UNNAO: One recent afternoon, dozens of young Hindu men, swords drawn and saffron scarves draped around their necks, rode motorcycles through a Muslim neighborhood near the capital of India’s most populous state and chanted “Hail Lord Ram!“
In the preceding weeks they and their peers had acted as informers, police officials say, helping them identify thousands of Muslim-run butchers’ shops that have since been shut and urging officers to stop Muslim youths talking to Hindu girls in the street.
Their organization is the Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Force), a private militia set up in 2002 by Yogi Adityanath, a local priest and politician, to assert the dominance of India’s main religion which he felt was being eroded by minority faiths.
Since Adityanath’s promotion last month to chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state, home to 220 million people of which a fifth are Muslims, the group has become emboldened, openly proclaiming its Hindu roots and putting pressure on police.
The appointment of the 44-year-old, known for his fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric and a campaign against “Love Jihad” — or the conversion of Hindu women to Islam — has shocked some Indians, who say it undermines the country’s secular status.
They worry that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “development for all” agenda will be overtaken by radical, Hindu-first policies with the potential to stoke communal tensions that have erupted sporadically through India’s 70-year history.
Adityanath declined to be interviewed for this article.
“Blood can be shed, and Muslims will feel the pain,” Pankaj Singh, a senior leader of the Hindu Youth Force, told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the rally in Unnao, an hour’s drive southwest of the capital Lucknow.
Such comments have sent a chill through some in the Muslim community, on the defensive in Uttar Pradesh since this year’s election in which Adityanath rallied the Hindu majority and delivered a resounding victory to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In return for his successful campaign, the party handed the priest one of India’s most powerful positions, emboldening his militia to act and speak more openly than it did under the previous administration.
Based in Uttar Pradesh and funded by members who want to win favor with local power brokers, the youth force says it is 2 million strong and growing.
In Unnao, police stood back as members blocked traffic, honked horns and shouted pro-Hindu slogans on the busy streets. Muslims who came out to watch did so quietly from their doorways.
HINDU RIGHT, HINDU RADICAL
Modi himself is the product of the Hindu right, coming from the BJP and its powerful parent movement, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), that nurtured him early in his career.
But since sweeping to power in 2014, he has focused on economic reforms that he hopes will drag India into the modern era and create enough jobs for a swelling workforce.
Adityanath represented the BJP during the Uttar Pradesh state polls earlier this year, and helped Modi consolidate power as he bids for re-election in a national ballot in 2019.
The priest, however, has often defied BJP discipline and is not part of the RSS machine, raising fears that Modi may have unleashed radical “Hindutva,” or religious-nationalist forces that he will struggle to contain.
“The BJP has no command over this organization. They respond to Adityanath and no one else,” said Gilles Verniers, assistant professor of political sciences at Ashoka University.
A close aide to Modi said it was Adityanath’s job to maintain law and order in the state.
“The onus lies on him. It is his duty to take care of his vigilante group,” said the aide.
Daljit Singh Chawdhary, additional director general of police for Uttar Pradesh, dismissed the threat of the youth force acting outside the law.
“We are not tolerating any vigilante group taking the law into their (own) hands, while at the same time anyone is free to provide us with tip-offs,” he said.
“We have had no recent complaints against the Hindu Yuva Vahini, so there is no reason for us to take action against them.”
The original source of Adityanath’s power is an ancient temple in Gorakhpur, eastern Uttar Pradesh, where people treat the shaven-headed priest with reverence.
Soon after he was named chief minister last month, a devotee collected dust from the rug on which Adityanath had walked, so as to worship it.
Built on such devotion, the youth force has evolved into a powerful group that dispenses justice and has proved itself a formidable vote-getter.
The BJP’s national spokesman, Nalin Kohli, said the party’s victory in Uttar Pradesh was not only thanks to Adityanath and his private militia. But Singh expressed little doubt about the group’s importance in securing the result.
“Modi won Uttar Pradesh because of Adityanath’s ground force,” Singh said.
One of Adityanath’s first directives after becoming chief minister was to impose a ban on Uttar Pradesh slaughterhouses that operated without licenses.
Most Indian states have laws that ban the slaughter of cows, considered sacred by Hindus, while buffalo slaughter requires permission from state governments.
Butchers in Uttar Pradesh have long complained that authorities failed to issue new licenses, although the outgoing government allowed them to continue operating anyway, ensuring employment and food for the Muslims who dominate the industry.
Adityanath’s militia has been pushing police to enforce rules calling for a complete ban on illegal slaughterhouses and the sale of meat from unlicensed shops.
“We got the police to shut down 45,000 small meat shops in less than 24 hours ... they would have failed without our informers,” said Singh, who added that he reported daily to Adityanath. “They (police) know we are the real heroes now.”
Chandani Qureshi, a mother of four, said her husband worked as a sweeper in a meat shop in Lucknow. Her family relied on his daily wage of 300 rupees ($4) to survive.
“The chief minister’s men came with orange flags, broke the window panes of our shops and threw knives and weighing scales out on the street,” she said, sitting in her one-room home. “We had no power to stop them.”
Owners of large abattoirs have sought injunctions to block Adityanath’s orders to ban unlicensed slaughterhouses and thousands of butchers have protested against the ban, yet some doubt they will prevail.
“I don’t think we can defeat Adityanath’s militia. It would be better if we start selling something else,” said Mohammed Faizan, who inherited a meat shop from his grandfather.
Uttar Pradesh’s deputy chief minister and state BJP president, Keshav Prasad Maurya, said his government would not let slaughterhouses sell cow and buffalo meat. It wanted shop owners instead to start selling chicken and eggs.
“The dairy business is more profitable than the beef trade,” he said.
He also said members of Adityanath’s militia were acting as responsible citizens. “It would be wrong to consider them as a parallel administration.”
At the rally in Unnao, Singh stood on a rickety stage and awarded idols of Hindu gods to youths for halting sales of beef, stopping religious intermarriage and composing poetry in honor of cows.
As well as helping to close down butchers, the militia has been tipping off “Anti-Romeo Squads,” groups of police who intervene to prevent young men and women meeting publicly.
A police official who oversees 64 such squads said the units were formed to tackle sexual harassment of women, but admitted that there had been cases where militia members pressured policemen to target Muslim men seen in the company of Hindu women. He declined to be named.
Muslims say they are being singled out.
“They think our boys are villains,” said Irshad Sheikh, whose son was detained by police recently.
Singh, the youth force leader, rejected suggestions that the squads deliberately targeted Muslims.
At the rally, he met the father of a 21-year-old Hindu woman who was recently forced by members of the militia to call off her wedding to a Muslim man.
“For centuries, Muslims have been playing the dirty game of converting Hindus,” Singh said, as his men returned from their run through the Muslim neighborhood. “But now if they touch a Hindu girl, we can fight with our swords.”
The woman’s father, Subhash Chandra, said he welcomed the militia’s intervention.
“The Muslim boy trapped her and wanted to convert her. I am lucky that Yogi Adityanath’s people saved my daughter’s life. How can a Hindu become a Muslim? It is a sin to convert anyone.”
INSIGHT-Hard-line Hindu youth call the shots on streets of northern India
INSIGHT-Hard-line Hindu youth call the shots on streets of northern India
Trump won about 2.5M more votes this year than he did in 2020. This is where he did it
- Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories
WASHINGTON: It’s a daunting reality for Democrats: Republican Donald Trump’s support has grown broadly since he last sought the presidency.
In his defeat of Democrat Kamala Harris, Trump won a bigger percentage of the vote in each one of the 50 states, and Washington, D.C., than he did four years ago. He won more actual votes than in 2020 in 40 states, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Certainly, Harris’ more than 7 million vote decline from President Joe Biden’s 2020 total was a factor in her loss, especially in swing-state metropolitan areas that have been the party’s winning electoral strongholds.
But, despite national turnout that was lower than in the high-enthusiasm 2020 election, Trump received 2.5 million more votes than he did four years ago. He swept the seven most competitive states to win a convincing Electoral College victory, becoming the first Republican nominee in 20 years to win a majority of the popular vote.
Trump cut into places where Harris needed to overperform to win a close election. Now Democrats are weighing how to regain traction ahead of the midterm elections in two years, when control of Congress will again be up for grabs and dozens of governors elected.
There were some notable pieces to how Trump’s victory came together:
Trump took a bite in Northern metros
Though Trump improved across the map, his gains were particularly noteworthy in urban counties home to the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, electoral engines that stalled for Harris in industrial swing states Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Harris fell more than 50,000 votes — and 5 percentage points — short of Biden’s total in Wayne County, Michigan, which makes up the lion’s share of the Detroit metro area. She was almost 36,000 votes off Biden’s mark in Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, and about 1,000 short in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.
It wasn’t only Harris’ shortfall that helped Trump carry the states, a trio that Democrats had collectively carried in six of the seven previous elections before Nov. 5.
Trump added to his 2020 totals in all three metro counties, netting more than 24,000 votes in Wayne County, more than 11,000 in Philadelphia County and almost 4,000 in Milwaukee County.
It’s not yet possible to determine whether Harris fell short of Biden’s performance because Biden voters stayed home or switched their vote to Trump — or how some combination of the two produced the rightward drift evident in each of these states.
Harris advertised heavily and campaigned regularly in each, and made Milwaukee County her first stop as a candidate with a rally in July. These swings alone were not the difference in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but her weaker performance than Biden across the three metros helped Trump, who held on to big 2020 margins in the three states’ broad rural areas and improved or held steady in populous suburbs.
Trump’s team and outside groups supporting him knew from their data that he was making inroads with Black voters, particularly Black men younger than 50, more concentrated in these urban areas that have been key to Democratic victories.
When James Blair, Trump’s political director, saw results coming in from Philadelphia on election night, he knew Trump had cut into the more predominantly Black precincts, a gain that would echo in Wayne and Milwaukee counties.
“The data made clear there was an opportunity there,” Blair said.
AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters, found Trump won a larger share of Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020, and most notably among men under age 45.
Democrats won Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin but lost in Pennsylvania. In 2026, they will be defending governorships in all three states and a Senate seat in Michigan.
Trump gained more than Harris in battlegrounds
Despite the burst of enthusiasm Harris’ candidacy created among the Democratic base when she entered the race in July, she ended up receiving fewer votes than Biden in three of the seven states where she campaigned almost exclusively.
In Arizona, she received about 90,000 fewer votes than Biden. She received about 67,000 fewer in Michigan and 39,000 fewer in Pennsylvania.
In four others — Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin — Harris won more votes than Biden did. But Trump’s support grew by more — in some states, significantly more.
That dynamic is glaring in Georgia, where Harris received almost 73,000 more votes than Biden did when he very narrowly carried the state. But Trump added more than 200,000 to his 2020 total, en route to winning Georgia by roughly 2 percentage points.
In Wisconsin, Trump’s team reacted to slippage it saw in GOP-leaning counties in suburban Milwaukee by targeting once-Democratic-leaning, working-class areas, where Trump made notable gains.
In the three largest suburban Milwaukee counties — Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha — which have formed the backbone of GOP victories for decades, Harris performed better than Biden did in 2020. She also gained more votes than Trump gained over 2020, though he still won the counties.
That made Trump’s focus on Rock County, a blue-collar area in south central Wisconsin, critical. Trump received 3,084 more votes in Rock County, home of the former automotive manufacturing city of Janesville, than he did in 2020, while Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 total by seven votes. That helped Trump offset Harris’ improvement in Milwaukee’s suburbs.
The focus speaks to the strength Trump has had and continued to grow with middle-income, non-college educated voters, the Trump campaign’s senior data analyst Tim Saler said.
“If you’re going to have to lean into working-class voters, they are particularly strong in Wisconsin,” Saler said. “We saw huge shifts from 2020 to 2024 in our favor.”
Trump boosted 2020 totals as Arizona turnout dipped
Of the seven most competitive states, Arizona saw the smallest increase in the number of votes cast in the presidential contest — slightly more than 4,000 votes, in a state with more than 3.3 million ballots cast.
That was despite nearly 30 campaign visits to Arizona by Trump, Harris and their running mates and more than $432 million spent on advertising by the campaigns and allied outside groups, according to the ad-monitoring firm AdImpact.
Arizona, alone of the seven swing states, saw Harris fall short of Biden across small, midsize and large counties. In the other six states, she was able to hold on in at least one of these categories.
Even more telling, it is also the only swing state where Trump improved his margin in every single county.
While turnout in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous as the home to Phoenix, dipped slightly from 2020 — by 14,199 votes, a tiny change in a county where more than 2 million people voted — Trump gained almost 56,000 more votes than four years ago.
Meanwhile, Harris fell more than 60,000 votes short of Biden’s total, contributing to a shift significant enough to swing the county and state to Trump, who lost Arizona by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2020.
Rightward shift even in heavily Democratic areas
The biggest leaps to the right weren’t taking place exclusively among Republican-leaning counties, but also among the most Democratic-leaning counties in the states. Michigan’s Wayne County swung 9 points toward Trump, tying the more Republican-leaning Antrim County for the largest movement in the state.
AP VoteCast found that voters were most likely to say the economy was the most important issue facing the country in 2024, followed by immigration. Trump supporters were more motivated by economic issues and immigration than Harris’, the survey showed.
“It’s still all about the economy,” said North Carolina Democratic strategist Morgan Jackson, a senior adviser to Democrat Josh Stein, who won North Carolina’s governorship on Nov. 5 as Trump also carried the state.
“Democrats have to embrace an economic message that actually works for real people and talk about it in the kind of terms that people get, rather than giving them a dissertation of economic policy,” he said.
Governor’s elections in 2026 give Democrats a chance to test their understanding and messaging on the issue, said Democratic pollster Margie Omero, whose firm has advised Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in the past and winning Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego this year.
“So there’s an opportunity to really make sure people, who governors have a connection to, are feeling some specificity and clarity with the Democratic economic message,” Omero said.
Teen who lied about beheaded French teacher’s class says ‘sorry’
- Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history
PARIS: A teenager whose lies about her teacher are accused of contributing to the educator’s murder by an Islamist radical apologized to his family in a French court on Tuesday.
Eight people have been on trial since early November, charged with contributing to the climate of hatred that led to an 18-year-old of Chechen origin beheading teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris in 2020.
They include Brahim Chnina, the 52-year-old Moroccan father of the adolescent testifying Tuesday.
Then aged 13, the adolescent falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
She was not in the classroom at the time.
“I would like to apologize to the family,” the 17-year-old, who has not been named, told the court. “I destroyed your lives, I am sorry.”
Also on trial is Abdelhakim Sefrioui, a 65-year-old French-Moroccan Islamist activist.
He and Chnina spread the teenager’s lies on social networks with the aim, according to the prosecution, of “designating a target,” “provoking a feeling of hatred” and “thus preparing several crimes.”
Both men have been in pre-trial detention for the past four years.
The teenager told the court that she lied to her mother to justify why she had been suspended from school for two days over her behavior and repeated absences.
“I was in panic and stress,” she said. “I told her I had been in class and that I wasn’t happy with what went on there and that the teacher excluded me. That we looked at cartoons.”
Sefrioui posted a video describing Paty as a “teaching thug.”
He also staged an “interview” with the teenager outside the school, whispering to her what to answer. The adolescent dutifully reiterated the falsehoods.
“I thought somebody would stop me in my lying, but nobody ever said that I wasn’t in class,” she told the court Tuesday.
She stuck to her story even after Paty’s death. Only following her arrest and 30 hours of interrogation did she admit to investigators that she had made it all up.
The teenager, whose delivery in court was matter-of-fact, showed emotion only when she talked about her father.
“Without my lies, none of us would be here,” she said, sobbing. “I used my father’s naivete and kindness.”
She added that “my father says you must always respect teachers,” a remark that prompted an astonished “really?” interjected by the court’s presiding judge.
The teenager was sentenced to 18 months of probation in December 2023 after being convicted of slander.
Paty had used the Charlie Hebdo magazine as part of an ethics class to discuss free speech laws in France, where blasphemy is legal and cartoons mocking religious figures have a long history.
His killing took place just weeks after Charlie Hebdo republished the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
After the magazine used the images in 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed its offices, killing 12 people.
After long wrangling, Blinken to testify in Congress on Afghanistan
- Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation
- Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has agreed to testify publicly at a House of Representatives committee hearing on the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, the panel said on Tuesday, after a long dispute with the Republican-led committee.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said Blinken had committed to appear at a public hearing on Dec. 11 to discuss the committee’s investigation of the withdrawal three years ago.
The committee and the State Department have been wrangling over Blinken’s appearance for months. Panel Republicans voted in September to recommend Blinken be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena.
The State Department had contended that the panel was provided with large amounts of information, with Blinken testifying before Congress on Afghanistan more than 14 times and the department providing nearly 20,000 pages of records, multiple high-level briefings and transcribed interviews.
McCaul released a report on Sept. 8 on the committee Republicans’ investigation of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, blasting Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration for failures surrounding the evacuation.
The issue had become intensely politicized before the presidential election on Nov. 5. In his successful bid for a second term, Republican former President Donald Trump drew criticism for shooting video for his campaign at Arlington National Cemetery where he appeared at a ceremony honoring troops killed in the evacuation.
Trump also sought to pin blame for the withdrawal on Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent.
Democrats have insisted some blame for the messy end of the war — less than seven months into Biden’s presidency — should be laid at the feet of Trump, who began the withdrawal process by signing a deal with the Taliban in 2020.
The issue could become even more politicized after Trump returns to the White House on Jan. 20, after he spoke during his campaign of firing those responsible for the pullout from Afghanistan.
UN probes sexual exploitation allegations against aid workers in Chad
DAKAR: The UN in Chad has launched an internal investigation, following a report on allegations of sexual exploitation of Sudanese refugees, which included aid workers.
The statement, written days after the story was published, was seen on Tuesday. It said the seriousness of the allegations cited in the AP’s story, warranted immediate and firm measures and that those responsible should be punished.
“Refugees are already vulnerable and traumatized by the events that led them to flee their country and under no circumstances should they be the victims of abuse by those who are supposed to help them,” said Francois Batalingaya, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator in Chad.
Earlier this month, the accusations were reported by some Sudanese women and girls that men, including those meant to protect them such as humanitarian workers and local security forces, had instead sexually exploited them in Chad’s sites for displaced people. They said the men offered money, easier access to assistance, and jobs. Such sexual exploitation in Chad is a crime.
Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women, have streamed into Chad to escape Sudan’s civil war, which has killed over 20,000 people.
Sexual exploitation during large humanitarian crises is not uncommon, especially in displacement sites. Aid groups have long struggled to combat the issue, citing a lack of reporting by women, not enough funds to respond and a focus on first providing basic necessities.
Experts say exploitation represents a deep failure by the aid community and that people seeking protection should never have to make choices driven by survival.
The UN said it raised the risk alert level for protection against sexual exploitation of abuse to four, which is very high, especially since Chad was already classified as a country at high risk.
Albania police fire tear gas, water cannon at anti-government protesters
- Protesters said they were engaged in a campaign of civil disobedience against Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama
- “The protests will continue, this is a battle until this regime goes,” Tedi Blushi from the opposition Freedom Party said
TIRANA: Police in Albania’s capital Tirana fired tear gas and used water cannon to disperse hundreds of opposition protesters blocking roads, who accused the government of corruption and demanded it be replaced with a technocratic caretaker authority.
Protesters said they were engaged in a campaign of civil disobedience against Socialist Party Prime Minister Edi Rama. The opposition in Albania have been protesting almost every week demanding a caretaker government step in until parliamentary elections in 2025.
“The protests will continue, this is a battle until this regime goes,” Tedi Blushi from the opposition Freedom Party told local media.
The leaders of Albania’s two biggest opposition parties, Sali Berisha of the Democratic Party and Ilir Meta of the Freedom Party, are charged with corruption offenses and both accuse Rama of orchestrating these. They deny the charges.
Rama says the charges are not politically-motivated and accuses the opposition of trying to seize power with violence.
Berisha is being held under house arrest on corruption charges relating to his time as prime minister. Meta was arrested in late October also on corruption charges for the time when he served as president between 2017-2022.
Rama has been in power since 2013 and plans to run for a fourth term next year.
