Relationship Hero (YC S17) Is Hiring Relationship Coaches – Remote

Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in America, and the majority of it comes from cars and small trucks. That’s a major reason why President Barack Obama, in 2012, introduced a rule requiring automobile manufacturers to make their vehicles more fuel efficient—from 37 miles per gallon to more than 51 miles by the year 2025. As a side benefit, drivers would save money on gas and America’s oil reserves would last longer, reducing the incentive for energy companies to extract more of it.

But now President Donald Trump wants to “Make Cars Great Again”—by letting them remain as dirty as they are now. In an op-ed with that title in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new chief, Andrew Wheeler, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced a proposal to end those Obama-era requirements. Freezing fuel-efficiency standards, Chao and Wheeler wrote, will benefit consumers by giving them “greater access to safer, more affordable vehicles.”

This claim is based on specious evidence, experts say. In truth, the administration has concocted a tortured, flimsy argument—that cleaner cars will cost thousands more, and kill thousands more people—to scare Americans into believing that the government should scrap its most consequential policy for reducing emissions.

The administration’s 978-page proposal is called the SAFE Vehicles Rule—SAFE being an acronym for “Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient”—and it argues that cleaner vehicles are more dangerous than dirtier ones. “Today’s proposed rule is anticipated to prevent more than 12,700 on-road fatalities and significantly more injuries as compared to the standards set forth in the 2012 rule,” it states. It’s not entirely clear where that statistic comes from, but as Brad Plumer explained in The New York Times, it’s based on three arguments:

First, people who buy fuel-efficient vehicles will end up driving more, increasing the odds that they will get into a crash. Second, the fuel-efficient vehicles will themselves be more expensive, slowing the rate at which people buy newer vehicles with advanced safety features. Third, automakers will have to make their cars lighter in response to rising standards, slightly hurting safety.

Dirty cars, in other words, are heavier—and when heavy cars get into accidents, the people inside them are less likely to die. Thus, the administration argues, “It is now recognized that as the stringency of [fuel efficiency] standards increases, so does the likelihood that higher stringency will increase on-road fatalities. As it turns out, there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

But this argument has been “largely debunked,” David Greene, a civil and environmental engineering professor professor at the University of Tennessee professor, told E&E News. “The problem with that argument is that it didn’t take into account that all of the light-duty vehicles would be made lighter,” he said. “That leads to a simple physics equation—if all cars are lighter, there’s less kinetic energy involved in any crash. Therefore, the force between two vehicles is reduced when they collide.”

It’s also unclear whether increased fuel efficiency causes people to drive more, by any substantial amount. As Plumer noted, the Obama administration’s estimate was that people would drive about 0.1 percent more for every 1 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The Trump administration’s analysis found that the “rebound effect,” as it’s called, would be about twice as high as Obama’s analysis said—though that’s still not a very significant increase.

Experts also questioned the argument that lighter cars will cause more deaths. “The most important question is whether cars on the road are getting more similar in weight, or more dissimilar,” Mark Jacobsen, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, told Plumer. “If you’re bringing down the weight of the heaviest vehicles but not the lightest vehicles, then in the average accident, the cars will be better matched.”

The Trump administration admits that, under its proposal, both fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions would increase by about 4 percent. But it argues that if automakers are forced to make cleaner cars, which may cost slightly more, people will hold onto their dirtier cars for longer. Thus, “smog-forming pollution would actually decrease” by 0.1 percent.

Dave Cooke, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, doesn’t buy it. “There is no consistency to this logic,” he wrote. “They claim that these newer and more efficient vehicles will be so great that everyone will travel more, but not so great that people will want to buy them.” He argued that car manufacturers have been doing well since fuel efficiency standards have been in place. Currently, they’re “on pace for 17 million in annual sales for the fourth consecutive year, extending an industry record.”

The administration can’t say it wasn’t warned about the flaws in its logic. According to The Washington Post, an earlier version of this proposal was presented to the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, and officials said it contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”

As the Trump administration claims that freezing fuel efficiency standards will actually reduce pollution, it also ignores the health benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The draft proposal explicitly notes that it would only consider the domestic—not global—health benefits of slowing climate change. That could reduce the estimated climate benefits from the Obama-era car rules by about 87 percent, according to a recent paper.

On Thursday morning, 20 attorneys general pledged to sue the Trump administration over the proposed rule. That afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to soften the administration’s position, saying that the proposal “asked for comments on the range of options. We’re simply opening it up for a comment period, and we’ll make a final decision at the end of that.”

But Trump’s aims here are clear, and so are the consequences. Weakening the Obama standards “would clear the way for vehicles to, by 2030, spew an addition 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Canada,” HuffPost reported. That’s also equivalent to “firing up 30 coal power plants,” said Paul Cort, a lawyer with Earthjustice. And to justify this regressive policy, Trump is using two familiar ingredients: fear and falsehoods.

“Students should not be asked to pay more on their loans than they can afford. And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives. It’s no good, it’s not fair.” One can imagine Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders saying those words, but they actually came out of the mouth of Donald Trump during a speech in Ohio a month before the 2016 election.

It’s been completely forgotten today, but Trump’s platform included a decent student loan plan. Calling the debt burden a “crisis,” he vowed to cap loan repayments at 12.5 percent of a borrower’s income, and to completely forgive the balance if a borrower made payments for 15 years. This would be more generous than current income-based repayment plans. Trump also talked about pressuring colleges to lower skyrocketing tuition costs. “If the federal government is going to subsidize the cost of student loans, it has the right to expect that colleges work hard to control costs and invest their resources in their students,” he said in Ohio.

It was just about the last time the words “student loans” ever crossed Trump’s lips. He handed the Education Department to Betsy DeVos, who has been far more concerned with protecting for-profit colleges and debt collectors than any responsibility to students. At the same time, Democrats have come around to the idea that America shouldn’t just make student loans affordable, but irrelevant. Last week, the party leadership signed on to a higher education bill that would leave nearly all students with no debt.

This dividing line between the parties may play an important role in the 2018 midterm elections. Trump’s approval rating has consistently trended lowest among people aged 18-29. Democrats and Republicans appear to be making opposing bets on whether those young people will come out to vote.

Nearly everything DeVos has done inside the Education Department has shown indifference (if not worse) for college students, particularly those most likely to struggle with debt. While Trump’s budgets incorporate his income-based repayment concept, DeVos last year proposed canceling the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, the most generous income-based repayment that the government offers, which forgives payments after 10 years for those who choose public-sector careers like law enforcement, social work, teaching, or legal defense.

The program survived, and Congress temporarily expanded it by $350 million, so individuals who initially enrolled in the wrong repayment plans could be covered. But Democrats accuse DeVos of taking an “unnecessarily restrictive approach” to the expansion, with misleading information on the Education Department website and “unnecessary hurdles that have been put in place for borrowers.” And DeVos’ 2019 budget proposed killing Public Service Loan Forgiveness once again.

DeVos has also protected servicers who contract with the Education Department to collect payments for federal student loans. These companies have been repeatedly accused of misleading borrowers and pushing them into higher-cost options so they can extract more fees. But in a memo in March, DeVos asserted that states were prohibited from regulating student loan servicers, essentially extending a pre-emptive shield to companies with a history of ripping off student borrowers.

DeVos has filled top positions at the Education Department with executives from for-profit colleges, and her high regard for the industry is apparent in her policymaking. Last week, she proposed eliminating rules that forced for-profit colleges to prove that their students obtained gainful employment in their chosen fields after graduating, as well as proposing other rules making it tougher for students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges to cancel their loan debt. This gives for-profits, left for dead under the Obama administration, a new chance to lure in vulnerable populations with the questionable promise of career advancement while saddling graduates with mounting debt.

Democrats have gone in the completely opposite direction since the 2016 election, as the debate is no longer about whether to propose debt-free college, but which legislation to endorse.

Sanders’s College for All Act would eliminate undergraduate tuition at public colleges and universities, funded through a state-federal partnership that includes a transaction tax on stock, bond, and derivative trades. The Debt-Free College Act, from Senator Brian Schatz and Representative Mark Pocan, would cover students’ full cost of attendance, including room and board, thanks to state and the federal funds. And last week, Democrats on the Education and the Workforce Committee introduced the Aim Higher Act, which would make two-year community college tuition-free and expand Pell grants. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill would “ensure debt-free, quality and meaningful college education that is within reach for every student.”

The Aim Higher Act is a weak alternative to the other two bills, but the competition on the left is set, as Democrats unite around the principle of debt-free college as the main solution to the student loan crisis. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Congressman rumored to be running for president, endorsed all three bills last week, stating, “College should not only be for the privileged few. It is a benefit for all, and must be seen that way.” That’s in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s higher education proposals in the 2016 campaign, where she famously said she was “not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump’s kids.”

Trump was absolutely right in 2016 when he called student debt an “albatross.” It stagnates the economy, as young graduates cannot make major purchases like homes and cars while also managing massive debt. Democrats argue that relieving these debts—by transforming how America finances higher education—will pay off in higher wages, a more skilled workforce, and a stronger economy. The Trump administration sees a regulatory albatross instead, as it rushes to help for-profit companies that benefit handsomely from burdening students. Anyone who gets a student loan bill in the mail every month couldn’t face a starker choice in November.

By most metrics, Danny O’Connor, the Democratic nominee to replace retired Congressman Pat Tiberi, is a long shot. His Republican opponent, Troy Balderson, enjoys the support of the state’s governor, John Kasich, and of President Donald Trump. That should carry weight in a gerrymandered district like Ohio’s 12th, which has voted Republican for around 40 years and went for Trump in 2016 by 11 points.

But O’Connor, the 31-year-old recorder for Franklin County, has unexpectedly tightened Balderson’s lead, to the point that Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifted the race’s rating from “leans Republican” to “toss-up.” The Cook Political Report rates it likewise. Now, Trump himself is traveling to Ohio to stump for Balderson ahead of next week’s special election.

.@Troy_Balderson of Ohio is running for Congress - so important to the Republican Party. Cast you early vote or vote on August 7th. Troy is strong on crime and borders, loves our Military, our Vets and our Second Amendment. He has my full and total Endorsement!

An unsettled GOP has invested heavily in the race. Politico reported on Tuesday that national Republicans “have bombarded the suburban Columbus district with more than $3.3 million in TV ads in an effort to boost Balderson, a state legislator,” though O’Connor maintains a fundraising lead of $1,445,504 to Balderson’s $1,264,723. That O’Connor has managed to shrink his opponent’s lead to this degree could portend other Democratic successes in November. (The New York Times called the race a “big test of the ‘blue wave.’”) But if he wins—or simply makes it close—he may also put the party’s leadership in a difficult position.

O’Connor repeatedly has said that he won’t support Nancy Pelosi as the Democratic leader in the House, a position he seemed to reaffirm in his final ad, released on Tuesday. “The same old politics in Washington just aren’t working. Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats every day, leaving the issues that matter most to your family behind. We need new leadership in both parties,” he said.

He’s hardly the only Democrat politician to oppose Pelosi. In 2016, she survived a leadership challenge from another Ohio Democrat, Representative Tim Ryan, and as Politico reported in June, 11 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of top-tier candidates have said they’ll oppose her as the party’s leader in the House. The opposition doesn’t map cleanly onto the party’s internal divisions, either. Some candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, are left wing, but others aren’t. Ryan is a moderate who recently attended a conference organized by Third Way, the centrist think tank.

Similarly, O’Connor isn’t running to the left. He’s been compared to Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb, a moderate who won a special election in March the state’s 18th congressional district, and who is poised to keep a seat in Congress even though the district has been redrawn. Lamb, now running in the state’s new 17th congressional district, holds a double-digit lead over his Republican opponent. And like O’Connor, he has said he’ll oppose Pelosi’s leadership.

This emerging, cross-factional opposition to Pelosi reflects a growing resentment toward party leadership among the rank-and-file. Congress “is not working for people,” Lamb said in January, and added that the party needs “new leadership.” Kansas Democrat James Thompson, now running his second campaign for Congress, told The Washington Post in April that “...we need new, fresh leadership in there that has a progressive vision, and Nancy’s a corporate centrist.” Kathleen Williams, a three-term Democratic state legislator now running for Montana’s at-large congressional seat, said in a campaign ad that Democrats “need a fresh start.” The gist, generally, is that Democrats are too reluctant to change the guard, and that its tactics consequently failed to keep up with evolving political challenges. But there’s a deeper undercurrent, too. This is the year that Democrats could answer Trump’s pseudo-populism with a more authentic version.

Populism, when defined down to an anti-establishment impulse, doesn’t necessarily favor a specific political affiliation. Lamb, after all, is no democratic socialist. According to FiveThirtyEight, he’s already voted along with Trump’s agenda 63 percent of the time. If elected, O’Connor might not be much to Lamb’s left. Nevertheless, he’s a pragmatic populist—not only in calling for a change to entrenched leadership, but by centering his campaign around the defense of popular entitlement programs. Though he doesn’t back Medicare for All, O’Connor has campaigned heavily on protecting Medicare and Social Security, and has relied on a compelling personal story to do it. (His mother is a breast cancer survivor.)

Medicare and Social Security are reliably popular, and O’Connor’s soft anti-establishment rhetoric could appeal to voters who are disillusioned by Trump, but unwilling to fully embrace the Democratic Party. O’Connor has deliberately appealed to suburban Kasich voters, working under the assumption that they’re more moderate than their Trumpian peers. “Kasich is popular among Republicans in Ohio who are available to us to win. The Kasich voter who is a lifelong Republican, but is kind of alienated by Trump and likes that Kasich is more pragmatic, is the lane of voters we want,” one Democratic strategist recently told The Hill.

It can be dicey to pivot to the suburbs, as Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia proved, but the demographics of O’Connor’s gerrymandered district leave him little room to maneuver. And Kasich, of course, has endorsed Balderson. But there’s some logic to O’Connor’s strategy. Ohio is the only state Kasich won in the 2016 Republican primary, and while the 12th district is firmly Republican, Trump only won it with 52 percent of the vote. It’s not inconceivable that some of the Ohioans who backed the governor over Trump would disregard his endorsement and vote against Trump again. It would be a quite populist thing to do.

MoviePass, whose subscribers pay a monthly fee to see an unlimited number of movies in most theaters in America, appears to be circling the drain. On Friday, the service temporarily shut down after the company ran out of cash amid a flood of Mission: Impossible – Fallout ticket sales. Over the next few days, MoviePass’s parent company, the data analytics firm Helios & Matheson, announced further changes to the program. Blockbuster films, like the forthcoming Christopher Robin and The Meg, are no longer included in the pass; at the same time, the monthly fee increased from $9.95 to $14.95. Helios & Matheson’s stock, which was at nearly $60 a share a month ago, crashed amid the bad news. It closed Wednesday at $0.23.

MoviePass’ demise seemed inevitable, if only because of simple math. The company paid theaters full price for the tickets, but subscribers only paid $9.95 a month, so anyone who used MoviePass even once a month was costing it money. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in economics to realize that that’s not a sustainable model. Moreover, many subscribers suspected that such a good thing couldn’t last, and acted accordingly. The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich compared it to Supermarket Sweep. There was certainly a game show quality to it, as a couple million users tried to see how quickly they could spend hundreds of million of venture capitalist cash.

But MoviePass is not an anomaly. Many of the largest tech companies employ a similar strategy of burning cash in pursuit of rapid growth that could, theoretically, eventually be turned into profit. As the New York Times’s Kevin Roose argued earlier this year, only somewhat hyperbolically, the “entire economy is MoviePass now.” Looking at tech peers in Silicon Valley (particularly Netflix, to which it was inevitably compared) it should be no surprise that MoviePass settled on a simple formula: Take money from venture capitalists, provide a below-market price for a popular service, and profit.

While its endgame certainly wasn’t favorable for movie studios or theaters, MoviePass’s ambitions could hardly be compared to those of companies like Amazon and Uber, which are set on decimating commerce and transportation respectively. In fact, it was this lack of ruthlessness, rather than its unsustainable business plan, that ultimately did MoviePass in.

MoviePass’s plan was straightforward and familiar. When Helios & Matheson acquired a majority stake in the company last August, it dropped its price point—which had once been as high as $50 a month—to $9.95 in the hopes of scaling rapidly, which is exactly what happened. In August of 2017, MoviePass had 20,000 subscribers. By March of 2018, it had two million—and was projecting five million by the end of year.

Scale was the key to profitability. MoviePass could not continue paying theaters full-price for tickets if it wanted to survive, so it hoped to grow large enough to be able to pressure chains like AMC to give them discounted prices—a fair bargain, they would argue, given the amount of business that MoviePass’ millions of subscribers were bringing to theaters across the country. At the same time, it would function as a kind of advertising platform for those looking for a night out, using its platform to advertise for restaurants that moviegoers could go to with their dates before or after the movies. Finally, it would invest in movies themselves, then use its platform to push those movies on its subscribers.

None of these plans worked out.

Its subscription plan was immediately seen as a threat by theater chains, who worked to undercut it. In January, MoviePass feuded with the movie theater chain AMC, which was concerned that the service’s low price would devalue tickets, and pulled its service from ten AMC theaters in a failed attempt at extracting concessions. AMC later started its own subscription service, priced at a more sustainable $19.99 a month. It has acquired 175,000 subscribers in only five weeks.

MoviePass’s plan to monetize its users’ data proved controversial after its CEO Mitch Lowe bragged, “We know all about you. We know your home address, of course; we know the makeup of that household, the kids, the age groups, the income. We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterward.” The backlash, while deserved, obscured an important fact: Many large companies, particularly credit card companies, have this kind of data already, so it’s not as valuable as Lowe seemed to think.

MoviePass’s investments in movies were similarly disastrous. The John Travolta vehicle Gotti, which the company invested in and pushed on its platform, was a critical and financial disaster. The company investment in the film was sizable. Of Gotti’s $10 million budget, MoviePass provided an amount in the “low seven figures,” per an report in Deadline. MoviePass did claim that it drove 40 percent of the film’s ticket sales in its opening weekend—a figure which is not verifiable—but those ticket sales amounted to just over a million dollars.

Meanwhile, MoviePass’s core business—subsidizing trips to the movies—remained enormously popular, and coincided with a rebound in moviegoing. The 2018 box office is up nine percent over last year, driven in part by an especially strong crop of blockbusters, including two Marvel movies and new installments of Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Mission: Impossible. (Some have speculated that MoviePass’s growing customer base played a role in the boom, but there’s little reliable data about what MoviePass’s effect on ticket sales has been. Studio Movie Grill, a small chain with a stake in the company, has claimed that it saw increases “when it comes to increasing frequency and off-peak visits.”)

MoviePass is being mocked, but it’s understandable why Helios & Matheson concluded that selling investors on massive potential (and massive future returns) was a better bet than selling them on a sensible subscription model that would slowly pay dividends over time. The model that it ultimately deployed, in which it raised hundreds of millions from investors and then “redistributed” that money to consumers in the hopes of quickly amassing market share, has been deployed again and again by companies, many of whom lost much more money over a much longer period than MoviePass did. Amazon went public in 1997 and only recently became reliably profitable. Netflix is profitable, but has a negative cash flow of $2.5 billion. (That number will jump to as high as $4 billion as it increases its production of original content.) Uber, meanwhile, lost $4.5 billion in 2017, its ninth year in business.

These companies can continue to sell investors on a future in which they are ever more powerful—where Netflix has all but replaced television, where Uber has all but replaced car ownership and public transportation, where Amazon has all but replaced the entire retail industry. MoviePass tried to make the case that it was this kind of company, but it struggled to articulate what its ambitions were beyond building a massive customer base. This lack of clarity—and the company’s habit of launching ambitious side projects, like movie production, seemingly at random—appears to have caused investors to balk. MoviePass was simply never given the kind of runway that companies like Netflix and Uber, let alone Amazon, were.

Helios & Matheson made just about every mistake a tech startup can make in a very short period of time, but ultimately MoviePass’s model wasn’t the problem. As AMC’s nascent service shows, monthly movie passes not only can work, but may well be the future of moviegoing. The problem is with the larger model of tech entrepreneurship, in which nothing less than world domination is considered a failure.

If “these people” don’t return home “like gentlemen,” a provincial legislator in India said Tuesday, “they should be shot.” T. Raj Singh, from India’s dominant and right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, has a seat in Telangana province. The “illegal Bangladeshis and Rohingya” he thinks deserve to be shot are almost all Muslim.  And Muslims, in the BJP’s Hindu fundamentalist view of things, have no place in contemporary India.

In the United States, the Trump administration has drawn fire for its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which includes a new office investigating previously naturalized citizens for evidence of fraud and then stripping them of citizenship. India, however, is leagues ahead. Earlier this week, the country unveiled a new draft of its “National Register of Citizens,” a controversial citizenship audit which identifies whom the BJP considers true citizens. According to the project’s novel mechanics of exclusion, some four million Indians along the Bangladeshi border, most of them Muslim, will be stripped of Indian citizenship for having insufficient proof that they resided there prior to Bangladesh’s independence. Cloaked in legal language of treaties and cutoff dates, it’s just the latest measure toward an all-Hindu India. “Only then,” Singh said Tuesday—i.e. once the Muslims have gone home—“will our country be safe.” 

India was not always this way. In a speech given soon after Partition, Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress, the party instrumental in Indian independence, declared: “There is no doubt, of course, that those displaced persons who have come to settle in India are bound to have their citizenship. If the law is inadequate in this respect, the law should be changed.”

No such liberal concern seems likely to prevail in India at the moment. Even as opponents of the BJP have tried to fight the law in Parliament, its enforcement looks set to continue. The imminent banishment of the four million newly minted non-citizens, mostly Muslims, is likely to yield electoral benefits for the hardline BJP in upcoming elections. If the imagined hordes of arriving migrants can be used to scare American voters into mute xenophobia, similar effects can be counted upon in a Hindu fundamentalist India.

The “imagined” aspect of migrant crises deserves emphasis, not least because it is tied up in the American and the Indian proclivity for imagining invading phalanxes of migrants in the face of questionable evidence to this effect. In the United States, that means talking about a border “crisis” when in fact apprehensions along the border are at a historic low. In India, as argued back in 2000 by political scientist Anindita Dasgupta, “the constant political refrain in this pivotal state of the Indian Northeast [Assam] is said to be the ‘inundation’ it is facing from East Bengali and then Bangladeshi migrants.” Politically useful, this “myth of inundation” was also pulled out before India’s 2001 Census in an effort to separate “indigenous” from “non-indigenous,” giving the “indigenous” population a superior catalog of rights and claim to belongings.

The current onslaught brought by Hindu nationalists and the state’s Assamese hardliners is largely seen by critics as a naked attempt to shut out Muslims. This would demographically strengthen the Assamese hardliners, delivering a solid electoral constituency to the BJP. The new requirements reflect this; to satisfy the National Registration of Citizenship, applicants must show that they were in the state prior to 1971 when Bangladesh was created. It seems simple enough, but in Assam it is hardly that. The Muslim Assamese are abjectly poor; they are relegated to subsistence living and a precarious existence. Having the “right” documents is highly unlikely in these circumstances, and the demand for these documents seemed to be imposed precisely because the Indian state, and the BJP that controls it, knows it cannot be fulfilled.

As with so many issues in the region, today’s problems can be traced back to imperialism: specifically, the British—those previous overlords whose arrival marked the sub-continent’s disastrous loss of innocence. Long before the current nation-states of India and Bangladesh and Pakistan existed, the British, in their global quest for their favorite beverage, noticed the tea-producing value of the Assam lowlands. By 1826, Assam was incorporated into a new “Bengal Presidency.” More legislation soon arrived in the form of the “Wasteland Act,” which allowed for a massive land grab for tea-production, leading to what would be called the “Planter Raj.” Muslim peasants from surrounding areas were re-settled in Assam by British planters looking for cheap labor. 

In the nearly two hundred years that have passed the since the first slicing and dicing of Assam, the cruel politics of inclusion and exclusion have persisted. In 1905, Bengal Viceroy Curzon again carved up Bengal into administrative units that would best suit British interests. Then Partition came along in 1947, with the Pakistan Muslim League trying to get more bits of the state included in the ill-fated East-Pakistan that was created along the Eastern border with India. With the arbitrary lines overseen by British diplomats and the last British Viceroy, a good bit of the Muslim population found itself, on the eve of Partition on August 14, 1947, in India instead of East Pakistan. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t. In 1971, when war broke out between the two halves of Pakistan on the eastern and western sides of India, Bangladesh was born out of the mayhem. India, then gleeful at the slicing away of a chunk of Pakistan, took in refugees from the eastern portion, now Bangladesh. Then Assamese politicians backtracked as they had before, protesting alleged inundation by Muslims in 1985; another accord was signed, deeming the post-1971 arrivals forever illegal.

On the other side of India, Pakistan, petulant at having had a portion given to them by the British taken away by the Bangladeshis, arranged their own architecture of exclusion. Following the conversion of East Pakistan into Bangladesh in March 1971, 300,000 Urdu-speaking migrants chose to go to the part of the subcontinent that was still Pakistan, instead of staying in the new country in which they found themselves. Pakistan never took them back—they remain stateless and stuck in camps in Bangladesh even today. They are called “stranded Pakistanis,” many of the younger ones never having been to Pakistan.

With India’s new list of those who belong and those who do not, four million more are at the cusp of being thrown to the precarity of statelessness. In a world where powerful states assign and deny citizenships and belongings, this new episode is an example of the cruelties imposed by the gathering of names, the dividing into citizens with rights and non-citizens with very few if any of those rights.

The history of the subcontinent—still reeling from the lines the British drew, the people they divided then added up and divided again—may differ from the history of Middle Eastern-European migration, or that of the United States, in a perpetual state of confusion about its immigrant-nation identity. But what is striking in this new millennium is how legal procedures continue to dress up what is essentially ethnic cleansing—giving it the veneer of civility and the justification of history. These are but the latest casualties of a world in which states repeatedly declare the poor and the wanting ineligible for the protections conferred on their neighbors—and hide, when the immorality is pointed out, behind pieces of paper.