Heba Ahmed

Assistant Professor, Political Science. PhD student, JNU. Occasional ranter.

[Arunava Sinha @arunava]

You can buy (and read) 500-600 translated books instead of the IPhone Duo, and every single one of them can be flipped open.

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Dushyant Arora @atti_cus]

"RSS distancing" is a story which started with Gandhi's assassination and is continuing with Ram Mandir Robbery.

[S lrfan Habib एस इरफान हबीब عرفان حبئب @irfhabib]

Always been so proud of you Justice Murlidhar🙏

[Mayukh Biswas @MayukhDuke]

The newly elected BJP govt in the West Bengal broke a statue commemorating the 1859 Indigo Rebellion in Bongaon.

They are erasing all traces of the anti-colonial struggle, only to surrender at the feet of the new master- the USA.

[Reuters @Reuters]

Palestinians ran in central Gaza for the 10th edition of Palestine International Marathon, which brought together some 1,900 participants, according to organizers. The marathon followed a two-year halt due to the war

[Angshuman Choudhury @angshuman_ch]

So far, not a single argument from the Delhi foreign policy durbar on why India should not mediate has been convincing enough to make much sense, if you scratch them deep. Every one of them begins with “this is not our war” and ends with “we don’t have a recent history of mediation.” These are excuses, not arguments.

On Islamabad’s role, our responses generally circle back to “the Pakistanis have made themselves useful” & “they have a history with the warring sides.” Again, excuses.

Do we not have a “history” with both sides? Why haven’t we made ourselves useful? Is it because neither side trusts us enough? Or is it that we undid all of that history and trust by making a series of strategic blunders, among which receiving a medal from the Knesset three days before the war sits at the very top?

Would we ever have any compelling answers to these questions?

[Avani Bansal @bansalavani]

A lawyer’s midnight thoughts as Didi is set to take centerstage in SC in a few hours!

#MamataBanerjee (Didi) is set to argue in the SC today, challenging the ECI on the #SIR exercise. I like millions of others can’t wait to watch this unfold!

But here is the BIG HOPE that I am putting out there - perhaps this will be a chance to ask the META question that the SC hasn’t answered so far in the SIR debate!

The legal debate on SIR has so far revolved around safeguards: which documents should be accepted, how names should be published, what timelines should apply. Courts have rightly insisted on transparency and fairness.

Yet, the most fundamental question remains largely unaddressed -

Why is the burden of proving citizenship placed on the citizen in the first place?

That question is not procedural.
It is constitutional.

India’s legal system is extraordinarily efficient at answering technical questions.

Which rule applies.
Which document is valid.
Which authority has jurisdiction.

But when it comes to first-order constitutional questions - about power, accountability, & the moral architecture of the State, it often falls silent.

This silence is not accidental.
It’s structural.

Our system is designed to resolve disputes, not to interrogate design. It prefers procedure over philosophy, compliance over consequence. The result is a legal culture that constantly answers how something is done, but rarely asks whether it should exist in that form at all.

The current controversy around SIR is a telling example -not because SIR is unique, but because it exposes this deeper institutional habit.

Citizenship, under our constitutional framework, is a foundational status. Rights flow from it; it is not something that must be continuously re-established to the satisfaction of the State. When administrative exercises begin from suspicion rather than presumption, citizenship quietly shifts from being a right to being a claim.

This is not unique to SIR.

We saw it earlier in the NRC process in Assam - where documentary proof became the gateway to belonging, & where the absence of paper was treated as evidence of doubt. The legal system managed the process, supervised timelines, & resolved disputes but never fully confronted the deeper implication of what it meant for a republic to ask its citizens to prove their right to exist within it.

When electoral bonds were struck down as unconstitutional, the Court addressed the structure of the scheme but left untouched the democratic consequences already produced by it.

In criminal justice, undertrials spend years in prison only to be acquitted later. The system calls this delay. The Constitution calls liberty fundamental. Yet there is no serious institutional mechanism to ask who bears responsibility for stolen time.

Media trials destroy reputations long before courts speak. We invoke free speech & move on, without asking why parallel systems of punishment are allowed to flourish.

Even within courtrooms, deeper questions remain unasked.

Why does access to judicial time correlate so strongly with wealth?
Why do some cases stretch over days while others are dismissed in minutes?
Why do judges exercise enormous administrative power without structured accountability or continuity?

These are not accusations.
They are design questions.

But design questions are the ones institutions most resist because they expose not individual failures, but systemic choices.

The absence of meta questioning serves a purpose. A system that keeps citizens occupied with technicalities prevents them from seeing the larger picture. Procedure becomes a substitute for justice; compliance becomes a substitute for legitimacy.

And yet, constitutional law was never meant to be a technical toolkit alone. It was meant to be a moral framework that disciplines power.

Will Didi’s presence in the court, setting a precedence of a sitting CM arguing in the SC, change this?

Cannot wait to watch & hear!

Image - AI

[Achyut Chetan @achyutchetan]

When Amartya Sen won the Nobel for Economics, many of his ideas, and less technical essays, started coming down from the high academic world to common readers. After casually flipping through them, a friend of mine, an IITian, and hence considered brilliant by everyone (including himself), told me that there is nothing great about his work, and anyone could do all that development thinking: a bit of probability, elementary mathematics, a lot of rhetoric, choice, equality and other everyday words. In other words, even a low-ranking engineering graduate from a mediocre Engineering College (In 1998, there were no world rankings of institutions, but in 2011, IIT Kanpur was ranked somewhere below 250 in the world), could presume that he was intellectually superior to a Nobel Prize winner in a social science discipline.

Through some strange twists, the Francesca Orsini affair has sparked a war of disciplines––more accurately, an assault on the humanities and social sciences––on social media and other platforms. It's a caricature of what CP Snow had once called the battle between "The Two Cultures". For it to be a genuine war, we need the best practitioners of both 'cultures' speaking to each other, understanding one another, and THEN critiquing each other. In an age of superspecialization, that seems hardly possible, and that is quite understandable.

I have no way of proving it, but I know it by intuition, that the best in any field will not berate the best in another field, even if their own ideas lead to very different conclusions. While we celebrate Dante's Ptolemaic geocentric world in his great epic, we do not say Copernicus and Gallileo, and the whole of modern science is a mere superstition. Tagore and J C Bose were friends, but Bose never wanted to write a lyric, and Tagore never wanted to do science. There were many challenges to Freud, including some from his own disciples, but Einstein never questioned Freud's intellect. So when a science or commerce guy criticises top humanities and social science scholars, you know how mediocre they are in their own fields; and the vice-versa.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

I want to post a point of historic fact regarding the current "border" of Gaza.

The 1949 armistice line was actually 3 kilometers wider along the full perimeter of the Gaza Strip. However, Israel declared this area as a "buffer zone," and ultimately absorbed it as de facto Jewish-only territory.

Those lands around the strip, called the Gaza envelop, are technically supposed to be part of the strip itself. But Israel built settlements and farms there.

Today, when Israel talks about creating a "buffer zone," it's actually a buffer zone of the buffer zone, and so imperialism by the inch continues.

[Angshuman Choudhury @angshuman_ch]

Prof Tripathi is one in a billion & will be remembered in history as a shining pillar of empathy. Those bullying him are ordinary hatemongerers who will be swiftly & easily forgotten.

Go on, prof ✊🏽

[mohammed hussein~Gaza 🇵🇸 @mohammedIhysse]

When I defended my Master’s thesis under the bombing and rubble of Gaza, the very first question I was asked was:
“Why defend it under these circumstances? What benefit will it bring you now?”

I smiled and answered:
“Maybe I will die holding this degree, maybe it will be a symbol of resilience and strength, and maybe I will inspire others not to abandon their dreams — even in danger, even when death is near.”

This is who I am.
I am proud of what I did.
Proud that I defended my Master’s during the war.
Proud to have become a Palestinian researcher ✌️

[Angshuman Choudhury @angshuman_ch]

Imagine giving someone just *10 days* to prove their documentary citizenship & then using the district admin (instead of a proper court) to disenfranchise them. That’s the new citizenship determination SOP in Assam.

This new regime of exclusion (1/n)

https://t.co/oyJridARDY

[Nimer Sultany @NimerSultany]

One way to support @FranceskAlbs is to read, circulate, cite, quote, and teach the rigorous reports she has written on self-determination, carceral system, child rights, genocide, and corporate complicity. Here is a list:

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

"The Iron Dome protects civilians!"

No, the Iron Dome protects the Israeli regime from deterrence. We see this in the comfort the regime shows waging constant military violence on its neighbors knowing they can't retaliate. That's why Israel made a peace deal with Iran so fast.

Iran's advanced missiles can't be stopped by the Iron Dome, so Iran was able to smash Israel and force it to cease its unprovoked aggressions. If Israel had had a missile defense system which could casually swat those missiles out of the sky at a high rate of success, Israel would still be bombing Iran today, and would continue doing so until Tehran looked like Gaza. Israel's war-horny population would have supported this, because they'd have no skin in the game.

Saying you support funding Israel's "defensive weapons" while opposing sending it "offensive weapons" is as nonsensical as saying you would never give a mass shooter guns and ammunition, but you would give him body armor to keep him safe from the police. You're helping him commit mass murder just as much as you would be if you gave him guns and ammo.

If you believe a state is committing genocide, there is no justifiable reason for you to support enhancing that state's military capabilities and helping it defend itself from those who try to stop it. As others have pointed out, this is exactly the same as opposing Hitler's Holocaust but supporting giving anti-aircraft flak cannons to Nazi Germany.

It's a self-evidently ridiculous, warmongering, and ultimately genocidal position, disguised as progressive humanitarianism. It's all the ugliest things about western liberalism.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Hi Leslie, I'm a historian of Palestine. I spent 15 years of my life studying the history of the 6 paragraphs of propaganda you shared above. Virtually every sentence in this post is misinformation. Let's dive in:

1. "Palestine was largely a wasteland." During the last few decades of Ottoman rule, Palestine was experiencing rapid economic growth through its booming export industry of oranges, cotton, tobacco, wheat and barley and other commodities. Education was rapidly spreading in the late Ottoman period, as were lots of large infrastructure projects like roads and railways. Your characterization of the land as "a wasteland" speaks to your own bigotry and racism, not to Palestine. For 2 good books on the topic, see Alexander Schölch's Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882 as well as Ben-Bassat & Ginio's Late Ottoman Palestine : the period of young Turk rule.

2. With regard to the legality of the Jewish colonies in Palestine: they were all illegal, as the Ottoman government forbade foreign Jews from establishing residence in Palestine in the fall of 1881. Whoops, i guess you forgot to mention 100% of Zionists were illegal settlers who, incidentally, did not describe themselves as "returnees" as you did, but described themselves as colonizers. For more the illegality, see: https://t.co/iB0ym6H6jT For more on their own self-conception as colonizers, see: https://t.co/QIGHoYlGmm.

3. With regard to "these migrants were indigenous to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, drawn by the opportunities the Jews created" -- you are referencing the thoroughly debunked work of Joan Peters, who makes this argument in her fraudulent book from Time Immemorial in which she literally makes up data, invents number and falsifies documents. 0 serious historians cite that book, other than to illustrate it was a piece of fraudulent research. you can learn more about that here: https://t.co/EFh1opS56O

4. You are correct that most Palestinians, who constituted 2/3rds of the population, rejected giving 55% of their country to 1/3rd of its inhabitants who owned less than 6% of the land, most of which was acquired through colonial violence and minority rule. But it sounds like you believe anti-democracy and colonial violence are just methods of acquiring land?

5. You spread countless myths and lies about the Palestinian people. This thread thoroughly debunks every point you make about the Palestinains: https://t.co/iVehfkkL6M

If you are ever curious to learn more about the history of Zionism, Israel or Palestine, you can check out my courses on the topic: https://t.co/SMV6pMrxEi

[Buffalo Intellectual @ProfRavikantK]

war always brings censorship-- the 'new normal' rarely ever goes back to 'how things were'.

[Karwan e Mohabbat (Caravan of Love) @karwanemohabbat]

How should we grieve Pahalgam, asks Supreme Court lawyer, Shahrukh Alam, raising other more urgent questions about belonging and identity in hyper-nationalist times.

[Alishan Jafri @alishan_jafri]

A very insignificant word is missing from all these headlines. Can you guess?

[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

If you want to know how far humanity has fallen in the West, and how small and pathetic Westerners have become, consider this:

During the Nazi holocaust, there were many, many thousands of people - just normal people - who risked their life by saving and hiding Jews. Oskar Schindler became well-known for that, but there were many others. Albanian Muslims refused to cooperate with Nazi instructions concerning Jews, and saved the lives of hundreds. In France, Poland, the Netherlands, and other places, ordinary citizens were willing to put their lives and the lives of their families in danger to save Jews.

80 years later, European leaders and communities won't dare defy Jewish lobbies as they enforce cultural compliance with openly televised genocide, including starvation, massacres, and relentless barbaric destruction of everything and everyone.

80 years ago, people resisted, joined underground movements and became partisans, and were willing to put their lives on the line for humanity. Today, people can't even take a sharp rebuke or the fear of arrest, or a canceled contract. Reality is 'too much' for them, so they recede further and further into a make-believe world

The human spirit in the West has dwindled into a heap of basically nothing. Every child and idiot can be their dictator
-
And I promise you this: if Russia or China decided to genocide a people, or part of their population, there would be more resistance than there is in the West. The system would not be able to contain it, and many soldiers would defect or resort to sabotage and mutiny. Not in the West. The West is spiritually and mentally dead, lost in delirious, self-cancelling doubt and anxiety. A civilization of monsters and ghosts