War or peace, truth suffers

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.

As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.

Rahul Gandhi has made the grade more frequently than many others. Opponents of nuclear weapons on both sides are easily saddled with the opprobrium of helping the enemy. Occasionally, campaigners for peace between the two become targets of slander. Others run the risk of annoying both sides.

The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.

Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.

The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.

A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.

Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.

Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.

The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.

According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.

The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.

Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.

From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.

“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”

Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.

“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.

“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”

Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.

“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”

Love Jihad in Canada

 

Think like a civilisation

The biggest casualty of unquestioning enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought writes Shiv Vishwanathan


This essay is a piece of dissent at a time when dissent may not be welcome. It is an attempt to look at what I call the Pulwama syndrome, after India’s bombing of terrorist camps in Pakistan. There is an air of achievement and competence, a feeling that we have given a fitting reply to Pakistan. Newspapers have in unison supported the government, and citizens, from actors to cricketers, have been content in stating their loyalty, literally issuing certificates to the government. Yet watching all this, I feel a deep sense of unease, a feeling that India is celebrating a moment which needs to be located in a different context.

Peace needs courage

It reminded me of something that happened when I was in school. I had just come back from a war movie featuring Winston Churchill. I came back home excitedly and told my father about Churchill. He smiled sadly and said, “Churchill was a bully. He was not fit to touch Gandhi’s chappals.” He then added thoughtfully that “war creates a schoolboy loyalty, half boy scout, half mob”, which becomes epidemic. “Peace,” he said, “demands a courage few men have.” I still remember these lines, and I realised their relevance for the events this week.

One sees an instant unity which is almost miraculous. This sense of unity does not tolerate difference. People take loyalty literally and become paranoid. Crowds attack a long-standing bakery to remove the word ‘Karachi’ from its signage. War becomes an evangelical issue as each man desperately competes to prove his loyalty. Doubt and dissent become impossible, rationality is rare, and pluralism a remote possibility. There is a sense of solidarity with the ruling regime which is surreal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was encrusted with doubts a week before, appears like an untarnished hero. Even the cynicism around these attitudes is ignored. One watches with indifference as Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah virtually claims that security and war are part of his vote bank.

Thought becomes a casualty as people conflate terms such as Kashmiri, Pakistani and Muslim while threatening citizens peacefully pursuing their livelihood. One watches aghast as India turns war into a feud, indifferent to a wider conflagration. The whole country lives from event to event and TV becomes hysterical, not knowing the difference between war and cricket. It is a moment when we congratulate ourselves as a nation, forgetting that we are also a civilisation. In this movement of drum-beating, where jingoism as patriotism is the order of the day, a dissenting voice is not welcome. But dissent demands that one faces one’s fellow citizens with probably more courage than one needs to face the enemy. How does one begin a conversation, create a space for a more critical perspective?

What war feels like

Sadly, India as a country has not experienced war as a totality, unlike Europe or other countries in Asia such as Vietnam or Afghanistan. War has always been an activity at the border. It did not engulf our lives the way World War II corroded Germany or Russia. War is a trauma few nibble at in India. When our leaders talk even of surgical strikes, one is not quite sure whether they know the difference between Haldighati or modern war. They seem like actors enacting an outdated play. In fact, one wonders whether India as a society has thought through the idea of war. We talk of war as if it is a problem of traffic control. Our strategists, our international relations experts fetishise security and patriotism. The aridity of the idea of security has done more damage to freedom and democracy than any other modern concept. Security as an official concept needs a genocidal count, an accounting of the number of lives and bodies destroyed in pursuing its logic. The tom-tomming of such words in a bandwagon society destroys the power and pluralism of the idea of India as a society and a democracy.

The biggest casualty of such enthusiasm for war is democracy and rational thought. Our leaders know that the minute we create a demonology around Pakistan, we cease to think rationally or creatively about our own behaviour in Kashmir. We can talk with ease about Pakistani belligerency, about militarism in Pakistan, but we refuse to reflect on our own brutality in Kashmir or Manipur. At a time when the Berlin Wall appears like a distant nightmare and Ulster begins appearing normal, should not India as a creative democracy ask, why is there a state of internal war in Kashmir and the Northeast for decades? Why is it we do not have the moral leadership to challenge Pakistan to engage in peace? Why is it that we as a nation think we are a democracy when internal war and majoritarian mobs are eating into the core of our civilisation? Where does India stand in its vision of the civility of internationalism which we articulated through Panchsheel? Because Pakistan behaves as a rogue state, should we abandon the civilisational dream of a Mohandas Gandhi or an Abdul Ghaffar Khan?

Even if we think strategically, we are losers. Strategy today has been appropriated by the machismo of militarism and management. It has become a term without ethics or values. Strategy, unlike tactics, is a long-range term. It summons a value framework in any decent society. Sadly, strategy shows that India is moving into a geopolitical trap where China, which treats Pakistan as a vassal state, is the prime beneficiary of Pulwama. The Chinese as a society and a regime would be content to see an authoritarian India militarised, sans its greatest achievement which is democracy. What I wish to argue is that strategy also belongs to the perspectives of peace, and it is precisely as a democracy and as a peace-loving nation that we should out-think and outflank China. Peace is not an effeminate challenge to the machismo of the national security state as idol but a civilisational response to the easy brutality of the nation state.


Dissent as survival

In debating with our fellow citizens, we have to show through a Gandhian mode that our sense of Swadeshi and Swaraj is no less. Peace has responsibilities which an arid sense of patriotism may not have. Yet we are condemned to conversation, to dialogue, to arguments persuading those who are sceptical about the very integrity of our being. Dissent becomes an act of both survival and creative caring at this moment. One must realise that India as a civilisation has given the world some of its most creative concepts of peace, inspired by Buddha, Nanak, Kabir, Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi. The challenge before peacedom is to use these visions creatively in a world which takes nuclear war and genocide for granted. Here civil society, the ashram and the university must help create that neighbourhood of ideas, the civics that peace demands to go beyond the current imaginaries of the nation state.

Our peace is a testimony and testament to a society that must return to its civilisational values. It is an appeal to the dreams of the satyagrahi and a realisation that peace needs ideas, ideals and experiments to challenge the current hegemony of the nation state. India as a civilisation cannot do otherwise.

India and Pakistan: The fault is not in our stars

Badar Iqbal Chaudhary in The Dawn

Updated a day ago

In the hands of zealots and fanatics, the stories become an argument against all peace initiatives, making the journey all the more strenuous. —Reuters

“The fault, dear Brutus”, Cassius says in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” is not in our stars, but in ourselves”.

Years and years of ‘Aman ke Aashas’ and cabinet level meetings, of confidence-building measures and sari exchanges, of showing up at swearing-in ceremonies and civil society initiatives ... and then they all come tumbling down.

Slowly, painfully, assiduously we pick up the beads and start threading them. Each pearl is accounted for, each step pondered over, but then one slip and the process has to start afresh.

Extravagant, excessive preparations are made to make an omelette of reconciliation. Then a singular egg turns out to be bad, and the food gets spoilt.

It is not that we do not comprehend the need to establish friendly relations. The inevitable falling back to the narratives of peace and of building goodwill, the talks of overcoming the barriers and the friendly gestures all betray the understanding of the necessity of peace that persists among members of the public. If there was a lack of will, these processes would never have initiated, ab initio.

When the anger subsides, the realisation returns that belligerence is not a sustainable model; it cannot persevere, it has to stop.

Why, then, do these initiatives fail time and again?

It is because the animosity is too deep, the sentiments too fragile, the composure too fickle and the hurdles too many. It is this peculiarity which exists in men the world over, but most of all in the men of the subcontinent – the unyielding hubris, and the vanity. That is all it takes to lose focus of the objectives.

All it requires is one Vikram Sood and one Amir Liaqat, and a single moment of commentary in the presence of a jeering, thumping crowd.

All it demands is a single brainwashed soldier, who knows nothing better, and a moment of inhumanity that clouds the mind, to undo years of hard work.

This then gets shared, accumulates airtime, gains public attention and plays on the minds of the two nations – the nations, mind you, who are not wary of barbaric reactions themselves.

Gojra and Gujrat; Babri mosque in Ayodhya and Sri Krishna Ram temple in Karachi; the forced conversions in Uttar Pradesh and the forced conversions in Upper Sindh; all indicate to one aspect of the two nations: despite the animosity, and the overbearing pride in individuality, we are not too different.

We are more alike in treating our minorities than we would feel comfortable to admit.

In the hands of zealots and fanatics, the stories become an argument against all peace initiatives, making the journey all the more strenuous.

Patriotism becomes analogous to war cries, and public representatives, forever ready to pounce on a chance to gain some cheap publicity, dish out threatening statements, basking in their bubbles and relishing the short-lasting pertinence.

Unfortunately, the hawks always take over the narrative in these moments. The cardinal rule of perception is that the more intense, the more enduring statements would be perceived more readily by the public. These bring in ratings, and popularity. They ring home with the fable that has been etched in the conscience of the two countries. In the river of peace, the few ripples of pugnacity get noticed, and the relative sustaining calm gets easily ignored.

Philosophy believes the solutions do exist. Saadi Sherazi, the Persian poet had written:

Garat Khoway man amad nasazawar;
Tu khoway naik-e-khawaish az dast maguzar

[If my nature does not bode well with you, you don’t have to lose your own good nature because of it.]

Or like Marcus Aurelius, one of the five good emperors of Machiavelli, puts it: “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury”.

One of the two nations would have to show magnanimity; one of the two would have to sacrifice; and one of the two would have to take a leap of faith.

The warmongering would have to take a backseat, despite the excesses from the other side. Hearts would have to be won, foremost. Paranoia would have to be placated. Without this, the current state of affairs would persist.

Building any relationship requires working, but the one that comes with this much baggage requires the most. This is a rut, escaping from which requires considerable courage, ability to forgive and a lot more forbearance than we have shown the capability of.

The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Pakistan - The pipe dream of peace

 

Khaled Ahmed | February 12, 2014 

In Pakistan, the Taliban is negotiating in bad faith. Its choice of interlocutors for talks and list of demands confirm this.

The peace pipe Pakistan wished to smoke with the Taliban was turned into  a pipe dream after the banned organisation issued, on February 9, the following “to do” list for Islamabad before it could think of a ceasefire: one, stop drone attacks; two, introduce sharia law in courts; three, introduce Islamic system of education in public and private institutions; four, release Pakistani and foreign Taliban prisoners; five, restore property damaged by drone attacks and pay compensation; six, hand over control of tribal areas to local forces; seven, withdraw the army from tribal areas and close down checkposts; eight, drop all criminal charges against the Taliban; nine, release prisoners from both sides; ten, grant equal rights for all, poor and rich; eleven, offer jobs to the families of drone-attack victims; twelve, end interest-based system; thirteen, end support for the US’s “war on terror”; fourteen, replace democratic system of governance with Islamic system; and fifteen, end all relations with the US.

After deciding to talk peace with the Taliban, Pakistan had nominated a four-member “pro-Taliban” negotiating team. The Taliban responded by naming a five-member, equally “pro-Taliban” team, without consultation with them: Maulana Samiul Haq of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-Samiul Haq (JUI-S), Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Kifaetullah of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Red Mosque of Islamabad and Mohammad Ibrahim of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI). None of them is a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is a banned organisation. The new Taliban leader, a wanted criminal named Mullah Fazlullah, seemed to thumb his nose at the state of Pakistan by choosing his team from the politico-religious mainstream.

The five members represent a Talibanised section of the country, boasting old connections with the Afghan Taliban and the TTP. The irony was crushing — Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s own team contained people with pro-Taliban and anti-American leanings. The idea was to win the confidence of the Taliban, but Mullah Fazlullah didn’t bite. The talks wouldn’t commit the TTP to anything.

Another irony was that Fazlullah named Imran Khan on his panel, thus creating a situation where the PTI would be talking to itself while pretending to talk to the TTP. Mercifully, Khan begged off from this absurd scenario. After that, Kifaetullah of the JUI-F too bowed out. The JUI-F is more vulnerable to the Taliban because of its location close to North Waziristan than Samiul Haq, whose seminary is close to Peshawar. Fazlur Rehman has escaped attacks from the terrorists, which means North Waziristan thinks him soft on the state of Pakistan.

Maulana Abdul Aziz, frontman of al-Qaeda’s policy of Islamic vigilantism in Islamabad, whom the judiciary is perhaps too scared to convict in scores of cases of terrorism, held a separate press conference in the capital with scary-looking armed guards to say that “nothing short of [the] removal of democracy and [the] constitution itself would be acceptable as a condition for peace.”

His Red Mosque was attacked by commando troops in 2007, after he staged a number of vigilante incidents to force Islamabad to become an Islamic city the way the TTP thinks it should be. He symbolises Pakistan’s trajectory of Islamisation since 1947 and causes the Pakistani mind to split over what should be the next phase of state identity. By voting rightwing in 2013 against the ever-dwindling liberal elements, the people of Pakistan have joined the issue on the side of the Taliban. Intimidation plays the part of a persuader more than is often realised.

After Imran Khan and the JUI-F opted out, Fazlullah reiterated his disdain towards Islamabad by proposing two replacements: the chief reporter of a leading English-language newspaper, Ansar Abbasi, whose reports read like sermonising opinion pieces; and a serving senior bureaucrat, Oria Maqbul Jan, whose crazy advocacy of the Taliban has upset all kinds of Pakistanis. Both begged off, although their worldview on TV talk shows has presaged the next mutation of the Islamic state.

A debate is raging on TV about sharia. Almost all religious organisations — most of them with street muscle and some clearly aligned with the TTP — are convinced that sharia is not in force, and therefore the Taliban demand for dismantling the modern state is justified. An important presence on the negotiating panel appointed by the Taliban, the Jamaat-e-Islami, has however decided not to support the Taliban’s rejection of the current constitution.

The Jamaat clerics, however, insist that Pakistan’s Islamic constitution is not acted upon. They have in the past rejected the modern state’s punishment of “bad” conduct (munkirat) under a penal code and neglect of “good” conduct (marufat) as pieties enforceable through punitive legislation. Starting in the post-medieval period in Europe, the modern state stopped punishing the lack of piety and concentrated only on punishing crime. The Muslims of the world, free to choose as in Egypt, want it back. Already, Pakistan is fast losing the distinction between sin and crime.

The drive to get the arrested Taliban out of state custody remains on top of the Taliban agenda. So far, they have broken two big jails under the administered jurisdiction of the state and got their killers out — most of them returning piously to their job of killing innocent people. The Shia remain in their crosshairs and don’t mind lying when it suits them to keep the common Pakistani deluded into thinking that the Shia are, in fact, being killed by America and India. They have denied the killing of Shias in a Peshawar restaurant earlier in February.

One reason the TTP has more credibility than the state is the former’s intimidatory hold over the media. Most opinion-makers in Urdu are already on their side because of Urdu’s more unbuttoned ideological message against the modern state. But the English-language newspapers are actually threatened into censoring themselves by removing the more convincing liberal-secular voices from their opinion pages.

The “popular consensus” is thus against the state and in favour of the terrorists. Of course, peace has to prevail, but will the state accept its death that easily? Sharif will have to intervene and say enough is enough at some stage of this unfolding farce.

In the first week of February, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had to go to Dubai to meet the IMF team because the multilateral financial institution is unwilling to come to Islamabad after being painted by the media as an enemy of Islam and as an instrument of America’s diabolical plots against Pakistan. Dar was asking the IMF for another loan of a half a billion dollars while the Taliban had made a billion dollars in 2013 from Karachi alone .

One reason the Taliban can’t think of peace is the money it is making in Pakistan with almost zero loss of manpower, setting itself apart from the terror franchises in Yemen, Somalia and Mali — dying states that don’t have the financial lucre to attract terrorists. Pakistanis wonder who is financing the Taliban, often blaming Saudi Arabia, America and India.

The fact is that the Taliban is in the process of emptying Karachi of its cash after leaching the city of Peshawar dry. Out of the four billion dollars the Afghan Taliban makes from heroin, at least one billion falls to the TTP’s share as the “southern funnel”. Moreover, news of shakedowns from Islamabad and Lahore is being suppressed because the well-heeled victims want to keep it hush-hush.

Marijuana shoppers flock to Colorado for first legal recreational sales

'This is going to be a turning point in the drug war,' says one customer at a cannabis dispensary, 'a beginning of the peace'

• Rory Carroll in Denver
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 1 January 2014 20.23 GMT

Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran, makes the first legal recreational marijuana purchase in Colorado from Betty Aldworth. Photograph: Theo Stroomer/Getty

The debut of the world's first legal recreational marijuana got off to a smooth and celebratory start with stores across Colorado selling joints, buds and other pot-infused products to customers from across the United States.

Throngs lined up from before dawn on Wednesday to be among the first to buy legal recreational marijuana at about three-dozen licensed stores, with cheers erupting when doors opened at 8am local time.

“It's a historical event. Everyone should be here,” said Darren Austin, 44, who drove from Georgia and joined a festive crowd gathered in falling snow outside Denver's 3-D Cannabis store. “This is going to be a turning point in the drug war. A beginning of the peace.”

His son Tyler, 21, held a sign saying “It's about time”. Like his father, he painted his face green. “I'm going to move to Colorado. Seriously,” said Darren.

Behind them waited Savannah Edwards, 21, a substitute teacher who drove overnight from Lubbock, Texas. “I'm here not so much for the marijuana as the history.” Just as people reminisced about Woodstock, she would be telling this story half a century from now, she said. “I've never been to a dispensary before. I don't even know what I'll buy.”

Colorado became the first jurisdiction in the world – beating Washington state and Uruguay by several months – to legalise recreational cannabis sales. Voters approved the measure in a ballot initiative in the November 2012 general election – a landmark challenge to decades of “drug war” dogma which could herald a shift as radical as the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933.

JD Leadam, 24, a bioplastics producer from Los Angeles, flew in just for the day. “This is the first time in the whole of the world that the process is completely legal. It's something that I can tell my kids about.”

After Washington, Alaska may follow suit later this year, with activists then targeting Arizona, California, Nevada and Maine, said Mason Tvert, director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project. “Making marijuana legal for adults is not an experiment. Prohibition was the experiment and the results were abysmal,” he told a press conference.

Activists, customers and media gathered at the 3D Cannabis store for the first ceremonial sale. "It's 8am. I'm going to do it," said Toni Fox, the owner.

Tyler Austin, 21, who travelled from Georgia, held a sign saying 'It's about time'. 'I'm going to move to Colorado,' he said. Photograph: Ed Endicott/Demotix/Corbis

The first customer was Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war veteran who featured in pro-legalisation campaign ads. He bought an eighth of an ounce of an Indica strain called Bubba Kush and some marijuana-infused truffles. Total price, $59.74, including 21.22% sales tax.

State regulations insist every marijuana plant must be tracked from seed to sale but about 400,000 of the 2m tags sent in the post did not reach all stores in time. Authorities allowed licensed stores to sell regardless. The Denver Post called the glitch disappointing.

The three dozen stores that sold recreational pot on Wednesday will multiply in coming weeks. Regulators have issued 348 recreational pot licences: 136 for retail stores, 178 for cultivation, 31 for infused edibles and other spin-off products, and three for testing.

Cynthia Johnston, 69, bought two pre-rolled joints ($10 each) and an eighth of an ounce of Sour Diesel. “I've been working towards this moment since 1979,” she grinned. “Now, where can I smoke?”

Not in public spaces and not, according to notices which sprouted overnight, in many hotels. Pot must be consumed in private and cannot be transported over state lines, putting some restraints on the expected pot tourism boom.

Fears of joint-toking throngs in the street did not materialise by midday. Police said crowds were orderly and respectful. Denver City councilman Albus Brooks hailed their diversity and peacefulness.

As the first customers left the stores clutching their purchases jokes rippled across Twitter. “Curious if there has been a spike in Funyuns, Doritos and Taco Bell sales across Colorado today?” asked one.

Home Office is now a tool for stirring up racial tension

Dave Garret in The Independent 01/08/2013

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some very visible signs of the Government’s “hostile environment” crusade. There have been vans out on the streets with threatening slogans and, reportedly, non-white people being visibly stopped and searched.

The Home Office is responsible for community cohesion. Yet we are increasingly seeing what appears to be hostility towards non-white immigration, which will do nothing but incite racial tensions and divisions within otherwise rich and diverse communities.

This has to change. We urgently need a more balanced public debate on immigration, free of political agendas. Without it we risk eroding the very foundations of communities across the UK.

The Government has now made the Home Office, who are also responsible for community policing and safety, a highly visible, taxpayer-funded tool for stirring up racial tension and community unrest. The method and location of these stunts make it hard to believe that they are not targeted at non-white communities, but, whatever the truth, they are certainly perceived that way.

Refugee Action wants to see a more balanced debate about immigration, and believes the Home Office has a huge responsibility to avoid adding to its toxicity. At least in the interests of balance, we’d like some vans which say: “The NHS would collapse without foreign-born staff,” or “the Office of Budget Responsibility says that migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances” or “without immigration Britain would be without tea”.

Dave Garratt is chief executive of Refugee Action