Recent comments in /f/South_Asia

fortmis OP wrote

Reply to How a band of activists helped bring down Sri Lanka's government by fortmis

In June, a few dozen activists started meeting regularly at a seaside tented camp in Colombo for hours-long sessions to think up ways to revive Sri Lanka's flagging protest movement.

The group, which included a Catholic priest, a digital strategist and a popular playwright, succeeded beyond their wildest hopes.

A plan emerged to combine online agitation, meetings with political parties, labour unions and student groups and door-to-door campaigning to get enough people back on the streets for a final push, according to the three attendees.

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crime wrote

Reply to How Britain stole $45 trillion from India and lied about it by topa

Colonialism is truly the greatest fuking scam of all time.

"It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat." Just literally sanctioned and violently enforced grifting.

Not being in/from the UK, to hear that the narrative of their fuckery in India is "well, actually, we LOST money," and that somehow justifies it is beyond absurd. Even if it were true, subjecting ppl to colonial rule isn't overridden by being shitty at managing your economy. Like, to think that the most face-saving narrative they can spin is that they were not only violently repressive, but also bad at money they invented? Goddamm...

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by sadie_killer in How Britain tried to 'erase' India's third gender by An_Old_Big_Tree

The quoted Dr. Hinchy seems to use both terms at times, and she mentions that the law "was used to police a diverse range of gender non-confirming people," so perhaps she was making a distinction between "eunuchs" as defined by law vs. hijra as a specific group. But even if Dr. Hinchy is making such a distinction, it's not clarified anywhere in the article and the author of the article doesn't seem to care.

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sadie_killer wrote

Reply to comment by masque in How Britain tried to 'erase' India's third gender by An_Old_Big_Tree

wow, you weren't joking. i didn't think i would be particularly affected by the term, but that was relentless, i couldn't even get very far into the article.

i don't know much about traditional third genders, but checking wikipedia shows that while a very technical, insensitive read of the definition applies more than i expected, it also says:

In a series of meetings convened between October 2013 and Jan 2014 by the transgender experts committee of India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, hijra and other trans activists asked that the term "eunuch" be discontinued from usage in government documents, as it is not a term with which the communities identify.

anyway, in my opinion this is standard practice for the bbc. they're providing information that reflects negatively on the british empire, so they have to make sure they reproduce any harm that may otherwise be slightly reduced through the acknowledgement of the past.
i don't know if finishing the article would change my assessment, but i doubt it.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Reply to Air Pollution Threatens Displaced Families in Kabul, Afghanistan by n_n

End the war, and use the money spent on missiles and bombs to ensure the financial security of the refugees. This is the only justifiable choice for the USA to make, and yet not one of the candidates for president of USA will even speak this, let alone do it.

The farthest left candidate, Bernard Sanders, voted for the war.

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LostYonder wrote

Reply to India once called Zionism racist. Today it moves to replicate it by An_Old_Big_Tree

Add in there that in the Israelization of India, the Muslim minority is the target. In 2002 in the state of Gujarat, where Modi was then Chief Minister, he orchestrated a pogrom against Muslims that killed more than 1000 innocent people and destroyed entire neighborhoods. In the state of Assam today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims are having their citizenship taken away simply because the borders moved following Partition in 1947. These leaves all the Muslims in Assam as suspicious, leading extremely precarious lives. And now there is Kashmir and the wholesale slaughter and mass imprisonment of Muslims.

India is a living nightmare for its 170 million Muslims - the second largest Muslim population in the world...

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An_Old_Big_Tree OP wrote

Reply to India once called Zionism racist. Today it moves to replicate it by An_Old_Big_Tree

Via Azad Essa. The main points:

  1. A right wing group called the RSS is formed in 1920s. It looks to Hitler and Nazism as its inspiration in 1930s.

  2. A member of the RSS assassinates Gandhi in 1948 and RSS is banned (again)

  3. India votes at the UN for Zionism as racism in 1975.

  4. Modi, a member of the RSS, visits Israel in 2006.

  5. Modi becomes PM of India in 2014 and calls Israel and India kindred spirits.

  6. Modi looks at Israel as example on how to treat minorities, build a supremacist state and annex territory.

  7. Today, India wants to be Israel.

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