000-tobecategorised

The 3rd of October 2023: the day that changed the lives of more than 80 citizens of India, including mine https://www.adaniwatch.org/the_3rd_of_october_2023_the_day_that_changed_the_lives_of_more_than_80_citizens_of_india_including_mine Paranjoy Guha Thakurta Nov 28, 2023

Among the articles and videos on Adani published by NewsClick are one on how the changes in shipping policies helped the group, another on how rules were tweaked to enable it to become the biggest private operator of airports in India, and yet another on how a judge of the Supreme Court had given a series of rulings in favour of the conglomerate before he retired. For the last-mentioned article in the series of three articles, a ‘gag’ order was issued against this writer, his co-author, and representatives of the portal. Coincidentally, the day the order was issued I had interviewed Australian activist Ben Pennings, who had won a legal battle against Adani in Australia – read Geoff Law’s article on him here...

Among the persons who received unexpected visitors that morning, were not just popular anchors on NewsClick’s YouTube channel, such as Abhisar Sharma, Urmilesh (he uses one name), Bhasha Singh, Aunindyo Chakravarty and Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay (who has written several books, including an unauthorised biography of Prime Minister Narendra Modi).

One of the worst aspects of the police action was that at least 300 personal electronic devices (cellular phones, laptops, hard drives and pen drives) and other belongings (such as passports and property documents) of more than 80 individuals were seized and have remained in the custody of the Special Cell since 3 October. This is a way of depriving journalists of their livelihood. The Supreme Court has asked the Indian government to frame a set of guidelines on seizure of personal electronic devices by the first week of December.

‘It is dangerous all powers are with the agencies

The faux anti-imperialism of denying anti-Uighur atrocities  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/14/the-faux-anti-imperialism-of-denying-anti-uighur 14 May 2021

Why are some Western ‘anti-imperialists’ determined to whitewash China’s well-documented crimes against the Uighurs? the Uighurs are wronged four times over: by China’s oppression, by American imperialist cooptation, by left-wing denialism, and by Muslim leaders’ dereliction.

In contrast to this fickle and self-serving “solidarity” from American political leaders, scholars and human rights organisations have long been consistent in exposing and opposing China’s persecutory policies against the Uighurs, even when conflicting with the American empire’s realpolitik. https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/192000/asa170501992en.pdf ( detention without trial and long prison sentences for Uighurs, Kazakhs and members of other ethnic groups; long prison terms after unfair trials, e.g. those handed down to Uighur prisoners after the demonstrations in Baren county in April 1990; reported extrajudicial killings and detentions after the Baren incident; and the extensive use of the death penalty in Xinjiang.)

For the Trump administration, the Uighur’s plight was yet another card to play in its China-bashing, along with Hong Kong and COVID-19...

The current onslaught against the Uighurs is the continuation of a long history of settler colonisation, political domination, resource extraction, and geopolitical exploitation – now conducted, since 9/11, under the aegis of a “people’s war on terror.”

Far from being a recently-manufactured artefact of American manipulation, as the Grayzone and other denialists suggest, Uighur opposition to Chinese state rule is as old as the imposition of this rule itself. Independent Uighur states were declared in 1865, 1933, and 1944. By reducing the Uighurs to little more than Great Power pawns, with no autonomous politics or liberation aspirations of their own, some “anti-imperialists” reproduce the imperial hegemony they rail against.

(NB by WA university!)Grayzone is propagansappda (on the left fringe); not credible news. It has also consistently denied/white-washed Chinese repression (genocide?) of Uyghur Muslims

Cricket Mata Ki Jai: Jingoism Lost in Ahmedabad on Sunday https://thewire.in/sport/cricket-mata-ki-jai-jingoism-lost-in-ahmedabad-on-sunday That India lost in the final was karmic payback for the BCCI’s sins against the game, and also for the Ahmedabad crowd’s unwillingness to be sporting and civilised...

most cricket fans worldwide are thoroughly sick – fed up, pissed off – about India’s bully-boy dominance of world cricket. I don’t mean sporting dominance, which neutral fans can live with (as was the case with the West Indians of the Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards era, or Brazilian football in the time of Pelé). It’s the wholesale takeover by the BCCI of cricket’s financing, values, and calendar, giving them a grip over the game that is stronger, more ruthless and vice-like, more absolute and remorseless, more self-serving and mercantilist, than that once exercised by the game’s original overlords in England (who might, at some level, have been forgiven their assertion of ownership over cricket because they did, in fact, give us the game).

The BCCI has warped cricket, distorted it, making it so India-centric that other proud nations – some with better pedigrees than India’s – have been reduced to bit-part players, mendicants, petitioners for match-time. Everything is now about India: the crowds, the songs, the scheduling, the pitches, the money