Don't mean to be a negative nancy, but I **really**, really, dislike this trend of some Punjabi artists in the West now churning out artwork by making their own "covers" of popular magazines with photos from the protests.

Lot of genuine problems with this

For one, when these are shared on social media, the image is what captures attention, not the caption - a LOT of people are sharing these in groupchats/posting online with the assumption that they're real. Have had to correct some of my fam in India saying it's just artwork
This just adds to general misinformation, which is really not ideal at a time when we see coordinated efforts to spread that - the facts should stand out above all
Secondly, this gives really easy currency to those saying that farmers are protesting the bills because they're unknowledgeable; some Indian media outlets have already scored points off the National Geographic cover, "fact checking it", and inferring all info is as such.
Another problem is a lot of the "headlines" are lifted from other news stories - for example, the Rolling Stone "cover" literally copied the headline of IP Singh's great article (covered here). Give coverage to the people actually writing these stories!

https://t.co/NtgREE0rhF
These are my main substantive problems, but I also have a more of a meta-critique; I dislike the draw of such covers on an artistic level in the first place.

Is a movement only validated if it's covered in a magazine for Western audiences?
We're already seeing protestors take their narrative into their own hands with their own newspaper and independent journalists equipped with nothing more than a phone pushing out crucial information; so why do we still crave that Western validation? What purpose does it serve?
There's a whole world out there, with multitudes of topics to cover and politics to discuss. Sikhs, IMO, need to stop demanding tokenized representation in the mainstream as if it's owed to them and write their own narratives as they see fit
National Geographic ran a spread on the Green Revolution's ills in Punjab and I remember as a kid it was like two worlds colliding; I followed NatGeo for my "NatGeo interests", but this one article satiated my "Punjab interests". But they don't owe that to you and they shouldn't.
On that note, I think a great example of Punjabis/Sikhs in the West owning their own narrative and telling their own stories is going to be this initiative - I hope it can get as much traction as these covers did, as there'll be a lot to engage with:

https://t.co/LpGafXQZ3Y

More from India

Hindutva does not belong to Modi nor his party, it belongs to the people as a unifying, decolonial ideology similar to pan-Africanism or Yugoslavism.

His own brand of "positive secularism" is even milder - deepening special rights and welfare schemes for religious minorities.


After the disbanding of the Hindu Mahasabha and Jana Sangh, Hindutva as a political ideology does not even exist, except as a bogeyman in the minds of the Anglophone elite.

Even the BJP gave up Hindutva for civic nationalism, Gandhian socialism, and positive secularism in 1980s.

Under Modi, there has been compete policy continuity on minority rights and welfare from the Congress era, with little to no "Hindutva agenda" coming to see the light of day.

The most radical policy they can dream of is religion-neutral laws and equal rights for equal citizens.

Hindutva was essential in forming a national consciousness, but was abandoned with time. The modern BJP refuses to self-identify as a Hindutva movement, adopting moderates like Sardar Patel, Deendayal Upadhyay, and JP Narayan as their icons, rather than Savarkar or the Mahasabha.

When they say Hindu Rashtra, all they mean is an "Indic polity".

When British India was partitioned into a Muslim homeland and a Dharmic homeland, one state became a 'Ghazi' garrison state, and one the successor state to the Indic

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