Saturday 18th April 2026
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Modi’s India: Division Over Democracy

Noorie Abbas
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Modi’s India: Division Over Democracy

“If we all get together, there won’t be a detention centre big enough for us. Maybe there will be a day when this government will be in a detention centre, and all of us azad (free). We won’t back down,” shouts Arundhati Roy, Booker prize-winning author, outside of Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University.

For months, protests have erupted across India over a new citizenship law: the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The act, which allows the expedited citizenship of migrants who have fled from neighbouring countries, has brought scores of people to the streets to challenge its prejudice against Muslims. Protestors reciting the preambles of the Indian constitution across the country contend the CAA works to demote Muslims to second class citizens, contrary to India’s promise of justice, equality and fraternity. Demonstrations have been met with harsh police crackdowns and resulted in international outcry; it appears to all that the sanctity of human rights has been cast aside in the world’s largest democracy.

On the eve of India’s May Election, the Oxford Union held a No Confidence debate on the Indian Government. The overwhelming ruling was that Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) inspires little confidence for the fate for civil liberties in India. I was asked to speak in defense of Modi – a young, Pakistani student (though the Internet insists I am a 29 year old British-Pakistani diplomat) finding a new perspective from which to defend Pakistan’s number one enemy.

The response to my debate was inconceivable: Sound-bites of my speech reached Indian media channels , omitting any criticism of this political pariah’s human rights record. I still receive messages today from young BJP supporters who thank me for telling the world that Modi is not an evil-Muslim hating villain, but instead a Hindu hero. The most uncomfortable element from these floods messages, above personal comments on my appearance and mannerisms, was undoubtedly the sheer commitment and belief that Modi was ‘doing the right thing’.

As the months have rolled by, it seems the Indian nation has been glaringly confronted with the realties of Narendra Modi – behind populist rhetoric remains a real challenge to the secular, democratic nation India has always aimed to be.

So who is the the man behind this transformation? Narendra Modi’s BJP was re-elected with a landslide victory in May. However, entering their second term in office, Modi’s Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) policies continue to sow the seeds of division within Indian politics. Antithetical to Nehru and Gandhi’s wish for secularism in the state of India, the BJP asserts the importance of a superior, Hindu identity.

Grown out of the ranks of the right-wing, nationalist, paramilitary organisation of the RSS, Modi gained notoriety as the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002. During his tenure, Modi presided over a mass communal bloodletting that left two-thousand people dead and the demography of the province irrevocably changed. Reports saw mobs of Hindus yelling ‘Take revenge and slaughter the muslims!’, as eyewitness accounts testify to mass-rape, the dismemberment of pregnant Muslim women, and one elderly member of the opposition party – the Indian Congress – paraded naked and set on fire. Many of the surviving Muslims were corralled into slums and remain in ghettoes, such as the Ahmedabad dump, today. As Chief Minister, Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to the religiously-motivated riots, resulting in a nearly decade long ban on travel to the US and UK.

Yet, apologies from Modi were far and few between, as he expanded his Hindu nationalist base whilst simultaneously taking on more palatable policies for the West and the average Indian. Modi’s bravery in confronting previously un-confronted policies such as public defection and male responsibility for gang-rape allowed his party to soar to the top – winning his first national election in 2014. Elected on a platform of economic stability (as his term in Gujarat was under relative prosperity) and sectarianism, Modi has actively worked to change the secular ethos of India. The controversial CAA and its equally worrying relative, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are the latest of many policies to do so. 

The NRC is a register maintained by the Indian government containing the identification of citizens residing in the state of Assam. Beginning as a project to identify illegal immigrants within the state, the NRC requires residents to procure land deeds, birth certificates, and other documents to prove their lineage within the country. India’s Home Minister, and Modi’s righthand man, Amit Shah, declared in November that the NRC will be implemented across the country. In Assam, around 2 million individuals failed these citizenship tests – many of them Muslim.

Documents of this sort prove hard to supply, particularly in rural, impoverished areas. For women, the task is made even more difficult. In the region of Goroimari, none of the twelve required documents were available to large numbers of local women. Birth by midwives in rural areas complicates the prospects of having a viable birth certificate. Likewise, marriage registration is infrequent due to large numbers of underage marriages, and women often do not possess property under their own name. As one woman told The Wire in November, “My father’s name is in the 1951 NRC. My brother used the same legacy data of my father and is in the final NRC but I am out…My name was also not in the final draft. When I was called for re-verification, I gave my paternal family’s ration card where I am mentioned as my father’s daughter. Yet, I am out of the NRC.”

The fate of those deemed stateless is dire. Reports say there are destined to be sent to detention camps such as one in Karnataka. Though government officials stress the construction of these detention centres is unrelated to the NRC, anxiety over Assam’s citizenship tests has driven many, including a Muslim veteran of the Indian army, to suicide.

Hindus were not excluded from the NRC, a large number of immigrant Bengali Hindus (a large BJP voter faction) were deemed illegal as well. This was almost a strong defensive to Modi’s assertion that his policies are entirely above-the-line, yet, for those originally unlucky Hindus, fate has taken a different course with the passing of the CAA. The CAA and the NRC taken in tandem highlight the calculated and systemic destruction of Muslim rights. At face value, the CAA seems to take on humanitarian form: it allows for migrants who fled religious persecution in neighbouring states a fast-track to citizenship in the haven that could be India. In reality, underneath the noble façade lies a corruption of the very ideal: all religions are welcome, ‘all’ except followers of Islam.

The Modi government’s defence is simple: the neighbouring countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh etc.) are Muslim majority countries, so those fleeing from persecution will enviably be non-Muslim. However, Modi’s government conveniently casts aside the existence of Uighurs fleeing China, Rohyingas trekking across Bangladesh, and Ahmadis leaving Pakistan. All are Muslims sects that are continuously being persecuted and in need of asylum abroad, all are denied sympathy in the CAA. The CAA seen intertwined with the NRC paints an even more insidious picture: those excluded from the citizenship registry can seek recourse to stay in India through the CAA – unless they are Muslim.

At the face of criticism and the eruption of protests, Modi tweeted: “We in India are deeply motivated by Gandhi Ji’s emphasis on duties in addition to rights.” Through this, he attempts to take the focus away from the blatant destruction of civil liberties. He stressed to the protestors that duty to the state is more important, but he fails to realise that the protestors are demonstrating precisely out of this duty. Recitations of the constitution, chants of the national anthem and millions of raised Indian flags signal that this is a question of patriotism for the Indian people. But the question remains, will Modi be able to enforce his ‘duty’ over the Indian nation’s rights?

Students at Indian universities appear to be the standard bearers against the BJP’s Hindutva policies. Nightmarish clashes in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), and the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), have turned these bastions for the protection of civil liberties into battlefields.

Peaceful protests have been met with harsh counter-measures, many of which, including police brutality are entirely extraconstitutional. At an encounter at JMI, five brave women were recorded on a widely disseminated video defending an unarmed male student against police officers beating him with wooden sticks. A history professor at the institute writes: “in the middle of December, Delhi police tried to shut down protests against the religiously discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act by canning Muslim students into submission.”

In January, an attack on JNU saw the failure of the Delhi police, not through action, but inaction. Masked men carrying sticks, rods and glass bottles entered the building in the early evening injuring 18 students and a professor. The students believe these men belonged to the ABVP, a right-wing student organisation linked to the aforementioned Hindunationalist RSS. Aishe Ghosh, JNU’s student union leader, suffered serious injuries to her head, while the police remained absent. India Today reported that Ghosh alerted the police of the masked men at 3.00 p.m. but they did not send reinforcement until 7.45 p.m.

Cross currents of information, insults slung across the aisle, and denial of the victim’s trauma by the BJP has marked the event in the Subcontinent’s psyche. To make matters worse, following the events, the police identified a multitude of suspects: one of which is Ghosh, whom ABVP members claim organised the entire occasion. Ghosh, who still sustains injuries from the attack, refutes the charges and states that the Delhi police should make public whatever proof they claim to have.

Students across the world stand in solidarity with those in India fighting for their freedoms. Protests spanning the world from Los Angeles to Karachi show that the South Asian diaspora and beyond are committed to make the world see the atrocities occurring in Modi’s India. Right here in Oxford, on the 26th of January students will convene to celebrate India’s Republic Day with a demonstration against the CAA, NRC and its extension. When asked what drove the organisation of the protest, Gurmehar Kaur answered: “Imagine if the police were to walk in our campus here at Oxford and start manhandling students, throwing teargas shells in the libraries, breaking down windows and physically assaulting students – how abnormal would that be? We organised the protest to register our dissent so this kind of assault by the state on its university students is not normalised back in our countries. As students here, most of us have previously been students in the same spaces in India that are now under threat by the Modi government, we have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with our student fraternity.” Evidently, there are strong forces fighting for safety of civil liberties in India across the globe.

With that said, violent encounters in Assam have taken on a different, more brutal expression. The Northeast provinces presents a bleak reality of true division underneath those fighting for unity. In Assam, the issue of illegal immigrants fuelled protests for years in the early 1980s, partially dirven by citizens realised a swing in voting was in direct accordance with the large numbers of Bangladesh immigrants, who fled from oppression in East Pakistan. 

Much of Assam welcomed the NRC, and saw it as a chance to rid the state of illegal immigrants who had come in within that period. The CAA, on the other hand, is seen as a betrayal of the governments commitment to shed the burden of the ‘illegals’: they worry it, instead, opens the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi immigrants burdening the resources and threatening Assamese language, culture and recourses. Assam appears to care less about the exclusion of Muslims: they simply want no one else to enter, be it Hindus, Muslims or otherwise. Nativist sentiments ride high in the loudest protests against the CAA – a worrying dimension of the patriotic backlash against the BJP.

In this vein, human rights seem to be in an expedited decay. Protests are still met with police brutality, internet shutdowns (India is the world’s leader in number of internet shutdowns last year) and the enforcement of colonial-era Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The antiquated Section 144 makes it illegal for more than four people to gather in one place, and has been instated by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, to crush dissent.

India is torn in between true democracy and exclusionary rhetoric. Communalist weeds, alongside a heightened drawbridge approach to immigration, continue to spawn and challenge the secular, liberal framework Nehru-era Indians aspired to.

Not all hope is lost: Modi has attempted to suggest that the protestors are aggravated seditionist Muslims, but there are many beaming examples of inter-religious solidarity. Protests at the heart of Delhi in Shahida Bagh illustrate a multi-faith consensus, where ”Sikhs did their kirtan, Muslims offered namaz and Hindus performed a havan, all at the same time, to say that the protest against the CAA and the impending National Register of Citizens is not a religious one at all”, as The Wire reports.

The Indian Supreme Court is set to rule on the legitimacy of the CAA later in January, but as it stands, some lower courts reflect the sentiment of a secular, democratic India. In the bail hearing for one protest organiser, Bhim Army Chief Chandrashekhar Azad, this sentiment shone through. At the face of the prosecutor denying the permission of the defendant to protest, the Tis Hazari Sessions Judge Kamini La stated:“What permission? The Supreme Court has said repeated use of Section 144 is abuse. I have seen many people, many such cases, where protests happened even outside Parliament. Some of those people are now senior politicians, chief ministers.”

Moreover, some evidence shows the BJP appears to be losing its hold over the Indian public, as trouble over the CAA and a sinking economy shows a supposed reversal in the popularity that won them the landslide in May. The loss over state elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Jharkhand signal a challenge for the BJP and their sectarian policies.

The constitution-chanting protestors, many of them young, working class, some female, show an India that is slowing pulling together the canyons created by the BJP and their divisive politics. Glimmers of hope underneath the overwhelming sense of despair at the state of India’s democracy do shine through, but the fact remains that this may not be enough. Every second day, another message from an Indian man fascinated by the Oxford Union’s politics forces me to doubt that India is close to the reckoning required. As we wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling on the CAA, Modi and the BJP reside over a humanitarian crisis. India – one of the most populous nations and the largest democracy in the world – is set to enter the later half of the century as a superpower. Yet, as it moves from developing to developed, the necessities of true democracy cannot be ignored. All of the Indian people must commit to patriotism and love for their country in a unifying, not divisive, manner. 

150 years of rugby at Oxford

Betty Barber
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150 years of rugby at Oxford

Oxford rugby dates back to the sports infancy. As many will know, the Oxford University RFC is one of the most renowned amateur clubs in the world. It was founded in November 1869, over a year before the start of the Rugby Football Union’s creation, the governing body for rugby in England. This highlights the tradition of the sport at Oxford, demonstrating the key role that the university has had in its popularity. 

OURFC has witnessed the various changes that have been made to the game in the last 125 years. William Web Ellis, a student at Brasenose College in 1825, is thought to be the inventor of the sport. This view comes down to his disregard for the rules of football as a student at Rugby school in 1823. According to legend, he lifted the football up and ran with it, thereby constituting the characteristic movement of the sport. This is why the international committee named the rugby world cup the “William Webb Ellis Trophy”. The notoriety of the sport travelled quickly from Rugby to Oxford and Cambridge. The first university match was played in 1872. From there, graduates took the sport to other British schools which eventually allowed it to grow to an international level. 

Since 1869, there have been over 300 Oxford rugby players who have gained representative international honours. Among them are many famous players coming from the university: Phil de Glanville (former English rugby union player), Joe Roff (Australian rugby union footballer), Anton Oliver (former New Zealand rugby union player), Simon Halliday (former English rugby union international), Gareth Baber (former Welsh Rugby footballer), David Kirk (former New Zealand rugby union player; won the Rugby World Cup) and Rob Egerton (Australian international rugby union player; he won 9 caps for the Wallabies in the space of 13 weeks) to name a few. These examples testify to the tradition and power of rugby at Oxford. 

It would be wrong to neglect mentioning the genesis of women’s rugby at Oxford, which began in 1988. Since then, annual matches have been held against Cambridge University WRUFC. The 20 Varsity victories in comparison to the 13 from the opposition speak to the strength and capacity of the women’s team. In 2015, the OUWRFC joined up with the OURFC to become the ‘Oxford University Rugby Club’. Sue Day (former England captain; has won 59 England caps) and Heather Lawrence (founder of women’s rugby at Oxford) are just two examples of notable players coming from the women’s side.

To sum up, Oxford University is a breeding ground for Rugby talent. 150 years not only marks a triumph for the university, but also for the sport, attesting to the interconnected relationship that they share. Here’s to many more years of rugby at Oxford, with the hope that sporting legends will continue to be fostered in the place where the sport truly took off. 

Review: Dustin Lynch’s Tullahoma

Maxim Mower
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Review: Dustin Lynch’s Tullahoma

After an initial scan through the track-list for Tennessee-born country artist Dustin Lynch’s Tullahoma, you could be forgiven for presuming this is going to be a fairly standard, perhaps even predictable, country album. With names like ‘Momma’s House’, ‘Dirt Road’, and ‘Little Town Livin’’, the songs set the scene for this interpretation pretty well.

Or so you think. It’s clear from the very moment that the first chorus hits that the album isn’t going to be all back-porch sunsets and whiskey-shooting Friday nights. The album opener, ‘Momma’s House’ is a stormy cry of anguish, with Lynch blinking back the tears as he confesses he would burn his hometown down just to erase the memories made with his ex-lover, if it wasn’t for his ‘Momma’s House’. It could easily sound spiteful and bitter, but instead Lynch delivers it with a sense of complete emotional accountability, and as listeners we cannot help but be drawn in.

‘Little Town Livin’’ and ‘Dirt Road’ tread a more typical country path, following the blueprint that gave Lynch his first number ones with songs like ‘Cowboys and Angels’ and ‘She Cranks My Tractor’. The whole album is a tribute to Lynch’s hometown Tullahoma, and it happily meanders like the Mississippi river through small-town tales of falling in love under the stars, driving an old truck down quiet backroads, and cracking open a cold one with your friends. This wistful imagery, coupled with our storyteller’s raw emotion and charismatic drawl, forms the charming and picturesque backbone to the album.

However, underneath the familiar scenery and ear-worm hooks characteristic of Country music, there’s a certain depth and sincerity that makes Tullahoma especially endearing. He reaches back to tales from his past and present with a sense of vulnerability and honesty that’s hard to come by nowadays. This is especially evident in the way that he displays the movie-moment he had when reconnecting with an old flame on ‘Thinkin’ Bout You’:“Don’t be sorry for calling me up right out of the blue/I was just thinking bout you.” a song on which American Idol runner-up Lauren Alaina adds a striking second verse. He tips his stetson to the greats that influenced him on ‘Old Country Song’: “I’m gonna love you like George Jones loved to drink/Like Johnny loved some June”

Despite not being one of the lead singles, ‘The World Ain’t Yours and Mine’ is a standout. It’s a classic ode to an undying love, with Lynch finding himself planning to keep the relationship in question going until the end of time – until “The world ain’t yours and mine/Like it is tonight”. Part of the allure of country music is the way that it is able to tell a story that evolves into a beautiful, lucid picture over the course of three or four minutes, and Lynch has an eye for detail that adds great colour to his songs. He sings the touching motif, “The paint on the Pontiac’s faded/Got me thinking baby maybe we’ll make it”

The other key ingredient that should go into a good country album is, I believe, to have a happy ending. On his vivid and rich road-trip through through Tullahoma Lynch certainly provides, completing it on a high note. ‘Country Star’ is a joyful tribute to his girlfriend, model Kelli Seymour, before he closes the album with the loved-up and heartfelt ‘Good Girl’ “Still can’t believe I found you/Can’t imagine life without you”.

Lynch is a maestro at lulling his listeners into a false sense of security: taking them down the country lanes that they are used to before infusing what he knows best with refreshing R&B tinges and subtle experimentation. There is an overwhelming theme of nostalgia, but the mood is generally uplifting and heartwarming, carried by his lyrics that are saturated with emotion. The fact that this project opens with the angst of ‘Momma’s House’ only serves to intensify the sense of jubilance as we see Lynch move on from bitter heartbreak to ending the album content and in love.

The setting for Lynch’s new record is his beloved hometown of Tullahoma, but the emotional palette the country hitmaker draws upon is so eclectic and kaleidoscopic that you don’t have to be from Tennessee, the US, or even the countryside to find something in this album that really resonates. The language that Lynch speaks is a universal one, and leaves his listeners with a feeling of much-appreciated optimism.

Samira Ahmed: A Landmark Victory?

Yaamir Badhe
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Samira Ahmed: A Landmark Victory?

Last Friday, journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed won a landmark victory in her case against the BBC regarding equal pay. Ahmed claimed that she was being severely underpaid for her role presenting Newswatch, allegedly receiving £440 per episode of the programme, which she pointed out as was significantly lower than the £3000 per episode enjoyed by fellow presenter Jeremy Vine for his role presenting Points of View.

These claims were followed by a tribunal that came to a close last week, in which the BBC attempted to defend its decision to pay Vine more than Ahmed, by arguing that the difference in pay was due to Jeremy Vine’s “celebrity” status and “market value as a major star”, rather than the fact that he is a man.

This proved to be dissatisfactory evidence, with the tribunal swinging in Ahmed’s favour: as a result of this, Ahmed received the entire pay differential between her and Vine, amounting to a sum of £693,000.

Ahmed’s victory in the case has been hailed as an emphatic one and can be expected to set a precedent for other female broadcasters who claim to have been paid significantly less than their male counterparts for similar work.

However, while Ahmed’s success and victory in this case is something to be celebrated, it is perhaps also necessary to consider what the very fact that this case took place says about the BBC and about the gender pay gap. Samira Ahmed is just one of many BBC employees who have felt that their pay has been unfairly determined based on their sex; fellow broadcaster Carrie Gracie resigned from her role as BBC China editor in January last year citing the BBC’s “secretive and illegal” pay culture as her primary reason for doing so. Looking further back, in 2017, BBC radio host Jane Garvey also spoke out about the issue of equal pay at the BBC, calling on the BBC to “act now” regarding the pay discrepancy and claiming that BBC bosses have “fobbed women off” regarding the issue of the gender pay gap.

Clearly, Ahmed’s case is not an exception, and the BBC, along with many other organisations, has now been publicly revealed to have a serious issue regarding the equal pay of its employees.

One might think, then, that Samira Ahmed’s case, which is arguably one of the most prominent and widely reported of such cases to reach the headlines in recent years, would prompt a change in tone of the BBC with regard to the issue of equal pay. However, the BBC’s reaction and statement regarding the case suggests that it has barely acknowledged the underlying issue at all.

The verdict of the tribunal was that the BBC was unable to provide suitable evidence to show that Vine was paid more than Ahmed because of his celebrity status, to which the BBC responded after the case: “We have always believed the pay of Samira and Jeremy Vine was not determined by their gender … We are sorry the tribunal didn’t think the BBC provided enough evidence about specific decisions.”

We might consider the tone of this reaction to be rather worrying; although the tribunal worked in Ahmed’s favour, this reaction suggests that the BBC has failed to acknowledge the issue of equal pay itself, let alone the magnitude of it, and still holds the view that Jeremy Vine’s higher pay was justified.

As we near the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, Samira Ahmed’s case shows us that while the issue of equal pay can be corrected on a case by case basis, it remains widespread and all the more pertinent today.

The Ghost of Sanders Past: Jil Sander A/W 2020 in Review

Alec Holt
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The Ghost of Sanders Past: Jil Sander A/W 2020 in Review

Since the initial departure of its peerless founder and namesake in 2000, Jil Sander has spent much of the last two decades wrangling with its sense of identity. Erratic financial performances led to several changes in ownership and not one but two messianic returns to the label for Sander herself in 2003 and 2012. The latter came at the end of a seven-year spell with Raf Simons at the helm which had represented something approaching creative stability but had seen the brand headed in a direction increasingly divergent from that restrained minimalism upon which Sander had first built it. Nobody, it seemed, could quite fill her immaculately crafted shoes.

Yet an onlooker could be forgiven for detecting in their Autumn/Winter 2020 menswear show a ghost of collections past. Put on at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, for which they were this season’s guest designer, the vaulted refectory of the magnificent Santa Maria Novella served as a timelessly beautiful setting for some equally age-defying clothes. Heaped mounds of marigolds suffused the scene with an obstinately glowing warmth, not so much a pop of colour as a bath of it, a forecast of the tone-blocked looks which would take to the runway.

The looks: love letters to the most luxurious of creams, the most all-enveloping of blacks, the ruddiest of browns. It’s this mastery over the muted pallet which first strikes you about the collection, a hallmark of classic Jil Sander style; squint and you could still appreciate the impossibly pleasing tonal interplay of every outfit. To do so, however, would be to deprive yourself of feasts of texture, lustrous lapels and crisp cotton and pristine leather. The aesthetics are unimpeachable, the cuts tailored but never stiff. The slouchy suiting is on trend but unmistakeably Jil, with enormous turn-up cuffs piling on to chunky-soled shoes, while the more conventional formalwear is paired with eyeletted hiking boots and vast, blanket-like scarves to throw off the silhouette. The scarves and towering overcoats swallow up those modelling them but never look suffocating, the outfits maintaining a sharp, elongated shape. And indeed, length is a mainstay of the collection, much of the outerwear projecting down to the ankles and the knits to the mid-thigh. Scarves are thrust vertically over the shoulder to draw the eye downwards, but the volume of the pieces ensures that no look ever risks feeling flat or two-dimensional. Razor-straight cuts come off warm and wearable.

There are glinting details in amongst the neutral swathes, too; pearlescent ornaments tied around collars resemble a tastefully minimalist take on the Wild Western style bolo ties the likes of Prada have recently put out in the wake of  Old Town Road-inspired country mayhem, while studded reflective baubles lend some of the latter half of the collection a shot of futurism. Almost every look is accompanied by an eminently practical, unobtrusive, but unfailingly desirable bag, none of which ever feel like anything but an extension of the outfit itself.

Therein lies the triumph of this collection. As much as individual pieces are mixed and matched and used in multiple outfits, the overarching aesthetic vision is so unwavering and so consummately realised that each look gives off the impression of having been visualised as one complete, inseparable unit, while at the same time almost any item in the collection could be paired with any other and produce the same effect. You could build a wardrobe out of these clothes and never look back nor worry about being on trend. For Jil Sander devotees, that’s the justification behind paying prices most of us would balk at for what are fundamentally rather unassuming garments. Those same devotees will have found in this collection and in its auteurs, that is, Luke and Lucie Meier, creative directors since 2017, much of the original spirit of the label they love. Perhaps Jil won’t have to come out of retirement a third time after all.

Cyber security breached at St Cross

Rachel Cordery
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Cyber security breached at St Cross

St Cross College experienced a cyber attack on Wednesday, resulting in a loss of internet across the college.

Students were alerted to the situation yesterday after internet services were deactivated.

In a post on Facebook, St Cross said: “We are sorry to report that an IT failure continues to mean the loss of WiFi across the estate. We realise the inconvenience this causes and have an expert team on the case.

“WiFi has now been restored throughout the West Wing on the main site. We will update on progress elsewhere early this afternoon.”

All Oxford students received an email from the University Information Security team shortly after St Cross’s services were dis-activated to outline precautionary steps to prevent a similar attack from happening again.

The Security Team said: “We have seen a rise in phishing emails to staff and students; as well as a malware incident earlier this week that had a serious impact on some parts of the University.

“This activity has now been confined, and there is no indication that personal or sensitive information has been compromised.”

The guidelines to prevent future attacks include installing Antivirus, taking care to be wary of strange emails, and take immediate action if you are affected.

The University have advised students to, in suspicious circumstances, immediately disconnect computers from the network and inform IT support staff.

The Personal is the Political

Elizabeth Reynard
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The Personal is the Political

He was a boy
She was a girl
Can I make it any more obvious?
He was a punk
She did ballet
What more can I say?
He wanted her
She’d never tell
Secretly she wanted him as well
But all of her friends
Stuck up their nose
They had a problem with his baggy clothes

He was a skater boy
She said, “see you later, boy”
He wasn’t good enough for her

The first date may have gone well. Really well, in fact. They were funny, didn’t offer too many times to cover the bill and compromised to split it with good grace. But throughout, and afterwards, familiar alarm bells are ringing, and you can’t get it out of your mind. A Facebook profile picture: they’re blissfully happy, standing in front of their second ‘country house’ in Kent, leaning down in a dark blue Schöffel to pet their Labrador. And, crucially, across the middle of it the banner “nooo don’t vote tory ur too sexy aha”. (If you don’t get it, I have some bad news for you.)

Joking aside, it’s evidently an issue. If you google ‘Can a relationship survive political differences’, you get 133 million results – if even a quarter of those are actually related to the question, it’s evidently worth talking about. It seems like what we once considered important is changing. More than half of people stated that they have no religion in a survey published in 2019 – perhaps that’s why more and more often people are finding politics to be at the centre of what they value.

Our identity is, at its core, made up of different ideologies – ideologies which in turn inform our political beliefs, and the way in which we view the rest of the world more generally. Speaking personally, as someone who is (formally, at least) on the political fence, I would struggle to have a relationship with someone whose ideological beliefs on subjects that are important to me were fundamentally different to mine. But equally, it’s hard to put it so plainly. Someone may be ideologically distant to me in some respects and simultaneously a person whom I may admire; some people have been. Is it possible to overlook these things? Somehow, I don’t think that strongly disagreeing over the legitimacy of the abortion-rights movement is the same as overcoming a particularly aggressive snoring habit, but equally it doesn’t necessarily have to spell the end.

But even before you get to the relationship or friendship it’s possible, or even likely, that the political may stop it from going further. As standpoints and opinions become more impassioned, it’s hard to coexist with other perspectives that may fundamentally go against your own. If that opposing perspective is also concerned with telling the world why their opinion is more legitimate and, by extension, why other opinions are less legitimate than theirs, it becomes harder. If it is a case of fundamentally conflicting beliefs rather than a case of different experiences, then keeping your opinion of them separate from your opinion of their ideology is a struggle. This applies universally to relationships – if you have a family member that polemically differs from you in terms of your ideological beliefs, it’s hard to separate the frustration that that causes from the way you feel about them. Indeed, there are members of my family who were born, and evidently remain, in the Victorian era; one such person recently tried to justify the gender pay gap to me on the rock-solid foundation that women are less reliable because they have children. Ground-breaking stuff. Clearly, I’m still not over it. I’m not saying that putting your opinions out there for the world to agree or disagree with is a bad thing – on the contrary, that’s how change happens. But in terms of relationships, the intensity of emotion that fundamental political dispute can create is definitely a factor that could cause complications.

‘The personal is political’ was a political slogan of the student movement and of second wave feminism from the late 60s, underlining the connections between what we experience in our personal lives and larger social and political structures. While what it fought against has changed with the times, what it argues is still incredibly relevant, especially with regards to politics and relationships. The personal truly is political, because the ideologies that we have make up the way in which we see ourselves and others. Importantly though, we may not be right and we’re definitely not entirely objective when forming these ideologies which naturally change over the course of our lifetime: something that may contribute to whether politics really does spell doom for a relationship. If our ideologies do change – because of the things that we live through, or the people that we meet, or come to admire – then the way in which we associate them with different people may change too. But somehow it seems less realistic – or at least less achievable – when it comes to essence-defining ideological beliefs.

However, if we were to consider what we’d be without these debates or differences in opinions, the answer is bleak. Insular, boring, and two-dimensional people that remain only in the comfort zones assigned to them at birth aren’t really human beings, they’re practically lemmings. It’s just not how human nature works. By encountering people that we disagree with, we evolve and adapt using the things we learn from them and, nine times from ten, it doesn’t create an insurmountable wedge between us. The personal is political, but that isn’t to say that the personal or the political will never change. As hard as it is, ideological disagreement does not make up the whole of a multi-dimensional relationship between people and, depending on the way it is approached, doesn’t necessarily spell the end of a relationship. Despite the impassioned division that has characterised political discussion more than ever, life, our relationships and ourselves would be boring without it.

Lady Pat. R. Honising – Cowley Clinic Calling …

Lady Pat R. Honising
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Lady Pat. R. Honising – Cowley Clinic Calling …

Dear Lady P, 

I was so excited to come to Oxford: nights out, new people, and…sex. A far cry from the sheltered suburb of my tiny hometown with just one club to speak of. 

But that’s the issue, I made full use of my first fun term in the big (medium) city; Plush Tuesdays every week – the whole of Michaelmas was Freshers’ Week for me to be honest. Unfortunately, however, my antics are catching up with me and I’m paying for it now. Without going into too much intimate detail, something doesn’t feel quite right – but none of my friends will come with me to a STI clinic for a check-up. Is there even one here in Oxford? 

Also the thing is I’m scared of being judged for being gay if I go to the college nurse but am unsure of where I need to go. 

Lady P, what should I do? 

Yours sincerely, 

Mr C. Lamidia 

P.S. Too scared to Google this… 

Dear, sweet, not-so-innocent fresher, 

It’s everyone’s worst nightmare but fear ye not, it happens to even the most careful of us. The first thing to remember is that there’s nothing to be ashamed of – slut shaming is so 2010s! As long as it’s safe and consensual have as much slap and tickle as your heart desires – I know I did at your age. That being said, condoms can be your best friend, so if you have a lot of gentlemen callers make sure you’re minimising the chance of catching a pesky infection (and feelings). Most colleges have JCR Welfare officers who can pidge you supplies. 

Good for you for keeping an eye on your sexual health, but for the sake of not just you, but anyone else you might be getting frisky with, you should get checked regularly, whether you have symptoms or not. Better safe than sorry, as I always like to say.

There is indeed a sexual health clinic here in Oxford. Conveniently, it is located just off the Cowley Road, a mere 15/20 minutes’ walk from the city centre or accessible by bus or bike. No need to trek out to the hospital, unless you want the exercise, that is. A confession, dear fresher, I’ve had to go there myself on the odd occasion (I suspect Lord P is straying but it’s far too scandalous to discuss). On the plus side though, my dear, I can confirm that the nurses there are not just understanding and confidential, but trained on LGBTQ matters too, so please don’t worry about being gay. They’re open as a drop-in centre every weekday, and you can check the times easily online, with a range of staff to make sure you get seen quickly and safely. That being said, although there’s no shame in getting checked, it’s natural to feel a little bit scared. 

In certain areas of the UK, the NHS will post you home kits so you can carry out the tests yourself and send them back – take a look on the website to find out if you can do this yourself. Although these don’t test for everything, they’re a good way to test for the most common infections from the comfort of your own room. 

Overall though Mr. C, I understand that matters of one’s genitalia it can be rather difficult to discuss and, I admire your courage for sending us in this submission. It is something that is really quite common, especially among your peers and nothing to worry about. 

Well done you for living your best life, and fingers crossed that all will be right as rain in no time. Keep having as much fun this term as you did last term. After all, you’re only at university once, make the most of not necessarily having to be up in time for work bright and early at 9am, unless you have labs or actually attend lectures. Carpe diem and all that, my dear fresher. 

Be safe, be respectful, and be sensible and the dating world is your oyster. 

Live laugh love, 

Lady Pat R. Honising xxxx

Debate: The West Has No Role To Play In The Middle East

Debate
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Debate: The West Has No Role To Play In The Middle East

Proposition – Leo Rogers

When considering as large a question as the West’s role in the Middle East, we should be starting with the bare facts. The region is home to multiple failed states (Yemen, Syria, and Iraq) and some of the world’s most brutal autocracies. Many of these depend upon Western support. The lucky few living in the region’s sole democracy, Israel, constitute a mere 5% of the total population. After a century of Western interference, huge swathes of territory are drenched with innocent blood and perpetually teetering on the edge of another catastrophe.

Western governments deserve much of the blame; many flashpoints have their roots in Western interventionism. In 1953, America overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, as punishment for his attempt at nationalising Iran’s oil. Subsequently, under American tutelage, the Shah’s regime crushed dissent with a Stasi-esque secret police force. The revolution that overthrew the Shah evolved into the brutal autocracy the Iranian people suffer under today. If you are British, ask yourself: if Clement Attlee had been overthrown by American proxies, and your parents and grandparents had been tortured by agents of an American vassal regime, would you consider America qualified to guide your country on the path to democracy?

 The incompetence of Western interventions is as unforgivable as its brutality. Journalist Andrew Rawnsley captured a particularly ridiculous instance of this phenomenon: prior to the 2003 invasion, Tony Blair was briefed by Michael Williams- a senior foreign office expert- on the potential for conflict to break out between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities. With characteristic starry-eyed idiocy, Blair responded: “That’s all history, Mike. This is about the future.” One might ask whether Blair has been following recent events in Iraq. The future he helped create demonstrates that what’s past is indeed prologue.

When confronted with this legacy, interventionists- ironically, given they tend to inhabit the right of the political spectrum – echo the classic Communist refrain that, though it may seem to have failed, their ideology has never truly been practiced. With enough commitments, better strategies, wiser alliances, we will be on our way to the sunlit uplands of a peaceful and democratic Middle East.

It’s too late. Alongside the millions of lives lost, homes destroyed, and families separated, the legacy of the last century of Western intervention is a loss of trust. The citizens of the Middle East are not stupid. They have memories as long as ours; too many have already made the rational calculation that, given the bloodshed and instability rippling out from every Western action in the region, we simply don’t have their best interests at heart.

 No amount of blood or treasure will win back this trust, and without it intervention is doomed to failure. While interventionists speak of moral responsibility, we have lost our moral credibility.

Opposition – Asher Weisz

More than any other event, the 2003 Iraq invasion has shaped our generation’s negative view of Western involvement in the Middle East. For reasons which I imagine are fluently explored above, many now see our presence in this region as inherently unnecessary and dangerous. Some, going further, see it as simply the latest stage in a long and sordid story of white imperialism.

Such views are useless caricatures. The legitimate role of the West in the Middle East today is twofold. Firstly, the West must protect its allies if it is to have any global respect, and in order to support its own interests and friends. Secondly, it is the imperative of powerful democratic nations not to watch idly by when populations are threatened by murderous totalitarians. That is not an imperialist imperative; it is an anti-imperialist one.

The Middle East is a troubled and volatile region. It is riven by religious divisions. Moreover, it is threatened by Iran’s maniacal imperialism. Worldwide, it is expected that the West will help those who put faith in it. In such a sensitive area, it is a travesty to betray this expectation. The Trump Administration’s cruel abandonment of the Kurds to Turkey’s mercy is a taster of the total breach of trust which this motion implicitly recommends. The idea the West has no role whatsoever would result in a situation where allies, particularly Israel and the Gulf states could be sure of no assistance against regional threats. Such shameful isolationism would make clear globally that it is dangerous to be the West’s enemy, but far more perilous to be its friend.

A complete Western absence from the region would also embolden those who seek its downfall. Amid the hysterical response to Qassem Soleimani’s assassination, the background of escalating Iranian aggression against the US and its allies has been conveniently forgotten. Our enemies are spurred on by our inaction. Ambivalence to all events in this crucial part of the world empowers every tinpot dictator and theocrat to threaten and hurt the Western nations.

Above all, Western refusal to involve itself in Middle Eastern affairs would be a conscious decision not to stop catastrophes perpetrated by murderers and terrorists. Under this motion, America would have rejected the Iraqi government’s desperate pleas to intervene against ISIS in 2014. Those “doves” who deny any place for the West would have feebly wrung their hands, posted their mournful tweets and held their demonstrations as Yazidis, Iraqis and Syrians were driven further under the yoke of bloodstained fanatics. It is only a presence in the region which stops disaster. There are times when moral duty compels us to act.

Western withdrawal from the Middle East would not mean that we had left those nations alone. We would have left them exposed: to the caprices of extremists and to the imperialism of Iran and Putin’s Russia. We would not leave peace. We would leave a vacuum waiting to be filled.


Truth and Technology: a Fraught Relationship

Jamie Slagel
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Truth and Technology: a Fraught Relationship

Recent discussion on the topic of so-called ‘fake news’ has exponentially grown. The use of the term “fake news” itself has increased by 40x (on Google search results) in the last year alone. The era of “fake news” has many worrying consequences, but perhaps the greatest is our all-too-real inability to really determine true from false: deception and reality seem too intertwined, despite our best efforts to genuinely and impartially seperate them. These troubles have only been severely compounded by the more eerie side of technological advancements.

The problem is very simple: there is so much misinformation out there – aggrandised by products of the modern age, like artificial intelligence, deep fakes and targeted algorithms –   that fact-checking seems like an almost impossible task. When we do actually try to distinguish true from false, it takes so long that few people actually carry through. Instead, other belief forming mechanisms—or, perhaps worse, decision-making procedures—fall into place. We suspend rational belief, and either believe what we want to believe, or throw our hands up in the air in confusion, and go back to watching cute cat videos online. Finally, after all of this, we make judgements decisions on these issues without justified beliefs.

Own a farm producing milk for a living? You’re probably going to stand by the health value of milk. Ardent vegan who thinks the milk industry is a moral outrage? You’ll be inclined to dismiss milk as being of little benefit to health. Don’t really care about milk other than with your cereal each morning? Cute cat videos it is. We believe what we want to believe, and if we don’t really care, we resort to lacking belief in anything. Apathy or impassioned belief without understanding the reality of a complex topic is an important discussion in its own right, but what I want to focus on is that this issue arises primarily from the vast piles conflicting opinions, articles, journals, videos, political statements, tweets and who knows what else just to find the truth.  The problem we face today is that when we develop a belief the threshold required to justify it is increasing to a level we simply cannot meet regularly, if at all. Advancements in technology has changed the way we consume media, making finding out the real truth seemingly impossible.  

Just take the recent example of deep fakes, ultra-realistic videos created using Artificial Intelligence. They were first reported by Motherboard at the end of 2017 when used to create fake pornography starring Gal Godot. A more recent report by the UK-led East Stratcom task force suggests something a lot more sinister. East Stratcom is an EU counter-measure to disinformation which reported that trolls backed by the Kremlin are experimenting with new AI technology that manipulates videos, and these videos will be used in the online information war in politics. This is exemplified by fake footage of Obama expressing sympathy for gay and lesbian victims in a shooting was disseminated in Georgia amongst conservative Christians by Russian-backed media.

But what are these deep fakes? The simplified version is as follows: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), devised in 2014 by Ph.D. student Ian Goodfellow, allow algorithms to create images, rather than just classify them—and it does this by having two GANs try to fool one another into thinking images they’ve created are real. As Samsung’s AI Centre has reported, this is extremely powerful: GANs only need one image of a person in order to create an ultra-realistic deep fake video.] If you were so inclined, you could just about ruin a stranger’s life by taking a picture of them on the street with this technology.

The Verge argues that this is merely scare-mongering. They contend that this technology has been around a while and has even been well-known for a couple years. In their eyes, it would remained marginal in the political sphere and information watchdogs (like East Stratcom) and corporations (like Facebook) e continue to keep a close eye on this kind of technology. However, the suggestion that the manipulation of photographic/videographic evidence hasn’t entered the political sphere or affected people’s mentality is simply wrong. One must merely cast their mind back to the time that Donald Trump tweeted out a fake (slowed down) video of Nancy Pelosi, and it seems that The Verge might well have benefited—as we all would—from hindsight. Or, we think back to that time he tweeted a video which purposefully edited clips from the 9/11 attack into Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s speech to make her seem pro-9/11. Not to mention the deep fakes supposedly originating from Russia, which are alleged to have been used to influence Brexit, the debate on Catalonian Independence, and the Eurovision song contest.

Like all technology, deep fakes have taken a while to reveal their more damaging potential. We may treat anything Trump says with scepticism, but no one can deny the widespread impact Trump and his tweets have. I for one don’t want to think about the effect of Trump tweeting deep fake footage of anything from 2020 presidential candidates or of the Ayatollah. With that said, Trump is as much, if not more, a victim of this sort of technology than a perpetrator. On May 16, one Belgian political party tweeted out a fake video of Trump calling upon Belgium to follow America’s footsteps, and exit the Paris climate agreement. Fraudulent behaviour, phishing and scams are rampant and convincing enough as it is to have fooled many of us—the power of deep fakes combined with the malicious intent of such fraudsters is somewhat frightening to consider. What this means is that very little, if anything, that we find online, provides any definitive proof that it is accurately reflecting reality.

Perhaps an even more worrying issue is information over-saturation. One solution to the above problem is just to check multiple sources, right? Well, that’s not so clear when contending with purposeful confusion mongers and disinformation publishers. Information over-saturation has a number of causes. For a start, there are just so many voices shouting over each other online that it’s difficult to differentiate what is backed up by real facts and what is made up. The IPCC, an authoritative voice on climate change, published in 2007 that climate change was real and the cause of man. The world was on the brink of a shift to radical action, but competing sources of information, such as this article published, claiming to have found leaked emails, ‘exposing’ that climate science alarmists had manipulated data to push their agenda disrupted change. Colloquially known as “climate gate”, the article, although quoting accurately,  took phrases out of context:three independent committees have found “climate gate” to be unsubstantiated.

It is the combination of new technology and existing consumer habits and dissemination tactics that is particularly dangerous. Consider again East Stratcom’s report that Russia are experimenting with deep fakes. The task force notes that “Often, the Russian policy is not to back one side or the other, but to amplify extreme views on both sides of an issue to fuel conflict, confusion and disaffection. Russia is believed to spend up to $1bn a year on disinformation activity.” This may seem counter-intuitive, but it actually makes a great deal of sense. When there is so much information which seems equally plausible out there, the resulting confusion leads people to suspend judgement, or, potentially worse, to stop caring. Technology like bots allow lies to be spread en masse and add some sense of legitimacy.

Imagine what deep fakes and manipulative AI technology could do: everything from creating emails indistinguishable from real ones to spread ten fake facts about climate change for each accurate point of data. All the problems caused by the information war around vaccines and autism is a worrying example of where every conversation is heading. Over-saturation, deepfakes, and things like fake news factories (which were reported in 2016, when the term “fake news” first arose, and have recently taken on a more sinister form), are all just the beginning of the kind of technology that can influence conversations. The consequences are terrifying. In the words of Marc Morano, notable for his non-profit that promotes climate change denial, “gridlock is the best friend” of anyone who wants to stop action against issues like climate change. The strategy Morano advocates is exponentially more effective in 2020.

So, what’s the solution? To start with, paying for reputable news sources is essential. The Times have long been charging for their online articles, while The Guardian and Wikipedia continue to ask their users for some sort of donation to their worthy cause. As consumers, we decide what drives our news. If what we want is free or entertaining news, then this clearly comes at the cost of accuracy, as clickbait, false stories and frivolous news take over. But if we prioritise our democratic values, we need to pay for accuracy; it is not clicks, or advertising, which drive our news sources, but reliable reporting.

This won’t entirely solve the issue. Ultimately, we need to change our habits when we consume the media. We need to start fact-checking everything we consume, and questioning whether what we’re engaging with is actually true. Programmes like the Poynter Institute’s MediaWise, which focuses on empowering us all to tell apart true and false and to stop disseminating fake news, or Google plug-ins like inVID, aiming to help users distinguish from falsities, will be crucial in this battle for the truth. Other organisations which have begun to address this issue include First Draft, Pheme and Full Fact, as well as the East Stratcom task force. 

As one of my Cherwell predecessors noted, “When it comes to the big stories, one where the safety of sources lies in the hands of the press, journalists are still the ones we turn to.” It seems like this is still the case today. We need to gain autonomy in handling our information in the face of our technological age, these organisations, amongst many others, provide tools towards our doing that. At this moment in time, this is a monumental task and responsibility for all of us. It’s a vicious cycle, if we let the problem fester, it becomes even more difficult. 

The Poynter Institute on its advice regarding how we engage with news, and East Stratcom, who state that we need to encourage people to: “question what they are reading before they consume it.” The first sentence in this very article contained a lie—one which was purposefully deceptive. One which might still be believed to be true by some who never made it to the end of this article. The statistic about the use of “fake news” in Google searches was false: the real number is closer to 400x than 40x. It is an unfortunate fact that most people reading this article probably believed the statistic without question, and perhaps even more unfortunate that many will fall short of fact-checking my corrected statistic as well. My predecessors at Cherwell have noted that ‘fake news’ is not a new concept, but technology, and its ability to magnify the effect of this fake news, is.

I have no doubt that technological advancement will roll on, whether or not we face up to these difficult questions. So the question becomes whether our own moral advancement will manage to match this. Will we bother to protect reality by changing our habits in acquiring information, reflecting on our morals in disseminating information and developing our decision-making abilities in using this information? Aldous Huxley stated on BBC Radio before the publication of Brave New World that eugenics might be the way forward. In his 1946 foreword to that same book, with the benefit of hindsight, Huxley changed tack: his message read that it is not technology, but the hand that wields it, that is good or bad. In this vein, it is the mixture of social media, AI, advertising systems and algorithm technologies combined with human shortcomings that have created this problem. It’s not eugenics or social media, nor atomic energy or Artificial Intelligence, that are the problem. The blame can only be on us. So, whether it’s education, counter-technology, or reforming our news consumption habits, something must steer us into reality. 

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