The feeling of cooling tensions induced an air of complacency. Groups such as the TRF, along with a fruit salad of insurgent outfits – the Kashmir Tigers, the People’s Anti-Fascist Front, and the United Liberation Front of Kashmir – were all spawned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s August 2019 revocation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted Kashmir singular autonomy. TRF has been particularly and violently opposed to the resettlement of the Kashmiri pandits, which they see as an effort to alter the region’s demography.

The murderous incident raised the obvious question: Would Modi pay lip service to the 1972 Shimla Agreement, one that divided Kashmir into two zones of administration separated by a Line of Control? (A vital feature of that agreement is an understanding that both powers resolve their disputes without the need for third parties.)

The answers came promptly enough. First came India’s suspension of the vital Indus Water Treaty, a crucial agreement governing the distribution of water from India to Pakistan. Pakistan reciprocated firmly by suspending the Shimla Agreement, expelling Indian military diplomats, halting visa exemptions for Indian citizens, and closing the Wagah border for trade.

Hindu nationalism proved particularly stirred, and Modi duly fed its cravings. On May 7, India commenced Operation Sindoor, involving what were purportedly precision missile attacks on nine militant camps in Pakistan and the Jammu and Kashmir area controlled by Islamabad. The operation itself had a scent of gendered manipulation, named after the vermillion used by married Hindu women to symbolise the durable existence of their husbands. Two female military officers – Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh – were tasked with managing the media pack.

The Indian briefings celebrated the accuracy of the strikes on what were said to be the sites of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Hizbul Mujahideen. Thirty-one suspected terrorists were said to have perished, though Pakistan insisted that civilians had been killed in this apparent feast of forensic precision. India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh would have none of it: Indian forces had only “struck only those who harmed our innocents”.

The next day, it was operations against Pakistan’s air defence systems in Lahore that stole the show. The inevitable Pakistani retaliation followed on May 10, with the Indian return serve against 11 Pakistani air bases. What followed is one version: Pakistan’s military broke into a sweat. A cessation of hostilities was sought and achieved. Armchair pundits on the Indian side celebrated: India had successfully targeted the terrorist cells supported by Pakistan. If one is to read Anubhav Shankar Goswami seriously, Operation Sindoor was a stroke of genius, threatening “the Pakistan Army’s strategic shield against terrorists”.

More accurately, this was a lovely little spilling of blood with weaponry between callow sibling throats, a pattern familiar since 1947. The two countries have fought four full-blown conflicts, two over Kashmir. Along the way, they have made the world a lot safer by acquiring nuclear weapons.

There was something for everyone in this retaliatory and counter-retaliatory feast. India claimed strategic proficiency, keeping censorship on the matter tight. Pakistan could claim some prowess in shooting down five Indian jets, using Chinese weaponry, including the J-10.  With pride and pomp, they could even appoint Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir to the post of Field Marshal, an absurdly ceremonial gesture that gave the impression that the army had restored its tattered pride. It was to be expected that this was ample reward for his, in the words of the government, “strategic leadership and decisive role” in defeating India.

The only ones to be notably ignored in this display of subcontinental machismo were the Kashmiris themselves, who face, in both the Pakistan and Indian administered zones, oppressive anti-terrorism laws, discriminatory practices, and suppression of dissent and free speech.

Ultimately, the bickering children were convinced to end their playground antics. The fact that the overbearing headmaster, the unlikely US President Donald Trump, eventually brought himself to bear on proceedings must have irritated them. After four days of conflict, the US role in defusing matters between the powers became evident. Kashmir, which India has long hoped to keep in museum-like storage, away from the international stage, had been enlivened.  Trump even offered his services to enable New Delhi and Islamabad a chance to reach a more enduring peace. Praise for the president followed, notably from those wishing to see the Kashmir conflict resolved.

In one sense, there seems to be little reason to worry. These are countries seemingly linked to sandpit grievances, scrapping, gouging, and complaining about their lot. Even amidst juvenile spats, they can bicker yet still sign enduring ceasefires. In February 2021, for instance, the militaries of both countries cobbled together a ceasefire which ended four months of cross-border skirmishes. A mere two violations of the agreement (how proud they must have been) was recorded for the rest of the year. In 2022, a solitary incident of violation was noted.

A needlessly florid emphasis was made on the conflict by Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Meta.  This was an encounter lacking a “decisive victory and no clear political end”. It merely reinstated “the India-Pakistan hyphenation”. In one sense, this element of hyphenation – the international perception of two subcontinental powers in an eternal, immature squabble – was something India seemed to be marching away from. But Prime Minister Modi, despite his grander visions for India, is a sectarian fanatic. History shows that fanaticism tends to shrink, rather than enlarge, the mind. In that sense, he is in good company with those other uniformed fanatics in uniform.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A group of Indigenous people who were evicted from their ancestral village in Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in south India 40 years ago have returned to their former homes.

It’s believed to be the first time Indigenous people in India have asserted their rights in this way, and returned en masse to their homes after being evicted from a Protected Area.

Forest department officials warn the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes inside Nagarhole National Park. The Indigenous people castigated them for delaying recognition of their forest rights, and went ahead anyway. ©Survival International

More than 50 Jenu Kuruba families took part in the long-planned operation, and have started building houses using their traditional materials and techniques. The Jenu Kuruba say they decided to return because their sacred spirits, who still dwell in the old village location, became angry at being abandoned when the community was forced from the forest in the 1980s.

Forest department officials, backed up by police, warned the Jenu Kuruba against re-occupying their homes, but the Indigenous people castigated them for delaying the recognition of their forest rights for years, and went ahead anyway. Today around 130 police officers and forest guards were on the scene, and prevented journalists from accessing the area.

Shivu, a young Jenu Kuruba leader, said today: “Historical injustice continues to happen over us by denying our rights on our lands, forests and access to sacred spaces. Tiger conservation is a scheme of the forest department and various wildlife NGO’s to grab indigenous lands by forcefully moving us out, but opening the very same lands in the pretext of tourism to make money

We have to today returned to our home lands and forests. we will remain here. Our sacred sprits are with us.”

Jenu Kuruba families begin to construct a house for their ancestors, as they rebuild their old village inside Nagarhole National Park. ©Sartaz Ali Barkat/ Survival

In a statement the Jenu Kuruba of Nagarhole said: “Enough is Enough. We can’t part from our lands anymore. We want our children and youth to live a life that our ancestors once lived. Tigers, elephants, peacocks, wild boar, wild dogs are our deities. We have been worshipping them as our ancestral spirits since generations. This deliberate attempt to separate us from our lands, forests and sacred spaces will not be tolerated. We resist the current conservation model based on the false idea that forests, wildlife and humans cannot coexist.”

For decades it has been official policy in India, as in many other countries around the world, to evict Indigenous people whose lands are turned into Protected Areas, a practice known as Fortress Conservation.

An estimated 20,000 Jenu Kuruba people have been illegally evicted from Nagarhole. Another 6,000 resisted, and have managed to stay in the park.

The Jenu Kuruba’s belief system centers around their connection to the forest, its wildlife, and their gods – including the tigers who live there – but forest guards harass, threaten, and even shoot members of the tribe.

Jenu Kuruba people are experts in their environment. They gather medicine, honey, fruits, vegetables, tubers, and the thatch and bamboo needed to build their houses.

Famed for their honey collecting skills – Jenu Kuruba means “honey collectors” – they are guided from birth to death by the philosophy “Nanga Kadu Ajjayya… Nanga Kadina Jenu Ajjayya – Our forests are sacred… The honey from our forest is sacred.”

Those beliefs underpin the tribe’s careful management of their environment and have ensured tiger survival. Indeed, the healthy tiger population found in their forest is what drove the Indian government to turn the area into a Tiger Reserve. It has one of the highest concentrations of tigers in all of India.

Caroline Pearce, Director of Survival International, said today: “The Jenu Kuruba people’s re-occupation of their ancestral land is an inspirational act of repossession. They’re reclaiming what was theirs, in defiance of a hugely powerful conservation and tourism industry that has enriched itself at their expense.

“If the Indian government really cares about tiger conservation, it will not only allow the Jenu Kuruba people to return, but encourage them to do so – because the science is clear that tigers thrive alongside the Indigenous people whose forests they live in.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Survival International.

AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons.  He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real estate and aristocratic privilege. The fall of the Rajapaksa family, propelled by mass protests against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s misrule in 2022, showed that the public had, at least for the time, tired of that tradition.

Not only is the new president outside the traditional orbit of rule and favour; he heads a political grouping known as the National People’s Power (NPP), a colourfully motley combination of trade unions, civil society members, women’s groups and students.  But the throbbing core of the group is the Janatha Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP), which boasts a mere three members in the 225-member parliament.

The resume of the JVP is colourfully cluttered and, in keeping with Sri Lankan political history, spattered with its fair share of blood.  It was founded in 1965 in the mould of a Marxist-Leninist party and led by Rohana Wijeweera.  It mounted, without success, two insurrections – in 1971 and between 1987 and 1989.  On both occasions, thousands died in the violence that followed, including Wijeweera and many party leaders, adding to the enormous toll that would follow in the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

It is also worth noting that the seduction of Marxism, just to add a level of complexity to matters, was not confined to the JVP.  The Tamil resistance had itself found it appealing.  A assessment from the Central Intelligence Agency from March 1986 offers the casual remark that “all major insurgent organizations claim allegiance to Marxism” with the qualification that “most active groups are motivated principally by ethnic rivalry with the majority Sinhalese.”  None had a clear political program “other than gaining Columbo’s recognition for a traditional homeland and a Tamil right to self-determination.”

By the time Dissanayake was cutting his teeth in local politics, the JVP was another beast, having been reconstituted by Somawansa Amarasinghe as an organisation keen to move into the arena of ballots rather than the field of armed struggle.  Dissanayake is very much a product of that change.  “We need to establish a new clean political culture … We will do the utmost to win back the people’s respect and trust in the political system.”

In a statement, Dissanayake was a picture of modest, if necessary, acknowledgment.  He praised the collective effort behind his victory, one being a consequence of the multitude.  “This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you.  Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful.  This victory belongs to all of us.”

The unavoidable issue of racial fractiousness in the country is also mentioned.  “The unity of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and all Sri Lankans is the bedrock of this new beginning.”  How the new administration navigates such traditionally poisoned waters will be a matter of interest and challenge, not least given the Sinhala nationalist rhetoric embraced by the JVP, notably towards the Tamil Tigers.

Pundits are also wondering where the new leader might position himself on foreign relations.  There is the matter of India’s unavoidably dominant role, a point that riles Dassanayake.  His preference, and a point he has repeatedly made, is self-sufficiency and economic sovereignty.  But India has a market worth US$6.7 billion whereas China, a more favoured country by the new president, comes in at US$2 billion.

On economics, a traditional, if modest program of nationalisation is being put forth by the JVP within the NPP, notably on such areas as utilities.  A wealth redistribution policy is on the table, including progressive, efficient taxation while a production model to encourage self-sufficiency, notably on important food products, is envisaged.  Greater spending is proposed in education and health care.

The issue of dealing with international lenders is particularly pressing, notably in dealing with the International Monetary Fund, which approved a US$2.9 billion bailout to the previous government on extracting the standard promises of austerity.  “We expect to discuss debt restructuring with the relevant parties and complete the process quickly and obtain the funds,” promises Dissanayake. That said, the governor of the Central Bank and the secretary to the ministry of finance, both important figures in implementing the austerity measures, have remained.

In coming to power, AKD has eschewed demagogic self-confidence.  “I have said before that I am not a magician – I am an ordinary citizen.  There are things I know and don’t know.  My aim is to gather those with the knowledge and skills to help lift this country.”  In the febrile atmosphere that is Sri Lankan politics, that admission is a humble, if realistic one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Planned Release of Tigers Raises Ethical Questions appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

Image by Alejandro Luengo.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, circa 5^th century B.C.

Nancy Pelosi’s recent saber-rattling jaunt to Taiwan has put the Fear into a lot of sensible people, and with good reason. Sometimes I wonder if people like her secretly want to die in a nuclear holocaust, or if being a shill for the arms industry simply requires epic stupidity. I suspect it’s both.

It’s clear that her visit was orchestrated to fill a certain type of American with jingoistic fervor. Over the years, the western imperial world has gotten a lot of mileage out of selling the Yellow Peril. Yet the military budget of the United States dwarfs that of China. Pelosi and her ilk are pumping fear over threats that don’t really exist.

Communist China regards Taiwan as a renegade province. Some say China has a legitimate claim, and maybe that’s true. As far as I’m concerned, the claim of any state has about as much moral weight as the claim John Wayne Gacy had to the children he raped and murdered. The Right of Might has inspired many imperial powers to occupy Taiwan, from the Dutch to the Japanese. I get it that there are strategic reasons why China won’t consider Taiwanese independence—particularly considering how cozy Taiwan’s government has always been with the U.S.—but strategy is not the same as morality. Regardless, my basic feeling on the China vs. Taiwan matter is that it’s none of my business. Then again, I’m not the CIA.

The inherently racist character of America views China as simultaneously weak, dangerous, and sexy. I’ve heard plenty of talk in my life about the “deviousness” of the Chinese, yet in popular American culture they’re consistently feminized, and just about every other pasty techbro I come across in San Francisco is either dating or fantasizing about dating a Chinese woman. How could a body politic like this possibly be clear-headed about any potential conflict with China? In addition, in America anti-communist sentiment is damn near instinctual; for all practical purposes, leftism here is dead, murdered by cointelpro and capitalist brainwashing.

Americans are dumb and they specialize in bluster. The U.S. is a relatively new country, and its citizens have no sense of their own history, let alone that of other countries. China, meanwhile, is the world’s oldest continuous civilization. You don’t reach that point by falling into every sucker’s trap that comes along. It’s no secret that the U.S. government’s big strategy is to provoke Russia and China into resource-depleting wars. It obviously worked on Iron Fist Puto, but I doubt Chinese leaders will be so easily hoodwinked.

However, that doesn’t mean they’ll roll over if seriously threatened. I doubt that a sinister and disingenuous idiot like Pelosi understands China well enough to realize the dragon she’s poking can and will defend itself. If that happens, either China will win—in the sense that Vietnam won, i.e. by preventing defeat… or all of us will lose.

Personal experience can be a powerful vaccination against bigotry. For example, during the Bush II regime America was saturated with propaganda about psychotic Muslim terrorists, but I was impervious to that bullshit partly because I went to grade school with people from several different Islamic cultures—specifically Iranians, Pakistanis, and Afghanis. As a kid I may not have known (or cared) about their cultural particularities, but I also knew they weren’t a bunch of alien zealots.

My interest in the history, culture, and politics of China began when I was in my early twenties. It was a direct outgrowth of my interest in kungfu, which I began studying in 1999 while attending UCLA. The on-campus recreation center offered a wide variety of martial arts classes, and I signed up for as many as I could fit into my schedule. I soon found myself immersed in the “kungfu underground,” known in China as the Jianghu—literally, “Rivers & Lakes,” a reference to the fringe habitats of kungfu practitioners both historical and folkloric.

The Los Angeles area has long had a thriving martial arts culture, partly due to the film industry; many martial artists have come to Hollywood to be stuntmen and fight choreographers. While I was living in L.A. I met a number of skilled kungfu masters, many of whom taught in parks to a small handful of students. I encountered some great people, along with plenty of frauds and freaks. I spent a lot of time at Chinese tea shops and restaurants. I learned Mandarin. And for the record, no, I didn’t date any Chinese women—despite recommendations from a number of middle-aged Chinese hostesses.

There are a couple of teachers I met who were quite famous in their milieu; they have since passed away. This included Hawkins Cheung, a former kungfu-brother of Bruce Lee, both of them having been students of the now-famous master Ip Man. I also met Dr. Jiang Haoquan, who was a master of several kungfu styles, a champion gymnast and diver, and a heavyweight boxing champion; in 1985—at the age of 68—he had an exhibition match with Muhammad Ali. When I met Dr. Jiang he was in his 80s, still powerful and agile, and married to much younger woman.

Dr. Jiang had been a kungfu-brother of Chang Dongsheng, one of the most famous and highly skilled masters of the twentieth century. Chang was a devout Muslim from the Hui ethnic group in northern China. At twelve years old he began studying the art of Shuai Jiao—usually called “Chinese wrestling” in English, it’s actually a throwing art; the Chinese never developed ground-based competition bondage arts like Greco-Roman wrestling or Brazilian Jujitsu.

According to reputation, Chang fought in hundreds of competitions and challenge matches, both friendly and not-so-friendly, and was never defeated.

Chang also taught Shuai Jiao at the Nanjing Central Guoshu Academy, created by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) in 1928. The Chinese state has long cast a wary eye upon martial artists, with their secret societies and their tendency to rebel against state control; the Boxer Rebellion is merely the most well-known example of kungfu trouble-making. Unregulated civilian martial arts practice inherently undermines the state monopoly on violence. The KMT dealt with this by following Japan’s example and organizing martial arts under the purview of the state. Thus was born the world’s first kungfu university.

Chang Dongsheng later became an instructor for the Red Wall paratroopers, an elite KMT military unit that fought both the Japanese and the Communists. He fled with the defeated KMT to Taiwan, where he was appointed senior instructor for the Central Police University. He also taught a number of KMT dignitaries, bodyguards, and other state-sponsored miscreants. According to one story I heard, when Chang retired from active service, Chiang Kai-Shek summoned him into the dictator-for-life office and offered him whatever he wanted. As a man whose service came from a powerful sense of honor and loyalty, Chang declined. Chiang Kai-Shek took the Taiwanese flag off the wall, folded it up, and gave it to Chang. Until he died of cancer in his 70s, Chang continued to conduct Shuai Jiao demonstrations with his uniform jacket open, signaling that he remained willing to accept any and all challengers.

The Communists had a different approach to dealing with the potential subversiveness of kungfu practitioners: they worked them to death in labor camps or murdered them outright. When the Cultural Revolution arrived, it destroyed much of what remained of kungfu’s legacy. For decades the practice was outlawed; masters had to teach in secret. The People’s Republic eventually engineered a facsimile version of kungfu, the acrobatic sport known as Modern Wushu. Their first major propaganda effort for promoting this new sport was the 1982 film Shaolin Temple, starring a young prodigy named Jet Li, now an internationally famous action star. The temple itself is now a popular tourist attraction, and China is adamantly pursuing the inclusion of Modern Wushu in the Olympics.

Chiang Kai-Shek and the KMT were a glorified cabal of villainous gangsters. But then again, civilization itself has never been anything but a protection racket enforced by a glorified cabal of villainous gangsters. In that sense, the KMT is fairly old-fashioned. The Chinese Communist state, on the other hand, is thoroughly modern—a mechanical beast engineered by totalitarian ideology. It may have lifted an unprecedented number of its citizens out of poverty, but it has done so with a terrifying trail of atrocities and environmental holocaust. A combination of the Qing dynasty’s corruption and predation by European imperial powers set the stage for Mao and his cult.

Due to the influence of film and television, most Americans have a somewhat romanticized view of kungfu, and of Asian martial arts in general. Much of the history of these arts and their practitioners is far uglier than the average middle-class mom dropping her kid off at the local dojo would care to imagine. Even the beloved fighting monks of the Shaolin Temple, mythical origin place of many kungfu styles, in reality were essentially a private militia; Buddhist temples were some of the largest landholders in dynastic China. Like all private armies, the Shaolin monks committed their share of atrocities.

Through much of China’s history, martial arts were largely a working-class trade skill; the career options of a “kungfu professional” were mostly limited to military service, private security for merchants and trade caravans, entertainment, banditry, and organized crime. To an extent, this is still true; two of the first Chinese masters to teach kungfu publicly in America, Lau Bun and T.Y. Wong, both served as Tong enforcers. They mediated disputes, kept drunks in line, collected gambling debts, and trained the Tong muscle.

For that matter, many of my fellow thugs-for-hire at the security company I work for, all Black men, are kungfu practitioners—several are former students of one of our supervisors, who used to have a kungfu school in East Oakland. When I’m sitting in my car all night keeping an eye out for bandits, I like to think of myself as part of a proud, international working-class tradition.

In conclusion, a story from my days as a kungfu student:

It was sometime around the year 2000, in the city of Alhambra, California. Having assisted in moving furniture to clear a practice space, I was standing off to the side in the meticulously decorated living room of my kungfu teacher, watching as a visiting master prepared to give a demonstration of his grappling skill. His competitor in this friendly match was another student, a gym-built American who was a former collegiate wrestling champion, and had spent several post-grad years expanding his fighting repertoire with Judo and Jujitsu. The student out-weighed the visiting master by a good twenty pounds of solid muscle.

The master, who was in his 50s, invited the student to give his best try at taking him down. What happened next was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed, before or since: not only did the student fail to take the master down, but he was so thoroughly out-classed that he could only laugh at his own failure. The master foiled all attempts at being controlled; every clash ended with him sitting on top of the student, striking poses and giggling. It was amazing, and it was hilarious. I was hooked; I wanted that skill, and so I became a student of that master. I’ll never make it to his level, but I’ll say this: I’m not an easy person to put into a “compliance hold.”

Now riddle me this: just what do you think the American response would be if its precious military forces went on the warpath against China and were likewise defeated and humiliated? Remember, these are the same forces that failed to subdue a bunch of poorly armed Afghani militants.

Let me put it another way: do you like mushroom clouds?

I’m not afraid of China. I’m afraid of Americans.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Malik Diamond.