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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that. See? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode we're speaking. With Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees, it wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What's blowing jobs. My party. Nice job. Thank you. That was wonderful. Thank you. Those are good. Lead into part two of our. Never been so pleased with an intro. I know. I really nailed that. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Did you like thrive on? Yeah. I think I like it enough to make him treasurer of the BJP. Ohl that's got your treasure of the BJP. Also. Our guest is Sophia Alexandra. Hi, everyone. Hello, Sophia. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back minutes after we finished the first episode. But I almost took off. This has been a rough one. I mean, it's it's not a lot of dead children. It is, but we don't talk about all of them. Yeah, that's yeah, we don't detail it. That's a silver lining, but it is a **** ***** just a silver lining. A lot of dead children, but we don't have to talk about them specifically. We could just say 2 or 3000 dead and not get more specific than that friend. Yeah. Sometimes the truest form of friendship is not going into more detail about horrible ethnic cleansings than you need to, I mean. That's what I put on our T-shirts, but it's a lot of words. Yeah, it has to go all the way on the sleeves and the back, but it's a lot. Hop on to behind the ********. Tea public for our new ethnic cleansing is horrible, but there's only a certain amount of detail that's really necessary to get across the key facts of what's happening without getting into, you know, a what's the word when somebody, like, looks at a car crash? That sort of thing. A lot of words on those T-shirts. Shirt also has you saying off five times. They're like, it's quoted. Yeah, it's not. We should have edited the shirt at some point. No. But honestly, we we were going for realism. We were cinema verite. That's what that means. It's putting umms on a T-shirt on 420 day. Fiance Miles and I call that a transparency bonus. Ooh, nice. Like, you know what's intentional? Yeah. In the wake of the Gujarat riots, Narendra Modi was shunned and marginalized and broader Indian society. But within Gujarat itself, his popularity grew. Some of this may have had to do with the fact the Muslim population of the area had been beaten, murdered, and ghettoized into political irrelevance. But Jerrod sounds tight around my Gujarat had that. Most of it had to do with the fact that violent bigotry is actually super fun when you're on the side of the majority. See, Modi is a very intelligent man and he grasped instinctively that the most important lesson that any would be tyrant can ever learn, which is never ever apologize. So instead of that, he followed up this nightmarish bloodletting with a Hindu pride March across the state. Ranks and ranks of uniformed Rs members celebrated their violent oppression of the Muslim minority and were met by cheering crowds. He was careful in his actual language, always delivering the message that without exposing too much of his ***. Saying things like if we raise the self respected morale of 50 million Gujaratis, the schemes of ALIS, malis and damalis will not be able to do us any harm. Those are all like stereotypical Muslim names in India. Do you see what he's saying? He doubled down on the genocide. He sure did. Which is a real power move. A white power move. A white power move, you might say. Yeah, Arian power. Let's let's get a little more specific. Yeah. Kendra solidified his base of power. The rest of the BJP suffered a series of electoral reversals. This also wound up working out for Modi. The more liberal wings of the party crumbled in the wake of these defeats. And while they flailed, Modi pressed forward in Gujarat and made deals with the biggest businessman in the region. He made life easy for them and they pumped more money into Gujarat's economy, allowing him to brag that he developed Gujarat into a financial powerhouse during his time in office. That's a real Trump. Yep, boast. Kind of sounds like they're all working from the same playbook. Over time, Modi seized control of the BJP and married its hardline racist fascist DNA with the financial interests of the business class. And I'm going to quote now from an article in the New Statesman. The turning point came in October 2008, when Tata Motors moved its car plant for its much publicized new budget hatchback. The nano from the leftist dominated W Bengal to the pro business Gujarat. In 2011, Ford invested $1 billion in setting up another car plant. Before long, Gujarat started to make headlines not for riots, but for its new image as an economic powerhouse from 2000, just like Minecon. For really wasn't about. No, it's about business selling. It was really just a self help business kind of guide. Yeah, exactly. From 2003, Modi began holding an annual summit Vibrant Gujarat, which cumulatively generated investment pledges of 920 billion. All the prominent in, yeah, all the most prominent Indian captains of industry from Ratan Tata to the Ambanis and the metals rallied behind Modi and declared him India's most business friendly chief minister. Gujarat now enjoys double digit growth and there's no question that Modi has run an economically successful. Administration. However, his claims to have made the states economy an ideal for the rest of India is disputed by economists who point out that the Gujarat model has done little to alleviate poverty or improve indexes of education, malnutrition or health care because the money does not to rich people down because trickle down theory is not a real thing. But if you can make the numbers look good on paper, you can get people to vote for you because they think they'll get some of that money and then genocide gets to happen. It's cool. It's cool that that always works. When the wealthiest men in Gujarat Saho good Modi could be for business, they put their money into making sure the few 1000 people had gotten murdered were forgotten. There was an investigation, of course, but the Indian Supreme Court decided there wasn't enough evidence to charge Modi himself of anything. That's so crazy. It's like, we tried, but, like, there's nothing to tie you to the genocide. So it's like, so weird. There's no evidence. But you're basically free. That's so crazy. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. Some officials within the government did try to take action against Modi. Haren, pandya. The cabinet minister gave sworn testimony about the riots, claiming that on the night it all began, he had attended a meeting at Modi's home and heard the Chief minister tell police officials to allow people to vent their frustration and not come in the way of the Hindu backlash. Yeah, it's a good switchblade moment. Sanjeev Bhatt, a police administrator, also testified to hearing Modi expressed similar sentiments, discussing his hope that the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur. The evidence was there, but most of Modi's political rivals were too frightened of the consequences of pursuing him to the fullest extent of the law. They decided to take their chances with the electoral system in the hope that. Sure. Ever take chances with the electorate? Sure. Don't. You really never should. You never decide not to fully pursue criminal charges against a fascist because you're worried about the backlash socially and decide to just trust in voters. Turns out that doesn't ever work. No? Yeah, got to be on the right side of history. Got to throw him in the *******. Meaning you can't wait until someone else is like, this is bad. Hmm. So meanwhile, Modi and his followers set to work eliminating the men who testified against them, but was quickly charged with the death of a suspect in police custody and sentenced to life in prison. Hiren Pandya was found dead in his car in 2003. His wife insisted this day that his death was a political murder. So that's cool. There's a lot of me, a lot more of those. Modi angrily ignored questions about the rights for years, one of the most direct responses. He actually did. Make came in 2013, when a reporter asked him if he felt sorry for all the Muslims who'd been murdered by those mobs he enabled. Ohh, Modi responded. If someone is driving a car and we're sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful? Of course it is. What's what if if you're sitting behind someone in the car and they hit a puppy, does it hurt you to see? Yes. But that's the same as him enabling this mob that killed 3. That's not even an analogy. It's it's pretty great. That's like sentences that don't form a whole story. I mean, there's definitely like some translation makes no sense stuff here like the Huey originally said and I'm guessing and like Gujarati or whatever. So it's like, you know, there's probably maybe it made more sense than the original language, but like, did it though, because it. You seem to address the fact it was always a ******** response. I just think the phrasing's a little weird. No, I just mean there's no part of it where he's like. What he's saying is that like his role in letting the letting in enabling these models are the Muslims though the puppy when he's like still a human in the analogy, why are the Muslims in another good point? This is just confusing. He's like, I am a man, but in this story the Muslims are a puppy and sometimes puppies get hit by cars and you don't like to see it and also you don't care driving the car, which he's behind this. Yeah, he was totally driving. No sense. I'm like, no, you're the driver and they're not a puppy, they're a man. And you just ran over the man, so I don't really understand why. I get what he was trying to make a difference. Doesn't think of Muslims as people, but. It's like that Simpsons bit where Lionel Hutz is like, yeah, this judge doesn't like me because I hit his dog with my car, only replace the word dog with the word son and replace the word hit with repeatedly. That's a good bit. Ohh boy. Modi's popularity was further augmented in 2005 when Gujarat police announced that they had shot dead a terrorist they believed had been planning to assassinate Narendra Sohrabuddin Sheikh. The dead man was said to have been a member of an Islamic terrorist cell. Collaborating with the ISIS Pakistani intelligence, Gujarati police claimed Sorbitan had opened fire on them when they caught him and they've been forced to fire back and kill him. None of this was true, and it soon became clear that the whole affair had been blatantly orchestrated by the authorities. And I'm going to quote now uh from scroll in an Indian news website. Those were the years when Gujarat was scarred by several such encounters. The police killed more than 20 people, claiming they were trying to murder the chief minister or commit other acts of terrorism. In few of these cases was the police's version effectively challenged. She's killing would have become just another statistic and forgotten police records, except for two interventions. First Ruba Boudin Sheikh wrote to India's Chief Justice that he did not believe the police's version of his brother's killing and that he was worried for the safety of Kauser Bi Sarabun, she's wife who disappeared. Cancel husband's killing. In response, the Supreme Court told the Gujarat police to find out how Sheik had been killed and what had happened to his wife. Second, Prashant Dayal, a journalist for the Divya Bhaskar paper newspaper, published a sensational report claiming senior Gujarat police officials had deliberately killed Sheikh and then rape and burned alive his wife. Holy ****. Yeah, it's ******. So a thorough investigation would have eventually secure the admission of the Gujarat government's legal counsel that the whole shooting had been a fake encounter. The motorcycle that police claimed Sheikh had been riding at the time of the shootout turned out to be owned by a relative of one of the cops who killed him as the crime was dug into. That's not even a good cover up. No, it was not a good coke. Get someone who's not directly involved with this is a case. One of the frustrating things about fascism is how lazy they're allowed to be and can still get away with it. Ah, yeah. It's very frustrating. So as the crime was dug into ultimate blame for planning, all this eventually settled on the shoulders of Amit Shah, a government minister in Narendra Modi's right hand man. The state investigation eventually revealed that Shah had been running a massive extortion racket for the Gujarati police. Sheik had been a part of this racket. And for one reason or another, Shah had decided that killing him would be good for business. And since he was going to commit murder, he figured he might as well make the murdered man's death work for his political patron. So he was like, oh, we'll just say this guy was planning to kill Modi. It'll buffer Modi's. Popularity and we'll get rid of this guy. All of this took years to properly dig up, though, and the slow drip of unimpeachable evidence of Modi and Shah. Shameless violent corruption had no impact on their political futures. Instead, Modi grew more popular year after year. He was reelected as Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2007. During his campaign, he deliberately mocked his political opponents for trying to prosecute him for murder, saying it is that body is failing on every level. It's not doing great. It's like a diaper, but a person's good. Uh, La La, la. By 2012, Narendra Modi stood at the very top of the BJP. And the BJP was one of the most powerful parties in the country with 10s of millions of members. Yeah, it is. Modi announced his campaign for Prime Minister near the end of 2013 and I'm going to quote again from The New Yorker here. He sold himself not as a crusading nationalist but as a master manager at the visionary who had presided over an economic boom in Gujarat. His campaign slogan was the good days are coming, a close look at the data. Showed that Gujarat's economy had grown no faster under his administration. The original previous ones dog days are over. Yeah. And he's saying it. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. A close look at the data showed that Gujarat's economy had grown no faster under his administration than under previous ones. The accelerated growth was a fantastically crafted fiction. Even so, many of India's largest businesses flooded his campaign with contributions. Modi was helped by an overwhelming public perception that the Congress party, which had been in power for most of the past half century, had grown arrogant and corrupt. Its complacency was personified by the Gandhi family, whose members dominated the party but appeared diffident and out of touch. Rahul Gandhi, the head of the party and Nehru's great grandson, was dubbed the reluctant. Prints by the Indian media by contrast, Modi and his team were disciplined, focused and responsive. The Gandhis would keep chief ministers who had traveled across the country to see them waiting for days. They didn't care, an Indian political commentator who has met with the Gandhis as well as Modi told me. With Modi's people, you got right in. So, like Modi's number one access and availability Trump's Trump's Trump. Being an out of touch political elite who just tells trust me, I know what I'm doing. We've been at this for a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Turns out that works. And also, you know, when you're trying to get elected for the first time as a fascist, you, uh, you, you button down a little bit on the racism and focused on I'm a good manager, I'm going to be good for the economy, I'm a good businessman. Yeah. A huge amount of the BJP success had to do with the casual corruption and elitism many Indians perceived from the Congress party. Most of their highest officials came from families who had dominated Indian politics since the nation got its independence. They acted as if power was theirs by right of birth. The men of the BJP, however, portrayed themselves less as aristocrats and more as humble warrior monks. They wore cheap, simple clothing and avoided displays of wealth. Narendra Modi talked regularly about the hours of yoga he did every day and repeatedly emphasized his simple life and noble refusal to **** anybody. So that's good. Yeah, this may seem odd, but Modi's refusal to have a family meant that he had no distractions from work. And that's the image, the hard working, religiously dedicated aesthetic that played for Indian voters. It's anyone's guess as to whether or not Modi really is the man he portrays himself to be, but it's possible that he actually is, 1 political commentator told The New Yorker. When you have that kind of power, that kind of adoration, you don't need romance. I mean, I just feel like the members of the. BJP should really have exploded on the scene more. Yeah, sorry. They should have come into power. I yeah, you're better at this than me. Yes, they should have ejaculated on Parliament. No, that didn't work. They should have really focused on stimulating the head of their party, stimulating the head and sort of making a cream pie of the different branches. Ohh so many we have fun. We do, we do, we do, we do. Where the hell was I? Here the BJP won the popular vote and Modi, its leader, became Prime Minister. He immediately set to work dealing with problems that prior government had ignored. Chief among them was public defecation. This is like this, but like India's like, ******* huge. It's like the biggest. It's one of the biggest countries on the planet. And like, this is not just like a sort of because of the lack of a lot of, like, good plumbing and stuff. It's. Often a lot of people consider it cleaner to go out in public, but like, then you wind up like this stuff spreads disease. Like, it was a big problem and it was mostly just laughing because I thought that it would be amazing if that problem only circulated around the BJP headquarters because people were like, **** you and just coming over **** just around it. And they're like, we have this really weird public defecation problem and like the rest of the cities, totally clean. They're like, yeah, but it's just like ***** running in the streets. Who are like, no, no, no, it's not just you. Definitely not. Yeah. It was a problem and they decided to deal with it. And again, in the traditional way that you see with this, they, like, launched a thing that looked really good but was less effective than it actually wound up being, but allowed them to, like, publicly claim that they were making great strides. So in one of his first speeches in Delhi, Narendra Modi promised to launch a nationwide campaign to build public toilets. In every school in 60 months, 110 million toilets were constructed, serving more than 60 million. Indians it was probably the largest, fastest toilet building program in world. But also the wire. Just fascist building. It also does that too. Yeah, building. And it's hard to fault Modi on at least the idea of adding more public toilets to India. But it's execution and its efficacy were distinctly mixed. And I'm gonna quote now from a voice of American news right up quote. Critics, however, charged that overzealous government workers may have inflated the numbers since a deadline had been set for declaring India open defecation free. By October 2nd, 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India's independence struggle, the entire movement happened in a mission mode there were targets to achieve, according to Nazar Khalid, a New Delhi research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate. Comics and nonprofit that works on child and sanitation issues in India. He charges that in some places, people were coerced into building toilets by local authorities who wanted to demonstrate progress. A study conducted last year by the group and four of India's biggest states found that access to household toilets increased from 37% in 2014 to 71% last year. However, roughly 1/4 of people who owned the toilet continued to defecate in the open. They considered it wholesome and healthy and an opportunity to get some fresh air or see their fields, so I thought that was going to be in C, their friends. I was like, damn, just pooping and talking. That's pretty awesome you pee? And T little bit of PNT for the BJP. That's a that's a merch shirt, that's for sure. We notice how how good I slice this. Look at this. You did, you sliced it. Great. We're playing with knives when we talk about fascism. And I really did a great job with mine. I'm very proud of you. And you know what else? I'm proud of these goods and services. Absolutely. I am so proud of these goods and services. I have no children, but in a way, all of the products and services that we advertise are my children. And by, in a way, I mean in a literal way and that I I have ****** the parent companies. In order to produce the products that you can now buy. So you are purchasing the spawn of my loins when you buy what? Sophie, this is how you sell products sells. Sophie absolutely sells myeloid line. I never needed to hear this. This podcast is built on the fruit of my time for ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change to be able to do it within podcasting. It's just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. We're back after that flawless ad break, and Sophia is now holding two knives. They've never been happier. Very ready to continue here. So the toilet building project had a debatable impact, but it achieved its real purpose, which was to give Modi a strong out of the gate win that made him look like a decisive and powerful leader. And since it was impossible to make more toilets into a partisan issue, there was nothing his opponents could do but kind of hand him that win. And Modi scored another early victory when he attacked India's massive problem with gang rape. In 2012, a 23 year old woman had been raped and tortured by 6 men on a public bus. She died of her injuries on a bus. Oh yeah, it was on. It was this. It was a huge story internationally. It happened like right before I went there. And it was still like the big topic of discussion in Delhi at the time. And it was this kind of like, horrible, horrible crime that catalyzed the fact that, like, India had a major problem with gang rape. And so this is like, this makes the international news. India gets, like, criticized for it worldwide. And like, it is something that has to be addressed. And I hate to give Modi credit for anything, but his first public speech on the issue, he actually gave a really good statement, he told a crowd parents. Ask their daughters hundreds of questions, but if any dared to ask their sons where they are going, which is like kind of the right way to lean in, like drop for that fascist. Yeah, one good thing. Yeah, he handles this, that. He handles talking about that well. I mean, Hitler was a vegetarian. We got to give him this one. He was pretty good. He was anti animal testing too. So with stories like that coming out of the early days of Modi's reign, it was hard for the world to stay mad at him for the minor issue of helping to orchestrate an insight. Three months of bloody riots that killed thousands of people. Ethnically cleansed large chunks of a major state, he said. The woke thing, so we're good. This is the day Modi became Prime Minister. Yeah, according to The New Yorker quote, Modi's effort to transform his image succeeded in the West as well, and the United States newspaper columnists welcomed his emphasis on markets and efficiency. In addition, Modi called on a vast network of Indian Americans who cheered his success at putting India on the world stage. The Obama administration quietly dropped the visa ban when Modi met Obama. Not long after taking office, the two visited the memorial to Martin Luther King Junior, a man Modi claimed to admire during his stay. Modi had a dinner meeting with Obama, but he presented White House chefs with a dilemma. He was fasting. Your Navaratri a Hindu festival. At the meeting he consumed only water, which obviously like makes him look really good. Is very religious base. It's like he's not even gonna eat at this this White House feast and stuff. So pretty awkward to have a full dinner in front of a man that's just like, now I'll have water. Thanks you. You knew when this meeting was happening, we could have like, picked a different schedule or something that we had done dinner. Like, we don't admit invite a lot of like the leaders of Muslim countries over during Ramadan. Or if we do, we do like the night thing that you're supposed to do. Like we could have worked this out, but could have just done like. A team meeting in the Rose Garden. You know, he might not be allowed to consume tea during it kind of depends. Like, there's different levels of fast. Well, never mind. Should have just rescheduled. Yeah. Well, Modi's early days were relatively unproblematic on the outside. There were numerous clear signs that he was still exactly as much of a fascist as he's always been. The trial of his old buddy Amit Shah over the murder of Sohrabuddin Sheikh was still going on at this point. But in 2014, Modi's first full year in Power, Shah just stopped showing up to court. The judge ordered him to appear, and in response, the government removed the judge. From the case. So Shah got a new judge named Briggo Palya, and this judge also complained about Shaw's refusal to come to court. He confessed to his friends and family that he'd been offered $16 million from the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court to drop the case. Damn, that's a lot. That is a lot of money. Lawyer refused because he was a good judge, and then he died, conveniently, of a heart attack. The caravan, an Indian News magazine, reported on some peculiarities about how the judge's body was returned to his family rather than the arrangements being made. The government officials. Like you'd expect for a government employee, they were handled by the RSS and his corpse arrived back at home covered in blood. Ohh, a lot of people suspect maybe it wasn't a heart attack. They didn't even bother to wipe the blood off. That's what they were sending a message saying how they were like, yeah, we don't give a ****. It's it's frustrating because, like, I've gone to a lot of protests where, like, thousands of activists organized for weeks and held like a mostly peaceful event. But like, one kid tosses a rock and that's like the whole story. Whereas, like, fascists get to, like, murder people and send their bloody corpses back to their family. And everyone's like, yeah, but the economy, it's very frustrating, very frustrating. Cool and good is what I meant to say. Shaw's case was given to 1/3 judge named Gosavi, who dismissed all the charges after about a month. Oh, that's so weird. That's so weird. Did the Pittsburgh assessors bloody corpse have anything to do with this decision? Might have been, might have been. And while all this was going on, Narendra Modi went ahead and made Amit Shah the president of the BJP, making him the second most powerful man in the country. Over the next few years, Modi and his followers consolidated power, killing her, sidelining judges who worked against them, and orchestrating a vast campaign of suppression against the press. Good journalists had been the chief enemy of Narendra Modi from day one, and the BJP set up a sophisticated cyber harassment campaign to shut down or scare off anyone who might speak out against them, Nahad Dixit, a reporter, told The New Yorker. Every day I get 300 notifications with **** **** and with conversations about how they should rape me with a steel rod or a rose thornbush or something like that. And obviously the worst of the abuse is saved for female journalists, who have been kind of at the forefront of attacking the Modi's regime, very brave women reporters in India. ***** its abuse does not just come from random Modi Bros Online. Official. Representatives of the BJP regularly tweet abuse to her, suggesting this that this behavior is officially condoned by the party, The New Yorker continues. Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer and the founder of Alt News, which tracks online disinformation, described a nimble social media operation that works on behalf of the BJP. In 2017, his group made a typical discovery when a pro BJP website, calledhindutva.info, released a video of a gruesome stabbing, which was passed around on social media as evidence that Muslims were killing Hindus and Kerala. Puneet Sharma and Rs apparatchik who Modi follows on Twitter promoted the video saying that it should make hindu's blood boil. But when Alt News tracked the video to its source, it turned out to depict a gang killing in Mexico which you might recognize does not have a high Hindu population or Muslim population was probably unrelated to any conflicts there. Yeah, also seems again pretty lazy they get to be lazy. It's fine, Sinha told me. He believes that some of the most aggressive social media poster instigated by an official IT cell staffed and. Funded by BJP loyalists, he said that people affiliated with the BJP maintain websites that push, promote propaganda and attack as enemies. They were organized and quick, he said. They got their act down a long time ago in Gujarat. Pretty cool. That's so ****** **. And again, so similar to what we have going on. I was gonna say completely different from anything that's ever happened anywhere, but I guess what you say works too. 2016 The Modi administration went after Indy TV, one of the most prominent and influential critics of their regime. All government advertising was pulled from the network, and members of the Modi cabinet pressured business owners and private corporations to stop buying ads on NDTV as well. The station was forced to lay off 1/4 of its staff. While good journalists lost their jobs and in some cases their lives, Narendra Modi continued to pump money into his social media operations. In 2019, Modi failed to stay up on your socials, got to stay up on the social, social needs. Touch me social meeds. In 2019, Moody faced reelection. He spent as much as $5 billion on his campaign. Regular ******* Bloomberg over here. Yeah, I mean, it's a big country, so you do have to, like, spread it out more. Uh, yeah. Pouring money into his propaganda efforts to mitigate the fact that India's economy actually took a bit of a dive under his leadership. It's like fascists aren't actually good at the one thing fascists are pretty good at wild. He was helped along in this by an attack by a suicide bomber on Kashmir on February 14th, 2019, which killed 40 Indian soldiers. Modi's online propaganda machine swung into action. Video went viral of Modi consoling the widow of a soldier. That recording was actually from 2013. But the truth never gets in the way of spreading a good meme. They're like she's a widow. You know what it was? A1 widows as good as another. I'm right. They're all the same thing. Throw it out there. Modi used anger over the attack as an excuse to ratchet up his anti Muslim rhetoric. He gave speeches claiming that the blood of the people is boiling and sent thousands of troops into Kashmir on the pretext that India's only semi autonomous Muslim majority state had to be cracked down on for the safety of the people. 12 days after the attack, the Prime Minister ordered a series of airstrikes on what he claimed was a terrorist training camp in a town called Balakot. Predictably, online Modi supporters hailed this as a massive success in the battle against terrorism, claiming that more than 300 Islamic extremists had been killed. Viral pictures of smoking corpses spread throughout social media, but journalists who investigated found only a few holes was boiling and sent thousands of troops into Kashmir on the pretext that India's only semi autonomous Muslim majority state had to be cracked down on for the safety of the people. 12 days after the attack, the Prime Minister ordered a series of airstrikes on what he claimed was a terrorist training camp in a town called Balakot. Predictably, online, Modi supporters hailed this as a massive success in the battle against terrorism, claiming that more than 300 Islamic extremists had been killed. Viral pictures of smoking. Corpses spread throughout social media, but journalists who investigated found only a few holes in the ground and no evidence that anyone at all had died. The viral photos were actually just pictures from the aftermath of a deadly heat wave. Purported video of the airstrikes was actually footage from a video game called Arma Two. Oh my God, I believe the Russian Government has also used to like fake videos of air strikes. It's very funny and good and cool. None of this mattered. The lies sold. Amit Shah bragged to a group of election workers that the BJP's social media operations had created an impenetrable wall of ******** quote. Do you understand what I'm saying? We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake. Cool about sweet and sour, am I right? Just bounce it out. I got good chicken, yeah? Narendra Modi was reelected and while his first term started with a series of feel good measures almost everyone could support, there was no pretence at all the second time around and I'm going to quote from The New Yorker again. Modi's government introduced a series of extraordinary initiatives meant to solidify Hindu dominance. The most notable of them, along with revoking the special status of Kashmir, was a measure designed to strip citizenship from as many as 2,000,000 residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before. In September, the government began constructing detention Centers for residents who had become illegal overnight. Cool and good, I mean again, doesn't remind me of anything happening anywhere. No, not unlike anything in history or now elsewhere on the planet. As is always the case in situations like this, the government's open embrace of bigotry acted as a blank check for bigots among the population. Hindu nationalists. That's so crazy how there's a connection between that. Really? Yeah. It's really weird, right? Yeah. I mean, this is the only time that's happened, too. A lot of only time happenings here. That's the first and only lots of those. So Hindu nationalists in northern India, for example, started to spread rumors that Muslim men had launched a hidden operation to trick Hindu women into marriage and then four said women into prostitution. These bogus rumors spread like wildfire. Social media and WhatsApp and quickly inquired the name love jihad. Interfaith couples have been increasingly insulted, assaulted as a result. That is actually the next show from the love is blind people on Netflix. Seriously, because it is a good title. You you know the only thing I watch on Netflix is, well, no, they don't have it on Netflix, so I had to torrent it. Yeah, never mind. Just know it's not for you. That's good. The only thing that's for me is rewatching old episodes of Star Trek the next generation in community. So that's that's basically it for me. I I'm. I'm a I'm an old man, and I hate new things. You're wearing an adorable cardian. Thank you. That proves. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Thank you. A tiny little cute old man working on it. You know what else I'm working on? These goods and services I'm working on getting together, making a little love connection with another corporation or two, just kind of pumping a couple of products out, getting them to push out a service or two and then you can buy them. Wet and fresh from the womb. More dry because it's less gross. No, no, no, no. You can't trust that it's fresh. All the products are wet. Yes, every product that we sell is damp as hell. That is our guarantee. Bye. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, we were just talking about how good we are at advertising products and services. I'm I'm proud of us. We were doing a lot of handshaking and popping champagne bottles. I love that. This industry works the way it does. It's great and good and cool. The years in power do not seem to have changed. Modi, a journalist with the New Statesman, interviewed a number of people who worked closely with the Prime Minister and they all reported more or less the same thing. Quote, he is teetotal and a vegetarian and lives in almost monastic lifestyle. One told me he is extremely focused. When he talks to you, he really listens. He can focus like few people I know. He calls it a day by 11 and gets up at 4:00 in the morning. And other aid told me he spends the 1st 90 minutes of the day happily surfing the Internet for articles about himself. His staff starts getting calls by 5:30 latest. He is obsessed with personal hygiene. To the third he changes his clothes at least four or five times a day, and he always eats alone. Always. Which is weird in India. Like eating together big groups of people is like a really important thing. That's a very strange fact. But also, if you look at all the pictures of, like, even the Democratic candidates eating, they all look like none of them know how to eat food like a normal human being. It's bizarre. Like, why can't you? Maybe it's just like being photographed makes you look weird eating like you just, like, get self-conscious. I don't know, I've never had to eat on camera. I was going to say happily surfing the Internet for articles about himself. First of all, obviously that is what Trump does. But happily is hilarious thing to insert in there. I just picture him, like, going like that. Like singing to himself and the Mr blue around. Yeah, good times. It is, of course impossible to say whether or not all this is true, but it plays well with Indian voters, particularly young voters who support Narendra Modi at unprecedented levels. And Modi is already hard at work earning the next generation of young votes. He's written a number of books that could best be described as dictatorial pop philosophy and had even more written about him that sell him as a management guru, essentially across between Tim Ferris and Adolf Hitler, who's also. Management, yeah, like he's like Hitler 2.0 they're so psyched about it. Moody even wrote a book specifically aimed at school aged children called Exam Warriors. This book is innocuous enough on the surface, and mostly focuses on urging children to study hard, look forward to exams as a way to prove and improve themselves, and do lots of yoga. It includes an automount of militant word play, though not just in the title exam warriors, but in chapters with headers like be a warrior, not a warrior, and sleep is a great weapon. Sharpen it. Wow, gotta sharpen your sleep. Can't, can't get to bed without a nice sharps, I mean. I never sleep without a machete. Yeah, I'm holding a knife, so I'm like, I get sharp sleep. Yeah, I get sharp sleep. I got a machete bayonet for one of my rifles. Pretty sharp, sleepy. Excited about it? Yeah. We should get you a machete. Please. Let's get a lot of machetes. A lot more machetes. Like all great dangerous narcissists, Modi saw in radio and podcasts the ultimate opportunity to brainwash the masses. His monthly show Man Keybot is hugely popular and he recently launched the Narendra Modi mobile app to further connect him and he has time to run a monthly show. I know I'm trying to run a monthly show as a stand up and it's license and I'm going to quote now from coverage by the print, an English language Indian news site. This is about how the riot started off quote the women sitting in seelampur, a Muslim dominated slum area, rightly felt it was no use. Was sitting there, the women decided to think he does now will be met by any real condemnation around the world. On February 25th, 2020, while President Donald Trump visited New Delhi, the city was convulsed by a wave of mass violence that is probably best described as an anti Muslim program. It started with protests against the expansion of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the law Modi used to remove the citizenship of some 2,000,000 Muslim citizens. And I'm going to quote now from coverage by the print an English language Indian news site. This is about how the riots started off. Quote The women sitting in seelampur, a Muslim dominated. Plum area rightly felt it was no use just sitting there. The woman decided to move their protest to a road underneath the Jafrabad metro station Saturday night. This blocked a road. Unless you block a main road, how do you get the attention of the mainstream? This is not the first time a road has been blocked by a group of protesting people. But BJP's Kapil Mishra said that the blocking of a road was somehow a matter serious enough for the people to take law into their own hands. He demanded that the road be cleared in both Jafrabad and the nearby Chanda Bag. What unfolded then? Was it clear? Diabolical plan. Make it look like a clash between pro and anti. Daa supporters, the clash goes. Violent Muslims provoked and forced to respond in self-defense. It looks like a riot. Used the violence as an excuse to clear the protests. The peaceful and democratic protests. When the Jafrabad protest site was cleared, a chop BJP RSS leader declared victory. BL Santhosh is the BJP general secretary, a post reserve for the IRS representative. Here was his tweet. Just as news came in of the Jafrabad site being cleared. Jafrabad Metro protest area totally cleared. The game starts now. Rioters need to be taught. Lesson or two of Indian laws. Pretty cool that it's a game. Yeah and Santhosh deleted the tweet later and to remove game starts now and replace it with a time to enforce the law and its entire spirit in a new tweet. The mask was a little bit too off for him. At least 42 people were killed during this game, and probably a lot more, but we don't know yet. The vast majority. Fun game, fun game. I do play a lot of games that kill 42 people, but everyone, everyone knows when we play knife tennis, you know, there's a risk. Sometimes you get shot, you have people sign the waivers, sign the waivers with a knife. It's the only way. Yeah, 42 people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslims. And once again the police stood by or actively aided the mobs. It is not a coincidence that the Delhi Police report directly to the Home Minister of I1, Amit Shah. Ohh no kula. As I write this, the fallout from this program has not fully fallen out. It took three days for Modi to even make a statement on the matter. The Delhi Police have made a lot of noise about holding reconciliation meetings to try and radicalize people and it is worth noting that Modi's muted response a tweet that said. We cannot allow vested interest groups to divide us and create disturbance smacked more than a little bit of fear and uncertainty in a mass expulsion of public rage that he and his party inspired but cannot fully control. Because the frightening reality of the situation in India Today is that while Narendra Modi enjoys almost unchecked power, he's not really a dictator. It seems more accurate to say that he and his propaganda have inflamed a huge chunk of the electorate, enough that they have bested him with unprecedented power, so long as he uses it to hurt the people he has worked to convince them they hate. One of the journalists, The New Yorker, talked to, a guy named Prasad, the editor of an Indian magazine called Outlook, said this of his country. It's very different now. The institutions have crumbled, universities, investigative agencies, the courts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services. And I think there is no rational answer for what has happened except that we pretended not to be what we were for 5060 years. But we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummel minorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their places, to conquer Kashmir, to ruin the media and to make. Operation, Servants of the state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is becoming the country it has always wanted to be. That's eerie and sad. Yeah, hopefully not true, hopefully not true. But I do find a lot I identify with in this fear of like, yeah, we're not reverting here in the US, you know, to the way we were before the civil rights movement, before the the LGBT rights movement, before all these gains were made, were becoming the country a lot of us always wanted us to be. Like. That's a terrifying thought. It is cool and good. Sophia, how you feeling? Feeling good. Feeling good as hell. Yeah, yeah. Stab myself with this knife. Don't do that. Don't do that. You know what? Keep it ready for a Nazi. It's true. If I go, I'm taking at least one Nazi with me. That is what? George Orwell. There's a fun quote from George. Do you like that? I said if I go, if I go, it's because I believe in, believe in the singularity and I'm like, well. If we don't all die, I'll be we gotta get rid of the fascists before the singularity. Otherwise we get fascist robots. Truth. Yeah, and I don't want that. No, that doesn't sound terrifying. Yeah. I mean fascists are also really inefficient. So maybe like a machine would be fundamentally anti fascist because it's just frustrated by the the inefficiencies that they generate in the system they control. Or if the machines did arise against us and they were fascists that because they're so poorly made there would be like 1 flaw that would be very easy to hack and they would just all die at the same time. Either that or we'd wind up in like and I have no mouth but I must scream sort of situation. Oh no yeah. Again, this is like a **** streak. Yeah, it's rough. Let me have a silver lining, dude. Well, turn into a **** streak right away. Yeah, I guess the silver lining is. You got any plugs to plug? Yeah. Really love. Love the lead in from **** streak. Yeah guys, if you want to keep this **** streak going, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at the Sofia SOFIYA. And you can listen to me on my 2 podcasts, one with miles Gray of the daily zeitgeist called 420 day fiance and the other one with Courtney Kosack called private parts Unknown. About 11 sex around the world. So. Yeah, follow me, follow, listen. So review. And uh. We have a dog related problem. Yeah, what the ****? There's some dogs barking outside the studio. Hopefully not. Andy's not involved. We have to go deal with a dog related situation, but you all deal with this fascism related situation. Perhaps by stockpiling arms, perhaps by just watch listening to behind the ******** visiting our website behindthebastards.com like AT shirt. We're listening to our political podcast the worst year ever. See, Sophie, I still do it sometimes. Alright, you don't. I know. Let's go see if the dogs are OK. Bye. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. The four whole months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.