The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Thind (1923) impacted all South Asians in the United States and led to the denaturalization of over fifty South Asian Americans who had already become naturalized citizens. One of them was Vaishno Das Bagai—and though Bagai’s painful story has been told before, records I recently discovered in the National Archives further reveal the deliberate and organized campaign that the U.S. government waged against South Asian Americans after Thind. As we mark the 100th anniversary of the decision, there are lessons we can draw from this history to reckon with racism and xenophobia today.

Born in Peshawar in 1891, Bagai was an early supporter of India’s freedom and independence from the British and was already working with the Ghadar Party in San Francisco when he decided to settle in the United States following his father’s death. He had inherited a good deal of land which could have cemented his family’s livelihood in Peshawar for the next generation. Instead, he used a portion of his inheritance to start a new life for himself and his family in the United States.

Bagai arrived in San Francisco on September 6, 1915 with his wife Kala and their three young sons, Brij, Madan, and Ram. He was eager to continue the cause of Indian independence and to allow his children to grow up in the United States. As his granddaughter Rani recounted some years later, Bagai “relished his new life in America.” He owned a home, started a business called Bagai’s Bazaar, and continued his work with the Ghadar Party.

And just over two weeks after his arrival, he declared his intention to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. In his application he declared that he would “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity” to the King of Great Britain and Ireland, become a citizen of the United States of America, and permanently reside in the U.S. He formally filed his naturalization papers five years later and secured the signatures of two witnesses.

That South Asian Americans were able to successfully naturalize was an anomaly. Other Asian immigrants had already been barred from naturalized citizenship on the grounds that they were not “white” as required by the nation’s naturalization laws dating back to 1790. It would not be until the Supreme Court ruled in the Thind decision, on February 19, 1923, that South Asians were not considered “white.”

The Thind decision dealt a devastating blow to all South Asians in the United States, especially those who had become naturalized citizens. It disrupted dreams. It put already vulnerable people at further risk of discrimination. And it further codified anti-Asian racism.

For Bagai, it proved to be too much. He had staked so much in America. He had tried to do everything that immigrants were supposed to do. He wore American suits, spoke English fluently, and adopted Western manners. As he later explained, the family had “all made ourselves as much Americanized as possible.”

But after he was denaturalized, everything changed. Without U.S. citizenship, Bagai became subjected to California’s alien land laws which barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” i.e. Asian immigrants, from owning land. He was forced to give up his property, including Bagai’s Bazaar. When he tried to visit relatives in India in 1928, he was refused a U.S. passport. Struggling with this injustice and feeling trapped and betrayed, in 1928 Vaishno Das died by suicide. In a letter addressed to the San Francisco Examiner, he explained that he was taking his life in protest.

I end my story with a famous quote written by America’s great scholar and a jurist.

Is life worth living in a gilded cage? Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind.

__________________

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his articles.

Read: America’s betrayal of Europe!

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By Ed Simon

[Editor’s Note: This essay was submitted for publication before the official release of the US Supreme Court’s final round of opinions for the term, including in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.]

At the time that I wrote this essay, a woman’s access to abortion was technically the constitutionally mandated law of the land. By the time that you read this article, Roe v. Wade will have been struck down by the Supreme Court, speaking to how rapidly the United States is being transformed by an extreme right-wing political project. If you read this column again, let’s say in a year after the midterm elections, and if the Republicans have retaken both the House and the Senate, then fully expect that there will be a national abortion ban, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised, for when it comes to the most extreme of their positions, the ultra-right is always reliable in at least that regard. Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization rather disingenuously and mockingly claimed that abortion rights would become entirely a states’ issue, but the revanchists have been wasting no time to ensure a federal ban on a basic issue of women’s bodily autonomy.

Last week, the libertarian “think tank” the Heritage Foundation, who believe in the unfettered freedom to poison the environment and exploit workers but not to make intimately personal decisions about your own health, held a “Life after Roe Symposium,” endorsing a federal ban on abortion. The National Right to Life Committee has plans that are even more dystopian, criminalizing speech that’s pro-choice, with Susan Rinkulas of Jezebel aptly describing such proposed policy as establishing a “worsening hell of criminalization, state surveillance, and maternal deaths.” At their Washington DC symposium, the Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts intoned “We’re being called to reclaim this country.”

Believe the fascists when they say this, and believe that the sweeping, radical, authoritarian program they have in mind for the United States includes not just a ban on abortion, but the establishment of a de facto Christian theocracy. 

A June 2022 poll from ABS News/Ipsos reported that 70% of Americans support comprehensive gun control legislation, with Ivana Saric of Axios noting that “Americans overwhelmingly prioritize gun control over ownership rights,” but on June 23, the Supreme Court struck down even the most tepid of common-sense gun control in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the same day that the court gutted Miranda Rights. The first decision’s majority opinion was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife it’s always worth noting was enthusiastically involved in the attempted coup on January 6th.

An October 2021 poll from the Pew Research Council revealed that 54% of Americans support a robust separation of church and state, but this week’s decision in Carson v. Makin mandated that states must support explicitly religious education with taxpayer money, though many on the right are already adamant on just what constitutes a faith, with Josh Blackman of Reason magazine claiming that Reform Judaism is undeserving of religious freedom protections since he maintains that their beliefs aren’t held “sincerely.”

Meanwhile, just this month Gallup demonstrated that 55% of Americans identify as “pro-choice,” and even larger majorities reject the most extreme positions of the forced-birthing movement. Yet all of us fully expect that Roe v. Wade will be struck down before the end of the month. Worth remembering that of the unelected justices empowered with making these decisions, a third (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were appointed by Donald Trump, who received far less than half of the popular vote. And, while John Roberts and Samuel Alito were appointed during George W. Bush’s second term, he first took office after losing the popular vote as well. This is the most manifestly anti-democratic court since Chief Justice Roger Taney’s in the years before the Civil War. That the Supreme Court in no way represents the interests or beliefs of the mass of the electorate is a truism so obvious it sometimes goes unstated, but it’s important to state it, emphatically and often. Even more disturbingly, obviously, is to what end all of these decisions are being made, for as Elie Mystal and Ryan Doerfler note at The Nation, the ”court’s conservatives – now a rock-solid majority – seem ready to complete the ideological project even openly and triumphantly.”

To focus only on the judicial activism from the bench is to miss the forest for the trees, however, for our slide into autocracy isn’t just manifested with 6-3 decisions out of the Supreme Court, but from the rank and file of the national and state GOP, and the armed shock troops of the Republican Party’s ongoing insurrection, from the Proud Boys to the Three Percenters. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1913 that the states were the “laboratories of democracy;” today they’re rather the torture cells of autocracy. As a case in point, examine the 2022 Texas State GOP’s official platform ratified this month, which among other planks proposes a state-level electoral college which would completely disenfranchise the majority of Texans, declaring LGBTQ people to be guilty of an “abnormal lifestyle choice” while proposing policies to strip them of their basic rights, officially maintaining that President Joseph Biden was not the winner of the 2020 election, and demanding a referendum be held by next year concerning secession.

For anyone not enraptured to patriotic pablum and paeans of American exceptionalism, the goal of the far right and the GOP, who are now synonymous, is obvious – to create a permanent state of reactionary minoritarian rule, where women and their doctors can be jailed because of abortion, where your tax money funds evangelical Christian schools, and where protest is kept in check by police and federal agents who can no longer be charged with the violation of individual rights, assisted by militias who’ve assembled an arsenal of millions of firearms. None of this is randomly decided and all of it is to work in tandem. In her book American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy, Trans activist and Senior Defense Analyst at the RAND Corporation Brynn Tannehill writes that American democracy isn’t “just in steep decline, but that we… [are] in the middle of an autocratic attempt.”

Everyone on the right understands and enthusiastically embraces this, save for maybe a few sad representatives who are accused of being “RINOs” by their own constituents and are unwilling to admit the role which the Republican Party played in getting us to this point. Some liberals and some leftists comprehend the score, but not yet enough, and entirely too many are also unwilling to admit how the quisling, milquetoast centrism of the DNC is responsible as well. The January 6th Committee, as admirable and necessary as that work may be, has engaged entirely too much in preaching to the choir, and not enough in preventing whatever awaits us on January 6th, 2025. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi seems, like most of her colleagues, too enraptured with the myth of the Good Republican, and President Biden has never availed himself of the rhetorical power of the bully pulpit right when we most need it.

That the Democratic Party seems unaware that the United States is headed to either an apartheid theocracy or civil war doesn’t mean that the bulk of voters don’t have that awareness. The unending litany of horrors that have appeared with increasing regularity since the 2016 presidential election don’t need to be subtly interpreted by most of us, from the increasingly genocidal anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of conservative politicians to the whitewashing of historical atrocity, to the cruel, misogynistic anti-abortion bounty-hunter laws enacted in Texas and elsewhere, to the proliferation of far-right American brownshirt phalanxes. In America, a well-armed mobocracy is instrumental to the maintenance of stochastic, reactionary tyranny. As Jeff Sharlet warns in his upcoming, brilliant book The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War,

Such are the spiritual truths of the Trumpocene… A ‘fringe’ that surrounds the center and moves inward, until suddenly there it is, the fringe, at the heart of things: the QAnon Shaman in the Senate chamber, or Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene… or Representative Lauren Boebert, who open carries; the ‘zip tie guy’ or Ginni Thomas, who helped plan that awful day in Washington.

Nobody sane wants a civil war, but how do we prevent it? How do we avoid fascism? General strike? Tax protest? Let me know by 2030 if you’re still allowed to read things like this.

___________________

Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a regular contributor at several different sites. He is also a contributing editor at the History News Network. He can be followed at his website, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

Courtesy: History News Network

The post Where Will America Be By 2030? first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Nilofar Suhrawardy

United States’ expertise at holding strategic command over controlling operation of diplomatic reins may well be assumed to have fumbled a little at propagation of so-called Ukraine-crisis because of alleged military designs of Russia. Yes, to a considerable degree, greater part of the world still depends on going by what is stated by White House as well as American media. Nevertheless, recent history has led several sections to reflect again on the degree to which United States’ “diplomatic communication” can be relied upon. United States’ sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan after around two decades has apparently served as an eye-opener about the degree to which dependence of a country on a superpower can be relied upon.

The Afghanistan-card played by United States and former Soviet Union had apparently more to do with former’s aim to have the upper edge in their rivalry as Superpowers. US succeeded and Soviet Union ceased to exist with many of its republics declaring independence. Three decades have passed since collapse of Soviet Union and diplomatic recognition of only United States as Super Power. But all is not over as yet. A key aim of Russian President Vladimir Putin is gaining again the former stature once held by Soviet Union. Putin is not oblivious of the fact that over-indulgence in war-games is going to be of no help to it. This apparently explains closer ties being entertained with China and attempts being made to increase friendship with countries viewed earlier as only US allies. United States is certainly keeping a close eye on these and is apparently not too pleased about the same. And this is one side of the story.

With respect to point made earlier about limited credibility of United States’ “diplomatic communication,” one may recall the hype once raised about so-called Arab Spring ushering (rather trying to impose) democracy in certain Arab countries. Certainly, the US media and White House went overboard in asserting this. All that is history now.

When India and Pakistan, non-signatories to Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) engaged in talks about their nuclear diplomacy, headlines of American media shrieked about these two permanent enemies heading towards MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), a nuclear war and so-forth. Despite skirmishes entertained between India and Pakistan, now and then, they have not backtracked from their nuclear diplomacy. 

Clearly, nature of United States’ diplomatic communication tends to have a specific purpose to suit its interest. If democracy could be imposed anywhere by external pressure, some importance could have been given to nature of the mirage called Arab Spring. Or if the same had not led to what is now worded as Arab Winter, hype raised about Arab Spring may have still prevailed. Similarly, United States’ Afghanistan-war has had virtually no impact on bringing terrorism in the region to a halt. The country and its citizens have been pushed backwards just as those affected by Arab Winter.

Now, against this backdrop, what can be said about United States asserting that Russian invasion of Ukraine can happen anytime? This may be viewed as the US perception which Washington wants the world to believe. From the other side, Russia has asserted a few times about it having “withdrawn” its troops, which Moscow is well aware that most countries won’t easily accept. At the same time, Russia is apparently well aware of cards which are likely to backfire on its attempts to retain its former earlier stature. Chances of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine may be viewed as fairly limited from this angle.

Besides, United States is fairly uncomfortable about dependence of many European Union members upon Russia for supply of natural gas. This explains Washington’s rigid opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is supported by Germany. Once Nord Stream 2 becomes functional, it would double the capacity of Nord Stream 1 pipeline. United States has asserted that it would block Nord Stream 2 if Russia attacks Ukraine. Economically and diplomatically, Russia’s concern is to push ahead Nord Stream 2. Ukraine stands to lose as this pipeline bypasses its territory making it lose the transit fees that Russia pays to send gas via its territory. Usage of Ukraine’s territory for commercial purposes also limits prospects of Russia invading the same.

Russia’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO is not likely to change in coming days. Ukraine’s desire to join NATO cannot be expected to make any headway till NATO accepts its membership, chances of which at present are minimal. At least, not till tension between Russia and Ukraine ceases because of collective defense principle binding NATO.

United States also seems fairly wary of ties between Russia and China. The importance given by both to strengthening their economic and diplomatic relations, asserting strong opposition to certain moves of United States cannot be missed. The noise made by United States about Russian plans to invade Ukraine can certainly not be ignored. However, some priority needs to give to diplomatic reasons apparently prompting US to display its stand against Russia at present. This strategy of United States’ diplomatic communication has certainly led Ukraine-issue dominate headlines. Chances of this having any negative impact on other countries’ economic ties with Russia may be viewed as minimal. Nor can Russia be expected to invade Ukraine only because Washington has aired such speculations!

_____________________

Nilofar Suhrawardy is a senior journalist of India and writer with specialization in communication studies and nuclear diplomacy. She has come out with several books. These include: Modi’s Victory, A Lesson for the Congress…? (2019); Arab Spring, Not Just a Mirage! (2019), Image and Substance, Modi’s First Year in Office (2015) and Ayodhya without the Communal Stamp, In the Name of Indian Secularism (2006).

(Article published by Counter Currents, has been shared by the author through email on Jan, a Google group of writers and publishers)

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By Nazarul Islam

May we consider this an elegy for the land mark judgement in the Case Roe vs. Wade, or a lamentation for the impending death of a law that has enabled millions of American women over the past half-century to control their bodies, their economic lives, their personal destinies?

Let’s not fool ourselves. The Supreme Court of the United States, now dominated by religious conservatives who have signaled again and again that they detest the 1973 decision that legalized female agency, is itching to erase it, stare decisis be challenged….

Or, in lay terms, precedent, which may guide all those concerned in the business of law.

We live in America—a country where women with unwanted pregnancies will be forced to bear children — in one state so far, but probably two dozen eventually – even if they have been raped – by a stranger, by a lover, by a teacher, a minister, a father or a brother.

We now live in a country where a state has willingly turned itself into a dictator-style hotbed of snitchery, and others will undoubtedly follow.

The idea that this state, Texas, prides itself on its love of individual liberty and autonomy is unnerving. Perhaps, its overwhelmingly white and male Legislature has burrowed its way into the uteruses of its least powerful citizens — the overwhelmingly poor, Black and Latino women who will no longer have control over their own bodies.

Again, those who understand law regard this new Texas ‘law’, to be potently unconstitutional, considering ‘out of law’—most abortions after roughly six weeks — before many women even know they are pregnant — and does not allow state officials to enforce it. Instead, the powers of enforcement have been turned over to the populace at large, sanctioning a truly sick form of vigilantism.

Apparently, any average Joe has the right to sue anyone he suspects of having aided and abetted an abortion — medical staff, the receptionist at the abortion clinic, the sister who lent $600 for the procedure. If the lawsuit is successful, the snitch will receive a $10,000 ‘bounty’, plus legal costs.

Also read: Supreme Court trashed its own authority in a rush to gut Roe v Wade

The person who received the abortion cannot be sued. Perhaps even the Texas Legislature understands that forcing a woman through unwanted childbirth is punishment enough. After all, researchers have found that women are about 14 times more likely to die during childbirth than during an abortion, which is one of the safest medical procedures on the planet.

To many silent observers, the state high court, with its unassailable conservative supermajority, has feigned a bizarre helplessness in the face of the Texas Legislature’s weaselly legal shenanigans. By a vote of 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining his liberal colleagues in dissent, the court declared it could not lay a finger on the Texas law because it presents such “complex and novel” procedural questions.

However, not far off awaits the fate of a less bizarre case challenging a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court in the fall. With this case, the court is expected to deal the death blow to Roe.

One cannot contemplate the demise of Roe without holding a thought for the courageous doctors and clinic staff who have been injured or killed in the course of helping women exercise their constitutional right to end pregnancies.

Obviously some of us may feel they are heroes like George Tiller of Kansas, the late-term abortion doctor who treated many women carrying wanted pregnancies, but who discovered in their second terms that their babies had anomalies judged incompatible with life, or that childbirth would cause the mothers irreparable physical harm.

Let’s remember was the target of relentless violence and harassment but never stopped caring for patients — and never stopped providing abortions.

In 1986, his Wichita clinic was firebombed.

In the early 2000s, on his top-rated TV show, then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly repeatedly called him “Tiller the baby killer.”

In 2007, Kansas accused Tiller of breaking its stringent abortion law.

In 2009, the state’s flimsy case went to trial. The jury acquitted Tiller in less than an hour.

Two months later, a Christian extremist shot Tiller in the head at his church, where he was working as an usher.

Tiller’s mantra, printed on lapel pins handed out at his funeral, was “Trust Women.”

In spite of the patriarchal impulses of the Supreme Court and Republican-dominated legislatures, the majority of Americans feel the same way.

If there is any good news to be gleaned as we anticipate a post-Roe world, it is that abortion will continue to be legal in at least 21 states.

Some states – among them California, Washington, Oregon, Connecticut, Vermont and New York – have protected the right to abortion and strengthened those laws over the years.

In California, for example, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified midwives may legally perform early abortion surgical procedures.

In 2019, as antiabortion fervor swept many states, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a first-of-its-kind requirement that requires the state’s public universities to offer students medication abortion, used to terminate a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.

In 1969, four years before the Roe ruling, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that state Constitution guarantees the right to abortion.

And unlike dozens of other states, California requires private insurers to include abortion as a covered service.

There is still a slim chance that Congress, with its razor-thin partisan margins, could pass a bill guaranteeing the right to abortion, which it should have done years ago.

Finally…the question remains ‘Is U.S. Supreme Court charged with protecting our constitutional rights, about to put a stake through the heart of Roe, relegating women, mostly the poor, to second-class status?’

Nazarul Islam

The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.

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