“Who’s going to pay the price?”

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Yes, India’s police minister Amit Shah often called Bangladeshi immigrants “termites.” Just the same way, here in America, Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists and murderers.”

How strikingly similar are India’s BJP of Modi and Shah, and America’s Republican Party (or GOP) of Trump! Both parties are supremacist: BJP is Hindu supremacist, and GOP is white Christian supremacist. The mastermind of Trump’s anti-immigrant hate is Steve Miller. And in India, it’s perhaps Amit Shah.

There are other similarities. Behind the Republicans are huge and violent forces, such as National Rifle Association (NRA) and KKK. Behind BJP is extremely militant RSS, an organization I was deeply involved with from 1962 through 1979.

Both KKK and RSS have been ardent supporters or followers of Hitler, Mussolini or such fascist or Nazi forces. Both organizations are anti-immigrant, anti-black, and anti-Muslim. Both are fiercely anti-socialist. In India, RSS is also fiercely anti-Christian, but they have downplayed it now, because they don’t want to irk Trump and lose his support.

Both BJP and GOP are for total privatization of the economy. In fact, they want to do away with the government; to them, as Ronald Reagan said, “Government is the problem.” They want to keep a skeletal government, mainly for military, police, and mass-spying agencies such as FBI and CIA in America, and RAW in India.

Most importantly, both forces want to use a democratic electioneering system to actually destroy and replace the traditional system with an authoritarian “One religion, one country, one language, one leadership” structure.

In fact, that is a stark reminder of how Hitler came to power in Germany.

In 1930’s Germany, Hitler called the Jews something similar to what Trump calls the Mexican immigrants and Amit Shah calls the Bangladeshis. He called the Jews “dangerous bacillus,” which means germs, bacteria. But because nobody reads history anymore, or analyzes it, reality like it is now forgotten or ignored.

Especially today, in case of India, the people in power want to divert people’s attention off the gravely ill economy, catastrophic climate crisis, unemployment, income inequality, or the countrywide violence on women and other weaker sections of the society. The manipulated, artificial crisis in Kashmir or the new NRC crisis in Assam is highly expedient.

On one hand, we have massively rich communities like Ambani and Adani (or in case of America, the Walton family or Koch Brothers), and with them we have their Goebbels-style media corporations, working closely with Trump, Modi, Shah, and RSS’ supremo Bhagwat.

Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In today’s India and USA, corporate media have been following that model for a long time. And they have successfully brainwashed the ordinary people. Nobody realizes that in a true democracy, dissent is essential; in fact, dissent is patriotic. Now, with mafia on the ground, Indian voices of dissent are branded as traitors. They are heckled and harassed. In cases like Gauri Lankesh, Kalburgi or Panesor, they have killed those voices. For others like Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, Medha Patekar or Nasiruddhin Shah, they have undermined their credibility.

The new NRC chapter is an integral part of this game. We’ve had Pulwama, and we’ve have Kashmir. Now the new episode is Assam and NRC. The so-called National Registration of Citizens pushed off two million (twenty lakhs) ordinary, innocent people of Indian citizenship, and put them in serious jeopardy. These people are mostly Bengali Muslims or Hindus, many are lifelong Indian residents. Now they are without status. They are neither Indian, nor Bangladeshi, nor of any other country. Major despair, poverty, disease, starvation, joblessness face them. Some have already killed themselves after the government published the first list of “non-citizens.”

This is a historic chapter of barbarism. An international crime – crime that global media such as the New York Times, BBC, the Guardian and Al Jazeerah have all strongly criticized.

Where are these two million people going to go, from an economic and social point of view? They will escape and hide for some time, and they will then die, or go to prison camps Indian government is building following U.S.-style private prison. America’s private prison is all about making profit out of putting people in jail. They even trade their shares on the stock market. Don’t believe me? Look up Geo and CCC – two big private prison corporations on Google.

Then, out of these hapless people, many would end up in Bangladesh (or West Bengal) to save lives – the way Rohingya refugees did. That is going to put major financial and space burden on Bangladesh, which is perhaps a part of the game too. Squeeze Bangladesh’s economy to death, because right now, India’s economy is sinking and Indian rupee has hit an all-time low. Make Bangladesh and Pakistan equally miserable, and save face. We need to understand all these various pieces of the puzzle – the various elements of the big game.

Then, end result of all this misery would be more violence, and more terrorism. And reaction to that violence and terror would be more violence, war, hate, bigotry, and repression. More hunger, despair, and more religious fanaticism and social divisiveness. Both on the Hindu and Muslim sides.

So, let us try to answer the question I asked above, “Who’s going to pay the price?”

I wait for your answer.

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Photo courtesy: CNN (not-for-profit, educational use)