"Smear campaigns on television and print media, speeches by high-level politicians and public narratives are designed to undermine ally credibility. Allies are frequently framed as instigators of societal discord, accused of sowing division and labelled unpatriotic or anti-national. Currently, these efforts at discrediting allies are part of a broader, global backlash against so-called woke politics, namely a reactionary response to progressive movements and ideologies"

https://article-14.com/post/becoming-allies-civil-liberties-activism-in-india-exclusive-book-excerpt--6a3215545f718

"Nearly five years after oxygen concentrators were rushed into India to save lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, people who imported them are now receiving Customs notices demanding lakhs in unpaid duty."

https://www.thenewsminute.com/karnataka/activist-who-imported-oxygen-concentrators-to-save-lives-during-covid-gets-customs-notice

"The American political scientist Elisabeth Noelle Neumann described the “spiral of silence” decades before social media existed. Her theory suggested that individuals suppress opinions they believe may isolate them socially.

Social media has transformed that silence into a permanent archive. For minorities this creates an additional layer of caution.

Silence becomes less about fear of disagreement and more about uncertainty over future consequences."

https://nsiddiqui.substack.com/p/indian-muslims-in-the-age-of-algorithms?r=4d06dl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

"Dehumanization prepares the conditions for killing while simultaneously anesthetizing the public imagination against outrage. Language itself becomes corrupted. The horrific casualness of terms like “corned beef” to refer to mangled bodies reveals not only cruelty but habituation to cruelty. A society learns to joke in the dialect of counterinsurgency.
Gogol understood this. The dead soul is not only the dead peasant..."

https://progressive.international/wire/2026-06-09-dead-souls-in-the-sugarlands-counterinsurgency-and-the-moral-life-of-solidarity-in-negros/en/

"The Sidra evictions were the latest in a series of moves to evict Gujjars and Bakarwals, beginning in 2020, right after the union government removed J&K’s special constitutional status by deleting Article 370...
The notices and evictions of these tribes—who form 15% of J&K’s population...after decades of life led on land that once belonged to no one and since 1960 has been owned by the government, have sparked accusations of religious bias"

https://article-14.com/post/after-decades-of-backing-the-state-j-k-s-tribals-face-demolitions-evictions-hostility-in-their-homeland-6a2a28ea95d5f

Have you read this book yet? If not, you might want to. Good reviews too.

https://knownturf.blogspot.com/2025/03/new-reviews-for-newest-book.html?m=0

I have a new poem out in the Stone Circle Review:

https://stonecirclereview.com/the-station/