Chinas National Day, October 1, was not a cause for celebration among the Uyghurs, Mongolians and Tibetans who gathered in Tokyo to protest the Communist governments suppression of human rights in their respective homelands.

Representatives for members of ethnic minorities from China who now live in Japan met Japanese lawmakers at the National Diet Building in Tokyo, where they described Beijings assimilation policies and other measures, which they allege are tantamount to cultural genocide. They also pleaded with Diet members to speak out against Chinas blatant disregard for basic human rights.

The meeting was part of joint protest activities organized by a Tibet support organization based in the United States. The joint protests were carried out in 88 locations in 36 countries to coincide with Chinas National Day. In Tokyo, it was followed by an October 3 protest march in the capital citys landmark commercial district near the Imperial Palace.

The meeting at the National Diet on October 1 brought the human rights and cultural oppression home to Japanese lawmakers through the testimony of the visiting participants.

Tsering Dorjee, a Tibetan participating in the event, pointed out how the Chinese authorities have recently ramped up surveillance of residents in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

Everyone now has to carry ID when moving about, he reported. And they have been keeping a tighter eye on the border, so that last year only a dozen or so Tibetans were able to make it abroad to seek political asylum.

Olhunuud Daichin, Secretary general of Southern Mongolia Congress, told lawmakers how since September Mongol children attending primary and middle school are increasingly being made to carry out their studies in the Chinese language, adding:

They are switching to the use of Chinese-language textbooks, and references to traditional Mongol ceremonies are being eliminated.

It looks like they are trying to exterminate the language and culture of the Mongolian people.

It should be noted that the Mongolians are divided between those living in the independent nation of Outer Mongolia and those in Southern Mongolia, which corresponds to the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia.

Kerimu Uda, President of Japan Uyghur Association, represented the Uyghurs in Chinas far western Xinjiang Province. (Uyghurs prefer to call their homeland East Turkestan.) They are currently suffering severe suppression by the central government, with huge numbers being forced into internment camps for reeducation.

He said, If Uyghurs do not have their names chosen from a list drawn up by the government, then they cannot even name their children officially.

The event accomplished its purpose of educating the lawmakers, according to organizers. Hidetoshi Ishii, executive director of the Japan executive committee for Resist China, and vice president of the Japan-based Free Indo-Pacific Alliance explained:

Almost all of the 10 National Diet members from both ruling and opposition parties that participated in this event stayed until the end. It shows that Japanese politicians are paying attention, which was very epochal. The members of the executive committee are willing to continue activities like this.

The meeting was followed by a press conference at which Olhunuud Daichin brought up the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 passed by the U.S. Congress to sanction Chinese authorities involved in the ongoing oppression of the Uyghur people.

I would like to see a Japan that values freedom and democracy follow suit and pass such a human rights law, he declared.

The meeting also passed a resolution stating, We must unite to force the Chinese government to halt its policies of ethnic genocide.

Two days later on October 3, about 350 people from the Uighur, Hong Kong, Southern Mongolia, and Tibetan homelands gathered in Tokyos central commercial and business districts to parade through the streets with flags of their respective ethnic groups, in protest of the Chinese governments persecution of ethnic minorities.

Planners for the demonstration, hosted by about 20 Japanese organizations working on human rights issues in China, focused on Chinas recent directives to abolish education in the Mongolian language for students in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China and the crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

Olhunuud Daichin representing the Southern Mongolia Congress told the group before the marches began:

The 71st anniversary of the Chinese Communist Partys administration is the 71st year of cracking down on us. We want to tell the people of the world about the current situation in China.

A 37-year-old Tibetan woman who participated in the march wearing the Chupa national costume said, I participated in the hope of Tibetan independence. I expect Japan to be a leader in Asia and want to see you exert your power and influence on these matters.

Another Tibetan woman in her fifties told the group, In Tibet, there is no end to people who commit suicide because they have no freedom. But (the international community) looks away while it runs to China for money.

Some day, I want to go back to a Tibet that is free, she added.

(Read the original stories here and here, in Japanese.)

Author: The Sankei Shimbun

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Uyghurs, Tibetans in Japan Decry Beijings Oppression of Human Rights in their Homelands at Diet Meeting - JAPAN Forward

The stark decision facing Americans this November was on full display in the first presidential debate. On one side, there was loud, obnoxious and unorthodox Donald Trump, whose strongman shtick turns on his base. On the other was Joe Biden, stately and mostly calm. Biden represents an older political order that has disenfranchised so many, and Trump did his best to dig into this disenfranchisement and convince Americans that his brand of chaotic evil is good, actually.

Even though the divided United States is so neatly summed up by the choice between Trump and Biden, the division isnt simply partisan. Its also regional, based on class or occupation, city versus rural, and ideological.

As Black Lives Matter protests have exploded across the U.S., its clear that the foundation of the country white supremacy is its greatest problem. To confront a problem woven into the fabric of the nation will require a reckoning that could transform, and even unwind, the country.

The U.S. has profound problems all settler-colonial states do. And as fascism rises, police brutality continues unabated and Americans take to their streets to demand rights, its increasingly clear that demanding system reform is a dead end. If the system was built to oppress, the only way to stop oppression is to destroy the system.

Dismantling the U.S. is an idea that is both radical and centuries-old. In 2009, Paul Starobin argued in the Wall Street Journal that Americans should consider transforming the U.S. into modern city-states, like innovative Singapore. He wrote: Americas broke, ill-governed and way-too-big nation-like state might be saved, truly saved, not by an emergency federal bailout, but by a merciful carve-up into a trio of republics that would rely on their own ingenuity in making their connections to the wider world.

Eleven years later, and the cry for decentralized government feels more and more like a possible solution to the mess that the not-so-United States finds itself in.

There is a deep crisis of democracy in the U.S.: the American government is too tied to the corporate world and too unresponsive to the people it governs. Partly, thats because governing every American through three levels of government means that the thorniest issues can be passed from jurisdiction to jurisdiction without ever settling on a satisfying resolution.

The U.S. is a nation that was built on genocide and through slavery, and it has never accounted for either. The deep inequalities that exist today trace a direct line to the countrys foundation. More than one-quarter of the 38.1 million Americans living in poverty are Indigenous, and more than 20 per cent are Black. Indeed, the very people on whose backs and whose land the United States is built are the ones who continue to live in the most difficult conditions.

Reparations must be paid, and one estimate places the amount at US$10 trillion to $12 trillion just to close the wealth gap that exists between Black and white Americans. But money isnt enough. Reparations also require a fundamental shift in where Black Americans find themselves in the U.S., while also giving land back to Indigenous nations that never ceded their territory. These two projects must be realized for the U.S. to face its past and chart a more equitable future, and its impossible to see this happening governed by the status quo.

The U.S. became the worlds most powerful superpower after the Second World War in an era where the prevailing political consensus, liberalism, was that if the markets were not mitigated, people would react with violence. The liberal consensus meant that both the Republicans and Democrats became big-tent parties that sought to help citizens in different ways by building a welfare state.

Liberalisms strength, glossing over the political divisions that exist within society, would eventually become its weakness, as the horror of two world wars and the Great Depression fell away from peoples minds. The Republicans, and then the Democrats, caused liberalism to fail in those fundamental promises: the welfare state was destroyed, the manufacturing base that provided good wages and good jobs is gone and inequality threatens social cohesion.

If liberalism falls, it will take its most important example down with it. And if it doesnt, it is still the right time to engage in a democratic process for Americans to redefine what their state looks like. This could be an example of democracy and self-determination, two words Americans throw around a lot when they are in other countries but which are rarely practised very well domestically.

A new federal arrangement could certainly replicate a colonial structure, but a process that is rooted in reparations and respect for Indigenous sovereignty would have to be created mutually, in a way that avoids doing political business as usual. It might sound lofty, even impossible, to imagine democracy operating in a way that is local, decentralized and responds to average peoples needs. But its exactly how communities in the U.S. right now are co-operating to survive through the pandemic, floods, hurricanes and fires. Why would it be impossible to apply these principles more broadly to create a new kind of federal arrangement?

In 2000, Johan Galtung predicted the U.S. empire would fall in 2025. In 2010, he argued that this might happen when an isolationist president is elected who seeks to remove the U.S. from foreign engagement. The fall of this empire would have a profound impact on the U.S. domestically, as so much of politics and the economy have operated in service of the empire. As Trump has promised to bring U.S. troops home, how will having a domestic military shape the new era of a nation that does not have bases around the world and is no longer the great global military superpower?

In 2016, Vice featured Galtungs theory and wrote: He argued that American fascism would come from a capacity for tremendous global violence; a vision of American exceptionalism as the 'fittest nation'; a belief in a coming final war between good and evil; a cult of the strong state leading the fight of good against evil; and a cult of the 'strong leader.'" Galtung argued that 15 contradictions would bring the collapse of the empire but also would have profound impacts on the stability of the U.S. as a whole, especially where so many people have such deep and important grievances with the state.

Theres little question something major is going to have to happen to course-correct, and its not simply a Biden presidency. A Biden victory will diffuse a lot of the anger many Americans feel while also igniting another kind of anger the fascist organizing that has been so intensely fuelled by Trump.

By eliminating this tier of government entirely, it would radically shift power and devolve decision-making to be closer to average people. It would fundamentally alter how states operate and would give average people a new struggle in which to participate: not just in rewriting a constitution that finally interprets "We the People" to mean all people, but also in righting historical wrongs through redistribution of wealth, land and power. It could be a way forward, where people can peacefully engage and bridge the division that threatens the existence of the United States.

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Time to reimagine the US government - National Observer

Since Aliaksandr Lukashenka, the authoritarian ruler of Belarus, claimed victory in the August 9 presidential election, the country has been swept by a popular uprising against his regime, which has lasted for a quarter of a century.

The national as opposed to state white-red-white flag, along with the white knight emblem, has been adopted by the protest movement. Its slogan Long live Belarus dates back to the national liberation movement of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Yet Belaruss popular revolution is not about national identity or the countrys geopolitical orientation. There has been no reference to its heroic past, nor have the European Union or Russian flags been flown. The Belarusian revolution is about freedom and democracy: the right to choose your own government and to express your opinion publicly without fear of violence and repression.

The soft power exemplified in womens marches and non-violent actions has been predominant in this revolution. There are no hierarchical power structures among the protesters. The focus is instead on grassroots cooperation, inclusion and mutual aid. In this sense, it is a post-national revolution focused on civic identity, that is attaining a better and more dignified life inside ones own country.

The white-red-white flag has been chosen to contrast with the state red and green Soviet replica, promulgated by Lukashenka. It dates back to the 15th century, when white and red elements were present on the flags of the troops of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a medieval forerunner of the present-day Belarus and Lithuania. The flag later became an official symbol of the Belarus Peoples Republic, a short-lived state of 1918, and was revived again by the Belarusian intelligentsia during the Nazi occupation of 1941-1944. Finally, the flag became an official state symbol of an independent Belarus in 1991, following the demise of the Soviet Union.

Having come to power in 1994, Lukashenka launched a propaganda campaign to discredit the white-red-white flag and the knight emblem as those of Nazi collaborators. He then used the question of revoking the ostensibly Nazi symbols as a pretext to push through a controversial referendum that allowed him to subjugate the legislature and embark on integration with Russia.

Lukashenka continued his assault on the short-lived national revival of 1990-1994 by curtailing use of the Belarusian language in public life and rewriting history textbooks. Russian was made an official state language, and the new state ideology portrayed national identity as stemming from the Belarusian partisan guerrilla movement during the Second World War.

There was little opposition to the creation of this fake narrative for several reasons. Belarusians have always lacked a strong sense of national consciousness. As part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth since the second half of the 17th century and the Russian Empire since the late 18th century until the revolution of 1917, Belarus was subject to strong Polish and Russian influences. Belarusians used to call themselves tuteyshyia literally from here as they did not identify themselves as Belarusian, Russian or Polish but as coming from this land.

Later, as the western frontier of the Soviet Union, Belarus was subject to further Russification. This process included the deployment of large numbers of Russian troops and their integration into Belarusian society, the appointment of Russian bureaucrats as heads of the Belarusian Communist Party and the wiping out of the local intelligentsia. More than 100,000 Belarusians, including teachers, doctors, writers and poets, were executed by the NKVD in 1937-1941 in the Kurapaty village on the outskirts of Minsk.

As a result, nationalism did not become a strong social force driving political change in Belarus as it did in the Baltic states. Unlike Ukraine, there was no nationalist sentiment among Belarusian communists either. The nationalist opposition, which managed to push through the white-red-white flag and the knight emblem as state symbols, lost its popularity in the late 90s having failed to act on economic reforms and was quickly crushed by Lukashenka.

The presidents geopolitical orientation towards Russia has not helped in building a sense of national identity either. In 1999, Lukashenka signed a treaty with the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, to form a Union State between Belarus and Russia, much of which has yet to be implemented.

Belarus then joined the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization and finally the Eurasian Economic Union. In contrast, the West has kept limited ties to Belarus, following the crackdown on the Belarusian opposition after thereferendums of 1995-96. It was only after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 that the West decided to expand contacts with the Belarusian government, helped by the release of political prisoners.

Western prosperity and its freedoms have always been attractive to Belarusians, whose country borders three EU members.

Sociologists say that Belarus is undergoing an identity crisis. People find themselves squeezed between two civilizational choices, unable to make up their minds. Polls show that public opinion has swung between supporting a western or a Russian orientation, with the latter often leading, although the gap has diminished in recent years. For example, those preferring full integration with Russia over joining the EU dropped from 60.3 per cent in January 2018 to 40.4 per cent in December 2019. At the same time the number preferring to join the EU has risen from 20.2 per cent in January 2018 to 32 per cent in December 2019.

Most of todays protesters are in their 40s or younger the two generations that have grown up in an independent Belarus. For them, their countrys sovereignty is inalienable. As Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the opposition, has said: It is not a subject of debate or haggle.

The polls since 2016 have shown more than 75 per cent of Belarusians wanting Belarus to remain independent from Russia, with 15 per cent preferring full integration.

As foreign travel has become easier, Belarusians are confronted with the question of who they are and what it means to be Belarusian. In recent years, several projects aimed at defining and (re)constructing Be- larus national identity have been launched. These include Belarusian language courses and singing classes, costume designs with national elements, translations of books into Belarusian and national history tours.

The election campaign and the post-election protests are speeding up this process. Public interest in national symbols and songs, as well as a history of Belarus, untainted by state propaganda, is growing.

The popular revolution in Belarus is helping to nurture a sense of civic identity. Having endured the hardships of the 1990s and the authoritarian oppression that followed, the country has matured over the past 30 years. Its people are ready to define how they want to live and will no longer tolerate more decades of repression.

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Shaking off oppression - Chatham House

On Mahatma Gandhis birth anniversary, activist and lawyer Prashant Bhushan delivered a lecture organised by the Gandhi Peace Foundation, New Delhi.

In his remarks, he asserted the relevance of Mahatma Gandhis teachings and principles to present-day India, saying Gandhi would have exhorted people at large to throng the streets in protest againstunjust and discriminatory laws and practices of the [Narendra Modi] government.

Below is the full text of his speech.

Mahatma Gandhis actions and writings during his lifetime tell us a lot about his view of justice in society as well as justice through courts. At one level, his view of justice was governed by what he felt was the consequence of an action on the weakest, the poorest and the most helpless man in society. At another level, his view of justice was governed by his belief in what was fair and equitable. At yet another level it was governed by what he felt was an act in public interest.

Gandhis view of justice for the last man

Gandhi always worked for and strove to provide justice to the weak and immiserated. He expressed this in his Talisman, in one of the last notes left behind by him. He said,

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melt away.

Here his view of justice is really governed by what is fair to the last or weakest person, rather than the greatest common good. It is because of this view of justice that he stood for the rights of and against the oppression of minorities, at the hands of the ruling majority. It is this view of justice that made him stand against majoritarian sentiments and stand with the deprived minorities if he felt they were being oppressed.

Though Gandhis often conflicting views on the caste system and its practice has been the subject of much controversy, and which was also ground for Ambedkars strong disagreement with the Mahatma, there is no doubt that Gandhi spent a substantial part of his life in working for the abolition of all forms untouchability and for allowing Dalits access to equal rights in every sphere of activity. Here too, it was his view of the oppression of and fairness towards the Dalits, that guided his actions.

Statue of Mahatma Gandhi on the premises of the Parliament House during the monsoon session, New Delhi. September 20, 2020. Photo: PTI/Kamal Kishore

Gandhi: Legal justice and justice of conscience

Gandhi had many encounters with the law and the judicial system and he faced them with an unflinching firmness of principle. He mooted the idea of civil disobedience where he propagated that it was just and principled to disobey laws which were fundamentally unjust and unfair. Gandhi wrote explaining his idea of satyagraha: The object behind the idea of Satyagrah is to make the people fearless and free, and not to maintain our own reputation anyhow.

Also Read: Prashant Bhushan and the Gandhian Response to an Illegitimate Law

Thus be defied many unjust and excessive laws, two of which mark important satyagrahas by Gandhi which Id like to mention. Under a harsh colonial law, peasants in Champaran, Bihar were made to cultivate indigo on a portion of their land or pay an enhanced rent to the factory. Further, those who refused to comply would have their land confiscated. When Gandhi visited Champaran in 1917, it was his first encounter with the hardships of the peasants in India. He was ordered to leave the district and even produced before a magistrate, where he only stated that, as a self-respecting man he was bound to disobey the DMs order and continue his stay.

He wrote to the viceroy that the peasants were living under a reign of terror and their persons and their minds are all under the planters heels. He travelled extensively defying all orders against his public activity and collected almost 7,000 testimonies which led the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, whose reports largely favoured the tenants and ended his first satyagraha successfully.

The other important satyagraha that Gandhi led later in 1930 was against the unjust salt tax the states monopoly over the production and sale of salt. Gandhi wrote on this stating:

The illegality is in a government that steals the peoples salt and makes them pay heavily for the stolen article. The people, when they become conscious of their power, will have every right to take possession of what belongs to them.

This then led to the famous Dandi march to the sea to defy the salt law, an event that hailed Gandhi as the law breaker.

Gandhi also disobeyed the British law of sedition. In 1922, he was imprisoned in Yerwada for violating Section 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code, for uttering or writing words exciting disaffection towards the government established by law. Section 124 (A) defines Sedition as:

Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law, shall be punished

He believed that while disobeying fundamentally unjust laws was just and fair, it was equally incumbent upon the conscientious objector practising civil disobedience to submit to any penalty that could be imposed by the judiciary for such civil disobedience, without indulging in any violence. Gandhi thus spent many years in jail for various acts of civil disobedience. He stated during this trail,

I wish to endorse all the blame that the leaned advocate general has thrown on my shoulders in connection with the Bombay, the Madras, and the Chauri Chaura occurrenceshe is quite right when he says that a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, having had a fair share of experience of this world, I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I know that I was playing with fire.

Gandhis sedition trial of 1922 was one that brought into sharp focus the conflict between obedience to the law of the land and obedience of ones moral conscience in opposing an unjust law. Gandhi had been charged with sedition for writing politically sensitive articles in his weekly journal Young India.

He went on to say at his trial:

Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr. Banker and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crimeI have studied some of the cases tried under it (section 124A) and I know that some of the most loved of Indias patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under that section.

And elsewhere in the trail he said,

I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done irreparable harm to my country or to incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad, I am deeply sorry for it. I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty. But to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not ask for any extenuating act of clemency. I am here to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.

Gandhi thus laid more emphasis on truth and justice of conscience rather than in courts of justice. He said, There is a higher court than the court of Justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts. This issue came up most starkly when he was charged for contempt of court for having published a letter in Young India written by the district judge of Ahmedabad to the registrar of the Bombay high court. The charge was that the letter was a private official letter forming part of a pending case. When asked by the chief justice of the Bombay high court to publish an apology, Gandhi submitted that he could not conscientiously offer any apology. He stated:

I regret that I have not found it possible to accept the advice given by His Lordship the Chief Justice. Moreover, I have been unable to accept the advice because I do not consider that I have committed either a legal or a moral breachI am sure that this Honble Court would not want me to tender an apology unless it be sincere and express regret for an action which I have held to be a privilege and duty of a journalist. I shall therefore cheerfully and respectfully accept the punishment that his Honble Court may be pleased to impose upon me for the vindication of the majesty of law.

Justice Hayward held that Gandhis actions scandalised the judge concerned (Judge Kennedy). He also suggested that Gandhi posed not as a law-breaker but as a passive resistor of the law, and held it sufficient to severely reprimand Gandhi and the editor for their proceedings and to warm them of the penalties imposable by the high court.

Later in November 1922, he was discontinued as a member of the Inn and his name was removed from the rolls. By then it was several years since he had practised as a lawyer. His appearances in court had been as someone who was charged as a law breaker. Gandhi was willing to submit to any penalty that could be lawfully imposed on him for disobeying the courts orders which he felt were unjust and violated his principles/conscience. I may point out here that for Gandhi adherence to ones principles/conscience meant being truthful, fair and just.

Mahatma Gandhi receives a donation in a train compartment. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Unknown author, Public domain

Gandhi in todays context:

Martin Luther King, Jr, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964 said, Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force that makes for social transformation. This reference to a peaceful and resistant India many decades ago, inspiring a civil strife-torn US towards freedom, is a startling acknowledgment of the power of Gandhis campaigns led by non-violent satyagraha and civil disobedience.

I believe, at no other time is Gandhi and his teachings/principles more relevant to India, than today. We are witnessing today an onslaught on many ideals and principles which were fundamental and very dear to him. There is an onslaught on minorities, on the streets, in the media and by fundamentally discriminatory laws being sanctioned by a bigoted government.

There is an assault on truth, civility, scientific temper and reason itself. There is an assault on dissent by the use of fundamentally unjust laws such as the NSA, UAPA and of course sedition, against dissenters and students such as Devangana Kalitha, Natasha Narwal, Safoora Zargar or Umar Khalid, activists and academics such as Anand Teltumble, Sudha Bharadwaj, Shoma Sen, Gautam Navlakha and several other framed in the Bhima Koregaon case; eminent activists and academics such as Harsh Mander, Apoorvanand and Yogendra Yadav, who are being falsely implicated in a trumped up conspiracy to have caused the North East Delhi riots, which were unleashed by the right wing to crush a successful and peaceful peoples resistance against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. There is a further assault on the media and on political opposition, through complicit agencies which pursue their political masters rather than the law.

There is also an assault and an attempt to suborn independent institutions like the judiciary, the Election Commission, the CAG, the NHRC, the CBI, the Lokpal, etc. Police investigative agencies, like the NIA, ED, NCB and the State police organisations, have been made handmaidens of the ruling establishment to harass and victimise innocent people while allowing law breakers to roam free, making a mockery of the rule of law.

There is no doubt, that Gandhi would have been aghast and dismayed at seeing the India of today. Could he have imagined that having freed India from British rule, more than 70 years later, our country and society would be reduced to a different form and more venomous servitude to falsehood, hatred and violence.

It is not clear if he would have fasted against all these malpractices in our society or what exact form his agitation would have taken, but there is no doubt that he would not have been at peace or rest with what is being witnessed in our country. His sense of justice would have led him to implore those propagating Hindutva/rabid media houses/the BJP and its IT Cell, to understand that vilifying Muslims by spreading this communal hatred is not only unjust and unfair but is causing harm to all humanity by shaking the foundation of brotherhood and love that our diverse society is built on.

He would have told them that the religious, linguistic and cultural diversity of our society is our asset and that any attempt to create a Hindu rashtra will be catastrophic of all. He would have told those who attack scientific temper by promoting superstition and blind beliefs that this is creating a society without knowledge and understanding; that the effort by this government to blunt and prevent critical thinking, discussion and debate in universities will prevent the quest for truth and progress in society; that the creation of a post truth society where people cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood would sound the death knell.

Also Read: Hindus, in Trying to Drive out the Muslims, Are Not Following Hinduism

Gandhi who called Section 124-A, the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen, would have been dismayed and appalled to see an independent India still persisting with the colonial sedition law that he outrightly opposed, where people are still being jailed for speaking out against the oppressive actions of the government or any authority.

He would have been appalled by the colonial law of contempt by scandalising the court still being used in India to punish people who speak the truth about the faults and failings of the judiciary, which is today barely able to give justice to a vast majority of those suffering and oppressed in this country today.

He would have been revolted by laws such as the National Security Act, which allows the government to keep in detention political leaders and others for months together, on the ground that the government feels their liberty would be a threat to national security. He would be appalled by the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the manner in which it has been used to persecute and incarcerate some of the finest human rights activists in the country a law which does not even allow bail till you are proved innocent and thus enables the government to keep innocent citizens rotting in jails for decades together while delaying trials.

He would have found all of these laws and practices a complete travesty in the name of justice. He would also have been appalled by the economic policies of the government which are mindless and cruel such as demonetisation or the manner of imposing the lockdown so fundamentally opposed to the interests of the poor and designed to benefit the few crony capitalists.

I have no doubt he would have been against the recent farm Bills which are designed to eliminate the minimum support price for crops and abolish any regulation of the unequal trade between the farmers/middlemen/corporates. All these would, from a Gandhian perspective, militate against every sense of fairness and justice.

Members of various farmer organisations block a railway track during a protest against the Central government farm Bills at Nabha in Patiala, September 24, 2020. Photo: PTI

Does Gandhi have anything for such an abusive, violent, intolerant and diminished society as we have become today terrorised, communally torn and governed by a despotic regime? Would his non-violent satyagraha and disciplined call for mass protest be relevant at all against bigoted authorities, powered by cronyism, violence and loot? I have no doubt Gandhi would have given a call for massive civil disobedience against such an unjust system with laws and practices that are oppressing the masses today. He wrote, Everyone should realise the secret that oppression thrives only when the oppressed submit to it.

Also Read: Hindutva Leaders Revile Gandhi and His Message, But Cant Resist Basking in His Glory

Just as he told our people that in resisting the British rule they must lose the fear of jail, COVID-19 or not, he would have exhorted the people today to throng the streets in protest against these unjust and discriminatory laws and practices of the government. He would have lauded and led the anti-CAA protests and would surely have launched a Jail Bharo Andolan, daring the government to incarcerate millions of peaceful protesters from across the country.

It is this courage in adversity that Gandhi would have displayed in leading India today, and as Gopalkrishna Gandhi has written in his introduction to a collected works of Gandhi, such courage becomes popular when the two have served consciences, not constituencies. Today, we take our cue from Gandhis courage. Gandhis courage invited wrath and incarceration. But he never sacrificed the cause of justice for fear of persecution. He said, Strength does not come from physical capacity but from an indomitable will. It is the indomitable will of the suffering masses that must galvanise us to stand up against this constitutional fascism that has suffocated our country today. Gandhis legacy of non-violent resistance, defiant satyagraha, obstinate adherence to a belief in justice and fairness, unflinching courage in the face of repression, are our call to action, even today.

Thank you. Jai Hind.

Prashant Bhushan is an advocate practising in the Supreme Court.

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Gandhi Would Have Been 'Aghast and Dismayed' at Seeing the India of Today: Prashant Bhushan - The Wire

This is an article from World Review: The State of Democracy, a special section that examines global policy and affairs through the perspectives of thought leaders and commentators, and is published in conjunction with the annual Athens Democracy Forum.

In recent years a handful of African countries, including Sudan and Algeria, have said goodbye to longstanding authoritarian rulers, creating openings, however small, for democratic change.

The West African nation of Togo, however, remains firmly under the thumb of a military-backed regime that of the Gnassingbe family, the longest-ruling dynasty on the continent. In recent years, the regime has fully embraced the tactics of digital repression to extend its longevity, outflanking (for now) an increasingly emboldened community of online activists.

The citizens of Togo, a country of roughly eight million people between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east, have lived for more than 50 years under a brutal dictatorship. The nations military regime came to power in 1967, with the installation of the armys chief of staff, Gnassingbe Eyadema, as president. Mr. Eyadema died in 2005, bringing to an end a ruthless 38-year reign marked by widespread human rights abuses. In the months after Mr. Eyademas death, the military-backed candidacy of his son, Faure Gnassingbe, proved victorious in an election marred by serious fraud allegations.

The generations of Togolese activists who had fought the dictatorship of Gnassingbe the First hoped his passing would bring an end to the nations tyranny, paving the way for a brighter democratic future. Instead, Mr. Eyademas death, in February 2005, and the election of his son in April led only to horrific violence: Between 400 and 500 people were killed during those months, with thousands more wounded, according to a United Nations report.

In response to the arrival of Gnassingbe the Second, a new generation of activists came to the fore. The internet was their most powerful tool, and as internet penetration in Togo grew, so did the democratic resistance movement.

I was one of those activists, and like many of my fellow dissidents I have felt empowered in the years since Mr. Gnassingbes rise by the ability to denounce the government its corruption and gangsterism on social media. You may rule over Togo with no accountability, I wrote in a 2014 Facebook post, addressing the administration, but we citizens rule over the internet, and we will hold you accountable.

Unfortunately, the Gnassingbe government isnt keen on any form of resistance, whether in the streets or online. (Mr. Gnassingbe was re-elected in 2010 and 2015 amid accusations of fraud by Togos opposition.) In fact, in recent years it has become increasingly obvious that we underestimated the governments ability to adapt its repressive methods to the digital world.

In the late summer of 2017, major protests quickly spread across the country in support of the oppositions demands that President Gnassingbe resign and that term limits, abolished by his father in 2002, be reinstated. During the monthslong demonstrations, tens of thousands of protesters chanted Faure Must Go, a slogan coined by an activist movement that I co-founded in 2011 with other young Togolese dissidents living in and outside the country. The Faure Must Go movement relied on decentralized digital organizing, which helped many of us maintain our anonymity, protecting us from direct physical repression by leaders.

However, the governments response to the 2017 protests made it clear that we werent as secure as we had thought. In September, the regime shut down the internet for nine days. In the ensuing months, hundreds of protesters were arrested and several were killed, including a 9-year-old boy, according to Amnesty International.

During this time, we received information suggesting that some activists had been arrested and tortured by the government based on evidence gleaned from private conversations that had taken place on WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app. This gave us a strong hint that the government was spying on us, thus destroying our anonymity as online activists and putting our own security and that of our family members in jeopardy. I was in contact with some of the imprisoned activists for months; many were subsequently forced to flee the country or to go into hiding.

Thanks to a 2018 investigation by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group based at the University of Toronto, we later discovered that a spyware program known as Pegasus was likely being used by the Togolese government to target smartphone users in the country. We believe the regime has used this program to attack the electronic devices of Togolese dissidents.

Pegasus is a product of the NSO Group, an Israeli company that has sold the surveillance technology to numerous governments around the world, solely, the company said, to aid in the fight against terrorism and crime. However, multiple allegations have emerged that the governments in question, some of them with poor human rights records, have also used NSO spyware to target activists, journalists and other civil society leaders. NSO is essentially selling arms to authoritarian governments, fueling abuse and oppression as it puts profits before human dignity.

By late 2018, the Togolese regime had managed to consolidate power by repressing protests and by organizing parliamentary elections under dubious conditions (which the opposition boycotted). It also passed a new cybersecurity law curtailing freedom of expression. As a result of the elections, President Gnassingbe gained the control he needed in Parliament to modify the constitution in his favor: A law passed in 2019 reinstituted the term limits eliminated by his father a major demand of the opposition but it did so while ignoring the three terms Mr. Gnassingbe had already served, potentially allowing him to rule Togo until 2030.

Other West African leaders, including Alpha Cond of Guinea and Alassane Ouattara of Ivory Coast, have recently followed in Mr. Gnassingbes footsteps by claiming that constitutional changes within their countries have essentially reset the term-limit clock to zero. (It is perhaps no surprise that the 2018 Citizen Lab report found potential Pegasus infections in Ivory Coast.)

When Mr. Gnassingbe ran for a fourth term in February 2020, the opposition had only a microscopic chance of winning. The regime, which retained control of the legislature, barred election monitoring groups from operating in Togo and deployed security forces across the country. Mr. Gnassingbe declared victory with 72 percent of the vote, surpassing his percentages in the 2005, 2010 and 2015 elections, amid further allegations of fraud made by the opposition.

Recent investigations by Citizen Lab and others have revealed that yet more government critics in Togo, including prominent Catholic leaders, have been targeted by NSO surveillance software, as part of an attempt to monitor their conversations and movements. The government seems to have succeeded at maintaining its grip on power in the face of mass protests. The Gnassingbe dynasty, in power for over a half-century, continues.

Yet the thirst for democracy in Togo is stronger than ever. The resistance must now go beyond holding authoritarian regimes accountable and demand that tech companies like NSO also be held responsible for the resources they provide to these governments.

The Togolese regime is ignoring a crucial truth: The internet has given the younger generation a taste of freedom and once people know what it feels like to be free, they can no longer be held in bondage indefinitely.

Farida Nabourema is the executive director of the Togolese Civil League, a nongovernmental organization promoting democracy and the rule of law in Togo, and the spokesperson for the Faure Must Go movement.

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In Togo, There Is Nowhere to Hide - The New York Times

The prime minister, in the inaugural function, unveiled the covers of a series of children's books written on the life and works of Father of the Nation PID

Sheikh Hasina said the government wants the children to remain safe and secure, get a beautiful life and be brought up as good human beings

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said the government is careful so that prompt action can be taken against any kind of child oppression in the country.

"Were taking steps to ensure security of childrenwere giving special attention to it so that prompt action can be taken against any kind of child oppression," she said on Monday.

The prime minister said this while inaugurating World Childrens Day and Child Rights Week 2020 at Bangladesh Shishu Academy Auditorium. She attended the program virtually from her official residence Ganabhaban.

Sheikh Hasina said the government wants the children to remain safe and secure, get a beautiful life and be brought up as good human beings. "Thats our aim."

Recalling the brutal attacks of August 15, 1975 where Sheikh Russel along with other children were also killed with Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family members, Hasina said any death of children shocks her seriously. "No matter whether it happens -- in our country or abroad, whether it occurs in the Bay of Bengal or on the beach of the Mediterranean Sea -- every incident hurts me."

The prime minister said she wants this world to be a reliable, livable and peaceful place for the children where each of them will have a bright future.

Reiterating that children are the future of the nation, the prime minister said they need to be built as worthy citizens of the country.

"Weve to give them the scope for flourishing their talent, knowledge and intelligence. And thats possible through creating an appropriate environment for their studies and good health. This will ensure a better life for them which will make a prosperous future for them," she said.

Also read: PM opens World Children's Day

Hasina said children are passing miserable days due to the Covid-19 pandemic as schools of the country are closed. "This is very much painful for them. What will they do sitting at homes?"

The prime minister urged the parents and guardians to take children outside their homes to any nearby park of any other place where children could play, at least for an hour. "This is very much needed for their mental and physical health, and we all have to maintain their health hygiene and safety."

She said the government has arranged classes for the students in TV and online so that their academic activities could be carried on during this pandemic. "Were using technology in this regard and will request the guardians to take proper steps, too."

The prime minister said that studies, sports and cultural activities are very much needed for children to make them as worthy citizens of the country. "Children have to pay attention to their studies as no one can contribute to the country without education."

Sheikh Hasina said there may be some problems in leading life and all will have to move forward resolving those issues.

The prime minister also briefly described various government initiatives taken for the children, including the distribution of free textbooks, stipends and different kinds of incentives during normal time and in this pandemic situation.

State Minister for Women and Children Affairs Fazilatun Nesa Indira presided over the program. Officer-in-Charge and Representative of UNICEF Bangladesh Veera Mendonca, Bangladesh Shishu Academy Chairman Lucky Inam and Shishu Academy trainees Ridita Nur Siddiqui and Naveed Rahman Turjo also spoke at the program.

The prime minister, in the inaugural function, unveiled the covers of a series of children's books written on the life and works of Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 'Amra Ekechi 100 Mujib', a book published with selected pictures drawn by children, and 'Amra Likhechi 100 Mujib', another book published with the writings of children, on the occasion of the 'Mujib Year' marking Bangabandhu's birth centenary.

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PM: Prompt action to be taken against child oppression - Dhaka Tribune