4 Days Hunger-Striking Twitter’s Sewa International Donation

Pieter Friedrich
2 min readMay 29, 2021

--

Hi, this is Pieter Friedrich.

After over 72 hours, I am now on my fourth day of hunger-strike to protest Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s $2.5 million donation to Sewa International USA, a nonprofit linked to the RSS, which is a violent Hindu nationalist paramilitary in India.

One aspect of my protest is that Sewa USA is a partisan organization run by people who literally campaigned to get Narendra Modi elected as Prime Minister of India. The sick irony of it all is that, when Jack donated those millions to Sewa USA for COVID-19 relief efforts, he gave to people who helped to put in office the very person responsible for the current crisis.

India’s catastrophic COVID crisis was caused by Modi.

Modi had over a year, while India remained less impacted by the pandemic, to prepare for a “just in case” scenario while planning a vaccination drive.

Instead, he squandered the time by laying foundation stones for structures that symbolize the Hindu Nation he wants to construct, campaigning for his party in state elections while praising the massive crowd sizes, exporting vaccines, and bragging on international stages about how India had defeated COVID. He allowed millions to gather for a mass religious festival in Uttarakhand, a state ruled by an RSS member who promised that the event would be safe and free from the virus because people would bathe — packed shoulder-to-shoulder — in the Ganga River.

Today, there’s a shortage of oxygen, ambulances, hospital beds, and even wood to cremate the dead. Today, the banks of the Ganga are lined with shallow graves holding countless corpses of those taken by COVID.

Yet, when choosing a charity to assist in India’s struggle against the pandemic, Jack picked one that’s tied up with the very person who created the crisis.

That’s why I’m still standing here, on hunger-strike, saying: “Take It Back, Jack.”

Please, stand with me.

--

--

Pieter Friedrich
Pieter Friedrich

Written by Pieter Friedrich

Friedrich is a freelance journalist and analyst of South Asian affairs. Learn more about him at www.PieterFriedrich.com.

No responses yet