A Bellwether for Narendra Modi as India’s Largest State Goes to the Polls While many voters say they are concerned about the economy, the prime minister’s party has placed a focus on religion, with often polarizing effects.
. Voters in Uttar Pradesh, a largely impoverished state of 200 million people in northern India, say they are concerned about the pandemic-battered economy, with youth unemployment widespread, housing shortages, and the rising cost of food and fuel. ........ the first set of results are expected March 10......... During a TV news interview, Mr. Adityanath, an acolyte of Mr. Modi’s and a potential successor as prime minister, cast the election in terms of “80 versus 20” — a thinly veiled reference to the rough percentage of Hindus in the state compared with Muslims. ...... the backlash to Mr. Adityanath’s remarks was swift. Within days, several high-profile B.J.P. members defected from the party, joining the Samajwadi Party
. That party, which is widely seen as representing the interests of the Yadav caste and other disadvantaged castes, has formed an alliance with other, smaller caste-based parties that were historically rivals. ......... The unemployment rate, which was as low as 3.4 percent in 2017, stood at nearly 8 percent in December 2021, with rates far higher among young people. And even as incomes have fallen for many, inflation has sent prices soaring for staples like tea, meat, cooking oil and lentils. ........ “Economic issues are far more important for people.” ........ “The B.J.P. has all the resources and all the power, but this election seems to be showing that new majorities can be formed” ........... “What we want is better public service like good education, good health facilities and employment for our children,” said Surender Yadav, a sugar cane farmer and a member of an O.B.C. group who said he had voted for the B.J.P. in 2017 but would not again. “These are the basic issues, but there has been no improvement,” he said. ............ “B.J.P. is doing good work. Law and order is under control. Girls can go out, roads are good, poor people were given houses,” said Sachin Kumar, a 25-year-old mechanic on the outskirts of Meerut. “We will vote for Yogi and Modi.” ......... The state elections in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere will reveal whether the party’s recent stumbles are just bumps in the road, or a larger obstacle to retaining power in the world’s largest democracy. .
How India’s Farmers, Organized and Well Funded, Faced Down Modi They received foreign and domestic financial support, kept their camps organized and looked for ways to be seen while trying to avoid violence.
. Mr. Prakash was one of thousands of farmers in India who used their organizational skills, broad support network and sheer persistence to force one of the country’s most powerful leaders in modern history into a rare retreat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said lawmakers would repeal new agricultural laws that the protesting farmers feared would leave them vulnerable to rapacious big companies and destroy their way of life. ............ Their victory won’t help India solve the deep inefficiencies that plague its farming sector, problems that leave people malnourished in some places even as grain in other parts is unused or exported. But it showed how a group desperate to preserve its hold on a middle-class way of life could successfully challenge a government more accustomed to squelching dissent than reckoning with it. ......... The farmers, who camped out on the outskirts of India’s capital, New Delhi, for a year, endured more than the elements. A vicious Covid-19 second wave roared through the city in the spring. The movement also experienced two violent episodes that led to the deaths of protesters, one in New Delhi in January and a second last month in the neighboring state of Uttar Pradesh, that increased pressure on the group to give up. ............ the farmers’ insistence on pressing their campaign, their support from a global network of allies and the nonviolent nature of the protests proved to be keys to their success ......... The effort isn’t over yet. The farmers have vowed to continue their protests until the government submits to another demand, that it guarantee a minimum price for nearly two dozen crops. Rather than retreat now, they sense an opportunity to push even harder on a prime minister who is nervously watching his party’s poll numbers dip in a string of states with elections next year. The government has said it will form a committee to consider the matter. .......... The government subsidizes water-intensive crops in drought-stricken lands. Farming focuses on staple grains while more nutritious crops, like leafy vegetables, are neglected.
......... Most of the 60 percent of the country employed in agriculture survives on subsistence farming. While some farmers enjoy middle-class lives, helped by modern aids like tractors and irrigation, many others do not see a profit and are in debt. With city and factory jobs hard to find in a country still struggling with poverty, many farm children emigrate to find a better life. .......... Financial aid, particularly from Sikh temples and organizations outside India, has been critical to the movement’s staying power, said Baldev Singh Sirsa, a farm leader.
............. Organizers leaned heavily on the Punjabi Sikh diaspora.
......... Protesters marched across from the United Nations headquarters in New York. The campaign worked: Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, and Rihanna, the pop singer, spoke in solidarity. ........ The B.J.P.’s poll numbers soon dropped in Uttar Pradesh, where the deaths took place. .
As Officials Look Away, Hate Speech in India Nears Dangerous Levels Activists and analysts say calls for anti-Muslim violence — even genocide — are moving from the fringes to the mainstream, while political leaders keep silent. .......... Activists and analysts say their agenda is being enabled, even normalized, by political leaders and law enforcement officials who offer tacit endorsements by not directly addressing such divisive issues. ...... “You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Indian Supreme Court judge, said in a public lecture. “Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.” ........... Vigilantes have beaten people accused of disrespecting cows, considered holy by some Hindus; dragged couples out of trains, cafes and homes on suspicion that Hindu women might be seduced by Muslim men; and barged into religious gatherings where they suspect people are being converted. ........ In recent weeks, global human rights organizations and local activists, as well as India’s retired security chiefs, have warned that the violent rhetoric has reached a dangerous new pitch. With right-wing messages spreading rapidly through social media and the government hesitant to take action, they are concerned that a singular event — a local dispute, or an attack by international terror groups such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State — could lead to widespread violence that would be difficult to contain. ............ Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, a nonprofit group, who raised similar warnings ahead of the massacres in Rwanda in the 1990s, told a U.S. congressional briefing that the demonizing and discriminatory “processes” that lead to genocide have been well underway in India.
.......... They celebrate a Hindu hard-liner’s assassination of Mohandas Gandhi — a renowned symbol of nonviolent struggle, but to them a Muslim appeaser. Pooja Shakun Pandey, a monk at the Haridwar event, has held re-enactments of Gandhi’s assassination, firing a bullet into his effigy as blood runs down. ........... The forces that shaped the ideology of Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, have slowly risen from the fringes to dominate India’s politics. ........ Dhirendra K. Jha, a writer who has studied the rise of Hindu nationalism, said he worried that extremists now dominate India’s politics in such a way that those who call for violence feel protected. “Unless this is dealt with, the kind of consequences that may happen — I can’t even imagine, I don’t dare to imagine,” said Mr. Jha. .......... Pradeep Jha, the main organizer of the city’s largest pilgrimage festival, said he shared the vision of a Hindu state, not through violence but by urging India’s Muslims to convert back; in such a view, everyone in India was Hindu at one point. ......... Mr. Narsinghanand has made a name for himself doing the exact opposite. As he sees it, India’s Muslims — who account for 15 percent of the population — will turn the country into a Muslim state within a decade. To prevent such an outcome, he has told followers that they must “be willing to die,” pointing to the Taliban and Islamic State as a “role model.” .......... “This Constitution will be the end of the Hindus, all one billion Hindus,” Mr. Narsinghanand said at a virtual event. “Whoever believes in this system, in this Supreme Court, in these politicians, in this Constitution, in this army and police — they will die a dog’s death.” .......... “He said nothing wrong,” said Swami Amritanand, an organizer of the Haridwar event. “We are doing what America is doing, we are doing what Britain is doing.”
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Facebook’s Failures of Invention . Young people, its most valuable demographic, keep spending time on TikTok, the irresistible short-video app that has become Facebook’s most formidable competitor in years. ........ New privacy features that Apple added to the iPhone last year are also hampering one of Facebook’s main moneymakers, targeted digital ads ........ but that, so far, remains more virtual than reality. ........ Meta’s stock value shed more than $250 billion last week. That’s a nearly incomprehensible amount — only a few dozen publicly listed companies are valued at more than $250 billion. ............ beneath Facebook’s many expensive problems is a single more fundamental problem .......... The problem is innovation: Facebook can’t seem to do it. The company just doesn’t appear to know how to invent successful new stuff. Most of its biggest hits — not just two of its main products, Instagram and WhatsApp, but many of its most-used features, like Instagram Stories — were invented elsewhere. They made their way to Facebook either through acquisitions or, when that didn’t work, outright copying. ........... it’s easy to see why investors might be skeptical that Facebook is the company that will invent the next big thing, whether the metaverse or whatever else. It’s been a very long time since Facebook created something truly groundbreaking. ......... Zuckerberg didn’t invent the idea of a social network, but Facebook’s first decade was nevertheless full of innovations. Perhaps the most important was the release in 2006 of News Feed, the system that organizes updates from your friends into a timeline — also known as the main part of the Facebook app. News Feed revolutionized how people navigated the internet. ........... As Steve Jobs said: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Facebook’s artistry lay in its operational excellence more than its originality. ......... Consider Instagram. When Facebook paid $1 billion for the photo-sharing app in 2012, Instagram had only 13 employees, about 30 million users and no revenue. ......... Today more than a billion people use Instagram every month, and in 2018 it may have been worth more than $100 billion. ............ Now Facebook is trying to do something similar with Reels, its TikTok clone. Reels made its debut in Instagram in 2020, and in 2021 Reels began rolling out on Facebook. ........ I use Instagram often, but I find it increasingly messy. It’s a dog’s breakfast of lots of different social features all sitting uncomfortably together — a place for permanent photos, for ephemeral stories, for influencers’ short videos and even for shopping. The Facebook app, meanwhile, feels like a lost cause of bloat; like a restaurant that serves too many different kinds of cuisines, the app tries to do so much it ends up doing almost nothing well. .......... Its market value has just fallen under $600 billion, the threshold that Democrats in the House have picked for new legislation aimed at curbing the power of “Big Tech.” As the analyst Ben Thompson notes, the digital ad market, once ruled nearly entirely by Google and Facebook, has recently become more competitive. ............ Facebook has coasted so long on other people’s inventions that it’s really hard to see where it goes now that its mimeograph machine is jammed. Perhaps it’s time for a new inspirational corporate slogan: Move fast — and make things. .
Radical Ideas Need Quiet Spaces . Visibility and attention, and even a lively cultural conversation, are one thing. Actually mustering the power to fundamentally rearrange society or politics — that is something else. And though activists are good at achieving the former, they often seem stuck when it comes to the latter. ............ Saul Alinsky, the famed community organizer who wrote “Rules for Radicals,” had a useful metaphor: For a revolution to be successful, he argued, it has to follow the three-act structure of a play. The first act establishes the characters and the plot, the second act sharpens the conflict, and in the third act, “good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution.” From women’s suffrage to the midcentury civil rights struggle, movements mastered this narrative, leaving a permanent mark on society. But by the early 1970s, Alinsky had started to worry that overeager revolutionaries were jumping straight to that third act, a losing proposition. ............. Those first acts matter because that’s where activists hammer out ideology, define goals, set strategy, build lasting identity and solidarity. It’s also where the essential work of organizing occurs.
............ Almost 200 years ago, in England, the right to vote was the domain of property owners and the landed gentry — about one in six men. (No one was even talking about women yet.) At the same time, the working class was increasingly frustrated with the horrid living conditions brought on by industrialization. With no political recourse, workers built a movement that became known as Chartism and had a simple objective: using the right to petition Crown and Parliament to demand representation. Chartism encouraged the working class to direct its energy toward gathering as many signatures as possible. This was a medium with almost zero cost. “Wherever there is a halfpenny sheet of paper, a pen and a few drops of ink, there are the materials for a petition,” wrote one Chartist. But the act of picking up these materials inspired solidarity — among those who worked with rulers to draw up the sheets by hand, went door to door to canvass, sneaked onto factory floors or set up tables in busy marketplaces. ................. When a Chartist activist had to argue his case, he was reinforcing his own beliefs, talking himself into deeper commitment while convincing others.
.......... In the summer of 1839, more than 1.25 million signatures had been gathered on a scroll that stretched some three miles long and was delivered to the government, where the Chartists were quite literally laughed out the door. But by then a new constituency had been born. A whole world of associations and a new politics spun out from the talking and signing. More petitions followed, until, 30 years later, working men were finally allowed to begin participating in democracy. ............. There is no switching off the internet. But we can better appreciate, as we increasingly do in our personal lives, that where we talk can affect how we talk
. ......... These activists need spaces to come together in the quiet when revolutions are only impassioned conversations among the aggrieved and dreaming. Because without those spaces, we risk a future in which the possibility of new realities will remain just beyond our grasp. .
The Magic of the Birds For the teenage sons of an obsessed birder, a father’s bird-watching habit had become nerdy — until some bold jays in an Ontario park turned dubious adolescents into giggly boys. ......... Here, birds break the fourth wall between us and the wild. And, just as my wife and I had hoped, a weekend away with birds can pierce the sullen exteriors of adolescents hardened by life in school. ......... “It’s just so cool to feel it land on your hand,” said Henrik, as a Canada jay picked bread crumbs from his palm. It had been years since one of my sons thought a bird was cool. Somewhere after elementary school, dad’s birding habit became decidedly nerdy. But now that innocent smile was back........ “It’s cool because you learn that birds have personalities,” said Henrik, as another jay dawdled on his wrist, sorting through the trail mix in his palm. “One will come up and chill in your hand for awhile. Some are really picky and pick over the different pieces of food in your hand to get what they want.” ......... Since 1977, the number of Canada jays surveyed throughout Algonquin has declined by more than 70 percent. Climate change is thought to be a cause, namely unseasonably warm temperatures that spoil the birds’ food supplies. ......... In the cafeteria we warmed up with hot chocolate and coffee, chicken soup and flimsy cheeseburgers — food that tastes good after spending hours in the cold. ....... For a while on the drive back south to New York the boys were rehashing their observations and hypotheses on the different personalities among birds. Then we re-entered the realm of cellular service, and they were teens on TikTok again. .
Heather Havrilesky Compares Her Husband to a Heap of Laundry . a marriage between a neurotic perfectionist and a formidably patient man with much to criticize about him, from an annoyingly “phlegmy” throat to a similarity to “a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, useless, almost sentient but not quite.” ........ “Your house is just like your acceptably mediocre day care: Everyone yells at each other, and then you get to eat powdered sugar-covered doughnuts, and then everyone is happy and has sugar all over their faces. Your world is not really collapsing.” .......... I know only my own marriage, like her, and I prefer to hide its nuttier moments. Marriage is — for myself and others — a secret. ......... the suburbs she describes — with their complement of harried strivers sacrificing to educate their kids — strike one as rather novel, considering. Yet the focus of the text is on big lawns, lawns with warning signs about canine feces, concerns over property values and other clichés. .......... the suburbs are clichéd
.......... “Being part of a community,” she observes, reprising a vision of the burbs articulated by legions of predecessors, “turns out to include countless hours of trying to look relaxed while you freak out on the inside.” ........... One of the book’s best episodes involves a chaotic last-minute cross-country road trip of too many miles and too few bathrooms. Stretches of scatological low comedy are cut with apt asides on the crazed intimacy of traveling by car with kids. It’s a bravado feat of family portraiture: savage, tender, claustrophobic. And Bill comes alive, escaping the gravity of the author’s confessedly self-centered consciousness. The trip is, in fact, a high point for their partnership, after which their story darkens, drifting toward romantic stalemate, potential infidelity and a harrowing medical crisis. We’ve spent enough time with the couple by this late stage that the universality of their predicament needn’t be asserted to be appreciated. Betrayal is betrayal. Fear of death is fear of death. .
