalism,” in which oppressed groups position themselves as political actors rather than passive victims. At turns fascinating and provocative, “Mistaken Identity” steps back from Twitter fights and think pieces to contextualize debates on identity politics and reconfigure how race informs leftist movements. The Intercept’s interview with Haider has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

Can you walk through how identity politics shifted from a revolutionary political practice to an individualist liberal ideology?

1977 was a historical turning point. First of all, it was a crisis for mass movements, which can be traced back to the civil rights movement — the New Left of the 1960s and black nationalism that came after that. These mass mobilizations and organizations ran up against their own strategic limits, they were confronted with state repression, and so their dynamism was declining. At the same time, there was what Stuart Hall called a “crisis of hegemony,” in which the coordinates of American politics were being totally rearranged — and the same process was happening in Europe — in which the economic crises of the 1970s had led to a total reorganization of the workplace, trade unions were on the defensive, and mass movements were decomposing. And so part of what happened in this period is that the language of identity and fighting against racism got individualized and attached to the individual advancement of a rising black political class and economic elites who were once excluded from the center of American society by racism, but now had a passageway to entry.

I think in the current moment, we lack a political language that can shift from division to solidarity, and that’s something that was a major question for the anti-racist movements from the ’50s to the ’70s, and that’s what the Combahee River Collective was writing about. We don’t have a language about collective struggles that take on issues of racism and can incorporate cross-racial movements. So I think part of the reason that this individualistic kind of identity politics comes up so much on the left among activists who really do want to build movements that challenge the social structure is because we’ve lost that language that came with mass movements, which could allow us to think of the ways to build that solidarity.

You write that “the ideology of race is produced by racism, not the other way around.” What does this mean?

In this book, I don’t talk about “race” in general because we could think about many different historical contexts in which divisions are introduced between groups, which become hierarchical, and some of them may be related to color of skin. But there are examples of that type of group differentiation that isn’t related to color of skin, like the case of the Irish and English colonialism in Ireland in the 13th century, which I refer to in the book. You could look at different examples of plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and you’d have to explain [race] differently because there were not only African slaves, but also “coolies” from India and China.

I talk about a very specific history of race that emerged from forced labor in colonial Virginia in the 17th century. … My argument is that the first racial category that gets produced is that of the white race, in order to exclude African forced laborers from the category that European forced laborers were placed in, which was one in which there was an end of their term of servitude, [as opposed to] the category of slaves, who had no end to their term. The white race was invented, as Theodore Allen said, in the way that the laws changed regarding forced labor, and that’s the beginning of the division of people into racial categories in U.S. history. What racism did in this case was it differentiated between different kinds of economic exploitation and ultimately became a form of social control, which divided the exploited through introducing hierarchies and privileges for some people, which prevented them from seeing a common interest [between European and African migrant forced laborers] and a common antagonism against those who were exploiting them.

Your personal encounters with racism and observations of campus activism are woven throughout the book. How have your own identity and experiences informed your understanding of race?



I always refer to a quote from Stuart Hall, who said that identity is not about returning to your roots, but about coming to terms with your routes. So in that sense, identity is not your essence or what’s inside you or at the foundation of you, but it’s about all the movement that has led to putting you where you are. I can trace my own identity back to my ancestors migrating from Iran to India, and then after the Partition, from India to Pakistan, and from there, my parents to rural Pennsylvania. That’s a story of movement across the globe and at every step, a mixing and mingling that transformed what was moving. My awareness of that has always made me skeptical of making the leap from identity to a particular kind of politics because identity can’t be reduced to one fixed thing, and when you have a politics which does that, it’s a disservice to people and to all of our histories of mixing and traveling and dynamism.

Regarding campus activism, my experience was as a person of color who was radicalized largely by learning about the Black Power movement and Marxism through the Black Power movement. So I never imagined that people would see an incompatibility between them, especially because Marxism was the powerful force that it was in the 20th century, as it was taken up and adapted in the non-Western world. That’s something that’s forgotten or suppressed today. So as a person of color getting involved in social movements, I was getting really dismayed that often, race became the source of division and fragmentation and defeat, instead of being part of a general emancipatory program. It was that frustration that led me to thinking about and writing about what went into this book.

The left is often accused of being “too white” or “too male.” How can the left begin to address internal racial dynamics?

If you have an organization or a movement that is dominated by white men, that is a political and strategic problem. If you treat it as a moral problem, you’re not going to be able to solve it. I think the important thing is to actually be able to change the situation. Anyone who has participated in activism knows that in a meeting, someone may be called out or told to “check their privilege.” There’s an interesting article that came out of the feminist movement by Jo Freeman called “Trashing” — the contemporary equivalent of “trashing” is “calling out.” The funny thing about calling out is that it doesn’t work because it centers all the attention on the white man who engaged in whatever transgression is being morally condemned. It also creates an atmosphere of tension and paranoia so that even people who aren’t white men may feel nervous about speaking because they might say the wrong thing — and get trashed. So it’s a question that people who are involved in organizing have to take seriously, that white men have to take seriously.

There was a principle that the black communist Harry Haywood said was fundamental in organizing during the anti-racist struggles of the 1930s. He said that everybody has to come to terms with their own national position. So white comrades have to oppose white chauvinism, and they have to take a leading role in opposing it. And he said black comrades have to take the leading role in opposing reactionary nationalism, which at the time was Garveyism and the like. He said that with this division of labor, which was part of actual mass movements, you could start to overcome these problems. But then he said later on, when the party dropped their actual campaigns against racism, they started policing each other’s language, and that division of labor was gone, and the problem didn’t get addressed. So that’s something that still holds. White men in movements have to take the lead in trying to overcome those hierarchies that manifest themselves in social interactions, but also people of color have to step up and say, “We don’t accept this division between racial and economic issues, between race and class, and if someone is coming in and trying to say that these issues are all ‘white’ or this is a ‘white movement,’ that’s not true because we’re here and we’re playing a role, and we believe these issues are connected and we can work on them together.”

Can you talk about the ideas behind black nationalism in the 1970s and its limitations? How has black nationalism endured in contemporary U.S. politics?

After 1965, after the civil rights movement had achieved major policy changes, it was unclear where the movement should be headed. Even leading figures in the civil rights movement were thinking that now that legal segregation had been formally undermined, they still had to deal with the fact that most black people were in poverty and that there were de facto structures of exclusion. Martin Luther King, for example, started to get interested in the Poor People’s Campaign, which is what he was working on at the end of his life. But another approach at this point was what some people called “riots” and what others called “urban rebellions” in the northern cities, revolting against the economic control of landlords and white businessmen and so on. In the northern, urban context, black nationalism as a political program was about building alternative institutions, rather than asking for integration into white society.

So there were two things happening. One was black nationalists building parallel institutions, and the other was the overcoming of legal segregation and the rise of a new black political class and economic elites, which had always existed to some extent, but the scale completely changed. And so black nationalist organizations were behind many of the campaigns to have a black mayor in a majority black city. In the case of Amiri Baraka, it was Kenneth Gibson. Part of the reason Baraka turned from black nationalism toward Marxism was the realization that once Gibson was in charge of Newark, politics as usual continued. I think black nationalism had a revolutionary role in its period — it was a very important strategic and political development — but throughout the ’70s, with the ascendance of the black political class and black economic elites, it ran into a contradiction.

Black nationalism became tied to black political and economic elites because it had an ideology of racial unity, and when people were completely excluded from governance and control over their own lives, it made sense for there to be a kind of alliance between these more elite figures and the lower economic strata because they were both confronting racial structures of exclusion. But as the process of incorporation of black elites into the existing political and economic structures continued, those interests were no longer aligned, especially in the 1970s, as politicians at every level were starting to impose austerity on their populations, cutting social programs and so on. It became the black politicians who were doing that, and so the contradictions between the black elite and the majority of black people in cities became very clear. And so what I think persists now is that division between the elites and ordinary working people, and a residual ideology of racial unity that is often used to cover up that class division. That was very much the case with Barack Obama.

How can identity politics be brought back to its radical origins within contemporary political discourse and organizing?

I think we have to be open to understanding that our identities are not foundations for anything; they are unstable, they are multifarious — and that can be unsettling. But we have to find ways to become comfortable with that, and part of how we can do that is by creating new ways of relating to each other, which can come through mass movements. The way we can overcome the fragmentation that identity seems to lead to now is precisely by recognizing what the Combahee River Collective proposed: being able to assert a political autonomy and also being in coalitions. I think that’s very practical. It’s not going to come from having endless arguments on Twitter; it’s something that has to come through political activity. It’s through working on concrete, practical projects in coalition with others. That in itself is a process in which racism is undermined, and white people who are working together with people of color can learn to question their own assumptions and overcome racist impulses.

I’m very inspired by the rapid growth of socialist organizations right now, but I am concerned sometimes that socialism gets equated with some kind of program for economic redistribution that has been the same since the 19th century. Socialists have always been engaged in coalition-building — there was always a principle of internationalism, there was never a fixed conception of the kinds of demands a socialist movement has to put forward. Sometimes a demand that may not seem to be directly related to the redistribution of wealth can be part of coalition-building and mobilizing people. If a socialist organization is at the forefront of a movement against racism — and this was the goal of certain black members of the Communist Party in the ’30s — then people are going to look around and say, “Who’s on our side? It’s these people. When we were dealing with police violence, these were the people, this was the organization that stepped in to help. And this is an organization that is multiracial, and they think that these issues we encounter in our daily lives matter, just as much as any other economic demand might matter.” So socialist organizations also have to be open to experimentation and flexibility in order to pre-empt identity as a source of division and instead, pre-emptively build solidarity.

Can you explain your vision of a universalist political framework?

We have to set aside the kind of universalism that resolves divisions and difficulties in advance by saying that we have some kind of universal foundation, like human nature or materialism like it’s some physical matter, which has nothing to do with materialism as Marx talked about it. That’s not the universalism I’m advocating for because that kind of universalism has historically been caught up with exclusion and domination — like what was put forth by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, which were systematic with slavery, colonialism, and various forms of violence. … My understanding of universalism is when the people and groups that are excluded from this [definition of] universal rise up and claim their autonomy to produce a new kind of universality. It’s not something that pre-exists; it’s a break with the existing state of things. The classic example is the Haitian Revolution, which came after the French Revolution, which pointed out that France still held colonies in which there was slavery, despite whatever was happening there.

We’d be able to see a new universalism if these rigid divisions between so-called identity categories like race and gender and the category of class were overcome in a real, practical movement. If we were able to see organizations emerge and make real, concrete change in which they bridge those gaps — in which it would become impossible to say that “this is a white organization” or “this is a male-dominated organization” — it would necessarily involve challenging economic inequality and the class structures of American society. For a movement to arise, which tackled the fundamental structures of inequality, domination, and exploitation in American society in such a way that identity as a force of division could not exist — that would be a real universal moment.

Top photo: Isaiah Moore, right, argues with counterdemonstrators about race relations during a rally in Coolidge Park on Aug. 17, 2017, in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The post How Identity Politics Has Divided the Left: An Interview With Asad Haider appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2018/05/27/identity-politics-book-asad-haider/feed/ 0 189867 9781786637376-cbe373447986afdac5e0af4862629e5b-1527260222 asad-haider-portrait-1527265549 Asad Haider.