Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians

The Data Centre Deluge: Who Pays for the AI Revolution?

By Alan john Koshy

Across India and Aotearoa, the unchecked expansion of hyperscale data centres is meeting growing grassroots resistance.

From the streets of Thane and Visakhapatnam to the farmlands of Southland, communities are resisting an infrastructure boom that is imposing immense environmental and social costs on locals.

This is not just a local planning dispute. This is “technofeudalism”, driven by a handful of tech oligarchs with both immense wealth and a quasi-religious zeal for artificial intelligence.

The data centre is the physical manifestation of this new feudalism. Like some insatiable beast from ancient myth, it demands we feed it our precious water, land and energy, while offering almost nothing in return.

The Frontlines: From India to Aotearoa

In India, the government’s ambition to become an AI powerhouse is colliding with local reality.

In Thane, just north of Mumbai, locals are protesting a proposed 53-acre Amazon hyperscale data centre in a densely populated residential area, surrounded by housing complexes, schools, and hospitals.

Residents fear it will worsen existing water shortages, with some calculating the centre could require up to 12 million litres of water daily; enough to fill nearly 1,000 swimming pools every week.

Beyond water, residents fear strain on the electricity grid, noise pollution that could reach 90 decibels, and the immense heat emanating from the facility's cooling systems.

Nearly 800 kilometres away in Visakhapatnam, a similar battle is brewing against a proposed US$15 billion Google hyperscale AI complex, in partnership with Adani Group and Bharti Airtel. It is slated to be the tech giant's largest AI hub outside of the United States.

Here, the concerns are amplified by the project's proximity to the Kambalakonda Wildlife Sanctuary, less than a kilometre away, in a city already facing significant water stress.

India's data centre capacity has nearly tripled since 2020, from 520 MW to 1.5 GW, and is projected to hit 4.5-6.5 GW by 2030. Wood Mackenzie forecasts it to hit a whopping 12 GW. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have already pledged a combined US$68 billion for AI-driven projects across India.

In Aotearoa, the Stop Data Centres NZ movement is organising protests, calling for a national framework and a pause on new hyperscale developments. Their petition demands national oversight of effects on water supplies, the electricity grid and productive land.

The planned Datagrid facility in Makarewa, Southland, with its 240-megawatt capacity and heavy groundwater use, has become a key battleground.

The Thirsty Subcontinent

To understand the fury of residents in Thane and Visakhapatnam, one must first grasp the scale of India's water crisis. It is a catastrophe born from a warming planet and decades of unchecked urban expansion.

India is home to 18% of the world's population but has access to a mere 4% of its freshwater. The country is the world's largest groundwater extractor, accounting for over 25% of global withdrawals.

An alarming NITI Aayog report warns that by 2030, 40% of India's population—about 600 million people—may have no access to drinking water.

Chennai ran dry in 2019, becoming India's first "Day Zero" city. Bengaluru once had over 260 lakes; today, only 80 remain. Delhi's 33 million people often survive on thousands of water tankers. Hyderabad, the most groundwater-stressed region, faces a shortfall of 909 million litres a day. Yet Amazon is expanding its data centre there, while Microsoft plans to expand in Pune, where water shortages sparked protests last year.

Nearly 75% of India's data centres are located in regions facing high to extremely high water stress.

Despite this, the union and state governments are offering massive tax holidays and fast-tracked approvals for these water-guzzling facilities, while their citizens struggle to secure their daily water supply.

The Hidden Costs

The environmental and social costs that communities are protesting are staggering:

• Energy and Emissions: The largest data centres use as much electricity as 2 million households combined. This demand is extending the lives of dirty coal and gas-fired power plants, undermining the transition to renewables.
• Water Consumption: If servers overheat, they fail. A single hyperscale data centre can consume millions of gallons of water daily for cooling, often drawing from stressed local supplies. This water is effectively lost forever, evaporating or becoming too contaminated to return to the system.
• Land Use and Displacement: These sprawling, industrial complexes lock vast tracts of land into permanent use, displacing housing, agriculture, and green spaces. Yet even the largest centres often employ fewer than 150 staff, while the AI they power threatens to automate entire industries.
• E-Waste and Toxic Legacy: Servers have a short lifespan, fuelling a global e-waste crisis. Less than a quarter is recycled; much is dumped on developing countries, exposing communities to lead, mercury and cadmium. Cooling systems are laced with PFAS "forever chemicals" that accumulate in soil and water and are linked to cancer, immune suppression, birth defects and high cholesterol.
• Noise: Local communities have compared the constant buzzing of data centres to "lawn mowers running 24 hours a day," seeping through closed windows and eroding quality of life.

These impacts explain why AI data centres are increasingly located in countries like India, Australia, Ireland, Chile and Brazil, regions with weaker environmental regulations or cheaper resources, while the profits flow back to Silicon Valley.

In the US, a Gallup poll found that Americans would rather live next to a nuclear reactor than an AI data centre.

This is environmental colonialism: communities pay the price, tech bros take the profits.

The fight is not against technology itself, but against a system that demands we sacrifice our communities on the altar of corporate profit.

The AI Bubble Could Pop Loudly

The fight against data centres is not just about water, land, and pollution. It's about a financial house of cards that could bring the global economy crashing down.

More than US$200 billion in data centre debt was raised in 2025 alone, with tech companies borrowing at levels that surpass the dot-com era, even after adjusting for inflation.

Much of this involves "off-balance-sheet financing, chip-backed collateral and complicated leasing structures", much like the murky financial engineering that triggered the 2008 crash.

What makes this bubble uniquely dangerous is the circular “closed-loop” financing system that props it up. The entire structure depends on constant capital inflows. If credit conditions tighten or a major player stumbles, the system could topple like dominoes.

When the dot-com bubble burst between 2000 and 2002, the impact was largely limited to stock market losses. But when a credit bubble bursts, assets are sold off at fire-sale prices, and a wave of bankruptcies wrecks the banking industry and the global financial system.

The awkward reality? The companies building AI are not profitable. OpenAI may burn more than US$140 billion before turning profitable, nearly five times more than Amazon, Tesla, and Uber's cumulative early losses combined. An MIT study found that 95% of companies see zero return on their generative-AI investments.

Goldman Sachs warns that US$19 trillion in market value is detached from economic reality. By comparison, the dot-com bubble looks muted.

None of this adds up. The debt is unsustainable, the returns are illusory, and the crash is inevitable. So why is Big Tech ploughing ahead, indifferent to the economic logic? The answer lies not in economics, but in ideology.

The Technofeudal Vision

Under technofeudalism, a handful of tech oligarchs control the digital infrastructure on which modern life depends. They extract "cloud rents" from businesses and governments that become dependent on their platforms, creating a new form of digital serfdom.

The data centre is the stronghold from which these lords extract their tribute. Like the castles of old, they are built on land seized from communities and defended by armies of lawyers.

But unlike the old lords, they do not live among the people they rule. They reside in distant mansions and superyachts, accumulating wealth that would make medieval kings blush.

As investigative journalist Whitney Webb has documented, many of these figures hold a "quasi-religious fervour" for artificial general intelligence. They are openly transhumanist, believing humanity's destiny is to merge with AI.

This ideological zeal propels the data centre boom even when the economics make no sense. Computing power is their god, data centres are their cathedrals, and communities are the sacrifice.

Fighting Back: Strategies for Resistance

Across the world, communities are successfully fighting back against the data centre deluge. Their strategies offer a blueprint for resistance:

• Start Early and Get Informed: Research local zoning laws, file Freedom of Information requests to uncover planning applications, and monitor changes in utilities to spot projects before they’re announced.
• Build Broad Coalitions: The fight unites conservatives and progressives, church groups and environmentalists, local businesses and sports clubs.
• Advocate for Strong Local Regulations: Push for ordinances that require community notice and input upfront, rather than allowing data centres “by-right” in any zone. “Special-use permits” force a front-end conversation about air, water, and noise.
• Push for Moratoriums and Frameworks: A moratorium is not a radical demand; it’s a sensible pause to “reboot” and create time for proper regulation. Campaigns in Aotearoa and the U.S. are calling for frameworks to ensure transparency, sustainability, and grid stability.
• Divestment and Boycott: By divesting from big tech products and services as much as possible, we can undermine the demand that justifies the data centre deluge.

We don't need more efficient data centres. We don't need better reporting standards. We don't need to make extraction more palatable. We need to stop building them altogether.

The protests in India, Aotearoa, and across the globe show the resistance has begun.

Alan John Koshy is a freelance writer and supporter of the Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians. He is a former Reuters business journalist and holds a Master's in Economics from the University of Canterbury.

The Scapegoat Economy: How Racism in NZ Is Intentional

By Alan John Koshy

We cannot afford to be distracted by the vitriol. The blatant racism of politicians like Winston Peters and Shane Jones is not an anomaly, nor is it the work of a few "rotten apples."

It is a symptom of a systemic need within capitalism to produce scapegoats, to divert working-class anger away from a failing economic system and toward a fabricated external enemy.

As Dutch sociologist Hein de Haas notes, sowing "suspicion or outright hatred towards migrants” has always been a convenient strategy to divide the working classes. To put it simply, divide and rule.

The Merchants of Hate

The conduct of Winston Peters and his acolyte, Shane Jones, fits this tactic perfectly, especially during periods of economic strain.

In 2024, Jones yelled "send the Mexicans home" at Mexican-born Green MP Ricardo Menéndez March. Earlier this year, he warned that this country would not be "a dumping ground for people trying to come to New Zealand and set up New Delhi," declared "we do not need any more Uber drivers," and capped his anti-Indian rhetoric with criticism that a free trade deal would risk a "butter chicken tsunami."

More recently, Peters, the veteran architect of this political playbook, told Chinese-born Green MP Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan, who has lived in New Zealand for 32 years, to "go back to your own country" multiple times.

As the Union Network of Migrants (UNEMIG) observed, "when language like this comes from the floor of our own Parliament, it gives cover for the same language in workplaces, schools and on the street."

A Decades-Old Lineage of Blame Politics

Winston Peters and Shane Jones belong to a tradition stretching back over half a century. Sir Robert Muldoon from the National Party, Prime Minister from 1975 to 1984, is widely cited as Peters' direct political ancestor, a right-wing populist who promised to lead "a government of the ordinary bloke".

In the 1950s and 1960s, a booming New Zealand had actively encouraged migration from other Pacific nations such as Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji to fill labour shortages.

But by the 1970s, as the OPEC oil price shock and other factors plunged the NZ economy into downturn, these same communities were scapegoated for "taking jobs from New Zealanders."

Muldoon expanded the terrifying Dawn Raids, unleashing police brutality that specifically targeted overstaying Pacific Islander migrants.

Pacific Islanders made up only one-third of overstayers but accounted for 86% of those arrested and prosecuted, while British and American overstayers, who comprised the other third, faced only 5% of prosecutions.

It was during this period that a then 33-year-old Winston Peters first broke into the corridors of power, as a National Party MP for Hunua. He would go on to found New Zealand First in 1993, after being expelled from the National Party for publicly opposing its economic direction.

In true bipartisan tradition, the Dawn Raids policy itself was crafted by a Labour government that preceded Muldoon. Before he joined Peters’ New Zealand First in 2017, Shane Jones was a high-profile MP for the Labour Party.

The Economic Engine of Scapegoating

Over the past 40 years, New Zealand has become a poster child for neoliberal financialisaton, far from any semblance of a real economy.

Investment has been systematically funnelled into property and financial assets, not into the productive enterprise that creates real wealth for the working classes.

The housing market has become a primary vehicle for wealth creation, but this is a "mirage of wealth" backed by massive debt and siphons the wealth of New Zealanders offshore through profits of foreign-owned banks.

In the 1950s, New Zealand was the third richest country in the world by GDP per capita. Today, it languishes in 37th place.

Productivity in the construction sector, the country’s most fundamental economic engine, is the same today as it was in 1985. The result is a housing market so broken that renters now spend nearly 40% of their income on shelter, and homes take 50% longer to build than a decade ago.

The government has run budget deficits for nearly a decade, and a return to surplus is not expected until 2029. Critics have described its fiscal approach as "hold the line and hope for the best."

The recent global energy price shock has laid bare New Zealand's vulnerability. Inflation has surged to a two-year high, driven by imported fuel costs. The Reserve Bank is now considering raising interest rates, which will hit families already stretched by the cost of living.

With an election looming, this is the context in which scapegoating thrives.

No More Scapegoats

In this climate of manufactured crisis, the political demand for a scapegoat is not an anomaly but a predictable survival mechanism for a system that refuses to admit its failures.

Winston Peters is only the latest ambassador of racist rhetoric designed to frame communities as a threat to national identity and resources.

The way forward is not culture wars or migrant-blaming but challenging an economic and political system that funnels wealth to the few while the rest of us fight over scraps.

We meant to post this earlier but there were more urgent issues such as the student protests in India and organising solidarity events in Aotearoa (even though Dharmendra Pradhan resigned the day before).

But this korero is always topical. 

About how politicians perpetuate the model minority myth, how it is lapped up by our Indian community and how the words out of the mouths of these politicians engender anti-Indian racism.

1992. Los Angeles. Four white Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers beat an African-American man Rodney King. Someone records this incident from a balcony nearby and the videotape is released publicly. The police officers face a criminal trial and are acquitted of all charges. There is widespread anger resulting in violent unrest over six days. One of the worst riots in American history. You can read all about it, there's reams written. But why are we mentioning this here? 

Mainstream media discourse during this period stereotyped and positioned Asian-American communities as the model minority. The highly educated, quiet, hard working, tax paying, successful migrants. A term coined by William Petersen in 1966 and used as a tool to 'elevate' Asian-Americans against other communities of colour especially Black communities. 

There was already tension between the Korean-American and Black communities in L.A. after a Korean-American businessman shot and killed a young Black woman in 1991. This tension heightened and spilled over after the court verdict in favour of the LAPD officers and many Korean-American businesses were looted/faced arson. No politician intervened to save this 'model minority' or diffuse the anti-Asian racism in 1992 L.A.

Prime Minister Chris Luxon, during his speech at the Kia ora Modi event on 11 July enthusiastically propagated this model minority myth about the Indian community talking to those Indians who attended the event. Here are some screenshots.

A report about the economic contributions by Indians to the New Zealand economy was released by the Waitakere Indian Association just before Narendra Modi visited Aotearoa. It was partially funded by the High Commission of India and Ministry for Ethnic Communities. Those are the numbers Luxon quotes.

That is how the community is primarily located within the schema of New Zealand. As migrants that contribute billions of dollars, as high energy, hard working, law abiding inhabitants etc etc.

And it is not just Luxon at this event but also ex PM Helen Clark just last week who was worried about the effect Winston Peters' racist remarks towards Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan might have on our trade relationship with China.

So whatever hue, this is the exact positioning these politicians want the Indian (and other migrants of colour) want to place in. Because pitting the idea of success against tangata whenua minimises and reduces their valid demands for changing racist, inequitable systems and infrastructures to an issue about the inability for hard work and keeping your head down. Protests, hikois and kapa haka in Parliament are seen as disruptive rather than resistance and a struggle for justice. They are termed as disobeying law and order that the model minority Indians apparently don't do. Maori, as we know, are over-represented as beneficiaries but the systemic barriers and ongoing effects of colonisation are dismissed and replaced with the label of lazy dole bludgers as opposed to the "wealthier, better educated" Indians Luxon spoke about.

While such myths are whole heartedly embraced by the Indians, they still fail to protect them from anti-Indian racism. Just like talking up Asian-Americans as a success story failed to protect them during the six days of rioting in L.A. Because these myths-of being high contributors to the economy, of being hard working and all that create a fake image of maintream/Pakeha-Indian solidarity that does not exist. So while Brian Tamaki (and Winston Peters) are derided for their racist remarks, they do not face any consequences. Just a few days of extra media attention.

Of course it is critical to point out that the same Indians who think they are white-adjacent and better than Maori (or tagata Moana) are not able to make the connection between Luxon praising them to the high-skies and refusing to sack Winston Peters. Then they wonder where the anti-Indian racism comes from as if it is an isolated phenomenon.

The only way to prevent anti-Indian racism is to reject the model minority myth, question the politicians who keep pushing it and stand in solidarity with Maori as settler-colonisers ourselves on this stolen land. 

The Movement Beyond the Leak: Why Shanmugam Anitha's Dream Still Defines the Fight Against NEET.

By Alan John Koshy

The recent protests that swept through Delhi, where thousands gathered and were met with brutal police crackdowns, may appear to the casual observer as an outburst towards the NEET paper leak scandals.

While the immediate demands for the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and compensation for affected families are critical, to limit this movement to a single examination irregularity is to ignore its much deeper and more painful origins.

The very spine of this movement was first shaped nearly a decade ago by the 17-year-old daughter of a daily wage labourer in Tamil Nadu whose dream of becoming a doctor was thwarted by the very existence of NEET.

A Child Who Deserved Better

Shanmugham Anitha was a 17-year-old girl from Kulumur village in Ariyalur district, a pocket of rural Tamil Nadu renowned for being the state’s cement hub. Her father worked as a daily wage labourer. Her mother had passed away when she was young, leaving Anitha and her four elder brothers to be raised by her grandmother in a home that did not even have a toilet.

She studied in a Tamil-medium government school, where she rose to become the only student in her entire district to score 100% in both Physics and Mathematics in her 12th standard examinations. Out of 1200 marks, she scored 1176. By any honest measure, Anitha was exceptional.

She wanted to become a doctor. Her own mother had died without timely medical help, and Anitha was determined that no one in her village would suffer the same fate.

But Anitha understood something that the architects of NEET refused to acknowledge. She knew that poor rural students could not afford the expensive coaching required to crack an exam that demanded 180 questions be answered in just 180 minutes. She strongly believed that if admissions were based on 12th standard marks alone, rural students like her would finally have a fair shot.

With this conviction, she approached the Supreme Court with a petition against NEET. She watched as Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) students, represented by senior advocate Nalini Chidambaram, argued that admissions should be made only on the basis of NEET. The Court agreed.

After the verdict, Nalini Chidambaram, who is married to former Union Minister P. Chidambaram, offered a chilling observation: "Any further appeal against NEET can only be done to God." That was a clear message to every rural, Dalit, OBC and Adivasi student in the country: Your fight is over, the doors are closed.

Nine days after the verdict, Anitha waited for a moment of solitude when her father and grandmother were out of the house. In that moment, she went to the innermost room of their small cement home that had held all her dreams and ended her young life.

The system had told her, in the clearest possible terms, that her 1176 marks meant nothing. That her brilliance in Physics and Mathematics was irrelevant. That her dream of serving her community was not valid unless she could afford coaching that her father's daily wages could never cover. She had been squeezed between the cracks of a broken system.

A Systematic Squeeze: The Data Behind the Exclusion

The Justice A.K. Rajan Committee was constituted by the Tamil Nadu government to quantify what Anitha's tragedy represented: the institutional exclusion of the poor and rural.

Justice Rajan, a retired Madras High Court judge who was born in a rural village himself, had once been forced to give up his dreams of becoming an engineer because of a change in exam rules in the 1970s. Perhaps that is why he understood, in a way that others could not, how a single examination could destroy a lifetime of aspiration.

The report, backed by over 85,000 public submissions, presents a damning case against NEET. Rural Tamil Nadu students, who once constituted a majority in medical admissions at 61.5% pre-NEET, saw their share drop to 49.9% post-NEET. The committee found that the exam has effectively wiped Tamil-medium students off the map. They went from representing up to 20% of admissions to a mere 1.6-3.2%. First-generation graduates, those with no doctor in the family, plummeted from nearly a quarter of admissions to just 14.5%.

Justice Rajan himself did not mince his words when he said: "NEET drives away the poor; only the rich and the affluent garner most seats". Anitha understood this before any committee was formed.

A System Working Exactly as Intended

NEET is administered in roughly 550 cities and towns across India, yet only a handful of these locations have the kind of coaching ecosystems that have become virtually mandatory for success. For students outside these areas, the exam is effectively inaccessible. This is not a Tamil Nadu problem. It is a national crisis.

With 63% of India’s population residing in rural areas and reliant on government healthcare, the country's medical model depends on doctors willing to serve villages. Fewer rural students becoming doctors means fewer doctors likely to serve rural areas. A public health crisis beckons.

These latest protests echo a decade-old struggle, much like the Rohith Vemula movement, that questions the structural barriers embedded within India's education system.

The JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) for IITs follows the same pattern as NEET. The same forces of expensive coaching, syllabus misalignment with state boards, and an examination format that rewards specialised training have gradually squeezed out rural, local language-medium, and first-generation students.

Once inside, students from marginalised communities face a hostile environment of caste-based discrimination, social isolation, and faculty indifference. Between 2018 and 2023, more than half of all dropouts from these institutions were from SC, ST, and OBC backgrounds.

A Roadmap for Justice

The A.K. Rajan Committee recommended the total elimination of NEET in Tamil Nadu and a return to admissions based on normalised high school scores, alongside a framework for "Adversity Scores" to ensure social justice.

These recommendations acknowledged that a child from a home without a toilet faces different challenges than a child whose parents can afford to send them to a top coaching institute.

Yet despite the Tamil Nadu Assembly passing a bill to this effect twice, the President of India has withheld assent, driven by the Union Government's advice.

The refusal to address the systemic discrimination against state board students is the logical conclusion of a system that views equity as a threat to centralised power.

The Deeper Truth

Babasaheb's vision for a truly equitable India states that a society which does not educate its poor cannot call itself progressive.

Until we dismantle an education model that treats coaching as a prerequisite and rural dreams as expendable, the injustice will continue to manifest.

Anitha's dream did not die with her. It lives on in every rural student who refuses to give up. It lives on in every protester who took to the streets. And it lives on in our collective determination to build a system that never again tells a child they are worthless because of the circumstances they are born into.

The Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians stands in solidarity with students fighting for equitable access to education and reaffirms its commitment to social justice in all its forms.

We are grateful to Professor Mohan Dutta for letting us publish from his original post on his culture-centred blog.

Jai Shree Ram in Auckland: Two mainstream NZ parties, the Kia Ora Modi Event and Mainstreamed Hindutva

Mohan J. Dutta

On a winter evening in Auckland this week, under a palm tree on a street outside the arena where the Prime Minister of India was being celebrated, a group of men raised a saffron flag bearing the bow and arrow of Ram and the words Jai Shree Ram. They chanted as they waved it, one of them wearing the Indian tricolour like a shawl, and by morning the photograph had travelled proudly through the digital veins of the diaspora. It deserves a longer look than it got, because if a liberal democracy wants a single test for the arrival of Hindutva in its public square, that slogan is the test.

Demonstrators outside the Kia Ora Modi event, Auckland, July 2026, with a saffron Jai Shree Ram flag.

Jai Shree Ram was once a greeting exchanged between pilgrims, and it has been remade into a war cry: the chant that rolled through the streets of Leicester in 2022 as communal violence flared half a world from the quarrels that ignited it, the chant that travels with mobs linked to the RSS and the VHP when they descend on mosques and minority neighbourhoods in India, a devotion hollowed out and refilled with menace. When the slogan flies over an Auckland street it does not fly alone; it arrives in the company of markers the world has learned to recognise, politicians at Hindutva events, saffron scarves on parliamentary shoulders, the image of Bharat Mata borne aloft, and the Kia Ora Modi event gathered a remarkable number of them into a single evening.

The production

Look at the welcome poster the Hindu Council of New Zealand, one of the nodal organisations of Hindutva, sent into the world: a wharenui in one corner, the silver fern, the Southern Alps, the two flags braided together, and over it all the face of Narendra Modi rising like a sun. This is the movement's signature move, the iconography of the host country draped across the iconography of the project, the local greeting stretched over the same travelling production that filled a Houston stadium in 2019 under the name Howdy, Modi.

Hindu Council of New Zealand welcome poster for the July 2026 visit.

If the poster supplies the imagery, the Council's Facebook post supplies the theology, extending a sacred Poornakumbh Swaagatam to the Prime Minister of Bharat and hymning the timeless bonds of dharma joining Bharat and Aotearoa, so that a state visit becomes a homecoming of civilisations, a trade mission becomes dharma, and the vocabulary of the Hindutva movement settles in plain sight on a New Zealand feed, tagged to the High Commission and the Consulate.

Hindu Council of New Zealand Facebook post framing the visit through Bharat and dharma.

When the Council's president boasted that every volunteer at the event was a woman, he reached for the regime's own phrase, Naari Shakti, woman power, the slogan of a government that garlands womanhood in the abstract while women human rights defenders grow old in its jails, a vocabulary that needed no translation on its journey south.

Post by the Hindu Council of New Zealand president on the event's volunteers as Naari Shakti.

The politicians

Into this production walked the political leadership of New Zealand. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon stood on the Spark Arena stage beside Modi, two men waving into a blaze of phone lights, and posted the footage himself, National MPs arrayed behind him. Every second of it will now be clipped, subtitled and pushed through the Hindutva ecosystem as recruitment material, burnishing the image the movement has spent two decades manufacturing: Modi as vishwaguru, teacher of the world, the singular leader on whose shoulders authoritarian populism always rests.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon's post from the Spark Arena stage.

This is the same country whose own Security Intelligence Service, in the years after the Christchurch terror attack taught it what Islamophobic extremism can do, identified Hindutva as a form of extremism in the Aotearoa context, and it now has a Prime Minister who says he is not worried about Hindutva in New Zealand even as he parades into a Hindutva rally and wakes the next morning on the front pages of the Hindutva-linked media in India.

Labour offered no counterweight: Jenny Salesa filmed the twelve thousand inside the arena and pronounced the vibe amazing, while Chris Hipkins went to meet Modi with Vanushi Walters, who wrote warmly of the growing partnership between our two democracies. The warmth was bipartisan and so was the silence.

Labour MP Jenny Salesa's post from inside Spark Arena.

Labour MP Vanushi Walters' post on meeting Modi with Labour leader Chris Hipkins.

The most telling image from Auckland, though, is the one that was never taken, because Modi does not hold press conferences: across more than a decade in office he has not taken unscripted questions from his own country's journalists, years in which the Varieties of Democracy Institute downgraded the world's largest democracy to an electoral autocracy, its newsrooms raided, its scholars jailed, its universities hollowed out. Of the two democracies toasted at Spark Arena, only one still answers to its people, and neither of New Zealand's major parties found a word to say about it.

The cost

None of this is new to these islands. Narendra Modi first came to New Zealand in 2001, as a functionary of the Bharatiya Janata Party and a senior member of the RSS, before his years as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and the mainstream arrival of Hindutva here has been building ever since, in full view of a documentary base assembled with patience and at personal cost: the white papers published by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, the encyclopedia entries recording the movement's presence in Aotearoa, the organising of activists such as Sapna Samant and Oscar Romero, the sustained work of the Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians, and five years of excellent reporting that traced the evidence and the linkages. The scenes captured in these photographs unfolded with that record open on the table, which makes them a choice rather than an oversight, and the bill for the choice will be presented twice.

It will be presented first in New Zealand, where the arrival of one majoritarian fury summons another: Hindutva hands Destiny Church and Brian Tamaki the enemy their Christian nationalism requires, and receives from them the enemy it requires in return, while Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits, tangata whenua and queer communities are caught in the space between them.

The thousands who streamed into Spark Arena came, most of them, for reasons as old as migration itself: to hear the songs of home in a southern winter, to see the leader of the country they left honoured by the country they chose, to stand for one evening inside a crowd that pronounced their names correctly. There is nothing to apologise for in that longing. But it is precisely this longing that the production harvests: the warmer the welcome and the fuller the arena, the louder the declaration to those trained to hear it.

And it will be presented in India, where every arena filled in a western democracy returns as proof that the world has blessed the project, that the raids and the jailings carry no cost abroad. The applause in Auckland does not stay in Auckland.

A saffron flag with a war cry flew over an Auckland street this week, and the political leadership of this country stood inside the arena it pointed toward. New Zealand should say plainly what it saw.

We started out to write a statement about Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki’s hate speech video from 17 June 2026 in which he called for certain communities of colour and for Hindus, Muslims and Christians to be ‘purged’ from Aotearoa New Zealand, and calling for mosques to be burnt but considering the reactions from assorted community organisations, politicians and media the issue requires a brief analysis. That takes time.

First though we strongly condemn Brian Tamaki’s racist, hateful words. While it is true that Narendra Modi’s government has not only oppressed but been extremely violent against Indian Muslims, Christians, various minorities and indigenous communities, it is indeed ironic that Brian Tamaki weaponises that oppression to carry on his violent rhetoric against various communities of colour and non-Christian faiths in Aotearoa. Because Brian is just like Narendra! Deliberately inciting animosity and bloodshed for his own agenda knowing fully well that the threshold for any law to apply is high. Or non-existent.

Brian also knows there no political desire for any discourse on hate speech towards tauiwi of colour and different faiths. It is a difficult space to navigate that requires patience and critical thinking, that we must all accept, is beyond the current lot in Parliament. Only very few of them have the ability to develop a comprehensive approach and of course many of them use violent words against the people of Aotearoa themselves.

That is why Christopher Luxon’s callous response, that he was not interested in anything that Brian Tamaki says. That is also why Chris Hipkins agrees. Although he said Brian Tamaki was a thug he still did not want to counter him. Not a word even from his number 13 list candidate Rakesh Naidoo, a supposed sterling police officer and hero in the inter-faith world. Wannabe members of Parliament, candidates, can speak up especially in their area of expertise and especially at number 13 but Naidoo has been silent. He could have persuaded Hipkins that Labour must assuage our communities yet there is an empty void.

Neither Luxon nor Hipkins have understood that hate speech leads to disastrous actions. What lead to the murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch on 15 March 2019? Did that happen in a vacuum? So what could possibly happen when a known rabble rouser calls for mosques and temples to be burnt? We have witnessed in India the consequences of Narendra Modi’s language so much so that Islamophobia is embedded in everyday life, casually, at micro-level with aggression against Muslims normalised.

Therefore, it was critical for both Luxon and Hipkins to respond to Brian Tamaki, not brush it off. That is what good leaders do.

As we said before, the current lot in Parliament lacks critical thinking and the ability to talk to our communities. Except as voters and economic contributors.

Finally, we discuss the response from our communities.

There was much outrage, rightly so.

But as we have always said, momentary affront goes nowhere.

One person loudly called for people to lay 105 complaints as if that going to deter Brian Tamaki from his racist, anti-rainbow, anti-non-Christian kōrero in the future.

Then there were our community ‘leaders’. Repeating themselves like a broken record.

Faith organisations called for government action and a whole bunch of them wrote a childish letter to members of Parliament threatening they will only tick party vote in the upcoming election because of their lack of action against Brian Tamaki. Strange bedfellows, two of the signatories the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ and the Hindu Council of NZ. As if a Hindutva organisation that actively advocates for mosques to be burnt and bulldozed in India, that pushes Indian Bengali Muslims across the border into Bangladesh, an organisation whose mothership RSS mobilised mobs to demolish Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992 is best friends the conservative Muslims of FIANZ.

Is that how it works? Common ‘enemy’ Brian Tamaki gives them cognitive dissonance that they together write a laughable letter saying they shall not participate in a democratic process while seeking solutions within a democratic setup!

How do we resolve this then?

Again, we have said this previously.

The solution is through sustained grassroots work where we build trusting relationships in intercultural spaces (as opposed to multicultural spaces), where we bypass staid, conservative, fearful community and religious ‘leaders’ and nuance-less politicians to have difficult conversations about co-existence and social cohesion (for want of better terms). No place for Zionists, Hindu fascists or other conservative religious types.

This includes us as tauiwi bringing in tangata whenua and working within the framework of the Treaty of Waitangi. No performative nonsense.

Then there is the progressive left of Aotearoa. We all know that when the progressives do not act, when they do not show allyship and stand alongside minority communities, the extreme right-wing enters that space.

The solution is in collective solidarity. For all of us to stand together for our workers, for our trans people, for our poor, the marginalised.

Of what purpose interfaith or religious spaces when they will not support the ‘other’ while expecting government to safeguard them?

After all, how does one stop a person like Brian Tamaki when current laws do not cover his hate speech? Not from reactive outrage or asking for 105 complaints to be made

People power is how one pushes politicians to make change. That means making them see people not as mere voters but active participants in our democracy. And for us, the communities to discard those conservatives while including the margins of the margins as we move towards harmony.

Ever since we spoke about Rakesh Naidoo and his Hindutva politics after the Labour list was dropped on 5^th June 2026, there has been a deluge of ‘sceptical’ queries seeking ‘evidence’ of that politics and offering justifications as to why Rakesh would interact with fascist Hindu organisations wearing his police uniform.

It has been interesting but not surprising to see liberals and ‘inclusive’ types doubt a collective of Indians with varied lived experience of Hindutva in India and Aotearoa, working at grassroots level, developing safe and trusting relationships with our people (and other vulnerable South Asians), meticulously documenting and archiving this fascism on this whenua.

Those who forget the simple acts of listening and showing solidarity.

Because why would anyone call out a high-ranking police officer guaranteed to become an MP for his Hindutva politics just as a joke?

The issue here is that it is not Indians or other South Asians who doubted us but the non-Indians and non-South Asians. Yeah, because they know  ‘non-Hindutva’ Indians and South Asians who have worked with Rakesh Naidoo who do not think he is a Hindu fascist. So why have these ‘non-Hindutva’ Indians and South Asians not publicly supported Rakesh? Surely there is no risk for their whanau back home in championing a high-ranking police officer/politician here is there? Not like those vulnerable Indian minorities particularly Muslims whose families have been threatened and intimidated and therefore who cannot raise concerns about Rakesh publicly. So let us see these ‘non-Hindutva’ Indians who deny Rakesh Naidoo’s Hindutva politics.

The issue also is when liberal and ‘inclusive’ types forget about the silenced marginalised and then turn around to reprimand them if they dare to raise their head one way or another. Show us the evidence, never mind your lived experience.

We stand by what we say and here is a 101 breakdown why Rakesh Naidoo attending Hindutva events in his police uniform under the guise of his ‘job’ is a dangerous problem.

1-Let us assume Rakesh attended Hindutva events over multiple years without knowing their fascist roots. Innocent Rakesh. Imagine a police officer in charge of ethnic communities not knowing what global intelligence agencies have been sharing with each other for decades. Especially since VHP, RSS, Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva orgs from India have been off and on various terror watch lists for decades. Imagine not reading up on the histories and politics of the ethnic and faith communities you interact with. What does that say about doing a job properly?

2-Now let us assume that Rakesh knew all along about the violent Hindutva organisations whose events he attended in police uniform. And he also encouraged other police to do so.  How horrifying. A police officer deliberately going into extremist spaces and behaving like it is all ka pai. Then talking about how said, on-terrorist-watchlists organisations can collaborate with the police. Why would he do that? To normalise their terror and Islamophobia? To legitimise the fascism? To blunt any potential criticism from vulnerable communities? To covertly intimidate Indian Muslims and other minorities? Because nothing says cahoots than a high-ranking police officer in uniform hobnobbing with Islamophobic Hindus.

3-But then the argument presented is, what else can Rakesh do if not go into Hindu extremist spaces because there are no other ‘Hindu spaces’. Therefore, he does not have a choice but be there. An NZ Police superintendent for ethnic communities who is so weak he cannot call out violent fundamentalist Hindu organisations but happily goes into their spaces because there is no alternative! Like, Rakesh could not initiate a secular South Asian collective space because he does not have the power to do so? What does that say about doing a job properly?

Our vulnerable Indian minorities, especially our Muslims, have already experienced men in uniform collaborate with the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and their affiliates in India to bulldoze, lynch, push across the border and kill people so how would they respond to an Indian origin police officer in these spaces in Aotearoa? Be traumatised, triggered, fearful, anxious. Feel unsafe. Unable to speak because they cannot trust the police.

Now let us dwell on feelings. When we say we are afraid and angry and anxious, you ask us for evidence. These emotions do not implicate Rakesh. They are just emotions. Gut instinct, discomfort, inherently recognising hegemonic power play because we have seen this before…all meaningless for the liberals and ‘inclusive’ types. Does not translate into the tangible and acceptable. Like, sorry Rakesh in Hindu Council photos is not proof of his fascist ideology. He is just doing his job. It is a photo-op.

(Remember how the wider Muslim community kept warning about an impending harmful event but not one listened because their observations and inferences were not ‘evidence’?)

Hindutva is not black and white like white supremacy. The saffron scarves, the flags, the slogans, the forehead marking, Hindi imposition, forced vegetarianism…all come after the ideology is well established and embedded socially and in the power structures.

To understand how Hindutva functions one must know the methodologies and manifestations.

Hindutva operates at multiple levels. While there is a ‘high command’ (RSS), it is also decentralised, mobilising at grassroots level through cultural work, entering social spaces and climbing up into power structures. Hindutva strategically adapts to audiences, giving them what they want while integrating ethno-nationalism in everything. A ‘double-sidedness’. Projecting ‘a "respectable religious conservatism" to middle-class and international audiences, while concurrently promoting aggressive Hindu majoritarianism at the local level.’ (Chapter 5 in The New Experts Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi's India by Anuradha Sajjanwar.)

It is what Australian academic Felix Pal calls it ‘organisational diffusion’. Which works in three ways:

1-Creating large number of proxy organisations to ‘simultaneously appeal to multiple audiences; saying all things, at all times, to all people; greatly expanding their constituencies and resource bases into otherwise mutually exclusive audiences’.

2-Controlling reputation through  ‘a switchboard mechanism, the production of diffuse interorganizational networks allows for the episodic obfuscation and revelation of interorganizational ties, enabling far-right actors to strategically distance themselves from violence and illicit activities in their networks, while also taking collective responsibility for legitimizing activities like charity or service provision.’

3-Leadership accommodation in which allows for diffusion of leadership positions.

It is within this structure that Rakesh Naidoo can operate with impunity. If you cannot discern and pick at this diffusion then you will never know. And you can recognise that diffusion only if you are immersed in it or study it deeply.

Which our liberal interrogators and their ‘non-Hindutva’ friends have not. Hence, they cannot see Rakesh’s deceptive politics or that there is a power imbalance due to which our vulnerable Indians/South Asians cannot speak up. Hence, for them, our anxieties as invalid.

We stand by what we say about Rakesh Naidoo being a Hindutva operator.

The kōrero in the South Asian community now is that if we have a Labour government then Rakesh will either be a Minister of Police or Minister for Ethnic Communities. Letting the Hindu establishment flourish and silencing our Muslims even more. There is real discomfort and nowhere to go. Labour cannot be trusted.

Rakesh Naidoo at the 2nd NZ Hindu Elders Conference in Wellington, October 2024.

Last night we posted this on some of our socials:

This was meant to be a short statement to unequivocally condemn the recent ruling from the Supreme Court of India denying bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam after five years in prison without charge and no timeline set for a trial.

But it has turned into a blog post.

Because the formation of Aotearoa Alliance Of Progressive Indians was a response to the activism and leadership of Umar Khalid and many other members of a people’s resistance movement against Hindu fascism.

Because we must remember and never forget what happened, name those who sacrificed, those who stand tall, those who fought for justice, for the soul of India.

A progressive, prosperous, inclusive, peace-generating India benefits not just the subcontinent but South Asia and the world.

                      UMAR KHALID         

                                                                                   SHARJEEL IMAM  

Umar was first arrested in 2016 on sedition charges for shouting ‘anti-national’ slogans at a student rally organised on the third anniversary to protest the hanging of Afzal Guru at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Three students-Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya, were alleged to have shouted anti-India slogans (disproved later) and were labelled the ‘tukde-tukde gang’, those seeking to break up India, by right-wing media. A label is now used freely then to stop any critique on democracy, government, politics, ideology…by anybody.

This post is not about Afzal Guru but you can read who he was and what he was alleged to have done in this article by Arundhati Roy instead. The hanging of Afzal Guru is a stain on India's democracy.

Or you can read her book Hanging of Afzal Guru: And the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament

Looking back now though, both, Afzal’s story, the unknown bombers, the allegations of anti-India sloganeering, the slander of tukde-tukde gang, mocking intellectual discussions were all a precursor of the misinformation and mass hysteria Hindutva would generate over a sustained period until such time people are numbly obeisant. A prototype for the intentioned Hindu fascist dystopian India. A trial, if you will.

In August 2018, two Hindus, Naveen Dalal and Darwesh Shahpur, attempted to assassinate Umar for being an ‘anti-national’. They were arrested and immediately granted bail.

Umar by then was a PhD student at JNU with ongoing involvement in student unions and resistance movements. Always on the radar of the government of India and media.

ProtestingThe Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Narendra Modi’s government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill in 2016 offering Indian citizenship to ‘illegal migrants’ who were religious minorities (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian) from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. This Bill was passed by the Lok Sabha (lower house) in January 2019 but lapsed with the dissolution of the 16^th Lok Sabha.

The bill was re-introduced as the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019 and was passed in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha (upper house) the same month. It led to widespread protests across India and in the diaspora.

This Act essentially makes way for Indian Muslims to be made stateless through various mechanisms as well as harming other minorities. (See image of CAA, NRC, NPR handout from AAPI below.)

They first started in the North-Eastern border state of Assam and spread to Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi. Hundreds of police forcibly entered the campus and beat the students hunting them from libraries and toilets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Jamia_Millia_Islamia_attack

This led to more student protests across universities in India even as police brutality continued.

https://cjp.org.in/anti-caa-protests-continue-regimes-excesses-exacerbate/

It was an important moment in India where a people were standing up against the suppression of political dissent, an important part of any democracy.

However, it was when local Muslim women came together for a sit-in protest at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh against the Jamia attack that the world noticed. Shaheen Bagh stands out as the most critical protest against CAA. Indian women have always been at the forefront of the freedom struggle, organising and agitating. But Indians have forgotten the sacrifices made by their ancestors and Shaheen Bagh showed us that even in an independent India we must never take democracy for granted; that having an elected government is not a sign of freedom; that how we treat our minorities and marginalised is a true indicator of the state of a nation. Shaheen Bagh was an intergenerational, non-violent road barricade that grew spontaneously, attracting people from everywhere with crowds growing up to 150,00 in number on some days. Bilkis Dadi (Grandmother Bilkis), the then 82-year-old matriarch who was there daily from day 1 was listed in the Times 100 for 2020 and by the BBC in their 100 inspiring and influential women the same year. Bilkis Dadi turned up at the farmers’ protest in December 2020 but was removed by the police.

BILKIS DADI

                                               SHAHEEN BAGH ANTI-CAA SIT-IN PROTEST             

The Shaheen Bagh protestors stayed put even through the riots in February 2020 despite multiple efforts to forcibly remove them by the government of India and its proxies. Until Covid-19 arrived in 2020.

Read Mapping Assertion and Belonging: Reflections on the Life of the Anti-CAA Movement in New Delhi, India to understand the significance of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in against CAA.

Delhi Riots February 2020.

On 23 February 2020, BJP ‘leader’ Kapil Mishra demanded the Delhi government forcibly remove a sit-in at Jaffrabad or he would take things in his hand. Violence erupted the same day in the North East Delhi where Shaheen Bagh is. Hindu mobs entered Muslim homes and establishments bearing saffron flags (Hindutva insignia), carrying weapons and shouting Jai Shri Ram (that David Seymour also chanted in January 2024 while attending a Hindu extremist event in Auckland). The violence continued over the next few days with destruction, gas bombing and setting fire to property. A mosque was vandalised. Delhi Police, controlled by the central government, was either hands-off or made weak attempts to control the violence. 53 people died, most of them Muslim. Meanwhile Narendra Modi hosted Donal Trump and tweeted once asking people to maintain peace.

Political prisoners.

By April 2020 the government of India started arresting Muslims charged with conspiring to or inciting the February riots under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). A law from 1908 British era Raj that was formalised by the Indira Gandhi government in 1967 to prevent secessionist activities and subsequently tweaked over decades until it became the UAPA we know today. The current version allows the government of India to label individuals as terrorists.

As any such law anywhere, it is full of vague terminology and can be interpreted as convenient for the oppressors of the day.

• Gulfisha Fatima was the first person arrested under UAPA in April 2020.
• Then Safoora Zargar, who was 3 months pregnant at that time, in April 2020
• Meeran Haider and Shifa Ur-Rehman in April 2020.
• Sharjeel Imam in August 2020.
• Umar Khalid in September 2020.

Kapil Mishra freely continues to preach his Hindutva ideology as a BJP leader and is now a minister in the Delhi government.

Contemporary resistance movement in the Indian diaspora of Aotearoa.

On 15 December 2019 a group of Indians in Auckland organised a protest against CAA followed by a march from Jean Batten Place to Myers Park in January 2020.

We came together again in February 2020 to highlight the riots in North East Delhi.

It is here we want to point out how long-standing Hindu patriarchs have shaped the Indian community here for the Pākeha gaze and how mainstream media in Aotearoa continues to disregard the vastness and depth of the Indian community, indulging in easy, superficial, transactional connections without reflecting on their ignorance.

And hence why resistance from our people here matters.

It was in February 2020 that Shane Jones said, to paraphrase, there were too many people from New Delhi who had immigrated to New Zealand and Indian students had ruined the country.

John Campbell interviewed Venkat Raman, editor of Indian Newslink in March 2020 about Shane Jones’s comments but not a word about the riots in Delhi and neither does the duplicitous Venkat mention CAA or the riots because Indian minorities do not matter to him unless they can be weaponised for his own benefit.

https://www.1news.co.nz/2020/03/11/shane-jones-doubles-down-on-indian-students-comment

The anti-CAA protests in India started a movement across the Indian diaspora through which we all connected with each other.

Umar and Sharjeel’s continued incarceration and refusing them bail harms all Indians. It is an indictment of the Indian judiciary, their supplication to Hindu fascists.

This decision:

(a) Not only sends a signal to Indian minorities, especially Muslims, that there is no place for them in the Hindu fascist imagining of India. That they must never stake a claim, seek ownership of or participate in progressing the nation. That they must always ‘obey’ the government.

(b) But it has wider implications for ALL Indians who question the government, who demand their democratic rights and resist oppression.

A nation that was slowly usurped by the British since they established the East Indian Company in 1600 and left it divided by drawing a random line on a map, is not only being further divided while also dismantling democratic institutions and practices. Where an opiated Hindu upper caste and socio-economic class, conservative or liberal, turns a blind eye to injustices, while weaponizing representation and anti-racism in the diaspora, or is fearful of repercussions, it normalises subjugations. One day it will be their turn.

In the words of the immortal Rahat Indori sahab (sir)

‘लगेगी आग तो आएंगे घर कई जद में, यहां पे सिर्फ हमारा मकान थोड़ी है' Many houses will burn when there is a fire, not just mine alone.

He also wrote:

We conclude with a few words from Aamir Aziz's poem सब याद रखा जाएगा We will remember everything.