Technologies of Genocide | New Series

This is the first conversation of a four part series.

Bombay-based photographer and author of The Red Cat and Other Stories Ritesh Uttamchandani and Suchitra Vijayan discuss her book Midnight’s Borders, as a continuation of their decade-long conversation about history, memory, and photography.

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative Commons License)

Reflections on representations | History begins at home: Conversation on photography and memory

This is the second conversation of a four-part series. 

Sinthujan Varatharajah is a political geographer, essayist, and researcher based in Berlin. Their work focuses on geographies of displacement and statelessness. In this conversation, they discuss the relationship between spatial politics, geographies of power, and statelessness. 

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative commons license)

Reflections on representation | Representing geographies of displacement

This is the third conversation of a four part series.

Photographer and filmmaker Laura Saunders discusses her work on the US / Mexico Borderlands, by interrogating the multifaceted histories of migration; and the colonial violence of the border as a site that produces narratives of criminality. Laura is documenting the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, an expansive fracking project that began in 2015. She has rooted this work in looking at "community resistance from the edges of Appalachia, where environmental and economical extraction has become commonplace." 

Music: Architect by Blue Dot Sessions (Creative commons license)

Reflections on representation | Against empire: Records of resistance

In this episode, Francesca Recchia is in conversation with Fatima Zaidi, a journalist, activist and member of the Karachi Bachao Tehreek.

Karachi Bachao Tehreek is a grassroots coalition of lawyers and activists who are  concerned about the sustainability of the development projects in the city. They work in collaboration with community leaders in the  working class localities that bear the brunt of this so-called development. In this conversation, Zaidi details the timeline of urban violence and disenfranchisement taking place in the city, how the resistance movement came about and what are their demands. Even as the State enacts explorative capitalist policies, Zaidi expresses hope in the future of a people's movement.

Urban displacement and grassroots activism in Karachi

Francesca Recchia speaks to Adrian Levy, co-author of The Forever Prisoner: The Full and Searing Account of the CIA’s Most Controversial Covert Program. Based on four years of intensive reporting, on interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents, The Forever Prisoner is a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes.

RAW, ISI and loss of life over the years: Francesca Recchia in conversation with Adrian Levy

Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Prasanna S. about data privacy in India, the state's use of the Pegasus spyware to surveil voices of dissent and what it means for civil rights in the country. The discussion was originally held on Twitter Spaces.

Data privacy and surveillance in India: Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Prasanna S.

Suchitra Vijayan sits down with author Jessica Namakkal to discuss her book "Unsettling Utopia". The book presents a new account of the history of twentieth-century French India to show how colonial projects persisted beyond formal decolonization. Through the experience of the French territories, Namakkal recasts the relationships among colonization, settlement, postcolonial sovereignty, utopianism, and liberation, considering questions of borders, exile, violence, and citizenship from the margins. She demonstrates how state-sponsored decolonization—the bureaucratic process of transferring governance from an imperial state to a postcolonial state—rarely aligned with local desires.

Legacies of French colonialism in India: Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Jessica Namakkal

Francesca Recchia speaks to Ashley Jackson about her book Negotiating Survival: Civilian–Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan.

Based on over 400 interviews with Taliban and civilians, this book tells the story of how civilians have not only bargained with the Taliban for their survival, but also ultimately influenced the course of the war in Afghanistan. While the Taliban have the power of violence on their side, they nonetheless need civilians to comply with their authority. Both strategically and by necessity, civilians have leveraged this reliance on their obedience in order to influence Taliban behaviour.

Challenging prevailing beliefs about civilians in wartime, Negotiating Survival presents a new model for understanding how civilian agency can shape the conduct of insurgencies.

Negotiating Survival: Francesca Recchia in conversation with Ashley Jackson

In this conversation, Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Arvind Narrain about his book India's Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance. They touch upon the provisions in the constitution that have been interpreted to shove India into an unofficial emergency situation, reflect on how this compares to India's emergency of the 1970s and imagine what the way forward can look like.

India's Undeclared Emergency: Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Arvind Narrain

In this conversation, Urvi Khaitan sits down with Mytheli Sreenivas to discuss her book, "Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India'. The book explores colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India: A conversation with Mytheli Sreenivas

Twenty years after the Gujarat pogrom, Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Zahir Janmohamed about the moment, his experience on the ground and his work since. The conversation delves into the deep seated anti-Muslim sentiment in India and looks for ways to heal. 

The conversation was originally held as a Twitter Space session.

How home disappeared: Twenty years after the Gujarat pogrom

Suchitra Vijayan speaks to Darren Byler about his book Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. 

In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.

Terror Capitalism - A conversation with Darren Byler

Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Elizabeth Baer about her book "The Genocidal Gaze."

The first genocide of the twentieth century, though not well known, was committed by Germans between 1904–1907 in the country we know today as Namibia, where they exterminated hundreds of Herero and Nama people and subjected the surviving indigenous men, women, and children to forced labor. The perception of Africans as subhuman—lacking any kind of civilization, history, or meaningful religion—and the resulting justification for the violence against them is what author Elizabeth R. Baer refers to as the “genocidal gaze,” an attitude that was later perpetuated by the Nazis. In The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich, Baer uses the metaphor of the gaze to trace linkages between the genocide of the Herero and Nama and that of the victims of the Holocaust. Significantly, Baer also considers the African gaze of resistance returned by the indigenous people and their leaders upon the German imperialists.

The Genocidal Gaze: A conversation with Elizabeth Baer

In this podcast, Francesca Recchia sits down with Helidah Ogude Chambert to discuss the racism and xenophobia inherent in the United Kingdom’s immigration policies, where it stems from and which communities are particularly vulnerable to it and why.

UK’s racialized immigration policies: Francesca Recchia in conversation with Helidah Ogude Chambert

Since 11 April 2019, Julian Assange has been held in the UK’s notorious Belmarsh prison that was once known as Britain’s Guantanamo Bay. This year marks his fourth year inside Belmarsh for revealing the US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julian Assange is an Australian journalist and publisher who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks broke one of the most important stories of the last decades on the war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan when they published a series of leaks by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. In this conversation, Suchitra Vijayan talks about the incarceration and persecution of Julian Assange with lawyer and human rights defender, Stella Assange. The conversation was originally held as a Twitter Space session and has been edited for length and clarity.

The Trial of Julian Assange: A conversation with Stella Assange

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Eric Sype and Jalal Abukhater from 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. They interrogate how Israel’s assault on Palestinians is enabled by global tech giants, weapon manufacturers, data brokers, and social media platforms. Building on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s landmark report Forever-Occupation, Genocide, and Profit, they examine the “economy of genocide” in which Palestinian life is commodified, Palestinian data becomes raw material for AI-driven warfare, and digital platforms facilitate both propaganda and erasure.

The discussion traces 7amleh’s evolution from monitoring online censorship to mapping the broader system of digital apartheid. Eric and Jalal detail how big tech companies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, have deepened ties with the Israeli state, operating R&D centres that produce surveillance, predictive policing, and autonomous weapons systems, all battle-tested on Palestinians. 

They also document systematic shadow banning, takedowns, and narrative control on social media, particularly since October 2023, when Meta reversed prior human rights commitments and accelerated censorship of Palestinian voices. This silencing operates in tandem with physical violence: ICT infrastructure in Gaza is deliberately destroyed to impose communications blackouts.

The episode closes by examining tech worker resistance and the structural parallels between today’s profit-driven annihilation and earlier stages of capitalism built on slavery and colonial extraction. Dismantling big tech’s role in genocide requires intersectional organising — uniting tech workers, human rights defenders, and users — to disrupt both the flow of data and the profits it generates. 

#technology #genocideingaza #meta #microsoft #google

Technologies of Genocide: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with 7amleh

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, Sams Wahid Shahat, Mohammad Arafat and Apon Das of the Tech Global Institute. They unpack the aftermath of Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising, which ended the Awami League’s 16-year rule but left behind a trail of unacknowledged deaths, disappearances, and state-sponsored impunity. Drawing on the landmark report Bloodshed in Bangladesh, the conversation reveals how digital forensics, open-source investigation, and survivor testimony challenge the state’s attempts at erasure.

The discussion traces how the team worked under conditions of internet shutdowns and media blackouts to archive atrocity evidence in real time. They explain how metadata, satellite imagery, and video analysis reconstructed the final hours of massacres such as the killing of 20-year-old Mohammad Ridoi, whose disappearance still haunts his family. Archiving is a political act that confronts Bangladesh’s machinery of impunity and keeps memory alive against official narratives.

They also explore the disinformation ecosystem that accompanied the killings: pro-government propaganda campaigns on Facebook, deliberate framing of student protesters as violent extremists, and a systematic effort to discredit the uprising. Against this, informal networks of communities mobilised to counter state lies.

Key Takeaways

- Digital forensics as resistance: Satellite imagery, metadata, and video archives countered state denial and reconstructed events minute by minute.
- Archiving as a political act: Preserving testimonies and evidence challenges the state’s monopoly over history and builds collective memory.
- Disinformation as state strategy: Paid social media campaigns framed protesters as extremists.
- Justice and accountability: Beyond trials, justice means refusing erasure, ensuring victims’ sacrifices become part of Bangladesh’s democratic legacy.

Sabhanaz Rashid Diya is the executive director of Tech Global Institute. She’s a computational social scientist with over 16 years of experience in technology, public policy, and ethics.

Sams Wahid Shahat is a dedicated researcher in the fields of media and information management and fact-checking.

Shekh Mohammad Arafat has been a fact-checker since 2022. Throughout this period, he has developed interests in media and information literacy, fact-checking training, and disinformation research

Apon Das is an experienced media and information researcher and fact-checker. He has written books on introducing fact-checking as a media literacy intervention for majority world communities.


Technologies of Genocide: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Tech Global Institute, Bangladesh

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Abdullahi Boru Halakhe in a conversation that traces the longue durée of exploitation and violence in the Congo from the colonial atrocities of King Leopold II to the resource wars that continue to devastate the region today. They unpack how the technologies of extraction and the politics of dispossession remain intertwined, shaping a global system in which Congolese land, labour, and life continue to underwrite the comforts of the Global North.

Abdullahi situates Congo’s crisis within the history of empire and its afterlives. He revisits the 19th-century “civilising mission” of Henry Morton Stanley and Leopold’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State, connecting it to today’s extraction of coltan, cobalt, and gold that powers Silicon Valley. From the uranium that fuelled the Manhattan Project to the minerals driving AI and green tech, he argues that the Congolese people have been made to pay for the world’s progress with their blood and labour.

The conversation then turns to Rwanda’s complicity in the ongoing violence. Abdullahi unpacks how the legacies of the 1994 genocide, and the First and Second Congo Wars that followed, continue to shape Rwanda’s sub-imperial role in the region. He details how Rwanda and Uganda act as conduits for resource extraction, exporting minerals that geologically do not exist within their borders, and how the profits of this trade flow through the Gulf states to Western markets. In this network, Congo becomes the epicentre of a global pipeline linking African sub-imperial powers, Gulf petrostates, and Western tech conglomerates: a chain of exploitation that transforms human suffering into industrial capital.

The discussion broadens into an examination of how the same extractive and militarised logics underpin genocides and wars across the Global South from Congo to Sudan to Palestine. Abdullahi identifies the United Arab Emirates as a central malign actor, financing wars and shaping political economies of violence under the guise of development and modernity. What emerges is a picture of a world where the technologies of genocide — surveillance, securitisation, and resource militarisation — are integral to the global order.

The episode closes with a meditation on history as resistance. For Abdullahi, liberation begins with reclaiming historical knowledge and refusing amnesia. From the Bandung Conference to the dreams of pan-African solidarity, he insists that history offers both warning and possibility: a reminder that despair is political, but so is hope. As Suchitra notes, this conversation marks a rare moment in the Technologies of Genocide series — one where history itself becomes a site of liberation, and knowledge a tool against the algorithmic erasure of human struggle.

—

Abdullahi Boru Halakhe is the Senior Advocate for East and Southern Africa at Refugees International. He is an African policy expert with over a decade of experience in security, conflict, human rights, refugee work, and strategic communications. He has advised organisations including the International Rescue Committee, International Crisis Group, Amnesty International, BBC, the EU, AU, USAID, and the UNDP. Abdullahi holds a Master’s in International Security Policy from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Technologies Of Genocide X Abdullahi Halakhe

Suchitra Vijayan speaks with Abduweli Ayup, writer, linguist, and one of the most significant chroniclers of the Uyghur genocide. Their conversation traces how China’s “People’s War on Terror” in Xinjiang evolved into an unprecedented system of algorithmic suppression. This model of mass repression uses surveillance, biometric data, and AI-enabled policing function as instruments of erasure. They examine how the technologies of control that dominate Xinjiang today grew out of earlier experiments in Tibet and have since become templates exported around the world.

Abduweli situates the Uyghur crisis within a longer history of systematic destruction of community life. He describes how Uyghur language, once the core of identity and imagination, has been deliberately targeted: children forbidden from speaking it at home, parents punished for using it on the phone, and entire generations funnelled into state-run boarding schools designed to sever cultural memory. What distinguishes this genocide, he argues, is not only its scale but its capacity to imprison thought itself.

The conversation then turns to the architecture of surveillance that makes this possible. Abduweli explains how the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (a vast data system initially developed using U.S. technologies) links a person’s phone, bank card, ID, health records, and social networks into a single apparatus. This system determines who becomes a suspect. It is this integration, he says, that turns daily life into a site of constant vulnerability.

Suchitra and Abduweli also trace how the technologies tested on Tibetans and perfected on Uyghurs now circulate globally. From Zimbabwe to Venezuela to Qatar, Chinese-built “safe city” infrastructures, and facial recognition frameworks have been exported. This creates a supply chain where American microchips, Chinese algorithms, and Gulf capital produce new forms of mass control.

The discussion widens into an examination of forced labour transfers and the economic logic that sustains genocide. As visible mass detentions drew international attention, China shifted, under the guise of “poverty alleviation,” to relocating hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs to factories across 18 provinces. This model is more insidious than the camps: it uproots people from their communities, and folds their labour into global supply chains. From seafood processing plants to fashion brands to automobile manufacturing, Uyghur forced labour is the backbone. 

The episode closes with a meditation on complicity. The Uyghur genocide is made possible by transnational networks of technology firms, investment funds, and consumer markets. Without Silicon Valley’s chips, international capital, and global demand for cheap labour and surveillance tools, the machinery of repression could not function at its current scale. The Uyghur genocide is a final warning. It demands a reckoning with what we buy, what we ignore, and what kind of human future we are willing to defend.

—

Abduweli Ayup is a Uyghur activist born in Kashgar, China, in 1973. In August 2013, he was detained by Chinese authorities for his efforts to promote Uyghur linguistic rights by opening schools to teach children the Uyghur language. His detention lasted until November 2014. In 2016, Ayup founded the non-profit Uyghur Hjelp to investigate and document the plight of Uyghurs and advocate for their cause. He has continued his efforts to open Uyghur language schools and publish Uyghur language textbooks in the diaspora.

Technologies of Genocide: Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Abduweli Ayup

For this episode, Suchitra Vijayan spoke to Nijah Cunningham

Nijah Cunningham is a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an Assistant Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY (where he is currently on leave). His teaching and research focus on issues of time, aesthetics, and historiography in 20th century African American and African diasporic literature and culture.

5 Objects | Conversation with  Nijah Cunningham

A Conversation with Mou Banerjee by Suchitra Vijayan

A Tailor & a Journalist: Cow Protection and Conversion in early modern Bengal by Suchitra Vijayan

“You speak to many upper class people and they will tell you, caste is not an issue in my house, we never talk about it. That’s the fundamental problem” – Francesca Recchia in conversation with T.M. Krishna

TM Krishna, is a leading vocalist in Carnatic music. The extraordinary rendition of music paired with the originality of his interpretation of it, Krishna is one of the most distinctive voices in the Carnatic tradition today. As a vocalist, he has collaborated with the Chennai Poromboke Paadal, performed with the Jogappas (transgender musicians) and co-conceptualised and performed Karnatic Kattaikuttu, a unique conversation between art forms and communities that belong to two ends of the social spectrum. In an attempt to redress the existing caste elitism from the Carnatic music system, Krishna launched his own Carnatic classical music festival, the Uroor-Olcott Kuppam Marghazi Vizha.

In Your Face | Conversation with  TM Krishna |  Episode 3

The Power To Gaze; Consent, Coercion and Consumption in Photograph

On 12 December 2019, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 - rightly referred to as India’s Nuremberg Law - was passed, leading to widespread protests across the country. Millions of Indian citizens are protesting against this fundamentally discriminatory law and many, including students, have been met with severe repression and criminalization at the hands of the Police, particularly in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). 

The brutality of State violence is most visible in the abuse of 41 minors, who have been detained and subjected to custodial torture, criminalization and post custodial coercion in UP. The report Brutalizing Innocence jointly produced by Quill Foundation, Citizens Against Hate and HAQ: Centre for Child Rights documents the police action against minors, the methods and patterns of violence inflicted, the various violations of national and international laws and the inaction of human rights institutions. Based on fact finding missions conducted across various districts in UP between 10 and 24 January, along with verified media accounts, this report records the testimonies of minor victims, witnesses, police officials and photographic evidence of the abuses as well as cases police FIR. 



Joining us today to speak about the patterns of State violence, the nature of abuse suffered by the minors, the importance of documenting this evidence and holding the institutions and the State accountable are Bharti Ali and Nidhi Suresh, who were part of the team that put this report together. Bharti Ali is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of HAQ: Centre for Child Rights with nearly 28 years of work in the development sector, focusing on gender and child rights issues. Nidhi Suresh is a programme officer at Quill Foundation, a human rights research and advocacy organization in New Delhi. She also works as a freelance journalist, covering stories on human rights. She is a recent graduate from Utrecht University, Netherlands, with a Masters in Conflict Studies and Human Rights. Previously, for a year, she worked as a reporter in Kashmir based out of Srinagar.

Patterns of violence, impunity and silence | conversation with Bharti Ali and Nidhi Suresh

A nation needs its anthems, flags, soldiers, and statues. But, the function of the writer is something else. Writers are the ones who capture the conflict, the dissonance, and often the lies we are constantly told over and over again. We’re all living through a remarkable moment, especially for many of us in South Asia, particularly in India. As we at The Polis Project try to make sense of what is happening today, we decided that we would use the 45th anniversary of the Emergency to take a strong look at the past and the present. We reached out to historians and journalists who covered the Emergency to think about the past. But, when it came to the present, we really wanted to reach out to the writers and the poets on what they thought of the state of the republic. The conversation you will now hear is an exchange between Suchitra Vijayan and a writer, Annie Zaidi. It’s a conversation about small mercies and many tyrannies. But, it’s also a conversation about how we think, act, and react in an age where the very act of thinking could become an act of treason.

Emergency Special | Suchitra Vijayan in Conversation with Annie Zaidi

“Consistent resistance” and the peaceful struggle for equality of the Pashtun Tahafuz-Movement

Suchitra Vijayan speaks to the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles. Before that, he completed BAs in Philosophy and Political Science at Indiana University.

His theoretical work draws liberally from German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, histories of activism and activist thinkers, and the Black radical tradition. He is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that considers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also is committed to public engagement and is publishing articles in popular outlets with general readership (e.g. Slate, Pacific Standard) exploring intersections between climate justice and colonialism.

For this episode he picked 
1.  Illmatic
2. Black Marxism
3. Amílcar Cabral
4. Combahee River Collective Statement
5. Ender's Game

5 Object Podcast | Conversation  with philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

In this conversation, The Polis Project's Suchitra Vijayan and Vasundhara Sirnate, discuss Prof. Ravinder Kaur's new book Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India.  Prof Kaur walks us through the transformation of the Indian nation-state into a neoliberal business enterprise and theorizes the process of branding the nation-state through a rich visual archive of posters and advertising material. She articulates how those early years of 'India rising' rhetoric and aggressive push for globalization is largely responsible for the emergence of authoritarian populism under Modi. We explore the unintended political consequences of the corporatization of the state, what this means for the future.

"Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in India": A conversation with Dr. Ravinder Kaur

Every Wednesday, leading up to the American Presidential elections, The Polis Project will host activists, organizers, writers, reporters, and progressive voices as a part of our Politics Podcast. They don’t just tell you what happened. They inform you of the issues, policies, and legislation that matter to their communities, beyond the headlines. The podcast is available in video and audio formats. We launch the first episode with award-winning journalist and activist based near Atlanta, Anjali Enjeti. She writes about voting rights, politics, immigration, culture, and is the co-founder of They See Blue Georgia,  a group of South Asian Democrats, fighting to flip Georgia blue. In this episode, Enjeti argues that the fight for rights continues beyond the voting day,  and how South Asians must fight white supremacy and simultaneously mount a challenge against Hindutva in the United States. She also lays out practical strategies and how to prepare for the 2020 election day. By Suchitra Vijayan 
30 September 2020

Politics Podcast | Ep 1 “Everyone needs to have a voting plan. Vote early”

Suchitra Vijayan in conversation with Prof. Romila Thapar about her new book "Voices of Dissent" and the history of dissent in India.

Dispatches | A History of Dissent: Conversation with Prof. Romila Thapar

Since September, thousands of farmers have been protesting the new laws that aim to deregulate Indian agriculture.

They have clearly stated that these neo-liberal laws will dismantle safeguards, create greater instability, severely affect their livelihoods, and put the country's food security at risk. While simultaneously creating an opportunity for large private corporations to enter and exploit the agriculture sector.  

Organized by more than 31 trade unions, the protest has drawn support from nearly all Punjabi society segments. These peaceful protests have been met with tear gas, water cannons, and violence by the Indian Police. Yet, the protests continue to grow and have now spread to other Indian cities. The Indian diaspora and their allies have also taken to the street to support the farmer's protests. They are building a powerful solidarity movement globally to fight against the emergence of Hindutva, its politics, and violence.

In the united states, Council Member Kshama Sawant is seen as an important ally in this fight. This month She introduced the Seattle city council resolution in solidarity with farmers' protests in India. In February this year, she also introduced the resolution that urged India to uphold the Constitution by repealing the citizenship laws and to stop the National Register of Citizens.

Joining us today to discuss the recent resolution in support of the farmer's protest, why she introduced it, and understand the significance and effectiveness of these resolutions is Council Member Kshama Sawant.
Sawant is an American politician and economist who has served on the Seattle City Council since 2014. A former software engineer, Sawant became an economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States from her native India. She was the first socialist to win a citywide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the school board in 1916.  

Listen to our last episode here: https://soundcloud.com/user-256643655/politics-podcast-ep-6

Politics Podcast | Ep 7 "Change Comes from Social and Labor Movements"

The Polis Project, Inc is a hybrid research and journalism organization producing knowledge about some of the most important issues affecting us, by amplifying diverse perspectives from those indigenous to the conflicts and crisis affecting our world today.

THE POLIS PROJECT

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