Above: President Donald Trump holds hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India as they take a walk together on Sunday, September. 22, 2019, around the NRG Stadium in Houston, TX. Photo by White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
Four states have purged Muslim voters by the millions. The states are West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Kerala.
Forgive me the click-bait headline, but I need to get your attention to how India’s Hindu nationalist party has applied the voter-purge trickery and anti-immigrant race-baiting that Trump promises to import to the USA.
This is no accident: Trump cronies have spread their dark magic on the targeting of voters of the wrong color or religion from Hungary to Russia and other proto-fascist states. And now, with great success, they’ve taught Trump’s Hindu fascist BFF, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi even hired Trump’s bodyguard.
India’s state elections this week produced Trump’s wet dream. In West Bengal alone, 9.1 million people, overwhelmingly Muslims, were stripped from the voter rolls, tagged — using AI — as suspected alien voters who crossed illegally from Bangladesh and Myanmar (Burma).
Modi’s voter purge assaults hit eleven other states including Tamil Nadu (9.78 million purged), Rajasthan (3.1 million) and my beloved Kerala (2.4 million). Kēraḷa valare sundaram āṇu. [Look it up!]
The result: Modi’s Party, the right-wing BJP, won a “shock” election victory this week in a state, West Bengal, that’s India’s political equivalent of California. I wasn’t shocked, however, given the scrub of millions from the rolls.
Trump’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act is a sickening replica of Modi’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) policy.
We are launching a voter protection campaign before the midterms to expose and challenge the latest in vote suppression horrors, taking on the purge’n generals in Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin and Arizona, working with our partners Black Voters Matter Fund, Transformative Justice Coalition and Rainbow PUSH. At its heart will be six investigative reports – plus, clear instructions on how to stop the games and save your vote.
Join this effort and get your name in the credits (or other cool swag) for your tax-deductible donation.
Trump’s program, like Modi’s, would scour voter rolls for suspected aliens. Modi has created a citizenship roll which is as screwed up as the ICE/DHS list of deportees which Trump would use to hunt down the aliens on our own rolls. This was tried once before, when the DHS list was used to purge 179,000 Florida voters. Of that group, Florida charged only a single alien voter (a Republican!) who was not a citizen. Yet tens of thousands of folks named “Rodriguez” lost their vote.
The Indian government shrugs off its errors, saying the purged voters can apply to the courts for reinstatement. In fact, of the 9.1 million Bengalis purged, an astonishing 3.4 million legally challenged their loss of voting rights. Yet, as reported on Democracy Now, only 2000 have had their cases heard.
This sure as hell sounds like the trick pulled off by Trump front-group True the Vote, self-styled vote-fraud hunters who proudly challenged some 800,000 voters in the last presidential. Yes, True the Vote’s victims could appeal to authorities — in person. One of their targets, African-American career military expert, MAJ. Gamaliel Turner, had to fly 2,700 miles to get his ballot counted.
Both Modi and Trump are matching lists and names to hunt down “duplicate” voters. In the US, the discredited Crosscheck Program, which Trump’s SAVE Act would bring back, previously purged literally tens of thousands of voters named “Garcia.” In India, the purged are named “Khan.”
The parallels between Modi’s and Trump’s suppression tactics are deep and creepy. In West Bengal, the government deployed AI to tag voters using such criteria as excessively large families or a wide difference in age between husband and wife…a little demographic trick they know will hit Muslims hardest. Similarly, Trump’s former attorney, Cleta Mitchell has launched a group, EagleAI, which set out to challenge a quarter million voters using a mystery AI program.
Another ugly parallel: The GOP is pulling all-nighters to re-draw Congressional district lines following last week’s Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais to allow Jim Crow gerrymandering to eliminate Black representation. This is right up Modi’s ally. His own racial gerrymandering (they call it “delimitation” in India) cut the number of Muslim-majority constituencies in Assam State, for example, from 35 to 21. Maybe that’s why he and Trump like to hold hands.
And the most chilling, deadly parallel: Modi’s 2019 amendment to the Citizenship Act specifically excludes Muslim immigrants from a program to grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians fleeing persecution.
And there are darker implications of the US following down India’s fascist path: The West Bengal opposition says poll workers were beaten to death. Every election in India is turning into a January 6. I wonder if Modi, though, will go so far as to pardon the rioters.
Hand in hand, the world’s largest democracies are becoming less so. Cry for our beloved countries.
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