On October 14 in Punjab, northern India, . The protesters were Sikh, from a religion native to the region but with followers all over the world. The violent actors, who killed two and injured some 80 or more, were local police.

When I first saw my fellow Sikhs adopting the hashtag #SikhLivesMatter, despite my initial wariness at their cooption of the moniker used by African American activists, I accepted it. I assumed there was a direct comparison being made between unwarranted state action, the devaluation of human life and a call for accountability.

Over the past few weeks, as the global Sikh community exploded with anger and concern, I was shocked to see how my community focused on issues that were beside the point.

Time was lent in major media outlets, after an , to assess the concerns as they were actually voiced. In particular, Sikhs complained of a media blackout, which led to obliging language of inclusion on the part of some media organizations. But the coverage concluded with assessments that the situation was confusing, and no specific recommendations were offered on how to address the issues that Sikhs face.

While the situation is still tense, it has not escalated. However, the relevant questions that were present at the outbreak of violence have not been addressed, and the media’s attention is threatening to ebb without asking anything germane.

Sikhs are a very visible but often population. They are industrious, and part of their own narrative about a “media blackout” was generated online because they have built their own media networks to address their needs as a diaspora. In this case, that is how the anger and frustration built so quickly, and why #SikhLivesMatter became the banner for Sikh activism.

A Sinking Feeling

Sikhs are a people who have also endured injustice. Sikhism is built into the DNA of the Punjab, which was invaded since the of recorded history, until the came along and created a religion—and an —to serve their needs in peace and war.

More recently, violence directed at Sikhs came at the hands of Western powers. Within living memory are the last acts of the British Empire, including a and the still-unrecognized that followed India’s independence. And a single generation ago, in 1984, then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi rolled tanks into the with the help of .

Narendra Modi © Shutterstock

All this accounts for why, when a curfew was recently enforced in Punjab, the air around the world hung heavy with fear for the worst.

Such an outbreak also explains why the relevant issues became lost in explosive emotional elements of the situation. These events are traumatic in the medical sense, and as with the survivors of war, they trigger effects in cognition and speech and to ask the right questions.

Punjab: Battleground for Global Capital Interests

With a traumatized population on one hand, Punjab is also home to a host of natural resources and international corporations hungry to profit from its historically fertile fields.

In Britain, appeared on television for a panel discussion and demanded the BBC devote air-time to the developing situation—a plea that . In Canada, where the outside of the region lives, the situation has become a political football during election season, partially because the community has for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to address his role in . In the United States, Sikh communities are their central, Indian religious authorities in order to root out the corruption.

Long the breadbasket of India, Punjab was the source of the British Empire’s With five rivers of flowing Himalayan snowmelt feeding a relatively flat region, Punjab has long-been so fertile that it has been the for as long as the statistics have been recorded.

In the late 20^th century, this meant the region of Western agricultural giants, who have employed the same in Punjab as they have in the US and elsewhere (though and have largely outlawed the practice because of its deleterious effects on farming, farmers and the food provided to the general public).

Today in Punjab, these companies run roughshod over the long-preserved agricultural lifestyle. Rivers are running lower due to the multi-generational of genetically-modified seeds leaving chemicals in the soil. The farmers, in a land without basic education, sign into and end up buried in debt to the seed companies, leading to among Punjabi farmers. With all this affecting the primary business of the region (and due to the proximity of Pakistan), rates of are also alarmingly high, especially among the young men who would otherwise be looking to take over these businesses.

Sikhs Should Focus on Modi and Transparency

With all this as background reading, it is easy to see why a diaspora dealing with painful memories might not be able to articulate itself perfectly. And it also explains why Sikhs would gravitate toward the hashtag African Americans have used successfully to both to their issues and to unite a widespread activist network that had been in for years.

But it does not mean the hashtag should be used, or that Sikh issues are to be conflated with those of African Americans. (Although the use of that hashtag could be used as an invitation and bridge-building tool by the Sikh community.)

However, it is painfully clear that Sikhs have reason to be afraid. America has recently relations with India, which has long-been key to the US economy as a source of cheap technology and manufacturing labor. India is increasingly seen as a large player in the global economy.

All this means power and influence is pouring in from international bankers. And the road to Punjab’s lucre runs right through the office of Prime Minister Modi, who has a history of to advance his own political purposes. It even means the holiest site in Sikhism, the Golden Temple, could potentially fall of Modi’s government.

These are the reasons Sikhs across the globe are up in arms about a seemingly trivial skirmish. But the single, most pressing question now should be—as it was in Ferguson and Baltimore—will there be justice for those who died at the hands of the police?

Every effort should be made to follow this process in its most minute detail. And calls should come from every corner of the globe to pressure Modi to attend to these matters and denounce his own cold and deliberate history of profiting from sectarian violence.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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“Socialism” has long been a bogeyman in . The very term is anathema; practically alone it derailed ’s health care proposals of the 1990s.

But during that time, in a socialist nation, economist Thomas Piketty was working methodically to collect hundreds of years of economic data. The result, his monumental work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was a surprise best-seller in the United States after being hailed in Europe as the most profound study of economics since Karl Marx invented the field.

Piketty’s theories describe basic economic forces that are, in a sense, “natural laws” of economics. And the only candidate in the 2016 US President Election addressing himself to Piketty’s findings is the deeply resonant Bernie Sanders.

The general thrust of Piketty’s theory is straightforward. Wealth naturally aggregates toward itself. It’s the economics version of “like attracts like.” In the context of democratic economies, which come with banks as a means to pool resources and grow, this means the rich will get richer. Piketty has given this truism the weight of a law by proving, in an exhaustive study, that the interest rates banks pay to those who have amassed fortunes—because they allow the holding bank to exercise lending power and influence—will always outpace the growth of the overall economy.

In describing these forces the way he has, Piketty has isolated a single, attainable charge that should be the bellwether for democratic capitalist economies: Their stability can be directly attributed to their effectiveness at curbing these forces. Moreover, his foundational work explains why Aristotle said, in alluding to unnamed governmental experiments that preceded classical Greece, “democracies always end in oligarchies.” It was the philosopher’s description of the same law. And it is why, in every religious tradition of the Western world, there is a history of moral imprecations against usury.

But the rhetoric of American politics obfuscates this all-important task. The Republican candidates would rather talk about moral issues, even though their field is morally bankrupt. The Democratic candidates want to emphasize that “it’s the economy, stupid,” but not go so far as to alienate their big donors.

The Right Candidate?

Enter Bernie Sanders, the only candidate speaking to this issue. Right now, the mainstream media is referring to his success as “populism.” But that label has never applied to a winning candidate (see William Jennings Bryan). The political class focus on “the resonance of his message,” as if the substance of what he is saying were secondary. But that is the analysis of an elite who fail to recognize that their job is one of stewardship.

Americans “might be dumb, but they ain’t stupid.” Sanders’ campaign has been catching fire because he is speaking plainly and directly. But mostly, his success is owed to what he is saying, not how he saying it. And whether it is by intuition or common sense—Aristotle also said the simplest explanation is usually the best—Americans are well-aware of two things: First, that the rug has been pulled over their eyes, and second, that there is great risk in continuing down the same path.

And this is why Sanders as a candidate matters to the world right now. The consequences the US not addressing itself directly to Piketty’s law are incredibly bleak. Everyone now knows how interconnected the world is, especially in the economic sense. No one can deny Apple is able to amass its wealth on the backs of ’s workforce. And, in keeping with Piketty’s law, no one without interested backers can deny the dramatic risk the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) bill poses to both the “even playing field” of international trade (in its severely lop-sided intellectual property provisions), and the sovereignty of nations itself (in its grant of Fast-Track authority to corporate-appointed arbitrators).

Again, people may not understand the finer points of these debates, but they understand that if the allocation of resources continue to be decided by men who have no check on their authority—and they have the power to disallow advancements in green technology and carbon emissions, for example—then governments are basically shell corporations. People know that even if it doesn’t look like Mad Max, it feels like it somehow.

The American people know they are living an experiment. They know, whether by Piketty’s law or just a feeling in their gut, that there is a force at work threatening the very fiber of the experiment. And the world-over knows that Americans have a responsibility, as the only remaining superpower, to curb the abuses of its warlords and put its power to use for good. Bernie Sanders seems to be the only candidate who is willing to talk about the world that everyone else sees.

Where the rest of the candidates have all kinds of motives for entering the race—from naked ambition (Ted Cruz and Bobby Jindal) to the desire to serve their constituencies (Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley)—the only candidate who has distinguished himself by addressing these fundamental economic issues is Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders campaign is not inevitable—far from it. He is simply the only candidate speaking to these issues. Eventually, the rest will catch on and attempt to ride lay claim to Sanders’ “populism.” There is probably someone out there who can do it better, and Hillary Clinton will certainly make the most careful and calculated attempt to take up that position.

But no matter who tries, until they show a willingness to confront the very power they seek to hold, they are, by Piketty’s law, necessarily working against the interests of all of us and cannot “right the ship” in the sense the American people—and the world—want to see it righted.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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In the wake of the South Carolina shootings, the US government has showed it is capable of swift action. Within days, the incident was labeled a hate crime, which allows prosecutors to impose tougher penalties on , a 21-year-old who ended the lives of nine in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The waves of support and anger flowing from the killings made quick work of a long-standing controversy. The southern states that have, up to now, continued to use the as displays of “heritage” have called for replacements. Major retailers have taken the step of banning all merchandise bearing the flag.

But this victory of public opinion over a symbol threatens to become only a symbolic victory as the outcry is used to push for more restraints on civil liberties. And the chief mechanism for affecting these more restrictive measures is the “terrorist” label, which masks, in this case, a conflation between arguments for equality and those that would otherwise cut against enabling governmental agency.

In the age of the Internet—and especially over the past year—there has been a growing sense of racial injustice. Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray are just two of the many names of non-whites suffering abuse at the hands of local police. But there is another long-standing prejudice that calls for the “terrorist” label’s application ignore.

“” people, including Latin Americans, have frequently suffered at the hands of the federally-sanctioned “racial-profiling” policy. For these groups of people, the “terrorist” label has been used to justify indefinite detention, rendition, absence of due process and even torture. More widely, governmental agencies have justified warrantless wiretaps, mass data collection and other invasions of individual information—against all peoples—under the banner of “terrorism.”

The Bar

It is easy to understand why the call for the “terrorist” label to apply went up: people are angry, and justifiably so. But to call for the label to apply in the case of Roof is the wrong approach to equality. It is, effectively, an argument to lower the bar for white people, instead of arguing to raise the bar for non-whites.

Here is an of this double-standard from The New Yorker. In its June 29 issue, the call for the “terrorist” label to apply went specifically to the Patriot Act’s language of “coercion.” But just weeks , in a “Letter From Norway,” there was discussion of the 2011 Utoya massacre that involved a more convincing plea: to understand extremism from the inside out; to look at its sources in the strange, individuated and deeply psychological nature, and in the failure of human relationships. In other words, in the moment and perhaps under the weight of what they were expected to say, even the usually cool, collected New Yorker became overheated.

This heated argument has other glaring holes that the Norway article reveals. For example. although affiliated with an ideology, an extremist’s agenda is largely incoherent. The act of killing itself, although specific in its victims, is a generalized kind of performance—it is the attempt of a narcissist who conceives himself as voiceless doing something unthinkable, in order to make others hear him. It comes from a desolate, desperate point of view.

To coerce, on the other hand, one needs to aim for some specific political point—like Palestinian nationalism of the 1970s. Hate is more bland and, as Sartre pointed out in Jew and Anti-Semite, it has no real engagement with the conversation, and thus nothing to say.

Those arguments aside, the parallel between local and national police agencies should be fleshed out to fully appreciate what a wider adoption of the “terrorist” label might mean. For “Muslim-looking” peoples, it has meant being spied upon and arrested without explanation, often without recourse to the courts. For those arrested within 100 miles of a border or on a military base, it means foregoing all the rights afforded by the US Constitution. Some have been , effectively executed without a hearing. Some have even been detained, despite being cleared of any wrongdoing—to prevent reprisal for the improper arrest.

Is a wider swath of the population ready to accept this treatment? Do people really want a more cumbersome process for administering justice, when the courts are already backlogged? And what of the falsely accused? Each of these procedural impediments makes it harder to clear one’s name.

The truth is the —in Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland and even at pool parties in Texas—impose fear on a more regular basis than any single 20-year-old could. The truth is the US military—around the world, but in Muslim-majority countries in particular—imposes a more pointed and openly hostile fear.

Equality is a valuable idea, and it is something we must work toward together. But to apply the “terrorist” label more widely is to place us all within the sights of an even larger, more slowly-moving police power that has no better record when it comes to injustices against non-whites.

Instead, let arguments for equality focus on the real harbingers of fear in our lives: the corporations and governments that amass great power and are all too willing to use it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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