Tag: history

This Indian historian fights the far-right, one makeup video at a time | India Election 2024

Ghaziabad, India – It is close to midnight. Ruchika Sharma sits in her makeshift studio at her home in Ghaziabad, a city just outside India’s capital, New Delhi, a small mic hooked to her shirt. The 33-year-old historian and former professor is getting ready for her latest YouTube video show.

The recording hours are odd, but it is a considered decision. There is little ambient noise at this time, she reasons. For an independent creator like Sharma, a studio with fancy audio setups and soundproofing is beyond reach – especially since she knows that each video she puts out makes it harder for her to land a job.

Sharma looks at a phone that doubles as a teleprompter. Another phone serves as her recording rig. On two small wooden racks hung on the cream-coloured wall behind Sharma, sit a dozen history books. Also on the wall are a picture of Indian revolutionary icon Bhagat Singh, who was hanged by the British colonial regime in 1931, and a copy of the 17th-century painting of the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz’s first sight of his Christian wife Shirin, bathing in a pool.

On her wooden table, alongside tripods and ring lights is an eclectic mix of cosmetic products: brushes, mascara, concealer, powder puff, and, most important of all, eyeshadow.

She hits the record button.

Sharma starts with an introduction to Nalanda, a sixth-century Buddhist university in northern India that was home to nine million manuscripts and was burned down in a major fire in the 12th century. A widely held belief – promoted by sections of India’s Hindu right, amplified by a government-run modern-day version of Nalanda University, and referenced in multiple news articles – suggests that Nalanda was destroyed by a Muslim general named Bakhtiyar Khilji.

Sharma calls this one of the “biggest myths of Indian history” before citing a slew of historical sources that she says buttress her assertion. These sources, which she says are often cited by those who paint Khilji as Nalanda’s villain, don’t actually refer to the university at all, she points out. Instead, she says, the sources suggest Khilji attacked another Buddhist university, where many people were killed in his attack.

Midway through the narration, she picks up a bottle of concealer and applies it under her eyes. She drops a sarcastic joke – telling her viewers that she is citing the very same sources that WhatsApp forwards pushing dubious or fake history tend to quote. A sponge comes out to blend with the skin tone, and soon, a lilac eyeshadow is in place.

At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its Hindu nationalist allies face allegations of rewriting history, turning the past into a political battleground for the future, these unconventional history lessons, laced with makeup and satire, are Sharma’s attempt at setting the record straight.

With more than 200 YouTube videos in just over two years, the historian is building a growing audience: Her YouTube channel, Eyeshadow & Etihaas, has nearly 20,000 subscribers, while on X, where she amplifies the arguments she makes in her videos, she has 30,000 followers.

But perhaps the biggest testament to her mounting influence lies in the threats and abuse she routinely receives for her videos. They’re a badge of honour she shrugs off, but would rather not have to wear.

“I often get such death threats. Rape remarks keep coming,” she says. “They no longer work on me.”

A spread of makeup palettes, brushes, and mascara in front of Sharma which she uses during her recording for makeup. (Md Meharban/Al Jazeera)
A spread of makeup palettes, brushes and mascara in front of Sharma, which she uses during her recording [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Eyeshadow and history

Sharma grew up surrounded by history, in a family shaped – like millions of others – by India’s modern tumult.

A grandchild of partition refugees, Sharma spent her childhood in Mehrauli, New Delhi’s oldest surviving inhabited area. After India’s cleavage at independence in 1947, her grandparents, both Punjabis from present-day Pakistan, found sanctuary in the neighbourhood and bought land on which they built a home.

She thinks of the stories of partition she heard from them as her first brush with history. From her terrace, she would watch Qutb Minar, a five-story red and buff sandstone tower built in the 12th and 13th centuries by Muslim rulers that is as much a landmark of New Delhi as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris. “I have a strong emotional connection with it. I think that monument is beautiful,” Sharma says.

When she was 13, her parents decided they needed more space and moved out of the family house to Ghaziabad, a neighbouring district of Delhi, where she lives with her elder sister and her 61-year-old mother, a retired government official who worked at Indian Oil, a government oil and gas corporation. Sharma lost her father to cancer in 2017.

Sharma says she was always interested in eye makeup. She would wear kohl in high school. She began using lip gloss in college, and during her PhD in 2020, she started applying eye makeup and lipstick to cope with an abusive relationship.

“I was in a physically and mentally abusive relationship for 10 years, battling PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], and scary thoughts of self-harm. I was in therapy for it,” she explains.

Sharma saw an eyeshadow YouTube video that caught her attention. “Watching eyeshadow videos, seeing the colours arranged in palettes, and putting them on my eyelids was incredibly therapeutic for me. It would calm me down,” remarked Sharma.

She was teaching in a college at the time and would buy eyeshadow palettes, though her mother disapproved of it.

“I’ve never worn makeup in my life, even to parties or weddings. I don’t like her makeup and clothing style. I’m conservative and religious, and I come from a different generation and period,” said her mother, who requested anonymity.

Her mother’s other concern was that Sharma was spending too much money on expensive eyeshadow palettes.

As with makeup, Sharma’s academic pursuit of history was not something her parents supported initially.

Sharma was in eighth grade when a history teacher who she remembers as “Sheila ma’am” changed her view of the subject. Until then, she says, teachers would ask students to underline important dates and moments in history in their textbooks, and then memorise them.

“However, at our first lesson with Sheila ma’am, she said that history could not be taught using a single textbook and that she would give us lectures like they do in colleges, and that we would have to take notes,” Sharma says. “Initially, I thought I would fail the history exam.”

Sharma began to visit the school library frequently and study any history books she came across, finding the process fascinating. Sharma got 94 percentile in 10th grade and took up humanities in high school.

Sharma got into Lady Shri Ram College, one of New Delhi’s top arts institutions, for her undergraduate studies, but her parents believed there was no future in history and pressured her into taking up an undergraduate programme in business studies.

Fresh out of college at the age of 21, she was recruited by a high-paying corporate firm. She left her job after just four months. She was bored. “I realised I needed to return to history. My parents were not very enthusiastic about my change of plans,” she says.

Sharma had continued to read history as a hobby during her undergraduate years. One book influenced her above all others – The Hindus: An Alternative History, by American historian Wendy Doniger, who was targeted by the Hindu right-wing who claimed that her book vilified the Hindu religion. Publishers subsequently pulled the book from the Indian market in 2014, raising widespread concerns about the state of free speech in India.

Making the leap from a corporate life to go back to school, she joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which regularly ranks as among India’s top research universities, for her master’s and PhD in history.

Sharma took up a contractual teaching position at Indraprastha College For Women in Delhi University. And in mid-2022, as physical classes resumed after COVID-19 cases dipped, Sharma started wearing eyeshadow to campus. “My students were very piqued by it and encouraged me to start a YouTube channel where I could provide makeup tutorials,” she says. “I declined. but then a student proposed that I talk about history while putting on eye makeup”.

That intrigued her. She read up online on how to start a YouTube channel. And two weeks later, she recorded her first episode where she matched her blue outfit with blue eyeshadow.

Her first video was a trip down memory lane: a 28-minute episode about Qutb Minar, where she discussed the monument’s history and construction, its architecture, and the history of architecture and design in Islam.

That first video, which she described as an experiment, brought her over 400 subscribers in the first few days.

Sharma, the YouTube historian, was born.

Sharma shooting a YouTube live for her history channel from Humayun’s tomb, a Mughal-era monument in New Delhi, India [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

‘Cannot let these myths slide’

Myth-busting was not the idea behind her YouTube channel initially, she says. She wanted to introduce people to aspects of Indian history that they were unfamiliar with.

She soon started recording videos on architectural reuse, non-vegetarian food in Indian history, homosexual and interfaith relationships in the Mughal period, and Sati, an ancient Hindu practice in which widows would burn to death by sitting atop their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.

But the comments she saw under her videos often had little to do with the content of what she had said.

“People used to comment a lot on videos about the Mughals breaking temples and oppressing Hindus. This is how I learned about the widespread myths, which I compiled into a video debunking the 10 biggest myths about Mughals,” she explains.

With each video, the responses alerted her to more historical myths, half-truths and instances of complex themes from the past that were often presented publicly without context.

“Initially, the trolling and abuse I received for my videos affected me greatly,” she says. Her past mental health struggles compounded the hurt, she said. “But over time, I became immune.”

Since then, she has had no shortage of material to work with: from the razing of Hindu temples, ostensibly by medieval Muslim rulers; to stories of atrocities committed by these rulers that eliminate nuance.

These are subjects that are often invoked by leaders of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and their allies to paint India’s history as one filled with the oppression of Hindus by Muslims – a narrative that critics have long warned feeds into the demonisation of India’s 200 million Muslims. In an animated Instagram video in late April that the platform later took down, the BJP portrayed India as a Hindu land pillaged by Muslim raiders for centuries. In fact, Islam arrived in the Indian subcontinent as early as the 7th century – much before Khilji, the Mughals and other Muslim rulers and commanders.

Under Modi, school textbooks have been changed to incorporate this Hindu nationalist reading of history – including suggestions that a Vedic sage was the “father of aviation” and that atomic science was known to ancient Hindus.

“I cannot just let these myths slide,” Sharma says.

“Lines were always blurred in India between history, faith and politics. But what has changed is that blurring of lines has led to violence,” she adds, arguing that the portrayal of Indian Muslims as historical villains has helped make it easier for Hindu majoritarian politicians and mobs to target them. Since Modi came to power in 2014, hate crimes – including lynchings – against Muslims have skyrocketed.

No figure in Indian history evokes the kind of hatred in Hindu nationalist historical accounts that Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor does. He is accused of having killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus, committing unimaginable atrocities on his ‘kafir’ (infidel) subjects, and razing down religious sites of ‘non-believers’.

Sharma believes this portrayal of Aurangzeb ignores the time he lived in.

“Aurangzeb arrived at a critical juncture in the history of the Mughal Empire when the empire was on the verge of disintegration,” she says. The wars he waged had “little to do with religion”, and were “all about political conquest”.

Breaking temples built or patronised by defeated kings was the norm at the time, she says – one that Hindu kings too had long followed. The idea was simple: Such temples were seen as manifestations of the former sovereign’s authority. Aurangzeb followed that practice, while at least 25 new Hindu temples also came up under his reign, Sharma says.

Yet, the widely held image of Aurangzeb as a particularly evil king has real-world consequences for those who differ. The Mughal king is also eulogised by some for having practised a humble lifestyle and for his religious knowledge. This landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in trouble. In June 2023, police arrested a teenager for putting up a social media status praising Aurangzeb, after receiving complaints.

“This idea is that because Aurangzeb broke a temple, so I will break this person’s house because he is a Muslim and because I think Aurangzeb and this person are the same,” Sharma says.

According to Abhilash Mallick, an associate editor of the fact-checking unit of The Quint, an India-based digital news organisation, history is challenging to fact-check because “we are unable to provide a yes or no answer”.

“So we must cite historians and their research and then allow the reader to draw their own conclusions,” he says. “We need people who can simplify history in videos and give all kinds of proofs in the same link. Videos work best. People consume them the most.”

That is where Sharma comes in. “She removes the historical jargon and makes videos in Hindi which is what I like about Ruchika’s approach,” he says.

As India votes in its seven-phase national election, the race between the politicisation of history and attempts to counter myth-making has only grown in intensity.

In late April, Sharma decided to take on a particularly powerful opponent – Prime Minister Modi himself.

Who is an ‘outsider’?

Speaking at an election rally in the western Indian state of Rajasthan on April 21, Modi appeared to describe Indian Muslims as “infiltrators” in trying to suggest that the opposition Congress wanted to take the private property of Hindus and distribute them among Muslims.

Within hours, Sharma posted a link on X, referencing a video of Modi’s comments and pointing to a YouTube episode of her show, challenging common beliefs about the Mughal empire that ruled India from 1526-1719 AD, though weaker kings from the dynasty continued to control an ever-shrinking empire all the way up to 1857.

The Mughal video, like all of Sharma’s history videos, begins with a more than one-minute preview of the video, followed by her introduction, in which she lists her credentials and tells viewers that her channel is a “passion project”.

Sharma applies a reddish eyeshadow that matches her red top. Throughout the video, she combines memes and Bollywood music to inject humour. Three minutes into the video, she picks up a skin serum and pours a few drops on her right palm as she takes on the first myth – that the Mughals were outsiders.

She discusses how, with the exception of Babur, the dynasty’s founder, and his son Humayun, the remainder of the Mughal rulers were born in India. Mughal food and clothing, she claims, are now commonplace in most Indian households. She discusses modern borders and the idea of nations and how they emerged centuries after the Mughals, and how by today’s notions of nationhood, most of the dynasties that ruled India would have had roots that could make them “outsiders”.

Sharma then picks up a concealer and begins applying it to her left eye as she debunks the second myth: that the Mughals were especially violent.

She refers to suggestions that the Mughals burned all documents prior to their rule. She explains how the Mughals preserved the histories and texts of the ancient Indian period through translations, such as Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.

A provocative question follows: “If documents were not burned, did they burn people?” she asks, before answering herself.

“Maybe as much as some other kings in India burned,” she says, explaining that the Mughals, while violent, had a track record no worse than many other rulers of the time.

But fighting historical battles in India’s present, surcharged political environment has risks. Doing so while wielding an eyeliner as a weapon is even harder – as Sharma has learned.

Sharma filming b-rolls of a Mughal-era monument for use in her YouTube broadcasts [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

‘I don’t want to rot in jail’

From labelling her a pseudo-historian and questioning her credentials to hypersexualised slander, the online abuse that Sharma faces is as wide-ranging as the makeup tools on her table and the slices from history she clinically dissects.

Sharma admits that when she first started creating the videos, she worried she wouldn’t be able to withstand the trolling. “They call me ugly. They assume I’m a [religious] convert. They call me a mulli and a jihadi,” she says. Mulli is a derogatory word used to slander Muslim women.

“But I’ve come to realise now I have a thicker skin.”

Still, she feels let down by her own peers. Sharma often hears from members of academia – including female historians – that she is cheapening history by talking about it while putting on makeup in front of a camera. “Women have internalised this idea that if they want to be taken seriously, they need to invisibilise their body and desexualise themselves,” Sharma says. “You shouldn’t have to choose between femininity and academia.”

Meena Bhargava, a retired history professor at Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women, believes that few academics are willing to speak out in India’s current political climate, where many universities have cracked down on critics of the Modi government.

“Some historians simply give up. We’ve talked so many times and then grown tired that people aren’t changing. Despite the harassment, Ruchika routinely posts historical videos on her YouTube account, which is encouraging,” says Bhargava.

Academics “who appear simple and dressed in a saree may be speaking nonsense”, she says.

“Then there’s Ruchika, who is flashy, fashionable, and wears trendy clothes. Despite all this, she knows what she is talking about.”

Sharma says Indian historians have a “social responsibility” to convey accurate history to the public – but that for the most part, they’ve failed. “Historians are happy writing journals that only five people read,” Sharma says.

She chooses to make her videos in Hindi, rather than English, to reach a larger Indian audience.

But as her viewership grows, so does – she believes – the target on her back. Sharma has applied for assistant professor positions at more than two dozen Delhi University colleges since 2022, after her short-term contract job at Indraprastha College was over, but has not been able to land a job. That is no coincidence, she says.

Often, she says, questions asked during interviews are attempts to tease out the interviewee’s ideology. She speaks of an incident where the interviewer turned out to be a senior historian aligned with the current government, whom she had confronted in a separate panel discussion earlier. During the job interview, she says, he inquired about recent archaeological excavations at a Mughal palace and mentioned the discovery of temple remains there.

“He asked me why they discovered temple remains there. I told him that one can find many things during excavation and that archaeology is very layered,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Why is it that only under mosques do you find remains of temples?’”

Sharma knew then that she wouldn’t get the job.

Now, she says, she goes to interviews without any expectations that she might be selected. “One Google search and anyone will know about my ideology and the government does not want somebody like me.”

It is not just her career that is on the line: Dozens of critics of the Modi government, including journalists and academics, have been arrested over the past decade, many on charges that rights groups have described as excessive or motivated.

Sharma doesn’t want to join them.

“I don’t want to rot in jail. I don’t see the point of it. I’d rather say what I can rather than say something that could eventually land me in jail,” she says before turning to the humour that often marks her videos too. “I can do much better work if I stay outside.”

Her mother worries about her daughter. “I keep telling her to quit this work. I feel scared,” she says.

Sharma has asked her mother not to share her videos in family WhatsApp groups and worries about being recognised in public. “I usually don’t tell her that I get death threats but she also has it in her brain that people are getting to know me and she tells me that I should wear a mask when I go outside,” says Sharma.

But despite her fears, Sharma is not ready to give up yet.

In her makeshift studio, it is time for a retake, so she sifts through brushes and picks the eye-shadow palette. She gently brushes the eyeshadow on her left eyelid. “I will continue making videos as long as they let me.”

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Original Source

This Indian historian fights the far-right, one makeup video at a time | India Election 2024

New Delhi, India – It is close to midnight. Ruchika Sharma sits in her makeshift studio at her home just outside India’s capital, New Delhi, a small mic hooked to her shirt. The 33-year-old historian and former professor is getting ready for her latest YouTube video show.

The recording hours are odd, but it is a considered decision. There is little ambient noise at this time, she reasons. For an independent creator like Sharma, a studio with fancy audio setups and soundproofing is beyond reach – especially since she knows that each video she puts out makes it harder for her to land a job.

Sharma looks at a phone that doubles as a teleprompter. Another phone serves as her recording rig. On two small wooden racks hung on the cream-coloured wall behind Sharma, sit a dozen history books. Also on the wall are a picture of Indian revolutionary icon Bhagat Singh, who was hanged by the British colonial regime in 1931, and a copy of the 17th-century painting of the Sasanian king Khosrow Parviz’s first sight of his Christian wife Shirin, bathing in a pool.

On her wooden table, alongside tripods and ring lights is an eclectic mix of cosmetic products: brushes, mascara, concealer, powder puff, and, most important of all, eyeshadow.

She hits the record button.

Sharma starts with an introduction to Nalanda, a sixth-century Buddhist university in northern India that was home to nine million manuscripts and was burned down in a major fire in the 12th century. A widely held belief – promoted by sections of India’s Hindu right, amplified by a government-run modern-day version of Nalanda University, and referenced in multiple news articles – suggests that Nalanda was destroyed by a Muslim general named Bakhtiyar Khilji.

Sharma calls this one of the “biggest myths of Indian history” before citing a slew of historical sources that she says buttress her assertion. These sources, which she says are often cited by those who paint Khilji as Nalanda’s villain, don’t actually refer to the university at all, she points out. Instead, she says, the sources suggest Khilji attacked another Buddhist university, where many people were killed in his attack.

Midway through the narration, she picks up a bottle of concealer and applies it under her eyes. She drops a sarcastic joke – telling her viewers that she is citing the very same sources that WhatsApp forwards pushing dubious or fake history tend to quote. A sponge comes out to blend with the skin tone, and soon, a lilac eyeshadow is in place.

At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and its Hindu nationalist allies face allegations of rewriting history, turning the past into a political battleground for the future, these unconventional history lessons, laced with makeup and satire, are Sharma’s attempt at setting the record straight.

With more than 200 YouTube videos in just over two years, the historian is building a growing audience: Her YouTube channel, Eyeshadow & Etihaas, has nearly 20,000 subscribers, while on X, where she amplifies the arguments she makes in her videos, she has 30,000 followers.

But perhaps the biggest testament to her mounting influence lies in the threats and abuse she routinely receives for her videos. They’re a badge of honour she shrugs off, but would rather not have to wear.

“I often get such death threats. Rape remarks keep coming,” she says. “They no longer work on me.”

A spread of makeup palettes, brushes and mascara in front of Sharma, which she uses during her recording [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

Eyeshadow and history

Sharma grew up surrounded by history, in a family shaped – like millions of others – by India’s modern tumult.

A grandchild of partition refugees, Sharma spent her childhood in Mehrauli, New Delhi’s oldest surviving inhabited area. After India’s cleavage at independence in 1947, her grandparents, both Punjabis from present-day Pakistan, found sanctuary in the neighbourhood and bought land on which they built a home.

She thinks of the stories of partition she heard from them as her first brush with history. From her terrace, she would watch Qutb Minar, a five-story red and buff sandstone tower built in the 12th and 13th centuries by Muslim rulers that is as much a landmark of New Delhi as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris. “I have a strong emotional connection with it. I think that monument is beautiful,” Sharma says.

When she was 13, her parents decided they needed more space and moved out of the family house to a district neighbouring Delhi, where she lives with her elder sister and her 61-year-old mother, a retired government official who worked at Indian Oil, a government oil and gas corporation. Sharma lost her father to cancer in 2017.

Sharma says she was always interested in eye makeup. She would wear kohl in high school. She began using lip gloss in college, and during her PhD in 2020, she started applying eye makeup and lipstick to cope with an abusive relationship.

“I was in a physically and mentally abusive relationship for 10 years, battling PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], and scary thoughts of self-harm. I was in therapy for it,” she explains.

Sharma saw an eyeshadow YouTube video that caught her attention. “Watching eyeshadow videos, seeing the colours arranged in palettes, and putting them on my eyelids was incredibly therapeutic for me. It would calm me down,” remarked Sharma.

She was teaching in a college at the time and would buy eyeshadow palettes, though her mother disapproved of it.

“I’ve never worn makeup in my life, even to parties or weddings. I don’t like her makeup and clothing style. I’m conservative and religious, and I come from a different generation and period,” said her mother, who requested anonymity.

Her mother’s other concern was that Sharma was spending too much money on expensive eyeshadow palettes.

As with makeup, Sharma’s academic pursuit of history was not something her parents supported initially.

Sharma was in eighth grade when a history teacher who she remembers as “Sheila ma’am” changed her view of the subject. Until then, she says, teachers would ask students to underline important dates and moments in history in their textbooks, and then memorise them.

“However, at our first lesson with Sheila ma’am, she said that history could not be taught using a single textbook and that she would give us lectures like they do in colleges, and that we would have to take notes,” Sharma says. “Initially, I thought I would fail the history exam.”

Sharma began to visit the school library frequently and study any history books she came across, finding the process fascinating. Sharma got 94 percent in her 10th grade examination and took up humanities in high school.

Sharma got into Lady Shri Ram College, one of New Delhi’s top arts institutions, for her undergraduate studies, but her parents believed there was no future in history and pressured her into taking up an undergraduate programme in business studies.

Fresh out of college at the age of 21, she was recruited by a high-paying corporate firm. She left her job after just four months. She was bored. “I realised I needed to return to history. My parents were not very enthusiastic about my change of plans,” she says.

Sharma had continued to read history as a hobby during her undergraduate years. One book influenced her above all others – The Hindus: An Alternative History, by American historian Wendy Doniger, who was targeted by the Hindu right-wing who claimed that her book vilified the Hindu religion. Publishers subsequently pulled the book from the Indian market in 2014, raising widespread concerns about the state of free speech in India.

Making the leap from a corporate life to go back to school, she joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), which regularly ranks as among India’s top research universities, for her master’s and PhD in history.

Sharma took up a contractual teaching position at Indraprastha College For Women in Delhi University. And in mid-2022, as physical classes resumed after COVID-19 cases dipped, Sharma started wearing eyeshadow to campus. “My students were very piqued by it and encouraged me to start a YouTube channel where I could provide makeup tutorials,” she says. “I declined. but then a student proposed that I talk about history while putting on eye makeup”.

That intrigued her. She read up online on how to start a YouTube channel. And two weeks later, she recorded her first episode where she matched her blue outfit with blue eyeshadow.

Her first video was a trip down memory lane: a 28-minute episode about Qutb Minar, where she discussed the monument’s history and construction, its architecture, and the history of architecture and design in Islam.

That first video, which she described as an experiment, brought her over 400 subscribers in the first few days.

Sharma, the YouTube historian, was born.

Sharma shooting a YouTube live for her history channel from Humayun’s tomb, a Mughal-era monument in New Delhi, India [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

‘Cannot let these myths slide’

Myth-busting was not the idea behind her YouTube channel initially, she says. She wanted to introduce people to aspects of Indian history that they were unfamiliar with.

She soon started recording videos on architectural reuse, non-vegetarian food in Indian history, homosexual and interfaith relationships in the Mughal period, and Sati, an ancient Hindu practice in which widows would burn to death by sitting atop their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres.

But the comments she saw under her videos often had little to do with the content of what she had said.

“People used to comment a lot on videos about the Mughals breaking temples and oppressing Hindus. This is how I learned about the widespread myths, which I compiled into a video debunking the 10 biggest myths about Mughals,” she explains.

With each video, the responses alerted her to more historical myths, half-truths and instances of complex themes from the past that were often presented publicly without context.

“Initially, the trolling and abuse I received for my videos affected me greatly,” she says. Her past mental health struggles compounded the hurt, she said. “But over time, I became immune.”

Since then, she has had no shortage of material to work with: from the razing of Hindu temples, ostensibly by medieval Muslim rulers; to stories of atrocities committed by these rulers that eliminate nuance.

These are subjects that are often invoked by leaders of Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and their allies to paint India’s history as one filled with the oppression of Hindus by Muslims – a narrative that critics have long warned feeds into the demonisation of India’s 200 million Muslims. In an animated Instagram video in late April that the platform later took down, the BJP portrayed India as a Hindu land pillaged by Muslim raiders for centuries. In fact, Islam arrived in the Indian subcontinent as early as the 7th century – much before Khilji, the Mughals and other Muslim rulers and commanders.

Under Modi, school textbooks have been changed to incorporate this Hindu nationalist reading of history – including suggestions that a Vedic sage was the “father of aviation” and that atomic science was known to ancient Hindus.

“I cannot just let these myths slide,” Sharma says.

“Lines were always blurred in India between history, faith and politics. But what has changed is that blurring of lines has led to violence,” she adds, arguing that the portrayal of Indian Muslims as historical villains has helped make it easier for Hindu majoritarian politicians and mobs to target them. Since Modi came to power in 2014, hate crimes – including lynchings – against Muslims have skyrocketed.

No figure in Indian history evokes the kind of hatred in Hindu nationalist historical accounts that Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor does. He is accused of having killed hundreds of thousands of Hindus, committing unimaginable atrocities on his ‘kafir’ (infidel) subjects, and razing down religious sites of ‘non-believers’.

Sharma believes this portrayal of Aurangzeb ignores the time he lived in.

“Aurangzeb arrived at a critical juncture in the history of the Mughal Empire when the empire was on the verge of disintegration,” she says. The wars he waged had “little to do with religion”, and were “all about political conquest”.

Breaking temples built or patronised by defeated kings was the norm at the time, she says – one that Hindu kings too had long followed. The idea was simple: Such temples were seen as manifestations of the former sovereign’s authority. Aurangzeb followed that practice, and patronised at least 25 Hindu temples, Sharma says.

Yet, the widely held image of Aurangzeb as a particularly evil king has real-world consequences for those who differ. The Mughal king is also eulogised by some for having practised a humble lifestyle and for his religious knowledge. This landed a 14-year-old Muslim boy in trouble. In June 2023, police arrested a teenager for putting up a social media status praising Aurangzeb, after receiving complaints.

“This idea is that because Aurangzeb broke a temple, so I will break this person’s house because he is a Muslim and because I think Aurangzeb and this person are the same,” Sharma says.

According to Abhilash Mallick, an associate editor of the fact-checking unit of The Quint, an India-based digital news organisation, history is challenging to fact-check because “we are unable to provide a yes or no answer”.

“So we must cite historians and their research and then allow the reader to draw their own conclusions,” he says. “We need people who can simplify history in videos and give all kinds of proofs in the same link. Videos work best. People consume them the most.”

That is where Sharma comes in. “She removes the historical jargon and makes videos in Hindi which is what I like about Ruchika’s approach,” he says.

As India votes in its seven-phase national election, the race between the politicisation of history and attempts to counter myth-making has only grown in intensity.

In late April, Sharma decided to take on a particularly powerful opponent – Prime Minister Modi himself.

Who is an ‘outsider’?

Speaking at an election rally in the western Indian state of Rajasthan on April 21, Modi appeared to describe Indian Muslims as “infiltrators” in trying to suggest that the opposition Congress wanted to take the private property of Hindus and distribute them among Muslims.

Within hours, Sharma posted a link on X, referencing a video of Modi’s comments and pointing to a YouTube episode of her show, challenging common beliefs about the Mughal empire that ruled India from 1526-1719 AD, though weaker kings from the dynasty continued to control an ever-shrinking empire all the way up to 1857.

The Mughal video, like all of Sharma’s history videos, begins with a more than one-minute preview of the video, followed by her introduction, in which she lists her credentials and tells viewers that her channel is a “passion project”.

Sharma applies a reddish eyeshadow that matches her red top. Throughout the video, she combines memes and Bollywood music to inject humour. Three minutes into the video, she picks up a skin serum and pours a few drops on her right palm as she takes on the first myth – that the Mughals were outsiders.

She discusses how, with the exception of Babur, the dynasty’s founder, and his son Humayun, the remainder of the Mughal rulers were born in India. Mughal food and clothing, she claims, are now commonplace in most Indian households. She discusses modern borders and the idea of nations and how they emerged centuries after the Mughals, and how by today’s notions of nationhood, most of the dynasties that ruled India would have had roots that could make them “outsiders”.

Sharma then picks up a concealer and begins applying it to her left eye as she debunks the second myth: that the Mughals were especially violent.

She refers to suggestions that the Mughals burned all documents prior to their rule. She explains how the Mughals preserved the histories and texts of the ancient Indian period through translations, such as Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.

A provocative question follows: “If documents were not burned, did they burn people?” she asks, before answering herself.

“Maybe as much as some other kings in India burned,” she says, explaining that the Mughals, while violent, had a track record no worse than many other rulers of the time.

But fighting historical battles in India’s present, surcharged political environment has risks. Doing so while wielding an eyeliner as a weapon is even harder – as Sharma has learned.

Sharma filming b-rolls of a Mughal-era monument for use in her YouTube broadcasts [Md Meharban/Al Jazeera]

‘I don’t want to rot in jail’

From labelling her a pseudo-historian and questioning her credentials to hypersexualised slander, the online abuse that Sharma faces is as wide-ranging as the makeup tools on her table and the slices from history she clinically dissects.

Sharma admits that when she first started creating the videos, she worried she wouldn’t be able to withstand the trolling. “They call me ugly. They assume I’m a [religious] convert. They call me a mulli and a jihadi,” she says. Mulli is a derogatory word used to slander Muslim women.

“But I’ve come to realise now I have a thicker skin.”

Still, she feels let down by her own peers. Sharma often hears from members of academia – including female historians – that she is cheapening history by talking about it while putting on makeup in front of a camera. “Women have internalised this idea that if they want to be taken seriously, they need to invisibilise their body and desexualise themselves,” Sharma says. “You shouldn’t have to choose between femininity and academia.”

Meena Bhargava, a retired history professor at Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women, believes that few academics are willing to speak out in India’s current political climate, where many universities have cracked down on critics of the Modi government.

“Some historians simply give up. We’ve talked so many times and then grown tired that people aren’t changing. Despite the harassment, Ruchika routinely posts historical videos on her YouTube account, which is encouraging,” says Bhargava.

Academics “who appear simple and dressed in a saree may be speaking nonsense”, she says.

“Then there’s Ruchika, who is flashy, fashionable, and wears trendy clothes. Despite all this, she knows what she is talking about.”

Sharma says Indian historians have a “social responsibility” to convey accurate history to the public – but that for the most part, they’ve failed. “Historians are happy writing journals that only five people read,” Sharma says.

She chooses to make her videos in Hindi, rather than English, to reach a larger Indian audience.

But as her viewership grows, so does – she believes – the target on her back. Sharma has applied for assistant professor positions at more than two dozen Delhi University colleges since August 2023, after her short-term contract job at Indraprastha College was over, but has not been able to land a job. That is no coincidence, she says.

Often, she says, questions asked during interviews are attempts to tease out the interviewee’s ideology. She speaks of an incident where the interviewer turned out to be a senior historian aligned with the current government, whom she had confronted in a separate panel discussion earlier. During the job interview, she says, he inquired about recent archaeological excavations at a Mughal palace and mentioned the discovery of temple remains there.

“He asked me why they discovered temple remains there. I told him that one can find many things during excavation and that archaeology is very layered,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Why is it that only under mosques do you find remains of temples?’”

Sharma knew then that she wouldn’t get the job.

Now, she says, she goes to interviews without any expectations that she might be selected. “One Google search and anyone will know about my ideology and the government does not want somebody like me.”

It is not just her career that is on the line: Dozens of critics of the Modi government, including journalists and academics, have been arrested over the past decade, many on charges that rights groups have described as excessive or motivated.

Sharma doesn’t want to join them.

“I don’t want to rot in jail. I don’t see the point of it. I’d rather say what I can rather than say something that could eventually land me in jail,” she says before turning to the humour that often marks her videos too. “I can do much better work if I stay outside.”

Her mother worries about her daughter. “I keep telling her to quit this work. I feel scared,” she says.

Sharma has asked her mother not to share her videos in family WhatsApp groups and worries about being recognised in public. “I usually don’t tell her that I get death threats but she also has it in her brain that people are getting to know me and she tells me that I should wear a mask when I go outside,” says Sharma.

But despite her fears, Sharma is not ready to give up yet.

In her makeshift studio, it is time for a retake, so she sifts through brushes and picks the eye-shadow palette. She gently brushes the eyeshadow on her left eyelid. “I will continue making videos as long as they let me.”

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‘No turning back’: Carnation Revolution divides Portugal again, 50 years on | The Far Right

Lisbon, Portugal – The olive-green military vehicles are the same, as are the uniforms of the personnel riding them. It’s even the same day of the week on this April 25 – a Thursday.

This is when it all started, on the shore of the Tagus River where the sun hangs like a bulb over the Portuguese capital and Europe’s westernmost edge.

But the cheering crowds beside the road today, waving red carnations bought from flower ladies on Rossio Square weren’t there 50 years ago. Nobody clapped their hands or posted photos on social media along with catchy hashtags.

On that brisk dawn, the streets were deserted while Lisbon still slumbered, while a revolt was taking birth. That morning, Portugal was still a fascist dictatorship that had fought three brutal wars in Portuguese Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique in its desperate bid to keep control over its African colonies. By the end of the day, Portugal’s 42-year-old dictatorship, Estado Novo (“New State”), had been felled by a swift military takeover.

“We were professional soldiers, we’d been in wars and were trained to deal with stressful situations, but this was something completely different,” says former navy captain Carlos Almada Contreiras.

Contreiras was among the 163 military captains who in September 1973 had come together in secret at a “special farmhouse barbeque” to form the clandestine “Movement of Armed Forces” (Movimento das Forcas Armadas, MFA). These were men who had fought the Portuguese dictatorship’s colonial wars and knew very well that no military victory was close at hand; on the contrary, morale was in decline and an estimated 9,000 Portuguese soldiers had died since 1961.

Veterans parade on the streets of Lisbon alongside crowds celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, during which military leaders deposed the former authoritarian dictatorship, Estado Novo [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

On April 25, 1974, they turned their gaze towards Lisbon’s political heart, intending to seize control of key military installations, political chambers and broadcasting facilities, as well as the airport. At the time, 50 years ago, nobody could predict the outcome of the day.

However, the rebels knew that “there was no turning back,” says Contreiras.

It was now life or death – if the military action failed, the MFA conspirators would in all probability have been charged with high treason and quite possibly sentenced to death. But a victorious outcome might just bring a new dawn for a dying empire in its last throes.

Was he afraid? Contreiras takes a deep breath and recalls that morning when his life – and the lives of numerous others – changed forever. “I haven’t thought of that,” he says. “We had to act, otherwise we would continue to live in this dead political system, keep fighting these meaningless colonial wars.”

In the end, and in less than a day, MFA gained full control over Portugal’s military facilities and brought an end to the far-right dictatorship. Prime Minister Marcello Caetano bowed to the conspirators and Portugal’s notorious secret police – PIDE – was dismantled.

The following year, 1975, a US-backed counter-coup in November would supplant the new government and the Carnation Revolution would come to an end. But the change it had brought about was permanent.

“The people of Portugal and millions of people in our African colonies were given their lives back,” says Contreiras.

As Portugal celebrates 50 years of pluralistic democracy today, however, the long shadows of the country’s authoritarian past are creeping back in the wake of the March 2024 elections, in which far-right political party Chega (“Enough”) gained 18 percent of the vote and drove a wedge through the heart of the Portuguese two-party system, which had dominated the chambers of power since the 1970s.

‘We had to act,’ former navy captain Carlos Almada Contreiras recalls the events of April 25, 1974 when he and other senior military figures finally stood up to the dictatorship in Lisbon [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

A revolution is born

On April 25, 1974, Portugal became world news. Newspapers around the world were drenched in bright images of celebrating Portuguese masses who took to the streets and placed red carnations in soldier’s rifle barrels and uniforms. Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” is often described as a near-bloodless military takeover. But much blood had been spilled in the years leading up to that moment.

In the early 1960s, as most African nations fought for and won independence from their European colonisers, Portugal stood firm in its claim to the country’s African “possessions”. These were now dubbed “Overseas Territory” instead of “colonies” as a result of a 1951 rewrite of the constitution and the country had responded to self-determination claims with brutality and repression.

Dictator and Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar had established the “Estado Novo” in 1932 – a corporatist state rooted in anti-liberalism and fascism formed in the wake of the demise of Portugal’s monarchy – and kept Portugal out of the second world war. Despite being a brutal dictatorship, Salazar managed to lead Portugal into NATO’s anti-communist club in 1949 thanks to its control of the Azores Islands, a vital strategic outpost.

When the first colonial war had erupted in Angola in March 1961, soon followed by wars in Portuguese Guinea and Mozambique, Portugal was able to source weaponry – helicopters, fighter aircraft and petrochemical weapons like napalm – from allied nations, primarily the United States, West Germany and France.

Furthermore, during the Cold War, the Azorean military base became a vital strategic and geopolitical outpost in the mid-Atlantic, particularly for the United States, whose continued access to the military facilities depended on political and economic support to Salazar’s authoritarian rule. The Azorean military facilities became crucial for the United States during its military operations to aid the Israel forces during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

A veteran joins the crowds on a march down Av da Liberdade on the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on April 25, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

Finally, in the mid-1960s, the Portuguese dictatorship started to implode. The colonial wars had finally brought Portugal’s economy to its knees, and large numbers of forced military conscripts were deserting – much to the embarrassment of the government – fleeing the country and becoming vocal proponents of antiwar movements in countries like France, West Germany and Sweden.

As a navy captain, Contreiras patrolled the Atlantic waters between Angola and Sao Tome. He recalls the first signs of dissent within the army. Within an authoritarian political system, the very thought of rebellion was unheard of. Therefore, the first whispers of change occurred in private exchanges.

“War fatigue and a longing for democracy finally caught up with us,” he says. “As part of the navy, I experienced all war fronts, and it was a living hell.”

A revolutionary seed was planted, he believes, and it grew into something larger – something irreversible. “The revolution was born out of the words we uttered at sea.”

Along with the seemingly never-ending colonial wars, the Portuguese military had started to ease the way for more rapid military rank advancement and promotions in 1973 through a series of new laws to attract more men to pursue military careers.

Low-ranking officers who remained on the lower rungs of the career ladder despite many years of war service saw this as an existential threat. “We were both frustrated and nervous about the development,” Contreiras recalls.

In the summer of 1973, the “Naval Club” had been initiated by the 200-odd military captains who were determined to protect their military careers and refused to be singled out as scapegoats for Portugal’s declining successes in its colonial warfare. The initial programme called for “Democracy, Development and Decolonisation” and to achieve these goals, the clandestine movement realised the only way was through a military overthrow of the Estado Novo.

In September 1973, Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by military leaders in a US-backed coup. The Naval Club decided to copy the Chilean coup makers’ use of secret signals via public radio and convinced a radio journalist, Alvaro Guerra, to join the plot. Guerra would issue the “signal” which would start the military operation by playing a chosen song on his nightly programme, Limite (“Limit”).

Contreiras secretly met Guerra “mere days before the revolution” and handed him his last instructions. The chosen song – Grandola, Vila Morena by folk singer Jose Afonso – was to be played shortly after midnight on April 25, 1974, signalling to the MFA to launch its takeover attempt. “It was well planned, it all depended on timing,” he recalls.

A woman selling carnation flowers during the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on April 25, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

Return of the far-right?

Fifty years later, Afonso’s song is playing at a cafe on the Avenida da Liberdade as more a million people take to the street to commemorate the “Carnation Revolution”.

The impressive turnout of the elderly, youth, parents, and their toddlers underlines the importance of the dramatic political event – not just for those who lived through it.

Claudia and Lucia, two teachers in their 40s, break down and cry while drinking coffee at a cafe before the start of the commemoration march along Avenida da Liberdade down to Rossio Square.

They are crying for their parents who survived the dictatorship, explains Claudia.

“It’s so hard for them to talk about what it was like during the Estado Novo,” adds Lucia. “Many Portuguese have just put a lid over the past, never to talk about it again. For us, the children of the revolution, it’s been hard to deal with their pain, let alone helping them to move on. That’s why the rise of the far-right in Portugal is such a hard blow – for us and for our parents.”

The commemoration march – during which political leaders make speeches and cheer for the revolution while crowds of people drink beer and “ginja” (a Portuguese liqueur) – is framed by chants: “25 April, always! Fascism, never again!”

Still, in this environment of seemingly overwhelming consensus, some have chosen to march against the human current, against the wave of numerous people. A middle-aged man, seemingly just walking by, shakes his head and curses the revolution. Nobody seems to notice him, and his words are lost in the sea of revolutionary chants.

The man may be one of the self-titled pacote silencioso (“silent pack”) of whom Portuguese scholars have been talking for years, particularly during the past decade which has been a constant repetition of financial crises, government-imposed austerity policies and rising poverty, leading to an exhaustion of trust among some in democratic institutions and Portugal’s dominant parties, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD).

A carnation lies on top of a newspaper on a bench in Lison during celebrations on April 25, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

The signs of dissent are here to be seen. On a park bench, another middle-aged man smokes a cigarette and glares at the passing wave of people. From a speaker, the hymn of the revolution is played again, to which the man screams: “Turn off that piece of shit! Nobody believes in that anyway!”

On the bench beside him lies a red carnation on top of a copy of the sports paper A Bola. A woman snaps a photo of the carnation and the newspaper, excusing herself, assuring the man she is not about to steal his flower. The man smiles and says: “Don’t worry, there are no thieves here. The only thieves are in the Portuguese parliament, stealing from the people!”

It’s a sentiment that many appear to share. Chega clinched 50 seats in parliament in the same year that Portugal celebrated 50 years of liberal democracy. According to an analysis by social scientist Riccardo Marchi, Chega’s swift rise since its formation in 2019 by Andre Ventura, a former social democrat and television personality, is rooted in Portugal’s established “two-party system”, dominated by PS and PSD and which became an established political model after the fall of Estado Novo in 1974.

Marchi writes: “The PS and PSD were unable to reverse the growing dissatisfaction of large sectors of voters with the functioning of Portuguese democracy. This feeling of democratic decline was attributed to the elite of the two dominant parties and is evidenced, for example, by the steady increase in abstention.”

Chega’s electoral victory has been at least partially attributed to the far-right party’s ability to persuade formerly reluctant voters to return to the voting booth and to present itself as an appealing choice for young adults (primarily men between 18 and 25) with a deep-lying lack of trust in political institutions. For the first time since 2009, voter turnout reached close to 60 percent, which according to Marchi is a testament to Chega’s ability to attract young voters who are “unaware of the nostalgia for the right-wing dictatorship, and dissatisfied but informed about politics, mainly through the tabloids and social networks”.

This trend has overlapped with eroded historical narratives about Portuguese colonialism and the Salazar dictatorship. There is lingering nostalgia among Chega voters for the “stability” and “order” that the Estado Novo offered its citizens, scholars have said. But the notion that the future is to be found in an authoritarian past goes hand-in-hand with a renewed global populist movement of recent years and Chega’s rewritten historical narrative, which includes downplaying the dictatorship’s global atrocities while outright celebrating it as a functioning state.

A woman holds a carnation flower during a performance at the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on April 25, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

This narrative has even begun to cross the political aisle. In 2019, Lisbon’s socialist mayor, Fernando Medina, underlined Portugal’s historical global identity as “a starting point for routes to discover new worlds, new people, new ideas”. Portraying Portugal as a positive historical actor who “discovered new shores”, Medina turned a blind eye to the brutality and atrocities that went hand in hand with Portuguese colonialism.

In the conservative press, Chega’s rise is portrayed as “a maturing wine” while the Carnation Revolution, according to The European Conservative magazine, opened the door to political instability, chaos and “left-wing hegemony”.

Framing its movement as a resurrection of Portuguese dignity and identity has been a success for the Portuguese far-right, according to an analysis by anthropologist Elsa Peralta: “In today’s overall scenario of global crisis, former imperial myths and mentalities seem to have gained a second life, often testifying to a grip on a nostalgic and biased version of the colonial past,” she writes.

Chega has been able to ride this nostalgic wave, lifted by a European discourse rooted in xenophobia, focusing on immigration and populist solutions to complex financial and political dilemmas, observers have said.

Uprooting the seeds of a revolution

Half a century ago, Estado Novo’s primary pillars of power were the police, military and the Catholic church – and academic circles. Both of Estado Novo’s dictators, Salazar and Caetano, were well-educated economists who saw Portugal’s universities as an extension of the conservative identity of the corporatist state.

Today, many Portuguese universities have become ideological battlegrounds between Chega’s far-right policy and climate action groups who are taking a stand against fossil fuels-driven capitalism.

The day before the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, Matilde Ventura and Jissica Silva from the student climate crisis action group Greve Climatica Estudantil (GCE), are smoking cigarettes in plastic chairs and enjoying the sunshine next to protest tents pitched on the campus of Lisbon’s Faculty of Social and Human Sciences for the past month.

This is a group action with various other action groups at universities in Portugal and other European countries, protesting against the country’s dependency on fossil fuels.

According to Ventura, a political science student, the climate crisis has become a perfect engine for Chega and the party’s far-right agenda which downplays the man-made environmental destruction of the Earth and questions climate change as a hoax.

“Something’s changing here,” she says, squinting her eyes against the bright sunshine.

‘Something’s changing here’. Matilde Ventura and Jissica Silva, seated centre, of Greve Climatica Estudantil (GCE), a student climate crisis action group at Lisbon University of Social and Human Sciences, says the police stormed their protest encampment last November [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

She recalls the early hours of Monday, November 13, 2023, when the climate action groups had decided to occupy the campus ground. That was when police stormed the campus and forced the student occupants out of their tents where they slept. They were hauled to the police station and kept in custody overnight. “It was the first time since the Salazar dictatorship that police crossed the threshold into a university,” she says. “It was a significant and symbolic step. The police were violent against us, and – don’t forget – there are many Chega supporters among the police. But we refused to be silent.”

The students returned to the faculty campus the next day, refused to leave, and continued to make their voices heard. The threat against democracy and the climate go hand in hand, says Silva, a medical student. “The fossil fuels-driven capitalism is the context that embodies all aspects of the problem,” she adds. “All issues – political, financial, social and environmental – can be traced to the problem with climate change and its roots in fossil fuels dependency.”

CGE’s campus occupation is significant for both Portugal’s far-right movements and the country’s financial oligarchy. Lisbon’s Faculty of Social and Human Sciences was born from the Carnation Revolution, established in 1977 on a site that had previously belonged to the military.

Now, the faculty is about to be removed and the former military barracks it occupies is to be converted into a hotel complex. The moving date is not set, but the occupying students of CGE see it as a symbol of political ebb – of uprooting one of many seeds planted by the revolution.

“The circle is closed,” says Ventura. “It’s been 50 years since the revolution, and the far-right is back. Not only in parliament but also as a force against the democratic fight against the climate crisis.”

Members of Chega were there, at the campus, when Ventura and Silva and other students returned from police custody, they say. Chega’s young political star, 25-year-old former university student Rita Matias, entered the campus to hand out flyers and denounce the climate crisis protests.

“Chega was protected by the police,” says Ventura. “But we managed to oust them from the campus and block the entrance by forming a human wall and chanted the same motto as our parents did after the revolution: ‘25 of April, always! Fascism, never again!’”

The incident, she concludes, was a testament to the perils of Portugal’s far-right momentum: “Portugal’s political and economic leaders have no idea how it is to live here. If they did, they wouldn’t waste another minute by moving forward in the same shape and form as today.”

Silva talks of her grandfather, a war veteran from the battlefield of Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde). “He often talks about our shared responsibility to make things right,” she says. “He returned to Africa after the revolution to work with a museum, to remember the colonial wars and what really happened. That’s an inspiration for me.”

Veterans parade with crowds celebrating them during the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on April 25, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

A lost revolution?

All over Lisbon, there are red carnations painted on murals, displayed on posters, visible in shops and worn by people. On an electricity pole close by, someone has shared a question on a poster for the 50th anniversary: “E depois?”(“And then what?”)

Portugal’s Carnation Revolution was “the most profound to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War”, writes historian Raquel Varela in her book about the revolution, A People’s History. But it’s easier to commemorate the dismantling of a fascist dictatorship and the decolonisation of African colonies than to approach the death of the revolution, due to the following counter-coup on November 25, 1975. As one prominent employee at Lisbon University, who wishes to remain anonymous, puts it, “We must not only remember 25 April 1974 but also address the trauma of 25 November 1975.”

Varela concludes that the reason the Portuguese coup in 1975 remains a delicate political topic is that it suffocated a social revolution that “was the last European revolution to call into question private property of the means of production”.

Between April 1974 and November 1975, writes Varela, “hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike, hundreds of workplaces were occupied sometimes for months and perhaps almost 3 million people took part in demonstrations, occupations and commissions. A great many workplaces were taken over and run by the workers. Land in much of southern and central Portugal was taken over by the workers themselves. Women won, almost overnight, a host of concessions and made massive strides towards equal pay and equality.”

Portugal’s NATO allies, primarily the United States, feared that the former fascist state would become a socialist state. The White House, led by President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, acted through the US embassy in Lisbon, instructing the American ambassador Frank Carlucci – later secretary of defense – to “vaccinate” Portugal against the communist disease. The United States supported an anti-communist military section, the so-called “Group of Nine” with both political capital and military equipment, as well as bullying Portugal within the NATO community.

When the “Group of Nine” finally deposed the revolutionary government in Lisbon on November 25, 1975, by dispatching 1,000 paratroopers, and clinched power over the Portuguese government, the Carnation Revolution came to an end.

The historical aftermath has been dominated by a narrative based on the notion that the Group of Nine normalised and stabilised Portuguese society via a “democratic counter-revolution”. The United States rewarded Portugal with a massive economic boost in the form of a “jumbo loan” to integrate the Portuguese Armed Forces further into NATO and liberalise the industries that had been “socialised” during the revolution.

Now, the tiny right-wing party, Centro Democratico e Social – Partido Popular (CDS-PP), has moved to make November 25, 1975 an annual day of remembrance. The day, CDS-PP states in a submitted law proposal, “marked the path towards an irreversibly liberal democracy of the Western model”. This proposal has the backing of Chega while PS, the Communist Party and the Left Bloc oppose it.

‘People became squatters’. Silvandira Costa, 61, was a young teenager when her family ‘returned’ from then-Guinea, Africa, following independence after the Carnation Revolution [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

‘I am a refugee, not a returnee’

One focus of attention for far-right parties in Portugal today is immigration. One-third of Portugal’s non-white immigrants live in poverty.

In Rio de Mouro, a town of 50,000 inhabitants situated 23 kilometres (14 miles) from Lisbon, migrant workers from former Portuguese colonies arrive to sub-let over-priced apartments and take low-paid jobs in construction, the service sector or season-dependent industries.

Silvandira Costa, a 61-year-old assistant administrator and union activist at Editorial do Ministerio da Educação, a publisher of learning materials, points to a row of apartment buildings a five-minute drive from the train station. “All these houses were occupied by returnees after the revolution,” she says. “People had no place to go, nowhere to sleep, so they became squatters.”

Costa can relate to their situation. She was in her early teens in 1977 when her family “returned” to Portugal from Guinea-Bissau, where she was born, in the wake of Guinean independence. “I’m a refugee,” Costa emphasises – she does not see herself as a “returnee”. “I consider myself African. I was born in Guinea, I had my first experiences of smell and taste of food and experiencing the soil and the solidarity among the people in the village where I grew up.”

Refugee status, however, was never granted to 500,000 – 800,000 Portuguese citizens who arrived in Portugal in the mid-1970s from the former colonies. Portugal’s post-revolution governments and the United Nations High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR) deemed them “citizens of the country of their destination” and, therefore, not eligible for refugee status under the Convention of Refugees of 1951. For Silva, that underlined the sentiment of being a castaway in a new society, one to which she arrived without any possessions but the clothes she was wearing. “If we weren’t refugees, then what were we?” she asks out loud. “We left our home in Guinea in a hurry, boarded a plane and expected to deal with the situation in Portugal without any money, nowhere to stay, no work for our mom and me and my sister were looked upon as aliens at school.”

Costa’s mother had left Portugal in the 1950s, as part of an immigration programme under which Portuguese citizens – often poor families and urban dwellers – were promised land and a purpose at the frontiers of the empire. The colonial war in Portuguese Guinea changed everything. Then the Carnation Revolution ended 500 years of Portuguese presence in Africa.

It was a burden to carry, to be the “physical representation of Portuguese colonialism and repression”, says Costa.

People from Guinea-Bissau protest during the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon on the 25th of April, 2024 [Fredrik Lerneryd/Al Jazeera]

At the train station, she approaches a group of young Guinean men who have gathered on the concrete steps close to the train station. They speak in Creole, about life, hardships, the situation in Guinea-Bissau, and the future.

“The future?” says one man and laughs. “We talk about Africa – but the only future we’ve got is the world under our feet.”

“Portugal has an enormous responsibility to deal with her colonial past and atrocities against African people,” says Costa. “Chega repeats the same historical mistake as the fascists did by blaming poverty, inflated living costs and social insecurity on immigrants. They’re afraid of the truth, and now they’re trying to whitewash Portugal’s colonial history.”

A closed circle

Back in Lisbon, at Rua da Misericordia, on the second floor of the old military barracks that was overtaken by the MFA on April 25, 1974, former navy captain Carlos Almada Contreiras looks out over the same street on which his life irrevocably changed – along with the lives of millions of others in Portugal and its colonies.

Now, tourists stroll in and out of restaurants and stores. Vehicles drive up and down the same cobblestone street that carried the olive-green military vehicles that early April morning 50 years ago.

“So much has changed, yet the street remains the same,” he almost whispers.

Locked inside the narrow street, constantly sprayed by salty winds from the Atlantic Ocean, Europe’s last social revolution took place. “It was a revolution for the coming generations; it’s important to tell the story in a way that runs along their everyday life, to make them realise what was at stake back in 1974.”

How did it feel to be part of the collapse of a colonial empire? Contreiras laughs, ponders the question, and then answers: “I’ve never really thought of it. But sure, that’s what we accomplished in the end.”

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Rwanda genocide: ‘Frozen faces still haunt’ photojournalist, 30 years on | Genocide

Warning: Some of the images below are graphic and show victims of massacres. 

On April 7, 1994, one of the most harrowing events in modern history began: the Rwandan genocide. 

One hundred days of unfathomable slaughter in which an estimated 800,000-1,000,000 people were killed. 

Rwandans were pitted against Rwandans, Hutu against Tutsi, neighbour against neighbour, and in some cases, family member against family member. 

From grandmothers to infants, no one was spared – all dispatched to the next world by machete, machinegun or hand grenade. 

Thirty years ago, Jack Picone was among the first international photographers to document the carnage.

He reflects on the journey he took in the grips of genocide, how ordinary Rwandans are finding healing and forgiveness, and the memories that still haunt him to this day.

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What is the history of foreign interventions in Haiti? | Crime News

The proposal initially sparked an uproar. In October 2022, then-Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry and 18 top officials called on the international community to send a “specialised armed force” to help combat the spread of gang violence in Haiti.

But Haiti has struggled with a long, fraught history of foreign involvement — and the prospect of a new wave of outside interference was met with scepticism.

Now, experts say that public opinion is shifting in Haiti, as the violence continues to fester and Haiti’s already tenuous government is on the verge of yet another shake-up.

“In October 2022, most Haitians were against an international force,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH). “But today most Haitians will support it because the situation is worse, and they feel there are no other options.”

Still, the history of international involvement in Haiti casts such a long shadow that it continues to be a divisive subject — both among the Haitian people and the outside forces that would potentially be involved.

A new level of crisis

The instability in Haiti entered a new chapter this week when Prime Minister Henry — an unelected official who has been serving as de facto president — announced that he planned to resign. 

The announcement came after mounting international pressure, as well as threats from the gangs themselves. One of the country’s most notorious gang leaders, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, told reporters that a “civil war” would erupt if the deeply unpopular Henry did not step down.

The calls for an international force to intervene arise from the acute nature of the situation, Esperance and other experts told Al Jazeera.

Gang violence has forced more than 362,000 Haitians from their home, largely in and around the capital of Port-au-Prince. The United Nations estimates that at least 34,000 of those have been displaced since the start of the year.

Armed groups have also taken control of roadways and other vital arteries around the country, limiting the flow of supplies. With high rates of poverty already driving malnutrition, the UN has warned the country is at risk of famine.

“The gangs control more than 95 percent of Port-au-Prince,” Esperance said. “Hospitals don’t have materials, there’s not enough drinking water, the supermarkets are almost empty. People are staying at home because it’s very dangerous.”

Will Kenya take the lead?

With gang violence at crisis levels and Haiti’s government in shambles, some Haitians are increasingly looking abroad for assistance.

An August poll released by the business alliance AGERCA and the consultancy DDG found that about 63 percent of Haitians supported the deployment of an “international force” to combat the gangs.

An even higher portion — 75 percent — said the Haitian police needed international support to reestablish order.

But countries like the United States and Canada have baulked at the prospect of helming such a force themselves, though they have offered to back other governments that might lead one.

In July 2023, Kenya announced it would be willing to deploy forces to Haiti and potentially lead a multinational security mission.

The UN Security Council threw its support behind the initiative, approving the Kenya-led mission. But the effort has since stalled, amid court challenges and other slowdowns.

In January, a Kenyan court ruled that deploying forces in Haiti would be “illegal and invalid”. And just last Tuesday, Kenyan officials said they would pause any deployment to Haiti until a new government was in place.

Jonathan Katz, the author of the book The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, told Al Jazeera that the international community’s hesitation to lead a mission to Haiti is a testament to the poor track record of past foreign interventions.

“These countries are saying, ‘We need to do this because we can’t think of any other solution,’” said Katz. “But nobody wants to do it themselves because every single one of these interventions throughout Haiti’s history have ended with significant egg on the face for everyone involved.”

‘A direct colonial occupation’

Since the early 1900s, there have been at least three direct interventions in Haiti, including a decades-long occupation by US forces.

That occupation lasted from 1915 to 1934 and was carried out in the name of restoring political stability after the assassination of then-President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam.

But during their time in Haiti, US forces oversaw widespread human rights abuses and the implementation of a “corvée”, a system of forced labour sometimes likened to slavery.

“Slavery it was — though temporary,” said US civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson, writing for The Nation magazine in 1920.

“By day or by night, from the bosom of their families, from their little farms or while trudging peacefully on the country roads, Haitians were seized and forcibly taken to toil for months in far sections of the country.”

US soldiers even removed substantial funds from the Haitian National Bank, carting them off to New York.

“This was a direct colonial occupation that began under US President Woodrow Wilson and lasted for five administrations, both Republican and Democrat,” Katz said of that period. “Later occupations were carried out with varying degrees of directness and indirectness.”

A hand in Haiti’s politics

For instance, the US would intervene again in Haitian politics during the Cold War, as it propped up governments friendly to its interests in the name of anti-Communism.

Positioning himself as an anti-Communist leader upon his election in 1957, Haitian President Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier actively courted US support, even as he led a brutal campaign of state violence against his own people.

Despite misgivings about Duvalier, the US offered him aid: US Ambassador Robert Newbegin, for instance, arrived in Port-au-Prince prepared to give Duvalier’s administration approximately $12.5m in 1960 alone.

One estimate puts the total US support given to Haiti under Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, at $900m. Meanwhile, the Duvaliers faced accusations of murder, torture and other violations.

The US also sent troops to intervene directly in Haiti. In 1994, for instance, US President Bill Clinton sent a contingent of about 20,000 troops to restore Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after he was overthrown by the country’s military in 1991.

That deployment took place in parallel with a UN mission that ran from 1993 to 2000, also with the support of the US.

In 2004, Aristide was overthrown once more, but this time, the US encouraged him to step down, flying him out of the country and sending troops to the island alongside nations such as France and Chile.

That force was then replaced by the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, which lasted from 2004 until 2017 and was led by the Brazilian military.

While MINUSTAH was tasked with enhancing security, it soon faced allegations of committing rape and other atrocities against civilians. A massive cholera outbreak that killed more than 9,300 people was also traced back to a sewage leak from a UN facility.

A Haitian-led future

Given its pockmarked history of Haitian intervention, the US has expressed wariness towards leading a new international mission to Haiti. Many are calling for solutions to be Haitian-led, instead of foreign-led.

“We need to give the Haitians time and space to get this right,” former US special envoy to Haiti, Daniel Foote, said in a recent interview with NPR.

“Let’s let the Haitians have a chance to mess up Haiti for once. The international community has messed it up beyond recognition countless times. I guarantee the Haitians mess it up less than the Americans,” he added.

For his part, Katz said the Kenya-led mission, with its UN backing, would have provided a buffer for the US and other powers that have a checkered history in the region.

In the 20th century, the US carried out these occupations of Haiti. Later, you get these outsourced occupations by the UN, which the US supports,” said Katz.

“But these always turn out poorly for the reputations of those involved, and they never leave the country on a better footing. So now with this Kenyan-led initiative, you have an almost double-outsourced intervention.”

A last resort

But with the Haitian government in disarray and violence rampant, some experts question what systems are in place to foster recovery.

President Jovenel Moise’s assassination in 2021 left a power vacuum in Haiti’s government, and no general elections have been held since. Katz argues the US made the situation worse by lending support to Henry, whose popularity has cratered amid questions about his commitment to democracy.

“Anybody paying attention has been saying for years that this was an unsustainable situation that was going to explode,” said Katz. “When there’s no legitimate democracy, it opens the door for people with the most firepower.”

Both Katz and Esperance point out that, while countries like the US have helped equip the Haitian National Police, the boundary between the officers and the gangs they are meant to combat is often porous.

The gang leader Cherizier, for instance, is himself a former member of the Haitian National Police’s riot control branch.

The result is that Haitians feel like they have no choice but to look abroad, Esperance explained.

“We need a functional government. An international force will not be able to solve the problem of political instability,” said Esperance. “At the same time, Haiti cannot wait. We are in hell.”



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Ancient find reveals new evidence of Malaysia’s multicultural past | History News

Kedah, Malaysia – Until six months ago, none of the inhabitants of the village of Bukit Choras, set amid rice fields near the steep and lush hill of the same name in northwestern Malaysia, had any idea they had been living next to an archaeological wonder all their lives.

It was only after a team of 11 researchers cleared the thick bushes and secondary jungle from the top of the hill, and gently scraped away at the soil that a missing piece of Southeast Asian history was revealed.

The 1,200-year-old Buddhist stupa of Bukit Choras was discovered last August in Malaysia’s Bujang Valley – a river basin scattered with several clusters of protohistoric sites in the country’s northwestern Kedah state.

The stupa is the best preserved in the country and experts say it could hold the key to Malaysia’s long history of multiculturalism.

“This site is an anomaly because it stands all by itself,” Nasha Rodziadi Khaw told Al Jazeera. Nasha is the chief researcher of the team from the University of Science Malaysia’s Global Archaeology Research Centre (CGAR) in the northwestern island of Penang, who supervised the excavation between August 28 and September 12 last year.

Bukit Choras is situated near the small town of Yan on Kedah’s southern coast about 370km north of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Nasha Rodziadi Khaw led the team of scientists who unearthed Bukit Choras’s stupa [Kit Yeng Chan/Al Jazeera]

Unlike the 184 archaeological sites previously identified in the Bujang Valley, which lie to the south, the stupa is isolated on the northern side of Mount Jerai, which was once a cape and a pivotal navigation point for seafaring traders who ventured to this part of the world from as far as the Arabian peninsula.

“We are still not sure of Bukit Choras’s function. It may have been a military garrison or coastal trade outpost, but we need to do further excavation [to assess]. Based on our preliminary findings, it shows plenty of similarities with other sites found in Java and Sumatra, Indonesia,” said Nasha, whose team will continue to work at the site throughout the first half of 2024.

A forlorn discovery

According to Nasha, Bukit Choras was first reported in 1850 by a British officer looking for treasures, and then, in 1937, briefly studied by another British scholar, HG Quaritch Wales. Wales undertook some minor excavations, but only reported finding a squarish Buddhist stupa, taking note of its measurements. He never provided any illustration or plate for the site.

Nearly 50 years later, in 1984, the then-director of the Bujang Valley Archaeological Museum returned to Bukit Choras to do some site cleaning and documentation, but the site remained largely undisturbed.

“I realised that nobody had done proper investigation [since then] and managed to get a fund to survey the site in 2017,” Nasha told Al Jazeera.

“We used electronic waves to do physical detection of what was hidden underground and found there were some big structures underneath.”

Nasha received more funding from Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education to conduct proper excavations in 2022, and his team was stunned to discover how well-preserved the site was compared with those unearthed in the Bujang Valley between the 1930s and 1950s – some of which had deteriorated because of erosion, human activities and even accidental destruction.

“At first we only excavated 40 percent of the whole Bukit Choras site, finding a stupa about nine metres long,” said Nasha. “But the most important discovery was two stucco statues of Buddha in good condition that have never been found in the area before.”

Stucco, Nasha explained, was thought to only be found in Java and Sumatra in neighbouring Indonesia, as well as in India, at the time.

Ancient ties

Placed in two niches together with an inscription in Pallava (the language of the Pallava Dynasty that ruled in South India between the 3rd and 8th century CE), Bukit Choras’s two Buddha statues have architectural features resembling those of other ancient artefacts from the Srivijaya kingdom that prospered between the 7th and 11th centuries CE, in an area from southern Thailand, through the Malay peninsula and into Java. The statues are now being studied and restored at CGAR on Penang island.

“The discovery of two still intact, human size statues and the inscription is very significant for further studies,” Mohd Azmi, the commissioner of Malaysia’s National Heritage Department, told Al Jazeera. “This shows that the site has not been disturbed and has the potential to give new evidence on Ancient Kedah’s history.”

Excavation trenches at the Sungai Batu Archaeological Complex [Kit Yeng Chan/Al Jazeera]

The discoveries in the Bujang Valley testify to an ancient civilisation that archaeologists refer to as the “Ancient Kedah Kingdom”. It prospered between the 2nd and the 14th century CE, stretching across the northwestern coast of the Malay peninsula and into Thailand predating the arrival of Islam in the region.

Ancient Kedah grew rich on international trade as well as the production of iron and glass beads, prospering as a multiethnic and multireligious ancient Southeast Asian polity where residents and foreign traders lived together.

Nasha points out that findings in the area suggest that for centuries, traders from China, India and even the Middle East came to the area to do business – and were often forced to spend long spells in Kedah when the harsh monsoon seasons made sailing back home impossible.

Temples and artefacts were built by local labourers mixing foreign architectural motifs and knowledge with two main influences.

“First is Buddhism, classified in areas such as Sungai Mas, Kuala Muda, and Sungai Batu in Semeling, plus the most recent being the temple site at Bukit Choras,” explained Asyaari Muhamad, a senior archaeologist and the director of the Institute of the Malay World & Civilisation at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, referring to some of the Bujang Valley sites.

“The rest, such as the archaeological site in the Pengkalan Bujang complex [near the village of] Merbok, received Hindu influences. This classification is [based on] the discovery of artefacts and temple structures symbolising the religious beliefs or influences at that time,” he said.

All of Ancient Kedah’s temples functioned as places of worship mostly for the mixed population of migrant traders and workers.

“In [the area of] Sungai Bujang, for example, most of the temples are clustered together near the main trading area and used to cater for the religious needs of the traders, while in Sungai Muda, they catered to the traders and workers of the local glass bead and pottery-making sites,” said Nasha.

Tuyeres, or air conduits, for the ancient iron smelting sites whose remains were found at Sungai Batu Archaeological Complex [Kit Yeng Chan/Al Jazeera]

“We believe it was the same in Sungai Batu, the main site for Ancient Kedah’s iron smelting furnaces, where we found evidence of a community and its temples. But in Bukit Choras, proof of economic activities or industry has not yet been found,” he said.

Archaeological discoveries suggest that while Ancient Kedah thrived for centuries, it went into decline when climate transformed the large maritime bay and accessible riverways leading to the iron smelting site of Sungai Batu into mangrove and tidal swamps that were impassable to ships.

“Multiculturalism is not new in the Malay peninsula and Ancient Kedah,” added Nasha. “It started with trade in the 2nd century, when there was an increase of connectivity between China, India and Southeast Asia, and continued well into the Melaka kingdom, which we know was also a multicultural society, and continues today.”

The Malaysia of the 21st century is also a multiethnic and multireligious Southeast Asian nation made up of a majority of Malay Muslims, followed by Chinese, Indians and more than 50 other ethnic groups living across the peninsula and the northern half of the island of Borneo in the states of Sarawak and Sabah.

Asyaari said it was important for researchers to collaborate and reach a better understanding of the origins of civilisations in and beyond the Malay peninsula.

“Any statements about new or previous findings need to be carefully examined so that […] a theory, discovery, and the results of a study do not become an issue and controversial in nature,” he said.

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Protests over Israeli leader Herzog’s presence at Dutch Holocaust Museum | Israel War on Gaza News

Thousands of protesters demonstrate in Amsterdam against Israel’s war on Gaza.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog has attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where his presence prompted protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.

The opening took place on Sunday as pro-Palestine demonstrators chanted “Never again is now” and “Ceasefire now” near a square close to the museum.

Thousands of protesters demonstrated against Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 31,000 people since October, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel launched the assault after Hamas, the Palestinian armed group that governs Gaza, led an attack on Israel on October 7, killing at least 1,139 people, according to an Al Jazeera tally based on official Israeli statistics.

Human rights group Amnesty International put up detour signs around the new museum to direct Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. In January, South Africa brought a case against Israel at the ICJ over allegations it was committing genocide in Gaza. A final ruling could take years, but the court ordered several provisional directions, including an order for Israel to prevent acts of genocide.

Nazi persecution

The Holocaust museum showcases the stories of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps, as well as their persecution under German World War II occupation.

Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis.

“This museum shows us what devastating consequences anti-Semitism can have,” said Dutch King Willem-Alexander at a gathering at a nearby synagogue.

Dutch King Willem-Alexander speaks at the opening ceremony of the National Holocaust Museum at the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, March 10, 2024 [Bart Maat/Pool via Reuters]

Dutch Jewish anti-Zionist organisation Erev Rave, which organised the demonstrations at the musuem’s opening with the Dutch Palestinian community and Socialist International, said that while it is important to honour the memory of Holocaust victims, it cannot stand by while the war in Gaza continues.

“For us Jews, these museums are part of our history, of our past,” said Joana Cavaco, an activist with Erev Rav, addressing the crowd before the museum’s opening ceremony. “How is it possible that such a sacred space is being used to normalise genocide today?”

A pro-Palestinian Dutch organisation, The Rights Forum, called Herzog‘s presence “a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land”.

In a statement before the museum’s opening, the Jewish Cultural Quarter that runs the museum said it is “profoundly concerned by the war and the consequences this conflict has had, first and foremost for the citizens of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank”.

It added that it is “all the more troubling that the National Holocaust Museum is opening while war continues to rage. It makes our mission all the more urgent.”

The museum told the media that it had invited Herzog before the events of October 7. It said in a statement that it recognised that Herzog’s attendance was controversial, but that he represents the country where Dutch Holocaust survivors migrated to.

A flyer with a picture of Israeli President Isaac Herzog lies on the site of a protest in front of the National Holocaust Museum [Piroschka van de Wouw/Reuters]

Herzog’s remarks that not only armed groups but “an entire nation” was responsible for the October 7 attack and that Israel will fight “until we break their backbone” have been cited by South Africa in its ICJ lawsuit against Israel.

Herzog has said his comments were misrepresented, and only part of what he said was cited in order to build a case against Israel in the ICJ.

The Israeli leader said the museum sent “a clear and powerful statement: remember, remember the horrors born of hatred, anti-Semitism and racism and never again allow them to flourish”.

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Brazil’s Fordlandia: Tracing the roots of Amazon deforestation | Environment News

Aveiro, Brazil – The flames roared higher than a hundred feet, sending smoke billowing across the jungle.

Boars scattered from the underbrush. Toucans shot from the trees. And thousands of acres of Amazon rainforest soon crumbled into ash.

It was 1928, and a vast stretch of land in north-central Brazil was being cleared for a monumental undertaking: Fordlandia, a $20m city dreamed up by the richest man in the world at the time, American industrialist Henry Ford.

From the charred earth rose a hospital, a cinema, schools and bungalows. A golf and tennis courts were built for the arriving Americans to feel at home. The sawmill and factory floors, meanwhile, were the purview of the local workers.

But over the past eight decades, Fordlandia has lain largely abandoned, slowly falling into disrepair.

Still, smoke continues to hang in the air, as Brazil contends with an ongoing legacy of deforestation and fortune-seeking in its world-renowned rainforest.

About 2,000 people remain residents of Ford’s utopian experiment, a decaying reminder of the ambitions that shape the forest.

Plagued by poverty, these residents find themselves caught between competing pressures: to protect the environment that surrounds them — or exploit it to make ends meet.

“Yes, I deforest. How else am I going to farm?” said Sadir Moata, a 31-year-old resident of the area.

A muscular farmer with dark, bushy eyebrows, Moata took it upon himself to rehabilitate one of Fordlandia’s larger houses, originally intended for American expats. He mucked out the bat droppings and tamed the overgrowth in the garden so that his father could use it as a home.

But his income from farming is meagre, and clearing the land through fire allows him to grow more crops.

“I get 600 reals [$120 per month] from a government programme. There’s me, my wife, two children and a brother who eats with us. What kind of life am I going to have with 600 reals?”

But experts, advocates and other residents warn that the cost of Amazon deforestation will inevitably be higher than any gains.

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How RSS textbooks are reshaping Indian history and science under Modi | Education News

Kolkata, India – At the three-storey building of Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, a school for grades five to 10 in Uluberia town in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, students gather every day at the prayer hall 15 minutes before their classes begin.

The walls in the prayer hall are bedecked with colourful posters of Hindu deities, saints, mythological figures, ancient Indian scholars, kings and Hindu religious practices. The prayer starts with the Saraswati Vandana, a chant praising Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge.

The same routine is followed at Sarada Shishu Mandir, the preprimary school for children to grade four which stands next to it.

Sarada Shishu Vidya Mandir, an RSS-run school in Howrah, West Bengal [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]

When students enter the classrooms after the prayers, they encounter the same ancient figures yet again – in a series of books called Sanskriti Bodhmala, or cultural awareness manuals, published in English, Hindi and several other Indian languages. The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are mandatory for the students of classes four to 12, who also have to take a nationally coordinated annual test based on these books.

For more than two centuries, millions of Indians, especially Hindus, have long read about the ideas and philosophies attributed to ancient scholars from what is known as the Vedic era (1500 BC to 500 BC), when many of the religion’s scriptures were written.

But under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, many of these concepts have made their way into India’s vast formal schooling system, blurring the lines between religious Hindu beliefs on the one hand and established history and science on the other.

In a country where half the population is younger than 25, this, say critics, has given Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their Hindu majoritarian partners the ability to use pedagogy to influence the minds of millions of young Indians – many of whom will be voting for the first time in national elections expected to be held between March and May.

Atoms to aviation

Vedic-era philosopher Kanada was the world’s first atomic scientist, say the books meant for the students of classes four and six.

Kanada, in his book Vaisheshika Darshan, did write about anu (atoms) being the smallest particles of substances that cannot be further divided. But the substances he listed – prithvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vayu (air), akasha (ether), kala (time), dik (space), atma (soul) and manas (mind) — make it clear, say scientists, that he was speaking in philosophical or metaphysical terms.

The class five textbook tells them that Vedic sage Bharadwaja, who is credited with writing the book Vymaanika Shastra (Science of Aeronautics), was the “father of aviation”. The class five and class 12 books call ancient Indian physician Sushruta “the inventor of plastic surgery”.

The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are not approved by the government. But they have been taught in addition to the state-approved syllabus for decades in a large chain of schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right ideological mentor of the BJP.

The schools are formally operated by Vidya Bharati, the education wing of the RSS, which controls more than 12,000 such schools catering to nearly 32 million students across India. The schools are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) or the government education boards of the states they are located in.

A poster on a school wall depicts RSS founder KB Hedgewar and his successor MS Golwalkar as ‘great men who birthed a new awakening in the Hindu society’ [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]

In recent years, unsubstantiated historical and scientific claims – being taught in Vidya Bharati schools – have made their way into the formal syllabus of state-run schools.

The claims of Kanada’s atomic theory and Sushruta’s plastic surgery are already a part of the curriculum of the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) – an education board controlled by the federal government. The NIOS describes itself as “the largest open schooling system in the world with a cumulative enrolment of 4.13 million [during last five years]” students.

The NIOS curriculum also encourages students to find out about Vedic mathematics – another subject taught specifically at RSS schools.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) new module on India’s moon mission says the book Vymaanika Shaastra “seemingly reveals that our civilisation had the knowledge of flying vehicles”.

The NCERT is the apex body advising the federal and state governments on school education, including model textbooks. However, various state education boards may differ from NCERT’s advice and pursue their own syllabus. Among federal government boards, CBSE had 1.2 million students appearing in the grade 12 exams and 1.8 million students appearing in the grade 10 exams in 2020.

In Vidya Bharati schools, students must keep shoes outside classrooms [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]

In 2019, federal Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal said, “Our scriptures mentioned the concept of gravity much before Newton discovered it.” Sanskriti Bodhmala books say the same, one of its books attributing it to fifth-century mathematician Aryabhatta and another to 12th-century mathematician Bhaskaracharya.

“The Sanskriti Bodhmala books have no conflict with the formal syllabus, as the history presented here is entirely missing in the existing formal syllabus, which thoroughly neglects India’s pre-Mughal history. That is where we stress on,” Proloy Adhikary, in charge of Uluberia’s Sarada Vidya Mandir, told Al Jazeera.

He said the National Education Policy (NEP) that the Modi government has introduced had been implemented in Vidya Bharati schools for several years now.

“The NEP has taken some of our schools’ practices to the broader sphere,” he said, hoping for more information from the Sanskriti Bodhmala books to find their way into the formal national school syllabus.

‘Glorious culture’

Vidya Bharati says its cultural awareness examination for students was introduced in their schools “with a view to transmitting a glorious culture to the new generation”.

Debangshu Kumar Pati, a Vidya Bharati official in West Bengal, claimed the contents of their books are well-researched. “We inform students of the history that the colonialist and Marxist historians have suppressed to make generations of Hindus feel inferior,” he told Al Jazeera.

A large photo of Swami Vivekananda at the Vidya Bharati school [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]

But historians – not just Marxists among them – as well as scientists and other critics have accused the Modi government of altering school syllabi to suit their Hindu nationalist agenda.

Hilal Ahmed, associate professor of history at New Delhi’s Centre for the Studies of Developing Societies (CSDS), told Al Jazeera no one can be blamed for telling new histories “as the discovery of the past always lies in the future – as long as proper historiographical methods are followed”.

“Since history writing is a complex process, serious historians have evolved methods and protocols, including the requirements to verify the veracity of the sources, introducing the sources, and explaining how the information is being interpreted and connections are being made. But these schools don’t follow the protocol of citing serious history,” he said.

Ahmed thinks the Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks present history as if they have discovered “the final truth of the past”, calling them “anti-student”.

“They introduce a kind of pedagogy that would not allow the students to draw their own meanings of the past. The students would be hostile to other renditions of history. They are being prevented from thinking of the past afresh in the future,” he said.

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, one of India’s best-known cosmologists, debunked many such claims in his 2003 book, The Scientific Edge: The Indian Scientist from Vedic to Modern Times. Most claims about modern scientific discoveries having a Vedic origin “do not stand up to scientific scrutiny”, Narlikar wrote, adding: “That they were curious about the universe is beyond doubt. But that they knew what modern science talks about today cannot be accepted.”

In 2023, when Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath claimed that major scientific developments in branches like metallurgy, astrology, astronomy, aeronautical sciences, and physics took place in ancient India and were later taken to Europe by the Arabs, Breakthrough Science Society (BSS) issued a statement, asking, “If superior knowledge in astronomy, aeronautical engineering, etc., is available in the ancient texts in Sanskrit, why isn’t the ISRO using them?”

“Can he [Somanath] show one piece of technology or theory that ISRO has taken from the Vedas and applied to make a rocket or a satellite?” the statement asked. The BSS is a Kolkata-based group of rationalist scientists.

From fringe to mainstream

Vidya Bharati’s role in pushing a certain kind of history is part of a larger project of what critics have called the “saffronisation” of education, after the favoured colour of the Hindu right. It is a process pursued by the Modi government and the institutions controlled by it.

The Sanskriti Bodhmala books are published by Vidya Bharati Sanskriti Shiksha Sansthan, whose former president, Govind Prasad Sharma, served on the BJP government’s National Curriculum Framework’s steering committee formed in 2021.

Of the 25 focus groups the state-run NCERT formed to develop the National Curriculum Framework, based on which new textbooks for government schools were written, five had Vidya Bharati officials as members.

The Bengali language versions of Sanskriti Bodhmala textbooks [Snigdhendu Bhattacharya/Al Jazeera]

According to Vidya Bharati’s national president D Ramakrishna Rao, “senior and retired teachers” of their schools were being picked up as resource people in many Indian states for writing textbooks for government schools.

“Vidya Bharati has been putting its all-out efforts and providing unstinted support to the government at the [education] policy preparation stage for almost five years,” Rao wrote in a column for a right-wing website in 2021.

Some of their schools’ principals and office bearers are members of the committee for the development of the National Professional Standards for Teachers, and almost every state task force for the implementation of the NEP included their representatives who “actively monitor” the process, Rao added.

‘Catch the Hindu minds young’

Between 1999 and 2004, when the BJP formed its first-ever federal government, a similar effort to change school curriculum was made.

A key name to emerge for that project was Dinanath Batra, then Vidya Bharati’s general secretary. Shortly after Modi came to national power in 2014, his home state Gujarat made Batra’s books mandatory in government schools.

Batra is a pioneer among Hindu nationalist historians, even though globally acclaimed historians such as Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib accuse him of turning both history and geography into fantasy.

Journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, who has authored several books on Hindu nationalism, and has a biography of Modi, told Al Jazeera the Vidya Bharati schools are part of the RSS’s larger strategy of creating hegemony over all walks of life, including education.

Mukhopadhyay said the idea behind the RSS operating such a large network of schools across the country is to “catch the Hindu minds young and instil the idea of ancient Hindu invincibility, a past when Hindu India was the dominant race all over the world and that the golden bird of Indian civilisation was destroyed by thousands of years of slavery, first in the hands of Muslims and then the [Christian] colonial powers”.

He said Modi’s rule has given the Hindu nationalists “their best chance to restore that ancient glory of global Hindu superiority”.

“If you instil such thoughts in children’s minds, they will grow up with a tremendous amount of anger against Muslims and Christians. Such information attempts to create a constant state of paranoia in Hindu minds about the entire world being a conspirator against Hindu supremacy,” he said.

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This is Not a Drill | Nuclear Weapons

Hawaiians respond to a threat of nuclear attack and a survivor tells of coping with the Hiroshima bombing.

It is 41 minutes and 40 seconds to midnight in Honolulu. Heat rises from the asphalt in Hawaii’s capital. It is a beautiful day and people are out for strolls and running errands. Suddenly, sounds of sirens cut through the air. TV broadcasts, radio shows, and mobile phones are flooded with the following message: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” Panic descends throughout the island. Thousands of goodbye messages to loved ones are sent – even ones containing dramatic declarations or confessions. It took authorities almost one hour to let people know this was an error. We hear from people who tell us how they coped with the frightening events of this day in 2018.

We also hear of the harrowing experience of surviving an actual nuclear attack. Toshiko Tanaka was six years old when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on her city of Hiroshima. “I remember the horror of that day: blinding light like thousands of strobe lights, my body thrown to the ground.” The atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were the only time nuclear weapons have been used. Today, about 120,000 Hibakusha – survivors of the bombings – are still alive. Tanaka tells us of her life as one of these survivors, and of the work those bombings inspired her to do. She is 84 years old now and has dedicated her life to fighting against nuclear proliferation.

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