#china threaten India

[no-passaran]

Genocide experts warn that India is about to genocide the Shompen people

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.

[Maps] Environmental path cleared for Great Nicobar mega project, 10 Oct 2022. Mongabay.

#shompen #genocide #stop genocide #india #indigenous #indigenous peoples #indigenous rights #human rights #anthropology #stateless nations #end occupation #andaman and nicobar islands #nicobar islands #great nicobar #💬 #asia #geopolitics #ecocide #sustainability

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Reuters is Canada-Based Private Media]

Bangladesh will raise the minimum wage for garment workers by 56.25%, the first hike since 2019, the junior labour minister said on Tuesday after a week of protests calling for higher salaries. The minimum wage for workers will be increased from 8,000 taka to 12,500 taka ($114) per month from Dec. 1, State Minister for Labour and Employment Monnujan Sufian said. There will also be a 5% annual increment. The protests, which led to clashes with police that killed two workers and wounded dozens more, pushed the government to form a panel of factory owners, union leaders and officials to consider the demand for higher pay.[...]

"(Government welfare) cards will be provided to the workers, later the ration cards will be given to them so they can buy essential commodities at cheaper rates," Rahman, also a former president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, told Reuters. Workers, however, are not happy with the rise at a time when inflation is running at 9.5%.

7 Nov 23

[TheDailyStar is Bengali Private Media]

The wage board for garment workers has set the minimum salary at Tk 12,500, a little over half of what workers demand. Union leaders have rejected the new minimum wage put forth by the wage board, which accepted the proposal of factory owners’ representative Siddiqur Rahman. The current starting wage is Tk 8,000. Union leaders yesterday threatened to go for tough demonstrations. Workers had demonstrated for 12 straight days.[...]

Before the announcement, members of the Minimum Wage Board, formed on April 9, held a meeting at its office. While the meeting was going on, union leaders outside chanted slogans demanding a minimum wage of at least Tk 23,000. Demanding a starting salary of Tk 25,000, Montu Ghosh, president of Garment Sramik Trade Union Kendra, said the measly amount set was not enough to lead a good life. Inflation and high prices of essentials have made things worse for garment workers. Ghosh along with other union leaders of the Mojuri Briddhite Garment Sramik Andolon, a platform of workers’ unions, in a statement rejected the new minimum wage and called for a rally on Friday where they would announce tougher programmes[...]

If the workers’ unrest continues, the responsibility will lie with the wage board, Nazma said.[...]

[The] president of the Bangladesh Apparel Workers’ Federation, said the prime minister’s intervention is needed in setting the new minimum wage. He demanded ration cards, not the family cards of the TCB, for the garment workers.[...]

The new minimum wage is much less than those offered in India, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Indonesia. Only Pakistan has a lower minimum wage. Early last month, the Centre for Policy Dialogue, after a survey, interviews and research, estimated that the minimum wage for an RMG worker should be Tk 17,568. The new minimum wage falls short of that. The think-tank had delved into food and non-food expenditure patterns of 228 workers from 76 factories and even considered how many earning members an average RMG worker’s family had. The CPD had stated that the food cost for an RMG worker family was at least Tk 9,198 a month but notes that the standard food expenditure for a family of four would be Tk 16,529 and that the garment workers have to cut corners to make ends meet.

It said 12 percent of the workers’ families do not buy milk at all, 5 percent do not buy sugar, and 5 percent do not consume fruits.

8 Nov 23

[cypherdecypher]

Animal of the Day!

Burmese Peacock Softshell (Nilssonia formosa)

(Photo by Joel Sartore)

Conservation Status- Critically Endangered

Habitat- Southeastern Asia; India; Southern China

Size (Weight/Length)- 60 cm

Diet- Insects; Fish eggs; Fish; Small amphibians; Aquatic plants

Cool Facts- Not only does the Burmese peacock softshell turtle look like a wet pile of mud but its face is one for the history books. Instead of pulling its head back into its shell like other species of turtle, these softshells can retract its head into the skin rolls of its neck in a frankly terrifying display. Their long nose allows the majority of the Burmese peacock softshell to stay underwater while taking a breath with only their snoot poking out. Very little is known about these turtles due to their rarity. They are mostly threatened by overhunting for their meat and water pollution from gold mining along river banks.

Rating- 14/10 (Soft shell = speedy boy.)

#animal of the day #animals #turtles #reptiles #tuesday #june 13 #burmese peacock softshell #softshell turtle #biology #science #conservation #the more you know

[probablyasocialecologist]

From 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country’s extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 per cent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil. China's comparatively strong performance is corroborated by data on other social indicators. Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes. These results indicate that socialist provisioning policies can be effective at preventing extreme poverty, while market reforms may threaten people's ability to meet basic needs.

Capitalist reforms and extreme poverty in China: unprecedented progress or income deflation?

#china #extreme poverty #capitalism #privatisation

[birdstudies]

October 8, 2023 - Long-billed Bush Warbler (Locustella major) These bush-warblers are found on grassy slopes with bushes and grass and in alpine meadows, forest clearings, and cultivated areas in northern Pakistan, northwest India, and western China. Foraging alone in grass and scrub, they feed on insects but the specifics of their diet are not well known. They build deep cup-shaped nests from dry grass on or near the ground well-hidden in dense grass or roots. They are classified as Near Threatened by the IUCN due to habitat loss caused by logging and agricultural expansion.

#long-billed bush warbler #bush warbler #locustella major #bird #birds #illustration #art #grassland #birblr art

[originalleftist]

I wonder if those who think Israel should be destroyed, or that the US should do nothing to assist in it's defence, have ever really thought about what Israel's defeat and destruction would entail.

Because even beyond the immense loss of life, primarily to civilians, that that would entail, the reality is that Israel has nuclear weapons. And if it is ever in a position where it is desperate enough, where it's existence is imminently threatened, it will likely use those weapons. And again, this is not because Israel is uniquely destructive or genocidal- it's literally the central reason why every country that has nuclear weapons (so the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) has them. As a final deterrent, and means of retaliation, against destruction.

So if Hamas or Iranian or another enemy were to successfully overrun Israel, such that Israel's existence as a nation-state was imminently threatened, those nukes would come into play. And it should go without saying, but that will not help anyone. Not Israelis. Not the US. And not Palestinians. Because you can't have your own state when you're dead.

Israel is a small nation, surrounded by enemies. The choices of it's government bear some responsibility for the latter fact, but regardless, that is the situation at present. The best guarantee that Israel will never find itself desperate enough to consider using those nukes is likely a strong guarantee of US support. No, that doesn't mean that the US has to give Israel unlimited offensive weapons for any purpose. But it does mean that whenever Israel's existence is threatened, it does not stand alone.

The alternative is not a good one. For anyone. And if you want the destruction of Israel by force, you are not supporting a "free Palestine". You have one goal- the slaughter of "Zionists" (by which is meant, Israeli and also often diaspora Jews). And are willing to see Palestine and a lot of other places turned to radioactive wastelands to get it.

Remember this as well when you see commentators and social media posts denouncing Biden for supporting Israel against Iran, accusing him of genocide, and urging people to stay home/vote third party/vote Trump on Election Day.

#Israel #Palestine #Gaza #US #Iran #Nuclear Weapons #Two State Solution #Election #2024

[mariacallous]

“How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today.

U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world.

In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe.

Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts.

Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be.

A DIRTY GAME

Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course.

In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game.

Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts.

In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name.

Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified.

That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge.

In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again.

IDEAS MATTER

Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms.

The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.”

The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault.

These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins.

Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew.

CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS

Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule.

In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others.

Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021.

Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront.

THE DECISIVE DECADE

First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble.

Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes.

The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside.

Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure.

So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go.

When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme.

Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place.

Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top?

DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed.

It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage.

During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well.

This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them.

Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceivedhypocrisy are very real.

RULES FOR RIVALRY

Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help.

First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections.

The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what?

Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West.

Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places.

Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight.

Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be.

By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends.

The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend.

Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether.

This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist.

Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose.

Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires.

[thatwobblychair]

CoD The Other Good Guys Bear! Edition

What if the rest of the good guys in call of duty were bears? Part 2 - see Part 1 for 141 as bears

More bear facts! Cause bears are truly the best! 🐻💯

Alejandro: Mexican Grizzly Bear*

Ursus arctos nelsoni - now Ursus arctos horribilis

*depiction of what a mexican grizzly bear may have looked like alive

A now extinct subspecies of the grizzly bear that once inhabited northern Mexico. Due to its predation on cattle farms, they were considered pests and hunted by farmers. By the 1960s there were less than 30 individuals remaining. In 1974 the last known individual was shot in Sonora.

It was smaller than grizzly bears from the United states and Canada, and its colouration was said to range from a pale yellow to greyish-white with a darker undertone, though some individuals were described to be darker and reddish brown.

Due to its silvery fur, it was called 'el olso plateado' (the silvery bear) in Spanish, though it's name in the Ópatas language (an indigenous Mexican people's) was 'pissini'.

Rudy: Spectacled Bear "Andean Bear"

Tremarctos ornatus

The last remaining short-faced bear, native to the Andes Mountains in northern and western South America. Though all bears are omnivores, the spectacled bear has a mostly herbivorous diet with only 5-7% of their diet being meat.

The bear is named after it's distinctive eye markings, though not all spectacled bears may have such markings. Individuals can have highly variable fur patterns making it relatively easy to distinguish from one another.

It's short face and broad snout is thought to be an adaptation to a carnivorous diet despite it's herbivorous preferences.

Paddington Bear is said to be a Spectacled Bear from Peru.

Farah: Asian Black Bear "Moon Bear"

Ursus thibetanus

A medium sized bear native to Asia and highly adapted to arboreal life. It can be found in parts of Korea, China, Japan, eastern Russia, the Himalayas, southeastern Iran and northern India. It is listed as vulnerable due to deforestation and poaching for its body parts (used in traditional medicines).

The name 'moon bear' is given due to its distinctive creamy white cresent fur patch, though in some individuals it is "V" shaped. It has a powerful upper body stronger than it's lower limbs and are known to be the most bipedal of bears.

It has a reputation for extreme aggression despite their reclusive nature and there have been documented reports of unprovoked attacks. They are said to be more aggressive than the Eurasian Brown Bears that may cohabit the same areas and the American Black Bear.

Alex: American Black Bear

Ursus americanus

Alongside the Brown Bear, it is one of the only Bear species not threatened with extinction.

Despite living in North America, it is more closely related to the Asian Black Bear and Sun Bear than Grizzly Bears (North American Brown Bears) and Polar Bears. It's ancestors are thought to have split off from the Sun Bear.

Black Bears are distinguished from Grizzly Bears who may cohabit the same area, with their longer tall ears, straight face profile, shorter claws and lack of distinctive hump.

Teddy bears, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Smokey Bear are all inspired by the American Black Bear.

Nikolai: Polar Bear

Ursus maritimus

A large bear native to the Arctic. It is closely related to the Brown Bear and can hybridise with them though this is rare and not often seen. (See Grolar Bears)

They are the most carnivorous of all bear species (hypercarnivores), specialising in hunting seals through ambush attacks. Polar Bears are usually solitary but can be found in groups on land. They can form stable 'alliances' based on dominance hierarchies outside of breeding seasons with the largest males at the top.

It's common name was given in 1771, and was previously referred to as 'white bear', 'ice bear', 'sea bear', 'Greenland bear' in 13th - 18th century Europe. The Netsilik cultures (Inuit) named it 'nanook' and have several additional different names for them depending on sex and age of the polar bear.

Laswell: Kodiak Bear "Kodiak/Alaskan Brown Bear"

Ursus arctos middendorffi

Named after it's habitation of the Kodiak Archipelago in southwest Alaska, the Kodiak bear is the largest subspecies of Brown Bear, with some individuals comparable to the Polar Bear in size.

An island bear, it is 1.5-2x larger than it's mainland cousins the grizzly bear, though physically and physiologically, the two bears are very similar.

Due to its tendancy to feed in dense groups, it has thought to have developed more complex social behaviours (in comparison to mainland grizzly bears) to minimise infighting/fatalities via both verbal/ body posturing and social structures.

+

All info taken from wiki. Please let me know if ther any mistakes.

#cod mwii #cod mw2 #call of duty modern warfare #cod mwiii #alejandro vargas #rudy parra #rudy cod #farah karim #farah cod #alex cod #nikolai cod #kate laswell #laswell cod #bears #bear facts

[sketching-shark]

🔥 with Tang Sanzang or his Buddha of Glorious Sandalwood self, your pick

He would be SO much more interesting if he was written to be more like the historical Xuanzang than as a parody of Confucian scholars!!!

Feel like I'm preaching to the choir in some ways, but yea it's been remarked on by many another poster that of all the pilgrims Tang Sanzang does usually come across as the most static (with perhaps the exception of Bai Longma, but he spends most of his time as a horse so cut him some slack) and sometimes the most annoying. Which does make sense in a lot of ways, especially since you could reasonable argue that everyone's favorite weepy monk presents an early version of the "damsel in distress trope" given how often his role in the story is to get kidnapped and saved.

That said, it has been nice to see an uptick of people arguing that given the circumstances of having to wrangle three extremely dangerous yaoguai on a journey where he's routinely threatened with death by devouring and multiple instances of sexual assault, a lot of Tang Sanzang's even more frustrating actions do make quite a bit of sense, from using the headband against Sun Wukong to the favoritism towards Zhu Bajie (i.e. the one pilgrim who hadn't tried to kill/eat him). The monk doesn't change much over the course of the journey, but I'm in the camp that there's some pretty interesting implications about how he thinks & approaches the world! So three cheers to the og for making it crystal clear on just how messed up each of the pilgrims are lmao.

Even so, I do think it would be really cool if JTTW itself or retellings spent more time making the implicit explicit, as it were, and let Tang Sanzang grow and change as a character outside of his usual mandated tropes. I do think a lot of this could be accomplished by including more traits from Xuanzang himself, who if I'm remembering this right he was both a master translator, a savvy diplomat (having reportedly gotten along well with everyone from local rulers to bandits), and possessed a pretty amazing tenacity and set of travel skills. Not to mention I think it would be amazing if Tang Sanzang's story followed Xuanzang in that the historical monk was NOT permitted by the Tang emperor to travel west, but did so in direct defiance to that rule because he was that dedicated to reviewing the Buddhist scripture in India and bring its lessons back to China. Said as much before, but that situation could add a really interesting layer to the general image of the world JTTW presents!

#xiyouji #jornuney to the west #jttw #tang sanzang #tripitaka

[journeytothewestresearch]

This is purely so my friend and I can end a debate, what did each of the pilgrims do to end up on the journey??? I know that the Tang monk fell asleep during a lecture and knocked over rice, Wukong obviously has a laundry list full of war crimes, but what did Sha Wujing/Zhu Baije/Ao Lie do??

All three broke some kind of heavenly rule and were either kicked out or threatened with death.

Sha broke a cup:

Zhu drunkenly made a pass at the Moon goddess:

And the dragon burnt his father's jewels.

The reason that they all ended up on the journey is because each was by chance encountered by Guanyin as she traveled from India to China while looking for a scripture pilgrim. She recruited them to help protect the monk.

#Sun Wukong #Monkey King #Zhu Wuneng #Zhu Bajie #Sha Wujing #Sha Monk #Monkey #Pigsy #Sandy #Journey to the West #JTTW #Lego Monkie Kid #LMK #MK

[simply-ivanka]

Trump Was Good for America’s Alliances

He pushed NATO to spend more on defense, expanded the Quad and facilitated the Abraham Accords.

By Alexander B. Gray Wall Street Journal April 3, 2024

Foreign-policy experts are predictably fretting over Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. They fear that the former president threatens the alliances and partnerships that have sustained global peace since 1945. Should Mr. Trump return to the White House, the thinking goes, he will be unconstrained by the guardrails that prevented him from torpedoing America’s alliances in his first term and will permanently damage both U.S. security and the international order.

This narrative concedes a point that undermines its premise: The U.S. alliance system didn’t crumble during Mr. Trump’s first term. On the contrary, the Trump administration strengthened relations with partners in the Indo-Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe and the Mideast. Anyone who believes that Mr. Trump was once bound by conventional wisdom but won’t be again—and will wreak havoc on the global order he ostensibly detests—hasn’t been paying attention.

To understand Mr. Trump’s record, recall what he inherited. The Obama administration’s disastrous “red line” in Syria, its ill-conceived Iranian nuclear deal, its failure to deter or respond adequately to Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine, its toleration of Chinese malign activity in the South and East China seas, and its promise of a “new model of great-power relations” with Beijing had brought U.S. relations with allies and partners like Japan, Taiwan, Israel, the Gulf Arab states and much of Eastern Europe to a historic low point. Much of Mr. Trump’s tenure was spent not simply repairing those relationships but expanding them in innovative ways.

Mr. Trump appalled many foreign-policy veterans, who thought his rhetoric threatened the world order. In one sense, that fear was absurd: Nearly every American administration has publicly scolded North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries for shirking their defense-spending commitments. Mr. Trump did likewise—and, perhaps unlike his predecessors, was seen as willing to take decisive action to secure change. Through public and private cajoling—also known as diplomacy—he secured a commitment from NATO members to beef up their contributions. From 2017 through 2021, nearly every signatory raised defense spending, contributing substantially to the alliance’s ability to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

These efforts resulted in a significant redistribution of U.S. forces from legacy bases in Germany to facilities in Poland and the Baltic states, where they are far better positioned to deter Moscow. Along with NATO allies, Mr. Trump provided long-sought Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine, imposed sanctions against malign Russian actors, and worked with partners to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would have increased European allies’ energy dependence on Russia. These weren’t the acts of a retrograde isolationist; they were the work of a pragmatist seeking novel solutions to 21st-century challenges.

The administration’s goal of strengthening America’s standing in the world bore fruit, including the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Arab states, a significant upgrade to the Quad alliance among the U.S., India, Australia and Japan, stronger diplomatic relations with Taiwan thanks to unprecedented cabinet-level visits and record arms sales, and an unexpected deal between Serbia and Kosovo.

At each step, Mr. Trump asked his staff to think of creative ways to resolve issues that had bedeviled their predecessors for decades. Doing the same things over and over and expecting different results rightly struck the president as insane.

After three years of press adulation over America’s supposed return to the world stage under President Biden, one might ask: What have Americans and the world gotten from a supposedly more alliance-friendly U.S. president? So far, a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the failure of American deterrence in Ukraine, an Iranian nuclear breakout inching ever closer, and an accelerating Chinese threat toward Taiwan. Allies in the Mideast, Eastern Europe, and Asia have begun to chart their own course in the face of an uncertain U.S. trumpet.

The global foreign-policy elite is sowing needless fear around the world by willfully misrepresenting Mr. Trump’s first term and scare-mongering about a second. Should Mr. Trump return to the White House, there will doubtless be sighs of relief among officials in friendly capitals who remember his time in office. It isn’t difficult to understand why: Mr. Trump’s language may make diplomats uncomfortable, but his actions strike fear among those who matter most to American security: our adversaries.

Mr. Gray is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He served as chief of staff of the White House National Security Council, 2019-21.

#trump #president trump #trump 2024 #repost #america first

[roseoftrafalgar]

Happy International Snow Leopard Day! ❄️ Ft. Law helping a snow leopard cub with a minor arm injury.

-> for some snow leopard facts, click the readmore!

Snow leopards are sometimes referred to “ghosts of the mountains” for their elusiveness and solitary nature.

They are found in the icy mountainous regions of Central Asia (i.e Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, etc.), South Asia (i.e. Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, etc.), Russia, Mongolia, and China.

In northern Dolpo Nepalese folklore, it is sometimes believed that snow leopards carry the sins of their past lives & whoever kills them “inherits” their sins.

Often opportunistic hunters and less aggressive compared to other big cats when it comes to hunting their prey, as they will retreat from a kill if another predator threatens them. However, they are able to kill prey 3 times their own weight.

They’re more related to tigers than leopards.

They can jump 6 times their body length.

They typically have blue, green, or grey eyes & can see 6 times better than humans.

Their short nasal cavity warms the air they inhale before entering their lungs.

Their tails can serve as scarves & they sometimes like to nom on them.

-> Visit Snow Leopard Trust to learn more about snow leopards & conservation efforts, as there is less than around 10,000 in the wild!

#one piece #one piece fanart #trafalgar d. water law #trafalgar law #international snow leopard day #snow leopard #snow leopard cub #baby animal #(​i am always torn between grey or gold eyes for him. maybe a grey with subtle gold tones or pale icy gold is a good middle ground) #(the animal/character parallelism makes me feel a certain type of joy) #fun facts #my art

[ffiahh]

PROJECT PLUTO

Sevika and Vi Roommate AU

Sevika gets an unwanted pink rat as a roommate. 

Characters: Sevika, Vi, Silco

Mentioned Characters: Powder, Ekko, Lux, Mylo, Claggor, Vander

Pairings: Powder x Ekko x Lux (mentioned)

Content Warning: Cursing, arguing, hinting of drugs, description of smoking, brief mention of food, brief mention of death

Word Count: 3141

☾*:･ﾟ✧. so, my first full fic on here. credit to my sister for this prompt. its basically kind of like crack, (maybe?). there is NO romantic intent between sevika and vi, none of my works with them will be, they just bicker like siblings, maybe even like parent and child. yes sevika is desi in here, she will be desi in any of my pieces of work that includes her. whether she is from pakistan, india or bangladesh, i don't know. that can be debated.

What the fuck.

Sevika was undeniably pissed. It was a normal occurrence for her to be angry over things she couldn’t control; whether it was a stupid employee fucking something up, or if she didn’t have any of her makhan bada stocked in the fridge, or if her mechanical arm wasn't co-operating with her brain. Or the way she could never get her ponytail right, even if it is the simplest of hairstyles. But this. This took the cake. Nothing pissed her off more than the two brats that seemed to wedge their way into her sweet simple life; it felt as though they stuck their little, grubby fingers so far up her ass to pull out her guts only to throw them right back at her face. Brats. 

Sevika curls her nose up in distaste, her prosthetic fingers twitching to curl up in a fist; her eyes squinting distastefully at Vi. Vi had a cocky smirk on her lips; the kind that had the corner of her mouth lazily pulled up. It pissed Sevika off; if it weren’t for the very expensive, fine China vase she would gladly throw a punch. Or two.  

“What is this pink rat doing here? She's my roommate? I don't want it.” She at least is thankful the blue one isn't here. Ugh.

Vi’s smirk seemed to deepen, scoffing quietly as she walked toward Sevika. She even walks stupidly. “I have red hair now, see?” Sevika lets out a distasteful growl, as Vi so nicely shakes her disgusting red hair in Sevika’s face. Sevika lets out a guttural groan as she turns her head away, her hand pushing at Vi to move her away, Vi only staggers slightly before she finds her footing again, leaning against the back of the sofa, the smirk disappearing for a small snarl to take its place. 

Silco only blinks, looking at Sevika before he slips his hands into his pockets. He decided not to wear his fake eye today, just a flesh of pink left behind his eyelids. He sighs quietly. “You have agreed to a roommate, Sevika.” Silco shifts his weight slightly, his shoulders hunching as he does so. 

Ugh. His posture is horrible. 

Sevika’s lips curl into a frown as she gestures a hand to Vi. “You didn't tell me it was her.” 

“I knew you would refuse if I did. I am doing this for Powder, she will be staying until she is able to find a place for herself. It won't be that long.” 

Sevika clicks her tongue, crossing her arms against her chest. “Why couldn't she have stayed with Powder? Or the other brats?” 

Vi crosses her arms as well, her hip jutting out slightly. “Mylo is essentially homeless; he's staying with Powder, Ekko and Lux right now, and Claggor only has one room at The Last Drop.” Vi then scoffs, her face scrunching slightly as she throws a hand toward Silco. “I don't want to stay with him.” Vi tightens her arms over her chest, clicking her tongue. “He says your house is bigger.” 

Sevika runs a hand down her face in exasperation. “I regret helping run a pharmaceutical business.” 

Vi scoffs, her eyes lowering down Sevika’s form before she sneaks a glance back at Silco. “Just a pharmaceutical business?”

Sevika snarls, her body hunching up and her hands curling into tight fists. She starts to take a threatening step toward Vi. “Why you-” 

“That's enough. Vi will be staying here. End of discussion.”

It’s been a week since the pink rat stole the extra space in her humble abode, Sevika didn’t like it. Vi didn’t do anything; she was just there. Always there. Sevika would always see an extra pair of shoes and slippers by the door, and would find short strands of red hair on her living room sofa, or would even see her stupid red jacket lazily thrown over a random, poor sofa or chair. Sevika heard her when she tried to go to bed, when she talked too loud and could hear her heavy footfalls thundering around the apartment for bathroom breaks. How much water does she fucking drink? She heard her when she laughed loudly at her own jokes. 

You know what’s worse? They’re dad jokes, Vi laughs at her own dad jokes. It was as if a little angry, red old man moved in. 

Sevika sighs deeply, stretching her arms over her head. Usually, she would be… okay starting the day, with a nice cup of tea and makhan bada, a nice workout. Normally, her days were quiet, calm and alone. That was until the pink rat took the room opposite hers. Her presence inflating to every inch of that room, nothing of Sevika was left. The audacity. Sevika also has an inkling that she's been stealing her food. The little shit. 

Determined to catch Vi in the act, Sevika bounds to the bathroom, and quickly but thoroughly takes a shower; she doesn't allow herself to shiver and jerk at the cold water before stepping out, wiping herself quickly. Sevika takes a seat to connect her prosthetic arm, her mind drifting to whatever Vi could be doing in the kitchen. God, she’s going to raid the cabinets, take everything her small body can consume. Or, what if she uses all her loose tea leaves? That shit is expensive. Soon enough, she’s gargling the last of her minty spit out in the sick, before she finds herself in the kitchen with Vi… playing video games? In the kitchen? At 9 in the morning? 

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

Vi swivels, yes swivels- her head to give Sevika an incredulous look, her fingers still over her keyboard. “Playing video games.” 

“Have you even eaten breakfast?” 

Vi doesn’t bother looking up at Sevika again, as her eyes are glued to the screen. “What are you? My mum?”

Sevika doesn’t answer to that but lets out a determined grunt as she stalks toward the fridge; a shiver just went up Sevika’s spine at the mere thought of even going anywhere near- 

“Who’s Jinx?”

Vi lets out a sigh, blinking slowly at the screen, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “It’s Powder. Now, shut up; stop distracting me.”  

Sevika grunts, her lips snarling as she opens the fridge. Her eyes scan the fridge; finding her sweet box, filled with makhan bada, she takes it out gently; opening the lid. One, two, three, four, five, si- the little shit. Sevika turns to look at Vi; whose attention is still on the laptop in front of her; Sevika squints; Vi doesn’t look nervous; her eyebrows are furrowed, and there's a little curl on her top lip as she concentrates, her grey eyes scanning the screen. She doesn’t look guilty, but she is. Sevika knows deep down. She has to be. 

Sevika breathes heavily through her nose, closing the lid gently as she places it back in its fridge. “You’ve eaten my food.” 

Vi just briefly looked up at Sevika, before they glued back on the screen again. “No, I didn’t.” The look of a lying, thieving bitch. 

Sevika blinks at Vi. “Yes, you did.” 

“Did you see me?” 

This b- “No.” 

Vi hums, smiling triumphantly at the sound of a woman shouting ‘VICTORY’ swimming out from her laptop speakers, as she leans back on her chair. “Then I didn’t.” 

Sevika can feel a vein start to pulsate on her temple. “You and I only live here.” 

Vi shrugs, her fingers gliding across the trackpad before closing the lid on her laptop. “You don’t know that. Somebody else could be living here, they could be living in the attic.” 

Sevika gives Vi an incredulous look; she can almost feel the steam coming from her ears. “This is an apartment, it doesn’t have an attic!” 

Vi gives Sevika an incredulous look of hers in return, the corners of her mouth turned up in a smirk, her elbow reaching up to rest against the back of her barstool. “The basement then.”  

Sevika breathes in deeply, her nostrils flaring; something Vi supposedly finds funny. Sevika could almost feel her hair grey 20 years quicker. “Don’t touch my food!”

Sevika wants to die. She could only stare up at her ceiling as the horrid sound of ‘music’ ruptured her eardrums, her eyes angrily running over the corners of her ceiling. I should get the ceiling repainted. She sighs heavily, glaring at the ceiling when the volume increases; it felt as though the whole apartment was dancing. Sevika could have sworn she saw her pictures shaking slightly. She hopes that her fine China vase is safe.

Sevika- embarrassingly enough- jumps slightly; her arms under her chest squeezing against her body, when the horrid music�� started to scream. Screaming? 

Sevika grunts to herself, ripping the blankets off of her, not bothering to put her slippers on before she’s pounding her large fist on Vi’s bedroom door, hard enough that Sevika swears there’s wood splintering. Sevika doesn’t waste another moment to raise her fist, before the door flies open and Sevika is looking down at Vi. 

God, she’s short. 

“Turning the fucking music down!” 

Vi leans against the doorframe, waving a finger at her ear as she shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders. Sevika doesn’t bother hiding her eye roll, as she bulldozes through Vi and into her room. She can vaguely hear Vi shout behind her, underneath all the horrid layers of music she decided to haunt the entire apartment building. Perhaps, baking cookies is necessary now. 

Vi can only raise an eyebrow at the way Sevika is frantically looking around her room, her short ponytail bouncing along with her, before Vi stands up straight, her mouth agape as Sevika angrily smacks the speaker, the piece of tech hitting harshly against the wall before the music stops, small pieces of plastic falling from the gadget and landing on the carpet with a small thud. 

“You broke my speaker!” 

“You’re playing God awful music! I’m doing us all a favour!”

Vi splutters, pointing her finger at the ground as she stomps her foot lightly. “Don’t bring God into this! My music is not that bad!” 

“You don’t even believe in God!” Sevika snarls, her fists curling tightly. “I’m trying to sleep!” 

Vi scoffs, crossing her arms over her chest, as she shifts her weight to one foot, jutting her hip out. “At this hour? Letting your old, wrinkly body rest and recharge?”

Sevika could only let out a disgusted grunt, the statement bringing a visceral bodily shiver as she turned her head, as if keeping the pink rat out of her sight would help her, with the kind reminder of what her body could end up like. It did not. “Don’t talk about my body like that! I’m only like 10 years older than you!” 

“10 years too old!” Vi then gestures to the broken speaker; shaking her hand at it for emphasis, laying on the floor, in sad broken pieces. “You have to pay for my speaker now!” 

Sevika waves a hand dismissively at Vi, huffing as she crosses her arms over her chest; her eyes lazily running over Vi’s room. “What am I? Your mother? Paying for your shit.” 

Vi glares at Sevika, her nose scrunching as her lips turn into a small frown. “The shit you broke!” 

Sevika scoffs, rolling her eyes again. “I couldn’t find the off button, which wouldn’t have been a problem if you hadn’t put your music so fucking loud!”

Vi lets out a loud groan, her hands coming up to tug at her slightly before she turns to stomp out into the hallway. “Ugh, I can’t wait to move out!”  

Sevika lets out an amused sound that sounded like a merge of a laugh and a scoff. “You and I both! Maybe, then I’ll get some peace and fucking quiet!” Sevika lets her arms fall to her sides, looking around Vi’s bedroom. “And pick up your shit! This room’s a mess!” 

Vi doesn’t bother turning her head to talk, as she reaches the end of the hallway. “You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not my mother! My mum’s dead! Ass.” Vi throws in a colourful middle finger for good measure. 

Vi sighs, blowing out a puff of smoke as she rests her head against the back of the sofa. She can feel her whole body relax, the calm settling over her heart, and weighing her limbs down. It felt nice, sure her mouth was a little dry, her stomach wasn’t settling right- it wasn’t the milk from this morning- and to everyone else it looked as though she had cried for a whole night, and she could have sworn the blue petals on the fine China vase were waving at her but it felt nice. She should stop, but another side effect of weed is poor judgement so she carries on. Vi is probably on her 3rd joint, when the front door opened, the shuffling and a quiet thud of boots falling to the ground before-

“What the fuck?” 

Oh, Sevika’s home. 

Sevika’s nose curls as her lips carved into a frown, she’s in trouble, Vi realises; so she doesn’t bother saying anything, as she brings the joint up to her mouth again, breathing in the faint citrus taste, before the smoke escapes her mouth and nose. 

“Why are you smoking weed in my living room?”

Vi smacks her lips, seemingly distracted by the whirls of smoke coming from her mouth before she remembers that Sevika asked her a question. “Ah, just wanted to piss you off.” 

Vi could only hear Sevika grumbling, before the joint was roughly snatched from her hands, Vi’s reaction was delayed, so she could only stare wide eyed as Sevika glares at the joint, squeezing it slightly in her hands before she brings it to her own mouth, taking a puff. Vi glares at Sevika, an almost confused look on her face. “Oi!”  

Sevika just blows out the smoke, her eyes watching its movements before it disappears quickly. She turns to take a seat by the sofa, her large hands harshly smacking Vi’s feet off the coffee table, wiping the glass as she lets out a grunt when she takes a seat. She stares at the joint between her fingers, taking another puff before she leans back on the sofa. “Shit.” 

Vi could only snap out of her; she turns to stare at Sevika, her eyebrows raising before a smirk falls onto her face. “Go, old hag! You only live once, amiright?” 

Sevika just grunts; sending a harsh glare at Vi from the corner of her eyes, taking another blow from the joint; letting the smoke fly from her nostrils. Sevika did not think she would be smoking weed in her living room next to the pink rat she unfortunately calls her roommate, but she’s here smoking weed with her angry pink roommate. 

Surprisingly, Sevika and Vi lost track of time; the living room reeked of the strong, pungent smell of weed, if the living room wasn’t open plan; the whole room would have looked like fog. It made Sevika’s head spin; but being high on weed helped, it also helped with the thought that she was actually smoking weed with Vi, it greatly helped without any conversation or arguments. 

“So-” 

Sevika groans loudly, knocking her head back on the sofa. 

“Damn, who pissed in your tea?” Vi keeps her gaze on Sevika; letting swirls of smoke escape from the corner of her mouth. In Sevika’s eyes; Vi looks like shit; her eyes were bloodshot; her face looked too long and her hair was too red. Most times she looked like a worm. In Vi’s eyes, Sevika looks like shit, her eyes looked as though looking at everything all at once, Sevika’s hair looks as though she shook it a million times, and dragged it across her floor. Vi thinks she would have been a bear in her past life.  

Sevika pinches the bridge of her nose, taking another quick puff from her joint, letting it swim out of her mouth when she sighs. “Just- this brat was talking my ear off today at work, and- just shut up, okay?” 

Vi reaches forward to snub out the joint in the ashtray on the coffee table; bending the small stick and wiping her hands off of any excess leaves. She leans back on the sofa, interlocking her fingers in her lap as she gives Sevika a knowing look. “The pharmaceutical side or the pharmaceutical side?”

Sevika could only stop smoking to give Vi an incredulous look, her top lip pulling up in distaste before she blows out the smoke into Vi’s face, smirking when Vi grimaces, blinking her red eyes. “Little shit.” 

Vi’s own lip pulls up in a snarl, as her eyes run over Sevika’s form once, before they land back on her face. “Bitch.” 

“Don’t talk to your elders that way.” 

“Now you want to be older.” Vi doesn’t say anything else, just interlocking her fingers over her stomach as she settles down into the sofa, sighing loudly. Vi is a sleepy stoner. 

“What happened at your work that got you here?” 

Vi didn’t feel so sleepy anymore, she stared wide-eyed at Sevika, her senses were slowly coming back to her and she felt as though she was in her own body again. Fuck you, Sevika. “Shit, umm…” Vi sighs, running her hand over her face, before she pulls back her hair, huffing slightly when it falls back into her eye again. “My.. ex trainer got sacked for sexually harassing his intern, I’m still looking for a trainer. It’s not good habit to book fights without one so…” 

For once Sevika was too stunned to say anything, looking down at the way the tip of the joint burnt softly. Sevika clears her throat, tapping the joint, and watching the way the ashes fall into the ashtray. Don’t say it, Sevika. Don’t say it. “I can be your trainer.” Fuck you, Sevika. 

Vi’s face looked as though Sevika grew another head, her eyes scanning over Sevika’s face for any deceptions. “...Sevika? Are you sure this is you? Maybe let the weed effect go away. Come back to me in an hour.” Vi waves her hand dismissively, leaning her head back onto the sofa, closing her eyes again. 

Sevika lets out a huff, rolling her eyes. “I used to have fun sparring with Vander before he died, wouldn’t mind having something like that again.” Sevika sneaks a glance at Vi from the corner of her eyes. “I’m only going to ask once.” 

Vi smacks her lips, a sigh falling from her lips as she slowly raises her head to look at Sevika, before she shrugs. “Sure, why not?” 

Sevika huffs. “I still want you gone, brat.” 

#fiah: project pluto #arcane #arcane violet #violet #vi arcane #vi x reader #vi fanfic #vi x reader smut #arcane sevika #sevika arcane #sevika #sevika smut #sevika x reader #sevika x reader smut #sevika x you #sevika imagine #vi #arcane imagines #vi league of legends #silco arcane #silco #powder arcane #ekko arcane #ekko league of legends #jinx #jinx arcane #jinx the loose cannon #jinx league of legends #lux league of legends #mylo arcane

[birdstudies]

August 25, 2023 - Yunnan Nuthatch (Sitta yunnanensis) Found in southern China and possibly extreme eastern India, these nuthatches live in mature pine forests. They feed on insects, often foraging among clusters of pine needles. Little is known about their breeding habits, though a female about to lay eggs was found in March and juveniles have been observed in late May. They are classified as Near Threatened by the IUCN due to likely population declines caused by habitat loss in their relatively small range.

#yunnan nuthatch #nuthatch #sitta yunnanensis #bird #birds #illustration #art #woodland #birblr art

[cursedvibes]

Tengen for the character thing (+sukuna or uraume too if you feel like it)

I already answered Sukuna and Uraume, so I'm choosing grumpy grandma :D

favourite thing about them

I love how she falls in such a morally grey area. Dark grey even if you ask me. She's not a villain (yet) and most of the main characters look up to her in some way, don't dare to question the status quo she set up ages ago, but the more we find out about her, the more sketchy everything about her becomes. She uses human lives and bodies to prolong her life and keep it in a state she's comfortable in. In contrast to Kenjaku or Sukuna, she doesn't have to worry about a natural death, so this really isn't necessary for her and yet she uses these people to avoid change. You could say she would threaten civilization or the Japanese population otherwise if she doesn't merge, but we have seen that she can hold on for quite some time with barrier techniques. And if she's such a threat, then wouldn't it be more ethical to take yourself completely out of the equation? Lock yourself up or kill yourself instead of sacrificing others to keep you as you are? That doesn't even touch on all the sorcerers that die almost daily due to the system that she set up and upholds. Add onto that her protecting Kenjaku by keeping their existence secret and likely even ensuring their survival after each six eyes battle. And now we have the new layer of her connection with Sukuna, where she clearly has some sort of fascination with his body and has meddled with it before, not unlike Kenjaku. Love how she's not just some old conservative, but there are layers to her and what she's doing or her inaction.

least favourite thing about them

Need more of her backstory and interactions with Kenjaku and Sukuna. Also, she's just so wonderfully frustrating in her stubbornness. If she has a position, she'll really dig her roots in like the tree that she is and won't budge (although other times she's so whimsical in that "come what may" attitude she shows before Kenjaku breaks her barrier and where she decides that she might as well go along with Kenjaku's plan and evolve because it's inevitable...could've realized that 1000 years ago). Could've avoided so many deaths if it wasn't for that. Not really a "least favourite" because I love her for that, just something that makes me want to shake her a bit.

favourite line

"You asked me what I'm doing. All I need to do is distract you." (distraction=standing around...Kenjaku is so easy when it comes to her)

"It wasn't that I was confident. Just like how the seasons are naturally changing, I thought that it was inevitable for something like this to happen."

"That child's objective is to force the evolution of all human beings throughout Japan."

brOTP

Yuki. Love their forced cohabitation where both clearly want to be as far away from each other as possible, but also can't resist talking. Would've liked to see what their everyday life looked like when they weren't discussing plans to stop Kenjaku.

OTP

TenKen. I absolutely love their relationship. How they contrast each other, how they push each other to further extremes both intentionally and unintentionally and there's just so much to speculate about their past and what they might've been like before they broke off. There are so many little hints at what their relationship used to be like and how they really feel about each other, it makes me insane.

nOTP

Tengen/Sukuna. Just...no. Don't see that at all.

random headcanon

I'm not sure if she was born outside Japan, but I imagine during the 200 years before she came into the public eye and created her cults, she was travelling around China, Korea and India to learn more about jujutsu and especially barrier techniques and that's how she gained such proficiency in it.

unpopular opinion

evolved Tengen > human appearance. I just think that even her "thumb" form is so much more interesting than what she looks like fresh after a merger. I really would like to see her gradual ageing process and how she turns from just an old lady into a more cursed form. Also I'd liked to see her in her old form in general aka before she started the first merger or just before she was planning to merge with Riko or any other Star Plasma Vessel.

song i associate with them

Deebu - River of Memories I often listen to this and other Deebu songs while writing TenKen fics. It has a nice mix of chill, dreamy, but also rooted in the past that fits very well with Tengen I think.

Agnes Obel - Broken Sleep There are a bunch of Obel songs that fit Tengen in my opinion, but this one is the most on-point with the lyrics and music. Fits her isolation and her wasting away in her tree.

favourite picture of them

suit!Tengen <3

I like the way her real body looks now too. Kind of a mix of the more masculine image she projects and how she used to look in that one sketch we saw. So she's thinner, her eyelashes longer, but the rest is the same. Although her biceps still looks relatively muscular all things considered, so I think she must've put on more muscle since we saw her in that volume sketch (around Edo era I'm assuming based on the clothes and this probably being shortly after a merger). There she seemed almost fragile, but not so much here, despite being more withered.

And of course cursed womb!Tengen. She looks so cute. Like a little gummy bear.

#asks #jujutsu kaisen #tengen

[beardedmrbean]

A blackmail scam is using instant loan apps to entrap and humiliate people across India and other countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At least 60 Indians have killed themselves after being abused and threatened. A​ BBC undercover investigation has exposed those profiting from this deadly scam in India and China.

Astha Sinhaa woke up to her aunt's panicked voice on the phone. "Don't let your mother leave the house."

Half-asleep, the 17-year-old was terrified to find her mum Bhoomi Sinhaa in the next room, sobbing and frantic.

Here was her funny and fearless mother, a respected Mumbai-based property lawyer, a widow raising her daughter alone, reduced to a frenzied mess.

"She was breaking apart," Astha says. A panicked Bhoomi started telling her where all the important documents and contacts were, and seemed desperate to get out of the door.

Astha knew she had to stop her. "Don't let her out of your sight," her aunt had told her. "Because she will end her life."

Astha knew her mother had been getting some weird calls and that she owed somebody money, but she had no idea that Bhoomi was reeling from months of harassment and psychological torture.

She had fallen victim to a global scam with tentacles in at least 14 countries that uses shame and blackmail to make a profit - destroying lives in the process.

The business model is brutal but simple. There are many apps that promise hassle-free loans in minutes. Not all of them are predatory. But many - once downloaded - harvest your contacts, photos and ID cards, and use that information later to extort you. When customers don't repay on time - and sometimes even when they do - they share this information with a call centre where young agents of the gig economy, armed with laptops and phones are trained to harass and humiliate people into repayment.

At the end of 2021, Bhoomi had borrowed about 47,000 rupees ($565; £463) from several loan apps while she waited for some work expenses to come through. The money arrived almost immediately but with a big chunk deducted in charges. Seven days later she was due to repay but her expenses still hadn't been paid, so she borrowed from another app and then another. The debt and interest spiralled until she owed about two million rupees ($24,000; £19,655).

Soon the recovery agents started calling. They quickly turned nasty, slamming Bhoomi with insults and abuse. Even when she had paid, they claimed she was lying. They called up to 200 times a day. They knew where she lived, they said, and sent her pictures of a dead body as a warning.

As the abuse escalated they threatened to message all of the 486 contacts in her phone telling them she was a thief and a whore. When they threatened to tarnish her daughter's reputation too, Bhoomi could no longer sleep.

She borrowed from friends, family and more and more apps - 69 in total. At night, she prayed the morning would never come. But without fail at 07:00, her phone would start pinging and buzzing incessantly.

Eventually, Bhoomi had managed to pay back all of the money, but one app in particular - Asan Loan - wouldn't stop calling. Exhausted, she couldn't concentrate at work and started having panic attacks.

One day a colleague called her over to his desk and showed her something on his phone - a naked, pornographic picture of her.

The photo had been crudely photoshopped, Bhoomi's head stuck on someone else's body, but it filled her with disgust and shame. She collapsed by her colleague's desk. It had been sent by Asan Loan to every contact in her phone book. That was when Bhoomi thought of killing herself.

We've seen evidence of scams like this run by various companies all over the world. But in India alone, the BBC has found at least 60 people have killed themselves after being harassed by loan apps.

Most were in their 20s and 30s - a fireman, an award-winning musician, a young mum and dad leaving behind their three- and five-year-old daughters, a grandfather and grandson who got involved in loan apps together. Four were just teenagers.

Most victims are too ashamed to speak about the scam, and the perpetrators have remained, for the most part, anonymous and invisible. After looking for an insider for months, the BBC managed to track down a young man who had worked as a debt recovery agent for call centres working for multiple loan apps.

Rohan - not his real name - told us he had been troubled by the abuse he had witnessed. Many customers cried, some threatened to kill themselves, he said. "It would haunt me all night." He agreed to help the BBC expose the scam.

He applied for a job in two different call centres - Majesty Legal Services and Callflex Corporation - and spent weeks filming undercover.

His videos captured young agents harassing clients. "Behave or I will smash you," one woman says, swearing. She accuses the customer of incest and, when he hangs up, she starts laughing. Another suggests the client should prostitute his mother to repay the loan.

Rohan recorded over 100 incidents of harassment and abuse, capturing this systematic extortion on camera for the first time.

The worst abuse he witnessed took place at Callflex Corporation, just outside Delhi. Here, agents routinely used obscene language to humiliate and threaten customers. These were not rogue agents going off-script - they were supervised and directed by managers at the call centre, including one called Vishal Chaurasia.

Rohan gained Chaurasia's trust, and together with a journalist posing as an investor, arranged a meeting at which they asked him to explain exactly how the scam works.

When a customer takes out a loan, he explained, they give the app access to the contacts on their phone. Callflex Corporation is hired to recover the money - and if the customer misses a payment the company starts hassling them, and then their contacts. His staff can say anything, Chaurasia told them, as long as they get a repayment.

"The customer then pays because of the shame," he said. "You'll find at least one person in his contact list who can destroy his life."

We approached Chaurasia directly but he did not want to comment. Callflex Corporation did not respond to our efforts to contact them.

One of the many lives destroyed was Kirni Mounika's.

The 24-year-old civil servant was the brains of her family, the only student at her school to get a government job, a doting sister to her three brothers. Her father, a successful farmer, was ready to support her to do a masters in Australia.

The Monday she took her own life, three years ago, she had hopped on her scooter to go to work as usual.

"She was all smiles," her father, Kirni Bhoopani, says.

It was only when police reviewed Mounika's phone and bank statements that they found out she had borrowed from 55 different loan apps. It started with a loan of 10,000 rupees ($120; £100) and spiralled to more than 30 times that. By the time she decided to kill herself, she had paid back more than 300,000 rupees ($3,600; £2,960).

Police say the apps harassed her with calls and vulgar messages - and had started messaging her contacts.

Mounika's room is now a makeshift shrine. Her government ID card hangs by the door, the bag her mum packed for a wedding still lying there.

The thing that upsets her father the most is that she hadn't told him what was going on. "We could have easily arranged the money," he says, wiping tears from his eyes.

He's furious at the people who did this.

As he was taking his daughter's body home from the hospital her phone rang and he answered to an obscenity-laden rant. "They told us she has to pay," he says. "We told them she was dead."

He wondered who these monsters could be.

Hari - not his real name - worked at a call centre doing recovery for one of the apps Mounika had borrowed from. The pay was good but by the time Mounika died he was already feeling uneasy about what he was part of.

Although he claims not to have made abusive calls himself - he says he was in the team that made initial polite calls - he told us managers instructed staff to abuse and threaten people.

The agents would send messages to a victim's contacts, painting the victim as a fraud and a thief.

"Everyone has a reputation to maintain in front of their family. No-one is going to spoil that reputation for the measly sum of 5,000 rupees," he says.

Once a payment had been made the system would ping "Success!" and they would move on to the next client.

When clients started threatening to take their own lives nobody took it seriously - then the suicides started happening. The staff called their boss, Parshuram Takve, to ask if they should stop.

The following day Takve appeared in the office. He was angry. "He said, 'Do what you're told and make recoveries,'" Hari says. So they did.

A few months later, Mounika was dead.

Takve was ruthless. But he wasn't running this operation alone. Sometimes, Hari says, the software interface would switch to Chinese without warning.

Takve was married to a Chinese woman called Liang Tian Tian. Together, they had set up the loan recovery business, Jiyaliang, in Pune, where Hari worked.

In December 2020, Takve and Liang were arrested by police investigating a case of harassment and released on bail a few months later.

In April 2022 they were charged with extortion, intimidation and abetment of suicide. By the end of the year they were on the run.

We couldn't track down Takve. But when we investigated the apps Jiyaliang worked for, it led us to a Chinese businessman called Li Xiang.

He has no online presence, but we found a phone number linked to one of his employees and, posing as investors, set up a meeting with Li.

With his face shoved uncomfortably close to the camera, he bragged about his businesses in India.

"We are still operating now, just not letting Indians know we are a Chinese company," he said.

Back in 2021, two of Li's companies had been raided by Indian police investigating harassment by loan apps. Their bank accounts had been frozen.

"You need to understand that because we aim to recover our investment quickly, we certainly don't pay local taxes, and the interest rates we offer violate local laws," he says.

Li told us his company has its own loan apps in India, Mexico and Colombia. He claimed to be an industry leader in risk control and debt collection services in South East Asia, and is now expanding across Latin America and Africa - with more than 3,000 staff in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India ready to provide "post-loan services".

Then he explained what his company does to recover loans.

"If you don't repay, we may add you on WhatsApp, and on the third day, we will call and message you on WhatsApp at the same time, and call your contacts. Then, on the fourth day, if your contacts don't pay, we have specific detailed procedures.

"We access his call records and capture a lot of his information. Basically, it's like he's naked in front of us."

Bhoomi Sinha could handle the harassment, the threats, the abuse and the exhaustion - but not the shame of being linked to that pornographic image.

"That message actually stripped me naked in front of the entire world," she says. "I lost my self-respect, my morality, my dignity, everything in a second."

It was shared with lawyers, architects, government officials, elderly relatives and friends of her parents - people who would never look at her in the same way again.

"It has tarnished the core of me, like if you join a broken glass, there will still be cracks on it," she says.

She has been ostracised by neighbours in the community she has lived in for 40 years.

"As of today, I have no friends. It's just me I guess," she says with a sad chuckle.

Some of her family still don't speak to her. And she constantly wonders whether the men she works with are picturing her naked.

The morning that her daughter Astha found her she was at her lowest ebb. But it was also the moment she decided to fight back. "I don't want to die like this," she decided.

She filed a police report but has heard nothing since. All she could do was change her number and get rid of her sim card - and when Astha started receiving calls her daughter destroyed hers too. She told friends, family and colleagues to ignore the calls and messages and, eventually, they all but stopped.

Bhoomi found support in her sisters, her boss and an online community of others abused by loan apps. But mostly, she found strength in her daughter.

"I must have done something good to be given a daughter like this," she says. "If she hadn't stood by me then I would have been one of the many people who've killed themselves because of loan apps."

We put the allegations in this report to Asan Loan - and also, through contacts, to Liang Tian Tian and Parshuram Takve, who are in hiding. Neither the company nor the couple responded.

When asked for comment, Li Xiang told the BBC that he and his companies comply with all local laws and regulations, have never run predatory loan apps, have ceased collaboration with Jiyaliang, the loan recovery company run by Liang Tian Tian and Parshuram Takve, and do not collect or use customers' contact information.

He said his loan recovery call centres adhere to strict standards and he denied profiting from the suffering of ordinary Indians.

Majesty Legal Services deny using customers' contacts to recover loans. They told us their agents are instructed to avoid abusive or threatening calls, and any violation of the company's policies results in dismissal.

#nunyas news #there's likely a fairly simple way to scam the scammers