SANGLI, Maharashtra — Seventeen people drowned to death on 8 August 2019 in Sangli district’s Bramhanal village when their boat capsized in swirling floodwaters.

These deaths, which included 12 women, four children, and a man, could have been averted if the local administration had listened to villagers who had asked for two boats to evacuate the village two days prior to the tragedy. 

Their pleas, villagers said, fell on deaf ears.

“Help yourself. Don’t expect a boat. Do whatever you want. These were Tehsildar’s precise words,” said Bramhanal resident Siddhakumar Vader, who told HuffPost India he had called Tehsildar Rajendra Pol on 6 August and alerted him to the impending disaster, two days before the tragedy.

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With the administration unresponsive, over 1000 people from the village were forced to use a single 20-seater boat to escape to safety. The boat was carrying more than 40 people when it capsized. Vader lost four members of his family, including his sister-in-law and a small child. 

“Even now nobody from the administration has turned up. You are the first person to visit my place. Look at the apathy. I will kill the tehsildar if I see him,” a grieving Vader told HuffPost India. “He could have easily saved all the lives which were lost that day. But his arrogance killed them.”

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in Maharashtra has launched a public-relations blitz in a bid to blunt criticism of his handling of this year’s floods. A grainy video clip, widely circulated by the government, claims to show a state minister swimming to a flood-ravaged village. 

Yet the testimonies of the villagers of Bramhanal reveal that the government, and the local administration, were caught unawares by the deluge. Nearly 50 people have died in the floods, and if the events leading up to the tragedy in Bramhanal are any indication, many of these lives could have been saved. The floods, in a nutshell, sum up the BJP’s governance strategy in the state and centre, where structural inadequacies and plain incompetence are masked by rhetoric and PR. 

Chronicle Of Deaths Foretold

Bramhanal village is nestled between two rivers — the Krishna river and its tributary, the Yerala.

On 4 August, four days before the tragedy, both rivers breached their banks, turning the village into an island. As the water levels continued to rise, the villagers began to panic, said Uttam Badgare, the village headman.

The village had only two boats: a rickety fifteen-year-old motorboat, donated to the village in 2004 by the then minister, the late Patangrao Kadam of the Congress party, and a row-boat that, Badgare quickly realised, was useless in the strong currents of the floodwaters.

The villagers initially thought to wait for help from the administration, but as the water continued to rise through the day, they decided to start evacuating themselves.

The next day, on 5 August, the village panchayat began to rescue residents — but everyone wanted to be the first to leave.

“There was no order. Everyone wanted to leave the village as even the houses situated at the tallest part of the village had begun to get submerged,” said Sayaji Mohite, a gram panchayat worker who piloting the boat from 5 August to 8 August, the day it finally capsized. “We were requesting people to maintain order but it was tough to control them as everyone was worried for their lives.”

On 6 August, Siddhakumar Vader said he called the local tehsildar of Palus Taluka and asked for more boats, only to be told that no boat would be sent. 

“I told them that the village had two boats already so try to adjust,” Pol told HuffPost India. “There was no question of negligence or lethargy.” Pol said there were bigger and needy villages than Bramhanal in the area. 

At 9 am on 8 August, three days into the village’s heroic quest to self-evacuate, the desperation in Bramhanal was evident. At least 42 people piled into the boat, which was designed to ferry a maximum of 20. While the administration has claimed that there were only 25 people on board at the time, several survivors told HuffPost India that there were 42 people on board.

“Even if they had sent one police constable or a peon to bring order when people were getting inside the boat, this incident could have been averted. But the administration was absolutely missing,” said resident Sagar Vader, who lost his mother in the 8 August tragedy.

“The boat was nearly drowning even before we began the journey,” said Pramod Jagdale who was also among the 42 onboard. Mohite led the boat out into the waters, but the over-burdened craft flipped 200 metres short of safety. 

Once the boat flipped, it was the people from the neighbouring villages of Khatav and Wasagade who helped rescue survivors.

“The administration came hours after the incident,” Vader added.

Sangli district collector Abhijit Choudhari said he has ordered an inquiry into the tragedy.

“That incident was actually an accident. An unfortunate one. We will have to inquire if the villagers had alerted the Tehsildar or not. The exact issue will come out only after an inquiry,” the collector maintained.

Ten days since Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government shut down all mobile services and the internet in Jammu & Kashmir, making it harder to understand how Kashmiris feel about the state losing its special constitutional status, and effectively choking any dissent, backlash and protests against its demotion to a Union Territory. 

Two competing narratives have emerged amidst the communication blackout. 

The Modi government, and large sections of the Indian media, claim that Kashmir is calm and Kashmiris are thrilled at the changes. 

Meanwhile, reports in other sections of the Indian media and the foreign press, paint a disturbing picture of a people besieged by heavily armed troopers.

Telling is the fact that after days of refuting reports of a large protest in the Soura area of Srinagar, the Modi government has admitted there was one.

HuffPost India spoke with women’s rights activist Kavita Krishnan, who has returned from a five-day fact finding mission from Kashmir, along with economist Jean Dreze, Maimoona Mollah from the All India Democratic Women’s Association, the women’s wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and Vimal Bhai, a social activist. 

From August 9-13, Krishnan, who is secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, and a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), traveled to Srinagar, Sopore, Bandipora, Anantnag, Shopian and Pampore.

Describing the situation as grim, Krishnan said, “Frankly, it looked like occupied Iraq or occupied Palestine.”

What did you see? 

The situation is absolutely grim. Kashmir is under military siege. There are paramilitary forces on every street, outside homes, outside localities. The situation is really quite alarming. There is no scope for anyone to speak, no scope for peaceful protests. 

On the day of Eid, there was desolation. No one except tiny children were in festive clothing. They were not allowed to go to the mosque to do their prayers in rural areas. The azaan was not permitted so they just had to do their namaz at home. People feel a complete sense of anger and betrayal. There is helplessness, frustration. 

In the Kashmir Valley, we did not meet a single soul who was happy with the decision. They were upset with the media coverage. They said, ‘Everyone is saying that it’s a great thing for Kashmir, but whose wedding is it and who is celebrating? It’s supposed to be our wedding, at least ask us whether we are happy? How come no one is asking us what we think?’  It is seen as an act of humiliation and violence against the people of Kashmir. 

What is the curfew like? 

I can tell you that there is a complete and total curfew. Even in the street where we were staying which is an upmarket locality of Srinagar, Rajbagh. Even that was under complete curfew on the day of Eid. Across Kashmir, there is a sense that this is an assault and an act of aggression against the people of Kashmir. 

Did you speak with Kashmiri pandits? 

Yes, we did. We spoke to several Kashmiri pandits. We have video documentation of one of them. He is trying to explain that Kashmiriyat is a thing and that means celebrating Eid. He is a pandit, who is saying ‘our festival Eid is coming.’ We met Sikhs. We met Hindu migrant labourers. They all spoke about the safety and the terrible situation that everyone was in. 

 The Modi government has said that Kashmir is mostly calm, but there are sporadic protests involving a handful of people. They came out against the BBC’s video footage that suggested there was a large protest in Soura.

Yes, but they are not allowing protests. Protests have been sporadic, I agree. There was one huge protest in Soura near Srinagar. That was correctly reported. It was a very large protest. We met pellet gun victims, who were not protestors, but bystanders there. We met some of those kids. You can’t gag and blind people and say there are no protests.

We met people in villages all over Kashmir, where little kids have been… there is no other word to use… they have been abducted by the police. They have been picked up from their homes in the middle of the night from their beds and they are held indefinitely, illegally, either in army camps or in police stations. They are being beaten up. Their parents have no way of ascertaining whether their children will disappear or be returned. There is no case that is registered, no FIR. I can say that to every village we went, there were arrests that had happened. 

You are saying that a class 7 boy was arrested? 

Not one. We met one Class 7 boy, who was arrested. He told us that there are others — younger than him — who have been arrested and who are still in custody. It’s total terror.

Why would the authorities be picking up children as young as that? 

As an act of intimidation. Their parents assured us that their children have not thrown stones. Their parents said they have been picked up on the way to mosques, from their homes, from their beds at night. That kind of thing. They are making it a point to raid houses in the night and take away young boys in the night. It creates immense fear, especially among the women. The women have whispered to us that they have been molested during such raids. This was the story in every village that we visited. My question is what is the Indian media doing? Why are they not visiting these places? We could visit them. 

This is very grave news and serious accusations. Have you brought back proof?

Yes. We have video documentation of family members and of a child who had been released one day before. We do have documentation.

Could you elaborate? 

I’ll tell you two things. One video is of a 11-year-old child who was released one day before Eid and he is saying that he was kept in custody from fifth onwards and beaten up, and there were children younger than him in custody. Then, we have video of family members, we are not identifying them because they are scared, but their teenage boy has been picked up in the middle of the night from his bed and he is being kept illegally. They have gone to the thana but they keep taaloing them, saying it is not in our hands, we cannot do anything. They are really afraid because there is no record of their arrest. Tomorrow, if something happens to him or he just vanishes, there is no record that he was arrested at all. We have that on record. 

These arrests that you spoke of are are being done by the police or the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force)?

What we were told was that it is the police as well as army. We did not go to the police stations because we were begged by the people not to. They were in two minds. They want someone to intervene but they fear it could make life worse for their boys. They said, ‘We are hoping against hope that they will be returned safely, but please do not make inquiries right now.’ They are not even sure where they are kept. They are guessing that some of them are in the thaana, some of them are in the army camps which are cheek by jowl to these villages. They are saying an illegal detention, by the police or the army, is a crime. And given Kashmir’s history, it is immensely dangerous. We know that there have been mass graves, mass custodial killings, mass disappearances, in Kashmir. 

Getting back to the protest in Soura. You were able to speak with people there? 

We could not reach Soura because the police would not allow us to reach, but we went to the hospital in Srinagar, SMHS (Shri Maharaja Hari Singh). In that hospital, there were two people who were badly injured by pellet guns in their eyes and face and arms and body, and we were able to speak with them and their families. We got to know from them that this in fact has happened in Soura, the previous day. And that there were many more people injured in the skin hospital in Soura. We wanted to go to Soura and we immediately tried to go, but then the paramilitary would not let us cross. 

Frankly, if you ask me, the numbers of military deployment and paramilitary deployment being reported in the Indian media is an underestimation in our opinion. In our opinion, it must be much, much, much, much higher. To every Kashmiri, there must be four CRPF personnel. The entire place is full of CRPF, everywhere. There is no single street in Kashmir that does not have CRPF. There are outside every home. It’s crazy. 

So your sense from being on the ground is that the Soura protest was large?

It was enormous that is for certain. Protests by all accounts continued. The next day, when we were on the way to Soura, the police stopped us. But where the police stopped us, we could see that there were young boys on the street protesting and the CRPF was unable to get them off the street. We have photographs of those boys and of the protest. We have videos of testimonies of people there which makes it very clear that people are immensely angry and upset. They said, ‘We are being treated like prisoners. We are being treated like slaves.’ This is a refrain everywhere. ‘You have turned our home into a prison. You have turned each of our villages into a prison.’ People are not able to visit each other on Eid. Brothers and sisters in neighbouring villages are not able to visit each other on Eid. There is immense grief and foreboding about what the future holds. 

You are not leaving people any peaceful avenue for protest. If there is curfew everywhere, where are people supposed to protest. Stone pelting is happening because you are choking every other avenue of protest. Then, only those who are reckless and willing for the worst are going to come out and say do your worst but here we are on the streets. That is lesser in number. But the point is that people want to express their anger. They want to hold peaceful processions, they want to speak up, they want to be seen. If you were to lift the curfew, I would bet on it, that there would be a huge peaceful mass gathering in Srinagar and other places. There is no scope for it. 

It is likely that if the curfew is lifted, there would be huge violent protests not peaceful ones. 

Then, they should not lie. They should say that we know it’s unpopular, they should say that we have done it against the will of every Kashmiri, and that is why we are locking and gagging them because we have occupied them and we don’t want them to speak. Say so. Why say they are all happy, they are all welcoming it, and it’s all fine. The Indian government should not lie. Don’t say everyone is happy. No one is happy. Everyone is suffering terribly.

People feel there is a particular vindictiveness about doing this around Eid. They said ‘we only have two festivals in a year.’ And they have hit out at this festival and completely extinguished it. We did not witness any festivities anywhere. Any child above the age of seven or eight would not have been in any festive clothing. 

How did the Kashmiris respond to your fact finding mission?

We received a warm welcome. I can’t tell you how warm and hospitable, and we felt terribly moved by this. People in such terrible circumstances with good reason to be angry against India and Indians, of course, they would be suspicious. They would ask us are we from the government or from the media. They would say that you human rights valas, you have never done anything for us. They did not trust to speak the truth in Delhi. All that was there. But inspite of all of that, out of their meagre supplies, they would ensure that we had a cup of tea. Shopkeepers would go to their stores and get out juice packets. They would welcome us in and give us lunch. We got such a warm welcome everywhere. These are human beings with no anger towards Indian people. The anger is towards the policy of the Modi government.  This is something the Indian media should be doing. They should be there on the ground.

Cable TV was not working, earlier. Now it is?

Now, there is cable TV, but local Kashmiri channels are not available, and they are only able to watch national like New Delhi. Local Kashmiri journalists are struggling. They got out papers for some days but now their offices are closed till the 17th. They are saying that we are not being able to get paper to print because the paper comes from Delhi. They are saying that we somehow managed to bring out the papers till now, everyday, but the army would come and ask us — why are you printing, how come you are printing, where are you getting your news from. If the internet is down, how come you are printing your news. You are not being able to get agency news. Some of them are trying to keep afloat despite it all, but local Kashmiri channels can’t do anything. 

A lot of information is about Srinagar. How is it outside Srinagar? 

Far, far worse. So there was a slight relaxing of the curfew just before Eid, but very slight and for a very short time. People were rushing about doing Eid shopping. Sheep were unsold. For sheep traders, it was a waste of one year of preparation. People just don’t have the money to buy. The situation in the villages was utter terror. There is unbridled arresting, every single political activist of any party, no matter how small. Young boys have been picked up en masse. This is what we could confirm. 

These were villages and towns.

Yes, villages and towns. We went to Sopore and Bandipora as well as villages between Srinagar and Sopore and between Sopore and Bandipora. We visited villages in south Kashmir, in Anantnag, Shopian and Pampore. 

How are people dealing with the communication blackout? How did you deal with it?

It was a complete blackout. We could not communicate with a soul. So there are queues around police officers. If a police person has a phone, people mill around them in the evening and hope that they will be allowed to make a call to a loved one outside Kashmir. Inside Kashmir, there is no communication. Someone who lives in Srinagar, but has family back in the village cannot check on the welfare of their family. It is a terrible situation. Even on the roads to these places, there are checkpoints everywhere. There are huge convoys of paramilitary. Frankly, it looked like occupied Iraq, occupied Palestine, if you ask me. There is not a development deficit in Kashmir, there is a democracy deficit.

When do people think this going to end?

I don’t think anyone sees an end in sight. They think this is what has come to stay. They are hoping that a little bit of the restrictions are lifted. 

Access to basic supplies. What is the situation? 

Until the 9th (August), even milk was not available. Children were not having milk. There was a dire situation. But on the 10th, there was a slight relaxation of the curfew for a few hours so people came out and stocked up on some basic stuff. The thing is that everything is uncertain. All shops are closed. They open for brief windows here and there. A few ATMs are open. Another problem is that people are not being able to earn so they don’t have money to buy stuff, including migrant workers from other states like Bihar and UP. They told us that they have been earning better in Kashmir that in any other state — Rs. 600, 700, 800 a day, which is higher than other states. 

What is the situation in hospitals? 

The pellet injury situation is terrible. The two pellet injuries we saw — I don’t know how to describe it — it was horrible. The injuries are awful. Their eyesight is badly affected. Their entire face is full of pellet injuries. 

Patients in general are not able to reach hospitals. The big hospitals are saying that we have stocks. But the curfew is preventing people from moving. Today, we met an auto driver in Srinagar, who is an asthmatic and he is on his last dose of Asphyllin and Salbutamol. He’s been trying to move around trying to buy the stuff, but the chemists are closed. The few chemists who are open say that their stocks are over. Some hospitals have a lot of stock, but he is saying that he may not be able to get to those hospitals. He is not able to move around everywhere.

Also, the pellet injury people very often avoid going to government hospitals because the police basically get hold of them and file cases against them. So not only are they victims of pellet guns, they also face cases all their life. 

Caitlin Ruiz, a 30-year-old resident of Tucson, Arizona, first got involved in multilevel marketing companies in her early 20s. Also known as MLMs, businesses such as Mary Kay, Tupperware, Amway, Arbonne, LuLaRoe and a host of others, employ consultants who sell products directly to the public as well as recruit new members.

Ruiz was attending school and working full-time, and like many 20-somethings, searching for a fulfilling career. A co-worker introduced her to Mary Kay, an MLM that sells makeup and beauty products, in 2012. The co-worker set up a lunch meeting with her “upline,” the person who recruited her into the company, to pitch Ruiz on joining them. “She said all the right things,” Ruiz said.

Ruiz was promised flexibility, the ability to stay home with her future children and the opportunity to build a business that would eventually allow her to quit working completely. 

Ruiz also had a lot of student debt that she wanted to pay off, and her co-worker’s upline assured her she could put an extra $400 or $500 a month toward her loans by working for Mary Kay. “They promise you the world and all the flexibility that you want. They make it seem like this big secret that nobody knows about,” Ruiz said. “I fell for it.”

MLMs hook people with the promise of becoming independent business owners with unlimited earning potential. But for many, getting caught up in an MLM turns out to be a nightmare. That’s especially true for women, who make up the majority of consultants for these companies.

The business model of an MLM is designed so that the majority of participants see modest earnings to none at all (somewhere between 73% to 99% earn nothing). A select few at the top, however, enjoy major financial success ― not because they’re genius salespeople, but because they’ve amassed huge “downlines” and collect enormous commissions and bonuses based on their sales.

So how do even seemingly intelligent people fall prey to MLMs despite the overwhelming evidence that they’re thinly veiled pyramid schemes? Often, it has to do with the cult-like tactics used to recruit and motivate participants. 

Understanding The BITE Model

The comparison between cults and MLMs is not a new one. Amway, one of the largest MLMs in the world, has been the subject of several books that detail the company’s cult-like strategies, including “Amway: The Cult of Free Enterprise” written in 1999 by former distributor Stephen Butterfield.

Douglas M. Brooks, an attorney who specializes in representing victims of pyramid schemes, deceptive MLM programs and business opportunity scams, agreed that Amway is one of the prime examples of how MLMs mirror cults.

Brooks recently presented a working paper at the 2019 International Cultic Studies Association annual conference titled “Coercive Techniques in Business Opportunity Cults.” In the paper, he notes that Butterfield’s experiences with Amway, as well as those of others who have written about their time with this particular MLM, included “mass meetings with enthusiastic distributors giving standing ovations to high level Amway speakers, mysterious terminology, relentless focus on recruitment, positive thinking, the avoidance of any questioning of Amway or its high level distributors, and the tendency for Amway distributors to dedicate more and more of their time and energy to the organization, often at the expense of their relationships with friends and family, despite the lack of financial success.” 

All of these factors, he said, are consistent with the popular perception of what a cult is. To this day, former distributors continuemaking the comparison. And Amway is just one of many MLMs that function in this way. 

But what is the true definition of a cult? The term might conjure images of men and women dressed in long, hooded robes, chanting together and drinking toxic Kool-Aid in pursuit of enlightenment. And that is an extreme example of what a cult might look like. However, many cults aren’t so easy to spot.

Steven Hassan escaped the Unification Church (also known as the “Moonies”) in 1976 and has since become a mental health counselor and one of the leading experts on mind control and cults. According to Hassan, a cult is an organization that exercises undue influence over its members to make them dependent and obedient. Undue influence is defined as persuasion that takes over any free will or judgment; as a legal term, it refers to a person or group taking advantage of their position of power over others.  

In cults and other organizations that employ mind control, undue influence is first imposed on victims by showering them with praise and affection and promising a fantasy world or elite status. Once a member is hooked, the organization employs a systematic method of control to disrupt that person’s identity and ability to think independently and rationally.

That process of gaining undue influence follows what Hassan calls the BITE model:

Behavior Control: This type of control is all about dictating who a person is and what they do. Behavior control can include restricting what types of food a person eats, what they wear, when they sleep and who they are allowed to associate with. Financial exploitation, manipulation or dependence is also often a key component of behavior control. Individualism is discouraged and groupthink is encouraged. 

Information Control: To exert undue influence, cults will often withhold or distort information to make it more acceptable (or simply flat-out lie). Information control involves using deception, discouraging access to non-cult sources of information, encouraging spying on each other and producing propaganda such as newsletters, YouTube videos, movies and other media. 

Thought Control: Cults will also seek to control how members think so that the group’s doctrine is accepted as the truth. Loaded language and clichés are used to stop critical thinking and reduce complex ideas to platitudes and buzzwords. Often, only positive thoughts are allowed; constructive criticism or questions are immediately shut down.

Emotional Control: Members of cults experience extreme emotional highs and lows; they’re showered with praise one moment and then made to feel guilty, fearful and unworthy the next. They’re told that any problems they experience are their own fault and never that of the leader or group. The cult instills irrational fears about leaving or questioning the leader’s authority.

These are just some of the examples of how cults and other mind-controlling organizations employ the BITE model of undue influence. They likely sound very familiar to current and former MLM participants.

Here are some of the biggest ways MLMs mirror cults in their tactics.

MLM Tactic #1: Love Bombing

One of the reasons MLMs are successful at recruiting new members is because the introduction is made through someone familiar. It doesn’t come from a stranger off the street.

Typically, the first pitch you get is from a friend or family member who invites you to a meeting. However, the details of this meeting are purposely kept vague. All you know is that it’s about a financial opportunity. “It’s all very mysterious,” Brooks said. The key is getting you to that first meeting.

Once there, the recruiter uses a technique known as “love bombing.” Love bombing is a term reportedly invented by the Unification Church that has evolved today to mean a type of toxic, manipulative affection.

MLM members will shower prospective recruits with warm welcomes and excitement, saying how wonderful it is that they came, what an exciting opportunity it is and congratulate them for joining. It’s almost as if the recruit is being seduced ― they feel special, important and like they’ve uncovered a precious secret no one else knows about.

The meeting starts when someone high up in the company inevitably gives their rags-to-riches story. They explain how bad things were before, how they were trapped by debt and a dead-end job. But by selling products for the company, they’ve changed their lives. Meeting attendees are encouraged to pursue the same happy ending. 

Meetings are a big part of the MLM culture. “All of it is designed to get you to the point where you’re willing to give it a shot and sign up as a distributor,” Brooks said. “And course, if you’re serious about this business, you’ve got to keep on coming to meetings to learn how to do this.”

A large amount of pressure is placed on recruits to come to weekly meetings, as well as special events such as product parties and conferences. They pay out of pocket to attend these events.

Hoping to achieve the same level of success as the Mary Kay spokespeople she met at meetings, Ruiz bought about $1,500 worth of products within the first two months of joining. She attended meetings often, as much as once or twice per week. She spent so much time working on her business that it eventually began to affect her relationship with her now-husband.

“They always want you doing things for the business,” she said. “You work nine to five, and then you get off at five and go to the Mary Kay meeting until nine at the earliest,” she said. “I wouldn’t see him.”

Tactic #2: The Art Of Deception

The people who get up onstage to talk about the incredible income they earn and luxurious lifestyles they live don’t actually make that money selling products, Brooks said. Rather, the income is generated by a huge downline, and it’s only available to a tiny fraction of the group (those near the top of the pyramid).

“The truth is that you’re not going to be that person on the stage,” Brooks said. “That person has a very intimate relationship with the officers of the company. In addition to the commissions that they’re getting paid based on their downline, they’re getting money from selling recruitment tools and systems, and they may also be getting additional compensation from the company for appearing at meetings and speaking.”

Eventually, the allure of the Mary Kay lifestyle wore off. Unimpressed with her results and tired of hounding her friends and family members to make sales, Ruiz let her Mary Kay business fall to the wayside. A couple of years later, however, she fell for another MLM pitch and dabbled in Younique. At the time, the makeup company was fairly new and she thought she could get in on the ground up. Now, instead of attending meetings in someone’s home, she spent hours online, watching Facebook live presentations and learning how to hook new customers on Younique products through carefully crafted cold messages.

“They’d get really irritated if people weren’t participating,” she said. “It was all about empowerment and building the life you want, but if you didn’t attend these groups ... they’d sound kind of pissy.”

But Ruiz didn’t believe in the products and found the experience to be underwhelming. “I put about $500 into it and got maybe five orders. Two of them were my mom,” she said. So she left after a few months. 

In 2015, Ruiz was invited to another Mary Kay party and went only in a show of support for her friend. After attending, however, she was hooked again thanks to a particularly charming speaker who convinced her she just didn’t go about the business the right way before. This woman gave her special attention and listened as she lamented about everything from her skin problems to the stressors of her upcoming wedding.

“I decided that night because of her confidence, because of her willingness to work with me on my skin and because I felt like I had given up this product that I should have never gone away from,” Ruiz said. “I thought, ‘This time, I’m going to rock it. Especially under this lady.’”

From then on, Ruiz was in constant communication with her upline. They attended the weekly meetings together and regularly met for lunch to discuss the business. Ruiz received endless texts and phone calls from her upline. She described her as a mother-like figure who used everything from her fears about the cost of her upcoming wedding to her longing to spend more time visiting her parents in Michigan as fuel to keep at it. “Again, I put a lot of money into products,” she said. 

Tactic #3: Financial Exploitation

Despite all her effort, Ruiz didn’t come close to making a profit. She said the largest sales she ever made were around $200, though most were along the lines of $25 to $50. Considering how much product consultants were expected to keep on hand, “you’re not making back crap,” she said.

If MLMs were legitimate businesses, there wouldn’t need to be such a strong emphasis on recruitment. Retail sales would support the business model.

But Brooks explained that the nature of multilevel marketing forces these companies to be recruitment machines due to the rate of attrition. “The one thing you’ll never see [an MLM] disclose unless they have a gun to their head is what their attrition rates are,” he said. The longer they can keep consultants on board, the better the company will do financially ― especially those at the top of the pyramid. But ultimately, if all you’re doing is buying and selling products, it’s nearly impossible to make any money. 

“In essence, you have an unlimited number of recruiters who are all selling the same stuff at the same prices,” Brooks said. “If you look at what’s really going on, there are some retail sales … but it’s not an efficient way of selling. Making a few bucks here and there isn’t going to do it.”

Brooks added that when you look at the compensation plans of MLMs, there’s usually a monthly purchase obligation, though these companies will often deny that’s the case and attempt to dress that requirement up as something else.

“You have to really get into the weeds of the compensation plan with each company, but ultimately, you find that in order to really participate, you’ve got to buy $100 or $500 worth of stuff every month,” he said. Often, you can’t reap the benefits of the downline you’ve created unless you meet that inventory purchase qualification. In essence, the employees of MLMs also end up their biggest customers.

According to Brooks, a major problem with the MLM industry is the fact that these companies are not bound by the Federal Trade Commission’s franchise rule, since the initial buy-in is usually less than $500. That means MLMs don’t have to disclose important information such as business costs, success and attrition rates, and other financial details to help consultants make an informed decision before joining. 

“Frankly, if you knew and you understood and you thought about it, you’d never join an MLM,” he said. “I’ve noticed that even with the companies that do provide some disclosures ― and even though those disclosures are flawed ― they still show that a tiny percentage of people make money … and yet, those companies don’t seem to have any trouble recruiting people.”

It was during one lunch meeting with her upline that Ruiz realized her business wasn’t the glamorous opportunity she was made to believe. “She basically broke down for me how she makes her income,” Ruiz said. It became clear that the way to make money was not by selling products, but by recruiting a downline that would do the selling for her.

After crunching the numbers, Ruiz knew the women telling their success stories at parties probably didn’t earn as much as they said they did.

“The other thing that dawned on me was holy shit, this actually is a pyramid scheme,” she said. “I realized at that point in time what it actually took to be successful at that kind of business and I didn’t like it. So I stopped accepting her phone calls.”

Tactic #4: Guilt, Shame, Fear

When it comes to MLMs, having a regular 9-to-5 job is considered a failure. Members are fearful of becoming stuck in the rat race or unable to reach all of their goals because they’re limited by their paychecks. MLMs prey on this desire to “own” a business with flexible hours and limitless earning potential.

But when consultants reach out to their uplines and complain that reality isn’t matching up to what was promised, the blame is always placed back on them. “The No. 1 thing that they tell you when you get to that place of discouragement is that ‘You get out of it what you put into it,’” Ruiz explained. Never mind that the market might be saturated, the products inferior or the limited network of potential customers fed up with hearing about it. “If stuff isn’t moving, it’s your fault.”

Brooks said becoming involved in an MLM often results in a combination of guilt, shame and fear because this is a business where you are not only the victim; you’re also the perpetrator. “Not only were you sucked into it; you’ve sucked other people in,” Brooks said. And for those who eventually recognize what the business is really about, the realization that they’ve roped loved ones into the same situation is demoralizing. “You know that it’s just not going to work,” Ruiz said. “You know that you’re basically just turning this person into a means to your own end. It doesn’t feel good.”

In fact, according to Brooks, victims of pyramid schemes are the least likely of consumers who’ve been defrauded to actually report it. “As part of the cultic conditioning that takes place, [what] you’re taught right from the beginning is that if you fail, it’s your own fault,” Brooks said. “The system is perfect. You just didn’t follow it well enough, or you didn’t stay with it long enough.”

Are all MLMs cultist pyramid schemes? Maybe not. But the numbers overwhelmingly say there’s no good reason to get involved with one and find out. “The odds are just that bad,” Brooks said, adding that you’d be better off trying the lottery, where everybody at least has an even chance of winning. “With MLM, it’s like buying a ticket for last week’s lottery.”

Katy Perry’s co-star in the video for her 2010 hit “Teenage Dream” is accusing her of sexual misconduct.

In a candid Instagram post published Monday, model and actor Josh Kloss says that Perry exposed his penis to her friends at a party.

Kloss wrote:

So I saw Katy a couple times after her break up with Russel. This one time I brought a friend who was dying to meet her. It was Johny Wujek’s birthday party at moonlight roller way. And when I saw her, we hugged and she was still my crush. But as I turned to introduce my friend, she pulled my Adidas sweats and underwear out as far as she could to show a couple of her guy friends and the crowd around us, my penis.

Can you imagine how pathetic and embarrassed I felt?

Kloss said that Perry’s team “lorded over” him about his interactions with the pop star and that he wasn’t allowed to discuss anything about her publicly.

“And a couple interviews they edited and answered for me,” he wrote.

In a follow-up post, Kloss posted a slideshow with alleged emails from Perry’s publicist. In the images, the publicist highlights how Kloss should answer questions regarding Perry and “Teenage Dream.” 

“I’m not helping her bs image another second,” Kloss wrote in his initial post. He follows up his reasoning for coming forward in his second post, in which he says the experience of being “treated like a prostitute” completely shocked him, especially since his initial impression of Perry was that she was “cool and kind.”

“You block it out, because you watch the face of children being uplifted by positive music she sang,” he wrote. “And your mind is stuck trying to do your job and protect her bs image or be honest and help the global dialogue about power and abuse.”

HuffPost reached out to Perry and Kloss. Kloss’ reps declined to comment while Perry’s did not immediately respond.

This isn’t the first time Perry has come under fire for what some saw as inappropriate behavior.

While acting as a judge on “American Idol” in 2017, Perry kissed then 19-year-old contestant Benjamin Glaze smack on the lips right before his audition.

Glaze said the move made him uncomfortable since it was his first kiss.

“I wanted to save it for my first relationship,” he told The New York Times. “I wanted it to be special.”

Automobile sales in India saw their sharpest decline in nearly 19 years in July, dropping 18.71% and leading to 3.45 lakh job cuts, auto industry body Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) said on Tuesday.

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So why should this matter to you? Here’s your five-point guide:

1. The dip in domestic car sales, according to Livemint, is an important indicator that shows the economy is slowing down. India’s automobile industry employs around 3.7 crore people directly or indirectly. It accounts for 7.1% of the country’s GDP and nearly half of its manufacturing output, according to this Business Today report. While the industry has faced slowdowns before, one big concern this time is that all the segments of the industry—from manufacturers to dealerships to auto part makers—are reporting a decline in sales.

2. There have been multiple reasons cited for the drop in sales, including high GST rates, a crisis in NBFCs and a dip in the purchasing power of consumers. The crisis has led to as many as 3.45 lakh people being laid off due to job cuts at manufacturers, dealerships and auto part makers, said SIAM Director General Vishnu Mathur. Besides, jobs of over 10 lakh workers are at risk, he told NDTV. Representatives from the government have asked for a stimulus package to revive demand ahead of the festive season. 

3. These staggering numbers are just one part of a larger, dismal picture. This handy guide from Livemint lays out all the other indicators that show economic activity is slowing down in India, including falling tractor sales (and hence, rural demand) and a jump in unsold housing units.

4. The growth slump in the FMCG sector also points towards a slowdown. Britannia Industries reported lower-than-expected quarterly earnings this week, and the managing director of the company Varun Berry said, “And that’s a little bit of a worry, because even for a Rs 5 product if the consumer is thinking twice before buying it, then there is some serious issue in the economy.”

5. Spooked by the slew of bad news on the economic front, the government is making efforts to turn the narrative. An IANS report quoted unnamed official sources as saying that the government is working on a stimulus package that could include “tax cuts, subsidies and other incentives”. But for this, it would have to breach its fiscal deficit target of 3.3% (fiscal deficit is the difference between total revenue and total expenditure of the government).    

(With PTI inputs)

CHANDIGARH, Punjab — The destruction of a Guru Ravidas temple and its holy idols by the Delhi Development Authority in the national capital’s Tughlaqabad region has prompted protests across Punjab’s Doaba region.

On Tuesday, August 13, shops, schools and colleges in Jalandhar, Patiala, Barnala, Fazilka, Samana, Ferozepur and Moga remained shut as the ruling Congress and opposition Akali Dal supported the bandh. Reports suggest at least 12 people have been injured in clashes with the police.

Guru Ravidas was a Bhakti-era mystic, now revered by large sections of Punjab’s Dalit community. His followers, who call themselves Ravidassis, claim their temple was on land first occupied nearly 160 years ago by Guru Ravidas’s follower, Guru Roopa Nand. Guru Roopa Nand, who is also revered by the community, dug a pond and even built a hut, a suit filed by the Guru Ravidas Jayanti Samaroh claims.  

The community has contrasted the DDA’s demolition of their temple with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s expressed aim of building a Ram temple in Ayodhya.

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The DDA, which is controlled by the central government through the Union Ministry of Urban Development, maintains that the demolition of the temple was in line with Supreme Court directions. RD Meena, Deputy Director Horticulture, DDA told HuffPost India that the temple was demolished to restore the green belt in the area. 

The temple was demolished on August 10, prompting demands that the central government intervene to provide a fresh plot of land on which to rebuild the temple.  

“While the BJP is adamant to built Ram Temple in Ayodhya, it is demolishing minorities temples across India,” said Chaudhary Santokh, a Congress Member of Parliament from Jalandhar. “The central government should have intervened and prevented the demolition.”

“It will cause further drift between the minority community and will damage the social thread of the country. This could have been prevented easily,” said Chaudhary. 

Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to intervene. He has also formed a five member panel to meet the religious and political representatives of the community and formulate a strategy to resolve the issue with the Centre. 

“The state government has offered to provide all legal and financial support for the construction of the temple. The centre should allocate land for the construction of the temple,” said Chaudhary.

Idol Confusion

The ire of the protestors appears fuelled by the fact that the DDA demolished not just the temple, but even removed the idols placed in its premises. 

The demolition of the temple, interviews with members of the Guru Ravidas Jayanti Samaroh Samiti and their legal representatives, appears to have been arisen out of a misunderstanding.

“The temple authorities submitted false affidavit in the Supreme Court on August 2 stating that they had vacated the land,” Meena told HuffPost India. “However, they were still occupying the land on August 9. Following this, the Supreme Court in its order directed Delhi Police to get it vacated and provide possession to DDA.” 

The land was considered to be occupied, because while the office bears of the temple had vacated the land, an idol of Guru Ravidas was still placed on the land.

“As communicated by my client, I verbally informed the court that the Samiti had vacated the area and are ready to hand over the possession to DDA,” said Sumita Hazarika, advocate for the Samiti to HuffPost India. “However, when DDA visited the site, they found the idol at the site. When court was informed, it took a strong note and ruled in favour of the DDA.”

Rishi Pal, President of the Guru Ravidas Jainti Samaroh Samiti, said the temple was constructed in 1959 and an idol was placed on the site. It was inaugurated by former Union Railway Minster Babu Jagjivan Ram and the Samiti was powerless to remove it of its own. 

“As per directions of the Supreme High Court on August 9, we were asked to remove the idol by August 10. However, Delhi Police and security personnel from the BSF and CRPF surrounded the temple premises on the same night and did not allow us to enter. Next day around 8 am, they demolished the entire structure and took the idol away,” said Pal adding that DDA should have waited till next day to allow them to remove the idol. 

“They could have filed contempt of court against us instead of demolishing the temple,” said Pal. He added that Delhi High Court had asked DDA to allocate a separate land for the construction of the temple but the latter  claimed helplessness in the absence of any special policy for religious shrines in the country. 

Punjab On Alert

Des Raj Kali, a Punjab-based Dalit writer and activist, said the demolition of the temple can lead to an atmosphere of unrest in the border state. 

“Punjab shares its border with Pakistan where anti-national elements including Khalistan supporters are waiting for an opportunity to intrude into the Indian territory,” Kali said. “Meanwhile, the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir has further increased the security concerns in the region. In such a scenario, upsetting the Dalits in the state would be difficult to handle for the state government.” 

He further added that religious and caste hatred is on the rise in Punjab, and Hindu organisations are aggressively pursuing agendas which have brought them into conflict with the Dalits. 

“This new conflict is resulting in a socio-religious realignment wherein radical Sikh organisations are joining hands with Muslims whenever any of them clashes with Hindu groups,” said Kali. 

Punjab is presently guarding its borders with no additional security cover provided by the centre. The law enforcement agencies in the state have claimed that they have adequate security apparatus to deal with any kind of insurgency at their own. 

The state government has hoped that the central government would accede its request for intervention to settle the matter amicably. 

SC warns against politicising issue 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Tuesday warned against politicising the demolition of Guru Ravidas Temple.

“Don’t think that we are powerless We know the seriousness of the issue. We will start contempt. It cannot be like this.” a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra said when the counsel appearing for the temple authorities referred to the agitation on the issue in Punjab. 

Shah Faesal, Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer turned politician, was stopped from boarding a flight to Boston at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi and sent to Srinagar earlier today, a person close to Faesal told HuffPost India.

HuffPost India has reached out to the Delhi Police and the Jammu and Kashmir police for confirmation and will update this copy when they respond.

Faesal is the latest public figure from Jammu and Kashmir to be detained by security services since the Indian government imposed a lockdown in the region on August 5 2019. Since then, the state has been bifurcated, its constitutionally-guaranteed “special status” has been scrapped by Parliament, and mainstream politicians including former Chief Ministers Omar Abdullah of the National Conference, and Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s Democratic Party were arrested.

Faesal, who in 2009 became the first Kashmiri to have topped the civil service examination, has been critical of the Modi government’s abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s (J&K) special status and its subsequent lockdown. 

In an interview with HuffPost India, last week, Faesal said, “Nobody had the slightest idea that the Indian Constitution would be robbed of its value in broad daylight.”

“More hurtful is the manner in which it was done. It was done with such unilateralism  and ruthlessness, without taking into consideration Kashmiris. There cannot be a darker day for democracy,” he said. 

In an interview with the BBC on Tuesday, he said that the choice left to Kashmiris were “stooge or separatist.” 

“I’m not going to be a stooge. I think one clarity which this step has brought unto all of us is that those people who believed that India would not betray this generation of Kashmiris....You know this new insult, this new phase of indignation that has begun on 5 August, 2019, and it is my generation which has got the taste of betrayal,” he said. 

SANGLI, Maharashtra — 42-year-old Pramod Jagdale of Brahmnal village in Sangli district of Maharashtra never dared enter water, so he could never learn how to swim.

But when a boat rescuing him from Maharashtra’s rising floodwaters capsized, Jagdale was one of the lucky survivors in a tragedy that claimed 17 lives. 

Jagdale’s unlikely saviour was a 10-year-old life jacket that he bought for Rs 2,200 in Goa in 2009. The idea was to teach his children and nephew how to swim. 

“Neither did he or any other kid from the family use that jacket. Neither did they learn swimming using it,” said Jagdale’s elder brother Hemant.

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So the jacket gathered dust in Jagdale’s storeroom until August 4 this year, when the Krishna river breached its banks and inundated the fields surrounding Brahmnal.

As the waters rose, Jagdale remembered his jacket.He cleaned it, wore it, and refused to take it off, to the point that Jagdale and his jacket became a running joke.

“Everyone was laughing at him but he refused to remove the jacket,” said Jagdale’s neighbour Shekhar Saymute. “He said eventually this jacket only will help him as he didn’t know swimming. We made fun of him and clicked photos.” 

Jagdale was undeterred by the mockery; he wore the jacket for two whole days right upto the point that he boarded an over-crowded rescue boat on August 8, 2019.  He was one of 42 passengers crammed into a boat meant to seat 20. 

Their craft capsized 200 metres from the shore; 17 people drowned, at least some of whom were trained swimmers. Jagdale, who had never swum in his life, survived.

“It was all because of this jacket. I managed to stay afloat and went on top of a nearby tree, where some people from neighbouring villages helped me get to the ground,” he recalled.

Jagdale is still shaken by memories of the tragedy.

“I can still hear their screams, women, children wailing. I have not been able to sleep,” he said. “If not for this life jacket, I would have been among the dead. I don’t know what made me wear this but I was adamant despite everyone laughing at me.”

Jagdale said he would preserve his life jacket for the rest of his life. 

“Game of Thrones” star Alfie Allen has revealed how the creators of HBO’s epic fantasy drama once pranked him with a fake script that prematurely killed off his character Theon Greyjoy.

But the joke ultimately ended up being on showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, because Allen simply took the spoof development in his stride.

“I kind of just took it on the chin and got on with it,” Allen explained on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Late Late Show with James Corden.” 

Allen recalled how fellow cast members told Benioff and Weiss, some three weeks after he’d received the bogus script, that they should probably call him “because he might be tearing his hair out.”

“But I wasn’t, I was sunbathing,” said Allen, who also revealed how the pair played a similar stunt on Kit Harington, who played Jon Snow.

Check out the interview here:

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump has said that India and China are no longer “developing nations” and were “taking advantage” of the tag from the WTO and asserted that he will not let it happen anymore.

Trump, championing his ‘America First’ policy, has been a vocal critic of India for levying “tremendously high” duties on US products and has described the country as a “tariff king”.

The US and China are currently engaged in a bruising trade war after Trump imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese goods and Beijing retaliated.

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Earlier in July, Trump asked the World Trade Organisation to define how it designates developing-country status, a move apparently aimed at singling out countries like China, Turkey and India which are getting lenient treatment under the global trade rules.

In a memorandum, Trump had empowered the US Trade Representative (USTR) to start taking punitive actions if any advanced economies are inappropriately taking benefits of the WTO loopholes.

Addressing a gathering at Pennsylvania on Tuesday, Trump said India and China, the two economic giants from Asia, are no longer developing nations and as such they cannot take the benefit from the WTO.

However, they are taking the advantage of a developing nation tag from the WTO, putting the US to disadvantage, he said.

“They (India and China) were taking advantage of us for years and years,” Trump said.

The Geneva-based WTO is an intergovernmental organisation that regulates international trade between nations.

Under the global trade rules, developing countries claim entitlement to longer timeframe for the imposition of safeguards, generous transition periods, softer tariff cuts, procedural advantages for WTO disputes and the ability to avail themselves of certain export subsidies.

Trump expressed hope that the WTO will treat the US “fairly”.

He said the WTO views certain countries like China and India as “they’re growing”.

“Well, they’ve grown,” he said and warned that the US will not let such countries to take advantage of the WTO.

“We’re not letting that happen anymore...Everybody is growing but us,” he said.

The Partition of India in 1947 resulted in a mass migration that left millions of people dead, displaced and dehumanised in the quest to carve out two nation states divided on arbitrary sectarian lines. For many South Asians, it is hard to dissociate independence from British rule and the promise of a new beginning from the widespread destruction that came after.

I have always been aware of a connection to India’s neighbouring countries, mainly because I had grown up hearing stories of relatives from west Punjab and east Bengal. More recently, I spent hours looking through digitised National Archives records, trawling through Thacker’s Indian Directory and the Registers of Employees of the East India Company and the India Office, 1746-1939. And finally, there were the names my grandmother had mentioned, tying me inextricably to places across borders. 

 When I wanted to read about Partition, I began with fiction written in English, from Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. I then moved on to reading English translations of narratives originally written in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali. Each book brought me closer to a collective South Asian consciousness that flowed alongside national identities, a space where boundaries blurred, where there were still roads that led to Lahore and Dhaka.

In this list of novels and short story collections set during or immediately after Partition, some of the names will be familiar and others less so, but they are all equally deserving of a place on your reading list.

HINDI

1. Partitions by Kamleshwar, translated by Ameena Kazi Ansari

Kamleshwar once wrote that Partition had made people “refugees in [their] own minds and hearts”. Published in Hindi as Kitne Pakistan (How many Pakistans), this experimental novel is an exploration of divisions and the writing and rewriting of history across spatial and temporal boundaries. The main character, an adeeb or littérateur, presides over a fictional court and listens to various historical figures such as Babur, Aurangzeb, and Lord Mountbatten present their version of history.

2. Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, translated by the author

Possibly the most well-known Hindi novel on this list, Tamas—partially based on Sahni’s impressions of the riots in Rawalpindi in 1947—tells the story of the growth of communalism in a small town in undivided Punjab. A local politician Murad Ali instructs Nathu, a tanner, to kill a pig and the carcass is found outside a mosque the next day. This act ignites simmering tensions and the ensuing violence results in the division of the once-peaceful community along religious lines. 

3. A Village Divided by Rahi Masoom Reza, translated by Gillian Wright

This semi-autobiographical novel explores the impact of Partition on a community of Shia Muslims in Gangauli, a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh. In Gangauli, where the syncretic Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb exists — Hindus and Muslims come together to celebrate Moharram — the idea of a separate Muslim state seems unnecessary. When outside political forces make their way to the village, they are, at least in the beginning, unable to create an impact since local identities are linked to the land and social structures of caste and class rather than religion. 

4. This Is Not That Dawn by Yashpal, translated by Anand

This is a long novel — my edition has 1,119 pages — that delves deeply, often at microscopic level, into the lives of a group of young adults and their families in pre-Partition Lahore and later in India. This is also a feminist narrative: Yashpal is primarily concerned with the trajectories of his female characters. Tara and Asad are willing to bridge their religious differences for love; Kanak, the daughter of a rich publisher, defies her family to get married to Puri who belongs to a lower middle-class family. The title of the English translation references the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem, Subh-e-Azadi: “Woh intezaar tha jiska, yeh woh seher to nahin” (This is not the dawn we waited for).

URDU

5. An Epic Unwritten, edited and translated by Muhammad Umar Memon

In this volume of Urdu short stories, Memon chooses to include Saadat Hasan Manto’s lesser-known Sahae over his Partition classics such as Toba Tek Singh and Khol Do. In Ismat Chughtai’s Roots, Amma refuses to migrate to Pakistan along with her family (“If that [India] isn’t our country, then how can a place where you live for four days become our country?”); in Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti, an abducted woman returns to her husband only to find that the nature of their relationship has changed; in Ashfaq Ahmad’s The Shepherd, Dauji’s syncretic identity is challenged in the wake of communal riots. 

6. A Woman’s Courtyard by Khadija Mastur, translated by Daisy Rockwell

Although women and children were disproportionately affected by Partition violence and are often presented as victims in earlier literature, post-Partition modernist narratives tend to focus on how migration enabled women to forge independent identities. In Mastur’s novel, Aaliya, who has reluctantly migrated to Pakistan with her mother, finds work as a schoolteacher and is able to escape the restrictive environment of her family. 

7. Basti by Intizar Husain, translated by Frances W. Pritchett

The first in a Partition trilogy, Basti is a portrayal of the deracinated post-Partition self; in this case, the Urdu-speaking muhajir in Pakistan. Zakir and his family may have migrated to the other side of the line, but home remains an elusive space beyond the line. For Husain, the persistence of memory is intertwined with the disillusionment that follows post-Independence reality. Zakir looks back on his early days in Pakistan: “Those were good days, good and sincere … And the days afterward? Them too, so I can know how the goodness and sincerity gradually died out from the days, how the days came to be filled with misfortune and nights with ill omen.”

8. Regret by Ikramullah, translated by Faruq Hassan and Mohammad Umar Memon

There are two novellas in this volume: Regret and Out of Sight. In Regret, Saeed reminisces about his childhood friend Ehsan, whose family has stayed on in Pakistan in spite of the Congress’ offer for them to move to Delhi. Out of Sight presents the story of the Ahmadi community, a rarely heard voice in Partition literature. Ismail who has migrated to Pakistan finds a closed society: his community is declared non-Muslim and faces persecution. He is left wondering about the life he could have led in an undivided India: “If the religious strife and the sectarian riots that flared up later as a result of Partition, hadn’t gotten in my way, I would have spent my life quite differently as a well-known prosperous lawyer in Gobindpur.”

PUNJABI 

9. Pinjar by Amrita Pritam, translated by Khushwant Singh

In response to the violence that followed the partition of Punjab, Pritam wrote her best-known poem, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu (Today I Invoke Waris Shah), in which she implores the Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah to rise from his grave to witness the tragedy of Partition. She writes: “Once, one daughter of Punjab cried / you wrote an entire saga / Today, a million daughters / cry to you, Waris Shah”. Pinjar is the story of one such woman. Puro, a young engaged woman is abducted by Rashid; when she manages to escape and return home, she is rejected by her family. 

10. Savage Harvest: Stories of Partition by Mohinder Singh Sarna, translated by Navtej Sarna

On his short stories, Sarna wrote: “My Partition stories pass knee-deep through the dark quicksand of blood and crushed bone, but they keep their head, on which they carry their bundle of hope, clearly above the quicksand.” In the title story, Savage Harvest, Dina and his wife try to save an old Hindu woman from a group of Muslim men that includes their son; in A Defender of Humanity, Hussain, a Pathan bus driver risks his life to protect his Hindu passengers on their way to India; in Gondlanwala, Shabbir rescues a young girl abducted by his uncle.

BENGALI 

11. Mapmaking: Partition Stories From Two Bengals edited by Debjani Sengupta

In her introduction, Sengupta notes that “in Bengal, the closeness of the two communities was also a fact of language.” In Manik Bandyopadhyay’s In a Place and in a Land set in pre-Partition Bengal, Narahari refuses to migrate to West Bengal even though Hindus have started to leave the region; in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Road, Israel, whose son has died in a refugee camp returns back home only to find it occupied by refugees who have come over from East Bengal; in Syed Waliullah’s The story of a tulsi tree, a group of Muslim migrants are unable to destroy a tulsi plant in a house they have occupied.

12. A Life Long Ago by Sunanda Sikdar, translated by Anchita Ghatak

When Sikdar was ten years old, her family moved from Dighpait in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India. In this semi-autobiographical memoir, Sikdar presents a snapshot of life in a tiny village in East Bengal in the 1950s, the close relationship between the young Dayamoyee and the family retainer Majam, and the uncertainty faced by the villagers who decide to migrate to India. Once in India, Dayamoyee locks away her childhood memories, revisiting them only when she hears of Majam’s death in the early 1990s.  

A Rajasthan court on Wednesday acquitted all six accused in the Pehlu Khan lynching case.  

Khan, a 55-year-old dairy farmer, was lynched by cow vigilantes in April 2017.

Khan and his two sons, Irshad and Arif, were returning from a cattle fair in Jaipur to their home in Haryana when they were stopped. A video of the incident showed Khan being beaten and kicked. He died in hospital two days later. 

The case trial concluded on 7 August 2019, News18 reports, and Khan’s sons were among the over 40 witnesses who deposed.

The accused were charged under sections 147, 323, 341, 302, 308, 379 and 427 of the IPC. Two minor are being tried separately at a juvenile court, News18 says.

In June 2019, Khan and his two sons were chargesheeted for allegedly transporting cattle without permission, NDTV reported. However, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot rejected news reports on this.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” is great advice, since there are serious nutritional benefits to eating apples. But the saying ends before it mentions what else to eat.

To learn which other fruits (and vegetables) you should be eating every day, we spoke to Dr. Michael Greger, author of “How Not to Die,” and cardiologist Joel Kahn. 

Greger’s bestseller lays out “The Daily Dozen,” the 12 foods to eat every single day. The dozen includes beans (legumes), flaxseed, nuts, grains, spices, beverages and ... exercise? The Daily Eleven certainly doesn’t have the same ring to it, we guess! (Regardless, it’s good advice.)

Let’s dive deep into the remaining five components of the dozen below and learn why you should be eating these fruits and vegetables every single day. 

Wait, isn’t the sugar in fruit bad for you?

Fruit is part of the Daily Dozen, and if you’re concerned about your sugar intake when it comes to eating it, know that both doctors differentiate between fruit sugar and what Greger calls “free sugar” found in products that contain corn syrup, such as candy bars and sodas. When free sugar is consumed, people experience an increase in triglycerides, fatty liver and blood pressure. But our bodies process sugar differently when it’s eaten as part of fruit. 

To get nerdy for a moment, the fruit’s cell walls have a non-digestible physical barrier made of fiber, and that fiber slows the rate at which sugar gets absorbed into our system. “There appears to be no limit of sugar intake as long as it’s the way nature intended,” Greger said.

Kahn concurred, citing a Chinese study that showed that fresh fruit consumption even helped people suffering from diabetes. “If you were a diabetic eating fruit, you had less risk of complications of diabetes because there are so many minerals and vitamins in fruit that it helps protect your nerves and arteries,” Kahn said. “Fruit is very protective across the board. There are treatment programs for diabetes that use diets largely of fruit.” He also noted that fruit is often a better food choice than anything else lying around. “If you’re having a handful of blueberries, you’re not eating a doughnut,” he said.

Berries

Suggested: one serving per day

If the fruit you’re about to eat ends in -berry, you’re on the right track. Strawberries and blueberries are especially good for you. “Berries are the healthiest fruit, just like greens are the healthiest vegetables,” Greger told HuffPost. He cited one Harvard study that showed senior women who consumed berries had a slower rate of cognitive decline. There’s also a growing amountof research about berries’ benefits with regards to cardiovascular disease, which Greger noted is the No. 1 killer of men and women.

“In the entire gamut of nutrition voices, everyone loves berries, which is very rare,” Kahn said. “People who follow many diets ― including whole food, plant-based, keto and paleo ― love it because it’s a low-glycemic fruit. Berries have natural sugars, like all fruits do, but you’ll get less of a rise in blood sugar with berries than you might with a mango or a pineapple.”  

Dark, leafy greens

Suggested: two servings per day

Popeye was on to something. Leafy greens “have the highest nutrient density than any other food, meaning more nutrition per calorie than anything else we could possibly put in our mouths, which translates to about a 20% drop in heart or stroke risk for each daily serving,” Greger said. Greens worth seeking out include arugula, kale, beet greens and Swiss chard. It’s summertime, so use it as an excuse to get outside to shop for groceries. “If you want to get mustard greens, turnip greens or collard greens at a farmers market, that’s fantastic,” Kahn said. “Collard greens are unbelievably high in natural plant-based sources of calcium.” 

Cruciferous vegetables

Suggested: one serving per day

If it’s in the cruciferae family, it should be on your plate. Broccoli and cauliflower are probably the most prominent cruciferous veggies, but Greger advises to branch out to cabbage. “Red and purple cabbage have the same eyesight- and brain-protecting antioxidants that berries do, but at a fraction of the cost,” he said. “I encourage people to always keep purple cabbage in the crisper to slice up shreds onto any meal for a colorful, healthful garnish. It’s important to get in cruciferous [vegetables] every day because of these kinds of compounds that are basically found nowhere else in the food supply.” 

Among Kahn’s favorite cruciferous veggies are watercress, radishes, mustard greens and wild arugula ― yep, some of those are also leafy greens, but that highlights their importance, especially because of sulforaphane: “There is a chemical created in our bodies by eating these veggies called sulforaphane,” he said. “It’s been shown over and over again to be very protective against the development of cancer.”

Fruit (yes, as an entire category)

Suggested: three servings per day

Yep, berries are a fruit, but eating fruit is so important that there’s a whole category dedicated to them. Which fruit should you consume every day? “Pick a fruit, any fruit!” Greger said. “There’s all sorts of wonderful things out there. Berries just happen to be a fruit with a lot of studies about them, but there’s also apples!” He noted that eating apples can potentially reduce the chance of stroke and heart attack mortality. 

Kahn is impressed by the antioxidant level in kiwis. But if you don’t have a plentiful supply of kiwi in your fridge, fret not. “I’m fine with just bananas,” he said. “If you’re in a gas station and you have a basket of bananas, and you have every other abomination of health [around you], never fear the old banana in a pinch. It’s perfectly fine and the best choice you can make in a lot of situations like that.” 

Vegetables (again, the entire category)

Suggested: two servings per day

I know, I know. Morevegetables? After you’ve filled up on leafy greens and cruciferous veggies, it’s important to squeeze in two more servings of these plants. And even though mushrooms aren’t technically veggies, they were cited by both doctors as being worthy additions to your diet. And those two docs aren’t alone. “They’re the hot group of vegetables being adored worldwide,” Kahn said. “They have a natural ability to lower cholesterol through their action in the gut. Plus, there’s good data that you can influence your risk of cancer by eating mushrooms, particularly breast cancer.”

Greger said that you don’t have to buy the pricier culinary mushrooms, such as shiitake, to get the benefits. “Eating plain white button mushrooms, the cheapest kind, can seriously boost our immune system and cut down on upper respiratory tract infections,” he said. “When I encourage people to follow a plant-based diet, that’s short for a plant- and fungus-based diet, but it’s a mouthful that doesn’t taste very good.”

Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish climate change activist, has no plans to meet or talk with US President Donald Trump when she attends the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York next month.

“Why should I waste time talking to him when he, of course, is not going to listen to me?” Thunberg told CBS in an interview shared online Tuesday. “I can’t say anything that he hasn’t already heard.”

The 16-year-old also dunked on America’s efforts to combat climate change in the clip, below. It’s “not very high,” she said.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the concept of climate change, calling it a Chinese hoax and “bullshit,” and his administration is pursuing a decidedly anti-environment agenda. In 2017, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on combating the climate crisis.

Thunberg will travel to the U.S. onboard the 60-foot solar-powered yacht Malizia II with her father and a film crew. The zero-emission vessel is scheduled to set sail from Plymouth in southwest England on Wednesday afternoon. The journey is expected to take two weeks. 

The trip signals that “the climate change crisis is a real thing,” said Thunberg, who has risen to global prominence with her weekly anti-climate change school strikes.

“By doing this it also shows how impossible it is today to live sustainable,” she explained. “That, in order to travel with zero emissions, that we have to sail like this across the Atlantic Ocean.”  

After arriving in the U.S, she plans to travel by low-carbon transportation (including buses and trains) to Canada, the U.N.’s annual climate summit in Santiago, Chile, in December and other countries in South America.

CHANDIGARH — While the Congress leadership in Delhi has struggled to articulate a coherent political response to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s decision to nullify Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and bifurcate the state into two union territories, veteran Congressman and Chief Minister of Punjab Amarinder Singh has leveraged his “army veteran” status to both condemn the decision and avoid being drawn into a debate over his “patriotism”

When Home Minister Amit Shah first announced the decision on the floor of the Rajya Sabha on August 5, the BJP and its supporters went on overdrive to describe anyone who opposed the decision as “anti-national”.

Singh appeared unruffled by this strategy. He described the decision as “totally unconstitutional and undemocratic”, even as he banned any demonstrations in favour of, or against the decision. 

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As the Chief Minister of a state with a border with Pakistan, Singh criticised the Home Minister for jeopardising national security by not seeking a political consensus on a significant departure on India’s Kashmir policy.

A week later, on August 12, the Chief Minister hosted 125 Kashmiri students for lunch at Punjab Bhawan in Chandigarh on the occasion of Eid-al-Adha — thereby burnishing his, and the Congress party’s pluralistic credentials.

The next day on August 13, he harrumphed angrily at Pakistan minister Fawad Chaudhry’s appeal to Punjabi soldiers to refuse to serve in Kashmir.

As a consequence, Singh has managed to appear tough on national security, empathetic to the Kashmiri people, and opposed to the de facto abrogation of Article 370.

The Lunch Diplomacy

Punjab has over 8000 Kashmiri students enrolled in the state’s public and private universities. Most of them could not go home for Eid this year, because of the unrest in the Valley after Article 370 was nullified. 

Singh’s decision to invite a group of students for lunch appears to have paid off. 

In a worrying sign that his government is following the Modi doctrine of avoiding the press and relying on Twitter, journalists were barred from attending the lunch, and students were frisked for their phones by security. 

Singh’s office, meanwhile, tweeted a set of laudatory videos.

“Woh Kehte hain na, Singh Is King. Aapne sahi kar dikhaya. I was crying from the last four days in my hostel as I was unable to meet my parents on Eid this year. But all my resentment vanished when I heard that CM Punjab has invited us for lunch,” said student in a video tweeted by the Punjab CM. 

“We feel much safe here. This is our second home. We feel safer than we are in our own homes,” said another student in the video. 

“We could not clicked selfies with the Punjab CM as mobile phones were not allowed inside,” one student told HuffPost India in an interview. 

According to the students, they had apprised the Punjab CM about the situation back in Kashmir, they were assured full safety and support by the state government.

Abrogation of article 370  is ‘Kabzaa’, feels Kashmiri students 

“I feel that the move has both advantages and disadvantages of its own, the manner in which it was implemented was nothing less than a ‘Kabzaa’ (forceful occupation) by the Indian government,” said Salman, a student who along with three of his friends Nasir and Aadil was invited by Punjab CM.

Though all three along with one more female student had booked a flight from Chandigarh to Kashmir on August 14 but could not board it as they reached 10 minutes late behind the reporting time. 

As per Nasir, the flight was to depart at 12:40 pm and they reported at the counter at 12:10. “We were not allowed to board the flight and were told that the booking counter got closed at 11:55 am,” said Nasir. 

He broke down while speaking to HuffPost India on phone. He was worried about his family and also about her sister Soliha who along with her one year old daughter came from Srinagar to stay with them in Baramulla. 

“During such shutdowns there is an acute shortage of food and other essential supplies as we do not keep much cash at homes. With this sudden shutdown, all the ATMs and shops are closed. I am worried as to how my family was procuring  milk for my little niece,” said Nasir. 

He further added that students from Kashmir had hoped that the government will open lines for 10 minutes on Eid allowing them to speak to their parents but that did not happen.

Many other students who accompanied Salman and his friends to CM’s feast said that they were in a state of shock and were not able to concentrate on studies.

While they claim that Punjab is like a second home to them and they feel safe in the state, they couldn’t hide the pain of getting frisked on the gates of every public place in their eyes.

Since Bollywood doesn’t do an awful lot of films on rocket science, it’s obvious that the filmmaker who’s helming one of the first films on the subject would feel the need for oversimplification.

In the Vidya Balan-Akshay Kumar starrer Mission Mangal, a fairly decent feel-good entertainer, director Jagan Shakti truncates complex scientific jargon into accessible, bite-sized dialogue to ensure the viewer doesn’t get lost in the complex trajectory of India’s mission to Mars which it successfully completed its maiden attempt, a first for any country.

Featuring an ensemble cast, Mission Mangal, like the Mars mission, understands the economy of time and clocks a little over two hours, delivering a compressed chronology of how a small team of scientists from the Indian Space and Research Organisation (ISRO) fought several hurdles, both financial and moral, to send a satellite to Mars, by doing what one can be conventionally understood as jugaad.

While set in a space station, the film’s central idea of hustling and overcoming space-sized obstacles through tact and inventiveness is massively relatable and leaves you with a satisfying, feel-good vibe although the way one reaches there could’ve been more fulfilling had the story been told with more deftness.

Akshay Kumar plays Rakesh Dhawan, the mission director who works with Vidya Balan’s Tara Shinde. Though her senior, together they lead a motley bunch of scientists that include Eka Gandh (Sonakshi Sinha), Kritika Aggarwal (Taapsee Pannu), Varsha Pillai (Nithya Menen), Kirti Kulhari as Neha Siddiqui (Kriti Kulhari), Parmeshwar Naidu (Sharman Joshi) and Ananth Iyer (H. G. Dattatreya).

In what is genuinely a relief to watch, the women in the film don’t get mansplained by Kumar and are introduced with their independent social contexts outside of their ISRO jobs. In fact, the film’s universe is rather utopian - everybody here is nice to a fault. The obstacles are purely logistical, unlike in Hidden Figures, which the film has been compared to, where intersectional racism was a major force of oppression. Even the insults dropped by faux villain Dalip Tahil, who plays a NASA-returned, foreign-accented scientist cynical about Balan and Kumar’s ambitious plans of the PSLV’s capacity to orbit Mars, are so cheesy, he appears to be a parody of a bad guy instead of an actual bad guy.

Which, in an ironic way, contributes to the failings of an otherwise sincere film. It’s simplistic treatment and robs a complex mission of its authenticity. Do a bunch of space scientists just restart a massive machine at their station when they can’t track the satellite? Do seemingly complex problems such as working out the rocket in half the fuel required as easily resolved as depicted? Sure, the filmmakers need cinematic liberties to propel the narrative but dumbing down a sophisticated operation takes away from enjoying its intricacies.

Too often, the film also goes into subplots absolutely irrelevant to the plot, simply because the storyteller must tell the story in an ‘entertaining way.’ So you have Vidya Balan tracking down her daughter at a city bar and then doing shots with her. Why? Because cool Mom, yo. There’s also Balan’s Islamophobic husband, played by Sanjay Kapur, who’s quickly becoming the go-to actor for stay-at-home-Dad roles.

To be fair, he does look like someone who spends a lot of time at home.

In its consistent attempt to be a woke entertainer, Kapur’s Islamophobia is called out, a character who’s pregnant gets a customised creche at work (“her choice, to work or to stay at home”), an injured army man asks his scientist wife to stop nursing him and go back to space, and Akshay Kumar is (thankfully) relegated into the background in a crucial scene where the women take centerstage.

Sharman Joshi plays what Sharman Joshi has played, a bumbling bachelor awkward with women while Sonkashi Sinha smokes and has casual sex which is weirdly justified by giving her a tragic backstory. Why can’t she just smoke and have casual sex and be a kickass scientist without carrying childhood trauma? Ugh.

Most of the dialogue feels unrefined and lacking verity. Some of it has the philosophical depths of a WhatsApp forward on a family group. This is like a Films Division documentary but with an actual budget. And some lines that are actually funny. As far as performances go, Vidya Balan is reliably good while Pannu, Kulhari and Menen are confident and appropriately convincing in their parts. However, the film never gives a sense of each of them having a camaraderie and we always see them as individuals and not a collective team.

Since it’s an Akshay Kumar movie, there’s a bunch of “Make-in-India” references and, well, spoiler alert, Prime Minister Narendra Modi (whose party wasn’t in power when the project was launched) actually pops in on the screen to rave about the cost-effective success of the Mars project.

Yep.

Now why would Mission Mars suddenly turn into Mission Bhakt is anybody’s guess.

DARRANG, Assam — Two days before Eid, Alekha Khatun smiled and waved her younger children goodbye as they headed out of the meeting block in Tezpur Jail. She then turned to her older daughter Taslima and said she won’t be coming home anytime soon. 

“We don’t have any money left,” Alekha told her stunned 12-year-old daughter. “We don’t know how to keep sending you to schools even, we can’t fight the case anymore.”

When Alekha was sent to a detention camp in Tezpur Jail two years ago, Taslima returned from prison visits to her mother with hope: News of a new lawyer one time, documents which friends and family said were absolute proof of her innocence, her father saying an official at the court has promised the case will be resolved soon. That day, however, Alekha asked her not to hope anymore. Instead, take charge at their family, three hours away in the village of Kharupetia in Darrang district.

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“We are very poor, she said. And my father has no money, nothing left. Not even money to feed us well, she said,” Taslima said, staring at the ground and fiddling with the corner of her blue printed headscarf. “She asked me to take care of my younger sister and brother. Hug them a lot, love them a lot. Who knows if I will ever come out, she said.”

Assam’s National Register of Citizens was meant to serve as a comprehensive list of Indian citizens residing in the state. Instead, it has turned into a nightmarish witch-hunt directed at the state’s most vulnerable residents. Millions of mostly Muslim families are paying the price of the state’s incompetent bureaucracy which is responsible for apprehending and trying people who they suspect are ‘foreigners’.

While supporters of the process claim that those excluded from the rolls can always plead their case before Foreigners Tribunals, mounting legal fees have driven families like Alekha’s to the point where they must choose between saving a parent from prison and feeding their young children.

Today, on the country’s 74th Independence Day, thousands of Indians in Assam are being driven into modern day slavery — selling off ancestral property, taking loans at staggering rates of interest from informal money lenders, and ultimately pledging to labour in fields for free, in a desperate bid to raise money to free their loved ones from incarceration. 

Rather than assuage the plight of the vulnerable, India’s right-wing ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has promised to roll out a version of the NRC across the country. 

“I have nothing left,” said Alekha’s husband, Usman Ali, describing his tumultuous descent from a comfortably placed grain trader to an impoverished manual labourer in two short years.

In 2017, Usman borrowed Rs 3 lakh from a private bank, another Rs 2 lakh from a local money lender, and burnt through every paisa of his savings to pay for lawyers to save his wife. Last week, he finally sold their small plot of land, and their two-room home, for Rs 1.5 lakh and moved to into a single shared room in his father’s tin and bamboo home in a remote village called Shyamtila.

“The business was finished a year ago, now I sold my house, the last thing I had,” Usman said. “I took the children out of private schools. They will now have to go to free government schools, and even then I don’t know how to buy them books and clothes.”

Drowning in debts

The Assamese state, and many of the resident elites, have long had a deep-seated paranoia of being overrun by Bengali, especially Bengali Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. 

In 1997, Alekha was labelled a ‘doubtful’ voter, or a D-voter, over a simple clerical error. Her name was noted as Alekha Khatun in one set of government documents, and Alekha Begum in another. 

Twenty years later, in 2016, she was issued a notice by the Foreigners Tribunal and asked to prove her parentage. Alekha’s parents and her husband Usman’s family all have enough documents to prove they are Indian — which means she should have had her name cleared immediately. But she missed one hearing because her lawyer failed to communicate the date to the right person. The tribunal sent her to prison in 2017. 

“Khatun, Bibi, Begum, these are all interchangeable among us. The government officials issuing these documents are often Assamese Hindus who do not understand this,” said Intaz Ali, whose brother is fighting a similar case. “They put a random surname and when two documents don’t match, they throw us in jail.”

For Usman, Alekha’s imprisonment meant an ordeal of mounting legal fees. He estimates he has spent almost Rs 7 lakh on lawyers, the final Rs 60,000 for a Supreme Court lawyer who took his fees upfront and then stopped taking his calls.

“They usually lurk around the Foreigner Tribunals,” Intaz said, referring to lawyers who have been doing brisk business. “When poor, illiterate people like them turn up at tribunals getting a notice, they pounce on them. We are desperate, we give them whatever they want.”

Usman used to make a living as a small trader, buying and selling rice. He is now a daily wage labourer earning between Rs 300 and Rs 400 a day. He recently thought of moving to Kerala, where the wages for labour are higher, but his eight year old daughter Zamina asked him to stay.

“How will I go to school, if you are not around,” she asked.

“I had no answer. So I didn’t go,” Usman said. “I may have to borrow again and work for free for the money-lender to pay back the loan.”

Usman said he has already missed one EMI has a majority after he handed over a chunk of the money he got from selling off his house to a new lawyer he has hired. The rest, he has to save to pay for his jailed wife’s medical expenses. “She has a nerve disease doctor’s said. She keeps fainting, she was put in a hospital 10 times in two years.”

Modern-day slaves

Ashraful Hossein, a social activist told HuffPost India that the NRC process had created a vast, impoverished, easily exploited workforce who had been stripped of all constitutional rights. 

Twenty-five-year old Abdul Malik works as a mason nearly twelve hours a day for a wage of Rs 400 a day. And later in the evening and way into the night on days, he does odd jobs for a man who he borrowed money for to pay for the legal expenses of his brother who was sent to a detention earlier this year. Malik’s brother was intercepted by the police in Jorhat where he worked as a construction labourer— over a six-hour drive away from their village in Darrang district — nine years ago, and had been appearing at a tribunal there to prove his citizenship for nearly a decade. “He just gone out to get a paan when the police stopped him and took his details down,” Malik said. 

Then earlier this year, he was declared a foreigner when he went for the hearing and packed off to Jorhat Central Jail. His wife and family couldn’t visit him soon as a car costs nearly Rs 6,000 and a trip ends up costing the family nearly 8000 rupees. Since then, Malik sold off a small plot of land his brother owned, mortgaged agricultural land he had and worked every day the past four months to feed a family of nine — his own and his brother’s — and also pay High Court lawyers. 

“I work in the fields, sometimes all day and still earn rupees 200. Also, I am frail and have been ill so people don’t always give me work. I need to take breaks often and word travels,” Malik’s sister-in-law Razia told HuffPost. When the legal costs started mounting a couple of years ago, Razia and her husband went off for almost a year to work in Karnataka’s coffee plantations.

“We saved around Rs 40,000 working all day, almost without a single day off. All that money disappeared paying lawyers and figuring out what to do in less than a week. I have nothing now,” she said. Razia’s children — 4, 7, and 8 year old boys — have been asking for exercise books and pencils for school, but she has asked them to wait. 

“They don’t even have proper shoes. On days, they just walk to school barefeet. I work all day, but still can’t afford books, copies, pencils,” she told HuffPost India. Later Malik, who has a one-year-old daughter himself, said, “Who knows how long we can afford to keep sending them to school. We have nothing left to sell or mortgage and no more men in the family who can work,” he said. 

A few kilometres away in Kheroni village, last year, a posse of policemen arrived at the door of the village headman and handed him two foreigner tribunal notices — written in English — meant for 20 year old Abasuddin’s family. No one in the family read English, so they took the letters to a village school teacher who read it out and said Abasuddin’s parents had been declared foreigners in a case that had been lodged 10 years ago in 2007. The family had no knowledge of this case and said they had not received any notice in the past. Abasuddin’s parents were so scared that they fled the village. 

Abasuddin decided to fight the case. He borrowed Rs 50,000 from a local moneylender and promised to work for free on his land until he could pay him back. The money-lender was not convinced, so Abasuddin roped in his 17-year-old brother to also work for free on his land. 

“Our whole family doesn’t own any land. We live in shanties on government land in villages,” Abasudin said. “I used to make Rs 200 a day working as a farm hand, how will I pay for lawyers. Just making copies of documents costs more than that.” 

“I do other small jobs when he lets us go to make some money for food,” he added. 

When Malek Ustoor’s father and mother got notices declaring them foreigners, his father fled the village. His mother Majeda Khatun, a sickly old woman, who could barely understand the consequences of the notice written in English, refused to budge. 

Ustoor, who can’t read or write, also could not understand fully what this could mean and started enquiring about lawyers. A few days later, the police arrived at their doorstep and asked his mother if she could lead them to the village headman’s house. Majeda, an illiterate 50-year-old who worked a farm labour, got on to the police van as asked. 

“The van did not stop, we kept walking, and then running and the van rolled away with my mother inside. I couldn’t understand what was even going on,” Ustoor said.

Ustoor makes around Rs 5000 a month working as a farm labourer; the High Court lawyer he contacted demanded Rs 60,000 to even start working on his case. He sold two cows and three goats for Rs 30,000 and borrowed another Rs 60,000 from a money lender. He promised to work for a 4-5 hours for free on his land every day till he could pay back the money. 

Nearly six months have passed, Ustoor is still paying off his debt and his mother is still in prison. The lawyer Ustoor hired got bail for his father who then returned last month.

Childhoods destroyed

Habibur Rahman, a social worker who has been working in Darrang for years, said the Foreigner Tribunal practice of sending English-language notices to barely literate villagers had only added to their misery.

“Even if they get it to me, I can’t help as even I can’t read English. Some village teachers too aren’t very comfortable in the language,” Rahman said. The result is, they circle back to the police to understand what the notice is and that’s a “trap”.

Amina Bibi’s husband and a neighbour’s wife received notices the same day. No one was around to read it for them. Amina’s sister, however, suggested that they go to the police, so Kamaluddin, the neighbour whose wife got a notice went to them. 

“Just get the two of them here. We will sign some documents and let them go, the police said,” Kamaluddin recalled. When Amina’s husband and Kamaluddin’s wife arrived with their families, and without lawyers because the police had promised to help, they were packed into a van and driven away. 

“They are in jail now, go get a lawyer,” the police said. 

Amina’s husband was a poor farm labourer with no money. A fortnight after he was arrested, her 15 year old son said he was dropping out of school to work as a farm labourer. Then a week later, as the family’s bills for lawyers, food and school mounted, her 13 year old son dropped out of his seventh standard class and joined his brother in the fields. 

“I couldn’t stop crying, but what could we do? Where will I get money?” Amina said, weeping. 

“My older son was very good in studies. His matriculation examination was just two months away, he would do well. We wanted him to study and get better jobs than we could,” she said. The boy couldn’t take the exam’. 

Amina too began working as a farm hand and then at people’s houses in neighbouring villages, cleaning and washing utensils. That won’t pay for lawyers and court proceedings. She too may have to take a loan and work for free to pay it back. 

“They have nothing to mortgage and which bank will give these people loans. And even if they did, how will they pay interest?” social worker Rahman said. 

Amina’s daughter, also called Taslima, smoothens the skirt of her bright pink dress obsessively as her mother breaks down wondering how she will pay for her school. 

“She is very good in studies. I don’t want to take her out of school,” Amina said of Taslima.

Taslima grabs her mother’s hand and squeezes it, scolding her in a low voice: “Sshhh…”

“Taslima, tell madam what you want to be?” a neighbour nudges the 11-year-old. 

“A doctor,” Taslima said, “But my father is in jail.”

August 15, 2019 marks India’s entry into the 73rd year of its independence, an event to be commemorated with passionate speeches and tricolour-festooned WhatsApp forwards celebrating freedom. It also signifies ten days since the state of Jammu & Kashmir was erased with the abrogation of Article 370 and plunged into virtual darkness. Phone lines and internet connections remain cut off with next to no sources of reliable information available to locals. Panicked families have still not been able to contact each other. A state of de facto curfew operates in the Kashmir Valley and basic services and supplies are hamstrung by restrictions on movement and the communication blackout.

Meanwhile, the end of this month will see millions rendered stateless in Assam through the opaque and flawed National Register of Citizens. Through it all, an economic slowdown and high unemployment rates continue to cause alarm bells to ring. And yet, within the uncertainty and protests, the government has stressed that everything—despite all signs pointing to the contrary—is “normal”.

It’s a tried and tested, musty old script, played out across the world: the stripping away of civil liberties, the brutal, callous imposition of the will and cruel might of the state on entire regions, populations, and sometimes nations, and through it all, the denial of violence and wrongdoing. As we blow trumpets of national pride, the question begs to be asked: who exactly is allowed to be free?

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Drowned by cacophonous primetime debates and Twitter showdowns, it’s easy to ignore that within chaos and conflict are actual flesh-and-blood human beings, each driven by a unique knot of desires, ambitions and fears. But when you’re a pawn in a game that you may not even know the name of, does that even matter?

When things seem the bleakest, turning to fiction can often be instructive. As we question the very nature of freedom, here is a short reading list of novels from around the world that vividly tell the stories of ordinary lives turned upside down by conflict and war created by those who wield power. And sometimes, these lives even emerge on the other side, if not entirely free, at least clutching at a humanity that is still intact.

1. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Set mostly during the Nigerian-Biafran War of the late 1960s, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s extraordinary novel depicts the effects of conflict and violence on those caught in the midst. The war, fought between the government of Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra, was in part an outcome of the all-too-familiar internal tensions in nations born of an arbitrary redrawing of maps and borders by departing colonisers. Marked by ethnic violence, widespread malnutrition and starvation, the genocide left hundreds of thousands dead.

Half of a Yellow Sun, whose title comes from the emblem adopted by the short-lived Republic of Biafra, chronicles the war through five characters, who we first encounter in a time of peace. Even as they attempt to lead lives unmarred by the violence festering around them, they are inevitably consumed by it, each responding differently to its horrors.

Adichie, who was born a decade after the war, lost both her grandfathers to the violence. She wrote the novel, she said, “because the thought of the egos and indifference of men leading to the unnecessary deaths of men and women and children enrages me, because I don’t ever want to forget”. And while she starkly evokes the spectre of death, starvation and the trauma of war in her novel, Adichie excels most remarkably in entwining the larger politics of the time with what propels and transforms her characters: The novel, she explained is also her tribute to love—“the unreasonable, resilient thing that holds people together and makes us human.”

2. The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam

Anuk Arudpragasam’s debut novel takes place over the course of a single day and night but holds within its slim pages and chronology, questions about life, death and what it means to be human. Within the frenzy and turmoil of war, the novel limits its scope with deliberate precision to one character and his ruminations—to staggering effect.

Dinesh is a young man in a makeshift camp in the final days of the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), witnessing mangled bodies, amputations and scarcity in all forms. So far removed from the life he had known, and heading towards a seemingly inevitable death, Dinesh fixates on the minute physicality of being alive–the acts of sleeping, eating, walking, breathing.

But when another refugee proposes that Dinesh marry his daughter, his relationship with death—and life—begins to change, transformed into the challenge of forging a relationship with a stranger who might hold some form of meaning and respite. Poetic and philosophical, The Story of a Brief Marriage is a testament to the human yearning for dignity, pride and companionship, even in the middle of war. 

3. Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Melanie Mauthner

In 1994, between April 7 and July 15, Rwanda witnessed one of the world’s most gruesome atrocities—an ethnic genocide in which nearly 1 million people from the country’s Tutsi minority were killed. Entire communities, including kids, were encouraged to participate in the mass murders using whatever weapons they could find. In her novel Our Lady of the Nile, Scholastique Mukasonga asserts that the tendrils of such extreme and callous hatred go far back into time.

Set 15 years before the genocide, the novel takes place in an exclusive girl’s boarding school where the daughters of Rwanda’s elites are sent to be groomed for marriage and a gendered public life. Discrimination is at play from the start. Only 10% of the student body is allowed to comprise of Tutsis. What starts off as a coming-of-age story soon turns into the fruition of years of resentment fostered during Belgian colonial rule. Ethnic violence, abetted by those in power, becomes terrifyingly real in the school perched high above the rest of the land—a prelude to what is to come more than a decade later.

In her novel, Mukasonga, who lost 27 of her family members in the 1994 genocide, shows with chilling deftness how easy it can be for ordinary people to choose a path of grotesque brutality.  

4. Girl At War by Sara Novic

How does a 10-year-old make sense of something that defies everything she’s ever known? Sara Novic’s dark, accomplished novel answers that question and more as it tells the story of Ana Juric over four parts, starting with the breakout of civil war in Yugoslavia in 1991. It all begins with a road blockade and a question about a box of cigarettes: Serbian or Croatian? Soon, Ana’s childhood is swept away by the Serbo-Croatian war that killed tens of thousands of people.

Unsettling yet moving, Girl At War features what are almost universally recognisable markers of ethnic and civil strife—neighbours suspecting and turning on each other, a once diverse city being reorganised according to ethnicity, and every gesture being scrutinised for signs of loyalty and allegiances. But within it all, Ana’s story is most vividly and painfully one of a child losing sense of safety, security and certainty, something she has to grapple with, and try to reconcile herself to, for years to come.

5. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad

Cartoonist Malik Sajad’s autobiographical graphic novel is timelier than ever for its deeply personal account of everyday life growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s. Sajad’s protagonist, Munnu, starts off as a young boy who finds joy in drawing, sugar and his large family. But life in a land wracked by conflict is anything but typical. His elder brother’s friends cross over to the resistance, his father is routinely taken away by the military for identification parades, and school often remains closed due to the violence inflicted on the valley.

With influences of Joe Sacco’s graphic novels about Palestine, the stunningly illustrated Munnu also pays homage to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Like the representation of Jews as mice in Spiegelman’s iconic graphic novel, Majad communicates the “endangerment” of his characters by depicting them as humanoid version of hangul, the Kashmiri deer species.

Effortlessly unspooling the complexities of Kashmir’s history and politics through Munnu’s own journey to becoming a cartoonist, Sajad’s story is simultaneously one of a young man trying to find his place in a broken world.

PULWAMA — Eleven days after authorities began detaining hundreds of local leaders and activists in Kashmir, fearing violence after the region’s special status was withdrawn, it is unclear in many cases where they are or why they were taken away.

On Aug. 4, a day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government scrapped provisions that gave Kashmir more autonomy than any other Indian state, 45-year-old Shameem Ahmad Ganai was arrested in Pulwama district, his wife Fareeda said.

Fareeda said she went to find her husband the next morning at the local police station in Kakapora, but he was no longer there. “We don’t know where he is and what the charges are,” she said. “We heard he has been shifted outside Kashmir.”

Last week, Jammu and Kashmir Director General of Police Dilbag Singh told Reuters that around 300 people had been arrested, some of whom had been taken out of the state.

But a government official, who declined to be named, said at least 500 local leaders and activists have been arrested or detained across Kashmir since the beginning of last week.

Authorities say the crackdown is necessary to prevent disorder after a move they say will bring Muslim-majority Kashmir into line with the rest of India, help the economy and end a bloody insurgency.

In the latest detention, Shah Faesal, a celebrated bureaucrat turned politician, was picked up on Wednesday, said a state government official. Earlier in the week, he had told the BBC’s HARDtalk that Modi’s government had “murdered” democracy.

Ganai, a meat shop owner, was previously arrested in 2016 on charges of stone-pelting, attacking security forces with rods, and damaging government property. His family said he had taken part in widespread protests after the death of a popular militant leader.

“He was released after three months but never indulged in any protests since then. I don’t know what his fault was this time,” Fareeda said.

SRINAGAR,Jammu and Kashmir — Ten days into an extraordinary suspension of civil rights and liberties in Kashmir, Indian authorities have refused to put a precise figure to the number of opposition politicians, trade unionists, lawyers, rights activists and civilians arrested, detained, or placed under house arrest, in the aftermath of the government’s decision to revoke the state’s special status and bifurcate it into two union territories. 

Instead, spokespersons for Governor Satya Pal Malik, the state police and the Union Home Ministry have responded with obfuscation and evasion, even as senior police officers admitted that some of the detainees have been rendered out of Kashmir and are being held in the Indian mainland. 

At a press briefing on Monday August 12 2019, for instance, Inspector General of Police Swayam Prakash Pani said: “We do not have centralised number for who is being arrested in what part.”

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On Wednesday, on the eve of Independence Day, Syed Javaid Mujtaba Gilani, Additional Director General of Police, Armed, Jammu and Kashmir police, said, “There have been detentions under Public Safety Act, we are not denying that. There have been preventive arrests as well. Some people have also been shifted out of the state.” 

On the same day, former IAS officer-turned-politician Shah Faesal became the latest public figure to be detained in New Delhi without cause and spirited away to an undisclosed location. He joins three former Chief Ministers Farooq Abdullah, Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, who continue to remain under detention since August 5 2019. Other prominent political detainees include veteran National Conference leader and former Member of Parliament Mohammad Shafi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s one-time ally and former cabinet minister Sajad Gani Lone, who once described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as his older brother.

Last week, the valley’s most widely read English daily Greater Kashmir reported that more than 500 political leaders and activists have been arrested, including the president of Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association Mian Abdul Qayoom, activist Raja Muzaffar Bhat, former advisor of chief minister Mufti, Waheed Para, trade union leaders Shakeel Qalander, and Yasin Khan; and activist and wife of Hurriyat leader Nayeem Khan, Professor Hameeda Nayeem. A PTI report last week had said that 20 people including Qayoom had been transferred to Agra Central Jail. The report described them as “potential trouble makers”.

All communication lines in the valley remain severed, making it difficult for journalists and civil society activists to estimate just how many people have been jailed. Meanwhile, a police source told HuffPost India that the total number of those detained could be as high as 1500.

The government’s refusal to share the numbers of detainees is in sharp contrast to the eagerness with which the state has been quick to publicise estimates of the number of people who supposedly offered Eid prayers in the state. 

“In the entire area of Jammu and Kashmir, we have reports or Eid prayers having been peacefully concluded. In Jammu, for example, 5000 people offered Eid prayers at the Eidgah…in Kashmir, people offered prayers in Baramulla…over 10,000 people offered prayers at the historic Jamia Masjid (Baramulla)...everywhere the prayers were facilitated,” the government spokesperson said on Monday. 

The Eid prayer numbers are meant to indicate that “normal life” has  resumed in the valley.

But when HuffPost India specifically asked the J&K government’s official spokesperson, Rohit Kansal, about the number of those detained, he said, “We have no idea about the numbers.”

Night raids in South Kashmir 

Outside Srinagar, in south Kashmir’s volatile Shopian district, dozens of residents told HuffPost India about the widespread night raids carried out by the army since August 4.  

“Four youths were arrested from our village last week,” said Bashir Ahmad, a resident of Imam Sahab village in Shopian. “Their parents queued up outside the camp every morning for any information about the whereabouts of their kin.”

Ahmad said the spree of raids carried out by the forces has instilled fear among the local population. 

“After the lockdown, we somehow managed to bring home one of my brother’s sons studying at a college in Baramulla. Now, we are wary that he might be arrested as well as the raids continue throughout the night. We have told him to not move out of his home at all,” Ahmad said. 

On Wednesday, in New Delhi, Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association, and a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), told HuffPost Indiathat she had spoken with an 11-year-old child who had been picked up security forces and detained for days without charge.

“They are making it a point to raid houses in the night and take away young boys in the night,” said Krishnan, who had just returned to Delhi after a five day fact-finding mission in Kashmir. “Parents said they have been picked up on the way to mosques, from their homes, from their beds at night.”

When HuffPost India tried to reach Army spokesperson Rajesh Kalia in Srinagar through the only working cell phone number at Media Facilitation Centre in Srinagar, his phone was not reachable. 

This reporter also tried to meet the Army spokesperson in Srinagar at his office, but was not allowed entry inside the army camp.