Evolution, Sex, and Finding Your Inner Grok: 
An Interview with Marlene Zuk
Michele Pridmore-Brown interviews Marlene Zuk

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

MARLENE ZUK IS AN EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST at the University of Minnesota. Her last book was a pithily entertaining look at sex on six legs. In her new book, she has jumped from bugs to humans. Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live contains a tiny bit about two-legged sex, quite a bit more about human diet, but mostly it dissects our fantasies about the distant Paleo-past. In particular, it addresses the currently popular notion that if we adopt the lifestyle of our Paleolithic ancestors — whether that means running barefoot, or heaving boulders in one of the nation’s “CrossFit” studios, or eating raw meat still dripping with blood — then we’ll be more in sync with our real natures. As she points out, a growing number of Manhattan urbanites and Silicon Valley types are zealously, indeed quasi-religiously, trying to access their inner “Grok” *** (lingo, in case you didn’t know, for their Paleo- or cave-selves). But, they’re barking up the wrong tree, and missing the real lessons of evolution, according to Zuk.

***Grok - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Grok'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man."
Grok is a neologism coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Grok

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Michele Pridmore-Brown: You just wrote Sex on Six Legs, which makes sense in terms of your work on crickets and sexual selection, but now, in this book, you’re busting a cultural myth about our hominid evolutionary past. How are they related?

Marlene Zuk: The two books are more connected than people might think. A lot of my day job — as a biology professor and researcher — got me interested in rapid evolution and how quickly change can happen. Our work on crickets showed that a mutation that alters their wings and makes males unable to chirp spread throughout the population in fewer than 20 generations, remarkably quickly in evolutionary terms. Being unable to chirp protected them from a parasitic fly, so that’s why the mutation was advantageous. I started thinking more about what determines the rate of evolution. Lots of new evidence is suggesting that some traits in people, such as adaptation to high altitude, might also have evolved very quickly. This then made me ultrasensitive to all these mentions in the press and popular literature and even in conversation about how we humans have gotten out of sync with our environments because we evolved as hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic — some x thousand years ago, say 10,000 to 200,000 years ago. The idea is that, because of modern life, we have developed this awful malaise: we’re out of sync with our real selves and the best way to remedy that is to mimic the diet, exercise, and childrearing practices of way back when.

MPB: In your book, you’re very specific about the form these attempts at mimicry take — for instance, supposed Paleo diets that eschew starch and allow only roots, berries and meat; so-called “CrossFit” exercises that mimic running from lions and heaving boulders, and so on. It seems like you’ve got two things going on: consumers misunderstanding evolution, and then Paleo-fantasies as a kind of secular religion.

MZ: When I was researching this book, I read a lot of stuff on Paleo blogs and websites, and I can tell you I was struck by how deeply invested people are in a particular version of what the past is like. And now I should mention my caveat that I am not writing a diet book. I don’t care what people eat; or rather, I’m not giving advice on what the best diet is. I’m not even saying whether the Paleo diet is good for you. Not my concern. Rather, I’m interested in this use of a vision of the past to base decisions on. So often, you get this response from Paleo aficionados of: “Well I’ve switched to a Paleo diet and my allergies are much better and my sex life is improved,” and so on. That’s fine for them, but if we want to understand which diets are best for people, we need to look at the data.

MPB: I guess you could say our fantasies about the Paleo-past smack of the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s return-to-nature cult. Did he not promulgate accessing one’s inner “noble savage” as a way of curing the ills of civilization?

MZ: Absolutely. Our Paleo-fantasies play into this whole nostalgia thing. Humans have always looked to the past, even their own childhoods, as a better, more wonderful time, when life was simpler, easier, healthier. Maybe these Paleo fantasies are just an über-manifestation of nostalgia for a lost past. I’d be curious what people in other fields think about the pervasiveness of this idea that we’re mismatched to our environment — and what it would mean to feel well suited to it.

MPB: In your book, you mentioned a 1987 piece by Jared Diamond in Discover entitled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” He’s referring to agriculture, which seems to be framed as a kind of original sin. Did he have a hand in launching this Paleo-craze?

MZ: I haven’t read his current book, but I think his focus is more on what we can learn from foraging tribes. I certainly agree with that. My objection is to the assumption that what we did before — say, pre-agriculture — was healthier, or even ideal, and then, somehow, we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and it’s all been downhill. Diamond talks about the ways in which agriculture was bad, and he is right about those costs. Of course, walking upright is bad for us too, at least in some ways, but that ship has sailed. I think a deeper understanding of evolution helps you better understand the futility of pointing to a moment in time as being the perfect one.

MPB: Can you say a bit about how we’ve evolved since the dawn of agriculture, 10–12,000 years ago? And how there’s no going back to some prelapsarian moment, even if there was one, which there wasn’t? We were never happy savages, or even just disease-free.

MZ: Right, there was never a time when our bodies or minds were in perfect sync with the environment. Besides, humans aren’t all alike, and we never were; people have been variable throughout our history. And, yes, it’s clear that human health got worse right after the adoption of agriculture — in part because there were a lot more people around. In other words, if you have a steady food supply, then people have more babies, and then there’s crowding, which means an increase in diseases that you don’t get when there’s separation. And if you are sedentary, diseases like cholera, which are spread through contaminated water, are more likely to occur.

MPB: Getting back to your point about rapid evolution, what are some examples of the ways humans have evolved since agriculture? Besides the lactase gene (for digesting milk), are there other dramatic examples uncovered in recent years by genomic research? In other words, part of your point is that we can’t return because we are already different, so we’d be even more mismatched to the past than we are to the present.

MZ: New genetic tools are allowing scientists to scan the human genome looking for signatures of selection, and they are finding evidence of recent evolution all the time. Depending on our ancestry, we have new genes for resisting disease, for living at high altitudes, and for digesting starch, all abilities that our more distant ancestors lacked.

MPB: You use a nice metaphor of a maloccluded zipper to describe the fit between an organism and his or her environment. We are always, almost by definition, maloccluded, it seems?

MZ: Oh, yeah. It’s not like everything is going to line up. If you’re a real organism, then the fit is only just “good enough.” The Nobel-winning biologist François Jacob famously said that “evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer.” An engineer says, “I need to solve this problem and I’m going to find the best parts, put them together in the most efficient way possible, with a clear endpoint or finished product in mind” — the finished product being, for instance, a bridge or a computer chip. Evolution doesn’t work like that. Rather, the tinkerer just has stuff lying around in, say, the garage, and this tinkerer can only work with the materials he’s already got. As organisms, we ourselves carry around in our bodies all the materials that evolution can act on, and some of it we’ve had since life began. Noah Shubin’s book Your Inner Fish talks about this: if you look at human anatomy, you can see traces of our evolutionary past. There’s all these parts that don’t work ideally because initially “the tinkerer” was working with a fish skeleton and there’s only so much you can do if you need to breathe air but have gills. You’re always handicapped, or jury-rigged, or sometimes it’s a happy facilitation, but in any case evolution is always tinkering and there’s no endpoint. That’s the other point of my book: that there is no engineer saying, “Oh, we need to get from here to there and then we’ll be done.”

MPB: Getting back to your title: I assume that part of the Paleo-fantasy regarding sex is that we were meant, by fiat of nature, as it were, to be either overtly or covertly promiscuous?

MZ: Well, the myths are variable. There’s also, on the other hand, this myth that we’re meant to be monogamous or to live in idealized Cleaver-like families — and that we’re going to hell because we aren’t. Everybody is interested in this idea that there are certain universals — like raising kids, or parents loving their kids, for instance. But you get on shaky ground when you extrapolate further. The promiscuous label is interesting because people play that one on both sides, depending on their agenda.

MPB: You have an interesting point in your book about human males and adaptability. We’ve heard a lot recently in the news, especially in the The Alantic, about the limits of male adaptability (as compared to females). I was intrigued because you refer to testosterone as in fact a mediator of evolution.

MZ: Yeah, well, this stuff has to happen through some mechanism. It’s like thinking about those parts in the garage, and what’s lying around. If you’ve got testosterone lying around in your garage, then you tinker with it. Testosterone has a lot of different effects. To think about testosterone as this chemical that destines men to be surly, uncommunicative, and violent is missing the point entirely. Selection can act in a lot of different ways, including on testosterone. In many species of male birds, elevated levels mean that they start to sing in the spring, and yet, clearly, it doesn’t have that effect in human males. In other words, testosterone does different things in different organisms, and in the same organism but different contexts. New fathers, for instance, have lower levels of testosterone compared to what they had before the kids were born. And if they sleep with the new baby, they have even lower levels. In other words, there’s a complex dance going between the environment and the body. It’s an ongoing back and forth.

MPB: This seems like an argument for paternity leave.

MZ: Sure, you could say that. I’m not going to say all men will react to infants in this way or that we should institute a policy. Rather, my point is that males with high levels initially may end up with lower levels, depending on their environments. Men can adapt to childrearing — and changes in testosterone levels mediate this adaptation. This idea that they’re destined to want to spread their seed, well, it’s a myth of sorts.

MPB: You mentioned old fathers as a rich source of mutations, which I know is not good at an individual level, even if these mutations do provide raw material for natural selection. I wondered if you might speculate about what effect IVF, contraception, and parental postponement is likely to have in the longer run?

MZ: Whether more raw material and variation will end up resulting in more rapid evolution … I don’t know. One of the most apt quotes I came across in the literature was this: When someone asked: are we still evolving? The answer was the question: are we all having the same number of children? Since the answer to that question is no, we’re evolving and will continue to do so.

MPB: One more question about your book: what’s next or what do you feel that you left out?

MZ: There’s a chapter I almost wrote for the Paleo book, and I ended up not having time because I was moving from California to Minnesota. It was about Paleo-fantasy pets. There’s so much we’re finding out now, about dogs and other domesticated animals. An article just came out about how dogs have amylase genes, which allows them to digest starch. When dogs were domesticated, they must have foraged in the dumps of early humans, and were also able to eat scraps. So, it’s possible that even your dog didn’t eat a Paleo diet. It illustrates the point. The noncarnivorous dogs (with the gene) must have outbred the purely carnivorous ones. So, not only have there been recent genetic changes in us, but also in the organisms we interact with.

MPB: Here’s a writerly question. You run a lab at the University of Minnesota, you pursue research on crickets in Hawaii, you teach and direct graduate students, you go to conferences, you write academic articles — how do you manage to write popular science books as well?

MZ: [Laughs] Sometimes one or the other ball is falling! The writing is fun. I get to interact with people I wouldn’t otherwise interact with. It’s just not enough to live a life where I’m doing science and interacting with scientists. As for method, I write in bits and pieces. I do substantial parts of my books on sabbatical. In general, though, I do try to be pretty disciplined. I have a word goal of 1,000 words a day. So, if I get to a hard part in the middle, I have to keep going to get the 1,000 words. But, it’s never continuous because my life just isn’t like that. When my students who are writing dissertations tell me that they have to have x number of uninterrupted hours, and it has to be in the morning or whatever, well, then I tell them they’re in the wrong line of work.

MPB: What do your colleagues think of your books?

MZ: I don’t want to come across as snarky here, but some my colleagues have this attitude of, “Oh yeah, you write for the general public. I would if I weren’t doing something more important.” And, naturally, they think they could do it really easily! There was always this question of whether, if you do books for the general audience, does this count as scholarly output, or is it more along the lines of outreach, or, say, teaching. I made the case that it was scholarly; in other words, just because it’s not wet lab work — I’m not collecting data and so on — it’s still got scholarly implications, or so I argued.

MPB: For you, which is harder: the pure science or the popular science writing?

MZ: Well, I don’t know. [Long pause.] You have more control with writing, whereas with science you don’t know what’s going to happen. At the same time, not knowing is soothing in a way. You have to wait and let it unfold, and I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder. That’s an interesting question. The difference definitely lies with control. In science, you can exert control in the sense that you can design your experiments, and decide what questions you’re going to ask, but nature’s doing what it’s doing and you can’t control that.

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UK plan to replace migrant carers with automation branded ‘ridiculous’

The UK government is again putting blind faith in tech
 

Open Government Licence STORY BY Thomas Macaulay


A UK government plan to replace migrant care workers with automation has been slammed as “ridiculous” by one of the country’s AI luminaries.

The new immigration system would close the door to “low-skilled” workers from the EU, who currently make up a huge proportion of staff in social care, a sector where there are already more than 120,000 job vacancies — and growing demand. The government wants employers to fill this gap with “wider investment in technology and automation.

“We need to shift the focus of our economy away from a reliance on cheap labor from Europe and instead concentrate on investment in technology and automation,” reads a new policy paper detailing the proposals.

This demand has been slated by Noel Sharkey, a professor of AI and robotics at Sheffield University and former judge on TV series Robot Wars.

“I think this is a ridiculous idea and it’s really going to have very severe consequences for our aging population,” Sharkey said on BBC Radio 5 Live today.

[Read: EU wants to create a single market for European data]

The British computer scientist has previously worked with elderly dementia-suffers, an experience that taught him the importance of human qualities in care work.

“You need to sit by peoples’ bedsides, you need to hold old peoples’ hands … putting them in the hands of machines would be a ridiculous idea for a start,” he said
Fears for future

When the new immigration system comes into force in January 2021, workers who earn less £25,600 will be blocked from entry to the UK.

Care workers currently earn as little as £16,000, according to the National Association of Care and Support Workers (NACSW), and with the sector already in crisis, their average salaries are unlikely to reach the new threshold any time soon.

Christina McAnea, the assistant general secretary of UNISON, the UK’s largest trade union, fears the plans “spell absolute disaster for the care sector.”

“Care work is highly skilled, but low paid, so falls foul of the government’s arbitrary immigration threshold,” she said.

The government has been promoting the potential for robots to replace human care workers for some time. Last October, it pledged to invest £34 million in developing care robots, which it claimed could “revolutionize” the UK’s care system.

But just like the government‘s plans to fill healthcare funding gaps with apps and secure borders with blockchain, this digital initiative is being driven by political ideology rather than public benefit.

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How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

For seven decades, India has been held together by its constitution, which promises equality to all. But Narendra Modi’s BJP is remaking the nation into one where some people count as more Indian than others. 

By Samanth Subramanian Thu 20 Feb 2020 The long read

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, 

Soon after the violence began, on 5 January, Aamir was standing outside a residence hall in Jawaharlal Nehru University in south Delhi. Aamir, a PhD student, is Muslim, and he asked to be identified only by his first name. He had come to return a book to a classmate when he saw 50 or 60 people approaching the building. They carried metal rods, cricket bats and rocks. One swung a sledgehammer. They were yelling slogans: “Shoot the traitors to the nation!” was a common one. Later, Aamir learned that they had spent the previous half-hour assaulting a gathering of teachers and students down the road. Their faces were masked, but some were still recognisable as members of a Hindu nationalist student group that has become increasingly powerful over the past few years.

The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills.

The word often used to describe the RSS is “paramilitary”. In its near-century of existence, it has been accused of plotting assassinations, stoking riots against minorities and acts of terrorism. (Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead in 1948 by an RSS man, although the RSS claims he had left the organisation by then.) The RSS doesn’t, by itself, engage in electoral politics. But among its affiliated groups is the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), the party that has governed India for the past six years, and that has, under the prime minister Narendra Modi, been remaking India into an authoritarian, Hindu nationalist state.

It was nearly 7pm when Aamir saw the approaching mob. At that time in mid-winter, the campus of JNU, perhaps India’s most influential state-run university, is unnervingly dark. It spreads over more than 400 hectares of wooded land, sealed off by a wall from the rest of south Delhi. Residence halls sit in groves of acacia and borage. To get anywhere from the gate requires a bicycle, an auto rickshaw or a long walk. The university’s 8,000 students appear to occupy a remote world unto themselves. Since its founding in 1969, though, JNU has functioned as a microcosm of national politics. The ideologies of its students and faculty – exhibited in its hyperactive student politics – have traditionally been liberal, leftist and secular. Through its academics, JNU frequently moulded government policy; its graduates went into the media, major non-profits, the law or leftist parties. Over the years, JNU has stood for much of what the conservative, ethnocentric BJP has resented about the country it governs today. The university has been like a stone in the boot of the BJP, hobbling the party with every step.

When he spotted the mob, Aamir ran into the dorms, up the stairs and into his friend’s room. They locked the door, then hid on the balcony. They heard the attackers shattering panes of glass, barging into rooms and beating students. Aamir silenced his phone. “I was sure they’d break my arms and legs if they caught me,” he said. The mob had come with clear intent, targeting students and faculty who had been critical of the BJP: a Muslim student from Kashmir, teachers with ties to the political left, members of groups that championed underprivileged castes. The president of the JNU student union, Aishe Ghosh, received a deep gash to her head and her arm was broken. The rooms of ABVP allies, though, were spared.

Later, it emerged that the university’s own cadre of ABVP had been bolstered by students from other universities – and perhaps by people who weren’t students at all, people who were just RSS muscle. Rohit Azad, who has spent two decades at the university, first as a student and then a professor of economics, told me that although he had seen his share of violence between student groups, “this thing – this act of bringing in attackers from outside – that was unprecedented”. It was as if the Young Republicans had invited some alt-right thugs to join them in running amok through Berkeley, beating up black and Hispanic students, Young Democrats and anyone who’d expressed support for Bernie Sanders.

Play Video 

1:32 Masked mob storms top Delhi university, injuring staff and students – videoVideos of the attacks leaked out through social media in real time. The police were called, but they didn’t move to stop the violence. Instead, a posse of policemen installed itself at JNU’s gate, allowing no one in. Yogendra Yadav, a political activist, arrived at the gate at 9pm. Ninety minutes later, the attackers emerged, still masked and armed. Even then, the police detained no one. Instead, they were permitted to walk away as if nothing had happened. When Yadav’s colleague took photos, Yadav was set upon by a knot of men, knocked down and kicked in the face. The police did nothing. Later, from a video, Yadav identified a local ABVP official among those who had hit him. In a statement, the ABVP blamed the attacks on “leftist goons,” but on television members admitted that the masked, armed men and women on campus were part of the ABVP. Still, the Delhi police pressed no charges. “The police gave the goons cover, gave them free rein on campus,” Yadav said. A JNU professor went further, claiming that: “The police are complicit.”

The onslaught on JNU marked the middle of a season of nationwide protest, provoked by a new law. The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed by parliament on 11 December 2019, provides a fast track to citizenship for refugees fleeing into India from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Refugees of every south Asian faith are eligible – every faith, that is, except Islam. It is a policy that fits neatly with the RSS and the BJP’s demonisation of Muslims, India’s largest religious minority. To votaries of Hindutva, the country is best served if it is expunged of Islam. The act was both a loud signal of that ambition and a handy tool to help achieve it.

Since December, millions of Indians have turned out on to the streets to object to this vision of their country. The government has fought them by banning gatherings, shutting off mobile internet services, detaining people arbitrarily, or worse. After protests flared at Jamia Millia Islamia, an Islamic university in Delhi, cops fired teargas and live rounds, assaulted students and trashed the library. As demonstrations spread across the state of Uttar Pradesh, police raided and vandalised Muslim homes by way of reprisal. Detainees in custody were beaten; one man reported hearing screams in a police station all night long. (In various statements, the police claimed to be acting in self defence, or to prevent violence, or to root out conspiracy.) At least 20 protesters died of bullet wounds. Police officials denied firing at the crowds, even though the police carried the only visible guns at these rallies.

Still, the protests have persisted well into February. At Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood in south-eastern Delhi, hundreds of thousands of people have turned up over nine weeks to take part in an indefinite sit-in. The BJP has taken a ruthless view of all this dissent. On one occasion, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu cleric who is chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, said: “If they won’t understand words, they’ll understand bullets.” One of Modi’s ministers used “Shoot the traitors to the nation!” as a call-and-response at a rally – the same slogan the ABVP had raised in JNU.

In its 72 years as a free country, India has never faced a more serious crisis. Already its institutions – its courts, much of its media, its investigative agencies, its election commission – have been pressured to fall in line with Modi’s policies. The political opposition is withered and infirm. More is in the offing: the idea of Hindutva, in its fullest expression, will ultimately involve undoing the constitution and unravelling the fabric of liberal democracy. It will have to; constitutional niceties aren’t compatible with the BJP’s blueprint for a country in which people are graded and assessed according to their faith. The ferment gripping India since the passage of the citizenship act – the fever of the protests, the brutality of the police, the viciousness of the politics – has only reflected how existentially high the stakes have become.


The RSS and the BJP’s success, over the past six years, is owed in part to its adept poisoning of the public discourse. Politicians, indoctrinated media outlets and squadrons of social media trolls lie, polarise and demonise all day long. Among their stratagems is the invention of categories of abuse for their opponents, to convey with a single label why such people should not be trusted to have India’s interests at heart. “Presstitute” is one, applied to liberal journalists to accuse them of selling their coverage for money or influence. “Sickular” is another, born of the RSS’s opinion that Indian secularism is a demented version of minority appeasement.

The term “JNU type” refers to leftists of every stripe – from Maoists yearning for the revolution, to moderates who abhor Hindutva. Traditionally, JNU has specialised in the humanities, so “JNU types” also came to be scorned for their soft humanism – for their opposition to capital punishment, to the army’s human-rights abuses, or to the state’s repressions in Kashmir. All while studying for years and years on the government’s dime, the BJP’s supporters complain. It’s enough to slot JNU types into the mother category: “anti-national”.

 

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in New Delhi. 
Photograph: Hindustan Times/Getty

In its earliest years, JNU soaked up the ideology of the man it was named after – Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister – and of his party, the Congress. It was still only a generation since independence, and Nehru and the Congress, having led the freedom struggle, exerted enormous moral authority. The university’s ethos and its very curriculum were built on Nehru’s values, says Rakesh Batabyal, the author of JNU: The Making of a University. It was secular in its worldview, left of centre in its economics and technocratic in its thinking on policy. “Students came from all over the country,” Batabyal told me. “There was a pluralism to the university that Nehru wanted for India.”

Over the next few decades, the locus of power in student politics migrated further leftwards, into groups that allied themselves with national communist parties. The ABVP, which opposed all these -isms – secularism, pluralism, socialism, communism – remained on the margins, just like its counterparts in national politics. The Hindu right had done nothing of note during the freedom struggle; in fact, the RSS didn’t take part in the mass movements that forced the British out of India. For almost half a century after independence, the political parties backed by the RSS remained in the political wilderness. “They used to say that, back in the 1980s, if you were a supporter at an ABVP event, you went to it with a blanket covering your face,” Azad, the JNU professor, told me. “That was how embarrassing it was considered to be.”

Then a mosque was destroyed, and India changed. For years, the RSS had claimed that the Babri Masjid, a 16th-century mosque in the town of Ayodhya, stood on the very spot where the Hindu deity Ram was born. The location warranted a temple, the RSS declared, not a mosque built by an invading Muslim king. Late in 1990, a BJP leader toured India’s heartland for two months, in an air-conditioned Toyota mocked up to resemble a chariot, to rouse Hindus to demand that a temple replace the mosque. (The man who sat in the Toyota’s cabin, serving as the rally’s logistician, was Narendra Modi.) In December 1992, a crowd of men from the RSS and BJP razed the mosque, watched but unhindered by the police. In the following weeks, religious riots erupted across India, particularly in Mumbai. Two thousand people were killed. The BJP’s obsession with the Babri mosque was bloody and divisive, but it also earned them new political capital. In 1996, the BJP came to power for the first time.

On the campus of JNU, in tidy parallel, the fortunes of the ABVP bloomed: it won its first seat in the student union in 1992, three key union posts in 1996, and in 2000, the presidency of the union itself. The man who won that plum post, Sandeep Mahapatra, entered JNU in 1997 – a time, he told me, when the ABVP’s supporters were proud and vocal about their allegiances. No one wrapped blankets around their faces any more. Part of the reason for the ABVP’s rise, Mahapatra said, was fatigue with leftist ideas. “The Soviet Union had disintegrated. Even there, the left had been defeated,” Mahapatra, now a lawyer in Delhi, said. “The students thought there was some space for nationalist thought.” 

The demolishing of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992. 
Photograph: India Picture/Alamy

The 90s were a decade of disillusionment with socialism and communism, and so too in JNU. Mahapatra’s opponents, he said, “were always talking about abstract things – what Mao had said, or what Marx had said”. The ABVP, for its part, mined the same faultlines on campus that the BJP exploited in Indian society. “We talked about Kashmir, about the Ram temple, about the Hindu nation.” These were all crucial items on the RSS wishlist: to take full possession of the disputed region of Kashmir, defeating Pakistan in the process; to build the temple in Ayodhya; to give Hindus primacy in India. Dust-ups and brawls between student parties, Mahapatra said, were common. Once, while speaking on a stage, he was injured by stones hurled at him by his opponents.

In the 21st century, the tracks of India’s politics and JNU’s politics diverged somewhat. Across the country, the old communist parties fell out of favour. In West Bengal, a citadel of the left, the communists were voted out of the state government in 2011, having held it for 34 years. The Congress, run as a family shop by Nehru’s dynasty, turned complacent and highly corrupt. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, it won just 44 seats – a historic low. The slide was swift and brutal. On campus, the leftist student groups splintered; new caste-based factions arose. But they all decided, Mahapatra said, to band together against the ABVP. Its numbers grew, but its electoral triumphs stalled. There hasn’t been an ABVP union president since Mahapatra, but the group’s power and authority have expanded in ways that tracked the havoc let loose by the Hindu right under Modi.

When Modi won his first term as prime minister in 2014, it was difficult to know how to read the result. Were those who voted for the BJP frustrated with the alternatives, or did they believe Modi to be the economic miracle-worker he claimed to be? Had they simply chosen to disregard the fact that he had allowed mobs of Hindu fanatics to murder hundreds of Muslims in riots during his chief ministership of Gujarat in 2002, or did they actively approve of this overt anti-Muslim agenda?

Only after Modi settled into power did many BJP voters begin to clearly voice their sympathies for Hindutva. These revelations felt sudden and shocking, to the point that you wondered if these voters had silently longed for a pure Hindu nation well before Modi. Relationships ruptured the way they did after Trump’s election or the Brexit referendum. Families bickered on WhatsApp groups, and friends fell out. “Before 2014, you’d have found a pro-ABVP student and a pro-left student who were friends with each other,” Cheri Che, a PhD student in history, told me. “After 2014, that was increasingly difficult.”

At JNU, the ABVP’s influence swelled. Che claimed that faculty and administration positions were filled with people who had RSS or ABVP connections. At one point, he said, the “wardens” – or supervisors – of nearly every residence hall were shunted out and replaced with ABVP sympathisers. Beyond the campus, Hindu nationalists felt so empowered that they formed gangs to lynch Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, on flimsy suspicions that their victims were smuggling cows or in possession of beef. (In Hinduism, the cow is revered as sacred.) Since 2014, at least 44 people have been murdered and 280 injured. The gangs acted with impunity, sometimes filming themselves, as if they’d never be prosecuted – and they were proven correct. In one Uttar Pradesh town, a Muslim man, beaten so badly that he would eventually die, was dragged injured along the ground. A photo showed a policeman clearing a path through the crowd as the mob hauled the body behind him.

On the JNU campus, Muslim students felt more and more anxious. On the day in 2017 when Yogi Adityanath, the Hindutva hardliner, was elected chief minister, a Kashmiri Muslim student was walking to a canteen. It was close to midnight. “I saw a guy, a hardcore ABVP supporter,” said the student, who asked not to be named. “As soon as he saw me, he said: ‘Now that Yogi’s here, we’ll cut down and devour the Muslims.’ He said it openly. There were a lot of people standing around. You wouldn’t have heard anything like that earlier.”

In February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar, a communist who was then the student union’s president, was part of a campus protest against the hanging of a Kashmiri man dubiously convicted of terrorism. The ABVP called in news crews from pro-BJP channels. Over the next few days, these channels aired footage that seemed to show Kumar and others yelling slogans calling for the break-up of India. For viewers, the videos confirmed what they already suspected: that JNU was a hothouse of treason. A few weeks later, the videos were found to have been doctored.

Regardless, the BJP’s leaders kept referring to JNU’s students – and to anyone who supported them – as “anti-nationals” and traitors. The Delhi police arrested Kumar and charged him under a century-old sedition law. When the police took him to the courthouse for his hearing, they encountered a mob of dozens of lawyers and at least one BJP legislator hollering slogans. “Shoot him!” they shouted. Then, inside the courthouse, while the police stood by, the mob beat Kumar up. Afterwards, a news report said, one of the attackers claimed with satisfaction: “Our job is done.” 

Students protesting against the arrest of union president
Kanhaiya Kumar at the JNU campus in February 2016. 
Photograph: Hindustan Times/Getty

After the February 2016 protest, the Kashmiri JNU student learned that police had visited his home in Srinagar, in Kashmir, and taken down a host of details about him and his family. He hadn’t even been at the protest, he said. Then he discovered that every Kashmiri student he knew in JNU had a similar story to tell. It shook him. “We decided – a group of us – that we’d just stay out of things having to do with politics,” he said. “We’re vulnerable here.” A little over a year ago, when he was going to the campus library one morning, he saw a big truck filled with people shouting slogans about the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Out of a set of loudspeakers on the truck, music from the Hindutva songbook poured out. Accompanying the truck, he said, were “people on bikes, people on foot – and they were outsiders, not students,” he said. “I thought: ‘The goons have come inside.’”

In 2016, Modi’s government installed at the head of JNU an engineering professor named M Jagadesh Kumar. The students and the press described Kumar as an RSS loyalist – part of the government’s wider campaign to seed universities and cultural institutions with RSS appointees. Kumar denied any links with the RSS.

On the evening of 5 January, as the attacks on campus escalated, Kumar messaged the police via WhatsApp, according to a police enquiry report. Instead of requesting help in curbing the mob, though, he asked for police to be stationed outside the gate. (Later, to a reporter, he said that he’d wanted campus security to tackle the assaults, which he called “unfortunate.”) Only at 7.45pm did a JNU official ask the police into the campus to intervene, but by then the violence had ended. The attackers were still on the premises hours later, but the university and the police let them leave, as if they’d dropped by for a visit and were now hurrying to catch the last bus home.

Even before the ABVP attacks, JNU had been seething. For weeks, the student union had been aggressively opposing a fee hike, boycotting registrations and forcing classes to be suspended. When the nationwide demonstrations against the citizenship act began, that was folded into the mobilisations on campus. To many students, the JNU administration, the RSS and the BJP were part of the same machine.

By itself, the new law defies India’s constitution, which is a long document steeped in the resolve to treat castes and religions with scrupulous equality. Written between 1946 and 1949, it was an exercise in nation-making – in gluing together a giant modern state from fragmented communities living across the land. To effect this, one of its chief promises was that citizenship would bear no connection to religion. The citizenship act’s exclusion of Muslims violates that promise.

But the act is most menacing when read in tandem with other recent government measures, which in totality aim to redefine who does and does not belong on Indian soil. These measures can be perplexing, even for Indians. For one, some of their functions seem to overlap. For another, they’re constantly referred to by the kind of abbreviations that are unavoidable in Indian life. The Citizenship Amendment Act is the CAA; the National Register of Citizens is the NRC; the National Population Register is the NPR. On Twitter, hashtags about the #CAA-NPR-NRC issue devolve into a thick alphabet soup. 

BJP supporters at a rally in New Delhi in December 2019. 

Photograph: Prakash Singh/AFP via Getty Images

The government started to create a register of citizens five years ago, in the north-eastern state of Assam. The riverine deltas and paddy fields of Assam lie across a porous border with Bangladesh, and migrants have crossed in both directions for decades. The arrival of Bangladeshis – many of them Muslims – became a heated political issue in Assam through the 70s and 80s. The migrants were blamed for taking jobs, usurping land and signing up for welfare benefits despite being ineligible for them.

Previous governments, as well as India’s supreme court, had agreed that a citizens’ register was necessary to distinguish migrants from locals. Citizenship isn’t always simple to prove in India; in a country of more than 1 billion people, fewer than 100 million hold passports, while other documents, issued at local levels by corrupt or inefficient officers, can be unreliable. For the BJP, the idea of a citizen’s register served as both a profitable electoral tactic and a religious wedge. In a stump speech in 2014, Modi told an audience in Assam that while Hindu migrants would be accommodated, other “infiltrators” would be sent back to Bangladesh. In April 2019, Amit Shah, now Modi’s home minister, said that Bangladeshi immigrants were “eating the grain that should go to the poor”. They were “termites”, Shah added. The BJP would pick them up, one by one, and “throw them into the Bay of Bengal”.

To get into the register, people had to prove first that an ancestor lived in Assam before 1971 and then that they were related to that ancestor. In a country of spotty electoral rolls and property deeds, of inconsistent name spellings and patchy documentation, this was always going to be difficult. When the registration of citizens began in 2015, Assam scrambled for its papers. Poor families, worried about being rendered stateless, spent their money on lawyers and documents. Some committed suicide. The so-called foreigners’ tribunals, set up to hear appeals, were incentivised to strike people off the register; the more foreigners you identified, the better your chances of staying on the tribunal.

In 2019, a Vice News examination of five of these tribunals found that nine out of 10 cases involved Muslims. Of the Muslims who appealed, 90% were declared illegal immigrants; for Hindus, the figure was 40%. The government plans to round up all these “foreigners” and transport them to fill nearly a dozen internment camps in the state. (One is already being built: a 28,000 sq metre, double-walled complex for 3,000 people, not far from the border with Bhutan. The centre has six watchtowers and a 100-metre-high light tower.) The BJP is so pleased with this process that it wants to compile a pan-Indian register of citizens, extending the exclusionary power of the process across a population of 1.3 billion. 

India’s Narendra Modi addressing the BJP 

campaign rally ahead of Delhi state elections 

in New Delhi earlier this year.

 Photograph: Manish Swarup/AP

Assam’s register was made public last August, and 1.9 million people, finding themselves omitted, had to hurry to file appeals. Four months later, the government passed the citizenship act. In this grand mechanism to determine “Indianness”, there will be one further component: a population register, hoovering up demographic data on the “usual residents” of India. But even this seemingly passive count of the population can transmute into yet another sieve for citizenship. After the population register is updated in September, lists of residents will be posted in each locality. Then anyone in the locality – officials, neighbours, vigilantes, RSS informers – can lodge an objection to your name’s inclusion. In such cases, you will be marked out as a “doubtful” citizen – a “D-voter” – with the prospect of being interned endlessly or thrown out of India. In this fug of paranoia, anyone might theoretically find themselves tagged “doubtful”: Muslims, dissidents, journalists and opposition political workers. The BJP knows its priorities. “No Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Christian or Parsi,” a new BJP booklet assures readers, “will find their name in the D-voter list.” Muslims, again, are conspicuous by their absence.

The end game isn’t to rinse 180 million Muslims out of India. It can’t be, for practical reasons. Where would they go? Even those speculatively identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants cannot be sent back home unless Bangladesh accepts them. What the BJP is aiming for is what its founders have always wanted: a country that is Hindu before anything else. In the 1940s, both Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Vinayak Savarkar, a leading RSS ideologue, were proponents of a two-nation theory. “The only difference,” says Niraja Jayal, a political scientist who studies Indian democracy, “was that Jinnah wanted the territory of undivided India to be cut into two, with one part for Muslims. Whereas Savarkar wanted Hindus and Muslims in the same land, but with the Muslim living in a subordinate position to the Hindu.” That unequal citizenship was what the RSS considered – and still considers – right and proper, Jayal said. “So you get a graded citizenship, a citizenship with hierarchies. You don’t need genocide, you don’t need ethnic cleansing. This does the job well enough.”

Modi’s first and second terms have now come to feel distinctly different. After 2014, the BJP consolidated its success by winning a series of state elections. The government began its citizenship registry in Assam, but its other prominent policies affected every Indian uniformly: a new tax on goods and services, chaotically implemented; a cancellation of high-value currency notes, intended to curb corruption but melting the economy down instead; and an Orwellian biometric identification scheme. The worst acts of rightwing violence – the beef lynchings – were committed by vigilantes emboldened by the BJP’s rise, and often supported by party leaders. (Two years ago, after eight convicted lynchers were released on bail, one of Modi’s ministers invited them to his house and draped floral garlands on them.) But the lynchings were not directly ascribable to the government in the way that events since Modi’s re-election last year have been.


In August 2019, three months into its second term, the government suspended a constitutional provision that has long granted special autonomies to the disputed border state of Jammu and Kashmir. Further, the state was split in two, and the halves brought under federal control. To forestall resistance, troops poured into the already heavily militarised Kashmir valley, and internet services across the state were shut down. They haven’t yet been properly restored; each passing day sets a new record for the longest shutdown of the internet by a government anywhere in the world. Kashmir’s leading opposition politicians were arrested; they haven’t been heard from since. Justifying a draconian detention order, the government argued that one of these politicians deserved to be held because of his ability “to convince his electorate to come out and vote in huge numbers”.

The RSS got the solution it wanted in Ayodhya as well. Since 1992, a legal battle has raged to determine what should be done with the site of the flattened mosque. In November, the supreme court – which appears increasingly pliant to the government’s needs – ruled that the mosque had been destroyed illegally, but that the land should nevertheless host a temple. It was as if a burglar, having been dressed down, was then invited to move into the house he’d robbed. The citizenship act was passed in December. Within half a year, with a speed and brazenness that left India dazed, the government had fulfilled some of the chief items on the RSS wishlist. 

 

Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP via Getty

Given the ferocity and stamina of the anti-government protests since December, it seems bewildering that no similar mobilisations met any of the government’s previous moves. From the 2019 election onwards, for several months, it seemed as if most Indians were implicitly in favour of this galloping onset of Hindutva. Why was it the citizenship act that electrified the public into protest? It may have partly been “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, Jayal said, but it also induced a broader, more primal kind of insecurity.

“With Kashmir, large segments of India have been persuaded over time that it’s a troubled region – which is an unfair stereotype, but maybe that made it harder for people to respond to its change in status,” she said. “With the Babri Masjid, it was fatigue over an issue that has dragged on for decades.” The citizenship act, though, “promises a whole range of unpleasant possibilities”. Despite the government’s assurances to Hindus and other non-Muslims, “everyone is anxious to be told they have to search for papers, although of course it’s worse for Muslims”, she said. “There’s the prospect of harassment. There’s the fear of being declared illegal. There’s the fear of the unknown.”

This sense of personal peril is matched by a sense of national peril. India can appear to be inured to injustices – the miscarriages of law, the iniquities of wealth and caste, the venality, the wounds and bruises to the body politic. What it still resists is any attempt to claw into the body and rearrange its very bones – its constitution. Nehru, Ambedkar and the other framers of India’s constitution engineered the country to be a liberal, secular democracy. Until recently, that idea had come to seem so impossible to dislodge that even patently unsecular politicians feel compelled to pay lip service to it. “Secularism is an article of faith for us,” Modi said during his 2014 campaign. By then, as an RSS member, he’d already been committed to the concept of a Hindu nation for 43 years.


'We are not safe': India's Muslims tell of wave of police brutality

When governments have threatened to split away from this constitutional foundation, they’ve met widespread popular opposition. After the prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended civic freedoms – of speech, of assembly, of due process – in 1975, she had to suppress waves of protest for the next 18 months, until she called off her declared state of emergency. The recent agitations against the citizenship act are similar: defiance of a law that meddles with the fundamental design of India.

For the first time since 1947, when the subcontinent went through its bloody partition into India and Pakistan, a politics is being constructed entirely around the premise of exclusion – of deciding who can’t be Indian, or calibrating how Indian anyone can be. The rabid focus on identity is a piece of a global pattern, of course, but it is especially dangerous in a country that is as tenuous a construct as India. This is still, as it was in 1947, a land teeming with so many identities – plotted multi-dimensionally along the axes of caste, gender, class, religion, language and ethnicity – that the only way to make it work is to accept that everyone belongs equally to India.

This egalitarian principle, therefore, has not been just an ideal; it has been a compact necessary for India’s survival. When a government starts to make the case for some to be considered less Indian than others, subtracting first one identity and then another as if they were Jenga blocks, the structure turns unsteady. Either the union dissolves, or it is kept together only by an iron-fisted, authoritarian regime – the kind that unleashes violence through the police, as in Uttar Pradesh, or through party auxiliaries under police protection, as at JNU. The danger posed by the BJP is that it is both preparing itself to be that regime and guiding India into an instability from which it may never recover.

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HINDUISM 

IS FASCISM, CASTISM AND RACISM

Firms making billions from ‘highly hazardous’ pesticides, analysis finds

Use of harmful chemicals is higher in poorer nations, according to data analysed by Unearthed

Damian Carrington Environment editor Thu 20 Feb 2020

A farmer without a mask sprinkles pesticide

 on crops in India. Photograph: Sanjay Baid/EPA


The world’s biggest pesticide companies make billions of dollars a year from chemicals found by independent authorities to pose high hazards to human health or the environment, according to an analysis by campaigners.

The research also found a higher proportion of these highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) in the companies’ sales in poorer nations than in rich ones. In India, 59% of sales were of HHPs in contrast to just 11% in the UK, according to the analysis.

The data from Phillips McDougall, the leading agribusiness analysts, are from buyer surveys focused on the most popular products in the 43 nations that buy the most pesticides. It was obtained and analysed by Unearthed, a journalism group funded by Greenpeace UK, and the Swiss NGO Public Eye.

The pesticides market is dominated by five companies – Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, FMC and Corteva (formerly Dow and DuPont). These companies sold $4.8bn of products containing HHPs in 2018, making up more than 36% of all their income, according to the analysis. Bayer said the analysis was “misleading” but declined to provide its own figures. Some companies also disputed the list of HHPs used.

The Unearthed and Public Eye analysis calculated that almost a quarter of sales by the big five were of products containing pesticides linked to human health effects, including known or presumed carcinogens, while 10% came from pesticides toxic to bees. Another 4% of sales were of chemicals that are acutely toxic to humans, the analysis found. About 200,000 suicides each year are attributed to pesticide poisoning, almost all in developing countries.

In rich countries, the average proportion of sales that were HHPs was 27% compared with 45% in low and middle income countries, reaching as high as 65% in South Africa, according to the analysis.

A global survey of pesticide management in 2018 by the World Health Organization and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found “various critical shortcomings”, with countries needing to strengthen their rules and enforcement to “minimise their harmful effects on humans and the environment”.

Baskut Tuncak, UN special rapporteur on hazardous substances and human rights, said: “It is inappropriate for companies to earn such significant income from HHPs in this day and age. The continued use of these products is unsustainable and is causing a multitude of human rights violations around the world.”

A report in 2017 co-authored by Tuncak accused pesticide companies of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and lobbying of governments, which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”. It also said the idea that pesticides were essential to feed a fast-growing global population was “a myth”.

Unearthed used a list of 330 HHPs compiled by Pesticide Action Network International (PAN), based on judgments from authorities such as the US Environmental Protection Agency, European Union bodies, the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants and the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

The FAO and WHO classify some but not all of these pesticides as HHPs on their list and a spokesman for BASF said the PAN list was “inflated”. Keith Tyrell, director of PAN UK, said: “Efforts to strengthen the UN’s approach are consistently blocked by the pesticide industry.”

Croplife International, the pesticide industry’s lobby group, has accepted that 15% of the chemicals its members sell are HHPs, but said many of these can be used safely in practice.

“Our members support the [voluntary] FAO International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management,” said a CropLife International spokeswoman. “We support countries to identify, and if necessary, remove HHPs from their markets.” Neither CropLife International nor the five companies responded to a request for an example of the voluntary removal of an HHP.

“Pesticides identified on the PAN list are often classified based on the acute toxicity of the active ingredient rather than the formulated product, which is not consistent with practical use,” said the CropLife International spokeswoman.

Tyrell said: “Pesticide companies refuse to publish information on the ingredients contained in their products so the UN and others, including PAN, are forced to look solely at the toxicity of the active ingredient.”

Bayer also disputes PAN’s list. For example, PAN includes Bayer’s glyphosate on its list based on the 2015 conclusion of the IARC that it is “probably carcinogenic to humans”. But Bayer says glyphosate should not be on the list, based on the conclusions of other bodies, such as the European Chemical Agency in 2017.

A spokesman for Bayer said the differing sales from nation to nation reflected the different needs of farmers: “Agriculture is very different from region to region due to different climates, pests, diseases and crops. In Brazil, for example, farmers must manage pests such as Asian Soybean Rust or insect pressure which don’t exist in Europe.”

He also disputed the financial analysis by Unearthed and Public Eye: “Bayer finalised the acquisition of Monsanto on 7 June 2018. Before, Bayer had divested parts of its businesses to competitors. Their calculations are therefore misleading.” Asked to provide alternative figures, he said: “Bayer doesn’t break down its sales figures by country, product or active ingredient. These figures are confidential.” Unearthed said its analysis follows standard practice for the financial analysis of merged companies.


A spokeswoman for BASF said: “BASF is convinced of the safety of its products when they are used correctly following the label instructions and stewardship guidelines. All products are extensively tested, evaluated and approved by public authorities in the respective countries. Additionally, all active ingredients in these products are approved in at least one OECD country.”

Tuncak said: “Systemic issues in many low- and middle-income countries prevent any reasonable assurance of proper handling and use of pesticides.”

Juman Kubba, at Greenpeace UK, said: “Keeping the world hooked on an industrial farming model based on crops drenched in toxic pesticides is in these companies’ interests. But these dangerous chemicals have no place in a healthy food system and governments must ban them worldwide.”

FMC referred the Guardian to the response from CropLife International and Syngenta and Corteva did not respond to requests for comment.

Fates of humans and insects intertwined, warn scientists

Experts call for solutions to be enforced immediately to halt global population collapses


Damian Carrington Environment editor Thu 20 Feb 2020 
 

An oil beetle in Plymouth, UK. A key cause of insect decline is the destruction of natural habitat. Photograph: Getty

The “fates of humans and insects are intertwined”, scientists have said, with the huge declines reported in some places only the “tip of the iceberg”.

The warning has been issued by 25 experts from around the world, who acknowledge that little is known about most of the estimated 5.5 million insect species. However, enough was understood to warrant immediate action, they said, because waiting for better data would risk irreversible damage.

The researchers said solutions were available and must be implemented immediately. These range from bigger nature reserves and a crackdown on harmful pesticides to individual action such as not mowing the lawn and leaving dead wood in gardens. They also said invertebrates must no longer be neglected by conservation efforts, which tend to focus on mammals and birds.


The alert has been published as two articles in the Biological Conservation journal.

“The current [insect] extinction crisis is deeply worrisome. Yet, what we know is only the tip of the iceberg,” the scientists write. “We know enough to act immediately. Solutions are now available – we must act upon them.”

“Insect declines lead to the loss of essential, irreplaceable services to humanity. Human activity is responsible for almost all current insect population declines and extinctions.”

Insect population collapses have been reported in Germany, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. The first global scientific review, published in February 2019, said widespread declines threatened to cause a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems”. Insects pollinate three-quarters of crops, and another recent study showed widespread losses of such insects across Britain.

The report notes that only about a fifth of the world’s insect species have even been named, mostly from only single specimens.

“Many insect species are going extinct even before being described,” the researchers said. “It is likely that insect extinctions since the industrial era are around 5-10%, ie 250,000 to 500,000 species.” 

Solutions include a crackdown on harmful 

pesticides. Photograph: Jean-François Monier/AFP/Getty

This estimate is based on the extinctions of land snails. Prof Pedro Cardoso, at the Finnish Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the latest report, said: “It is the best estimate we have. There is no reason to think the trends are different between insects and land snails, but snails leave their shells behind as evidence.”


The paper also notes that British butterfly and beetle populations were said to be “fast disappearing” in the 1870s by the entomologist Archibald Swinton.

Long-term data on insect populations is rare. “We don’t know everything – in fact we know very little – but if we wait until we have better information to act it might be too late to recover many species,” Cardoso said.

“Many species are declining, probably the majority, and overall it seems the trend is for a large decline. But there are of course some species that are benefitting, for example the swarms of locusts currently in east Africa.”

Matt Shardlow, the chief executive of the conservation group Buglife, said a key report in 2016 told world governments that declines in wild pollinators presented risks to societies and ecosystems.

“However, in a repeat of the failure of politicians to respond to scientific warnings about climate change, the cautious, scientific language used has not produced an appropriate response from governments,” he said.

“Scientists are now turning up the heat on insect declines in the hope that politicians will understand the urgency and the link to human survival, and will take action before it is too late.”

The key causes of insect losses, according to the scientists, are the destruction of natural habitat for farming and buildings; the intensive use of pesticides; industrial pollution and light pollution; and invasive alien species; and the climate crisis.


Light pollution is key 'bringer of insect apocalypse'

As well as large-scale solutions, Cardoso said insect-friendly gardens could help halt the decline. “When lots of people implement these small solutions, it can make a big difference to many insect populations. Even a couple of gardens could be a big thing for a species.”

He said a change of mindset was also needed because many people had learned to dislike insects. “I’ve never seen any small children – two, three or four years old – who were afraid of insects or spiders. It is cultural.”

Dark is Divine: 

A photographer uses his camera to challenge India’s obsession with fairness

Chennai-based Naresh Nil’s images depict gods and goddesses as dark-skinned.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Nilesh Nil

Jan 11, 2018 ·Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri

The unrelenting obsession with fair skin in India has been a subject of discussion for years. It has inspired campaigns, such Dark is Beautiful and #BinTheTube, which encouraged women to discard their fairness creams. And yet, the tendency to see fair people on television, in films and to uphold them as the standard for beauty remains strong. Apart from popular culture, there is also a bias over skin colour in religious iconography. The myriad of Hindu gods and goddesses – Lakshmi, Ganesh and Shiva – are often fair-skinned in their visual representation.

A Facebook photo series, titled Dark is Divine, by photographer Naresh Nil is subverting this narrative by portraying gods and goddesses as dark-skinned.

“Our idea was born out of this very notion of acceptance of fair as divine, which to me is more about normalisation of this concept in society,” said the Chennai-based photographer who worked on the project with creative director Bharadwaj Sundar. The two run a production house, Slingshot Creations, together.

Sita, with Luv and Kush. (Photograph by Nilesh Nil)

They started the project in September 2017 and, over two months, created almost seven portraits, including those of Bala Murugan, who is an avatar of Subramanya, Lakshmi, and Krishna as a child.

“We invited models with a dark or dusky skin tone,” said Nil. “The most essential consideration was whether the models themselves were comfortable in presenting and associating themselves with the representation of their skin tone.”

Krishna (Photograph by Naresh Nil)

In Nil’s photographs, Durga is many shades darker than the one we meet during Durga Puja celebrations. A dark-skinned Shiva is depicted in deep meditation, while a dusky Sita is seen having a quiet moment with her sons, Luv and Kush.

Shiva (Photograph by Naresh Nil).

According to writer and mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, the love for the fair complexion could be a hangover of our past. In an article for Verve magazine, he wrote:


“The nomadic tribes who came from the North West held the dark skinned settled communities of the subcontinent in disdain. Aryan gods like Indra were white. But this white supremacist flavor does not hold firm in the face of other evidence. Some say Shiva was a Dravidian god, a god of the settled communities – but he is described as Karpura-Goranga, he who is as fair as camphor. Some say that Vishnu and Ram are gods of the Aryan imperialists – but both are described as dark.”

Durga (Photograph by Naresh Nil).

The Dark is Divine photographic project was something that Nil and Sundar had talked about a few times and in September, they decided they will try and shoot it. “Of course we realised that this was related to more deep-rooted issues of preference for fair skin in our society and that we were challenging the common notions of purity and divinity. These additional thoughts were incorporated during implementation and the shoot.”


In a 2015 paper, titled India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances, published in the Washington University Global Studies Law Review, the author Neha Mishra writes:


“Most Indians show apparent ignorance about the practice of exclusion and discrimination based on the skin tone of a person although it is a deep-rooted problematic practice embraced by both the oppressor and the victim. This single practice has become so widespread in India, more so in the past four decades, that it has taken shape along the same lines as “colourism” of the Western world. However, the manifestation of the color discrimination in India differs as it hides behind various other variables…. Caste, class, religion, region, gender and economics are a few of these variables.”

Bala Murugan (Photograph by Naresh Nil).

The costumes and jewellery during the shoot of Dark is Divine were inspired to an extent by artist Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings. “Our focus was plain and simple, how are Gods or divinity presented in common culture, and by common we mean our immediate surroundings, whatever we come across in our everyday life,” said Nil.

While the reactions to the images on Nil’s Facebook page have been mostly positive, there are a few who have argued that the portrayal of goddess Kali and Kalratri as dark-skinned in popular culture makes his project a biased one. “The initiative is a creative endeavour based on our own observations in our everyday life – plain and simple,” said Nil. “We don’t intend to be biased, nor have we set out to interpret how literature portrays God. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but what would be fantastic is if we start seeing opinions materialising into new and varied work for people to see and understand. That is what we have done with our ideas.”

How Muslims are creating a new vocabulary of secularism for Indian democracy
Indian Muslims have entered a post-Islamist phase, marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions.
 

A demonstration condemning Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the new citizenship law in Bangalore on January 20. | Manjunath Kiran/AFP

CITIZENSHIP TANGLE
Feb 16, 2020 · Sharik Laliwala

The demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens have re-inserted secularism into India’s mainstream political vocabulary. This shift in political discourse has come at the behest of the Muslim community and was then picked up by students, civil society groups and political parties. The arguments made by the Muslim community – even by Islamic activists – against these citizenship initiatives are mostly articulated in the language of Constitutional rights guaranteed to all Indians.

This focus on fundamental rights belies the conventional wisdom that the hegemony of majoritarian politics would provoke radical tendencies among the Indian Muslims. The onslaught of Hindutva politics, implemented by the Bharatiya Janata Party, is increasing state hostility against Muslims day by day. It is exacerbating their socio-economic marginalisation. Bias against Muslims is not just evident in the deliberate misconduct by police forces but is even written into the law. For instance, the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat severely restricts property transactions between Hindus and Muslims in urban Gujarat to “maintain demographic equilibrium”.

On top of that, the Muslim community’s political representation is at one of its worst levels since Independence: the current Lok Sabha has only 25 Muslim MPs out of 543 MPs, six more than in the last Lok Sabha. This translates into a little over 4.5% share in the Lok Sabha, even though Muslims form 14.2% of India’s population. In January 2018, out of BJP’s 1,418 MLAs, only four were Muslim – though the BJP’s dominance in Northern and Western Indian states has somewhat faded since then.

Despite this, the growing invisibilisation of Indian Muslims – the “fifth column” of Indian society for the Hindu nationalists – has not led to radicalisation, barring exceptional instances in Jammu and Kashmir and a few anecdotal instances in Kerala. To the contrary, as the recent pro-democracy protests show, India’s Muslims are introducing a new vernacular idiom of secularism through civic symbols while sometimes innovatively merging them with religious motifs.
Rights-based language

This signifies a fundamental transformation in the political strategy of the Muslim community over the years: Indian Muslims are privileging a language of rights over the religious-moral duties emphasised by Islamic reformists.

Muslim feminist groups have almost always employed an understanding of human rights. A case in point is Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which has been vocal about women being denied entry to dargahs and demanding autonomy over personal life decisions. However, the “non-religious” groups among Muslims – such as pasmanda, or low-caste and Dalit Muslims, organisations working primarily in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, have devoted their energies to addressing the question of caste-based socio-economic backwardness among Muslims through representative politics.

In the current pro-democracy protests, especially by leaderless Muslim women in many parts of India, the act of holding portraits of BR Ambedkar, MK Gandhi, Savitribai Phule; reading the Preamble of the Indian Constitution; and upholding the national flag have been prioritised over religious ideals, at least in the public sphere. Indeed, the storm of Hindutva is making Muslims secular – quite unlike, Mohammad Iqbal’s poetic revelation about the “storm of West”. This is not to claim that Indian Muslims were not aligned with secular aims earlier, but to indicate that the active assertion of constitutional and secular symbols is their new and unique contribution. 

Women are leading the Citizenship 

Amendment Act protest 

at Delhi's Shaheen Bagh. Credit: Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

To speak this rights-based language more confidently, Muslims are increasingly adopting socio-political and educational means for progress, reducing the emphasis on moral reform. Despite the stereotype, most Muslim children in India attend secular schools. In 2006, only 7% of Muslim children of school-going age (7-19 years) attended a madrassa. Half of those who went to a madrassa undertook part-time religious education as they also attended a mainstream school.

Even Islamists have begun to articulate themselves through a rights-centred vocabulary, though they often prefer religious morality over constitutional ideals, especially on the issue of personal law and religious practices.
New symbols, new identity

My research on two Islamic reformist organisations operating in Gujarat, a state that was the laboratory for Hindu nationalist politics, confirms this discernible shift in prioritising socio-economic concerns over reformist activities. For example, Muslim charity schools run by these groups, with gender-segregated classrooms and a part-time religious syllabus, use the state-prescribed curriculum – in some sense, merging the site of a secular school with that of a part-time madrassa. Their aim is clear: to develop skills and learning capacities among Muslim children in light of continuous state neglect. By doing so, these Islamic activists negotiate secular modernity on their own terms, via justifications from Islam. They find a new moral ground to adopt secular positions by somewhat renouncing rigidities held regarding the infallibility of religious truth.

My findings are congruent with those described by Irfan Ahmed in his 2009 book Islamism and Democracy in India, which traces the remarkable metamorphosis in the value system of the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, an Islamist group founded in 1941. From a rejection of secular democracy and nationalism around the time of the Indian subcontinent’s Partition, the Jamaat began to trust religious pluralism, tolerance and a democratic system, particularly from the 1990s. These ideological transformations are most crucial, given Jamaat’s support to the Pakistan movement, including its role in Pakistan’s Islamisation project and alleged participation in terrorist activities through its student wing, Students’ Islamic Movement of India.

The Jamaat in India has not only abandoned its aim of establishing an Islamic state but also prompts its members to pursue careers in the social sciences, journalism and the civil services, while frequently collaborating with civil society organisations. This trend also can be witnessed in the functioning of political parties specially devoted to the Muslim question such as Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and the Welfare Party of India 

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Political parties centred on Muslim identity, including Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, are evolving. Credit: AIMIM/Twitter

This discursive shift is slowly allowing Muslim groups to nurture solidarities with other marginalised groups facing similar threats and insecurities. The overwhelming Muslim support for Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad among Muslims in the past few years exemplifies this tendency. However, the alliance between Muslims and Hindu Dalits is still somewhat incoherent given the over-representation of elite ashraf castes in Muslim groups whose socio-economic interests do not match with Dalit-led associations.

All this makes it clear that Indian Muslims have entered a post-Islamist phase, marrying a constitutional phraseology of freedom, justice and equality with religious notions. Their renewed faith in this vernacularised secular politics is borne out of the frustrations with the dominant liberal brand of secularism, which either preferred a limited adoption of mostly majoritarian religious symbols or abhorred display of religion in public altogether.

At best, the liberal custodians of secularism overlooked socio-economic concerns of the Muslim community – especially of the low-caste and Dalit Muslims – rallying behind an empty discourse supporting secularism, without mass appeal. At worst, Muslims were castigated as a community with antediluvian beliefs. By exposing these fault-lines, though it is premature to say, the pro-democracy agitations led by Indian Muslims have provided a new life and meaning to not just secular democracy but even participatory democracy.

Sharik Laliwala is a researcher focusing on Gujarat’s contemporary politics and Muslim politics in north India. He has been associated with the Centre for Equity Studies and Ashoka University.Support our journalism by subscribing to Scroll+. We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.