On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today's podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India's political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India's parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India's primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as "appeasing" Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India's Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India's megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources: Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam Shah From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard Spodek The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit Shani Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest Sergenti IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAY Segregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria "UNFINISHED BUSINESS" ETHNIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND THE POLITICAL CONTAGION OF PEACE AND CONFLICT IN GUJARAT, Saumitra Jha Adjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul Hasan Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin Deshpande WAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael Lokshin The Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo Thorat Labor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil Mullainathan Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar Bharti Sachar Commission Report, Sachar Commission Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul Novosas Vidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya Iyer For whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/China-Tech.mp3

On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today's podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India's political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India's parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India's primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as "appeasing" Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India's Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India's megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources:Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam ShahFrom Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard SpodekThe Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael BiggsThe Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit ShaniEconomic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest SergentiIMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAYSegregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria"UNFINISHED BUSINESS" ETHNIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND THE POLITICAL CONTAGION OF PEACE AND CONFLICT IN GUJARAT, Saumitra JhaAdjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul HasanPolitical Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin DeshpandeWAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael LokshinThe Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo ThoratLabor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil MullainathanWealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar BhartiSachar Commission Report, Sachar CommissionIntergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul NovosasVidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya IyerFor whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/China-Tech.mp3
The post is Not Mine, but I dont have the source rn

On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today's podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India's political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India's parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India's primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as "appeasing" Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India's Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India's megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources: Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam Shah From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard Spodek The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit Shani Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest Sergenti IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAY Segregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria "UNFINISHED BUSINESS" ETHNIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND THE POLITICAL CONTAGION OF PEACE AND CONFLICT IN GUJARAT, Saumitra Jha Adjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul Hasan Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin Deshpande WAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael Lokshin The Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo Thorat Labor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil Mullainathan Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar Bharti Sachar Commission Report, Sachar Commission Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul Novosas Vidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya Iyer For whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/China-Tech.mp3

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.
As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it
Anticipating the unintended ( arunisnowhere ) This newsletter is really a weekly public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution? Here.

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.
Newlaundry ( rockykol ) They have a bunch of podcast and you should check them out. They have Daily dose for daily news and NL Hafta for weekly news and NL charcha in Hindi. You should check their reports and coverage as well. They are also also highlighting the brands which are sponsoring hate and fake news on TV.
The Quint ( winterpainter11 ) The Big Story discusses about the news which are making the headlines and dissect the story with the views of the expert. And, they have The Big Story in Hindi as well.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.
If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.
The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

Edit- Added Newslaundry, the Quint and Anticipating the unintended.

On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today's podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India's political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India's parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India's primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as "appeasing" Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India's Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India's megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources:Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam ShahFrom Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard SpodekThe Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael BiggsThe Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit ShaniEconomic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest SergentiIMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAYSegregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria"UNFINISHED BUSINESS" ETHNIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND THE POLITICAL CONTAGION OF PEACE AND CONFLICT IN GUJARAT, Saumitra JhaAdjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul HasanPolitical Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin DeshpandeWAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael LokshinThe Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo ThoratLabor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil MullainathanWealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar BhartiSachar Commission Report, Sachar CommissionIntergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul NovosasVidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya IyerFor whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/China-Tech.mp3
The post is Not Mine, but I dont have the source rn

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.

As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.

If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.

The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today's podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India's political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India's parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India's primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as "appeasing" Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India's Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India's megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources: Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam Shah From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad's 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard Spodek The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit Shani Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest Sergenti IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAY Segregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria "UNFINISHED BUSINESS" ETHNIC COMPLEMENTARITIES AND THE POLITICAL CONTAGION OF PEACE AND CONFLICT IN GUJARAT, Saumitra Jha Adjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul Hasan Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin Deshpande WAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael Lokshin The Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo Thorat Labor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil Mullainathan Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar Bharti Sachar Commission Report, Sachar Commission Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul Novosas Vidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya Iyer For whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta
www.wealthofnationspodcast.com https://media.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/s/content.blubrry.com/wealthofnationspodcast/China-Tech.mp3

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.

As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to connect to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.

If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.

The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.

As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to connect to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.

If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.

The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

Susu Swamy is an aasteen ka saanp foreign agent. Did his PhD from Harvard University on a Rockefeller scholarship, under a Nobel Prize winning crypto communist. All he wants is anarchy in the country, so that his best friend's wife could rule again. His recent entrance exam antics have shown that he wants anarchy.

Full transcript of Susu's interaction with the then Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping, in 1981, where in he supports "Hindi Chini bhai bhai" and cements him being a Chinese agent since then

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19810515-it-is-necessary-for-india-and-china-to-work-together-deng-xiaoping-805957-2014-02-24

Excerpts from an article where Hindu Hriday Samrat opposes Ram Mandir in Ayodhya:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1285177585022808065

Full transcript of the speech given by Virat Hindu at Madina Education Center, Hyderabad in 1993, wherein he calls the construction of Ram Mandir, a sin, as underlined in the above tweet. Moreover, he asks Hindus to prove that Prabhu Ram was born in Ayodhya

https://cbkwgl.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/demolition-of-babri-masjid-and-aftermath-speech-by-subramanian-swamy-march-13-madina-education-centre-hyderabad/
A tweet containing article explaining the fall of the 2nd Vajpayee Government in 1999:
https://twitter.com/ThinkersPad/status/1160595325494517761
An excerpt from an interview Susu gave in 1999, after the fall of the 2nd ABV government:
https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1190601065697136640
The latest: https://twitter.com/ind_rajat92/status/1276405495201509379?s=19

Article from 1999 wherein he compares Antonia Maino to Goddess Lakshmi:

https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1285543509114540048
The article itself: https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/ap17swamy.htm
Here's a collection of excellent threads, made by a few people on twitter, exposing Susu for what he is:

An exhaustive collection of various people exposing Swamy

https://twitter.com/barbiernd7/timelines/1240185206109175809
Exposing why the National Herald Case, which Susu and his arselickers keep thumping their chests about is still stuck
https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1239561638245777410?s=19

Exposing his Kailash Mansarovar bubble

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1254631277979975680.html

Exposing Susu's hatred for the LGBT community and RSS during Vajpayee's time as the PM

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1243516552982429699.html
An article for the same thing: https://www.india.com/news/india/section-377-subramanian-swamy-likens-homosexuality-to-genetic-disorder-says-gay-sex-will-lead-to-spreading-of-hiv-3277619/

Exposing his "Maine Ram Setu bachaya, Congress ne explosives laga diye the todne ke liye"

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241754886582263809.html

His friendship with Genocidal maniac Rajiv Gandhi and his relations with Antonia Maino

https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1239213880351522818

Part of an interview to Vinod Dua, yes that Vinod Dua criticising the same BJP with which he merged his farce of a party in 2013

https://twitter.com/princegdstatus/1168531246655385600

On Susu's connection with Saudi Arabian Reporter (CIA-Agent) Khasoghi

https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1055684533671116800

Excerpts from an interview where Susu opposes India's Nuclear Bombs and wants India to defend Porkistan

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1281670388590600192

Excerpt from an interview to presstitute Quint wherein he tries his best to demean the BJP, even though he is a BJP RS MP, by spewing bullsh!t:

https://twitter.com/barbiernd7/status/1261684805483126785

Another collection where he makes statements against the RSS:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1261779658921644032

An article from 2011 describing Susu in detail

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/south/story/janata-party-chief-subramaniam-swamy-142454-2011-10-02

Vrat Susu being the Hindu Hriday Samrat he is and celebrating at an Iftaar party of Lalu Prasad Yadav, while wearing a jali topi:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1056861351082000385
https://i.redd.it/nifz2ynyk2151.jpg

Additional Articles, Threads and tweets:

[1999] Swamy's reception will bring Sonia and Jaya together

https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/ma24cong.htm

[2002] [Paywalled] An article where Susu wants VHP leaders and members to be arrested for Terrorism

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-papetp-national/tp-tamilnadu/invoke-poto-against-vhp-leaders-swamy/article27835074.ece

[2016] Swamy & Frenemies: The man is pugnacious but equally unpredictable. So is the BJP taking too big a risk by giving him a stage?

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/swamy-frenemies/297103
https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1235958709400018945
https://twitter.com/ThinkersPad/status/1171653560452489220
https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1190526238734999553
https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1084124381415059457
https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1176426884072202240
https://twitter.com/Hiranyareta/status/1063825860988416000
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1203381849369628672
https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1164410350336241669
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1196610321990897664
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1196628273066737665

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.
As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to connect to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.
If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.
The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.
As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to connect to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.
If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.
The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

Part1
Part 2

Relations Between Neoliberalism and Hindutva

It is at this point that it becomes apparent that neoliberalism has a strong common agenda with the other project discussed here – Hindutva. This is not in any sense to downplay the obvious differences and tensions between the two projects (most centrally around their conceptions of “freedom”). It also bears repeating that this does not imply that an alliance between the two was or is “inevitable.” Yet, as living political projects, shaped in a dialectical relationship with their social foundations, their common goals offer a space that can be exploited. It is from this perspective that we can understand the gradual growth of the alliance between Hindutva and neoliberalism that developed over the 1990s.
How does such an alliance operate? A good starting point is to note discursive dynamics in the English media. As an ideological site largely internal to the ruling class, the English media is an ideal location for ruling class organic intellectuals to play out negotiations between ideological projects. By observing media discourse, we can then identify the degree to which political projects are finding shared ground.
It is hence striking to note that over the last fifteen years, the English media has shifted to strongly emphasise the ideological resonances between neoliberalism, Hindutva and individualisation. This can be seen if, in a similar manner to the outline of Hindutva conceptions made above, we also outline the conceptions of neoliberalism on these issues:

Reduction of social processes to individual choice: In neoliberal ideology, all action in all social spheres is built around “utility-maximising” individuals. Despite being portrayed as a descriptive concept, this is in fact a normative one. The ‘failure’ of individuals to behave as “rational” utility maximisers is attributed to “perverse incentives” from either state or society, which is condemned as both immoral and irrational. In this sense, the utility maximising individual is the equivalent of the “good Hindu” in Hindutva – both the centre of the social order and the ideal that that order aspires to produce.
The state exists as the expression and guarantor, not of individual or collective rights, but of a supreme principle: The place of Hindu rashtra is in this case taken by “the market”. The ideal state is the night watchman, the guarantor of the “market” – the only legitimate collective social activity. The state should ideally be the market’s guarantor against interference, nothing less and nothing more. In fact, it is particularly striking that one finds precisely the same phrase – “night watchman” – being used by the Sangh intellectual Dattopant Thengadi (1979) to describe the state.
Divisions within society are unnecessary and pathological; the only division that is of importance is the line between “society” and its Other. In neoliberalism, “civil society” – the social counterpart of the economic concept of the “market” – is the only legitimate social institution (a concept taken even further with the notion of “social capital”). As in Hindutva, classes, castes and other identities are fictions, with their roots in malign state interference and “political meddling.” In neoliberalism, the state itself takes the place of the “foreigner.” Welfare agencies, the bureaucracy, the legislature, political parties – all are ‘outside’ society and responsible for its “pathological” divisions. Political actors are socially illegitimate, and for both Hindutva and the neoliberals there is no worse crime than to “politicise” social issues.

Simply listing these principles already makes it apparent that they have become shrill themes in much English media coverage. Perhaps the best example is the reservations “debate.” Caste-based reservations are attacked on the ground that they violate the principles of individual “merit”, as per the first principle. Since the state’s role is to guarantee these principles and not interfere with them, the state is attacked for “meddling” with “meritocracy” rather than doing its job and providing infrastructure, education, etc. Finally, the reservations policy is attacked for “dividing” society along “caste lines” and its roots are seen as being “vote bank” politics. Yet, even though it would be totally contrary to neoliberal principles, much of the English media is happy to advocate economic reservations – which have long formed part of the individualised “social uplift” agenda preached by the Sangh Parivar, projecting reservations as charity rather than social justice. This inconsistency is a hallmark of the effort at finding shared ground.
In an earlier paper, I have explored other examples of how these principles play out in operation. Moreover, the media is not only concerned with emphasising the common areas between the two agendas – it has also become a site for de-emphasising and reshaping those aspects that are not in harmony between the two projects. Thus, both in the view of the media and in reality, the Sangh Parivar has backpedaled on those of its issues that are not of interest to neoliberals: swadeshi, most of all, but also such issues as Akhand Bharat, Article 370, the universal civil code, etc. The Sangh’s earlier emphasis on “austerity” has also been quietly forgotten. The media in turn projects this as the gradual “moderation” of the Hindutva forces as they join the “mainstream.”
Similar policy accommodations on the part of neoliberal ideologues are also visible on a close reading. Some of them include:

The continual and peculiar emphasis in Indian neoliberalism on “national self-confidence.” This is foreign to neoliberal ideology as such. Rather, it is a notion that clearly owes a great deal to Hindutva’s promotion of the concept of a “national self” that is weakened and sapped by its internal divisions. It is not an accident that exactly the same terminology – “awakening”, “newfound confidence”, “assertiveness” – that was used by the Sangh Parivar to describe the Ayodhya movement is now used by neoliberals to describe India post 1991.
The endorsement of economic reservations, as described above.
The attitude towards NRI’s, seen as a kind of “vanguard” of both projects. NRI’s are projected as ideal Indians, representatives of what ‘India’ could achieve if Indians were ‘good’ individuals following correct social ‘values’. There could hardly be any message that neoliberalism and Hindutva agree upon more.

An Institutional and Political Alliance
These discursive adjustments form the face of a much deeper and growing relationship.(14) Such collaboration reached its most visible form at the national level during the NDA regime, when the Sangh Parivar and neoliberal ideologues cooperatively attempted to develop political praxis, institutional structures and hegemonic ideologies that allowed them to reap the advantages of a mutual alliance.
Among these moves were the accelerated privatisation of education, intensified repression of social movements and the opening of the Indian economy to NRI-driven foreign investment. The two projects also promoted “anti-terrorism” as the single most important agenda of the Indian state, while attempting to dissolve its commitment to any forms of “social justice”. The 2004 election campaign, with its celebration of “India Shining”, was a particularly evocative reflection of this alliance – India was shining because it was “growing” both economically and in “self-confidence” as a Hindu nation.
Meanwhile the Sangh Parivar, utilising its access to even enormous amounts of funds (significant amounts of which were either state or foreign-generated), institutionalised and formalised the “bargain” described above. The new pattern of expansion relied on the Sangh’s “seva” arms, which expanded enormously during the NDA regime. By the end of the NDA period, Vidya Bharati, the RSS educational organisation, was running – and still continues to run – the country’s largest private school network. Sangh Parivar outfits emerged as the largest “NGO’s” working in the tribal areas (Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and its allies). In Orissa and in Gujarat, cadre recruitment grew on a massive scale through “relief” operations in the wake of the 1999 cyclone and the 2001 earthquake respectively.(15)
A key example of these new practices is the “ekal vidyalayas” in tribal areas, possibly the largest Sangh Parivar cadre recruitment activity today.(16) As per their website, there are 26,314 ekal vidyalayas in operation at the time of writing (17), but the actual number is likely to be far larger. In these schools, young tribal men and women are hired as acharyas (teachers), given brief ‘training’ and a curriculum, and asked to take regular classes for children out of school. In practice, neither the curriculum nor the training nor the student population is clear. There is no infrastructure other than irregular textbooks. Even where the acharya ceases to function, they at times carry on drawing their salary.
As such, the schoolchildren do not seem to be the target of the scheme. Rather, the acharyas themselves appear to be the main goal. One obvious attraction is the stable salary (between Rs. 300 and Rs. 500). Second, the appeals in the training are mostly not concerned with overt Hindutva or even Hindu appeals. Instead, the focus is on social service, the need for gaon vikas, and the problems of “division” introduced by ‘politics’. The youth are forbidden to join any political party or any social movement of the area. The stress of the ekal vidyalaya progam is on apolitical social service – which in our society is a high status occupation. Thus the program offers a combination of material security through the salary, and of social mobility by earning respect of those with higher social stature while participating in a high status social occupation.
But, once again, the “bargain” requires the acharya to choose individualisation and depoliticisation, except through their commitment to the Sangh. Thus, ekal vidyalayas and other Sangh ‘seva’ activities build a committed grassroots cadre for whom the “bargain” mentioned earlier is now given a formal, very concrete form: benefits to individuals who perform, and the fear of the loss of all such benefits and a return to being a ‘non-entity’ if one fails.
Such a cadre in turn benefits Indian capital in general and neoliberalism in particular, in exchange for which funds are provided, media access guaranteed and state support (even under the UPA) more or less constant. The result is to make it easier to counter a 1980s’ style of politics, greatly weakening the capacity of petty commodity producers to resist the attack on their livelihoods.
2004 and After
The experiment was partly cut short by the 2004 elections. However hegemonic the aspirations of the neoliberal-Hindutva alliance were, it had failed to achieve real hegemony in the electoral realm. But its successor, the UPA, has become a classic instance of a neoliberal regime that is not backed by an organised political force. It has pursued a schizophrenic political program, whose contradictions have offered space for some small popular gains along with an avalanche of neoliberal policies. It will also almost certainly become an example of how Indian neoliberalism, in the absence of a “totalitarian” party as its ally, devours the support base of its own regime.
A sharp contrast to this situation is the 2007 Gujarat elections, where arguably the Sangh-neoliberal alliance has had its first major and resounding victory. Bankrolled by big capital, publicly proclaimed to be the saviour of both business and nation, the Sangh rode to power against a fragmented opposition speaking the language and raising the issues of the 1980s – caste divides, farmers’ suicides and tribal distress, in addition to tokenistic ‘secularism.’ The Gujarat verdict was built around two simultaneous phenomena. The first was the total dominance of capital, with state support, over both the working class and petty commodity producers, who are at the mercy of big capital in the State. The resulting insecurity and constant sense of threat was fed off of by the Sangh, whose “bargain” became ever-more attractive in this context. The result was the Sangh-driven organisational destruction of all other political formations, whose cadres were poached or coopted into Sangh formations (those who would not, or could not, were repressed or killed). In this context, there was no serious opposition; the Sangh has indeed effectively achieved hegemony, and the totalitarian party has reached fruition.
This is not the only form these collaborations have taken. In Chhattisgarh, a different kind of collaboration has created Salwa Judum, a state supported militia formed by an unholy alliance between the security forces, the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (whose cadres are known to be closely involved) and corporate pressure for mineral extraction. Operating in the southern districts of Dantewada and Bijapur, the Salwa Judum has killed hundreds of adivasis and driven lakhs of people from their homes in the name of fighting the Maoists. The militia is mostly led by the elite among the adivasi communities of the area, those who are, in that sense, most commoditised and most accessible to the offers made by the state/Sangh/capital combine. Even as per official figures, more than 600 villages have been emptied of their population; their residents have either fled into the jungles or are trapped in horrific “relief camps” being run by the State government. There are credible allegations that at least part of the motivation for doing this is to ease the handing over of the land to mining corporations. Wiping out the Maoists, among the most dangerous defenders of petty commodity and subsistence production, is no doubt also a goal for Indian capital – and of course for the Sangh.
Whereas Gujarat is India’s most capitalist state, Chhattisgarh is probably among the least. A truly hegemonic form of this alliance cannot take place here, for the degree of commoditisation is insufficient. Hence the balance within hegemony shifts towards force and away from consent, and the form it takes is that of direct, brutal violence – accumulation by dispossession in the most inhuman manner.

Conclusion and Implications for Left Praxis

Neither of these experiments is immediately replicable at the national level, but we do left politics a serious disservice if we therefore dismiss the danger. We have long allowed ourselves to be comforted with descriptions of the Indian right as peddlers of false notions, fraudulent demagogues building castles in the air around “Hindu rashtra” and “India Shining.” In particular, we have believed that Hindutva is primarily an exercise in identity-based chauvinism, a hate politics targeting minorities through propaganda and disinformation. We have seen our role in tackling this threat as primarily being one of awareness raising, enlightenment and education.
The argument here has been that this interpretation of historical processes is incorrect. The Sangh in particular has achieved its incredible growth because it is a truly totalitarian party of the ruling class: responding to the needs of multiple social sectors, while presenting solutions to those needs in forms that correspond to the interests of the ruling classes. Fighting such projects cannot be limited to awareness raising alone. They must be confronted as organisations, to hinder and undermine their ability to offer the material-ideological ‘bargain’ that operates at their very foundation.
When the UPA government falls in 2009, as it is almost certain to do, there will be another chance for neoliberal-Hindutva alliances to explore their full possibilities at the national level. The situation is ripe for such politics to blossom again. At this time, if we do not fight the Sangh on the political level, we not only hinder the battle for ‘secularism’, we provide Indian neoliberalism with an extremely powerful ally. One can even speculate that the one cannot be defeated without at least weakening the other.
Paper by Shankar Gopalakrishnan

[Update 02-01-2021]: Susu Swamy is now an expert on vaccines and vaccination programmes. Peddles fake news, opposes the vaccines approved by the DCGI. Also propagates the theory that the Prinicipal Scientific Advisor to the GoI is a Chinese Agent.
https://www.opindia.com/2021/01/subramanian-swamy-coronavirus-vaccine-covishield-astrazeneca-modi-govt/
Susu Swamy is an aasteen ka saanp foreign agent. Did his PhD from Harvard University on a Rockefeller scholarship, under a Nobel Prize winning crypto communist. All he wants is anarchy in the country, so that his best friend's wife could rule again. His recent entrance exam antics have shown that he wants anarchy.

Full transcript of Susu's interaction with the then Chinese Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping, in 1981, where in he supports "Hindi Chini bhai bhai" and cements him being a Chinese agent since then

https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19810515-it-is-necessary-for-india-and-china-to-work-together-deng-xiaoping-805957-2014-02-24

Excerpts from an article where Hindu Hriday Samrat opposes Ram Mandir in Ayodhya:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1285177585022808065

Full transcript of the speech given by Virat Hindu at Madina Education Center, Hyderabad in 1993, wherein he calls the construction of Ram Mandir, a sin, as underlined in the above tweet. Moreover, he asks Hindus to prove that Prabhu Ram was born in Ayodhya

https://cbkwgl.wordpress.com/2019/11/10/demolition-of-babri-masjid-and-aftermath-speech-by-subramanian-swamy-march-13-madina-education-centre-hyderabad/
A tweet containing article explaining the fall of the 2nd Vajpayee Government in 1999:
https://twitter.com/ThinkersPad/status/1160595325494517761
An excerpt from an interview Susu gave in 1999, after the fall of the 2nd ABV government:
https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1190601065697136640
The latest: https://twitter.com/ind_rajat92/status/1276405495201509379?s=19

Article from 1999 wherein he compares Antonia Maino to Goddess Lakshmi:

https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1285543509114540048
The article itself: https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/ap17swamy.htm
Here's a collection of excellent threads, made by a few people on twitter, exposing Susu for what he is:

An exhaustive collection of various people exposing Swamy

https://twitter.com/barbiernd7/timelines/1240185206109175809
Exposing why the National Herald Case, which Susu and his arselickers keep thumping their chests about is still stuck
https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1239561638245777410?s=19

Exposing his Kailash Mansarovar bubble

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1254631277979975680.html

Exposing Susu's hatred for the LGBT community and RSS during Vajpayee's time as the PM

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1243516552982429699.html
An article for the same thing: https://www.india.com/news/india/section-377-subramanian-swamy-likens-homosexuality-to-genetic-disorder-says-gay-sex-will-lead-to-spreading-of-hiv-3277619/

Exposing his "Maine Ram Setu bachaya, Congress ne explosives laga diye the todne ke liye"

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1241754886582263809.html

His friendship with Genocidal maniac Rajiv Gandhi and his relations with Antonia Maino

https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1239213880351522818

Part of an interview to Vinod Dua, yes that Vinod Dua criticising the same BJP with which he merged his farce of a party in 2013

https://twitter.com/princegdstatus/1168531246655385600

On Susu's connection with Saudi Arabian Reporter (CIA-Agent) Khasoghi

https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1055684533671116800

Excerpts from an interview where Susu opposes India's Nuclear Bombs and wants India to defend Porkistan

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1281670388590600192

Excerpt from an interview to presstitute Quint wherein he tries his best to demean the BJP, even though he is a BJP RS MP, by spewing bullsh!t:

https://twitter.com/barbiernd7/status/1261684805483126785

Another collection where he makes statements against the RSS:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1261779658921644032

An article from 2011 describing Susu in detail

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/south/story/janata-party-chief-subramaniam-swamy-142454-2011-10-02

Vrat Susu being the Hindu Hriday Samrat he is and celebrating at an Iftaar party of Lalu Prasad Yadav, while wearing a jali topi:

https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1056861351082000385
https://i.redd.it/nifz2ynyk2151.jpg

Additional Articles, Threads and tweets:

[1999] Swamy's reception will bring Sonia and Jaya together

https://www.rediff.com/news/1999/ma24cong.htm

[2002] [Paywalled] An article where Susu wants VHP leaders and members to be arrested for Terrorism

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-papetp-national/tp-tamilnadu/invoke-poto-against-vhp-leaders-swamy/article27835074.ece

[2016] Swamy & Frenemies: The man is pugnacious but equally unpredictable. So is the BJP taking too big a risk by giving him a stage?

https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/swamy-frenemies/297103
https://twitter.com/AparBharat/status/1235958709400018945
https://twitter.com/ThinkersPad/status/1171653560452489220
https://twitter.com/rishibagree/status/1190526238734999553
https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1084124381415059457
https://twitter.com/alok_bhatt/status/1176426884072202240
https://twitter.com/Hiranyareta/status/1063825860988416000
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1203381849369628672
https://twitter.com/tanmayj41128048/status/1164410350336241669
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1196610321990897664
https://twitter.com/JMehta65/status/1196628273066737665

The media should not narrate the story in a manner so as to induce the general public to believe in the complicity of the person indicted. Publishing information based on gossip about the line of investigation by the official agencies on the crime committed is not desirable. It is not advisable to vigorously report crime related issues on a day-to-day basis and comment on the evidence without ascertaining the factual matrix. Such reporting brings undue pressure in the course of fair investigation and trial

This is Press council of India lastest statement on the conduct of media on Sushant Singh Rajput case. It governs the conduct of the print. However, the News Broadcasting Standards Authority has been silent on the matter so far.

As our media is looking at the other side and with so much happening around every single day, I reckon it will be good time to compile a list of news outlets which are maintaing the standards of journalism (in my opinion).
There is no alternative to consume news than reading newspapers. And, there are many reputable ones such as The Indian Express, The Hindu, Business Standard, etc. If not, newsletters can be a good alternative.
Newsletters

theNewsbury- This would provide you information about everything important in political, financial, business news that affect our daily lives. It would also provide you with a list of events which are scheduled to happen today and did you hear. In author's word, it is a quick 5 minute read of all the latest sh*t that’s happening in the world in a fun, easy to read and totally quotable lingo. It is being run by a team of female and will reach your email on Monday to Friday. Here.
Splainer- It has a similar format as Newsbury but paid as it goes a little deeper. It is for those who require context where all dots are connected to connect to understand the story better. Again, it is run by a team of females and they would provide you a little sanity break in form of short videos or something as consuming news can be heavy. It will arrive in your inbox on Monday to Friday. In author's word, you get the big picture, analysis and best reporting on that one big story everyone’s talking about. Catch up on key headlines, and discover a wealth of cool, funny, smart reads and videos from across the globe. There is zero jargon and no rants - and all of it's served with a generous dose of cheeky humour that makes you lol! My referral.
The third slip- This is a weekly newsletter which would provide you latest happenings of India and around the world. It is for those who has missed the news over the week and would like a little humour with it. In author's word, a newsletter that brings you all the major news of the week: The big, the trending, the stuff you missed, the bizzare. Just ten minutes every Sunday. With humour (conditions apply). So don't worry if you missed reading your paper one morning because your dog pooped on it. Or you didn't go through your Feedly because of a 287-slide PowerPoint you had to make. We've got it all here. Think of it as a combination of Quartz & The Bugle without the insight or quality of either. Here.
The Political Fix- It is twice a week newsletter on Indian politics and policy. It is being run by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan from Scroll. On Monday, you will get the big picture. On Friday, you will receive recommended reading list and an interview from an expert. Here.
Indialogue- This is a newsletter centered on the biggest policy development in India. It will provide you the developments and explanations of the policy which will be folled by a news round up and a reading list. It is being run by Aman Thakker who is J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Scholar at the University of Oxford, and Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And, you will receive this weekly. Here.
Finshots- This is one of the best and highly recommended newsletter. In author's word, it will provide you latest, most important Financial developments delivered in plain English. In less than 3 minutes. They have nice infographics. And, on Saturday, you will receive a newsletter talking about the markets. Just subscribe it

Podcast

3 things- This is the flagship podcast from Indian Express where hosts Shashank Bhargava and Arun George talk to in-house experts about what is going on and why you need to care about it Here.
Interpreting India- Every two weeks, they bring in voices from India and around the globe to unpack how technology, the economy, and foreign policy impact India’s relationship with the world. Interpreting India is a Carnegie India production hosted by Srinath Raghavan. Here
The seen and the unseen- It is a weekly podcast hosted by Amit Varma which releases every Sunday. He has covered a wide range of topics such as the life and thought of Mahatma Gandhi (1 and 2), the Emergency, Hindutva, cricket, Demonetization, the Bangladesh War, Plato, Venezuela, the Harappans and the Me-Too Movement. Listen here. Recommended.

If you like longform perspectives and essays on politics and personalities then consider subscribing to the caravan. It has written on Justice Loya, Ayodhya, Kashmir and profiles on Narendra Modi, Ranjan Gogoi.

If you like consuming news through Youtube then I recommend Soch and Faye D' Souza.

The idea of the post is to make everyone informed so they make better decisions and arguments and support these journalists and agencies which are setting an example in their field. I have tried not to include those sources which have biases and included only those which stick with facts. It is possible that I might have yet included some. Please, let me know and I will edit the post. This isn't a complete list and I could have missed many quality source of news which are doing a great job. If so, comment down below and I will edit the post.

Part 1

Hindutva As a Dominant Class Project

It was in this context of general ‘prosperity’, between roughly 1985 and 1992, that the Hindutva organisations undertook an incredibly rapid mass expansion. In 1984, the Sangh Parivar was still a relatively marginal entity, riding on the dying halo of the JP movement. By 1992, it could stake a credible claim to being India’s largest organised political force (7), and the spectre of fascism was haunting the country. Such an extraordinary growth is unmatched by any other political force in independent India’s history.
In itself, this historical conjuncture should make one doubt theories that seek to explain Hindutva as a “distraction” from the “distress” of the working class. Nor is it a response to a crisis of capitalism, as is sometimes argued by analogy with theories of classical European fascism. On the face of it, the economic evidence shows neither crisis nor an absolute increase in distress among the poor or the working class. Indeed, it shows the opposite. The rise of the Sangh hence cannot be reduced to, or simply read off from, the prevailing economic circumstances.
Such an explanation however requires a shift in emphasis from analyses of Hindutva as a predominantlycultural-ideological phenomenon, which has been the most common approach taken by its opponents. Such analyses focus on the ideological aspects of “Hindu nationalism”, approaching it by asking questions regarding the appeal of such reactionary chauvinism in this political conjuncture. This helps analyse the mass appeal of Hindutva, and also provides ammunition to counter its propaganda and hate politics. But it does not necessarily completely explain the actual growth of the Sangh Parivar. The Sangh Parivar is not merely a vehicle of Hindu chauvinism – it is the most successful political organisation in India today. Its expansion has been the result of conscious political action, not merely automatic or unconscious cultural propagation. Indeed, the Parivar is an excellent example of a “totalitarian party”, in the Gramscian sense explored above. The growth of Hindutva is inseparable from the growth of the Parivar as an organisation.
From this angle, the Sangh has to be analysed as a party. It is necessary to look the manner in which the Parivar translates the dominant class interests that it projects into “universal” interests of other social sectors. This question turns also crucially on the manner in which the Sangh organises itself, for it is through such operations – as argued below – that it projects its actions as a response to social contradictions. This approach neither replaces nor negates the importance of deconstructing the hate politics of Hindutva; rather, it aims to complement it.
The Appeal of the Sangh Parivar to Dominant Class Interests
From the days of the Jan Sangh until the early 1980s, the Sangh Parivar had a relatively clearly defined mass base. The Jan Sangh, and then the BJP, was described as the “brahmin-baniya party”, with little following in rural areas and an inability to capture either the support of urban elites or the working class. Its party positions were a fairly direct reflection of the class position of its supporters, mainly members of the trading class. It favoured external protectionism and internal trade liberalisation, reflecting its members’ interests in unfettered access to domestic markets combined with restrictions on international competition. It opposed trade unions and workers’ struggles and promoted reactionary and jingoistic nationalism. In this sense it was indeed a “petty bourgeois” party in the usual sense. Outside the party, the Sangh Parivar had established most of its current front organisations by the early 1960s, but they remained small.
The Parivar underwent its first wave of post independence growth, both in membership and in stature, during the JP movement, sharing in the popular anti-Emergency sentiment. But it was only in the 1980s that it truly emerged to become a major political force among the country’s elite and big capital. Simultaneously, and primarily through the Ayodhya movement, it grew into a huge mass force.
At this time, there were some obvious benefits to capital in supporting Hindutva mobilisation. Many of these have already been discussed extensively in the literature. Ideologically, Hindutva was an antidote to the “subaltern” mobilisations of Mandal and the regional parties. It delegitimised class and caste struggle and instead promoted notions of “harmony.” It is in this sense that Corbridge and Harriss (2000) have identified Hindutva as an “elite revolt” against the other mobilisations. However, there is arguably a further element in the appeal that the Sangh Parivar enjoyed among the ruling class bloc – one which was specifically important in this time. The other movements of the time projected a politics of “communities” competing for state resources and control of the state machinery. Such politics had the effect, at the national level, of further contesting and undermining any effort at individualisation in the Indian polity. It explicitly foregrounded the notion that the polity of the country was a fractured one, built not around identical monads finding their unity in the state, but on contesting, frequently internally divided communities. In this manner it was indeed a class contestation – though a partial and contradictory one – rooted in the particular positions of petty commodity producers.
This was not a threat to Indian capital as such. As said earlier, individualisation has been a contested process throughout India’s recent history, and moreover petty commodity production – and the ideological systems associated with it – is a fundamental feature of Indian capitalism. Yet, it is arguable that the particular type of contestation witnessed in the 1980s was seen as a challenge. It was during this period, particularly the second half of the decade, that big capital in India had begun to push for opportunities to expand into new markets. The “reforms” of the mid 1980s served precisely this purpose. But, the contestation of individualisation embodied in the other movements of this decade threatened the coherence of the national state, whose active intervention was increasingly vital for such “reforms.” Indeed, these movements demanded precisely the kind of state action that capital increasingly found anathema – increased segmentation of markets, dictation of state spending by democratic politics and state interference in decisions by private capitalists. Finally, expansion by capital in this period also depended on cultural-ideological factors such as a common understanding of unified markets and commodity exchange in rural areas. This was an understanding that was lacking at the time (Rajagopal 1999), and was directly threatened by the promotion of community identities.
It is in this context that a much deeper appeal of Hindutva becomes apparent. To see this, let us examine some of the internal elements of Hindutva ideology, and in particular its approach to its own cadre and supporters. This approach is in no sense limited to merely anti-minority hate politics. Rather, it contains a very specific concept of the relationship between individual, society and state, an approach that is of particular interest in light of the prevailing political situation. Some of the key elements of this are as follows:

Reduction of social processes to individual choice: Like most organicist ideologies (and in a strong parallel to Gandhianism), Hindutva reduces social developments to questions of individual choice. Thus the Parivar aims to solve Hindu society’s problems by inculcating ‘correct values’ in upper caste men, as exemplified by M.S. Golwalkar’s declaration that “there is a ‘crisis of character’ in our country”; social problems are due to individuals’ “demoniac ways” (Golwalkar 1979). Other Sangh Parivar leaders have made countless similar statements. The remaking of society depends on whether every person can be made a “good Hindu.” What is a good Hindu is, in turn, defined by the Sangh.
The state exists only as the expression and guarantor of a collectivity founded around a transcendent principle: The ideal state is the guarantor of the Hindu rashtra, a “nation” that exists as an organic and harmonious unity between “Hindus.” The concept of “Hindu” here is linked on the one hand to the normative notion of the “good Hindu” discussed above, and on the other to the Sangh itself (see below). The Hindu nation is defined by the principles that it claims to adhere to. As Deendayal Upadhyaya (1979) once put it, “the state is brought into existence to protect the nation, and to maintain conditions in which the ideals of the nation can be translated into reality.” These ideals constitute the nation’s “soul”, and the “laws that help manifest [this soul] are termed dharma.” “A state cannot be without dharma nor can it be indifferent to dharma, just as fire cannot be without heat” (Upadhyaya 1979).
Divisions within this collectivity are unnecessary and pathological; the only division that is of importance is the line between “society” and its Other, the foreigner. All divisions “within” society are the work of malignant outsiders or foreigners, aimed at breaking up the unity and harmony of the Hindu nation. Thus D.B. Thengadi once claimed that “in our system… [social sectors] form an infinite spiral with no inner conflicts and no tensions” (Thengadi 1979). Sangh leaders frequently draw analogies between society and the ‘harmony’ of the human body (see e.g. Golwalkar 1979). As for those outside this nation, some of them are inferiors in need of education. As Golwalkar (1979) said, the RSS must “discourage people pursuing demoniac ways…[and inspire them] to develop their divine nature.” This includes those too “ignorant” to understand their role in Hindu society, a description that is applied particularly to adivasis. But in case education does not work, Golwalkar continues, “we may have to use sanctions of force also in our endeavour.” ‘Outsiders’ thus have a clear choice: they can swear allegiance to Hindutva and join ‘society’, or they can retain their beliefs, thereby confirming their ‘foreignness’ and making them fit for destruction.
It is the Sangh that both constitutes and represents the Hindu nation. The Sangh is not merely an organisation of Hindus – it is the Hindu nation itself. As a Marathi textbook for ekal vidyalaya teachers puts it (9): “The aim of the Sangh is to organise the entire Hindu society, and not just to have a Hindu organisation within the ambit of this society. Had it been the latter, then the Sangh too would have added one more number to the already existing thousands of creeds. Though started as an institution, the aim of the Sangh is to expand so extensively that each and every individual and traditional social institutions like family, caste, profession, educational and religious institutions etc., are all to be ultimately engulfed into its system. The goal before the Sangh is to have an organised Hindu society in which all its constituents and institutions function in harmony and co-ordination, just as in the body organs”.

I have gone into these principles in some detail for two reasons. Firstly, there are strong resonances between these principles and neoliberalism, which will be discussed later. Secondly, and more importantly, there is a striking similarity between these tenets and the individualisation process that Poulantzas outlines as one of the functions of the capitalist state. Hindutva, like most authoritarian ideologies, is as much about the production of an essentialised individuality as it is about a totalising notion of the state/community. Hindutva projects a vision of individuals as a collection of monads – “good Hindus” – with nothing to distinguish the one from the other, or to connect the one to the other, except a single legitimate collectivity: the Sangh. This is explicitly a normative vision, not a descriptive one. Such a society is the ideal, and it will be the effort of the Sangh to achieve it.
In this sense, Hindutva’s understanding of the ideal society is in fact precisely the capitalist state’s vision – reified to a level that it becomes unrecognisable within the parameters of bourgeois democracy. And it was precisely at this level that the Hindutva ideological project was fundamentally opposed to the ideological bases of the other movements of the 1980s. It is arguable that Indian capital endorsed Hindutva because, as a hegemonic project, it directly sought the breaking down of the collectivities that the 1980s’ movements had made the central feature of Indian politics. Such collectivities had become an increasing obstacle to the upholding of commodity relations as the organising principle of capitalist society.
It was this that translated into the vocal elite endorsement of the Sangh Parivar as a “nationalist” organisation, one pitted against “sectional” and “vested” interests. Most striking of all was the description of the Ayodhya movement as the creator of a “modern India” (Rajagopal 2001, BJP 1991). Indeed, contrary to much of the analysis of Hindutva as a “reaction” against “modernity”, the Sangh and its cohorts have always been very clear that – in their vision – it is Hindutva itself that promotes “modernity” in India. And from the viewpoint of capital, this was correct, for it would indeed help to create that truly “modern” vision: an ideologically individualist society.
The Ayodhya Movement and Hindutva’s Mass Base
Yet, while this argument may help explain the dominant interests being expressed by the project of Hindutva, we are still left with the question of how this project became hegemonic – or, more crudely, how it succeeded in building a mass base. For that, a closer examination of the Ayodhya movement is necessary.
There is no precise data on the nature of mass participation in the Ayodhya movement, but from available information it appears that its strongest bases were in urban areas, among the urban poor, and in small towns. Urban peripheries also saw strong participation, as well as some rural areas in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. However, it does not seem to have enjoyed a strong base in most rural areas. The organised working class in many urban areas supported the movement but were not active participants or leaders. Geographically the movement was most active in Maharashtra, Gujarat and the Hindi-speaking States, though it had support elsewhere as well.
Even this vague mapping throws up an interesting hypothesis: it appears that the Ayodhya movement mobilised precisely the social sectors that did not fully participate in the other 1980s’ movements. But these sectors also included large numbers of petty commodity producers, particularly in the case of the urban poor. At this time of an increasing shift in favour of large capital, such persons were subject to the same intensifying reproduction squeeze as all other petty commodity producers. Further, they now included in their ranks the increasing numbers of those who lost formal employment as part of the first waves of liberalisation-induced deindustrialisation. At the time this was a geographically specific phenomenon, but one particularly striking example is the textile mills of Bombay and Ahmedabad – many of whose workers, at least in the case of Ahmedabad, subsequently became rabid supporters of the Sangh.
Yet, despite the fact that their circumstances were similar to those of the mass base of most of the 1980s’ movements, these social sectors lacked political formations that could represent their demands in a time of increasing insecurity. One can hypothesise that two reasons fed into this vacuum. First, no corresponding social element to the “rich farmer” groups, which played the leading role elsewhere, existed in many of these contexts. Second, the state’s role was also far more complex and indirect, particularly in urban areas. The populist articulation of a shared “community”, led by large producers but with shared demands on the state, could hence not be formed. Producers were instead fragmented, directly facing the pressures of class differentiation and proletarianisation. Moreover, as the 1980s wore on, the inability of the other 1980s’ movements to produce results for most of their members led increasingly to disillusionment even in areas where such movements were strong. It is indeed true that these social sectors faced a crisis; but it was apolitical crisis, not an economic one.
Building Mass Support
It is in this context that the Hindutva organisations undertook their mass expansion drive. Until this period, the Sangh had focused largely on cadre building and indoctrination as its main method of organisation. Such organising built a core of dedicated cadres with a large geographical reach, but could not undertake mass expansion, especially outside the caste and class lines that defined the traditional strongholds of the Parivar’s organisations.
In the early part of the decade, the organisation undertook a series of changes. In particular, the RSS chose to foreground the VHP – and, later in the decade, the BJP – as the frontline Sangh Parivar organisations. Having been “relaunched” between 1979 and 1981, the VHP began a rapid expansion around 1984 (Jaffrelot 1999). The organisation led a series of mobilisations around the conversion of Dalits to Islam in Meenakshipuram (Tamil Nadu), the Shah Bano case, and the “Ekatmata Yatras.” Mobilisation now began to revolve around temple-building, social service and the yatras, with the last becoming the primary mode of mass action. As Rajagopal (2001) puts it, “there was a shift away from sectarian view of organising, with indoctrination as its aim and daily drill as its chief method, to a far more pragmatic approach that emphasised mobilisation over indoctrination, and political effect over organisational discipline.”
These new modes of organising had a very different impact from the old. They rested on offering various “gains” that corresponded to different contradictions facing different sectors. Unlike the other 1980s’ movements, however, these “gains” were not about state support or political patronage. Instead, they were specifically geared towards concrete, immediate benefits and responses to the contradictions faced by these social sectors at the time.
Some examples are as follows. For adivasis in Madhya Pradesh – a community largely lacking in political organisation but nonetheless increasingly commoditised – the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram offered direct access to hostels, schools, medical centres, etc. (and later became the nucleus of a more formal system of recruitment described in the last section). More than eight hundred schools were opened by the VHP in 1983 alone, mostly in tribal areas. Between 1978 to 1983, the number of full time activists in the VKA increased by six times, with most of their activities concerned with “service” (Jaffrelot 1999). Similar tactics were used with Dalits. Thus in the early 1980s, the VHP came out with a plan to build 100 temples in SC areas of Tamil Nadu (ibid.). Such temple building was to be a standard tactic throughout the decade, providing a way to channel funds into target areas and offering both employment and charity. In addition, for adivasis and Dalits specific economic contradictions with minorities were frequently exploited. One Ghaziabad riot in 1990, for instance, was triggered by the VHP essentially utilising a balmiki leader’s tensions with Muslims over land in the outskirts of the town, the area to which both had been banished by caste Hindu pressures (Basu 1996). Meanwhile, on the other side of the caste spectrum, the urban upper caste youth who formed a significant proportion of the “shock troops” of the Parivar gained both employment/financial support and the ability to implicitly target the OBC mobilisation that threatened their access to state employment (Jaffrelot 1999, Basu 1996).
In addition to these direct material gains, the Sangh movement also offered a more intangible – but arguably still material – gain by creating new public spaces that were accessible to traditionally marginalised sectors. The movement offered access to higher steps on the social hierarchy by simultaneously aiming to retain its high caste character and “respectability” while allowing entry to those earlier excluded. This strategy was applied to various social sectors. Thus Dalits were specifically wooed by the VHP in the early 1980s; many of the new temples were specifically designed as public eating spaces for cross-caste meals. Dalits were also made carriers of the “holy water” in the Ekatmata Yatras (Jaffrelot 1999), and more generally both Dalits and lower castes were allowed access to ritual spaces traditionally denied to them (Rajagopal 2001).
For women, as is attested by a large body of literature on the gender aspects of Hindutva (11), such access to new spaces and possibilities of political action was perhaps the biggest attraction of the movement. The Sangh offered a “safe” avenue of political action that permitted women, particularly women of lower middle class households, to participate in politics without facing family opposition. Moreover it sometimes even raised, in a conservative and reactionary manner, issues such as sexual harassment and pornography (Basu 2001).
Such access to space leads both to a sense of psychological empowerment and also to more immediate gains, through membership in a privileged group including economically wealthy and powerful individuals. The VHP and VKA’s networks in Madhya Pradesh, for instance, were largely funded by local wealthy traders and former royal families. This was later added to by increasing donations from urban elites and from NRI’s, who soon became a key funding source for the movement. The enormous amount of money that poured into the movement from such sources allowed them to offer both direct and indirect benefits to those who participated. Soon the VHP came to be known, in the RSS hierarchy, as the organisation aimed at the middle castes, the urban lower middle class, and similar social sectors of the kind described above.
Finally, during the latter half of this phase, access to these political spaces also meant participation in violence – and the financial, personal and psychological gains that follow on the use of violence against minority communities has been amply documented. Given the tilt of the state machinery towards the Hindutva organisations, such violence also often could be engaged in with impunity.
The Material-Ideological “Bargain”
In this sense, the movement offered both enhanced security and the prospect of social mobility. The ability to make these offers was crucially linked to the support given to the movement by capital, the state and the upper castes. None of these advantages could be offered by the other 1980s’ movements, who did not enjoy such support.
But this was an offer that came with a bargain. The gains on offer accrued not to the class or the community, but to the individual, and the person had to self-constitute themselves as an individual by abandoning all other markers of identity. As seen above, acceptance of Hindutva ideology and organisational methods brought this as its strongest implication. Thus Dalits and adivasis were explicitly or implicitly forbidden to raise issues of discrimination against their communities. The Sangh women’s organisations neither permitted nor encouraged raising of issues of women’s rights (Sarkar 2001). In the present day, teachers in the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram’s ekal vidyalaya schools are asked to renounce any party affiliation, any caste identity and any commitment to any “sectional interest” other than that of “Bharat” (see below and Gopalakrishnan and Sreenivasa 2007 for more details). In short, supporters and – at a much more intense level – cadres of the movement were required to discard all identities except their standing as an individual, “good Hindu.”
The Commodification of Politics
Such methods of individualisation were then reinforced by wider discursive tactics of the movement itself. Rajagopal (1999) has argued that one of the key innovations of the Sangh Parivar in the 1980s was the conscious use of political marketing, the re-constitution of political action as consumption. The decision to utilise yatras as the most visible mobilisation vehicle was central to this strategy, and this was combined with the mass marketing of items like stickers, tridents, clothes and pictures. Available statistics show striking evidence of this. Jaffrelot (1999) notes how, in three days of the Ekatmata Yatra in 1983, 6,000 images of Bharat Mata and more than 70,000 bottles of “holy water” were sold. The Ram Shilanyas in 1989 was performed with the use of bricks sent by villages across the country, and involved a cash contribution of Rs. 1.25 by every individual who joined the ceremonies around the bricks. According to the VHP’s statistics, more than 83 million rupees were collected. The yatras themselves became giant symbolic exercises, advertising the chosen few symbols of the movement (Ram; the trident; the colour saffron; the bricks) in a kind of mass cultural outpouring.
Political action in India has been historically associated with charismatic leadership, or at most with traditional party membership (as in the Communist organisations). The Ayodhya movement instead promoted a kind offetishisation of such political relationships and of political action itself, converting one’s relationship with a physical object or a symbol into the essence of one’s relationship with the movement. Purchasing a sticker or a flag became a method of participating; participating in pujas for bricks and images was a mode of political mobilisation.
The use of symbols in this manner functioned synergistically with the expansion of corporate advertising and marketing into rural India, as both converged on the importance of the “brand” as a basis of action (Rajagopal 1999). The Hindutva movement explicitly tried to convert their politics into a “brand” – and endorsement of that brand through purchase, exhibition or worship constituted the act of political support for the movement. But what is a brand other than a reification of the commodity concept itself? In this way, the Ayodhya movement operated through a discourse of commoditisation of politics. Political action was integrated withconsumption.
This analysis is not meant to claim that hate politics and Hindu chauvinism were irrelevant to the Hindutva mobilisation. They were no doubt the cultural categories and political tropes that formed the substance of the ideology. But the importance of the “Hindu community” was not a result of invocation of religious identity alone. Rather, this exploration postulates that it built on a partial satisfaction of the material-ideological needs of its cadre and its base – while simultaneously converting those needs into a driving force for individualisation and the restructuring of social relations in favour of capital. This partial coordination of interests between capital and large sections of petty commodity producers then becomes a dialectical part of the sense of “identity” of those involved. Hindu “identity” was thus politically reconstructed to mean individualised support for the movement, membership in its organisations and participation in its violence. In this sense, the movement was as much about rebuilding “Hindu” society as it was about targeting minorities.

The Entry of Neoliberalism

The remainder of this paper concerns the Indian polity after the start of reforms in 1991, with the rise to total dominance of the neoliberal project in India. To evaluate the relationship between neoliberalism and Hindutva in this context, we have first to evaluate Indian neoliberalism itself, both as an economic phenomenon and as a political project.
There are in a sense two sides to Indian neoliberalism. On the one hand, the glaring triumph of neoliberal policies and their endorsement by practically all major political parties across the political spectrum indicates the strength of neoliberal ideology as a shaping force of state action in the country. This is the analysis that most of us on the left share, and it reflects the massive defeats inflicted on the left in the last two decades.
But at the same time, Indian neoliberalism has some peculiar weaknesses. One such weakness is reflected in the policy trajectory that neoliberalism has taken in India. In the first decade, the primary focus was on regulatory liberalisation, trade liberalisation, capital account liberalisation and state rollback – namely the “classical” neoliberal model followed in most nations. But such reforms, essentially aimed at strengthening the power of finance capital, ran into growing obstacles. Those that remained confined to finance and industrial spheres, such as capital account liberalisation, went ahead with relatively fewer hitches. Others that were essentially reallocation of resources within the state, such as budget cuts, also have proceeded rapidly. But those that directly affected petty commodity producers, or the small number of capitalist producers in the agricultural sector – such as food subsidies, the public procurement and distribution system, or complete import liberalisation – have been partly or completely blocked. The PDS has been converted into the “targeted PDS” and thus severely maimed, but it has not been dismantled. Similarly tariff cuts have greatly harmed agricultural producers, but they have not been as total as they were in many other parts of the world.
It is arguable that this weakness reflects the nature of Indian capitalism and the continuing relationship between Indian capital and petty commodity producers. The existence of petty commodity producers is simultaneously a requirement for and a fetter on Indian capitalism, both as a result of democratic politics and through its material relationship with capital. Indeed, the vast majority of production in India, even that in the so-called organised sector, involves some degree of involvement of petty commodity producers. In this sense, incidentally, the neoliberal emphasis on informalisation and “outsourcing” is hardly new to Indian capitalism.
Hence, neoliberalism has required a recalibration in India. This recalibration has become increasingly apparent in the last seven or eight years. In this period, the major new initiatives in Indian neoliberalism have been in the area of what David Harvey (2003) described as “accumulation by dispossession” (or “accumulation by encroachment”, to refer to Prabhat Patnaik’s (2005) slightly more accurate description of events in India). These include liberalisation of mining, the accelerated growth in infrastructure sectors, privatisation of natural resources, and the creation of Special Economic Zones. Also in this category are the brutal judiciary-driven assaults on forest dwellers, urban workers and urban petty traders/producers. As is argued by the theory of accumulation by dispossession, these initiatives are aimed at directly expropriating petty commodity producers (as well as subsistence producers, in a few contexts) rather than eliminating them through market forces. By forcibly stripping these producers of their means of production, they result in mass proletarianisation and super-accumulation for the beneficiary capitals.
Unlike the blocked “reforms”, however, such moves towards accumulation by dispossession are unlikely to lead to the elimination of most, or even a significant portion, of petty commodity producers. They still only affect a relatively small number of producers as compared to the Indian economy as a whole. Rather than an effort at destroying petty commodity production, they can more accurately be seen as the most visible vanguard of a drive for intensified extraction of surplus from the latter – a drive whose most widespread manifestation is the crisis of reproduction in agriculture. This crisis, while also accelerating proletarianisation among the poor peasantry, is impacting producers in direct proportion to the degree of their commoditisation – meaning that the so-called “middle peasantry”, who were simultaneously the most vulnerable and the most commoditised, are being hit the hardest.
Thus, whereas petty commodity production cannot be totally eliminated, it can be more intensely subjugated and made more vulnerable to intensified extraction. Under neoliberalism, Indian capitalism has proven to prefer a more shrunken, dominated space for petty commodity production than in the earlier model. This intensified extraction is in turn made possible by the shift in capital accumulation towards larger producers and the organised sector. It is in this context that the political project of neoliberalism has developed.
Indian Neoliberalism as a Political Project
The failure to implement the “typical” package of neoliberal reforms in India is only one facet of Indian neoliberalism’s weakness. The other becomes immediately apparent if we compare India to Thatcherite Britain, Reagan’s America, or the Latin American dictatorships. In India, neoliberalism is not a mass political project. No political party or organised political force (such as the army in Latin America) has adopted neoliberalism as such as a part of its ideology. To this day, with the very significant exception of Gujarat (to which we will return), no political party has won elections with anything resembling an open endorsement of neoliberal policies. Moreover, other than a generic celebration of consumption and consumption-fuelled aspirations, even popular vernacular media rarely articulates the ideological principles of neoliberalism.
Indian neoliberalism has thus largely failed to build itself into a truly hegemonic project. This is in sharp contrast to Thatcherism, for instance, which built a popular base by using neoliberal ideology to refract genuine contradictions of social democracy (Hall 1979).
In Gramsci’s terms, Indian neoliberalism lacks a “totalitarian party”; it is an ideology without an organisation, except parts of the state machinery itself.
Why this is the case is a far larger question. At an ideological level, by comparison with Thatcherism, it can be seen that the contradictions experienced by most Indians cannot be easily reduced to the formulae of state over-regulation. The continued presence of the state as both supporter and opponent of petty production prevents an easy attack on it as an external imposition. The discourses of the 1980s remain far too powerful to be swept aside, giving rise to endless laments from neoliberal ideologues about “vote bank” politics and the inability of the Indian masses to understand the wisdom of the “market.”
This political failure in turn becomes an obstacle to the subjugation of petty producers. It is clear that if Indian capital found the discourses of the 1980s’ movements a fetter on their expansion, neoliberalism does so at a far more intense level. Such politics directly opposes the blanket liberalisation, regulatory withdrawal and speculative freedom that are so central to the neoliberal project. Moreover, in the Indian context, the persistence of such politics blocks the wholesale subjugation of petty commodity producers and hinders the ability of capital to impose its will on the Indian polity. As such, if neoliberalism is to politically succeed in reshaping India’s society and polity as it wishes, it requires a stronger foundation on which to attack such politics.
Paper by Shankar Gopalakrishnan
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