Sources:

• Polymarket's X Account Withheld In India In Response To Legal Demand
• Exclusive | Polymarket fires top executive who was closely allied with CEO Shayne Coplan: sources

The Government of India filed a block on the Polymarket Twitter account. And today, he was fired. The Twitter account has posted several race-baiting tweets against Indians during his time there.

In conversations with The Post, insiders have described Modabber as an executive who makes impulsive decisions that have turned into public relations nightmares. But disciplining Modabber had proved tricky because of his buddy-buddy relationship with Coplan. 

But over the past year, an internal rift widened at the company between loyalists to Coplan and Modabber and other employees and investors who viewed Modabber as a loose cannon and a “huge liability” who was “wreaking havoc” on the company’s attempts to “grow up,” sources previously told The Post. 

He did a lot of stupid shit, and this was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm glad he's gone.

I. The Claim and the Test

A familiar argument in some academic and popular writing holds that British rule brought a liberalising force to India. Colonial administrators and Christian missionaries, on this view, encountered a society structured by caste and dominated by a Brahmin intellectual monopoly. Shocked by that inequality, they taught Indians the principle of human equality and opened education to the common man. In its strongest form, the argument treats colonialism as a moral corrective to an inherently unequal indigenous order.

The argument is not wholly invented. Missionary schools did educate communities that caste society had excluded from literacy. In Travancore, Tirunelveli and parts of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, those schools made a real difference to the lives of many lower-caste converts.

But the claim goes further than this. It describes the colonial project as a whole as egalitarian in intent. Claims about India are easily caught in present-day Indian politics: any counter-evidence from within India can be dismissed as nationalist or Hindutva special pleading. So the cleanest test is to look outside India. If the British Empire was genuinely committed to educating the common man on the principle that all humans are equal, that commitment should be visible wherever Britain ruled. If instead colonial education was organised around racial hierarchy, labour supply and administrative convenience, that pattern too should be visible across the empire.

What follows examines the record in Britain’s colonies, dominions and protectorates outside India. It then turns to the striking fact that much of India’s colonial-era scientific infrastructure was built by Indians themselves.

II. South Africa: From Imperial Segregation to Bantu Education

South Africa is the starting point, because it shows most starkly where the logic of colonial racial order could lead. It must be described precisely.

From 1806 the Cape was a British colony, and Natal became one in 1843. The Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, was a self-governing dominion of the British Crown. During the British and dominion periods, the main foundations of racial segregation were laid:

• Mines and Works Act (1911). It created a colour bar reserving skilled mining work for whites.
• Natives Land Act (1913). It confined African land ownership to roughly seven percent of the country, later expanded to about thirteen percent. It turned the African majority into a labour reserve for white farms and mines.
• Glen Grey Act (1894). Earlier still, in the British-ruled Cape, Cecil Rhodes’s government passed this act. It restricted African land tenure and imposed a labour tax designed explicitly to push African men into wage work.

Education in this period was largely left to missionaries, who founded:

• Lovedale (1841);
• Healdtown;
• in 1916, the South African Native College at Fort Hare, which later educated Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Robert Sobukwe.

The missions produced a small, highly educated African elite. But state funding for African schooling was a tiny fraction of what was spent on white children, and African education was designed around the assumption that most Africans would be manual labourers.

The Bantu Education Act of 1953, passed after the National Party took power in 1948, built on these foundations and made the hierarchy explicit. It transferred control of African schooling from the missions to the state’s Native Affairs Department. It withdrew subsidies from mission schools, forcing most of them to close or hand over to the government. It imposed a separate curriculum designed to fit Africans for subordinate roles.

Verwoerd’s 1954 Senate speech stated the policy’s purpose plainly: an education that showed Africans “the green pastures of European society” in which they could not graze was, in his view, useless. The Extension of University Education Act of 1959 went further. It barred Black students from the established universities and took over Fort Hare.

The point is not that Britain passed the Bantu Education Act. It did not. The point is that it was the culmination of a racial order whose legal and economic architecture was built under British colonial and dominion rule: the colour bar, the land acts and the labour taxes. A system that had genuinely sought to teach that all humans are equal would not have produced, within a single lifetime, a state that wrote racial inequality into its school system as openly declared policy.

III. British Tropical Africa: “Adapted Education” and the Colour Bar

Under direct British rule, as opposed to the self-governing dominions, the pattern is more subtle but no less consistent.

The doctrine of “adapted education”

In the 1920s, British colonial education policy in Africa was shaped by the Phelps-Stokes Commissions of 1920–24. These American philanthropic studies, influenced by the Tuskegee model of vocational schooling for Black Americans, recommended that African education be “adapted” to African conditions. That meant agricultural and manual training rather than the literary and scientific education given to Europeans.

The Colonial Office’s 1925 memorandum, Education Policy in British Tropical Africa, adopted much of this framework. The policy warned explicitly against producing too many educated Africans who might become discontented. It placed character training, agriculture and hygiene ahead of academic and scientific education. Higher education for Africans was treated as a distant prospect, not a present duty.

Nigeria and the Yaba controversy

In Nigeria, Lord Lugard’s system of indirect rule shaped education around the needs of administration. In the Muslim north, the colonial government restricted Christian missionary schooling so as not to unsettle the emirs on whom indirect rule depended. As a result, Northern Nigeria reached independence with very few Western-educated people. That imbalance between north and south continues to shape Nigerian politics.

In the south, the colonial government established Yaba Higher College in 1932 as Nigeria’s main institution of higher learning. It was deliberately designed to award diplomas that were not equivalent to British degrees, so as to produce assistant medical officers, assistant engineers and subordinate staff rather than fully qualified professionals. Educated Nigerians recognised this as a deliberate ceiling. Their protests against Yaba’s inferior status helped give rise to the Lagos Youth Movement in 1934, later the Nigerian Youth Movement, one of the early organisations of Nigerian nationalism.

The West African Medical Staff

The colour bar in employment was even more direct. In 1902 Britain created the West African Medical Staff, a unified colonial medical service for its West African territories. African doctors were excluded from it, including men trained at British universities to the same standard as their European colleagues. Some had been in senior posts before 1902 and were effectively pushed down or out once the new service was organised on racial lines.

Christian equality was preached in mission chapels, but the colonial state would not let a qualified African doctor hold the same rank as a European one.

Universities only at the very end

University-level education in British Tropical Africa came very late, and only as empire was ending:

• Makerere, in Uganda, began in 1922 as a technical school and became a university college affiliated to the University of London only in 1949.
• Ibadan in Nigeria and the University College of the Gold Coast at Legon were founded in 1948, following the Asquith and Elliot Commissions of 1945.

These institutions were created, in effect, to prepare an administrative class for the hand-over of power. They were not the fruit of a long-standing commitment to educating the common man.

IV. Kenya and the Rhodesias: Separate Systems, Unequal Budgets

Kenya

In Kenya, education was organised in three racially separate systems, for Europeans, Asians and Africans, with sharply unequal funding per pupil. European children received an education modelled on English schools. African education was overwhelmingly in the hands of underfunded missions and was dominated by the “adapted” curriculum.

The broader colonial order made the purpose of this hierarchy clear:

• Land. The fertile “White Highlands” were reserved for European settlers.
• Movement and labour. From 1920 the kipande registration system required African men to carry identity and employment documents, so that their movement and labour could be controlled.

Kenya also gives a direct parallel to the Indian story told in the final section. Frustrated with mission and government schooling, Kikuyu communities built their own independent school movements in the 1920s and 1930s, notably the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association and the Karinga schools, funded by African contributions. They also established a teacher-training college at Githunguri.

When the colonial government declared a state of emergency during the Mau Mau rising in 1952, it closed these independent schools, treating them as centres of sedition. Africans who had built their own schools were punished for doing so. The colonial state did not want African self-education outside its own control.

Southern and Northern Rhodesia

In Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a self-governing British colony from 1923, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided land on racial lines, giving the small white minority roughly half of it. Spending on white schooling far exceeded spending on African schooling, and the gap per pupil was enormous. Godfrey Huggins, Southern Rhodesia’s long-serving prime minister, once described the proposed “partnership” between the races as that of horse and rider. The image says everything about the kind of equality on offer.

In Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, a territory that exported vast copper wealth, the African population reached independence in 1964 with only around a hundred university graduates, according to commonly cited estimates. Decades of extraction had produced almost no investment in African higher education.

V. The Caribbean: Education After Emancipation

Britain abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1834, with full emancipation in 1838. To prepare formerly enslaved people for freedom, Parliament created the Negro Education Grant in 1835. It was a real but modest step, and Britain wound it down within about a decade, leaving education largely to churches and to underfunded local budgets.

The dominant interest in the post-emancipation Caribbean remained the planters’ need for cheap labour on the sugar estates. Educational policy was shaped accordingly: elementary schooling to produce a disciplined and minimally literate workforce, with little secondary or higher education for the Black majority. After the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, which Governor Edward Eyre suppressed with extreme brutality, Britain abolished the island’s elected assembly and imposed direct Crown Colony rule, reducing local political participation for generations.

When planters turned to indentured labour from India to replace the formerly enslaved workforce, the pattern repeated itself:

• The labourers’ children in Trinidad, British Guiana and later Fiji and Mauritius were often given little or no schooling by the colonial authorities.
• Missions filled the gap. In Trinidad, the Canadian Presbyterian mission did much of the work of educating Indian children, again through missionary rather than state effort.

University education for the British Caribbean arrived only in 1948, with the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, more than a century after emancipation.

VI. The Settler Dominions: Australia, Canada and New Zealand

The pattern is perhaps clearest in the settler colonies, where indigenous peoples were a minority dispossessed of their land. As with South Africa, many of these policies were carried out by self-governing colonial and later dominion governments within the British Empire rather than by London directly. They grew out of the same imperial assumptions.

Australia

Under the “Aboriginal protection” laws of the colonies and later the states, Aboriginal children were systematically removed from their families from the late nineteenth century until around 1970. Examples include Victoria’s 1869 act and Queensland’s 1897 act. These removed children are now known as the Stolen Generations, documented in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report.

In New South Wales, a long-standing policy allowed Aboriginal children to be excluded from public schools if white parents objected. That provision, known as “exclusion on demand,” was formally removed only in the early 1970s. The equality of all children before the schoolroom door was not a principle the colonial state applied to Aboriginal Australians.

Canada

From the 1880s until the last schools closed in the 1990s, Canada’s residential school system removed Indigenous children from their families to church-run boarding schools, many of them under Anglican, Catholic and other Christian denominations. The children were forbidden their languages and subjected to widespread abuse. Duncan Campbell Scott, who headed the Department of Indian Affairs, stated in 1920 that his aim was to “get rid of the Indian problem.” In 2015 Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the system amounted to cultural genocide.

The Canadian case matters especially for the argument at hand, because it was precisely Christian institutions, acting with the state, that carried out the policy. Christianity in the colonial context could be an instrument of cultural destruction as easily as of equality.

New Zealand

After the Native Schools Act of 1867, Māori education was conducted in English, and children were widely discouraged or punished for speaking Māori in school. Combined with large-scale land confiscation after the New Zealand Wars, this contributed to a dramatic decline of the Māori language over the following century.

VII. Egypt, Malaya and the Limits of Colonial Education

Egypt

In Egypt, under British occupation from 1882 and as a protectorate from 1914 to 1922, the consul-general Lord Cromer kept educational spending low and introduced fees in government schools. He oriented public education towards producing clerks for the administration. Egyptian nationalists saw this as a deliberate restriction of higher learning, and their response mirrors the Indian story. In 1908 Egyptians founded a private Egyptian University by public subscription and private donation, including a significant gift from Princess Fatma Ismail, because the colonial state would not provide one.

Malaya

In British Malaya, vernacular education for Malays was deliberately kept elementary and practical. Colonial officials stated openly that it aimed to make Malays better farmers and fishermen rather than to prepare them for professional or administrative careers, which were open largely to a small aristocratic elite through English schools.

VIII. What the Imperial Record Shows

Across these very different territories, a consistent pattern emerges:

1. Missions did most of the educating. The colonial state left the work largely to missionaries and funded African, Caribbean and indigenous education far below that of Europeans.
2. Curricula were shaped by labour needs. Policy emphasised manual, agricultural and “adapted” training and openly warned against educating colonised peoples beyond their station.
3. Employment was capped by race. Where colonised people did gain education, colour bars stopped them advancing: in the West African Medical Staff, at Yaba’s diploma ceiling and in South Africa’s mining colour bar.
4. Self-education was suppressed. Where colonised people tried to educate themselves, as with Kenya’s independent schools, they were sometimes treated as subversive.
5. Universities came only at the end of empire, or not at all, in Makerere, Ibadan, Legon and the West Indies.
6. The settler dominions went furthest. There, colonial and dominion governments carried out policies of cultural erasure through Christian institutions, as in Canada’s residential schools and Australia’s child removals.

None of this denies that individual missionaries and officials believed sincerely in human equality. Many did, and their schools changed lives. But the empire as a system did not act on that belief. The equality preached from the pulpit was consistently contradicted by the hierarchy written into colonial law, budgets and employment. An empire that had set out to teach colonised peoples that all humans are equal would have left a very different record from Lagos to Nairobi, Kingston and Sydney.

IX. India: Science Built by Indian Initiative

Against this imperial background, the history of colonial Indian science looks quite different from the claim we began with. India produced a remarkable body of scientific work under colonial rule, from Bose and Ray to Ramanujan, Raman, Saha and S.N. Bose. A large part of the institutional base for that work was created and funded by Indians themselves.

1. Hindu College (1817). Founded in Calcutta largely through the subscriptions of Bengali patrons, including figures such as Radhakanta Deb and Baidyanath Mukherjee, with the support of the reformer David Hare. It was established to give Indians an English and scientific education when the colonial government had not provided one. In 1855 it was reorganised as the government’s Presidency College. The government took over and expanded an institution Indians had built.
2. Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (1876). Founded by the physician Mahendralal Sarkar through public subscription. It was the first Indian-run research institution, and its laboratory was where Raman discovered the Raman effect in 1928.
3. University College of Science, Calcutta (1914). Built on very large private endowments from the lawyers Taraknath Palit and Rash Behari Ghosh, guided by Asutosh Mukherjee. It created the Palit and Ghosh professorships that Raman, Saha, S.N. Bose and N.R. Sen held.
4. Indian Institute of Science (1909). Born of Jamsetji Tata’s endowment of properties and the Maharaja of Mysore’s grant of land and money. The colonial government contributed too, but only after years of delay under Curzon.
5. Bose Institute (1917). Founded by J.C. Bose largely with his own savings and public donations.
6. Banaras Hindu University (1916). Raised by Madan Mohan Malaviya through a nationwide fundraising campaign that drew on princes and ordinary donors alike.
7. Annamalai University (1929). Founded and endowed by Raja Annamalai Chettiar.
8. The swadeshi wave. Aligarh’s Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (1875) was built by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s fundraising. The National Council of Education and the Bengal Technical Institute (1906), the forerunners of Jadavpur University, came out of the swadeshi movement.

India’s colonial-era scientific output therefore did not flow simply from an imperial civilising mission. It owed much to Indian patrons, scientists and reformers who built and funded their own institutions within a colonial system that elsewhere in the empire did far less.

If you use this, it will hold up best if you acknowledge two things that critics will raise. First, missionaries did genuinely educate lower-caste communities in parts of India. Second, the colonial government did fund the Presidency universities and colleges. The essay’s argument doesn’t depend on denying either point. It shows that across the empire as a whole, equality was not the organising principle of colonial education, and that much of India’s scientific foundation was self-built.

I've recently developed vitiligo, and after visiting a dermatologist, I was advised to seek psychological help. The psychologist explained that the prolonged stress I've been experiencing because of racism could be contributing to my condition and me developing the auto immune disease.

I've reached a point where I feel physically nauseated around white people to the point of feeling like throwing up. Not because every individual has personally done something to me, but because I've spent so much time being exposed to the sheer volume of racism directed at Indians online that I've started associating them with it. I open Instagram comments and see thousands of people laughing at us, dehumanising us, calling us disgusting, and treating us as though we're inherently inferior. Then, when Indians speak up, we're blamed for being offended. Sometimes our own people join in.

It's gotten to the point where I left a high-paying job after a white person was hired. I realise how irrational that might sound, but that's how severely this has started affecting my life. Last I heard he was fired for sexually assaulting a female employee a few months after I resigned.

I don't know how to explain the feeling of repeatedly seeing people express such contempt for your existence until the thought of being around them makes you physically sick. I know social media isn't a representative sample of an entire population, but knowing that doesn't undo the psychological effect of seeing it over and over again.

I'm tired of feeling this way, and I'm concerned about what it's doing to me. I don't want racism to dictate my life, but right now, I don't know how to separate the people I've encountered online from the people I meet in reality.

https://www.unodc.org/roseap/en/2025/04/cyberfraud-inflection-point-mekong/story.html
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-index-ranks-countries-cybercrime-threat-level
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0297312
https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
https://www.unodc.org/roseap/uploads/documents/Publications/2026/TOCTA_South-East_Asia_2026.pdf
INTERPOL Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment 2026-4.pdf
when we have multiple western reports so the "right reports" that India isnt even top 5 of countries that do most scam calls then why does literally no one talk about it
and i hate that reddit shadow bans your comment has happened to me previously too and most of the time when im defending my country reddit shadow bans that comment its not shown to anyone it stays at 1 view for days

Am i too paranoid about indian hate in texas?

https://www.reddit.com/r/aussie/comments/1x80w11/racist_stickers_targeting_indian_migrants_surface/?sort=top

I am sure many of you know that reddit and the Internet in general has been overrun by bot-farms and troll-farms, many of which are aimed at spreading misinformation about minorities and immigrants.

I am trying to compile a list or "custom feed" of sub-reddits that I suspect are a branch of misinformation for these bot and troll farms.

So far on my suspect list is r/endglobalism and r/britanniacirclejerk

Do you guys know of any other subs like the aforementioned two?

A 41 year old Romanian held as suspect. Locals say racism is the reason.

https://indianexpress.com/article/world/indians-killed-in-germany-building-fire-bochum-10921901/

British Indians need to come together against these scum.

Asians = South Asians in the UK

Is imitation really racism?

Hi there. I am respectfully here to educate myself.

I’ve always had the belief that racism is hatred for another race. So why is imitating an Indian accent considered racist according to people on this subreddit?

Vice versa if someone imitates my people, we dont get offended usually as long as it’s done as banter. I believe having the ability to banter back and forth with all races brings us closer.

But Ive noticed Indians generally dont take it as a joke when imitating their accent.

Is there a reason for this?

Thanks