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Scam Call Centers of India by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

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One afternoon in December 2019, Kathleen Langer, an elderly grandmother who lives by herself in Crossville, Tenn., got a phone call from a person who said he worked in the refund department of her computer manufacturer. The reason for the call, he explained, was to process a refund the company owed Langer for antivirus and anti-hacking protection that had been sold to her and was now being discontinued. Langer, who has a warm and kind voice, couldn’t remember purchasing the plan in question, but at her age, she didn’t quite trust her memory. She had no reason to doubt the caller, who spoke with an Indian accent and said his name was Roger.

He asked her to turn on her computer and led her through a series of steps so that he could access it remotely. When Langer asked why this was necessary, he said he needed to remove his company’s software from her machine. Because the protection was being terminated, he told her, leaving the software on the computer would cause it to crash.

After he gained access to her desktop, using the program TeamViewer, the caller asked Langer to log into her bank to accept the refund, $399, which he was going to transfer into her account. “Because of a technical issue with our system, we won’t be able to refund your money on your credit card or mail you a check,” he said. Langer made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to log in. She didn’t do online banking too often and couldn’t remember her user name.

Frustrated, the caller opened her bank’s internet banking registration form on her computer screen, created a new user name and password for her and asked her to fill out the required details — including her address, Social Security number and birth date. When she typed this last part in, the caller noticed she had turned 80 just weeks earlier and wished her a belated happy birthday. “Thank you!” she replied.

After submitting the form, he tried to log into Langer’s account but failed, because Langer’s bank — like most banks — activates a newly created user ID only after verifying it by speaking to the customer who has requested it. The caller asked Langer if she could go to her bank to resolve the issue. “How far is the bank from your house?” he asked.

A few blocks away, Langer answered. Because it was late afternoon, however, she wasn’t sure if it would be open when she got there. The caller noted that the bank didn’t close until 4:30, which meant she still had 45 minutes. “He was very insistent,” Langer told me recently. On her computer screen, the caller typed out what he wanted her to say at the bank. “Don’t tell them anything about the refund,” he said. She was to say that she needed to log in to check her statements and pay bills.

Langer couldn’t recall, when we spoke, if she drove to the bank or not. But later that afternoon, she rang the number the caller had given her and told him she had been unable to get to the bank in time. He advised her to go back the next morning. By now, Langer was beginning to have doubts about the caller. She told him she wouldn’t answer the phone if he contacted her again.

“Do you care about your computer?” he asked. He then uploaded a program onto her computer called Lock My PC and locked its screen with a password she couldn’t see. When she complained, he got belligerent. “You can call the police, the F.B.I., the C.I.A.,” he told her. “If you want to use your computer as you were doing, you need to go ahead as I was telling you or else you will lose your computer and your money.” When he finally hung up, after reiterating that he would call the following day, Langer felt shaken.

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State of surrender by Zahid Hussain

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IT has not happened for the first time that the state has surrendered to a group it had declared terrorist. But the way the government capitulated yet again to the banned Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan is despicable. A day after the TLP threatened to storm the capital and two policemen were killed in Lahore, the interior minister announced that the government had accepted all their demands.

He was all praise for the leaders of the outlawed outfit that has held the country hostage to its retrogressive, violent ideology. All those involved in the rioting and killing of the law enforcers have been released and it has also been decided to unfreeze the group’s bank accounts.

It’s not clear what other demands the government has conceded to. The interior minister also appeared confused over the fact that his government had banned the TLP earlier this year and had declared it a terrorist group. He now wants the cabinet to review the decision. The minister tries to rationalise the surrender in the face of violence saying that “…it is not the job of the state to use the stick”.

It couldn’t get more shameful than this, with the government surrendering its right to use force to maintain law and order and protect the lives of citizens. These pronouncements by the interior minister raise questions about the state’s resolve to fight all manner of violent extremism and terrorism. In fact, the government has shamelessly accepted the use of violence by a proscribed organisation in pursuance of the latter’s illegal demands.

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Make No Mistake — The US War on Terror Is Far from Finished

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IN THE LAST chapter of his first book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman reminds his readers of Bernie Sanders’s June 2019 assertion: “There is a straight line from the decision to reorient U.S. national-security strategy around terrorismafter 9/11 to placing migrant children in cages on our southern border.”

“In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people — a full total may never be known — terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal and constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians.”

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Jim Crow Hindutva By Ashutosh Varshney

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Written by Ashutosh Varshney |
Updated: October 19, 2021 3:53:37 pmThe Hindu nationalism of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004) sought to make India more Hindu in public symbolism and discourse without using laws to make India anti-Muslim. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

To identify the core of BJP politics since 2019, I would like to introduce a new concept: Jim Crow Hindu Nationalism. This concept allows us to distinguish the BJP’s current politics from how the party exercised power when it last ruled Delhi. Equally important, the concept also reveals how BJP’s India is different from Nazi Germany, to which it is now increasingly compared in many circles worldwide.

What exactly is “Jim Crow”? Taking its name from a musical play depicting Black Americans in a demeaning light, the phrase has come to refer to an ensemble of laws and practices, which deprived Black Americans of their voting rights, subjected them to lynchings, and forced segregation upon their neighbourhoods, churches, schools, businesses and social lives. Inter-racial marriages were outlawed and inter-racial sex, especially between a Black man and a White woman, was violently punished. By the 1890s, such laws and practices were institutionalised in the southern states of the US, creating the term “Jim Crow South”.

Such politics lasted over seven decades, ending finally with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Until then, according to democratic theory, America was a “semi democracy”.

Electoral democracy coexisted with a racial political order, premised on White nationalism, in those 11 southern states that seceded during the Civil War, 1861-65, and were defeated. Two and a half decades later, White majorities in these states managed to impose, legally, a brutal regime of Black subordination.

This period of American history is well known to US politicians, intellectuals and many citizens. Other than those on the right-wing of politics, most have come to abhor America’s Jim Crow past. But it has remained generally unknown abroad. Until America’s rise to pre-eminence after 1945, US history was not part of world consciousness. Martin Luther King made the struggles of Black Americans internationally visible in the 1960s, and the Black Lives Matter movement has further enlarged world consciousness, forcing a historical reckoning within the US, too.

In comparative analyses of Hindu nationalism, this period of American history is not invoked. Rather, the focus has been on the better known Nazi period of European history. Part of the reason is that the early Hindu nationalists openly drew inspiration from the Nazis. Hailing Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, MS Golwalkar, an ideological father of Hindu nationalism, argued that Muslims “must entertain no idea(s) but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture… may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing… not even citizen’s rights.”(We or Our Nationhood Defined, 1938).

When Hindu nationalism is compared to fascism, an all-important difference is not noted. The institution of concentration camps was absolutely central to Nazi Germany. This institution had three aims: To imprison indefinitely “enemies of the state”, real or imagined, with administrative approval, but without judicial permission; to eliminate, physically, groups of unwanted people, again without judicial consent; and to push the incarcerated into forced labour. Jews were the main victims. An estimated six million died, or were killed.

In the post-1945 world, concentration camps are a near impossibility. International ostracisation would greet the country which built them. Because of its military-economic power externally and Han majoritarianism internally, only a country like China has been able to get away with its concentration camps, erected for the Uighur Muslims.

The Hindu nationalism of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004) sought to make India more Hindu in public symbolism and discourse without using laws to make India anti-Muslim. BJP politics today and the forces it has set in motion, especially after the 2019 election victory, are not pausing at a Hinduisation of the public sphere. Laws are being made to turn Muslims into second-class citizens; mob lynchings and intense hatred are instilling fear; and both law and violence are being combined to prevent religious mixing and deepen communal segregation. Hindu nationalists do not know Jim Crow history, but their politics is threatening to create a Jim Crow India in BJP-ruled territories. What race was to the American South, ethnicised religion is to Hindu
nationalists.

Consider what happened to Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. In the post-Civil War period, 1865-1870, three Constitutional Amendments emancipated Blacks. The 13th Amendment ended Black slavery; the 14th Amendment provided equal citizenship and equality before the law; and the 15th Amendment gave them voting rights.

In the 1880s, racist White parties, registering election victories, launched their counter-revolution. Using their power over elected legislatures, they passed laws to establish literacy, residency and poll tax requirements for voting, effectively disenfranchising the largely illiterate and poor Blacks. By 1872-3, feeling the air of emancipation, 80-85 per cent Blacks had registered to vote in the south. In 1905-6, subjected to new laws, only 5-6 per cent remained as voters. Lynchings installed a regime of fear. Between 1882-1930, an average of 100 Americans were lynched to death every year, mostly in the South, mostly Black.

Now consider how legislative control has been used in India after May 2019. Amended “public safety” laws give the government the power to designate any individual as a terrorist or “anti-national”, imposing preventive detention with uncertain access to courts; Article 370 and Article 35(a) were abolished and hundreds of Kashmiri politicians imprisoned; via the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), a religious requirement was introduced in citizenship laws, excluding only Muslims; laws prohibiting interfaith marriages are being passed in BJP-ruled states; and the “love jihad” militia punish Hindu-Muslim personal intermixing. Delhi also announced that a National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be created as a sequel to the CAA. In principle, using the CAA, the NRC can strip those Muslims, who don’t have the right documents, of citizenship. If implemented, a future NRC will effectively deprive millions of Muslims of their voting rights and, perhaps, welfare benefits. Lynchings have already made Muslims mortally afraid.

To prevent the nation’s full-blooded descent into a Jim Crow India, the political imperatives are now clear: Challenge the BJP, electorally, beyond the 11 states where it is not in power — most critically, in Uttar Pradesh; encourage greater federal pushback; and mount democratic protest and movements. In the US, until the 1950s, the courts and southern newspapers did not oppose Jim Crow. In India, too, these two institutions are currently unreliable. Can they change? Will they?

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jim-crow-hindutva-7577159/

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