naireeta de

greatest strength: self-sabotage 🌻

[naireeta de @naireetade]

@birdsofparadyes stan account

[Karthik 🇮🇳 @beastoftraal]

Watch closely and Modi's 'forgiveness' video does 6 things at once... and none of them are about forgiveness at all. It reframes a protest into a family drama, and asks the country to watch it as one:

1. Selective gendering of outrage
Modi's latest video registers "cultural shock" only at "our daughters" using abusive language. There's no equivalent line for the male protesters in the same crowd using identical language, possibly because of how BJP's IT Cell and "supporters" online (including the handles followed by Modi himself) have thoroughly normalized all sorts of abuse online for years. Modi's silence on this is hardly neutral, I believe - it simply marks women's transgression as the one requiring special anguish, while male vulgarity remains background noise, unremarked and continued to be "employed" to browbeat, shut down and instill fear.

2. Paternalism as agency erasure
Adult and near-adult (recently vocal) political actors are reduced to "misguided children" and "daughters" who have "lost their way" and need the leader's guidance. The language converts protest into a parenting problem. It strips them of political subjectivity and repositions them as dependents requiring moral correction rather than citizens making a political claim.

3. Forgiveness as optics, not principle
The public offer of forgiveness is conveyed even as BJP-aligned accounts published protesters' home addresses, phone numbers, workplace details, and family names (one office-bearer publicly called for more women to be "identified" and "made famous" with FIRs filed and no apology to be accepted). CNN-News18 went on a hounding spree too, with camera in hand. One protester received explicit death and rape threats while another was pressured into a filmed apology. Modi's video performs magnanimity while the machinery of 'state-led consequence' runs in parallel, goaded by BJP's supporters. Magnaimity in the sheets, hounding in the streets.

4. Civility as deflection
By elevating the tone of the abuse above the substance of the protest, the message relocates the story. Modi's video never once names the paper-leak allegations or the Education Minister's position and eventual resignation while blaming 'anti-national forces', the actual grievance that brought students to Jantar Mantar in the first place. Language becomes the crime while the underlying question of institutional accountability is removed from the frame.

5. Consistent paternal style, not a one-off
This is not an exception, of course. From Beti Bachao Beti Padhao's "daughters of the nation" idiom to this video's "we don't disown our teeth even if they bite our tongue", Modi's communication style has a standing template: the nation as family, himself as well-intended, insanely wise, corrective father, and dissent as waywardness requiring his patient guidance. The latest video just applies the same template to a fresh set of dissenters.

6. Who does the work in "forgiveness"
The video assigns every party a role: he forgives (the active gesture), they must learn (the passive correction), and the public is invited to embrace his account f events as the shared, settled one. It's not just that the video erases the protesters' agency, but it recruits the audience into ratifying the paternal frame as consensus, so that anyone still angry looks like they're refusing the leader's generosity rather than continuing to ask a legitimate question. Stupendously wily.

[Damn. @Theonenameddamn]

Guys, do you know what the biggest downgrade in world history is? Imagine a man who studies Economics at the University of Cambridge. He then goes on to earn a PhD from the University of Oxford. After that, he becomes a professor at Delhi University. He serves as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and also as the Chief Economic Advisor. He later becomes the Finance Minister of India for five years and then serves as the Prime Minister of the country for ten years.And then he's replaced by a an uneducated person. I don't know which country this is about, but if you ask me, that's the biggest downgrade in world history. The biggest downgrade.

[Arya @Arya_Patel19801]

There's no Neutral anymore. You either stand with India, or with the frauds.

[maha thandi magnum @JiyaAhuja14]

how can yjhd be a comfort movie for y'all that bunny gives me an ick

[Jill Filipovic @JillFilipovic]

"Women have very little idea of how much men hate them." -Germaine Greer

[Sarah Ironside 💙 @SarahIronside6]

Tonight I learned something I’ve always suspected. Most people will support a rapist over a woman.

[A 🇦🇪 @tutututuulip]

i don’t believe men mature later than women, i believe they’re just allowed to be more immature and have less judgement imposed on them for longer than women.

[Sucharita @Su4ita]

I am not Nirbhaya. She was not Nirbhaya. I am scared. She was scared. We are ALL scared of ALL men ALL the time.

[naireeta de @naireetade]

Oops @basedevel

[maddie, hot dog enthusiast @damnitmadeline]

Bf dropped his head for a full 30 seconds of silence bc he was explaining the stock market crash to me and I sagely supplied “it’s because mercury went into retrograde yesterday”

[Jordan Burroughs @alliseeisgold]

GIVE VINESH SILVER! 🥈

[vishal dayama @VishalDayama]

the extra 100g is from that invincible medal she has been wearing all this time

[ESPN India @ESPNIndia]

A year of protest against the federation chief.
Slept on pavements for 40 days.
Was beaten, dragged by the police.
Nearly immersed all her medals in the Ganga.
Underwent knee surgery.
Sealed her Olympic spot after an unforgiving qualification process.
Became the 1st Indian woman wrestler to qualify for three successive Olympics.

And now, she's beaten the unbeatable defending champ, won two more bouts to become the first Indian woman to reach a wrestling Olympic final.

Words fail to appreciate what Vinesh Phogat has just done.

https://t.co/ItdNkkWO1w | #Paris2024

[Women Posting W's @womenpostingws]

From being water cannoned by police to winning an Olympic medal

Vinesh Phogat of India makes history by beating the undefeated (for 81 matches) world champion in wrestling, assuring her an Olympic medal

Last year, she was one of the wrestlers leading a protest against the WFI president, who has a rape charge against him

This will be her first Olympic medal and it's one that is well deserved ❤️

[Rishabh Chakrabarti @basedevel]

@JoeBiden kehna chahun, barbaad kare alfaaz mere

[Aamir Khan Productions @AKPPL_Official]

16 years and we are still singing this song for everyone we love ❤️

[Sayantan Ghosh @sayantansunnyg]

Congratulations also to everyone who kept the argument alive on WhatsApp groups with their friends, families, colleagues and those who didn't shy away from uncomfortable conversations with people they love around dinner tables only for what they believed is right.