The Caravan - February 2023 8688065543, 9529020226

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Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath

VOLUME 15 • ISSUE 2 FEBRUARY 2023

cover story / politics 26

Destination Unknown The skewed vision of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra sagar

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On 30 January, the former Congress president Rahul Gandhi completed his Bharat Jodo Yatra—which translates to “the journey to unite India”—a march of nearly thirty-five hundred kilometres from Kanyakumari to Srinagar meant to resist the hatred and violence spread by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The yatra might work as a gesture, but to see it as an ideological alternative is a stretch. In order to effectively combat hatred and violence, Gandhi would have to walk the extra mile and actually call out Hinduism rather than blaming the atrocities on Bad Hindus who do not speak for Good Hindus like him. Instead, he tries to have it both ways, claiming to lead the resistance against orthodox Hinduism without alienating orthodox Hindus. Gandhi’s double standards and contradictory politics, as well as the Congress’s historical role in enabling the hatred and violence he claims to want to eradicate, reduce an avowed exercise in nation-building to a project meant to rehabilitate a single politician’s image.

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82

religion

history

politics

52 A Study in Saffron

72 Whitewashing Caste

82 A Damning

How Gurugram’s Hindu Right orchestrated the namaz row

How Indian immigrants used religion and caste to naturalise as White in the US

Document A UK report states VHP planned Gujarat violence in advance

hardeep dhillon

hartosh singh bal

vaibhav vats

FEBRUARY 2023

3

the lede

perspectives

8

gender

8 In Knots The double agony of victims of abuse in intercaste and interfaith marriages

18

saumya kalia history

10 Live Act

history

The unsettling colonial history of India’s Malabaris exhibited in human zoos

18 Rain on the Sangh’s Parade

s harikrishnan

dhirendra k jha

communities

politics

14 Flagging Spirits

20 Any Port In A Storm

The residents of Mulanje fear their ancestors’ wrath

How the Left used the BJP’s formula to discredit protests against Adani’s Kerala port

ernest pondani

sindhu nepolean

The myth that Nehru invited the RSS to the 1963 Republic Day event

books 98

environment

86 Who is to Blame? The climate crisis and Amitav Ghosh

shashank kela

86

4

the bookshelf

96

editor’s pick

98

NOTE TO READERS: THE MARKETING INITIATIVE ON PAGES 46–51 IS PAID ADVERTISING CONTENT.

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contributors THE LEDE

8 10

14

Saumya Kalia is a journalist based in Mumbai. She writes about health, gender, cities and equity. S Harikrishnan is an assistant professor at Dublin City University and the author of Social Spaces and the Public Sphere: A Spatial-history of Modernity in Kerala. He is also a photographer and a founding editor of Ala, a monthly online publication on Kerala. Ernest Pondani is the founder and executive director of the Youth Alliance for Democratic Culture, a Malawian NGO. He has previously worked with UNICEF and is now an investigations and research officer at the national ombudsman›s office.

PERSPECTIVES

18 Dhirendra K Jha is a contributing writer at The Caravan. 20 Sindhu Nepolean is an independent journalist and a research consultant at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. She is also a founding member of the Coastal Students Cultural Forum, a nonprofit working with coastal youth.

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

26 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. 52 Vaibhav Vats is an independent writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Al Jazeera, among other publications. He is working on a book on Hindu nationalism and the making of India’s Second Republic. 72 Hardeep Dhillon is a postdoctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation. She completed her doctorate in history at Harvard University and will join the department of history at the University of Pennsylvania this fall. 82 Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan.

BOOKS

86 Shashank Kela is the author of a historical monograph, A Rogue and Peasant Slave: Adivasi Resistance 1800-2000 (2012), and a novel, The Other Man (2017).

COVER

Photo: Ankur Sethi / PTI

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior associate editor Puja Sen books editor Maya Palit creative director Sukruti Anah Staneley associate editor Ajachi Chakrabarti web editor Surabhi Kanga assistant editors Tusha Mittal, Amrita Singh, Abhay Regi and Mehak Mahajan assistant editor (hindi) Vishnu Sharma staff writers Sagar, Nileena MS, Aathira Konikkara and Sunil Kashyap contributing writers Dhirendra K Jha, Prabhjit Singh, Jatinder Kaur Tur and Nikita Saxena editorial fellow Jessica Jakoinao reporting fellows Sujatha Sivagnanam and Eram Agha multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray fact-checker Swetha Kadiyala social-media and audience editor Anandita Chandra senior software engineer Anjaneya Sivan photo researcher Devadeep Gupta senior graphic designer Paramjeet Singh junior graphic designer Shagnik Chakraborty hindi translator Parijat P trainee journalist (hindi) Ankita Chauhan editorial manager Haripriya KM contributing editors Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury, Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume, Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and Salil Tripathi editorial interns Ishika Chauhan and Shradha Triveni social-media intern Sushmita Balakrishnan

Correction: Eram Agha’s “Tightrope Act,” published last month, incorrectly stated that Maratha Mandir is located near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, rather than Mumbai Central station, and referred to the director Ketan Mehta as Ketan Shah. The Caravan regrets the errors. They have been corrected online.

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THE LEDE In Knots The double agony of victims of abuse in intercaste and interfaith marriages / Gender

/ saumya kalia

illustration by tara anand

“I literally left everything,” a journalist, who did not wish to be named, told me. Entering an intercaste relationship, she said, was “really hard—to leave your family, to deal with the police.” But the couple stood their ground and married. Soon, however, a pattern of verbal and physical abuse crept into their relationship. Their marriage, once an act of love and rebellion, had now become a site

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THE CARAVAN

of regular violence. “I used to wake up at night and start crying,” the journalist said. “I kept thinking there’s no one who’s my friend or my community.” They eventually separated. Abuse within marriages in India is severely underreported. This abuse only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic—a 2021 survey report by United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women stated that violence against women was a “shadow pandemic,” with seven in ten women reporting that “verbal or physical abuse by a partner had become more common.” Women who defied social expectations and married outside their religion, caste or ethnicity found themselves more vulnerable. When women decide to make choices that go against familial or societal sanction, they often find themselves left out of the ecosystems of support and care in the face of abuse. The latest National Health and Family Survey showed that more than ninety-eight percent of women who faced gender-based violence did not seek any medical or legal help. There was the fear of facing stigma from institutional sources such as lawyers or police officials, along with lack of awareness about where to go for redressal. The same data found that among the first points of contact are a woman’s family and friends, followed by the husband’s family—both likely untenable options for those in intercaste or interfaith marriages where the families were opposed. The awareness about accessing support remains scarce, compounded further by fears of engaging with the police system. “The most common refrain women have been met with by friends and family is a ‘We told you so’ and ‘You made your bed so lie in it’ and some or the other variation of these unfair statements,” Kirthi Jayakumar, who runs the Saahas app for reporting domestic abuse, told me. “There is also the additional challenge from the system—social and security sector mechanisms carry the imports of patriarchy, casteism, xenophobia and misogyny into responding to any help-seeking behaviour from women.”

the lede

A 2011 study, using data from the 2005–06 National Family Health Survey, found that around two percent of marriages are interfaith. And, according to the 2011 census, less than six percent of Indian marriages were intercaste, a rate that remained similar over four decades. These are unions that demand courage against the brutal reality of caste endogamy, honour killings, and the manufactured bogey of “love jihad.” Intimate-partner violence within such relationships is misrepresented and exploited as a cautionary tale against inter-community marriages, the most recent case being that of the murder of Shraddha Walkar, a Hindu, by her partner Aftab Poonawalla, a Muslim. On 13 December 2022, soon after Walkar’s murder, the Maharashtra government passed a resolution to form a panel to collect details of people in intercaste and interfaith marriages. Appointed officials were tasked with tracking such couples, gathering information, including addresses and personal details, and contacting newly married women as well as their families. If the woman is “estranged” from her family, the officials are to urge them to get in touch with each other and to encourage families to seek counselling. The idea is to connect women with their families, purportedly to carve a way for support and rehabilitation. On 15 December, the government resolution was amended to include only inter-religious marriages. “Singling out couples like that, because they are in interfaith marriage and on the presumption that they are the only ones who face domestic violence, it’s quite juvenile,” Rama Sarode, an advocate who works with domestic violence and human rights cases, told me. “Such a step wasn’t taken in the past. Suddenly, with Shraddha’s case and anxiety around interfaith marriages, they want to take up this step.” She questioned the intentions behind

the move. “Even if this is in response to Shraddha’s case, Shraddha was not married.” The resolution has troubling implications for privacy and the right to personal choice. It implies that it is only “marriages of choice” that lead to abuse. There is absolutely no data to support the idea that violence takes place only in interfaith or intercaste marriages, or is perpetrated by a particular community. The government’s proposed solution of reconciling the “estranged” women with the family further jeopardises their safety. Interfaith couples often have to file for legal protection in response to threats and intimidation from families. A content writer, who also did not wish to be named, was in an abusive interfaith relationship before separating from her partner in 2011. Her office colleagues helped her transfer to a different city, far from her former in-laws. Her bosses also encouraged her to seek therapy and counselling. “In general, people should be tracking what’s happening to women—this has nothing to do with interfaith,” she said. “This can happen anywhere.” She recounted another abusive relationship in her twenties with a man from her own faith, who had been physically and emotionally violent with her. Her parents have not spoken to her since the divorce. “What I would have appreciated was for my parents to come into the picture and accept they also need a bit of counselling,” she said. “Instead, they’re still praying to 20 million gods to fix their daughter’s life.” “We see this across classes, we see this across religion, and we see this across castes,” Sarode said. “Whether she’s married, or she’s in a live-in relationship, or is being abused by her own maternal family, because that’s also a domestic relation.” Under the Protection of Violence from Domestic Violence Act, 2005, live-in relationships FEBRUARY 2023

are also characterised as domestic relations. “A victim of domestic violence is a victim of domestic violence, irrespective of which caste and which religion she belongs to.” Many who registered their intercaste or interfaith marriages and sought police protection have noted that they experienced harassment and stigma in the process. So when abuse does take place within these marriages, the prospect of revisiting a hostile system feels daunting. “There is so much fear,” the journalist said. “You have testified in front of the police that you will leave your family to be with someone outside their caste. And then if you were to say that there is abuse, or your partner is not who you thought to be, you are scared they will laugh at you.” Or, worse, dismiss the complaint. Providers of legal, health and security services “are not always sensitised, and may end up normalising their caste, class and religious privilege in their interactions with survivors,” Jayakumar told me. “It is devastating,” she said. “Their humanity is called into question, and their freedom and personal agency are weaponised against them. I find it ridiculous that we assume that anyone would choose to face violence.” For people in intercaste or interfaith marriages, rehabilitation seems impossible when the justice system was never trained to see how oppression is intersectional too. This dismissal complicates their individual identity and mental health. Some carry a disillusionment with the institution of marriage, a guilt for having defied social hierarchies. Some are stuck in toxic marriages, facing helplessness for not ever being able to access social or legal remedies. It pushes people into living complicated lives, one where they battle guilt, fear, helplessness and grief. Recalling her ordeal, the journalist said, “Main thak gayi hoon”—I am exhausted. s 9

the lede

Live Act The unsettling colonial history of India’s Malabaris exhibited in human zoos / History

On a cold autumn day in 1902, Parisians flocked to the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation—Garden of Acclimatisation—in large numbers to witness a spectacular installation of a gopuram, an entrance gateway to a Hindu temple typical of south Indian temple architecture. The installation was part of an ethnographic exhibition by the Hagenbeck brothers, titled Les Malabares—The Malabaris. It was one among various colonial exhibitions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that displayed non-European people and cultures from different parts of the world to entertain their European audience at home. Established by a fishmonger, who bought and sold exotic fish in Hamburg in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hagenbeck company had, by the 1870s, grown to become the largest trader in exotic animals. Carl Hagenbeck inherited the company from his father and expanded the business, to procure “indigenous peoples” from all over the world for, as one record puts it, “presentation in highly profitable spectacles to European scientific societies and the general public.” Humans became a visible part of such exhibitions in the nineteenth century, and, in central and eastern Europe, this trend peaked between the 1880s and the outbreak of the First World War. By the time the Malabaris were exhibited in 1902, Paris had seen many similar events. Particularly since 1877, when Carl Hagenbeck exhibited a group of Nubians from

Posters and photographs suggest that the bamboo climbers, jugglers, monkey trainers, snake charmers and temple dancers had become standard acts.

ww 10

Northeast Africa in front of the animal stalls which proved to be a success. Les Malabares appears to have incorporated installations, humans, arts, crafts and performances that covered— despite what the name suggested—the entire Indian subcontinent. Small straw huts were constructed around the temple structure, where artisans and weavers from India produced and sold a variety of Indian products. One photograph shows the setting: the temple installation amid autumn trees, with a gathering of people standing in the foreground, posing for the camera. The men are bare-chested and wearing turbans; the women stand towards the back, some of them holding babies. Men perform acrobatics on bamboo poles, and a young child is seen atop a shorter bamboo pole, in a backbend. In the front, another child poses in a similar contortion. Towards the left, a white man dressed in a suit and a hat—probably one of the Hagenbeck brothers— stands out among the crowd. Some other European visitors can be seen in the background. In September 1902, reporting about Les Malabares, the magazine La France illustrée introduced the Malabar region to readers as extending from “Cape Comorin along the western coast of India, at the foot of a mountain range called ‘Ghats’ and on which France has the Mahe port.” And, writing a detailed account of the exhibition, the renowned sports journalist Édouard Pontié noted that Les Malabares had brought to the very gates of Paris “true representatives of ancient and mysterious India, the cradle of the world of which so many things disconcert and astonish us.” The articles also make some intriguing observations about the lives and livelihoods of the people of Malabar. La France illustrée wrote, for instance, that Malabaris “live mainly on the highlands … [and] love jewellery, the value of which, in many families, represents a fortune,” and that their THE CARAVAN

opposite page: A set of colonial exhibition postcards and stamps. These attest to the commercial practice of exhibiting nonEuropean people and cultures in human zoos.

“national dish” was a stew of mutton and rice, which they relished “using their hands for spoons and forks, which they wash very carefully after each meal.” Pontié also noted that Malayalam was “sweet to the ear.” Any claims of such shows exhibiting “life as it is” were far from the truth. Scholars of art history Schwartz and Przyblysk, in their detailed work of visual culture in the nineteenth century, point out, for instance, that since facing competition in the 1870s, Hagenbeck had started experimenting with his shows to make them more appealing to the general public, converting them into “a diversified and kinetic show by incorporating blatantly staged performances not exclusive to the ethnographic.” It is hardly surprising, then, that the Malabaris of Paris would include, among others, Gujaratis described as “gypsies” or “Bohemians of India,” who can be seen “climbing like monkeys with surprising agility” to the top of the bamboo poles to do tricks, bayadères—temple dancers— with “charming and adorned heads,” snake charmers, jugglers from Hyderabad and “Hindustanis from the high plateaus.” An account of the history of the Hagenbeck company suggests that the induction of Indians for the show was done after Carl’s half-brother, John Hagenbeck, visited India in 1885, as part of his trip to South Asia to set up an exhibition of indigenous people. Over the next few decades, the Hagenbeck company toured the United States and Europe, putting up shows in various cities under different names like “Indian Caravan,” “Great Indian Exposition,” or, as in the case of 1902 in Paris, “Les Malabares.” Posters and photographs from other similar shows in Europe at the time suggest that the

courtesy s harikrishnan

/ s harikrishnan

the lede

FEBRUARY 2023

11

live act · the lede

Pontié reminded his readers, “these races, these customs, which have lived centuries in their integrity, will perhaps die tomorrow.”

courtesy wikimedia commons

ww

above: An illustration from The Illustrated London News, dated 8 May 1886, shows dignitaries awaiting the arrival of Queen Victoria at the opening of the colonial and Indian exhibition held in London on 4 May 1886.

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bamboo climbers, jugglers, monkey trainers, snake charmers and temple dancers had become standard acts that formed part of the show. A poster of a show in 1911 in Munich, Germany, lists fifteen acts as part of the programme, performed up to five times a day. In 1886, a colonial and Indian exhibition was inaugurated by Queen Victoria in London, to celebrate the British Empire. Saloni Mathur, an associate professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, notes that prisoners from the central jail in Agra were transported to be exhibited as weavers, coppersmiths, painters, silversmiths and potters. The previous winter, 42 Indians brought from the subcontinent on contract to be housed at a “living village of Indian artisans” at a different exhibition had been “grossly deceived” by a recruiting agent. Having been mistreated, starved and left in freezing temperatures—thirty snakes belonging to a snake-charmer were also reportedly killed by the low temperatures—41 of them, one having died, were sent back to India after their miserable experience. Mathur’s book India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, studies how India was “made fashionable” to the western world in the late THE CARAVAN

nineteenth century when, as she puts it, “foreign demand for all things Indian … was at an altogether different peak.” India was rendered both a commodity and an emerging consumer economy, and the exhibitions that exhibited arts, crafts and indeed humans, were a part of this political economy of colonialism and expanding global capitalism. The Collection Radauer, an online archive of human zoo collectibles by cultural historian and social anthropologist Clemens Radauer, consists of over three thousand postcards, photographs, publicity materials, newspaper and magazine articles, and other items linked to the exhibition of “exotic” people in Europe and the United States. Recordings made by the ethnomusicologists Otto Abraham and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel during their visit to Hagenbeck’s “Malabar Troupe” also survive in the form of phonographic and written records of the many types of musical instruments played by the troupe. On the other hand, large archive collections about colonial exhibitions in Poland and the Soviet Union are said to have been destroyed during the Second World War. Whatever little was left is scattered in letters, diaries, newspapers, magazines, postcards and stamps. In recent years, the lives of people such as Sarah Baartman, an African Khoikhoi woman exhibited as a freak-show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe, and Ota Benga, a Congolese man enslaved and exhibited in the United States in the early twentieth century, have shone light on the racist exploitations that human exhibitions perpetuated. Little evidence or oral histories of the plight of the many South Asians and those photographed standing in front of a gopuram in Paris, exhibited across Europe and America by the Hagenbeck brothers, have survived. The Malabaris remained, instead, objects of material culture on display, forcefully taken out of context to be admired, because, as Pontié reminded his readers, “these races, these customs, which have lived centuries in their integrity, will perhaps die tomorrow.” In truth, performers were often riled and ridiculed, as they enacted a dismal imitation of life, while being exposed to the elements of weather and disease. It is painfully ironic, then, considering how many recruits for these ethnographic shows perished on tour, that Pontié’s concluding call to action happened to be the literal fact of the day. s

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the lede

Flagging Spirits The residents of Mulanje fear their ancestors’ wrath / Communities

/ ernest pondani Slightly taller than Mount Olympus, the mythical home of the Greek pantheon, the 3,002-metre Sapitwa Peak, Malawi’s highest point, is regarded by locals as a sacred place where the spirits of their ancestors reside. For centuries, it was believed to be unreachable—its name translates to “a place where people do not go.” Although it was first climbed in 1894, many tourists attempting to scale the peak have died over the years, leading to the dominant narrative among locals that the spirits of the ancestors claim some lives when they are angry. Nevertheless, the peak remains a popular destination for mountaineers, while the Mulanje Massif, an inselberg of which Sapitwa is part, attracts thousands of tourists every year. “I hear a lot about Mulanje mountain,” a German tourist I met while visiting Mulanje, in August 2022, told me. He was in a white t-shirt, with the words “Welcome to the warm heart of Africa” in big letters at the back, denim shorts and hiking boots. “Some make sense, while other narratives are short of reasoning. I have chosen to disregard them in order to have a breathtaking experience. I strongly believe the benefits are more than the costs and I trust my cost-benefit analysis.” He added that the spiritual beliefs about the mountain motivated him. “I am curious to see what really happens and capture all the memories and take them home. This is one of the sensitive ecosystems and valuable tourist attraction areas here in Malawi. If I’m risk averse, nothing will work. After all, life is about taking risks.” Since the outbreak of COVID-19, locals have been offering food—such as nsima, a starchy porridge that is a staple in Malawi, as well as fruits, drinks, rice and meat—in the forests surrounding the mountain, seeking forgiveness and divine intervention 14

from their ancestors for a swift end to the pandemic. “We’re in crisis-ridden times, frankly speaking,” Gogo Nasoko, a resident of Bondo, a village in Mulanje district, told me. “The harvests have been meagre over the years. As if this isn’t enough, the novel coronavirus was also imposed on us. Now polio has landed on our communities.” In February 2022, the Malawi government declared that a strain of the wild poliovirus, endemic to Pakistan, had been detected in the capital, Lilongwe. It was the first African case of wild polio since 2016 and the first to be detected in Malawi in over thirty years, prompting a nationwide immunisation programme. In May, another case was reported in neighbouring Mozambique. The health ministry promptly introduced a door-to-door vaccination campaign targeting children less than five years old, especially in areas that are hard to reach. However, as with the COVID-19 vaccines, there was low uptake due to the same misconceptions and conspiracy theories about vaccines that were contributing to global vaccine hesitancy at the time. The communities

LETTER FROM MALAWI

surrounding the mountain continued to trust the more tried-and-tested divine powers of their ancestors. Nasoko attributed these disasters to an unhealthy relationship between the locals and the spirits. “Ancestral spirits are there up the mountain to save us from all these nightmares, but we’ve fallen short of their glory as communities and individuals,” she said. “People are just missing and drowning anyhow.” In December 2019, two revenue officials died while swimming near a waterfall during a hiking holiday at Mulanje. THE CARAVAN

Nasoko appeared to be in her late seventies. We were speaking on the veranda of her thatched house. I had chosen to interview her because the elderly in Malawi are considered to be societal memories and knowledgeable on cultural issues and traditional beliefs. I asked her whether she believed the sacrifices worked. “When we had an outbreak of smallpox”—in the 1960s—“we offered numerous food sacrifices to ancestral spirits,” she replied. “Our requests were answered. Food sacrifices are not made in vain. They nourish the spirits of our forefathers to continue healing this land when we are grappling with numerous challenges.” Steve Botolo, one of the longest-serving porters in the area, agreed. I met him at the foot of the mountain, as he prepared to guide a tourist up to Chambe Peak, one of Mulanje’s most popular hiking destinations. “The scary spiritual beliefs are not new,” he told me. “In fact, they have stood the test of time. For example, in shrubs like these, we often discover cooked meals, especially during harvesting seasons. The locals offer food sacrifices to their ancestral spirits as one way of appreciating them for the rains and bumper harvest. To us, it is not news. We made peace to live with them.” Locals attribute the challenges affecting their livelihood to a variety of factors, but Nasoko claimed that the troubles were manmade. “Of late, the dwelling places of our ancestral spirits are gradually losing their loyalty due to wanton cutting down of trees for timber and emerging development projects, which are being imposed on us without our say,” she said. “This is making our relationship with the spirits of our forefathers to be sour.” These beliefs contributed to the opposition to the Likhubula–Blantyre Water Project, a $23.5 million project—funded by the Export-Import Bank of India—that draws water from the Likhubula River on the Mulanje

ashley cooper / alamy photo

the lede

Massif to serve Blantyre, Malawi’s business capital and second-largest city, located over seventy kilometres away. The height and structure of the mountain have led to the development of a unique microclimate in the region, with heavy rainfall for much of the year favouring rich biodiversity and providing a reliable supply of clean water for nearby towns and villages. However, residents of the area believed that the installation of a pumping station at the Dziwe la Nkhalamba waterfall, a site for sacrifices intended to facilitate greater rainfall, would anger the spirits of their ancestors. Despite their protests, the project went ahead in 2016—and locals believe that the hardships they have faced since then are the result of their ancestral spirits’ wrath. Locals believe that the decision to go ahead with the project without their consent was against the joint management philosophy that was established to ensure a bottom-up approach to the management of all natural resources on the

mountain. The diversion of water from the Likhubula has affected their own access to clean water and, thanks to a decrease in rainfall over the past few years, has not adequately addressed the water crisis in Blantyre either. There are also fears that the project will affect the natural beauty of the area, jeopardising future tourism revenue. Officials from the department of tourism and the Blantyre Water Board refused my interview requests. “We were not involved right in the beginning, when the statutory corporations started constructing the pumping site,” Gracious Bello, another resident of the area, told me. “We tried to reason with them through our local chiefs.” There have been allegations that some chiefs were bribed by government officials, while some protesters were offered jobs as guards at the project site. “Unfortunately, all our efforts failed to bear fruits,” Bello said. “They labelled us enemies of development.” s FEBRUARY 2023

above: Malawian workers toil in a field below Mount Mulanje. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, locals have been offering food in the forests surrounding the mountain, seeking forgiveness and divine intervention from their ancestors for a swift end to the pandemic.

15

The CaravanԝƹɨȈȶǼɰ ʰɁʍɨljǼʍȢƃɨɁɥȈȶȈɁȶɰ ƃȶǁƃȶƃȢʰɰȈɰǹɨɁȴ ƃʍɽȃɁɨȈɽƃɽȈʤljȚɁʍɨȶƃȢȈɰɽɰ ƺɁʤljɨȈȶǼɥɁȢȈɽȈƺɰӗǼȢɁƹƃȢ ƃǹǹƃȈɨɰӗȃljƃȢɽȃƺƃɨljӗ ɨljȢȈǼȈɁȶӗƺʍȢɽʍɨljӗ ɽljƺȃȶɁȢɁǼʰƃȶǁȴɁɨljӝ caravanmagazine.in/caravan-columns

PERSPECTIVES Rain on the Sangh’s Parade The myth that Nehru invited the RSS to the 1963 Republic Day event / History

The much-hyped claim that India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to take part in the Republic Day parade of 1963 is nothing but an outright attempt to insert a lie in Indian history. Archival records refute this assertion. Instead, they suggest a completely different scenario: some members of the RSS, in their full uniform, entered that year’s Republic Day event, which was more of a citizens’ march than a military parade due to the national emergency caused by the Sino-Indian War of 1962. This claim has routinely cropped up in the last few years and generated intense speculation. “Recognising the role that the RSS played in national emergencies, Pandit Nehru invited them for Republic Day parade in 1963,” Ratan Sharda, a member of the RSS media team, wrote in his 2018 book, RSS 360. “A 3000 strong RSS contingent in uniform participated in the parade with just three days’ notice.” When the former president Pranab Mukherjee visited the Sangh’s Nagpur headquarters, in June 2018, the RSS and its sympathisers used this claim to silence critics. Even in September 2022, when the governor of Kerala, Arif Mohammad Khan, was criticised for visiting an RSS leader’s residence at Thrissur to meet the Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat, he invoked this very argument. Nothing of this sort ever happened, archival records show. “More than 100,000 people joined the citizens’ march and raised slogans renewing their resolve to safeguard India’s honour and integrity against Chinese treachery and aggression,” the Hindustan Times reported in its 28 January 1963 edition. “The Armed Forces parade was on a small scale this year, reminding the people that the bulk of the forces were at the front guarding against further Chinese encroachments. Even the citizens’ march was shorn of pomp and pageantry because of the national emergency and the need 18

bettmann / getty images

/ dhirendra k jha

for austerity and economy.” Nehru and his cabinet colleagues led a contingent of members of parliament in the march, the Times of India reported. Organising a citizens’ march was Nehru’s idea, since the ministry of defence, the nodal ministry that organised the parades, was contemplating dropping the event altogether. On 10 December 1962, Nehru wrote a detailed note to the defence minister, YB Chavan, in which he opposed the THE CARAVAN

perspectives

idea to drop the Republic Day celebrations and proposed the idea of a citizens’ march. I agree that the Republic Day ceremony should avoid all unnecessary expenditure. Also that there should be no movement of troops from different parts of the country to Delhi, but I do not understand that why there should not be any parade. That parade will only consist of some troops in Delhi itself, and, chiefly, it should be a civil parade, which can be joined in by a very large number of our people. The Home Guards, the NCC, will of course be there, as well as any other volunteer units in Delhi. Students, both college and school, may join it as well as trade unions and the numerous other organisations in Delhi. All these persons need not be drilled. It does not matter if they are not in step and they need not be trained for it. They should march en masse. I am sure this will be good and will have a strong effect on those who join it and on those who see it. The following day, he pressed the idea during a meeting of the Congress parliamentary party. “It was suggested that we should give up the parade,” Nehru said. “I did not like that idea, but we are converting the parade into much less of a military function and much more of a civil function … So the present idea is that the members of parliament be asked also to participate in the parade in a block.” In a note to Kesho Ram, his personal secretary, on 19 January 1963, Nehru again emphasised that the idea of the march was to have a strength of at least a hundred thousand people. At this time, the RSS was desperate to gain legitimacy. Its credibility had reached an all-time low, even though the ban that was imposed on it after the assassination of MK Gandhi in 1948 had long been lifted. The RSS likely saw the march as a window of opportunity and, as Nehru later revealed, began hectic efforts to mobilise its members not just from Delhi but also from neighbouring areas. On 4 February 1963, the RSS mouthpiece Organiser reported that over two thousand swayamsevaks, “in their full organisational uniform—white shirt, khaki knickers, belt, black cap and full boots—took part in the parade and formed the major highlight of the Delhi Citizens group.” Nehru was aware of these machinations. Addressing a meeting of the parliamentary party,

on 27 January 1963, Nehru had said, “Some Congressmen came to me a day before and said that RSS people are collecting men with uniforms from Ghaziabad and Meerut and other places, we do not have so many uniforms. I said, ‘Look, I cannot stop the RSS from coming in, it is wrong to prevent anything.’” He added that no dress code had been prescribed to civilians for their participation in the citizens’ march. “Also, I said no bands, private bands of parties. For the rest, they can come in any dress or uniform or not, I cannot hold that.” Nehru mentioned that the rumour was that twenty-five thousand RSS members would come but, despite the fanfare, only two thousand did. “We cannot stop them,” he said. “What can we do about that? The matter was in the hands of government only till the people came. After that it was not directly in the government’s hands. It had been handed over to the mayor”—Nuruddin Ahmed— “who had made very good arrangements.” It is possible that the RSS men took part in the march as members of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, a central trade union of the Sangh. They did not carry any banner or placards, or even the saffron flag of their organisation. Their contingent might just have got mixed up in the massive crowd and not looked conspicuous, because the administration had, in any case, asked several people to join in. This might have been the reason why most newspapers failed to take note of their presence, even though the RSS men joined the march in full uniform. Only the Hindi daily Hindustan carried a photograph of a group of RSS men taking part in the citizens’ march. The photograph is part of a full-page photo feature on the event, published in its 28 January 1963 edition. What is most striking in the photograph is that the RSS men carried the national flag instead of their saffron flag. This was perhaps the first time when, stoked by its desperate need to seek legitimacy, the RSS was forced to show some respect to the national flag in public. Until then, the RSS had despised the tricolour, even though when the ban on it was lifted in 1949, the organisation had given a commitment that it would respect the national flag. Yet, this photograph became the sole evidence for its false claims that Nehru had invited them to the Republic Day event and that the RSS had participated in it as a separate contingent. s FEBRUARY 2023

opposite page: Jawaharlal Nehru on 10 April 1954 in Delhi. Addressing a meeting of the parliamentary party, on 27 January 1963, Nehru had said, “Some Congressmen came to me a day before and said that RSS people are collecting men with uniforms from Ghaziabad and Meerut and other places, we do not have so many uniforms. I said, ‘Look, I cannot stop the RSS from coming in, it is wrong to prevent anything.’”

19

perspectives

Any Port In A Storm

ani photo

How the Left used the BJP’s formula to discredit protests against Adani’s Kerala port / Politics

/ sindhu nepolean In December 2015, Oommen Chandy, then chief minister of Kerala and a member of the Congress party, laid the foundation stone for the R7,525 crore Vizhinjam International Port project, a deepwater multipurpose seaport in Thiruvananthapuram district. It is being built under a public-private partnership model with Adani Ports. The agreement allows the Adani Group to operate the port for 40 years, with a provision to extend it for another 20 years, after which it is to be handed over to the Kerala government. Construction of the port began in 2015. The main argument of the proponents of the project is that by making Vizhinjam a hub for cargo operations in 20

the Indian subcontinent, a major part of transhipment traffic can be attracted there, allowing it to compete with ports in Colombo, Singapore and Dubai. A transhipment port is an intermediary port where transfer of cargo takes place from one ship to another, before it moves to a final destination. “The seaport will be a game changer as it will wean away a lion’s share of Indian transhipment cargo, now being handled at Colombo port,” Jayakumar, the chief executive officer of Vizhinjam International Seaport Limited, set up by the Kerala government, said. The Adani group has claimed that this project will boost the economy. Its supporters have also claimed that it will generate significant employment and could turn the nearby ThiruvaTHE CARAVAN

nanthapuram into a city like Dubai or Singapore. Both the mainstream media and political leaders have pushed this narrative. However, fishing communities across Thiruvananthapuram district have been protesting the port, with the resistance intensifying in August 2022. In its response, the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala has attempted to discredit and supress the protests using the same playbook often used by right-wing parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party. The government is currently led by Pinarayi Vijayan, a polit bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The state government and Left parties have attempted to brand the protesters as anti-national and as part of a

perspectives

foreign-funded conspiracy, employing the BJP’s formula to delegitimise collective protest by marginalised communities. The protesters say that the port construction is causing coastal erosion and impacting their livelihood and homes. AJ Vijayan, the founder-member of the National Fishworkers’ Forum and an independent researcher from the fishing community, pointed out that the initial claim was that the sea at Vizhinjam has natural depth and that there would be little need for dredging, but there has been significant dredging ongoing as part of the port’s construction. The protesters said that coastal villages to the north of Vizhinjam began to see extensive erosion after the construction of a breakwater into the sea. Critics of the project emphasise that at least three hundred people in the Thiruvananthapuram district have already been displaced from their homes and shifted to relief camps due to coastal erosion. The protesters demanded that the construction of the port be halted and a proper environmental impact study be conducted to assess whether the port is causing severe coastal erosion in the area. They also asked that representatives nominated by the protesters be included in the expert committee conducting the study. Other demands included the rehabilitation of families who lost their homes to sea erosion, effective steps to mitigate coastal erosion, financial assistance to fisherfolk on days weather warnings are issued, subsidised kerosene and compensation to families of those who lose their lives in fishing accidents. The protesters said that fishermen have had to go deeper into the ocean for their catch as a result of the port, thereby increasing their fuel costs. The government agreed to carry out a study and issued an order on 6 October last year constituting a four-member expert committee. However, it refused to include representatives from the fishing communities, as the protesters had demanded. It also refused to halt the construction of the project while the study was being conducted, a primary demand from the fishing communities. “Such a demand cannot be countenanced under any circumstances. It is illogical and unacceptable,” Pinarayi Vijayan said in the Kerala assembly. He has argued that there had been no coastal erosion due to the Vizhinjam project. He said that all the scientific studies conducted before the construction of the project had found no link between the

port construction and coastal erosion. He added that due to its special topography, even the coastal erosion seen in normal port areas would not occur in Vizhinjam. However, according to a 2011 study conducted by the National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management, almost sixty three percent of the Kerala coast is eroding. The NCSCM is a Chennai-based research institute under the union ministry of environment, forest and climate change. The study advised that “proper precautions be taken prior to erecting any further structures along the eroding and vulnerable coastal stretches of Kerala.” It also concluded that among all the coastal districts of Kerala, the Thiruvananthapuram coast had the highest percentage of erosion, at 23.33 percent. An office memorandum of the environment ministry dated 3 November 2009, also weighed the risks of constructing and expanding port projects in sensitive coastal areas. It concluded that such construction should only proceed when “hydro-dynamic studies indicate that the expansion activities of the existing port do not have significant impact to the shoreline.” It emphasised that new projects should be subjected to a “comprehensive environment impact assessment” based on “actual field measurements and appropriate modelling studies.” Questioning the claims that Vizhinjam can quickly become a leading transhipment hub in South Asia, the project’s detractors say that Vizhinjam will face a significant challenge from already established ports like Colombo and Singapore. They emphasise that it is only with worldclass services that Vizhinjam will be able to bring the vessels currently operating through competing ports to itself. A more robust assessment of the claims that the project will boost the economy—as the Adani group has said—and an analysis of pros and cons of the project is warranted in light of the concerns raised by the fishing communities. When the Vizhinjam port project was first announced, there were no serious protests from the fishing community, primarily because it was not adequately informed about the potential adverse effects. Social activists such as the late T Peter, the then general secretary of the National Fishworkers’ Forum, AJ Vijayan, and Johnson Jament, a marine conservationist, criticised this project, but the subsequent protests did not see widespread participation from fishing communities. FEBRUARY 2023

opposite page: Women from the fishing community protest against the Vizhinjam port in Thiruvananthapuram district. Protesters say that the port construction is causing coastal erosion and impacting their livelihood and homes.

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any port in a storm · perspectives At the same time, the Latin Catholic church, which holds significant sway in the area, also spoke against the project. M Soosa Pakiam, the archbishop of the Latin Catholic archdiocese of Thiruvananthapuram at the time, raised concerns. A letter written by him, demanding protection for fishing communities affected by the port project, was read out in all churches under the archdiocese. Members from the community told me that some churches had observed the day the government signed the contract with the Adani Group as a black day. However, at the time, the church did not actively spearhead protests against the project. Eugene H Pereira, the vicar general of the Trivandrum Latin archdiocese, told me that whenever the diocese attempted to speak against the project, there were rumours that the church was blocking a project that would enable major infrastructure

The Left in Kerala has attempted to brand the protesters as anti-national and as part of a foreignfunded conspiracy.

ww development in Thiruvananthapuram. The diocese had concerns about being branded as anti-development and there was no attempt to organise a collective movement. In the following years, isolated protests continued with smaller local demands. In 2017, during the piling work for the construction of a berth of Vizhinjam port, the locals protested alleging that there were cracks in the walls of many houses in the area and several houses were damaged. Collective protests also took place in 2021 at Shanghumugham, a popular tourist beach near Thiruvananthapuram city, as houses collapsed due to coastal erosion. But these protests were largely ignored by both the government and the media. On 5 June 2022, on world environment day, fishermen began a strike in front of the domestic terminal of Thiruvananthapuram airport. It was spear22

headed by a joint committee formed with representatives of the Kerala Swathanthra Matsyathozhilali Federation or the Federation of Independent Fishing Labourers, the National Alliance of Farmers, the Coastal Students Cultural Forum and other civil society groups. The protesters demanded that the government completely abandon the Vizhinjam project. However, the strike soon fizzled out. In July 2022, the Latin Catholic church decided to actively step in and galvanise their parishes. After this, the protests gathered momentum and led to a widespread, sustained movement. Many fishers in southern Kerala, especially in the Thiruvananthapuram district, are Christians and members of the Mukkuvar caste group. They are one of the most socially disadvantaged groups in Kerala. The community is often represented by the church. The coastal villages of Thiruvananthapuram district populated by Christian fishers also serve as parishes of the Latin Archdiocese of Thiruvananthapuram. Consequently, the Latin church was able to mobilise communities across 32 fishing villages from around a hundred and twenty parishes to participate in the Vizhinjam protest. On 20 July, a group of Latin priests started a strike in front of the Kerala government secretariat. People from parishes across the Thiruvananthapuram diocese came together in solidarity in a protest that lasted a little over ten days. Baselios Cleemis, the head of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, and VD Satheesan, an opposition leader and a member of the Congress party, also attended. Subsequently, on 10 August, fishermen reached the heart of Thiruvananthapuram city with their fishing boats and protested by blocking the city and surrounding the secretariat. People of various fishing hamlets from Pozhiyoor, the southernmost part of the district, to Anchuthengu, the northernmost part of the district, took part in this strike. It was after this agitation, which impacted the public and brought the city to a standstill, that the mainstream media in Kerala began to take note of the protests. THE CARAVAN

Finally, the protesters shifted their venue to the very entrance gate of Vizhinjam port. On 16 August, a day after Independence Day, thousands came to the port gate with black flags. The protesters said the strike would continue and intensify until the government was ready to negotiate. A protest committee was formed with Pereira as its head. On the third day of the strike, the protesters broke the barricades at the port gate that had been erected by the police and security personnel. They subsequently entered the premises of the main building and planted a community flag. As these protests escalated, the governmental finally began to hold talks with the representatives of the movement. Multiple rounds of discussions were held, including with the fisheries minister V Abdurahiman, but nothing concrete emerged. The government agreed to concede to some demands but refused to stop the construction of the port. Through this time, as sustained protests continued, politicians began to defame and communalise the resistance movement. The ruling LDF government attempted to cast the protests as an international plot to thwart the construction of the Vizhinjam port. They also attempted to portray the struggle as a conspiracy of the church. The chief minister’s statement that it was not simply fishermen protesting but seemingly a pre-planned agitation fuelled these narratives. The dominant discourse suggested that coastal communities lacked agency and were merely acting as disempowered pawns of the clergy. The church’s decision to be visibly present and at the forefront of the agitation enabled accusations that the protests were orchestrated. Abdurahiman described the protesters as “anti-national,” and said that no one who loves the country could accept such protests. “Hindering construction activities which are crucial for the nation’s development should be examined as [an] anti-national move,” he said while addressing a seminar organised by the Vizhinjam International Seaport Limited. He further hinted that there were ulterior motives for the protest. “I don’t think these demonstrations [are] a protest, it is something else,” he

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any port in a storm · perspectives continued. He even called the protests “treason.” V Sivankutty, the education minister, said the protesters were acting like “terrorists.” He further implied that there were foreign forces pushing the protests. “It needs to be investigated whether there has been any external force in the protests,” he said. Sivankutty claimed that “protesters are getting funds from the outside.” He also said that there were attempts to unleash riots in the state, even though the government was maintaining utmost restraint in using force. EP Jayarajan, the LDF convenor, demanded an inquiry into the people “hell-bent on denying Kerala its rightful place on the global trade map.” He also said the protests would “benefit only foreign forces.” P Mohanan, the CPI(M) Kozhikode district secretary, similarly said that attempts to stall the project were indicative of a deep-rooted multinational plot. He sought a probe into the funding of the protesters. The BJP had a similar stance on the protest. In a reference to the Latin Catholic church, K Surendran, the BJP state president, said that the people behind the Vizhinjam agitation were the same forces who organised the protest against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu. However, the most overt display of the convergence between the CPI(M) and the BJP came during a “long march” organised by supporters of the project. In the first week of November, a group called the Save Vizhinjam Port Action Council marched towards the secretariat in support of the port. The council comprised Hindu groups such as the Hindu Aikya Vedi or Hindu United Front, the upper caste Nair Service Society, Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam and Vaikunda Swami Dharma Pracharana. This march had the backing of both the CPI(M) and the BJP. Anavoor Nagappan, then the CPI(M) Thiruvananthapuram district secretary, and VV Rajesh, the BJP Thiruvananthapuram district president, attended the rally and addressed the “people’s collective.” “The protesters are being controlled by a group which has ulterior motives,” Nagappan said. 24

“CPM will provide all support to the people’s collective.” Meanwhile Rajesh said both the central and state governments intended to complete construction at the earliest. “The agitation is an attempt to sabotage the plan,” he said. “BJP will provide all support to the project.” The escalation of the protests outside the port gate, since August 2022, had compelled the halting of construction. The Adani group then approached the Kerala High Court and the Supreme Court asking for police protection to resume construction. The high court directed the construction work to go ahead with state protection. On 26 November, protesters tried to physically block the vehicles of port authorities carrying construction materials and trying to enter the project site. This led to a clash between the project’s supporters and opponents that turned violent, with the police detaining five men. Soon a message spread within the fishing community that the police had begun arresting protesters. The next day, on 27 November, priests and protesters went to the Vizhinjam police station seeking the release of those detained. They were accompanied by the family members of some of those picked up by the police. As the negotiations continued, large groups of people gathered outside the police station leading to further altercations between the police and protesters. Soon after it got dark, unidentified people began pelting stones from the terrace of a building opposite the police station. Things rapidly spiralled out of control and violence erupted. Police resorted to throwing tear gas shells, grenades, and a lathi-charge to disperse the crowd. Media reports estimate that at least forty-six protesters and thirty police personnel were injured. However, much of the media reporting on the incident simply repeated the police version that the protesters had attacked the police station and failed to include the voices of the protesting fishing communities. The police then registered a first-information-report against Thomas J Netto, the archbishop of the Latin Catholic archdiocese of ThiruvaTHE CARAVAN

nanthapuram, and named him as a prime accused in the case. They also registered cases against 3,000 people, booking them under an attempt to murder charge. They further claimed that protesters had damaged police station property and vehicles worth R85 lakh. This incident led to heavy tension in Vizhinjam and nearby areas. In the following days, a large number of policemen were deployed at the port gate. The strike committee came under immense pressure to end the protest. The government reiterated its stand that the construction of the port cannot be stopped and that representatives selected by the protesters cannot be included in the expert committee studying the coastal erosion. It formed a monitoring committee headed by the chief secretary claiming that it would attempt to meet, partially or fully, most of the other demands. On 6 December, after a sustained agitation of over 130 days, Pereira announced that the strike would be called off but not because they were satisfied with the promises made by the government. He told reporters that if required, the agitation may resume again. A defining feature of the reaction to these protests will remain the coming together of the CPI(M) and the BJP, two seemingly disparate forces, to speak in one voice. It showed the predictable way in which the state, irrespective of which party is in power, often responds to marginalised communities, pushing a uniform idea of what constitutes development. Those who raise questions are discredited and ideological differences cease to matter in this quest. The CPI(M) clearly used the same arsenal that the BJP routinely deploys to crush dissent. Commenting on this alignment, Theodacious D’Cruz, a Latin Catholic priest and one of the convenors of the protest committee, told the media that it showed the influence of corporate money. “It shows the nexus between the two parties,” he said. “They are all with Adani now. Political parties that had initially stated they were with the fishermen, have now changed their stand under the influence of money. Only fishermen are left to face the loss of livelihood and dwellings.” s

sanna irshad mattoo

DESTINATION UNKNOWN The skewed vision of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra

COVER STORY / POLITICS SAGAR

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the vazirabad chaurasta in Nanded, a town in central Maharashtra, echoed with the sounds of trumpets, drums, cymbals and patriotic songs in the afternoon of 10 November. Around a hundred local workers of the Indian National Congress had gathered to welcome their former party president Rahul Gandhi, who was expected to arrive before sunset and address a rally. Dozens of youngsters carrying national flags stood in one corner, while Brahmin priests chanted shlokas in unison at the centre of the crossroads. It was the sixty-fourth day of Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra—which translates to “the journey to unite India”—a march of nearly thirty-five hundred kilometres from Kanyakumari to Srinagar. “All of you would have seen that the people of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party are spreading hatred and violence in the country, pitting brother against brother,” Gandhi had told a crowd in Telangana, two weeks earlier. The objective of the yatra, he said, was to stand up against this hatred and violence, as well as against unemployment, inflation and crony capitalism. By 4.30 pm, the crowd at the crossroads had thickened. The local police had blocked traffic from entering the road leading to the railway station, about a kilometre to the north. On both sides of the road, residents stood outside their shops and houses to see the march. The first glimpse they got was of an open-roof truck with around a dozen camera operators, all of whose lenses were pointed to the north, followed by a pickup van fitted with a camera jib that filmed the march from all angles. Behind it, Gandhi was walking along with half a dozen special invitees, including Supriya Sule, a leader of the Nationalist Congress Party; Nana Patole, the president of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee; and the Bollywood actor Sushant Singh. Mallikarjun Kharge, the newly elected Congress president, also addressed that evening’s rally. Every now and then, Gandhi waved at the spectators flanking the road. He was walking within a perimeter formed by around a hundred police personnel holding a thick rope. I had naïvely assumed that anybody could approach him, shake his hand or give him a hug, as was being depicted in the many social-media videos about the yatra, but that was not the case. Many people shouted “Rahul!” to attract his attention. On arriving at the crossroads, he waved at the priests and party workers before turning east and continuing his journey. I had been watching from a roadside platform and followed Gandhi for about half a kilometre. What was unusual about the crowd was the presence, amid a dozen tricolours, of an Ambedkarite standard—a square blue flag with an Ashok Chakra, THE CARAVAN

symbolising equality as well as Dalit pride and resistance. It was being carried by a couple of women walking a little behind the perimeter. I walked up to the women and asked about their reasons for supporting the yatra. It turned out that they did not. They were returning from another event, organised by the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, a political party founded by Prakash Ambedkar. Because the local administration had blocked the roads, they told me, they had no option but to follow the yatra. “Jai Bhim wale hain hum”—We are followers of

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this spread: Rahul Gandhi and the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, greet attendees at a rally in Nanded on 10 November 2022.

destination unknown · essay Bhimrao Ambedkar—one of the women said. “We are not with them.” Nanded has a strong Ambedkarite presence, with Buddhists accounting for over fifteen percent of the population. Five days earlier, Prakash Ambedkar had held a rally on the same ground where Gandhi was headed, in support of the 22 vows that BR Ambedkar had administered to his followers as they converted to Buddhism, on 15 October

1956. These included pledges to “have no faith in Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh,” and to “believe in the equality of men.” Every year, on the anniversary of Ambedkar’s conversion, thousands of Dalits across the country take these vows while renouncing Hinduism, which, according to one of the vows, “impedes the advancement and development of humanity because it is based on inequality.”

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On 5 October 2022, Rajendra Pal Gautam, a cabinet minister in the Delhi government, organised an event at which, he later tweeted, over ten thousand people took the 22 vows. After a video of the event circulated on social media, Hindu fanatics, including BJP leaders such as its North East Delhi MP, Manoj Tiwari, forced Gautam to resign as minister. The Nanded rally called by Prakash Ambedkar, one of the few politicians to extend

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support to Gautam, had been organised to reclaim the legacy of the vows and assert their significance in the lives of Dalits. But Gandhi—who had delivered a speech the previous evening with a tripundra, a Hindu religious marking, on his forehead—showed no solidarity with the vows, even as he urged his audience to stand up against hatred and violence. He made no mention of them, or of Gautam’s resignation or the threats by Hindu fanatics to the annual conversion rituals of Dalits. The omission, while unsurprising, was significant. Since the BJP came 30

to power, in 2014, it has projected orthodox Hinduism as a superior religion in need of aggressive revival. In keeping with the ideology of the Sangh Parivar, it also perpetuates the caste system that would keep those lower in the social hierarchy subservient to the upper castes. However, in the face of increased assertion by oppressed-caste leaders—including some of its allies— seeking an increase in reservations in education, employment and political representation, it has projected Muslims and Christians as enemies to the existence of Hindus. On the national THE CARAVAN

stage, there is still no agreement over which political ideology should lead the opposition to the BJP. Gandhi’s yatra was meant to bring together Indians before the next general election, in 2024. During a press conference after he reached Delhi, Gandhi claimed that the Congress is the only party that can provide a “central ideological framework and structure” to fight the BJP. And yet, Gandhi’s refusal to stand up for Gautam was another example of his failure to address the core issue he claims to be fighting against: the BJP’s hatred and violence. In his speeches

mohd zakir / hindustan times / getty images

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above: On 5 October 2022, Rajendra Pal Gautam, a cabinet minister in the Delhi government, organised an event at which, he later tweeted, over ten thousand people took BR Ambedkar’s 22 vows. He was subsequently forced to resign.

and interviews during the yatra, Gandhi has projected violence as a diversionary tactic that allows the Narendra Modi government to transfer money and national resources to a few oligarchs. He has also depicted hatred as the outcome of frustrations among the masses caused by the government’s economic policies. In short, Gandhi presents unemployment, price rise and the concentration of wealth as the reasons behind hatred and violence. Gandhi classifies the victims of this hatred and violence in terms of identities such as farmers, the youth and the owners of small businesses. Such categorisation, which may strike a chord with Savarna voters, allows him to escape taking a stand on the hate crimes that have proliferated during the tenure of the Modi government, whose victims—Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims—find themselves absent from his narrative. To say that economics is the sole motive behind these crimes ignores the receding social relations between different communities. Farmers, young people and the owners of small businesses have suffered under Modi, but their suffering has mostly been limited to their livelihoods, not their lives. Many members of these communities have, in fact, supported the BJP. For instance, even at the height of the farmers’ agitation against the Modi government’s agricultural laws, Naresh Tikait, the president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, was willing to be photographed with the BJP MP Sanjeev Balyan, with whom he shares a caste identity. Balyan and several BKU leaders are accused of fomenting religious hatred before the 2013 communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, in which 62 people—two-thirds of them Muslim—were killed. By putting these identities on the same pedestal as those who have borne the brunt of the BJP’s hatred and violence, Gandhi fails to acknowledge that marginalised communities continue to face atrocities, humiliation and discrimination, or to provide a political vision that would alleviate this misery. The Bharat Jodo Yatra might work as a gesture, engendering enthusiasm among Congress supporters towards the political fight to come, but to see it as an ideological alternative is a stretch. In order to effectively combat hatred and violence, Gandhi would need to walk the extra mile and actually call out Hinduism, from which the BJP draws its strength, rather than blaming the atrocities on Bad Hindus who do not speak for Good Hindus like him. Instead, he tries to have it both ways, claiming to lead the resistance against the excesses of orthodox Hinduism without alienating orthodox Hindus. This act of political theatre seeks to metamorphose Gandhi from youth leader to sagacious keeper of the constitutional flame and to project FEBRUARY 2023

him as the answer to the ubiquitous question “If not Modi, then who?” However, Gandhi’s double standards and contradictory politics, as well as the Congress’s historical role in enabling the hatred and violence he claims to want to eradicate, reduce an avowed exercise in nation-building to a project meant to rehabilitate a single politician’s image. a common feature of Gandhi’s speeches throughout the Bharat Jodo Yatra has been the offer of an “alternate vision” to the country. “There is a particular vision that the RSS and BJP propose,” he said during a press conference in Jaipur. “It’s a violent path. It’s a hate-filled path. It’s a path that is designed to create two Indias. One is an India where there are five or six billionaires, and the other India where everybody else will live in poverty in desperation. That’s their vision.” Gandhi’s alternate vision was a country that had “a conversation with itself. It should be affectionate to itself. It should understand the pain that this country is going through. It should not be arrogant. It should be humble. It should reach out to people. It should embrace other people. That’s another vision. This is what Bharat Jodo Yatra has very successfully shown.” Gandhi had nothing to say about the possible content of these conversations—about his party’s political ideology, its social outlook, its economic model or its stand on religion. The BJP, he acknowledged, has “complete clarity on who they are. It’s easy to have clarity on who they are

Gandhi’s refusal to stand up for Rajendra Pal Gautam was another example of his failure to address the core issue he claims to be fighting against: the BJP’s hatred and violence. because for them it’s just, ‘Do you hate so and so? Yes, you do, okay, that’s who you are.’ For us, it’s much more complicated. But the day the Congress Party understands in depth who it is and what it stands for, it will win every election that it faces.” This alternate vision needs a thorough examination. A reporter in Mumbai asked Gandhi how he dealt with criticism and trolling. He replied that he tries to respond through “truth and nonviolence,” philosophies he credited to Hinduism. Even if we avoid the debate on whether they originated in Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism, the statement shows that Gandhi draws political inspiration from his religion. Throughout the yatra, like in his recent election campaigns, he projected 31

opposite page: The Bharat Jodo Yatra has marked an evolution in Rahul Gandhi’s Hindu image.

himself as a staunch Hindu who believes in rituals and scriptures. In September, he paid tribute to Swaroopanand Saraswati, a Hindu high priest who supported the caste system and practised untouchability, as one “who always showed the path of truth and religion.” He cited the Gita, instead of the Constitution, when asking Hindus to be nonviolent towards their fellow citizens. A vision of India constructed on the values of Brahminism and the caste system—of which, as Ambedkar points out, the Gita mounts a “philosophical defence”—cannot be inclusive. Gandhi used Hindu idioms to convey his political message throughout the yatra. On the eightieth day, in the temple town of Ujjain, in Madhya Pradesh, with his forehead smeared with a tilak, he began his speech with “Jai Mahakal,” a religious chant dedicated to the deity Shiv. Claiming that Shiv, Ram and Krishna were all tapasvis—ascetics—he said that “India is a nation of tapasvis. In Hinduism, tapasvis are worshipped and loved.” He called the yatra a tapasya—penance—but said that it paled in comparison to the tapasya performed by the labourers who trekked home during the pandemic, the farmers who work hard every day, as well as barbers, florists, electricians and small shopkeepers. “Why are these tapasvis not worshipped in this country?” he asked. “The government has nothing to offer them. Instead, it gives everything to two people who spend all day worshipping Modi,” referring to Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani, industrialists who have close relationships with Modi. When Gandhi reached Jammu, in January, a journalist asked him about his reaction to the government’s censoring of the BBC documentary India: The Modi Question. “Look, you read our scriptures,” he replied. “If you read the Gita and if you read the Upanishads, you will see the truth cannot be hidden. The truth always comes out.” Two weeks earlier, in Kurukshetra, another journalist asked him what he would do once the yatra ended. “When Arjun was aiming for the fish’s eye,” he said, referring to a story from the Mahabharat, “did he say what he would do after hitting the fish’s eye? He didn’t, right? It’s in the Gita also—you work with focus—so the yatra has the same thinking.”

Instead of challenging Narendra Modi for infusing politics with religion, Rahul Gandhi’s new strategy is to claim that Modi’s policies run contrary to Hinduism. 32

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While he was reluctant to be pigeonholed into a particular political ideology, Gandhi was unambiguous in his assertion that he is a Shaivite Hindu. When a YouTube creator, in Mumbai, asked him if he believed in god, he said that he did but added that his conception of god was a “very personal idea, an internal idea.” He cited Shiv as “a good idea” who “personifies a wholesale attack on the idea of the self.” This concept of religion does indeed seem personal and idealistic, but Gandhi contradicts Shiv when he participates in Brahminical rituals. In his book Riddles in Hinduism, Ambedkar calls Shiv “an Anti-Vedic God” because of his disdain for yajnas. Gandhi, on the contrary, seeks to bring Shiv back into the Brahminical fold. The yatra has marked an evolution in Gandhi’s Hindu image. During the 2019 general election, he accused Modi of corruption, popularising the slogan “Chowkidar Chor Hai”—the watchman is the thief. After the Congress subsequently suffered one of its worst ever electoral defeats, he changed tack by pitting Hinduism against the idea of Hindutva, a term developed by the Hindu nationalist ideologue VD Savarkar to distinguish religion from political ideology. The distinction itself is specious. Ambedkar has argued that the central doctrine of graded inequality within Hinduism makes it incompatible with the basic tenets of democracy. In any case, this has not worked, since believers prefer the original over imitators. Gandhi has now made religion itself his medium of political messaging. Instead of challenging Modi for infusing politics with religion, his new strategy is to claim that Modi’s policies run contrary to Hinduism. By using Hinduism as a political weapon, he is playing on Modi’s turf. It is true that Gandhi has used Hinduism to call for unity against religious division. In Delhi, in December, he said that the BJP “talks about Hinduism, but I ask you where it is written that the poor and the weak must be trampled? Where is it written that the weak must be killed? I have read the Gita and the Upanishads, but I didn’t find it anywhere.” It might be politically expedient to use religion to counter hatred, but doing so implicitly bolsters the presence of religion in politics. There is a difference between Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Brahmin, approaching the Gita as a “treasure house of Dharma” that can lead to “the highest good of mankind” and Ambedkar, a Dalit, treating the text as ancient literature that upholds inequality. Without acknowledging the oppression that is ingrained in the religion, Gandhi’s political use of Hinduism will only harm those occupying lower positions in the Hindu social hierarchy in the long run. What the country needs is not a Good Hindu telling people that his religion is one of compas-

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sion and employing scripture to instil love and harmony but a truly democratic leader who can establish the Constitution as a political weapon to counter hatred and violence. the alternate vision propounded by Gandhi must also be evaluated in terms of the history it is grounded in. While addressing journalists in Karnataka, he said that the Congress “is the only party that represents every single Indian person. It doesn’t discriminate between caste, community, religion or state. We are everyone’s party.” In Jaipur, he explained that the Congress is undergoing an evolution. “The party is adapting to the current condition of the country,” he said. “It is moving towards its roots. And I can tell you something: once the Congress finds its roots and becomes the organisation that it is, no one will be able to defeat it.” Those roots, however, do not inspire confidence. The Indian National Congress has often displayed a communal character and an affinity for the capitalist class. For the first few decades of its existence, it mostly functioned as an upper-caste bourgeois organisation, interested more in securing the prospects of Indian elites within the British Empire than in overthrowing colonial rule. The British historian Reginald Coupland writes that there “was no trace of anti-British feeling” in the early Congress sessions and that the Indian Councils Act of 1892, which opened the door for Indian representation in the legislative councils,

“The Hindu Communal Majority is the back-bone of the Congress,” Ambedkar writes. “It is made up of the Hindus and is fed by the Hindus.” “showed that the Government of India was by no means out of sympathy with its aspirations.” This sympathy for an organisation dominated by Hindus—only two of the 72 attendees at the first session had been Muslim—“revived Moslem anxieties,” Coupland writes. In 1906, Muslim elites formed their own representative organisation, the Muslim League, in order to more effectively compete for colonial patronage. The Indian Councils Act of 1909, which introduced elections to legislatures, provided separate electorates for Muslims. While they sought greater political power for themselves, however, there was little clarity about what members of the Congress sought to do with that power. They denounced the drain of wealth under the British and called for the establishment 34

of representative institutions, but had no concrete proposals on how to alleviate the poverty most Indians lived under. Labour issues were never brought up during the first two decades of the Congress. An attempt was made to discuss social reform at the annual All India Social Conference, until anti-reformists led by Tilak at the 1895 Congress session, in Poona, threatened to burn down the venue if the Social Conference was allowed to use it. This capitulation to orthodox Hinduism was a regular feature of Congress politics as it evolved into a mass movement. Tilak, who was the first Congress leader to have anything resembling a large political base, rose to prominence by opposing legislation raising the age of consent to 12 and by mobilising Ganesh Chaturthi processions in order to discourage Hindu participation in Muharram. The Congress politicians NC Kelkar, Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malviya and BS Moonje were instrumental in founding the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, and Motilal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi chaired some of the Mahasabha’s early sessions. In his book What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, Ambedkar writes that, after Gandhi took charge of the Congress, “it became a party of action, or, as Congressmen like to put it, the Congress forged sanctions—a thing never thought of before.” These sanctions had “two edges, social or economic. The social edge cut off all social intercourse even withdrawing the services of barbers, washermen, butchers, grocers, merchants, etc., in short, making life of the culprit impossible in every way. The economic edge cut off all business relations, such as buying and selling of goods. Its objective was the merchant class selling foreign goods.” Barring Muslim participation in the Khilafat Movement, he notes, these sanctions, which he described as “a tragedy” whose effectiveness “demands serious consideration,” were enforced “mostly by the Hindus.” The Congress, Ambedkar adds, would explain away this non-cooperation among Dalits by calling them “tools of British Imperialism.” He calls this an “absurd explanation,” since what his community feared was “that freedom of India will establish Hindu domination which is sure to close to them and for ever all prospect of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and that they will be made the hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The Congress’s attitude to internal divisions could be seen in the times Gandhi employed satyagraha against his fellow Indians. His first hunger strike on Indian soil, in 1918, was directed against striking millworkers in Ahmedabad, in order to persuade them to agree to the compromise THE CARAVAN

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above: After the British opened negotiations for a transfer of power, the Congress kept resisting concessions for minorities by calling them internal matters that should be resolved in a Constituent Assembly that it was sure would be dominated by Hindus.

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he had negotiated with the owners’ association. Seven years later, while intervening in a temple entry struggle in Travancore that had been raging for over a century, he demanded the expulsion of the movement’s non-Hindu organisers, including the Dravidian leader EV Ramasamy, better known as Periyar, since, he wrote, the satyagraha must be led by “Pure Hindus” in order to be “pure and strong.” Having leached the movement of all its radicalism, he left the decision to a referendum conducted among the dominant castes of Travancore, which, unsurprisingly, rejected the proposal.

“The Hindu Communal Majority is the back-bone of the Congress,” Ambedkar writes. “It is made up of the Hindus and is fed by the Hindus. It is this Majority which constitutes the clientele of the Congress and the Congress, therefore, is bound to protect the rights of its clients.” A large part of this brief consisted of resisting attempts by other communities to secure political representation. Following the creation of separate electorates for Muslims, the Congress passed a resolution at its 1910 session demanding the removal of “anomalous restrictions between different sections of His Majesty’s FEBRUARY 2023

subjects in the matter of the franchise.” It only accepted the measure in 1916, when it concluded an agreement with the Muslim League to present a joint constitutional proposal to the British. “There has been in Congress a group who have posed as nationalists but are in fact utterly communal in their outlook,” the former party president Abul Kalam Azad writes in his book India Wins Freedom. “They have always argued that India has no unified culture and held that whatever Congress may say, the social life of Hindus and Muslims is entirely different.” He recalls an example of this communal element in 35

destination unknown · essay action. Even though Muslims were the majority community in the province of Bengal, he writes, “for various reasons they were educationally and politically backward. Even though they numbered 50% of the population, they held 30% of the posts under the government.” In the 1923 provincial election, he notes, the Swaraj Party president, Chittaranjan Das—who had resigned the Congress presidency in order to contest elections—promised that, if his party came to power, it would reserve 60 percent of all new government appointments for Muslims. “This bold announcement shook the Bengal Congress to its very foundations,” Azad

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recalls. “Many of the Congress leaders violently opposed it and started a campaign against Mr Das. He was accused of opportunism and even partisanship for the Muslims but he stood solid as a rock.” Das died in 1925, after which, Azad adds, “some of his followers assailed his position and his declaration was repudiated. The result was that the Muslims of Bengal moved away from the Congress and the first seed of partition was sown.” The Government of India Act of 1919 had extended separate electorates to other communities, including Sikhs, Christians and Anglo-Indians. When Ambedkar successfully fought for the

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extension of separate electorates to Depressed Classes at the Round Table Conferences, Gandhi used another hunger strike, in 1932, to coerce him into accepting joint electorates instead. During the Second World War, as the British opened negotiations for a transfer of power, the Congress kept resisting concessions for minorities by calling them internal matters that should be resolved in a Constituent Assembly that it was sure would be dominated by Hindus. Ambedkar was able to secure some constitutional protections for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes but faced stiff resistance from orthodox Hindus. He writes that the “real mo-

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below: Ambedkarites protest the public flogging of five Dalits in Una, one of the many atrocities that Gandhi has neglected to mention during the yatra.

tive of the Congress in opposing the demand for constitutional guarantees is to keep the political field a free pasture for the Hindu Majority.” His inability as law minister to pass comprehensive legislation addressing the patriarchal elements of Hinduism, despite the Congress having a brute majority in parliament, demonstrates the hold orthodox Hindus had over the party. A similar fate awaited the attempts by Jawaharlal Nehru—India’s first prime minister and Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather—to instil socialism as the economic creed of the Congress, which Ambedkar describes as being “run by capitalists, landlords and moneylenders.” The historian Pitamber Datta Kaushik notes that it “has been described as a capitalist’s organization because many big industrialists—especially G.D. Birla and Seth Jamnalal Bajaj—have contributed lavishly to the Congress funds; because the majority of the members of its Working Committee and above all its ‘super president’ Mahatma Gandhi refused to believe in the theory of class war and propounded his own theory of trusteeship which regards capitalists as the trustees of wealth.” Kaushik writes that this theory “regards ‘economic equality’ to be ‘masterkey to non violent Independence,’ yet it rejects the theory of class war and is not prepared to sanction the use of violence for bringing about economic equality. Instead it propounds the theory of class collaboration and the technique of change of heart.” Nehru’s socialism believed more in state control, rather than state ownership, over the means of production and more accurately resembled the Keynesian welfare states of the capitalist world. Nevertheless, even this watered down version was constantly sabotaged by Nehru’s right-wing colleagues in the Congress, who, Kaushik writes, “avoided a policy of direct confrontation and adopted the technique of internal sabotage or non implementation.” While Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, moved the party to the left during her tenure as prime minister, the Congress was a key protagonist in introducing the neoliberal reforms that created the unequal economy that Rahul Gandhi laments today. If Rahul Gandhi’s alternate vision is based on a return to the Congress’s roots, with its communal and capitalist impulses, its value as a basis for the opposition to the BJP requires careful scrutiny. After all, the Congress’s political ideology has often varied from that of the BJP only in degree. “We consider them the same on some issues,” the Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajkumar Bhati said in a recent television interview. “For instance, the issue of social justice, the issue of economy—on the economy, both are of the thinking of capitalists. Yes, we see them different from the BJP on the FEBRUARY 2023

issue of communalism. Congress isn’t as poisonous, as hateful, but when the VP Singh government implemented the Mandal commission”—which recommended reservations for Socially and Educationally Backward Classes—“the BJP and the Congress were both in opposition.” Bhati added that the Congress “will have to clarify whether their thinking has changed or remained the same.” gandhi has had plenty of opportunities to make such a clarification. During his yatra, he addressed almost a dozen press conferences, at which journalists asked him what exactly is broken in India that he wants to fix. His usual reply was to accuse the BJP of dividing the country “on religious lines” before rambling about the government’s policies, such as the goods and services tax, that

While there might be an economic dimension to fomenting hate, this conspiracy theory does not explain why the government would allow violence to unfold only against certain communities. he argued contributed to the rift. It is undeniable that many people have faced violence because of their identity during the Modi government’s tenure. I have reported on a number of cases where Muslims have been attacked by BJP and RSS cadre over their profession, their choice of food and markers of their religious identity. I have also covered attacks by Thakurs on Dalit villages in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh. Since 2014, there have been at least five debates in parliament about hatred and violence against Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis. In December 2014, after around two hundred Muslims converted to Hinduism in Agra during a Vishva Hindu Parishad campaign for ghar wapasi—a proselytisation exercise whose name translates to “returning home”—parliament discussed forcible conversion. The opposition accused the VHP of coercion and inducement to secure the conversions. The Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy also accused the government of appointing university vice-chancellors “on political and communal basis” and the Indian Council of Historical Research of researching Hindu mythological claims. During a subsequent debate in November 2015, as dozens of writers, filmmakers and intellectuals returned their government awards to protest ris37

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ing religious intolerance, MPs brought up a number of examples, including the murders of the rationalists Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi, the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq and the vandalising of churches in Delhi. They also accused the cabinet minister VK Singh of casteism, since he had responded 38

to Rajputs in Haryana setting a Dalit house on fire by saying, “If someone throws a stone at a dog, the government is not responsible.” Singh is currently the minister of state for civil aviation and road transport. Three months later, parliament discussed institutional discrimination THE CARAVAN

against students from marginalised communities in higher education after the death by suicide of the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, who had faced months of harassment by the administration at the University of Hyderabad. The opposition mentioned that Bandaru Dattatreya, a union minister, had called

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sion that had found that a crime is committed against Dalits every eighteen minutes and that, every day, three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, two Dalit houses are burnt and eleven Dalits are beaten. Nearly a year later, in July 2017, a special debate on lynchings—triggered by the resignation from the Rajya Sabha of the Bahujan Samaj Party president, Mayawati, after the deputy chairperson refused to let her speak about atrocities against Dalits—touched on a number of incidents, including the public flogging of five Dalits in Una, attacks on Dalit villages in Saharanpur and the stabbing of a Muslim youth on the outskirts of Delhi. While defining hatred and violence during his many public addresses and media interactions over the course of the yatra, however, Gandhi has not found it fit to raise any of these incidents. Gandhi’s first public address, in Kerala, made clear how he looks at the issue. “There is a connection between hatred and the RSS and the BJP,” he said. “The RSS and the BJP are designed to benefit a limited number of people. They are designed to concentrate wealth in the country. And they can’t concentrate wealth in the country if the country is in harmony, people are happy and not fighting against each other. The British used to do exactly this.” While there might be an economic dimension to fomenting hate, this conspiracy theory does not explain why the government would allow violence to unfold only against certain communities. Neither does it explain incidents like the Delhi violence of 2020, when BJP legislators such as Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma openly incited violence instead of doing so behind closed doors. There is always a political and social dimension to violence. However, exploring those dimensions— and explaining why it is only certain communities that are targeted—would require naming Savarna

Vemula, in a letter to the education minister, Smriti Irani, an “anti-national.” Irani defended Dattatreya and the university administration. She remains in the cabinet, while Dattatreya is now the governor of Haryana. In August 2016, during a debate on atrocities against Dalits, the communist MP PK Biju quoted a report by the National Human Rights Commis-

left: Even as the local Congress supported the struggle by residents of Haldwani against being evicted by the Indian Railways, Gandhi did not mention it.

Evidently, Gandhi did not believe the exclusion of oppressed communities from affirmative action qualified as a central issue for the Bharat Jodo Yatra. castes in whose name and interest, under the guise of Hindu identity, the BJP commits such violence. Such complicity is inconvenient for Gandhi’s politics, which relies on wooing those same Savarna communities away from the BJP while competing with other parties for Bahujan votes. As a consequence, he refuses to name either the perpetrators or victims, except in terms of overFEBRUARY 2023

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destination unknown · essay arching identities, such as farmers, labourers and the youth. In Gandhi’s narrative, everyone is a perpetrator and everyone is a victim. “Their policies spread fear,” Gandhi said at the Nanded rally. “Denying farmers loans or minimum-support prices creates fear in their hearts. Telling young people that they will not get jobs despite the lakhs of rupees their parents have spent on their education creates fear in their hearts. Telling labourers that you will discontinue the National Employment Guarantee Scheme creates fear in their hearts. Then Narendra Modi and the BJP turn that fear into hatred.” He does not explain how the BJP turns this fear into hatred, which helps take the focus off those who face the brunt of it. In this way, he is able to speak of the suffering of oppressed communities without implicating Savarna castes. Gandhi refused to acknowledge victims even when asked point blank, by Meena Kotwal of the website Mooknayak, where Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims should see themselves in the fight between Hinduism and Hindutva. “See, the fight is

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below: In Telangana, Rohith Vemula’s mother, Radhika, joined the yatra. The organisers posted pictures of Gandhi hugging Radhika Vemula. However, besides this photoop, Gandhi had nothing to say about the demands she had raised.

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between the nation’s poor and two–three industrialists,” he replied. “The real fight is over wealth, over how the nation’s wealth is being distributed. Dalits, minorities, the poor, farmers and backward castes all have their place in that fight.” This implies that oppressed communities will be heard only if they frame their oppression in economic terms, since the hatred and violence they face on a daily basis is not considered the “real fight.” gandhi’s refusal to specifically address past incidents also extended to events that took place during the yatra. When he reached Delhi, in late December, four thousand families—most of them Muslim—were facing the threat of eviction by the Indian Railways in the Uttarakhand town of Haldwani, less than three hundred kilometres away. Even as the local Congress supported the residents’ struggle against the eviction drive, Gandhi did not mention it. Around the same time, upper-caste residents of the village of Irayur, in Tamil Nadu, who, district authorities found, still practise untouchability, dumped human faeces into a water tank used by local Dalits. Gandhi remained quiet about this incident too. Similarly, two important events had taken place soon before Gandhi reached Nanded. On 4 November, the local district court refused to rule on an application filed by Yashwant Shinde, a former RSS member who claimed to have witnessed a conspiracy, involving senior Sangh Parivar leaders, to carry out a series of bombings across the country, around seventeen years ago, which killed over a hundred people—most of them Muslim. Even though Shinde’s testimony supported his claim that the RSS and BJP were spreading hatred and violence, Gandhi did not acknowledge the court proceedings, either in Nanded or beyond. Clearly, the Congress no longer seeks to take credit for its role in identifying and prosecuting Hindu terror. Three days later, the Supreme Court upheld economic criteria as a valid basis for reservations in education and employment. It also accepted the exclusion of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes from reservations meant for Economically Weaker Sections. The BJP had introduced EWS reservations, which dilute affirmative action for oppressed communities and provide it to poorer sections of oppressor communities, in 2019. Politicians and legal experts were divided on the merit of the judgment. The Congress supported the judgment but subsequently set up an internal review to examine its stand on the issue. Gandhi, however, refused to take a stand. On 28 November, as the yatra passed through Madhya Pradesh, a journalist asked him about it. “Look,

destination unknown · essay this yatra has a clear objective,” he said. “I don’t want to distract from that. The thinking behind the yatra is to stand up to the hatred, violence and fear being spread. The central idea is that it is important to hear the people’s voice. It is also meant to resist the rising unemployment and inflation in the country. Beyond that, I don’t want to raise more political issues or divert this yatra. But we will definitely discuss the feedback we receive from the people.” Evidently, he did not believe the exclusion of oppressed communities from affirmative action qualified as a central issue. It also seemed likely that people he had met over the past month had not pressed him on the issue. The India Gandhi was seeking to unite, in other words, did not appear to care that a majority of its population was about to lose a key avenue for social mobility. While passing through Bellary, in Karnataka, on 15 October, Gandhi had been only too happy to talk about affirmative action for SCs and STs, since it provided him an opportunity to attack the BJP in the state. When the Congress had been leading a coalition government in the state, he said, it had constituted the Nagamohan Das committee, a judicial commission that recommended increasing reservations from three percent to seven percent for STs, and from 15 percent to 18 percent for SCs. “Why is the BJP government refusing to implement this?” he said. “BJP in Karnataka should stop making excuses.” Gandhi’s double standards were not limited to affirmative action. In Bellary, he noted that there had been “a fifty-percent increase in atrocities against SC and ST brothers” in the BJP-ruled state. However, his response to violence against Dalits in Rajasthan, which has a Congress government under which atrocities have risen by sixty percent, has, at most, been restricted to a mere condolence. In March, when two Brahmin men stabbed a Dalit man, Jitendra Meghwal, to death for sporting a moustache, Gandhi remained silent. Five months later, a Rajput teacher killed a nine-year-old Dalit child, Indra Meghwal, for touching his water pot. This time, Gandhi tweeted about the incident, calling it a “cruel act” without

using words like untouchability or discrimination. He did not criticise the state government for not being swift in delivering justice or make an effort to meet the child’s family. As his yatra passed through Rajasthan, in December, Rajput men threatened Meghwal’s father and brutally attacked his uncle. Gandhi made no comment. Gandhi also visited Alwar, where Pahlu Khan had been lynched, in 2017, for ferrying cattle. He made no mention of Khan although he made a visceral speech, in which he proclaimed, “I’m opening a shop of love in the market of hate. You hate me, it’s about your heart. Your shop is of hatred, but mine is of love. … Because our religion, our country, is a country of love.” The double standards can also be seen when it comes to Gandhi’s willingness to do business with oligarchs. In Delhi, Gandhi said that Modi was leading “a government of Adani and Ambani.” However, on 7 October, a month after the yatra had begun, the Rajasthan government held an investment summit at which Adani announced that he would invest R65,000 crore in the state—where it already has a sizeable presence, operating a solar park and a thermal plant, and supplying coal to state-run power plants—over the next five to seven years, by expanding his cement and solar power businesses and upgrading the Jaipur airport. “No chief minister can refuse such an offer,” he said to a journalist who asked about Adani’s investment the next day. “In fact, it would not be correct for a chief minister to refuse such an offer. My contention is in the use of political power to help certain chosen businesses. My opposition is to two or three or four large businesses being helped politically to monopolise every single business in this country.” The Rajasthan government “has not used political power to help Mr Adani,” he added. “The day they do that, I’ll be in opposition.” This anti-monopoly sentiment was contradicted by the way in which Congress governments had allowed Adani to capture an entire supply chain. In March, the Chhattisgarh government had approved the allocation of the Parsa East Kete Basan coal block, in FEBRUARY 2023

the Hasdeo forest, to the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam, which formed a joint venture with Adani to operate the mine. The chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Bhupesh Baghel, who joined the yatra when it passed through Madhya Pradesh, told Mooknayak that the mines were necessary to provide coal to Rajasthan’s power plants. Adani operates one thermal power plant in Rajasthan. In December, Scroll reported that millions of tonnes of coal from Hasdeo was being diverted to three other Adani-owned plants, in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Gandhi also appears to have gone back on his word on safeguarding the rights of Adivasis who have been protesting mining in Hasdeo since 2010. In May, while speaking at Cambridge University, he said that he had “a problem with the decision” to allocate the coal block. He said that he was “working on

Gandhi appears to have gone back on his word on safeguarding the rights of Adivasis who have been protesting mining in Hasdeo since 2010. it” and that people would “see results in a couple of weeks.” In July, the Chhattisgarh legislature passed a unanimous resolution urging the union government to cancel the allocation. Three months later, the state government asked the forest ministry to step in. Activists argued that the Chhattisgarh government’s actions were a charade, since it could just withdraw the no-objection certificate it had issued to the project. Instead, the mining continued. On 24 November, Gandhi held an Adivasi Sabha at Pandhana, in Madhya Pradesh. “We call you Adivasi because we believe you are the first and original owners of India,” he said. “They call you Vanvasi”—translating to “forest-dweller,” the preferred terminology of the Sangh Parivar—“because they want to snatch away your rights.” Several Savarna intellectuals praised 41

destination unknown · essay this counter to the RSS’s ideology, but, beyond rhetorical support, Gandhi seemed to have chosen Adani’s money over securing Adivasi rights in Hasdeo. around a hundred metres away from the Vazirabad Chaurasta, local Congress workers had begun filling the rooms of a city hotel a day before Gandhi arrived in Nanded. The cars in the parking lot carried stickers of the Bharat Jodo Yatra as well as indicators of their owners’ professions and social status. (Many seemed to belong to the bureaucracy and the judiciary.) These were the ones staying in luxury rooms who had got permission to join the cavalcade that followed the yatra, which also included the cars of journalists, an ambulance, a fire truck and container trucks in which the marchers slept at night. When I met them at breakfast, I got the sense that the ones staying in private rooms were not comfortable talking about their politics in public. However, in the dormitory on the top floor, where I had been staying while covering the trial on the Nanded blast of 2006, all the other bunks were occupied by participants in the yatra who had come from Mumbai by train. Over the course of the day, I interacted with eight of them—three Catholics, four Muslims and a Hindu from a Rajput caste, all of whom held district-level posts in the Congress. (There were no Dalit or Adivasi participants in the dormitory.) Royce Rodger Pharel, Wilfred Manuel D’Souza and Asher, Catholics from the Mumbai suburb of Vasai, told me that they had walked twenty-five kilometres the previous day in an unsuccessful attempt to meet Gandhi. They were going to try again the following day but were not too hopeful. “We don’t want the pass now,” Pharel said. “We have understood it’s going to happen for people who are going to come into the limelight.” Pharel is married to a Russian and runs a private education company. He told me that he has not faced personal discrimination since he returned from Russia, in 2016, and set up his business. “We are minority, we don’t want to be a majority in India, but don’t take what is there with us,” he said. “It’s not about me. I have a well-established business. I have a house, a car, but I’m fighting for the

That it had taken meeting Kalam to make his peace with Muslims, rather than understanding why hating someone for their religion is discriminatory, is perhaps the result of the Congress’s ambiguous ideology. 42

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future.” The recent change in state government, after a section of the Shiv Sena broke away to form a coalition with the BJP, made him anxious. The party local Catholics supported in the municipal corporation had defected to the BJP. Pharel was also pessimistic about his community’s prospects under a BJP government. “We think Hindu identity is better for getting government jobs, better for getting faster admission in college, for getting good jobs in banks, in railways, everything, even in sports,” he said, citing the example of a girl in his neighbourhood who had adopted a Hindu name in order to have a better chance of making it as a cricketer. When I asked Pharel what he wanted Gandhi to change if he came to power, he mentioned an end to discrimination based on caste and religion. He had a different understanding of caste discrimination, though, claiming that affirmative action for marginalised communities was discriminatory against privileged castes. “I’ve sent more than a hundred students to Russia for MBBS,” he said. “So, when this issue of reservations came, students are not getting admission in Maharashtra.” I asked him if this was a consequence of a lack of seats or reservations. All three replied in unison, “Reservations.” Asher, the youngest among the three, was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in management. He employed the popular anti-reservation argument, usually based only on anecdotal evidence, that well-to-do students from oppressed castes were getting preference over upper-caste candidates with “super” grades. “EWS is the only section that should get reservation,” he said. During the yatra, Gandhi often mentioned conversations he had had with students. When they told him they wanted to become a bureaucrat, doctor or engineer, he would ask them how they would achieve their dreams when the available seats were in the hundreds while the applicants were in the hundreds of thousands. Although he never suggested that the lack of seats was related to reservations, his supporters seem to believe this to be the case. Anurag Thakur, in his twenties, was one of the hundred or so “Bharat Yatris” who were participating in the bulk of the march from Kanyakumari to Srinagar. He had followed Gandhi through Kerala before heading home for a month. Thakur told me that he had been a “fully BJP guy” until 2020. “The area I come from has fifty-five percent Muslims,” he said. “So even my ideology, what I saw since childhood—Muslim processions being taken out, et cetera—I developed this mind that how long these people will live here, for how long they will do these things.” Thakur said that his mindset began changing when, on an acquaintance’s recommendation, he

destination unknown · essay attended a Congress camp and met the former president APJ Abdul Kalam. “Then, I understood Muslim religion is not bad. There are a few bad people in it. Even among Hindus, there are a few bad people.” That it had taken meeting Kalam, whom even the BJP concedes is a Good Muslim, to make his peace with Muslims, rather than understanding why hating someone for their religion is discriminatory, is perhaps the result of the Congress’s ambiguous ideology. Thakur told me that he supported Gandhi’s silence on atrocities against Dalits in Rajasthan. He was sceptical about the atrocities. When I asked him about Indra Meghwal, the nine-yearold who had been killed by his teacher, he said, “It’s an internal matter, I think. They may have had some feuds.” He added that he believed “that reservation is a bad thing. It shouldn’t be there for anyone.” The four Muslims were from a relatively poorer background. They spoke in a Mumbai dialect of Hindi and live in low-income neighbourhoods of the city. Mobeen Rein, who spoke for the group, has been in politics for over twenty-four years but is still only a block-level office-bearer. He told me that he was in the Congress because of the former state legislator Arif Naseem Khan. “Wherever we go, we say we are Naseem Khan’s people,” he said. “Rahul Gandhi is there, but for us, in Mumbai, it is all about Naseembhai.” Politics gave them a sense of power and protection, he added. They did not care much about the party’s national stand on the Ram temple or Gandhi’s posturing as a devout Hindu. Whenever I asked about religion, Rein would emulate Gandhi by changing the topic to unemployment and the economy. He was not aware about the debate on whether reservations should be on social or economic lines but said that there should not be reservations for anyone. The Congress supporters I met in Nanded seemed to belong to a particular constituency that the yatra panders to: half communal, maybe even full secular, but full casteist, oblivious if not hostile to the struggles of Bahujans. As Gandhi seeks to convince such supporters that the BJP is out to exploit them, he rarely asks them to confront their privilege. Instead, caste appears to be simply another subject to criticise the BJP when convenient. While passing through Andhra Pradesh, Gandhi accused the BJP of wanting to maintain the caste system but did not explicitly say that the Congress would demolish it. He gave assurances that his party believed in the Constitution and giving rights to people. In Badanavalu, a village in Karnataka, he inaugurated a road that connected Dalit and Lingayat settlements. A video published by the Bharat Jodo Yatra team heralded it as uniting

As Gandhi seeks to convince his supporters that the BJP is out to exploit them, he rarely asks them to confront their privilege. two communities that had been torn apart three decades earlier—in 1993, members of the Lingayat community had attacked Dalits over a temple entry dispute, killing three people. Gandhi’s role in bringing together the two communities appears to be mostly cosmetic. “The villagers themselves had negotiated with the past and settled into a new equilibrium without altering the caste order,” a ground report published by The Wire noted. “Did the Congress’s symbolic activities to celebrate the Bharat Jodo Yatra in the village come with a vision to ‘jodo’ Badanavalu into a casteless, egalitarian social order? In fact, the ‘jodo’ on both the counts of the ruined economy and the devastated social cohesion demands a radical political agenda more than the mere message of love and inter-caste dining. Rahul Gandhi’s acts were good gestures. But they were, at best, innocuous and, at worst, something which helped solidify ‘subaltern Hindutva’ and neoliberalism.” It is clear that Gandhi’s yatra has made some impact on Dalits and Muslims. At Nanded, I saw young Muslims running after him, wanting to shake his hand, even after the police pushed them away. In Telangana, Rohith Vemula’s mother, Radhika, joined the yatra. The organisers posted pictures of Gandhi hugging Radhika Vemula. However, besides this photo-op, Gandhi had nothing to say about the demands she had raised while extending solidarity to the yatra. In a subsequent tweet, she wrote that these included saving the “Constitution from BJP-RSS assault, Justice for Rohith Vemula, passing Rohith Act, increasing representation of Dalits, oppressed sections in higher judiciary, education for all.” Bhanwar Meghwanshi, the Dalit author of I Could Not Be Hindu, also joined Gandhi in Rajasthan, calling it a “pleasant and inspirational experience.” The political scientist Raosaheb Kasabe told me that he had also joined the yatra on the invitation of a Congress leader. “Rahul Gandhi has clarity, is what I have noticed,” Kasabe said. “I think he will eventually be able to assert his authority.” However, he worried that “Gandhi may take things to a metaphysical level.” It was a legitimate concern, given Gandhi’s strange responses at times. In Madhya Pradesh, a journalist had asked him about how the yatra had changed him. “Brother, I’ve left Rahul Gandhi behind a long time ago,” Gandhi replied. “Rahul Gandhi is in your head. He is not in my head. Try and understand.” s FEBRUARY 2023

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anushree fadnavis / reuters

We drive the Maruti Suzuki Grand Vitara to Odanthurai

W

e often talk about India's diversity and how surreal it is that people from different cultures have managed to co-exist, but if one were to quantify the vastness of the country, it'd turn out to be a Herculean task. For instance, India is said to have nearly a million villages, but finding out the exact number has been a challenge. What's even more difficult is to ensure that one's village doesn't just exist as a mere metric. The onus is on the village panchayat, and one such administrative body went on to create history. The extent

of its actions is such that many refer to the village as the ideal village in the country. Located in the Mettupalayam taluk, its name is Odanthurai, and it has set an example not just in sustainability but also selfreliance. From clean water, and renewablesource electricity, to even housing for all, Odanthurai's story is worth applause. As someone who's lived not too far from villages without the most basic amenities, I can imagine what life in Odanthurai would've been before it was revolutionised. It's not about the standards of living (that we city dwellers talk about) but the bare

necessities, the lack of which make life difficult. Instrumental in making Odanthurai what it is today, Mr R Shanmugam has overseen the transformation. Elected as the head of village council in 1996, he has worked tirelessly, even after retiring from the post, to ensure the welfare of his panchayat and its residents. A farmer by profession, Shanmugam has seen the issues up close, and has ever since, worked to not just find solutions but also make the most of government policies. We briefly spoke to him to understand his approach to helping achieve corruption-free

It amazes in the way it drives by seamlessly conjuring vehicular motion with no noise or tailpipe emissions...

The premium and comfy Grand Vitara's cabin also feels quite solidly built

governance, and in turn, uplifting the lives of those who depended on him to do so. A humble man and most certainly not hungry for any credit, Shanmugam shrugs it off as a collective effort. And while immensely proud of how far they've come (you can see that when he talks enthusiastically), he's someone who was just doing their job right. This is a little deviation from the story, but I can't help but mention the car, too, especially when we're talking about someone doing their job rightly. We drove down to Odanthurai in the Maruti Suzuki Grand Vitara. When we first drove the Grand Vitara at its first drive event earlier this year, the SUV felt unlike anything else in the space. As you'd be able to recall from our report, it was quite promising, and not just because of its long list of features, but also in the way it looked and drove. A long drive to Odanthurai allowed us to put it through its paces. It's powerful, we know that, but despite a variety of driving conditions, in terms of traffic, type of road, and the occasional urge to step on the accelerator, it managed class-leading fuel economy, not

Children take to the Grand Vitara with big smiles on their faces

Those rear seats offer the right amount of bolstering for a long journey

deviating from the company claimed 27.97 kpl. The Grand Vitara, launched as Maruti's flagship midsized SUV, has everything you'd expect from a car of this size and stature. The major reason why the Grand Vitara manages to outdo its rivals is because of its focussed approach to do things better. And while you don't have to be a specific customer type to enjoy this SUV, with a wide range of engine and transmission options, it has everyone's requirements covered. For instance, the ALLGRIP-equipped model will show no reluctance in allowing you to indulge in some off-roading. The Mild Hybrid model, available with an option of a manual and an automatic gearbox, offers great space and convenience, with a well-put-together interior, remarkably standout exterior styling, and a solid feature set. The Strong Hybrid model, which we're driving, is in a different league, though. Not just when compared to others in the segment, but in isolation, too, the Hybrid is a harbinger of the future. It amazes in the way it drives essentially by seamlessly conjuring vehicular motion with no noise or tailpipe

emissions but without having to worry about range. The only thing that one ought to worry about is the idea that petrol-powered cars aren't fuel-efficient. Because Maruti Suzuki has continued with its unabated progress in making cars that are easy and pocket friendly to run, with a flagship product, which helps the environment by burning less fuel. The employment of the hybrid tech (Combined Max Power: 115.56 PS) also ensures that the overall CO2 emissions are down/km, even when running on combined power. The parallel between Odanthurai and the Grand Vitara had me digressing. Coming back to the village, we learnt that electricity wasn't the only issue Odanthurai faced before Shanmugam joined office. The village had a water issue, too. While not the most populous, the village's water requirement was fulfilled by residents having to walk for miles to fetch water. A bore well brought transient relief but by eventually setting up a system to draw water from the Bhavani river, not only did Odanthurai suffice its needs, but it also

Like the innovation taken place in Odanthurai, the Grand Vitara brings something wholly new to the table

...from a standstill, the added impetus from the battery pushes the car to reach tripledigit speeds in no time

The Grand Vitara tackles bad terrain with absolute ease, true to its Rule Every Road philosophy

enabled 12 other neighbouring villages to benefit from it. Similarly, from enabling transport, micro-finance, and even housing facilities, the village panchayat has continued to bestow upon the residents some great benefits. And that's been possible of the combined leadership of the panchayat and the willingness of the residents to pay their taxes. It goes on to show that a system we loosely call flawed can be life-changing if implemented correctly. But where Odanthurai, Shanmugam, and the residents deserve a standing ovation is in their decision to plan a wind farm made. This was done through a loan that's been repaid already and continues to sell electricity to the TN Electricity Board and has enough money to pay the panchayat's bills too. The wind farm is about a hundred km away from Odanthurai and makes electricity without burning any fuel. It was a biomass gasifier (no longer in use, but it was well ahead of its time in the 90s) which showed Shanmugam and his team that getting renewable energy into the village was crucial. Solar energy played an equally important role, too, with solar-driven streetlights installed in the village. This has continued even now, and every house has a panel, and the energy can be harnessed for domestic use. The drive to Odanthurai gave us a chance to explore the relatively free roads

of Karnataka and the busier but well-made ones in Tamil Nadu. The variety of roads posed no issues to the Grand Vitara; it's versatile enough to negotiate slow-moving traffic one moment and make confident but rapid progress on winding roads the very next. The e-CVT is an easy choice if jerkfree driving is what you're after. The way the EV mode enables the Grand Vitara to transition between a large petrol-driven SUV to an electric one is beyond comprehension. Using it while driving through the village, to not disturb the residents, the noise-, pollution-free drive did amaze a lot of young kids who'd come to see the car. The way it complements the 1490 cc petrol engine while cruising is the kind of stuff we must see more of. And the way, from a standstill, the added impetus from the battery pushes the car to reach triple-digit speeds in no time, means there's still a lot of excitement for those who love driving. In a segment where a new product (no matter how prominent its badge) is always a gamble, Maruti Suzuki has shown that with the right product planning, nothing is impossible. A truly world-class hybrid midsized SUV that drives like a car twice its price, offers a long list of features, and amazes with its versatility for under ` 20 lakh! It has, very much like Odanthurai, set an example for others!

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reportage

A Study in Saffron How Gurugram’s Hindu Right orchestrated the namaz row

REPORTAGE / RELIGION ani photo

VAIBHAV VATS

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a study in saffron · reportage {ONE}

ck vijayakumar for the caravan

altaf ahmad was at home in Gurugram on 17 September 2021. It was his forty-fifth birthday. Throughout the morning, he had been fielding congratulatory calls and texts from his relatives and friends. Some of his callers joked about a coincidence: Ahmad shared his birthday with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ahmad’s birthday fell on a Friday that year. As he prepared to head out for namaz, he received a call from Abdul Haseeb, a local imam who had been teaching his daughters Arabic. They knew each other well. Haseeb told him that things were getting tense at the namaz site in Gurugram’s Sector 47. Dinesh Bharti, the founder of the far-right outfit Bharat Mata Vahini, had arrived at the site with a large number of supporters. The Sector 47 prayer site is roughly five kilometres from Ahmad’s home. As he drove there, he received five calls. The imams were frantic. “Jaldi aaiye, jaldi aaiye”—come fast, come fast—they told him. “These guys are shouting threatening slogans.” Ahmad told the imams not to move from the prayer site. “We have the permission to pray there, and it’s the police’s job to give us security.” By the time Ahmad arrived at the site, it had begun to drizzle. About a hundred metres away, the protesters, led by Bharti, were raising the temperature. “They would flag down autowallahs and pass-

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ersby, and tell them, ‘Pakistan bana diya inhone’”— They have turned this place into Pakistan—Ahmad told me. “The protesters were heckling Muslims,” he said. “I felt the goons could start throwing stones at the worshippers any minute.” The cops were amassed on the side of the protesters, ostensibly to restrain them. Ahmad heard the police tell the Hindus: “Let the prayer go on today. We won’t let it happen next week.” Infuriated, he took on the cops. “I told them the permission has been given by your department,” Ahmad said. The provocative sloganeering, which was relentless while the worshippers prayed, briefly stopped as Ahmad questioned the police. Bystanders were recording the exchange on mobile phones, and the cops backed off. Ahmad’s intervention momentarily put the police and the protesters on the defensive, and the namaz proceeded in what he later described as an “atmosphere of fear.” For Ahmad, the events of the day had crossed a certain threshold of endurance. After the confrontation, he returned with Haseeb to his small rectangular office. Ahmad typed a complaint against the protesters, printed it out and went with the imam to the police commissioner’s office. “This time, I thought, I’ll take on these guys, because you just cannot keep disrupting namaz every now and then,” he told me.

a study in saffron · reportage “That’s when I got a jolt,” Ahmad told me. “It’s not that several things had not been happening since I was born. There was the Babri Masjid issue, the 2002 riots.” Though he had lived through an era of Hindu nationalist ascendance, something about the local nature of the crisis affected Ahmad. “Now, I felt they have come on to something very, very fundamental about my religion,” he said. Ahmad stressed the importance of Friday namaz—only the Eid prayer, which took place two or three times a year, held greater significance for Muslims. The events of 2018 led to the formation of the Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch, a progressive civil-society group comprising many of the city’s prominent residents. Ahmad was a founding member. He became an active participant in the Manch’s activities, such as helping out with migrant relief work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The attacks on namaz in Gurugram receded following a brief eruption in the summer of 2018, after the local administration brokered a compromise between the Muslim community and the Samiti. Subsequently, the number of namaz sites was reduced from over a hundred to roughly three dozen, although some of the remaining sites—such as the one in Sector 47—could accommodate more worshippers than the previous ones. An uneasy peace prevailed for the next three years, until

previous spread: Muslim worshippers evacuate a namaz site in Gurugram as Hindu rightwing protesters arrive to oppose them, in December 2021. Since 2018, various factions of the Hindu Right in Gurugram had been attacking the centuriesold practice of congregational namaz, assigning it fantastical motives. this spread: The namaz site in Sector 47 (left) located outside the sector’s residential area (right), in new Gurugram.

ck vijayakumar for the caravan

ahmad was born in delhi, in 1976, inside the compound of Rashtrapati Bhavan, where his father served in the president’s press office for more than three decades. After studying at St Columba’s School, in central Delhi, and then securing a diploma in information technology, he moved to Gurugram in the late 2000s, in the heyday of the tech boom. The unforgiving treadmill of corporate life pushed him to the brink of burnout. He switched sectors and now runs a successful hospitality business across the city. Ahmad is of medium height, with a receding hairline and a salt-and-pepper beard. He talks animatedly and has a free, open-throated laugh. For years, Ahmad’s life was indistinguishable from the city’s elite—focussed on career, money and family. “I wasn’t too keen to get involved in what happens at the mosque level or the community level,” he told me. Things changed dramatically for Ahmad in the summer of 2018. In April that year, Hindu men threatened worshippers at a namaz gathering in Sector 53. The Samyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti, an umbrella body, comprising roughly two dozen far-right groups across Gurugram, had recently sprung up, and began disrupting namaz across the city. The Samiti attributed dark and fantastical motives to a Muslim religious practice harking back centuries and demanded the prayers be stopped.

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Bharti opened a new front of escalation in what he described as “a mission to eradicate namaz in the open.” On the morning of 17 September 2021, a few hours before Ahmad reached the prayer site in Sector 47, Bharti had embarked on his usual Friday routine from his home in Sadar Bazar, the old, dilapidated heart of Gurugram. Leaving the congested streets of his neighbourhood in a white Gypsy, he drove through the wide avenues of the new city, dotted with palatial bungalows and opulent high-rises. Pickaxes and spades were piled in the back of his jeep. He was a minor contractor, working in construction, and these tools of his trade now doubled up as improvised weapons. Bharti represented a new, growing tribe of rightwing political entrepreneurs. Without the money and connections that could smooth his way into the local Hindu nationalist establishment, Bharti had decided to create his own route to prominence and success. Throughout March and April 2021, he had been disrupting one prayer site after another, before all public gatherings were halted during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September, Bharti was simply picking up from where he had left off. His actions unleashed a local Darwinian political competition. Dozens of Hindu nationalists simultaneously began disrupting namaz sites across Gurugram. Most of the state-sanctioned sites were shut down, while the handful that were left remained a simmering source of unrest. The administration and police, reacting to signals emanating from the very top, retreated in the face of the mob. I reported on the namaz row over several months in 2022. What emerged, over multiple visits, meetings and phone calls, was a detailed portrait of the Hindutva machinery on the ground. In a sense, the story of the namaz row is also the story of a changing Gurugram in a changing India. With its shiny malls, glittering corporate offices and modern high-rise apartment complexes, Gurugram is seen as a symbol of India’s economic rise. But its wealth and prominence owe substantially to migrants from across the country, including working-class Muslims. The attack on Muslim prayer in Gurugram, one of the largest and wealthiest among India’s new-fangled cities, is part of an accelerated phase of Hindu supremacism under Modi. In this enabling climate of impunity, an unchecked proliferation of Hindu extremists operates freely, with the tacit approval of an illiberal middle class. i first met bharti in March 2022, outside the swanky new Bharatiya Janata Party office in the shadow of Signature Tower, a city landmark. In 56

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his late forties, Bharti is short, with the stout built of a wrestler. He was dressed in a saffron kurta, with a scraggly beard and a yellowish tilak on his forehead. A lotus pin adorned his pocket. He had called me to the office, and I had assumed he would do the interview there. But he looked uncomfortable in these surroundings. Bharti pointed to a scooter parked nearby and said, “Let’s go. My work at the office is finished.” Bharti expressed a sense of alienation by the wealth and modernity of Gurugram. As we drove through a tree-lined street in an upscale neighbourTHE CARAVAN

above: Altaf Ahmad, photographed on his way to Friday congregational prayer, in January 2023.

a study in saffron · reportage hood, he told me, in a tone of pathos, “People in Gurgaon have a lot of money. Bhagwan ne humein hi nahin diya paisa”—God did not bless me with money. He took me to a tea shop in Sushant Lok Market: a hole-in-the-wall joint, inhabited by the city’s underclass, surrounded by grocery stores. Three tables topped with cheap, brown sunmica were tucked closely together. We sat on rickety plastic chairs. Bharti was born in Rohtak, Haryana, in 1974. He was in high school when his father became seriously unwell, engulfing the family in a financial crisis. Bharti dropped out and slid into a series of working-class jobs: he began as a driver and helper in Delhi’s Red Line buses in the 1990s and later worked as a personal chauffeur. In 2002, he started a small business in construction, supplying bricks and sand. In 2010, Bharti moved to Haridwar. “I had a feeling of moving towards god,” he said. He spoke of exchanges with saints and ascetics on the banks of the Ganges, where they worried that future generations of Hindus might not survive. Bharti ended up staying in Haridwar for seven years and cited that spell as the motivation for floating the Bharat Mata Vahini. The totality of Bharti’s political manifesto was bigotry directed at Muslims. “A certain community has four wives and forty children,” he said. He told me he did not hire Muslim workers in his business on principle. “They don’t have purity,” he said. “They don’t even brush their teeth. A stink comes from their mouth.” Bharti believed he stood at the vanguard of national protection, preventing a descent into chaos. People were taking foreign funding to work against the country, he said, and he needed to stop them. “From time to time, they come in front of you, like in Shaheen Bagh or some other protest,” he told me. When I asked him how he knew the Shaheen Bagh protests received foreign funding, he said, “Soochnayen hoti hain”—We have information. It became clear soon enough that such boastfulness was a central feature of Bharti’s personality. Sometime in 2020, while driving in Sector 38, Bharti glimpsed a group of

Muslims praying in an open space. He made a video interrogating the maulvi about the permission to pray at the site. “The maulvi became worried,” he told me. He approached the local administration for a list of permitted namaz sites and then proceeded to reject the list as fake. “It had no signatures of any government officer,” he told me. “There was no letterhead of any government department.” This recourse to inflexible legalese was a ruse almost everyone I spoke to on the Hindu Right invoked regularly, as a means to invalidate local, informal arrangements of accommodation. Bharti told me he began to be consumed by the subject of namaz. He roamed everywhere and made videos of Muslim worshippers praying in the open. For Bharti, the ritual congregation of Muslims for Friday prayers amounted to shaktibal—a show of strength. When I asked him how such an established religious tradition could be labelled that way, he retorted, “Tell me one thing, do they find god only together in the open? Why can’t they offer namaz where they are working?” According to him, the Muslim demand for more mosques in Gurugram was “a conspiracy to spark riots” across the country. Everywhere he looked, he saw an Islamic conspiracy afoot, embedding itself in overt and covert ways. Sometime during the middle of our conversation, Bharti began showing me a clip from NDTV stored in his phone, from a few months earlier. In the video, Bharti jumps in front of a local cleric who had arrived to conduct prayers and lets out a belligerent cry. “Namaz nahin hogi yahan”—Namaz will not happen here. It takes several cops to hustle Bharti, who continues resisting by flailing his limbs, into a police van parked nearby. It was a theatrical performance, but the confrontation could easily have blown into a riot. As he tilted the phone screen towards me, Bharti’s face beamed with pride. Bharti’s unexpected prominence had created problems with the Samiti. He was an uncontrollable, somewhat anarchic, actor in the Hindu Right ecosystem. Bharti scoffed at hierarchy and lacked the discipline to be part of FEBRUARY 2023

collective action. Though he was an upper-caste Thakur, for a Hindutva foot soldier of working-class origins to amass so much prominence had upended the usual symmetry between leadership and social origins. He had a litany of grievances with the Samiti. “I have a capacity to command, so I command,” he told me. “If they don’t call me, why will I go?” The Samiti had bailed him out of prison twice, but Bharti felt it had not given him his due. “They didn’t highlight my arrest,” he said. “I started this, and others jumped in to take credit.” At the tea shop in Sushant Lok, a paranoid and menacing aspect to his personality began to emerge. We had been speaking for more than an hour. Bharti’s voice soared as he regaled me with his feats. After a while, he suddenly broke off. His attention shifted to a young shop attendant who had been sitting on a stool at the entrance to the joint. “Bhai, ke

Dinesh Bharti represented a new, growing tribe of rightwing political entrepreneurs in Gurugram. Without the money and connections that could smooth his way into the local Hindu nationalist establishment, he had decided to create his own route to prominence. sun raha hai tu?”—Brother, what are you listening to?—Bharti demanded of him. “Uth le. Khada ho le”—Get up and leave. The attendant, who looked no more than a teenager, moved away out of fear. Bharti seemed to enjoy his moment of power. “This guy was Mohammedan,” he remarked, assuming a tone of complete certainty. When I asked him how he knew, he said, with a flourish, “My radar is always alert. It never stops.” 57

a study in saffron · reportage bharti was stealing the thunder from under the Samiti’s noses, and he needed to be cut down to size. In September 2021, two new actors, representing different factions of the Hindu Right in Gurugram, appeared on the stage: Kulbhushan Bhardwaj, a legal advisor to the Samiti, and Kuldeep Yadav, the councillor who represented Sector 47. Bhardwaj, the enfant terrible of the BJP’s Gurugram unit, had recently been suspended from the party—for the third time—for making comments against the Haryana chief minister, Manohar Lal Khattar. Forty-eight years old and well over six feet tall, Bhardwaj had the raffish air of certain small-time

The retirees of Sector 47 were happy that the namaz had been stopped. “You also know we don’t love Muslims all that much,” Bhagwan Das told me. I asked if they would agree to the building of mosques. “Bawal ho jayega”— There will be trouble— Singh responded. criminal lawyers. Seated under a poster of the Hindu god Hanuman, his giant frame dominated his tiny, box-like cabin in Gurugram’s district court, where I met him. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt and a shiny gold watch. A red tilak extended all the way from the top of his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He had the extremely large hands of a cop. Bhardwaj described an early life suffused with class anxiety, as the son of a low-ranking Delhi Police officer. His failure, in adult life, to join the ranks of the esteemed and the powerful only seemed to have exacerbated that anxiety. He had enjoyed a brief moment in the limelight, when he represented Gopal Sharma, a 17-yearold who had shot at students of Jamia Millia Islamia during the anti-CAA agitation, in 2020. 58

Surrounded by lackeys, Bhardwaj would occasionally lapse into speech mode, as if addressing a public gathering, and the chamber would fall silent in reverence. Like Bharti, he disingenuously recast namaz as a threat to public order. “If children want to play cricket, and by chance it’s a Friday afternoon, these people are reading namaz there,” he said. “Why are you reading namaz there when we feel like playing cricket?” He drew on the spectre of “land jihad,” a falsehood spread by the Hindu Right that casts namaz in open spaces as a tactic to capture land. In both his words and actions, Bhardwaj was taking pages out of the classic alt-right playbook, opening up political space for himself by appearing more radical than the establishment that had rejected him. Yadav, the councillor, was everything Bhardwaj was not: a smooth-talking and successful politician. He came from a prominent local family that had been in politics for generations—a road in the city was named after his grandfather. “The villagers would elect us unanimously,” he said. “I arrived in the same flow of things.” Forty-one years old, clean shaven with sleek, glassrimmed spectacles, Yadav could easily be mistaken for a white-collar employee in one of Gurugram’s corporate towers. We met in his modern office in a glass building on Sohna Road. Luxurious leather sofas were arranged along the perimeter of his large cabin. Glass windows framed an impressive view of the city’s skyline. The councillor told me that he felt obliged to stand with the residents, as their representative, and had therefore joined the protests against namaz in Sector 47. He understood the cold rationality of numbers in the manner of a shrewd majoritarian politician; only a handful of the voters in his ward were Muslims. He told me that around thirty people used to pray at the namaz site before the pandemic, mostly labourers who were working inside the sector. After the lockdown, he said, the number of worshippers went up to a hundred, and residents started objecting. “Topiyon se to allergy hai na”—There is an allergy to skullcaps—Yadav said, in his thick Haryanvi accent. “Seeing THE CARAVAN

skullcaps creates the feeling these people have come from Pakistan. You’re getting my point?” Yadav told me the residents were enraged by the jovial manner of the worshippers. One incident in particular, when a few young Muslims entered the sector and began playing in the park and taking pictures, led to the Residents’ Welfare Association contacting him. “They told me a problem has begun here and it should be removed,” he said. Yadav made a case for the innate violent tendencies of Muslims, suggesting that divided as it may be by personal rivalries, the Hindu Right in Gurugram was united by ideological consensus. “Hindus still end up being soft,” he said. “Muslims think that the Hindus will build houses but we will eventually capture them. Slowly, our population will rise and then we will kill them, eventually the whole country will be ours.” He was dismissive of the ideological convictions of Bharti and Bhardwaj. He called it “rajniti chamkana”—political posturing. three warring factions of Gurugram’s Hindu Right were present at the Sector 47 namaz site in September and October 2021. Bharti was unapologetic about his naked political ambition, but Yadav and Bhardwaj insisted that the residents of the sector had approached them for help. Both claims appeared suspect. Bhardwaj was itching for the limelight again after his suspension; he had no prior connection to the sector. Various accounts I heard suggested that, after the events of 17 September, Yadav mobilised the residents himself. “If someone from another corner of Gurgaon comes here, the whole issue will get politicised,” he told the residents. It seemed a canny move in ejecting any political rivals from his own turf. On 1 October, the protesters, now including the residents of Sector 47, initiated a confrontation with the Muslim worshippers. Both groups comprised about roughly eighty people. The protesting residents were drawn from the sector’s retirees and housewives—the only people who could be mobilised on a Friday afternoon.

vipin kumar / hindustan times

a study in saffron · reportage

The Hindu protesters had brought along a microphone and a portable speaker, which they used to sing bhajans and raise slogans. “Land jihad band karo”—Stop land jihad—the housewives chanted. The protesters also carried placards, such as “Khule mein namaz band karo” (Stop namaz in the open) and “Namaz masjid mein ada karo” (Offer prayers in the mosque). After their first face-off with the worshippers on 1 October, the residents continued to protest for the next two weeks. Newer forms of paranoia seemed to be evolving. Some demanded identity checks of the Muslim worshippers lest they be terrorists. After the confrontation escalated one Friday, the namaz site had to be moved about two hundred metres away. In the background, the turf war between Hindu leaders turned ever more intense. Bharti, who had been prominent during the face-off on 1 October, was arrested two days later. He spent five days in jail. Two Fridays later, on 15 October, he was arrested from the Sector 47 site and only

released more than a week later. Bharti fumed that he was picked up while Bhardwaj and Yadav were not. “Were they not breaking the law?” He claimed that Yadav was colluding with senior police officials and the heads of the residents’ association, who all belonged to the same caste. Once again, Bharti’s limitless ambition thudded against hard structural realities. “I don’t have money,” he said. “That’s why I’m not able to get ahead in the party.” Some weeks later, Bharti and Yadav engaged in a public spat. Bharti blamed Yadav for his arrest, which drew a furious response from the councillor. “Itne joote maroonga”—I will beat you with shoes—he told Bharti. In an unguarded moment, Yadav admitted to me that he was coordinating closely with the police. “Even we could have got arrested,” he said. “It was our cleverness that we kept in touch with the administration. If the ACP wasn’t my friend, even the sector residents would have got arrested.” He told me he had regular conversations with the FEBRUARY 2023

above: Dinesh Bharti (centre) and his supporters performing a Hindu rite at the site for namaz in Sector 37, Gurugram, on Friday, 26 November 2021. This was one of many innovative ruses used by Bharti and others on the Hindu Right to occupy namaz sites on Fridays.

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police, who would advise the protesters on how much to escalate the situation. They would say, “Aaj itna kar lo”—Do this much today. “Once they told us, ‘You can jostle with us today,’” Yadav said. “When I’m communicating with them, they also have a responsibility to take us to success.” By late October, the worshippers coming to the site had begun to dwindle. Across the divide, the momentum of the protesting residents could not be sustained. It was a prosperous neighbourhood, and Diwali was around the corner. After a meeting with the district administration, on 18 October, the residents agreed to halt protests for the following two weeks. “They figured out Sector 47 is not working out,” Ahmad told me. The Hindu groups realised the difficulties of mobilisation in new Gurugram, he said, because it was mostly

What had been set in motion by Dinesh Bharti had found its way to the public utterances of India’s home minister, Amit Shah. 60

peopled with corporate professionals leading busy lives. Yadav told me that the authorities had assured him they would take care of the problem. In a fractious and controversial meeting between the Hindu Right and Muslim representatives, including Ahmad, in early November, which further reduced the designated namaz sites to twenty, the Sector 47 ground was struck off the list. the sector 47 namaz site is a rectangular field tucked behind a petrol pump on a busy thoroughfare. It is fallow scrubland ringed with barbed wire and strewn with gravel and rubble. Though the land technically belonged to the sector, it was effectively outside it. Even the view of the field from the sector was blocked by an apartment complex. “There’s an aerial distance of about seven hundred to eight hundred metres from the residential area,” Ahmad said. “Which kid will play there in the afternoon heat?” One afternoon in March 2022, I met two officeholders of the Resident’s Welfare Association of Sector 47: Sunil Yadav, the president, and RK Yadav, the secretary. Both had been living in the sector since 2005. Sunil Yadav THE CARAVAN

was a lawyer at Gurugram’s district court, where I had met Bhardwaj. RK Yadav worked as a property dealer. “I’m fulltime into RWA,” he told me. Both wore several astrological rings on their fingers. RK Yadav painted an apocalyptic vision of crime committed by the Muslims who came to pray: chain snatching, the stealing of gas cylinders from houses, the nicking of side mirrors and tyres from parked cars. When I asked him for complaints or first-information reports, he demurred. “These were small incidents,” he told me, suddenly trying to play down his accusations. Changing tack, he began to tell me the agitation against namaz was driven by the women residents of the sector. “This was the school time and ladies would go to pick up their children,” he said. “Seeing this mass, a fear would be felt.” Sunil Yadav told me that only four Muslim families resided in Sector 47, none of whom prayed at the site. His contempt for the working-class Muslim worshippers was clear. “They are all illiterates,” he said. “Puncturewallahs, house painters, these kinds of people.” What followed was wearily predictable. The Yadavs parroted the rightwing talking points: claims of “land jihad,” a refusal to understand the importance of congregational namaz and terming it a show of strength. “Why didn’t they read Friday namaz during the lockdown?” Sunil Yadav demanded. I suggested that Muslims considered the pandemic an emergency situation. He was unconvinced. “If that was an emergency, why can’t they do the same now?” he retorted. “Was Allah different then?” After the meeting, Sunil and RK Yadav directed me to a park inside the sector. While the namaz site was deserted, the park was a hub of activity: children on swings, housewives singing bhajans. Near the centre, four benches were affixed to the ground in a square formation, facing each other. This was the place where the retirees—some of the most vocal opponents of the namaz—met every evening. It was around 6 pm when I reached there; by 6.30 pm, the benches were cramped and full.

a study in saffron · reportage and irritated the longer the conversation went on. “If fifty to a hundred people are together, then it encourages terrorism,” he said. His pitch suddenly rose, in a fit of fury. “They should all be sat in a train and sent to Pakistan. If you want to read namaz, go to Pakistan.”

opposite page: The new complex of the Sheetla Mata Mandir, being constructed close to Sector 12A, in old Gurugram.

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below: A locality in Sector 12A, in old Gurugram. By November 2021, the Hindu Right had moved the namaz row from the newer, more moneyed sectors, to old Gurugram.

on 31 october 2021, Home Minister Amit Shah addressed a rally in Dehradun, inaugurating the BJP’s campaign for state elections in Uttarakhand. “When I came to Uttarakhand earlier, during the Congress tenure, my convoy was blocked in a traffic jam,” Shah said. “I was told there is permission to block a national highway for namaz on Friday.” He did not give any details about the incident, neither stating the date of the incident nor the name of the highway. Shah’s dogwhistle was an astounding intervention; the Hindu Right and the city’s administration interpreted it as an endorsement of their activities from the top brass. The sequence of events had been remarkable. What had been set in motion by Bharti had found its way to the public utterances of India’s home minister. By this time, the Hindu Right had moved the epicentre of the agitation to Sector 12A, in old Gurugram. This was the heartland of Hindutva politics in the city; it was where most of their foot soldiers came from. Here, the namaz row reached fever pitch—Sector 47 had been forgotten. The previous Friday, more than five hundred police officers had been deployed at the Sector 12A site.

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SP Singh, who had retired recently as a recruiter for a multinational company, told me he used to hire employees from places as far as eastern Uttar Pradesh and Odisha. He thought to recruit people from nearby Nuh, a Muslim-majority district in Haryana. Singh said they hired about fifty Muslims and claimed that 11 motorcycles were stolen in one day from the factory. “We fired everyone in one go,” he said. “That’s why they are not getting work.” “The Muslims are fooling you,” Singh told me confidently. He claimed that the Muslim worshippers were trying to cause a ruckus, which is why they had been stopped. “This park where we are sitting is for recreation,” he said. “If someone starts reading namaz here, will that look nice?” The retirees told me they were happy that the namaz had been stopped. “You also know we don’t love Muslims all that much,” Bhagwan Das, another resident of the sector, told me. Since they were opposed to worship in the open, I asked if they would agree to the building of mosques. “Bawal ho jayega”—There will be trouble—Singh responded, allowing himself a chuckle at the childish impracticality of the question. I soon became little more than a silent spectator amidst the chorus of voices. The accusations seemed endless and became increasingly lurid: most crimes, whether rape or murder, were committed by Muslims; Muslims were involved in love jihad; Muslims chose to remain uneducated. “They are worse than animals,” Ram Niwas, a former army official, said. He had started becoming gruff

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a study in saffron · reportage The Samiti members, led by Bhardwaj, had gathered at a nearby crossing, attempting to move towards the namaz site. At this point, they were apprehended by the police, who arrested 25 people, including Bhardwaj and Bharti. On 5 November, the festival of Govardhan Puja, morphed into a grandiose and militant avatar, was celebrated in Sector 12A. The Hindu Right insisted on enacting these festivities in exactly the same place that had been a designated namaz site for years. A brown mud effigy of Krishna had been carved, like a mound, horizontally on the ground. The dais, covered with a white sheet, was placed under a pink awning; workers of the Samiti waved saffron flags in the background as the invitees spoke into a cordless microphone. The speakers included prominent figures from beyond Gurugram. Surendra Jain, a senior functionary of the Vishva Hindu Parishad, was present. Kapil Mishra, formerly with the Aam Aadmi Party and now a BJP legislator, whose incendiary speech had sparked the Delhi violence, was the headline act.

Saleem explained the peculiar predicament of Gurugram. “Here, Muslims are scattered all across the city,” he said. “They are not giving us to permission to build mosques, nor are they allowing us to pray in the open.” “We gave you land in 1947,” Jain said. “You were given Pakistan as you asked for it.” While he spoke, those who had protested against namaz were felicitated with garlands. Chants of “Jai Shri Ram” erupted from the audience. “I salute these freedom fighters and dharma yoddhas”—religious soldiers—Jain bellowed. “I salute these warriors who made the Gurugram administration bow.” Eventually, Mishra took the stage, launching into an irascible speech. He 62

compared those defending the right to namaz with Shaheen Bagh, branding both as a threat to law and order. Mishra taunted the protesters, “Ho gaya CAA wapas?”—Did the CAA get repealed? He framed the agitation against namaz as freedom from the obstruction of roads. “No one has the right to block roads every week,” he said. “This will not be allowed.” In an already tense climate, the puja raised the stakes up further. In a piece for The Wire, Apoorvanand, a professor at Delhi University, pointed out several errors and contradictions in what was ostensibly portrayed as a religious gathering. At the centrepiece of the festival were women, yet here the speakers were almost exclusively male, the atmosphere dominated by frightening young men. There was also the incongruity of “Jai Shri Ram” chants on a day dedicated to Lord Krishna. “Is it really Govardhan Puja or something else?” Apoorvanand asked. the puja had been a rare public appearance for Mahavir Bhardwaj, the president of the Hindu Samiti and a powerful influencer and shaper of events behind the scenes. One afternoon, a few months after the events, I met him at the historic Sheetla Mata Mandir. The temple, a magnet for Hindutva mobilisation where religious activity was interwoven with the Sangh’s agenda, was close to Sector 12A. The Mandir was operating in a makeshift fashion, in a small fraction of a larger complex. Its functioning parts were hemmed in by construction barriers; on the other side, the building of a new, gigantic temple was underway. In April 2021, when Bharti was disrupting namaz across Gurugram, Khattar, the Haryana chief minister, had laid a foundation stone for the new temple. According to Amar Ujala, the project was estimated to cost R200 crore. The Times of India had reported that the eventual structure would be taller than the Qutab Minar. A few minutes after I arrived, Mahavir Bhardwaj alighted from an SUV. A sturdy, imposing man in his sixties, he wore a yellow kurta and pyjama, paired with white sneakers. BhardTHE CARAVAN

waj had been a lifelong worker for the Sangh. He was the sort of committed ideologue, devoid of electoral ambition, who form the enduring steel frame of the Hindutva ecosystem. Bhardwaj told me that the Samiti had been formed in 2018 “for the protection of Hindu interests.” Formed to mobilise against namaz, it had quickly asserted its writ in other domains, such as the closure of meat shops during Navratri. The organisation had over a thousand members, he said, and its patrons included a retired colonel and a retired sessions judge. Membership was free. “The only terms and conditions are that you must be Hindu,” he said. When I asked Bhardwaj why non-Hindus were barred, he replied, “Non-Hindus ko theek karne ke liye hi to banayi hai”—We have set it up precisely to fix non-Hindus. The Samiti’s organisational footprint lay behind the spectacle of the Govardhan Puja. Speaking at the Puja, Bhardwaj had advanced a novel theory about how the conflict around namaz could be solved. He urged the Muslims to do ghar wapasi—in Hindutva parlance, a homecoming, the reconversion of Muslims to Hinduism. The familiar paradox at the heart of the Hindutva opposition to namaz reappeared: the throttling of public worship in the open but an even greater resistance to mosques. And the question of mosques often provoked anger. Bhardwaj had been speaking to me in a formal, Sanskritised Hindi, his tone placid and controlled, but he flared up when I brought up the Muslim demand for more mosques. “Is there a guarantee?” he asked indignantly. “Kyon behenchod das-das bachche paida kar rakhe hain?”—Why have the sister-fuckers produced ten-ten children each? “If I have one room and produce ten children, then will I occupy the district commissioner’s bungalow?” Not far from the Sheetla Mata Mandir, I met Mufti Saleem, the city’s most prominent Muslim cleric and the president of the Gurugram chapter of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the nationalist Muslim body that had opposed Partition. Saleem came from a prosperous business family that had lived in the area for generations. We met at

a study in saffron · reportage

vipin kumar / hindustan times

left: Hindu rightwing protesters shout slogans to oppose namaz in the open, on 10 December 2021, in Gurugram’s Sector 37.

the Al-Manzil restaurant in the old city. Saleem owned the restaurant. The place had earlier been a liquor store, right across from the Sadar Bazar mosque, which would lead to intermittent tension. After the Hindu owner acceded to Saleem’s request to close the shop, Saleem bought the place from him to cushion his potential loss of income. The incident spoke of an older spirit of compromise. Saleem was dressed in a white salwar kameez and a skull cap; glass-rimmed spectacles adorned his small, oval-shaped face. For the city’s preeminent Muslim religious leader, he was precociously young, only 37 years old. He explained the peculiar predicament of Gurugram: it was a new city where most of the Muslims were migrants. In older cities, such as Delhi, mosques had sprung up organically over decades and centuries in neighbourhoods where there was a substantial population of Muslims. “Here, Muslims are scattered all across the city,” he said. “They are not giving us to permission to build mosques, nor are they allowing us to pray in the open.” Saleem told me the Haryana Urban Development Authority would invite applications for the allocation of religious sites from time to time. Temples and gurdwaras were regularly awarded sites, even the occasional church was granted

next spread: The Anjuman Jama Masjid in Sector 57, Gurugram, photographed in January 2023. The mosque site was allocated by the Haryana Urban Development Authority in the early 2000s. It has since been mired in litigation, preventing construction from being completed.

permission. The application for mosques repeatedly failed. “Everyone is worried on Fridays,” he said. “Even in this environment, we were turned down when we applied for a mosque. Our money was returned.” Only one application had been approved, in the early 2000s, for a mosque in Sector 57. The mosque was mired in litigation and remained unfinished. “Many secular people tell us, ‘Why don’t you take land and build a mosque?’” Saleem said. He said Muslim organisations could raise funds to buy plots outside the HUDA allocations but lacked the feeling of security. “If we spend one crore on a mosque, who takes responsibility that this won’t be sealed?” old gurugram has one of the largest auto parts markets in the country; most of the businesses are owned by Muslims. In one of the shops, close to the Sector 12A namaz site, I met Abdul Qadir Jeelani. Men like him, invisibilised and effaced from the popular representations of Gurugram, are part of the human capital powering the city. Twenty-three years old, Jeelani sported a trendy haircut usually seen in sports stars. He had come to Gurugram in 2019 from his hometown of Darbhanga, in Bihar, to apprentice in an auto parts shop. When he first arrived, Jeelani used to pray at the Sector 12A namaz site. He now prayed alone FEBRUARY 2023

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eras. “We started feeling awkward reading namaz there,” Khan said. “People were walking around with shoes, taking pictures with the camera.” The owners of the shops overlooking the site suddenly became bitterly opposed to the namaz. “Even the shopkeepers began looking at us in a strange way,” Khan added. “The poison was spread so effectively that everyone started feeling that namaz in the open is wrong.” Though the mosques had become strained with an unmanageable overflow of worshippers in the aftermath of the shutting down of most namaz sites, the boys said they were coping

ck vijayakumar for the caravan

in the shop, moving furniture within the bright green walls, kneeling and rising in the cramped space beneath a large, framed map of India opposite the glass door entrance. For Jeelani, twelve-hour work days are the norm. He stays at the shop until closing up around 8 pm. He told me he earned R20,000 a month, sending more than half of it home. Jeelani lived with four Muslim friends in a working men’s hostel in Rajeev Nagar, a ten-minute walk from the shop. One evening, I met him after work, and we walked back to his hostel. It was a narrow, thinly plastered building, akin to a warehouse. The rest of the street was filled with near-identical structures—Rajeev Nagar had a preponderance of such establishments. The monthly rent in the hostel was R5,000 per bed. Jeelani and his friends had thought of pooling their resources and getting a two-bedroom apartment but they could not find one—nobody wanted to rent to five young Muslim men. Around fifty boys lived in Jeelani’s hostel. Seven of them, including him, were Muslim. Jeelani would occasionally hear unsettling comments from the Hindu residents. “A boy asked me the other day, ‘Why are you still here after Partition? When these Muslim countries have been formed, why are you still here?’” Jeelani introduced me to his friends in the hostel, who lived on the floor above his. Arshad came from Mathura and worked as a technician in an information technology firm. Noor Islam came from Palwal, in Haryana, and was employed at Zomato. Israil Khan hailed from Bharatpur, in Rajasthan, and was an accounting executive. All three were in their early twenties and distantly related. Their hometowns were all within fifty kilometres of each other. They sat cross-legged on beds of light wood, with thin mattresses. Bedsheets had been dispensed with, and the mattresses were strewn with preparatory guidebooks and heavy, giant laptops of an older vintage. Chargers of all shapes and sizes were piled on side tables. Soon after I arrived, Jeelani disappeared downstairs to his room, to cook for everyone. The boys told me they went to the Sadar Bazar mosque for the Friday prayer. Ever since they had arrived in Gurugram, they had been going to the Sector 12A namaz site, which was closer. Once the Hindu Right began targeting the site, for them the tranquillity of prayer was lost. They described how violent threats assailed them as they spread their prayer mats. The vigilantes would urge the police to check the worshippers’ identity cards, labelling them as Rohingyas. The media arrived, with its paraphernalia of cam-

THE CARAVAN

below: Amit Hindu, of the Bajrang Dal, photographed in January 2023.

a study in saffron · reportage somehow. They told me that, in the aftermath of the attack on namaz, their parents were constantly worried and kept calling to check in on them. Their family members asked them to keep to themselves as much as possible and to not respond to provocations, no matter how grievous. “My brother told me, even if someone slaps you, you have to come back home quietly,” Islam said. Once the namaz sites began to be attacked by the Hindu Right, their parents forbade them to go, urging them to pray in their room itself. “We go for less than an hour for namaz,” Khan said. “But people are not able to tolerate even that.” Islam felt that this magnitude of hate had not existed in previous years. “Namaz had been happening for years,” he said. “It’s not like they needed the site for building AIIMS.” The inflammatory nature of the attack on namaz had led to an uptick in hostility. “We have to hide our identity, bilkul,” Islam said. Expressing his Muslimness openly was fraught with peril. “You will get boycotted, whether it’s in a company or studying in a coaching institute.” When they returned to their hometowns, the boys said, they felt relieved and free. “We can wear our cap and kurta there,” Khan said. Despite being culturally and linguistically closer to the locals than most other migrants to the city, they still felt excluded. “If you’re a Hindu in Gurugram, no matter from where, you’ll be considered a local,” Islam said. “If you’re a Muslim, even from here, you’ll be considered an outsider.” things had escalated at an alarming pace after Shah’s statement. On 26 November 2021, a hundred men led by Bharti occupied a namaz site in Sector 37 and began conducting a havan, a Hindu rite. The ruse this time was to commemorate the martyrs of the Mumbai terror attacks of 26 November 2008. There had been no such ceremonies in the previous twelve years. This was only one among the dozens of innovative disruptions that shook Gurugram. One week, the Hindutva groups, in conjunction with residents, planned a game of cricket, which began shortly before the time for Friday

prayer. At another site, trucks were parked in a way that made congregational worship impossible. The geographical net was widening and the protests becoming more decentralised; the villages of Sirhaul and Khandsa, as well as industrial Udyog Vihar joined in the agitation against namaz in open spaces. The state was effectively surrendering to the mob. Through most of the year, the police had stopped the protesters about a hundred metres from the namaz sites. From November onwards, Muslim groups told me, the police was neither stopping the protesters from reaching the sites nor preventing the disruption of prayer. On 11 December, Khattar broke his silence on the subject. “The custom of reading namaz in the open will not be tolerated, but an amicable solution will be found through discussions,” he said. Given the slack in law enforcement and the abrupt U-turn, it was hard not to come to the conclusion that Khattar had read the tea leaves. His intervention had come soon after Shah’s statement. If Khattar’s pronouncement had been an attempt to lower the temperature while simultaneously bolstering his Hindutva credentials, he failed in the former objective. Having receded, the state had lost control. On 18 December, Hindu groups disrupted the namaz in Udyog Vihar, heckling Muslim worshippers there to chant “Bharat Mata Ki Jai.” While emboldened Hindutva groups asserted their street power, furious shenanigans were being orchestrated in the background. On 3 November, three days after Shah’s statement, there had been a meeting between the representatives of the two communities in the deputy commissioner’s office. Ahmad and Saleem were present, along with others, on the Muslim side. Mahavir Bhardwaj and Kulbhushan Bhardwaj, with other office bearers of the Samiti, represented the Hindu community. Bharti had been excluded, which left him seething. Even before the meeting began, Ahmad had an inkling of something untoward. He saw police officers addressing the leaders of the Samiti in an FEBRUARY 2023

excessively deferential manner, adding the suffix “ji” to their names. Knowing the deck was stacked in its favour, the Hindu Right pulled out a surprise manoeuvre. “A new Muslim face is brought in front of you,” Saleem told me, recalling the introduction of Khurshid Rajaka, a leader of the RSS-affiliated Muslim Rashtriya Manch. Despite opposition from Saleem, Ahmad and others, the Samiti kept pushing to declare Rajaka as the sole representative of the Muslims of Gurugram. By the end of

“If you’re a Hindu in Gurugram, no matter from where, you’ll be considered a local,” Islam said. “If you’re a Muslim, even from here, you’ll be considered an outsider.” the meeting, the Samiti had succeeded in installing Rajaka. After Rajaka’s appearance, the designated namaz sites kept dwindling until they were extinguished to zero. Following appeals from the Muslim community, six namaz sites—where prayers were led by clerics who supported Rajaka— were resuscitated. The six sites are in close proximity. Saleem thought they should have been spread out across the city, but the authorities did not listen. “Now Khurshid has vanished,” Saleem said. “The damage he had to do to us, he has done.” During months of interviews, no Muslim had anything remotely positive to say about Rajaka. Both Saleem and Ahmad told me he had been ostracised from his home region of Mewat. The MRM was an organisation detested by Muslims; the community did not even break bread with members of the group. “He might have some importance in the RSS, but none among Muslims,” Saleem said. “Why was such a person made a representative of Muslims?” I met Rajaka at a busy intersection near the national highway, where he picked me up in his car. He drove fast, with an exaggerated sense of purpose, 67

a study in saffron · reportage called multiple people on his mobile and made small talk with me, sometimes doing all three things simultaneously. Rajaka spent most of his adult working life as a bank manager in Gurugram, before the wealthy megalopolis arose. Though he was now the national convenor of MRM, he admitted that, in his native Mewat, his neighbours and friends still considered him an enemy of the community—the biggest slur was calling someone a Jana Sanghi. Rajaka told me he focussed on students and youths, and was attempting to keep his community in a positive frame of mind. “I try to keep them away from people who are misleading them, like on the hijab issue or Shaheen Bagh,” he said. “People keep trying to mislead Muslims.” Rajaka was not entirely in agreement with the standard talking points of the Hindu Right. He agreed that there was no widespread Muslim crime, nor any encroachment, nor any attempt to show strength. He drew an analogy between namaz in the open with the practice of kanwars in Hinduism. “People opposed namaz,” he said, as if that alone was a reasonable justification. “That was the only problem.” Rajaka’s presence fuelled criticisms from Muslims about opportunism and personal ambition. “I am with Islam,” he shot back. “I am not with Muslims.” Rajaka claimed credit for saving the six remaining namaz sites, although he said he had faced opposition from Bhardwaj and Bharti, who pressed for a complete shutdown. Towards the end of our meeting, Rajaka began to speak about his co-religionists with a startling disdain. After picking me up, he had taken me to the office of Kuldeep Yadav, the councillor. The two began talking. Yadav admitted that there was local opposition to the building of mosques, while Rajaka said he knew that the reduction of namaz sites to six would continue to cause many problems. The issue seemed unresolvable. Suddenly, Rajaka turned towards me and spoke, as if pronouncing a final judgment on the fate of Gurugram’s Muslims. “Pit te hi rahenge saale”— The fuckers will keep getting thrashed. 68

{THREE} one friday afternoon, I accompanied Ahmad to the mosque where he prayed. We set off from his office in a Toyota SUV. Ahmad told me he was able to go to the mosque only because of his privilege. For the working-class Muslims of Gurugram—a large proportion of whom worked in construction—travelling many kilometres to a mosque, an endeavour which required both money and time, was not an option. After a ten-minute drive, we arrived at the Anjuman Jama Masjid in Sector 57. Iron rods jutted out of half-finished pillars, bare red bricks showed in the absence of paint. The mosque had three levels for prayer: a basement, an elevated floor and the terrace. In the already hot spring sun, the terrace lay deserted. The two levels below were packed to the rafters. Slippers and shoes lay strewn haphazardly along the stairs. Cheap rugs in mismatched colours were spread horizontally across the prayer hall; the odd whirring fan circulated dust. Despite the dreary surroundings, the solemnity of worship remained. Ahmad stood out, his visible upper-class prosperity an anomaly among the congregation of working-class worshippers. He fell into conversation with Aslam Khan, the chairperson of the Haryana Anjuman Charitable Trust, which administered the mosque. Khan told me the mosque site was granted in 2004 as part of the HUDA allocation for sites of religious worship, along with 17 temples, two gurdwaras and a church. The trust started work and built the basement, but some local property dealers soon won a stay order on construction. The petitioners demanded that a police station or a market should be constructed at the site instead of the mosque. The trust won the case in the high court and resumed construction, but the petitioners filed an appeal in the Supreme Court and construction was halted again. Khan told me that proceedings in the Supreme Court kept getting adjourned. “Only one masjid in new Gurgaon, and we are facing these kinds of problems for it,” he said. “This is a space allotted by the government— what could be illegal about it?” THE CARAVAN

Back at the office, Ahmad recounted how the namaz row had upended his life. His business and his family had suffered. For three months following the events of 17 September 2021, he stopped coming to the office. “I don’t give my number to anyone, not even my clients,” he said. If he walked to another nearby property of his hospitality business, Ahmad told me, his security guard followed him all the way. Then there was the extreme vulnerability of his business. “Twenty people can come in here and smash everything,” he said. His family kept checking on him through the day. He had received threats of various kinds, which included being run over by a vehicle or being shot dead. He said he had legally transferred all his assets to his family. “I have conversations with them about

“But it’s not just money or food that fulfills your life,” Ahmad said. “It’s also about dignity.” an action plan if things go wrong.” While things had become stressful for Ahmad, the namaz row had also brought forth a stubborn and steely aspect to his personality. “I’m fighting for a cause I feel strongly about,” he said. “I won’t give up. At least my daughters should know I fought.” He knew he could easily recede into his upper-class cocoon, Ahmad said, and ignore everything. “But it’s not just money or food that fulfils your life,” he said. “It’s also about dignity.” I asked Ahmad whether, during all his weeks at the heart of the namaz dispute, he had had any direct interactions with the obstructors, such as Bharti or Kulbhushan Bhardwaj. He looked up from his lunch, and his eyes narrowed in revulsion. “They make my blood boil.” an enduring consequence of the attack on namaz was the hyper-activation of the city’s network of Hindutva vigilantes. One of them who came to prominence was Amit Hindu, a foot soldier of the Bajrang Dal. Legally,

a study in saffron · reportage he went by Amit; the last name was a self-styled addition. One afternoon in March 2022, Amit called me to an unoccupied building in Sector 45, which served as the base of the Bajrang Dal’s Gurugram operations. The building had a national flag tied to a balcony fence on the first floor. Amit and his rudimentary operation were based out of the ground floor. It was a dimly lit, cavernous hall with white marble flooring. A wall-sized poster of Bharat Mata occupied a space to the right of the entrance. Amit appeared wearing a saffron shawl over a dirty white shirt, black trousers and Adidas sneakers. He was thin and reedy, with long hair bundled into a ponytail and a razor-thin saffron tilak vertically bisecting his forehead. He was born in 1992. At the age of twenty, he told me, he dropped out of college in Almora, in Uttarakhand. “Desh ko dekhna tha”—I had to watch over the country. “Muslims were committing atrocities all the time.” Amit claimed to have no means of income and told me his family and friends gave him money. He lived alone in a rented room and said he spent most of his time either listening to bhajans or keeping up with the news. “I love travelling,” he told me, recounting a trip on Janmashtami to Srinagar’s Lal Chowk, where they chanted religious slogans. It was a lifestyle of lumpen hippiedom, contemptuous of the world of work and jobs. Amit told me he spent ten days a month at the building. The rest of the time, he travelled. At the height of the attack on namaz in Gurugram, Amit claimed, the Bajrang Dal cadre would visit at least ten sites each Friday. Each Friday morning, the vigilantes would assemble where we sat. Two squads of roughly fifty people each would set off in cars and bikes to namaz sites across the city. “We would tell the Muslims namaz in open won’t be allowed,” he said. Amit told me he was arrested in Sector 12A. When I asked him why the Bajrang Dal was fighting for a field strewn with rubble, Amit revealed it was Hindu activists who had filled the field with rubble. “No one can sit there now,” he said, clearly pleased with the outcome. Like Bharti, Amit seemed infused with a messianic complex and often lapsed into speaking about himself in the third person. “Not only in India, but in the entire world,” he told me, “If the Hindu is disturbed, Amit Hindu will be there.” He radiated a restless energy, as if he was engaged in a search for some form of purpose or action. “I just got three–four calls right now,” he told me. Amit showed me a video of a few Muslims praying in what he said was Sector 44. He claimed the Hindus were facing problems because of the namaz. “Their biggest fear is for their girls,

because they do love jihad there,” he said, neatly tying two falsehoods spread by the Hindutva ecosystem into a single narrative. A well-built friend of Amit’s, who belonged to the VHP, walked in. As the friend spoke, Amit took drags from a wooden hookah. Then he raised his mobile phone to his face and began using it as a mirror, to adjust and sharpen the tilak on his forehead. Three minor boys from a neighbouring village sauntered in next, revealing another use of the building, as a site of indoctrination. “They come for one hour daily for training,” Amit told me. “We talk to them about the national interest.” Two days after I met Amit, he was arrested for assaulting two Muslim men near the Ramada Hotel in Sector 45, not far from the building where we met. One of them, Abdur Rehman, was a cleric visiting from Bihar and, with his skull cap and beard, visibly Muslim. Rehman had been travelling on a motorcycle with his friend back to where they were staying in Gurugram, and the two had halted for a short break near the hotel. According to Rehman’s testimony to the media, Amit was in a car with some of his friends when they spotted him and his friend. Amit and his cohort began harassing them. They snatched the cap from Rehman’s head and pulled his beard, and threatened to forcibly feed them pork. The men were mugged. Amit was arrested and bailed out the next day, after the Hindu Right ecosystem rallied for his release. Saleem, who had reached the spot upon hearing of the events, told me that Mahavir and others were in constant touch with members of the Muslim community, urging them to withdraw the complaint. Unlike Bharti, Amit worked within the Sangh fold and was deferential towards the local establishment. Consequently, his star began to rise. In July, I spotted his face in a picture accompanying a report in Scroll. Members of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad had been booked for genocidal slogans during a protest march against the killing of Kanhaiya Lal, an Udaipur tailor who had shared a post in support of the BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma after she made derogatory comments about the prophet Muhammad. In September, a picture of Amit standing alongside half-a-dozen men in front of Studio Xo Bar, an upscale establishment in Gurugram, was featured in a report in the Indian Express. The Bajrang Dal and the VHP were opposing the comedian Kunal Kamra’s show at the venue. The Hindu Right organisations accused Kamra of making fun of Hindu deities. The show was cancelled. The energies unleashed by the Hindu Right were seeping into society at large. In October, a spontaneous mob of around two hundred Hindus stormed FEBRUARY 2023

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a mosque in Bhora Kalan, a village in Gurugram. The mob was inflamed by repairs and renovation at the local mosque, which they saw in conspiratorial terms as a pretext to expand the mosque. They entered at prayer time, beating the worshippers and vandalising the mosque. In late December, the Indian Express reported that Amit and other Bajrang Dal members had attacked a namaz site in Sector 69. The same month, Kulbhushan Bhardwaj and a group of Hindus, including some local residents, held protests at an idgah ground in Sector 23A, which had been allotted for congregational prayers to the Haryana Waqf Board. the six namaz sites, despite running under the aegis of Rajaka and the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, continued to be targeted by the Hindu activists. In our meeting at the Sheetla Mata Mandir, Mahavir had told me the Samiti would resume the agitation if the six sites were not shut down. Bharti would also call me out of the blue, incensed about the namaz sites which he claimed had increased from the six that had been agreed upon. “Will Dinesh Bharti have to go out there again?” he thundered. “Why is the Samiti sitting on its bums?” When I mentioned that the MRM was part of the Sangh ecosystem, Bharti told me he did not recognise it as such. Since our meeting at the tea shop in Sushant Lok, Bharti had become increasingly elusive. He would agree to interview appointments, then cancel at the last minute with barely disguised excuses. But he would call unannounced, at odd times of the day, complaining about enemies, imagined and real, within and outside the Hindutva ecosystem. His candidness one moment would transform to threats the next. “Whatever I have said should not be misrepresented,” he would say. “There should be no mistake.” It was not difficult to see that these elements of his personality—brusqueness, overreach and social ineptitude—had landed him into trouble with the notables of the local Hindutva establishment. Messages from Bharti kept landing in my WhatsApp inbox. Shortly after watching The Kashmir Files, a propaganda film about the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of the early 1990s, he sent out a breathless essay gushing about the movie. It was written in a stream-of-consciousness vein, without any punctuation. Bharti claimed to have been fixated with Kashmir since his childhood. The fate of the Kashmiri Pandits would be the fate of Gurugram and all of India, Bharti warned, before chastising Hindus for being insufficiently united and patriotic. By the end, his rant had become an incoherent jumble, jumping from the imminent threat of Khalistanis to the youth going astray from traditional values. 70

Bharti was also attempting to gentrify his image. One day, he sent me an airbrushed studio photograph of himself. His leathery skin appeared smooth as a peach, and his unkempt hair was neatly coiffed. He was wearing a saffron stole around his neck, over a mustard yellow kurta, both shining with the luminousness of silk. These seemed to me the chaotic actions of a chaotic mind. Bharti appeared to have little coherent strategy to rise within the Hindutva fold. In April, Bharti made another solo move. He approached the district magistrate and the police commissioner, claiming that the namaz sites had increased from six to roughly a dozen and that the administration was doing nothing. Bharti wrote petitions addressed to these officials as well as the chief minister. This minor piece of theatre brought Bharti a morsel of media attention from local television channels. But it was a typically reckless, ill-advised decision that proved to be his undoing. Towards my later visits, whenever I spoke to Bharti, he was gripped by panic. He spoke of cases against him and meetings with his lawyers. Bharti felt he was being scapegoated by the establishment. There was some truth to this claim. Several people with knowledge of the events told me that the local Hindutva leadership had given Bharti enough warnings about his impulsive actions. Now, the establishment had decided to fix him. Two weeks after his petitions to the administration, another essay-length text landed in my inbox. “Gurugram Police you can file as many cases,” the text began, “I will not stop until I have ended open namaz.” Bharti accused the administration and the Hindutva leadership of collusion against him, claiming that he was being singled out from among the Hindu protesters and prosecuted. He ended the message with a threat: if the administration continued to pile false cases against him, he would kill himself and hold the officials responsible. “Either namaz in the open will end or my bier will be paraded around town.” When I last met Ahmad, he had given up hope of a fair outcome for the Muslims of Gurugram. For him, Khattar’s statement had been the final blow. “Why will police and administration increase the places when the chief minister has said it’s not allowed?” he said. “They very well can make it absolutely zero.” Ahmad thought the only thing worth pursuing any longer was the allocation of land for mosques. But he did not sound hopeful, and his tone was one of tired resignation. He had recently returned from his hometown of Rae Bareli, in Uttar Pradesh, where he had witnessed Adityanath’s re-election as chief minister. THE CARAVAN

shahid tantray for the caravan

a study in saffron · reportage

above: Worshippers at the Anjuman Jama Masjid during Friday prayers, in January 2023. The mosque has seen an excess of worshippers since most of Gurugram’s namaz sites were shut down.

a study in saffron · reportage

Ahmad felt that the volume and intensity of hatred towards Muslims was growing with each passing year. Just the other day, his wife told him that, in one of the residential WhatsApp groups, someone was inquiring about domestic help and had specifically stated that the person be non-Muslim. The overwhelming feeling, as a Muslim today, was fear. “We are scared about Friday prayers,” he said. “We are scared about celebrating any of our festivals.” The Hinduism of today, Ahmad thought, was unrecognisable from

the religion he had witnessed since his childhood. “Did Hindus not burn effigies of Ravana in parks?” he asked. “Does Ramlila not happen in every gully of this country?” To Ahmad, the issue was clear: to suppress Muslims and enjoy their suffering. Throughout his life, Ahmad felt strongly that he was an equal citizen of the country. His personal heroes were Abul Kalam Azad and the former president APJ Abdul Kalam. “I hated it when some people within my own community talked ill of the system in the FEBRUARY 2023

country,” he said. “I felt an ownership towards the country, that we ourselves have to fix things.” But the events around the attack on namaz, how things transpired, had changed something in him. Ahmad felt despondent. “I can’t tell a lot of people how broken I am from within,” he told me. Muslims, he said, had been demonised as the permanent villains of the Indian story. “We’re not on the journey to being second-class citizens,” he said. “It’s not an attempt any longer. It’s happened, it’s sealed, it’s done.” s 71

essay

Whitewashing Caste

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ESSAY / HISTORY HARDEEP DHILLON

How Indian immigrants used religion and caste to naturalise as White in the US THE CARAVAN

fotosearch / getty images

on 6 september 1915, 22-year-old Kala Bagai arrived at Angel Island aboard the SS Korea with her husband and three sons. Kala carried a material archive of her life in her luggage: gold ornaments, a portrait of herself, a sky-blue silk sari reserved for special occasions. Kala had carefully chosen the valuables, knowing her husband, Vaishno Das Bagai, intended to establish a home in the United States. After being questioned and examined at Angel Island, the Bagai family made their way to San Francisco. Sixteen days later, Vaishno submitted his declaration of intention for naturalisation. Given that a married woman’s nationality was considered a corollary of her husband’s, and a child’s nationality derived from the father’s, Vaishno’s application was important for the whole family. Vaishno prepared his naturalisation case hoping he would secure enough evidence to prove he qualified as a White person. At the time, the United States required each immigrant to prove five years of legal residency in the country and that he was a “free white person . . . of good character.” The latter requirement, delineated by the US Congress’s first uniform law for naturalisation in 1790, succinctly captured federal attempts to mold and settle a nation with White citizens. While birthright citizenship was legalised in 1868 and the Naturalization Act of 1870 extended naturalisation to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,” virtually all other aspiring US citizens

essay

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previous spread: Asian Immigrants arriving at the Quarantine Station at Angel Island, San Francisco Bay circa 1911. this spread: To prove he qualified as a White person, Vaishno Das Bagai secured three caste certificates from the magistrates in his home district of Peshawar through the US consul in Karachi and Bombay to certify he was a “high caste Hindoo from the Aryan origin.”

were required to legally qualify as “free white persons.” Between 1878 and 1952, US federal courts adjudicated more than fifty cases from immigrants from Asia, the Pacific, and Central and South America to determine who was White. Indian immigrants took to the offices of county clerks and then to courtrooms to prove they were White. They argued they were Caucasian and Aryan, citing race science theories and categorisations developed by anthropologists, philologists and imperial bureaucrats. But whether Indians and other Asian migrants constituted White persons remained a contested legal question among county clerks, US judges and local populations. Religion and caste, however, cut across these concerns as Indian immigrants cited their ancestral heritage and practices of endogamy to argue their racial ancestry and families’ lack of “intermixture” proved not only their race but purity of blood over multiple generations. To that end, Vaishno wrote to officials in India to obtain documents that would specify his caste. Vaishno secured three caste certificates from the magistrates in his home district of Peshawar through the US consul in Karachi and Bombay, as well as a letter from the headmaster of National High School in Peshawar City certifying he was a “high caste Hindu.” Caste and religion had become central in defining race and assimilability for Indian immigrants and came to be enshrined in the sociolegal institutions of the United States. They informed how Indian immigrants such as Vaishno substantiated their own racial status, and how they saw themselves in relation to other Indian immigrants with lower socioeconomic means who they believed did not warrant the same rights and privileges in the United States. a century later, US courts are adjudicating the issue of caste again. The most high-profile case in recent years is the lawsuit against the multinational conglomerate Cisco Sytems. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing recognised the claims of a principal engineer hired by Cisco in 2015, who reported that his two dominant-caste supervisors denied him various opportunities, including raises and promotions, and retaliated when he complained about being treated unfavourably because of his caste. The case is still ongoing and may set a historical precedent for the recognition of caste discrimination by US courts. Student activism has also led US universities to take a leading role in recognising caste discrimination. In 2019, Brandeis University became the first university to ban caste discrimination. Last year, the California State University, the largest public university system in the United States,

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THE CARAVAN

south asian american digital archive (saada)

whitewashing caste · essay

added caste to their anti-discriminatory policy. Numerous other universities, including Harvard, soon followed. However, the increasingly public conversation on caste and inequality has also brought into view the sharp fault lines that exist among the South Asian diaspora. In 2022, Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News, was compelled to resign after she invited Thenmozhi Soundararajan, the founder of Equality Labs, a Dalit civil-rights organisation, to speak about the subject of caste discrimination as part of the company’s larger Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programming. The invitation was revoked, following protests from Indian-origin employees who sent emails to the organisation’s leadership calling Soundarajan “anti-Hindu” and “Hinduphobic.” In the early twentieth century, caste was intimately tied to racial constellations of White supremacy in US courts, which structured the borders of rights, privileges and goods denied to “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Indian immigration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century because the borders of other countries such as Australia and South Africa be-

whitewashing caste · essay of living and threatened the racial composition of the United States. The earliest years of Indian immigration to the United States were coterminous with restrictions against other Asian immigrants. By the 1850s, the United States increasingly restricted the rights of Chinese men and women. Chinese immigrants were prevented from testifying in court, paid heavier taxes, disenfranchised from certain land purchases, and, by 1875, Congress agreed with nativist sentiments to thwart the arrival of Chinese women in the United States. In 1878, Ah Yup, a Chinese immigrant, unsuccessfully argued that Chinese people were White on the basis of anthropological classifications before California’s Ninth Circuit Court, which determined that “a native of China, of the Mongolian race” was not White. The United States eventually banned all labour immigrants from China for a ten-year period, which it later extended, and restricted all Chinese persons from US citizenship in 1882. Other immigrants from Asia were increasingly restricted from entry. States across the United States rapidly expanded citizen-only laws, preventing “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from purchasing or leasing agricultural property, holding business licenses, most professional occupations, home ownership and membership in numerous organisations and associations. These laws were designed to use legal status as a way to code race into law, in order to establish substantive socioeconomic barriers for Asian immigrants. gan closing off to Indian immigrants, who then heard news of their potential to earn larger sums of money in the United States and Canada. At the time, colonial India comprised present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Indian immigrants, largely from Punjab, arrived by the handful in the US South, and on the Pacific Coast. Many early immigrants worked for months or years across the Bay of Bengal and Pacific Rim before paying for their journeys to the United States. By 1907, the dozens of Indian men who had arrived in the United States rose to a few hundred, and by 1920, there were approximately ten thousand Indian immigrants living in the United States. They largely comprised men who were labourers, merchants, peddlers, students and refugees, besides a handful of women. Most families did not plan to immigrate and settle in the United States but saw migration as an avenue to secure financial stability and educational access for their families before returning to India. Indian immigrants experienced a huge backlash when they arrived in the United States. Nativists in the United States alleged that Indian and other Asian migrants undermined American standards

religion became a critical component of adjudicating race in US courts far earlier than Vaishno’s case. The first major concern related to religion emerged with Indian immigrants who wore turbans and other religious head coverings to court. In January 1907, Veer Singh, Dakam Chand and Fukur Chand travelled to the federal court in Oakland, California to file their first papers for naturalisation. Both men marked themselves as White and readied to swear their allegiance to the United States but before they could, JR Ford, a deputy county clerk, instructed the men to remove their turbans. Veer Singh refused. Cook responded by denying his first papers. Dakam Chand and Fukur Chand obliged, removed their turbans, and Cook accepted their first papers. However, as a local newspaper reported, Cook was soon notified by the United States immigration commissioner that “Hindus are not entitled to become American citizens under any circumstances.” The next year, things went smoothly for some Indian immigrants at federal courts in the US South. In 1908, Bellal Houssein and Abdul Hamid—Muslims—were among the first Indians naturalised. The two men were naturalised in FEBRUARY 2023

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whitewashing caste · essay Louisiana, where Asian immigrants’ proximity to Whiteness was a part of a larger effort to continuously differentiate the rights of Black Americans from others in the South. Abba Dolla, a man considered to be of Afghan descent born in Calcutta, also successfully naturalised in Savannah, Georgia after citing Hamid’s case as precedent and allowing the judge to examine whether his veins were visible through his skin to prove he was White. The matter came to a head in 1920, when Phil Swing, a judge in Imperial County, California, prohibited wearing their turban in court. Local immigrants swiftly responded to Swing’s edict insisting the court reconsider its opinion on the matter. Hari Singh Besra, a young Sikh immigrant in Southern California, penned a letter to the court, noting: I have been requested by the leading Sikhs farming in the Imperial Valley to bring this matter to your attention. That the wearing of turbans is a part of the religion of the Sikhs. … I beg you to grant me an interview so I may furnish conclusive proof that the wearing of turbans is a part of the religion of the Sikhs, and the order compelling them to remove them in courts is a great wrong which ought to be righted. Despite protest from immigrants and calls for exemptions on the basis of religion, county clerks and judges continued to employ their discretionary authority to grant or deny Indian immigrants wearing religious head coverings in and to court. This extended to Parsi immigrants. In 1917, the same year that Congress passed a sweeping federal law barring immigrants from a wide geographical area, including most of Asia, Dinshah Ghadiali, a Parsi immigrant then resident in New Jersey, was physically thrown out from court during his naturalisation ceremony because he refused to remove his religious head covering. His refusal made headlines with the New York Times, which insisted Ghadiali had refused to remove his “turban hat.” Indian immigrants wearing religious head coverings were also discriminated against in worksites

Indian immigrants argued they were Caucasian and Aryan, citing race-science theories and categorisations developed by anthropologists, philologists and imperial bureaucrats. But whether Indians and other Asian migrants constituted White persons remained a contested legal question among county clerks, US judges and local populations. 76

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and public spaces. Some cut their hair while others retained turbans, often wearing hats that covered their unshorn hair. As one White settler in Imperial County later recounted to the local press, immigrants hired on her farm, such as Baboo Singh, wore hats over their unshorn hair to avoid the routine ogling by White men, women and children, and the violent threats of the local storekeeper, Bill Brailey, who cursed and yelled at every Indian migrant who visited his store. Sudhindra Bose recounted similar forms of racism against him as a student in his 1920 publication Fifteen Years in America. As a student, Bose left his turban in a college cloakroom only to find it was “coldly assassinated—literally hacked and butchered to pieces.” Others had their turbans slapped off or pulled off in physical altercations when they were beaten by a small group or mob of White men. Courts also differentiated Parsi Indians from other religious communities in India, believing their ancestral heritage made them more proximate to Whiteness than other Indian immigrants. In 1909, the case of Bhicaji Franyi Balsara, an elite Parsi immigrant in New York who arrived in the US as a cotton buyer for the Tata group, drew the attention of the country. In 1909, judge Emile Lacombe granted citizenship to Balsara, ruling “he appears to be a gentleman of high character and exceptional intelligence” and of “the purest Aryan type.” Lacombe added that the naturalisation of Parsis created legal grounds for “Afghans, Hindus, Arabs, and Berbers” to naturalise as US citizens. Lacombe’s decision was purposeful. At the time, the department of justice actively undermined the cases of many Indian immigrants for naturalisation. District attorneys, many of whom held racist opinions toward Asian immigrants, routinely followed the cases of Indian immigrants and challenged them if they received naturalisation. Balsara’s naturalisation was successfully appealed by the justice department. In May 1910, the case made headlines across the United States as the Second Circuit agreed to review the case. The New York Tribune carried coverage of the case on its front page headlining the issue as a “Scientific Battle over Parsee’s Rights.” The paper feared that the case would establish “a loophole for the naturalization of little brown men and big brown men.” Balsara successfully retained US citizenship but on grounds that distinguished Parsees from other Indians given their ancestral proximity to Europe. The court ruled that the “Farsees emigrated some 1,200 years ago from Persia into India, and now live in the neighbourhood of Bombay, to the number of about 100,000. They constitute a settlement by themselves of intelligent and well-to-do persons, principally engaged in commerce, and are

courtesy of the california digital newspaper collection, center for bibliographic studies and research, university of california, riverside

whitewashing caste · essay

as distinct from the Hindus as are the English who dwell in India.” The ruling established precedent to distinguish Parsees as a separate group of Indian immigrants eligible for US citizenship. Three years later, Bengal-born Akhay Kumar Mozumdar brought another aspect of religion into court to prove he was White. Mozumdar testified that he was a “high caste Hindu of pure blood” and a member of the Aryan race to combat the naturalisation examiner’s declaration that he was Asiatic and not White. Mozumdar substantiated this argument by insisting that an invasion of India by Aryans occurred in ancient times, and that this group of Aryans maintained their racial purity through caste practices of endogamy. It is unknown whether Indian migrants independently introduced the idea of caste within the legal sphere to prove racial purity or whether judges inquired about it first. Mozumdar testified that he was Indian and “a high-caste Hindu of pure blood, belonging to what is known as the warrior caste, or ruling caste.” He then argued: The pure-blooded Hindus are divided into three castes—the priestly caste, the warrior or ruling caste, and the merchant caste. The blood is kept pure by rigid rules of exclusion. Anyone who marries outside of his caste is ostracized, and is disinherited by the native law. Hone of the high-caste Hindus will have anything to do with him … The great bulk of the Hindus in this country are not high-caste Hindus, but are what are called Sihks, and are of mixed blood … The

high-caste Hindus are of Brahmin faith, and in India are clearly distinguished from all of the other inhabitants, including the aborigines of the country, or the hill tribes, and also the descendants of the invaders, those of the Mohammedan faith. Caste provided an avenue for Mozumdar to prove racial purity by underlining the endogamous nature of upper-caste communities. Applicants and judges used caste as an avenue to delineate racial purity which was central to preserving Whiteness in the United States. At the time, the one-drop rule classified any person with African ancestry as Black, and miscegenation laws prohibited and criminalised interracial intimacies and marriage. The district court judge in charge of the case differed with Mozumdar on whether high-caste status ensured racial purity but still naturalised him. Following Mozumdar’s 1913 case, caste became an integral component in federal deliberations of whether Indian immigrants classified as White persons. Members of the anticolonial diasporic Ghadar movement, who advocated against the racist governance of the British Empire, including Bhagat Singh Thind and Godha Ram, used caste to argue they were White. The Bagai family was aware of these legal struggles. The family read and collected news accounts related to the condition of Indian migrants, including those who sought US citizenship. Vaishno’s documents stated he was a “high caste FEBRUARY 2023

above: A selection of US newspaper articles between 1907 and 1932 on Indian immigration. Many US newspapers covered the eligiblity of Asian immigrants, including Indians, to naturalise as White.

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whitewashing caste · essay Hindoo from the Aryan origin.” In March 1921, Vaishno was naturalised and the Bagai family, including his wife Kala and three sons, became US citizens. The different precedents established by federal courts on whether Indian and other Asian immigrants could naturalise as US citizens eventually made its way to the US Supreme Court. The question before the court in 1923 was: “Is a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amrit Sar, Punjab, India, a white person?” The applicant before the court was Bhagat Singh Thind, a young Sikh immigrant from Punjab, who had served in the US army and advocated for India’s independence. For the justice department, Thind most likely represented the perfect test case to try the boundaries of Whiteness. Thind was not as affluent as others who were naturalised. He spoke English but lacked graduate degrees from acclaimed universities and was not as active in White networks compared to many others, like Mozumdar. He also wore a turban, which served as a physical marker of distinction beyond the colour of his skin.

courtesy of the california digital newspaper collection, center for bibliographic studies and research, university of california, riverside

below: An article in the San Francisco Call dated 18 November 1906. Indian immigrants experienced a huge backlash when they arrived in the United States.

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William R King, a former justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, argued Thind’s case in the Supreme Court in January 1923. King relied on the work of American and European ethnologists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, James Drummond Anderson, Thomas Henry Huxley and Max Mueller, arguing that humans were divided into five races of which Indians from Punjab like Thind were part of the Aryan race and, therefore, Caucasian. King relied on the assumption that “Caucasian” and “white” were synonymous legal terms and cited a series of court cases previously approved by judges across the United States on the eligibility of Indian migrants to naturalise as US citizens. King then argued that Thind’s racial purity was maintained through caste: “The high-class Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint. The caste system prevails in India to a degree unsurpassed elsewhere … With this caste system prevailing, there was comparatively a small mixture of blood between the different castes.” Thind attached an appendix to King’s brief claiming he was a “free white person,” in which he emphasised the relationship between caste, blood and race in his claims to racial purity and Whiteness, like many Indian migrants who had sought US citizenship before him. He insisted that he was of pure Aryan blood, since ancient texts from India, specifically the laws of Manu, prohibited intercaste marriage. The US Supreme Court unanimously denied Thind citizenship on almost every legal basis Asian immigrants had previously presented to support their cases to be classified as White. Justice George Sutherland penned the court’s unanimous ruling, noting Indian immigrants were of “Asiatic stock” and could not establish racial purity based on caste because “intermixture” was still possible, “even in the case of the Brahman caste.” The Supreme Court’s ruling further noted, “What we now hold is that the words ‘free White persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” The ruling denaturalised Thind and rendered all Indian immigrants ineligible to naturalise as US citizens, marking them as a community of permanent aliens in the United States. Following United States v Bhagat Singh Thind, the Bureau of Naturalization released records to district attorneys across the country and encouraged them to rescind the naturalisation of all Indian migrants on grounds that they had procured US citizenship by fraud. It was likely the first largescale effort by the United States government to

whitewashing caste · essay denaturalise a migrant community. Indian immigrants learned of the efforts when attorneys general in California, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington initiated denaturalisation proceedings against them. The notices were first mailed in April, two months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Thind, using addresses on file. The denaturalisation notices informed Indian immigrants they were being charged with illegally procuring US citizenship on the account that they were not free White persons, and needed to immediately “refrain and be enjoined from ever after using or enjoying any of the rights, privileges or benefits” of US citizenship. Each person had sixty days to respond to the state’s bill of complaint or they would be denaturalised by decree. Most Indian migrants were denaturalised by decree. Many immigrants such as Vaishno refused to return their naturalisation certificates or tried to appeal the attorney general’s decision in court. Only a handful were able to retain US citizenship. Parsi and Muslim Indians with financial means employed arguments around religion to differentiate themselves from Hindus and Sikhs. Many Muslim and Parsi Indians who could trace their ancestry to regions more proximate to Europe and distant from India insisted they were still White and not Asiatic. Their legal arguments emphasised how distance from eastern Asia became an integral component of Indian communities as they sought to retain US citizenship in the face of denaturalisation. John Muhammad Ali, a retail merchant, former lecturer and father of two interracial children, had previously naturalised as a “high-caste Hindu” in 1921. In his denaturalisation case, Ali unsuccessfully argued that his ancestors had “invaded” India but kept their Arabian bloodline clear and pure by intermarriage within the family, and that his heritage could be traced back to Prophet Muhammad. His line of argument borrowed from British imperial understandings of Indian history which had repeatedly situated the Mughals as Muslim invaders. Other Indians situated themselves as long-term migrants of India with Persian origins. Qamar-ud-Din Alexander, a Parsi born in Rawalpindi, unsuccessfully argued he was of Persian descent and that his ancestors had immigrated to India six to seven hundred years earlier. The loss of land rights, voting rights, access to US passports and the ability to marry across racial lines, among other rights and privileges, were grave hardships for those who were rendered ineligible to citizenship. The British government’s India Office and its consuls in the United States did very little to help Indian immigrants beyond requesting additional time for Indian immigrants and families to sell their land and property.

The pain was unbearable for Kala Bagai’s husband. Over the span of a few years, Vaishno Das Bagai acquired several life-insurance policies in his name totaling $75,000. In early 1928, Vaishno traveled to Lands End with the intention of jumping from a cliff. He was restrained by his wife but less than two months later, Vaishno rented a room in San Jose, ignited the gas stove, and escaped all that hounded him. He left behind three letters to his family, including one informing his wife of the couple’s accounts. Vaishno wrote his fourth and final letter to the US public, explaining, “I came to America thinking, dreaming and hoping to make this land my home. ... But they now come to me and say, I am no longer an American citizen. They will not permit me to buy my own home, and lo, they even shall not issue me a passport to go back to India. ... Is life worth living in a gilded cage? Obstacles this way, blockades that way, and the bridges burnt behind.” Two generations later, his granddaughter told me she continued to witness the tears that settled onto the rims of Kala Bagai’s eyes when she spoke about her husband. subsequent revisions in immigration and naturalisation law were based on the idea that Asian aliens were worthy of citizenship due to their value to the United States during the Second World War and the Cold War. The civil-rights movement in the United States also played a role in highlighting the question of race in Congress, where immigration reform was widely debated. Bills to eliminate racial prerequisites emerged in 1940—advocating that the right of a person to naturalise should “not be denied or abridged because of race, color, creed or national origin”—but failed in Congress. Having failed at garnering support for substantial reform, many Asian American communities lobbied for piecemeal legislative reform instead. The Magnuson Act in December 1943, passed after substantial advocacy by Chinese Americans and Chinese diplomats, signaled the possibility that naturalisation and immigration reform was possible on the smallest scale for immigrants who could prove their value and contributions to the nation. The Magnuson Act allowed some Chinese immigrants residing in the US to naturalise as US

Religion and caste, however, cut across these concerns as Indian immigrants cited their ancestral heritage and practices of endogamy to argue their racial ancestry and families’ lack of “intermixture” proved not only their race but purity of blood over multiple generations. FEBRUARY 2023

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whitewashing caste · essay citizens each year and permitted upto 105 new entry visas per year. Two years later, Congress debated reform for Indian and Filipino men. Before the Philippines gained independence in 1946, Filipinos found themselves reconfigured as alien unless they naturalised in the US, and were targeted by state repatriation and deportation campaigns. However, the role of Filipinos during the Second World War led Congress to reconsider their eligibility for US citizenship. The same year, Indian immigrants represented by groups such as The India League for America, India Welfare League and India Association for American Citizenship, argued for immigration reform and naturalisation based on the idea that India and Indians contributed to the financial prosperity and geopolitical needs of the United States. The bill most widely supported by American officials was HR 173, which followed the pattern of the Magnuson Act. The attorney general, the state department and the US president at the time, Franklin D Roosevelt, pledged support for the bill because of India’s “great services” during the war and its ability to “furnish substantial amounts of raw materials” for and after the war. They also assured that Indians posed “no real danger” to US employment. The British government’s support for the bill, which emerged as India approached inde-

courtesy wikimedia commons

below: Indian immigration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century because the borders of other countries such as Australia and South Africa began closing off to Indian immigrants, who then heard news of their potential to earn larger sums of money in the United States and Canada.

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pendence, was also cited, underscoring how imperial considerations remained central to the making of US citizenship. In July 1946, Congress passed the Luce-Celler Act on the basis of the Magnuson Act and permitted one-hundred “persons of races indigenous to India” and the Philippines to immigrate to the US per year. The Act also allowed Indian immigrants residing in the US to naturalise. Together, the changes to immigration and naturalisation law that emerged over two decades bolstered the idea that legislative changes should be gradual—and small in scale and scope—and assessed according to the value aliens and their homelands added to American racial capital and geopolitical interests. The legal bar on non-Whites to naturalise as US citizens came to an end soon after the war through the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952. The act retained a system of immigration based on national quotas, thereby continuing the coding of racial provisions through national origin, and creating yet another set of racial asymmetries in US immigration and naturalisation law. s A companion piece to this article titled “The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law” is forthcoming in the journal Law and History Review.

True media needs true allies.

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I think what we need a lot more of is free, thinking press. Press which is unafraid, press which actually explores and gets into the nitty-gritties, which isn’t just there as one of news but continues to explore and dig deep, and is unafraid to do so. And it is that to my mind that Caravan represents, and which we need more of—good, well-reasoned journalism, which is unafraid and which has a voice. So keep it up! NAINA LAL KIDWAI, Chairperson, Max Financial Services

I read Caravan because I find it to be a journal that tells, investigates, and delves into important stories, on what’s going on in the country today. Caravan is not influenced by corporate interest or political alignments, and investigates in a genuine sense the real stories that we need to know. ORIJIT SEN, Artist

I do enjoy reading Caravan and I get a lot of pleasure out of it. And it forces me to think. The research that goes into the writing of the articles, the way they are written and the subjects chosen, are thought-provoking, in the sense that you think beyond the obvious. In the process of doing this—like in everything that is thoughtprovoking—you ask questions, you have doubts and you want to explore the freedom of asking questions and expressing your doubts and trying to get answers. And I find that I do enjoy it very much, because it forces me to do that. ROMILA THAPAR, Historian

REPORTAGE / POLITICS HARTOSH SINGH BAL

A UK report states VHP planned Gujarat violence in advance

a damning document · reportage

The Caravan has obtained a copy of an inquiry conducted by the government of the United Kingdom into the 2002 Gujarat violence, which was cited in a recent BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, titled India: The Modi Question. The report states that the violence was “pre-planned, possibly months ago” by Vishva Hindu Parishad, a Hindu nationalist organisation. The report notes: “The attack on the train at Godhra on 27 February provided the

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pretext. If it had not occurred, another one would have been found.” The report cites evidence for stating the violence was pre-planned: “Police contacts confirmed that rioters used computerised lists to target Muslim homes and businesses. The accuracy and detail of the lists, including businesses with minority Muslim share-holding, suggest that they were prepared in advance.” It also indicts the Gujarat state government, stating, “Chief Minister Na-

THE CARAVAN

rendra Modi is directly responsible.” The report notes: The VHP and its allies acted with the support of the state Government. They could not have inflicted so much damage without the climate of impunity created by the state Government. Chief Minister Narendra Modi is directly responsible. His actions have not just been guided by a cynical assessment of political ad-

a damning document · reportage

vantage. As an architect of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda which it has pursued since it came to power in 1995, he is a believer in the VHP’s ideological motivation. The report also makes observations on the scale of the violence and points to the involvement of police in the rape of Muslim women. “A conservative estimate based on information from reliable human rights contacts puts the

number of deaths at 2000 … The killing was accompanied in many areas by widespread and systemic rape of Muslim women, sometimes by police.” The reports states, “police contacts accept that implicit state Government pressure inhibited their response.” The full text of the report was published, for the first time, on The Caravan’s website. It is being reproduced in full below. Some names have been redacted to protect sources. s

FEBRUARY 2023

previous spread: Stills from the first episode of the BBC documentary, India: The Modi Question.

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BOOKS

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books

Who is to Blame? The climate crisis and Amitav Ghosh

/ ENVIRONMENT SHASHANK KELA ILLUSTRATIONS BY SHAGNIK CHAKRABORTY

in fear and trembling, Søren Kierkegaard sets out a philosophical category that he calls “the interesting”: “a category that especially today (just because we live … at a turning point in human affairs) has acquired great importance, for really it is the category of crisis.” In this lies its paradox. An interesting life—like that of Socrates—is a life of inward pain and trouble. The crisis is psychological, for it impels the sufferer to reevaluate ideas other people take for granted. Its origins, however, lie in the world around us—if it did not change, there would be no need to change our ideas at all. There’s little doubt that climate change denotes a turning point in human affairs, albeit one that Kierkegaard could scarcely have envisaged. Gener-

ally speaking, our first reaction to a crisis is to talk about it. War is a useful analogy, for even the threat of war drowns out all other conversations. A whole forest of expert commentary has grown up around climate change—but as we move outside this thicket, it fades into indifference. Most people pass by it with the equivalent of a mental shrug. It unsettles them but fails to unsettle their ideas—in that lies its paradox. The basic mechanism of global warming was expounded by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In 1957, Roger Revelle and Hans Suess showed that seawater was incapable of absorbing all the carbon dioxide generated by burning oil and coal—therefore “the increase of atmospheric CO2 from this cause … may become significant in future decades FEBRUARY 2023

if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially.” Which it did, inevitably. The first measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide commenced from 1958. The conceptual and technical tools of the earth sciences were slower to develop: it is only with advanced computing techniques that climate modelling becomes possible. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up in 1988; the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopted in 1994; the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 1997. Twenty-five years on, it seems clear that global warming cannot be held below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Evidently this is not because governments reject climate science. Its findings are accepted, but 87

who is to blame? · books only conditionally, as one more cog in the machinery of expert advice. To pass muster, they have to mesh with prevailing beliefs about economic activity, social cohesion, international relations, warfare, politics and so on. They must be shown not to disturb existing structures of production and consumption. Hence the desperate search for technological solutions, however delayed or speculative. The inconsistency of official attitudes is mirrored in individual responses. But these responses tell us only half the story. Today, most citizens of rich countries will know something, however imprecisely, about climate change; many people in India or Nigeria may not even have heard of it. The conceptual framework of global warming accentuates this disparity. It’s (relatively) easy to explain

Ghosh begins with the assumption that his readers display the appropriate response to climate change— respond, that is, with a looming sense of crisis. The problem, in his view, is to dismantle the barriers that prevent us from acting upon it. that the weather is changing—without a shared understanding of history, science and economics, it is all but impossible to explain why. Amitav Ghosh examines some of these conceptions in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which came out in 2016. A companion volume The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) amplifies the arguments of the first book. Ghosh begins with the assumption that his readers display the appropriate response to climate change—respond, that is, with a looming sense of crisis. The problem, in his view, is to dismantle the barriers that prevent us from acting upon it. His argument can be summed up as follows: climate change is apprehended, along with nature, by the imagination as much as the intellect. It is only by joining their forces that we can hope to act effectively. Our imagination is nourished by the stories we tell each other. Fiction is a potent medium of telling those stories—to overcome the first barrier, writers of literary fiction must open their doors and windows to climate change. The second barrier is erected by European conceptions of nature, matter and man: these 88

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fertilised the soil in which colonialism flourished. The foundations of modern science were laid during the seventeenth century. Starting with Francis Bacon and René Descartes philosophy reduced nature to pure object, mute and inert. This revolution in thought spilled into the social sphere. As Europeans voyaged across the globe—to trade, to conquer and to settle—the inhabitants of their colonies were recast as savages without rights. The land belonged to those who could put it to productive use, remaking nature by imposing their will upon it. By contrast, the victims of colonialism (especially in the New World) saw nature in a very different light—as a network of sacred landscapes imbued with spirits. According to Ghosh, until the seventeenth century, even “the great majority of Europeans, like common people everywhere, also believed the universe to be a living organism, animated by many kinds of unseen forces.” It is these ideas that we must relearn and embrace if we are to come to grips with climate change. The Nutmeg’s Curse closes with a ringing call for a “vitalist politics,” based on the recognition that nature is sentient: This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories … the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political. What exactly do we mean when we speak of “nature”? The ideas expressed by this—or any other—definition are rooted in history as much as epistemology: so much is obvious and Ghosh is right to point it out. What he omits, however, is just as consequential. For no idea can exist (far less be expressed) without a medium. This medium of crystallisation is culture—a hodge-podge of concepts and practices flowing out of lived experience. The experience is like a container: its shape is determined by the organisation of life and work in any given society. In effect, Ghosh suggests that it is possible to change our beliefs without reference to those patterns. The effect is to trivialise the problem of climate change by erasing the framework that gives meaning to our ideas. the central theme of The Great Derangement is summed up on page nine: “Climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena.” Ghosh ascribes this deficiency to the structural constraints of the novel-form as it developed in the West. The “literary-realist novel” was “mid-

who is to blame? · books wifed into existence … through the banishing of the improbable and the insertion of the everyday.” But climate change marks the irruption of formerly improbable events into our daily lives— this may be one reason why novelists find it so difficult to deal with it. At this point, Ghosh makes the conceptual leap that lies at the heart of his argument: “In these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and the proximity of non-human interlocutors.” Today, “we” have come to a renewed awareness that nature is sentient, full of “beings of all sorts” that have “will, thought and consciousness.” This awareness drives “the interest in the non-human that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade … from philosophy to anthropology and literary criticism.” Indeed, it could be asked whether the very “timing of this renewed recognition” may be: an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise these habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being? This possibility is not, by any means, the most important of the many ways in which climate change challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas. It is, however, certainly the most uncanny. For what it suggests—indeed proves—is that non-human forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. The most striking thing about this passage is the absence of the first person singular. The omission of the speaking ‘I’ conceals the nature of the propositions advanced in it—conceals them behind a screen of rhetorical questions and statements that blur the distinction between conjecture and fact (note the seamless transition from “suggests” to “proves”). They express a conviction for which no evidence is—or can be—supplied.

Making a case and expressing an opinion are two distinct (albeit related) enterprises: discursive writing is structured around their relation to each other. The affirmation that “those unseen presences actually played a part in shaping our discussions without our being aware of it” is entirely subjective. It is not and cannot be a statement of fact. The confusion does not end here. In Beast and Man, Mary Midgley discusses the intellectual antecedents of Descartes’ view of animals as living objects without will or emotion, sharply separated from humankind. Ideas of this kind do not, as Ghosh seems to

think, begin with the Reformation. The notion that nature exists solely for man to use can be found everywhere in Christianity from the Old Testament to Augustine. However, it rarely passed unchallenged. Well before the twentieth century, it was relatively uncontroversial to suggest that animals have will, thought and consciousness. But Ghosh avers that there was a time when people everywhere believed that physical phenomena are sentient too—that nature speaks to us through them. This is “evident” in all “pre-modern narrative traditions,” including the Hebrew Bible and the Greek and Indian epics. In them, the agency of non-human forces FEBRUARY 2023

is taken for granted. Gods and animals, even the elements, are “essential to the machinery of narration.” With the advent of the “serious novel,” this ancient awareness became obscured; elemental forces lost their hold on the imagination and were banished into the realm of Gothic fantasy and popular fiction. During the twentieth century, the novel’s scope was narrowed even further—modernism expelled science from it and made a fetish of psychology. These inherited conventions hamper us from “telling stories” about a phenomenon rooted in science and revealed in collective experience. Ghosh suggests that, in the ultimate analysis, climate change cannot be expressed imaginatively through language alone. Before the invention of the printing press, humans combined words with images as a matter of course; happily, the internet allows us to do so again. From this, “it would seem to follow that new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again, as it has many times before.” Ghosh thinks that the novel as an artistic form is ill-equipped to deal with climate change. I’d like to propose a different, more fruitful way of looking at the problem. Nature does not occupy a distinctive place in “pre-modern narrative traditions” for the simple reason that non-human forces or entities are not identical with nature. Some Homeric deities are associated with natural phenomena (Zeus/lightning, Poseidon/ water), others with human qualities (Athena/wisdom, Aphrodite/love), but their behaviour is thoroughly anthropomorphised. The gods, monsters and spirits of the Homeric tradition (like the monkeys and bears of the Ramayana) wrestle with distinctively human preoccupations: power and honour, love and lust, right and wrong. The birth of the novel has been linked to the Reformation, the values of Protestantism and the emergence of the bourgeoisie. All these theories can be falsified in some way: Petronius and Apuleius produced proto-novels during Rome’s golden age (The Satyricon and The Golden Ass respectively). The first recognisable novel in any culture was written by a noblewoman in medieval Japan (The Tale of Genji). The author of 89

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the first European novel (Don Quixote) was an impoverished hidalgo in Catholic, semi-feudal Spain. Definitions of the novel are even more slippery. Given its inherent plasticity, it seems wiser to stick to what it does: the novel imagines (or reimagines) individual lives embedded in a recognisable social milieu. By this token, the novelist has but one obligation: to translate his or her subject (whatever it may be) into lived experience. In the case of climate change, the events—torrential rain, hurricanes, wildfires or heatwaves—are familiar. Their magnitude may be unexpected, but the difference is of degree, not kind. The mere fact that they are becoming more frequent or reaching new places does not imply that their victims will see them in a new way. The utilitarian aspects of nature are subsumed into a wider set of meanings embedded in culture: consequently, there has never been a time when it could be excluded from fiction. The difficulty lies in absorbing climate change into our immediate perception of 90

nature, not the novel. Scientists may be able to tell us exactly how it affects fish stocks, but this fact is unlikely to strike the crew of a trawler in Newfoundland or a fishing boat in south India with anything like the same conviction: decades of over-fishing have accustomed them to chronic insecurity quite independent of global warming. In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro invents an alternative England where the psychological effects of an artificially shortened life-span and the immorality of treating human beings as things are fused into a parable about cloning. The outcome is tragedy but a tragedy that goes much deeper than the perversion of science. Ghosh appears to think that novelists have an ethical obligation to employ their talents in the fight against global warming. This seems mistaken to me (since when have novels been good at stopping anything?). They are certainly obliged to exert themselves as citizens, but their calling is more subtle than that. It is— or should be—to discover what climate change tells us about ourselves. THE CARAVAN

the nutmeg’s curse traces the origins of global warming to Enlightenment doctrines about nature. If colonialism served as their testing-ground, science acted as its accomplice. “Natural philosophers” catalogued, classified and named “the environmental endowments of empires … [making it] possible for imperial policy-makers in Europe to decide how best to make use of these resources.” The Linnean system of classification won acceptance not so much for its utility or elegance but because Spain chose to adopt it throughout its empire. The ultimate effect was to reduce plants to “objects of scientific inquiry,” not “subjects of songs and stories.” Colonialism was legitimised by stripping its victims of distinctively human attributes: this process can be traced in literature as well as philosophy. Thus, Shakespeare merely expresses a commonplace of his age in portraying Caliban as “an unredeemed brute.” For Ghosh, “Prospero’s words—‘I endowed thy purposes with words that made them known’—go straight to the heart of the European colonizer’s framing of the colonized.” This interpretation expresses a halftruth: its error lies in imprisoning the artist within the limitations of his or her culture. The Tempest is not as categorical about Caliban as Ghosh suggests. Shakespeare, like Montaigne—like any good artist—found it impossible to accept the opinions of his age at face value. That is why he takes care to present Caliban’s point of view in language that justifies and humanises his rage: This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me and made much of me … … and then I loved thee And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle … Cursed be I that did so! … For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island.

who is to blame? · books Nor was cultural vainglory a peculiarly European phenomenon: China and India were just as self-centered in this respect. Until the eighteenth century, the notion that Europeans—or Christians—were inherently superior to everyone else was used to defend acts that appeared indefensible on other grounds: land-grabbing, the slave trade and so on. Not everyone was agreed on what it meant. The inhabitants of the Chinese, Mughal and Ottoman empires presented a ticklish problem—the very size of the states into which they were organised extorted respect for their cultural achievements. Even the “savages” of the New World could arouse mixed feelings. Montaigne thought that they had much to teach his own countrymen. Bartolemé le Das Casas denounced Spanish policies in South America. Shakespeare was ambivalent about Caliban (and much else). Rousseau was to make a cult of primitive man. A much greater ambiguity marked ideas about the natural world—Ghosh simplifies them to the point of caricature in his discussion of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. TS Eliot pointed out the uniqueness of its structure: “a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which have only the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself.” Its subject is death and the experience of bereavement. Grief impels Tennyson to examine faith in the light of science: if the earth is as old as geologists say, where countless species have appeared only to die out, what marks us out from all the rest? The lyrics oscillate helplessly between grief and consolation, faith and doubt. Unable to resolve these opposites, Tennyson merges them into a vision of human perfectibility. When he writes that humankind is destined to “Move upward, working out the beast/And let the ape and tiger die,” Tennyson is invoking them as symbols of the bestial aspects of human nature. This usage harks back to Plato, who opposed our reason (good) to our appetites (bad). It does not imply pace Ghosh that he “envisioned the extinction of apes and tigers as a positive step towards Man’s evolution.” Mastery is associated with knowledge, the

ultimate reconciliation of faith with science. The poem’s closing lines, “And one far-off divine event/To which the whole Creation moves,” do not presage the end of history, far less the world, as Ghosh seems to think: they are a reference to the Christian Day of Judgment. Ghosh avers that climate change can only be addressed by challenging dominant conceptions of well-being measured in goods and consumption. No doubt many of us would agree with this, but his stated reason is much more startling. For “western settlercolonial culture is no longer confined to the settler colonies”: since 1989, it has been successfully exported all over the world, to be adopted with alacrity by “global elites.” It is perhaps only in the last two or three decades that the West has awakened to something that it had not imagined possible: that the non-West is fully capable of adopting extractive, carbon-intensive economies, and all that goes with them, like scientific and technological research and certain genres of art and literature. This partitioning of time is worse than misleading. One of the most significant dates in Japanese history is 1868: the Meiji Revolution that overthrew the Shogunate and restored the emperor to his titular authority inaugurated a tsunami of reform that transformed Japan’s economy. Its defeat in the Second World War sparked an even more vertiginous phase of industrialisation—this time, it was joined by South Korea and Taiwan. China’s takeoff began in the 1980s, but the basis of its growth had been laid during the preceding decades. Only their astonishing success sets these countries apart. Japan was followed by Turkey (from 1923), India (from 1947) and Egypt (from 1952; the Aswan High Dam was completed by 1970). European models exerted an abiding influence on art and letters. In Brazil, Machado de Assis published The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas in 1882. Filipino literature begins with Jose Rizal, who wrote in Spanish: Noli me Tangere in 1887 followed by El Filibusterismo in FEBRUARY 2023

1891. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart appeared in 1958. Ghosh flattens out and telescopes this complex history to arrive at a moral judgment. It involves, as we have seen, a binary opposition between European culture (and its derivatives) and what he calls “the non-West”—which is to say, every other culture in the world—until very recently. But the formulation is absurd: the very experience of colonialism fanned the winds of change. By the eighteenth century, West African societies were making war on each other to obtain captives for the slave trade. A century later, in India, Adivasi societies were haemorrhaging land to local immigrants: the social attitudes that lay behind this development existed long before the advent of colonialism. By the First World War, industrialisation had become a Holy Grail for the emerging bourgeoisie of Europe’s colonies. Ghosh leaves out a central facet of colonialism, one that James Baldwin identified with lapidary precision. He was referring to Africa, but his observations can be applied to the Third World in toto (including those countries that were colonised only indirectly). Even after all criticisms had been taken into account, one burning question remained, namely: What had this colonial experience made of them and what were they now to do with it? For they were all, now, whether they liked it or not, related to Europe, stained by European visions and standards, and their relation to themselves, and to each other, and to their past had changed. Their relation to their poets had also changed, as had the relation of their poets to them. [Aimé] Cesaire’s speech left out of account one of the great effects of the colonial experience: its creation, precisely, of men like himself. His real relation to the people who thronged about him now had been changed, by this experience, into something very different from what it once had been. … He had penetrated into the heart of the great wilderness that was Europe and stolen the sacred fire. And this, which was the promise of their freedom, was also the assurance of his power. 91

who is to blame? · books The Great Derangement discusses currents of indigenous capitalism in Asia: these were firmly squelched by nineteenth-century administrators who had no intention of allowing local entrepreneurs to compete with the mother country. This line of reasoning ends in a straightforward conclusion. Colonialism retarded industrialisation in India and China—therefore, they are justified in demanding a greater share of today’s carbon budget in order to catch up. On their economic policies after the Second World War—once they had wrested control of their own destinies—Ghosh is much more equivocal. To bolster his chronology, it is necessary to show that these were somehow inconsistent and half-hearted. This is done by citing moral critiques of capitalism by some public figures (MK Gandhi, U Thant) and connecting them loosely to China’s repressive policy of population control from the 1980s. Thus, in both China and India … there were significant numbers of people who understood, long before climate scientists brought in the data, that industrial civilization was subject to limitations of scale and would collapse if adopted by the majority of the earth’s people. Although they may finally have failed to lead their compatriots in a different direction, they did succeed in retarding the wholesale adoption of a consumerist, industrial model of economy in their countries. This is to substitute words (and tangential words at that) for deeds. By 1950, both India and China were firmly wedded to industrialisation. Both relied upon Western theories adapted to local conditions—more successfully in China than India. After Gandhi’s death, his ideas were relegated to the margins of planning, chiefly in the form of state support for handicrafts. As for China’s population policy, it was intended to facilitate the transition to an industrial economy, not to retard it. To Ghosh, twentieth-century art and literature are marked by self-reflexivity, “a radical turn away from the non-human to the human, from the figurative towards the abstract.” The notion of a perpetual advance blocked out “the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity, that of the earth and its atmosphere.” The effect is to reduce modernism to merely one of its strands—James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Picasso and the Cubists, Abstract Expressionism. The contention is imprecise and inaccurate: Joyce’s Ulysses is, among other things, a superb evocation of place. Nature does not drop out of the modernist novel any more than it does from the 92

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visual arts of the twentieth century. DH Lawrence delineates it as vividly as his Victorian predecessors and brings it into closer relation with inner life. The psychodramas of Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth are enacted in precisely evoked physical settings. Cezanne’s late landscapes form a bridge between Post-Impressionism and abstract art. David Hockney and Lucien Freud resurrect figurative painting after the Second World War. “Vitalism” is Ghosh’s shorthand for ideas associated with nature worship. The original inhabitants of the Banda Islands (in modern-day Indonesia) believed that their land was guarded by tutelary spirits. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch expelled most of them in a failed attempt to monopolise the nutmeg trade. But this

Global warming telescopes the future. This brings us to the fundamental obstacle that bedevils climate negotiations: who is to blame and who should pay? belief did not die out: it was adopted by Muslim and Christians settlers who subsequently made it their home. Today vitalism impels indigenous groups and peasants in different countries to defend their lands and livelihoods against the assaults of global capitalism. Only these struggles, writes Ghosh, are capable of inspiring a popular movement against climate change. The roll-call of their potential allies ranges from Catholics (those amenable to conversion by Pope Francis’ climate encyclical) to middle-class Asians disenchanted with consumerism. Needless to say, all differences of outlook, lifestyle and motivation are elided in this optimistic assessment. He ends as he began, by collapsing the distinction between conjecture and fact. In the summer of 1621, the leading men of the Banda Islands were rounded up and massacred. Perhaps the Dutch did this because they feared that the Bandanese were in league with the spirits of the land. In other words, white men knew (but refused to admit) that “landscapes are neither inert nor mute, but imbued with vitality.” Planetary catastrophe can only be avoided by making sure that “those non-human voices [are] restored to our stories.” ghosh divides the history of European thought into discrete epochs of “vitalism” and “mechanism” with the seventeenth century as wa-

who is to blame? · books tershed. This cripples any genuine inquiry into background ideas about nature and their consequences. It also embodies a basic error: before 1700, it was man’s dominion over nature that was taken for granted in Europe. In Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas writes of England that “a reader who came fresh to the moral and theological writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be forgiven for inferring that their main purpose was to define the special status of man and to justify his rule over other creatures.” The conviction that nature exists for its own sake emerged in opposition to mechanism. Descartes’ theory of animal existence found little favour in England: according to Thomas, “the theologian Henry More was more representative of English opinion when he bluntly told Descartes in 1648 that he thought his a ‘murderous’ doctrine.” By 1800, “the confident anthropocentrism of Tudor England had given way to an altogether more confused state of mind. The world could no longer be regarded as having been made for man alone, and the rigid barriers between humanity and other forms of life had been much weakened … [I]t was widely urged that all parts of creation had a right to live; and that nature itself had an intrinsic spiritual value.” Rationalism spoke in many tongues. Leibniz made it “his main philosophic business to object to the yawning gulf which both Descartes and Spinoza had placed between mind and matter, and object to it on rational grounds because it made life as a whole unintelligible … His reason for mentioning animals, therefore, was usually to show them as life-forms differing from people only in degree.” (Mary Midgley in Animals and Why They Matter). The central doctrines of the Enlightenment were rejected by CounterEnlightenment thinkers in Germany and elsewhere. Post-Newtonian science reduced nature into self-contained units for study and analysis: this did not prevent its practitioners from making connections between disparate phenomena and relating parts to whole. There is nothing mechanist about Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fledgling

science of political economy emphasised the public benefits of selfishness; in turn, it was challenged by moralists who repudiated its assumptions. In 1782, the elder Hazlitt—father of the critic and reviewer William Hazlitt— adopted the pseudonym of Benevolus to indicate that he subscribed to the Unitarian belief in human benevolence as opposed to self-interest. Land use remained reasonably conservative until the Second World War. Long before the nineteenth century, every element of the English landscape had been reshaped by human use. At the same time, traditional management practices encouraged a diverse assem-

blage of plants and animals in meadows, woods, field-margins, hedgerows and so on. These practices (and the emotions associated with them) were reflected in literature. Thoreau’s lonely eminence in American letters contrasts with the popularity of nature writing in England starting with Gilbert White of Selborne. By this I do not mean to imply that the Enlightenment was harmless. Mary Midgley’s central criticism (in Beast and Man) still remains durable: it encouraged a “homogenising approach to equality” flowing “from an unrealistic attempt to treat people as abstract, standard social entities, divorced from FEBRUARY 2023

nature. It enforce[d] the sharp division between mind and body, between culture and nature, between thought and feeling, which is the bad side of our inheritance from the Age of Reason.” Its ideas helped to shape the modern world for good and ill—the mistake is to assume that they dominated the field to the exclusion of all others. North America (like Australia later on) aroused a peculiar mixture of trepidation and greed. Its natural endowments—of land, pasture, timber, water—inflamed the acquisitive instinct of immigrants. In their European homelands, the commons were tightly regulated by law, social fetters and custom. Abroad, nature could be exploited without check or restriction. This hunger found expression in reckless destruction for immediate profit, no matter how small. An underground current in American literature beginning with Moby Dick and Walden examines the moral effects of this butchery. In other regions, colonialism came face to face with fully formed agrarian societies: South Asia is the classic example, but there were analogous developments elsewhere. These cultures displayed varying degrees of social stratification, possessed complex systems of manufacture, trade and monetary exchange, and were organised into states of varying size. All these activities affected the environment, sometimes on a very large scale. Mark Elvin’s environmental history The Retreat of the Elephants (which Ghosh quotes from) shows how successive Chinese dynasties reshaped the landscape through large-scale engineering projects to reclaim land and reroute water. Most South Asians believed (and presumably still believe) in “non-human forces.” This did not deter them from turning bush into fields, building dams and irrigation works, or degrading human beings into things. These events did not occur in a moral vacuum: they were embedded in an intellectual tradition that provided its justification. At the same time, the Indic religions—and Buddhism, in particular—saw nature in markedly different terms from those of the JudaeoChristian tradition with its roots in Greek culture. 93

who is to blame? · books The limits of environmental change were set by technology. Fire reshuffled existing assemblies of flora and fauna, suppressing some species and encouraging others. Pre-modern techniques of irrigation and land reclamation produced more drastic effects—the shrinking range of the elephant (or the lion) is a case in point. The industrial revolution endowed this process with a qualitatively new dimension. Colonialism spread its ripples across the globe. In India, it inaugurated a new phase of environmental change made up in equal parts of coercion and collaboration. Agriculture was transformed by taxes and tariffs designed to encourage cash cropping. Railroads and highways widened the market for goods. Sown area increased at the expense of woods and commons; traditional land management practices broke down. With the end of the First World War, Britain came under increasing pressure to justify its rule to a middle-class emboldened by nationalism. Restrictions on domestic industry were loosened; in 1935, the Government of India Act instituted limited power-sharing in the shape of elected provincial governments. The capitalist makeover of the Indian economy gathered pace. The process was anarchic and undisciplined, for colonial administrators had no interest in adapting its methods to local conditions (as happened in Japan). Its inherent wastefulness took firm hold of the bourgeoisie and spread below it, to other castes and groups. The economic history of India after 1947 shows how deeply those habits have taken root—today they impel millions of individual decisions about survival and subsistence, profit and consumption. The problems of inequality, crony capitalism or rent-seeking should not be confused with them; they’re displayed in the rising tide of rubbish that swamps our landscapes, the endemic neglect of soil and water conservation by those who suffer the most from this neglect. It’s attractive but erroneous to ascribe environmental recklessness solely to the propertied: the triumph of industrial capitalism has endowed it with the banality of custom. Once “vitalist beliefs” are narrowed down to actual practice—an envi94

ronmental ethic of land management based on sacred spaces—we notice how restricted they are. For the main point about these beliefs (and therefore this relation) is not their plausibility—which is bound to be subjective—but that they are conditional on specialised patterns of land use. This is what distinguishes them from peasant, folk or middleclass beliefs in “non-human forces” and spirits. By subsuming two distinct conceptual categories, Ghosh evades the difficulty of reading their meanings in practice. It is all but impossible to define tribal groups in Asia without some reference to land management. This distinction survives even when indigenous beliefs are subsumed into Christianity or Hinduism. In India, forms of nature worship are not restricted to Adivasi societies. Take sacred groves for instance—some landowning groups have them, many Adivasi societies do not (in some cases the difficulty extends further, to the absence of any recognisable form of nature worship). Without relating cultural beliefs to land use, we get nowhere at all. And when we do, we realise that they cannot be shuffled on and off like a suit of clothes: our beliefs must bear some intelligible relation to our daily lives. To be a shaman—to see sacred spaces and nature-spirits in woods and mountains—is not synonymous with learning a new skill. It cannot be done without inhabiting a congruent world of work and social relations or its living remembrance preserved over many generations. This is not the case with most of us. The industrial revolution displaced agriculture from its central position in human life: its ripple effects, slow and uneven, are still working themselves out. Today, most people live and work in cities where nature is reduced to slivers or tidied up to fulfil specialised functions (utilitarian, ornamental, recreational). Those who make a living from the land have learned to treat it as an economic resource, no different in principle from any other. Faith is merely one method out of many for making sense of our daily lives. The history of organised religions bears this out: elements that cannot THE CARAVAN

be adjusted to lived experience are abandoned or emptied of content. Today most believers turn to religion for certainties, not philosophical guidance (that function has been usurped by Social Darwinism, vulgar science and vulgar economics). Their life-worlds bear no relation to the social and material contexts in which nature worship once flourished. in 1934, Osip Mandelstam was arrested for reciting a poem about Stalin to some friends. Denunciation was followed by internal exile in Voronezh in southwestern Russia—a temporary reprieve as it turned out. There, in mortal fear for his sanity and his life, he composed his final sequence of poems. One of them runs: I’ll sketch this out; I’ll say this quietly— Because its moment is still not evident: The game of the unconscious sky will be Accomplished later, with experience… And beneath the time-soaked sky Of Purgatory, we frequently forget That the blessed storehouse of the heavens Is our home, limitless and present. We live in a planet of remarkable complexity, teeming with life evolved over millions of years. Its physical and organic processes are intermeshed, its resources finite. By contrast, our economic system involves a repetitive cycle of production and consumption that admits no limits. If that does not worry us, it’s because the time-spans involved seem very long. It is not our problem: the future will fix it (and if not, that is not our problem either). Global warming challenges this assumption by telescoping the future—from vague and comfortingly distant centuries to a few generations at most (the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren). This brings us to the fundamental obstacle that bedevils climate negotiations: who is to blame and who should pay? The outcome is a perpetual quarrel over contemporary

who is to blame? · books and cumulative emissions. The industrial economies of Europe and North America have been burning fossil fuels for two centuries or more: this gives them some obvious advantages in terms of technology and resources—not to mention organisational ability—when it comes to coping with climate change (the Netherlands is already futureproofing its dykes). Imperialism enabled them to prosper at the expense of the rest of the world, shackling and placing it at a permanent disadvantage in the competitive game of economic growth. In time, a few nations—mostly in East Asia—devised strategies both ruthless and far-sighted to break these shackles. Others merely added bad faith to the legacy of imperialism. In India, this takes the form of restricting the state’s positive functions to the bare minimum (infrastructure and regulation but not education or health). The effect is to cripple its capacity to deal with any number of problems, not just global warming. The ultimate goal of climate negotiations is decarbonisation: this does not affect the volume of goods or services, only the methods by which they are produced or consumed. Green energy is touted as a means of increasing, not decreasing growth. But things are not as simple as that. Goods of mass consumption have been travelling around the world from the eighteenth century: in that sense, there is nothing new about globalisation. However, after the Second World War, and especially after the 1980s, it has acquired a new connotation. Today, production is dispersed across the globe in complex chains whose emissions are free floating in all but name. They cannot be captured by national targets. Clearly, it’s vital to rewire capitalism in the short-term using every means at hand: the error is to see it as anything more than an interim solution. For in the long run, it is the contradiction between the earth’s resources and our habits that matters. The ideas associated with them (of growth, prosperity and so on) are deeply entrenched. Here, too, climate change has made no dent: there are no political parties, and hardly any mass movements, prepared to question them.

This does not mean that critiques of industrial capitalism do not exist—the trouble is that they remain more or less theoretical, more or less academic. One of the pioneers of the genre, Rudolf Bahro, criticised the German Greens of the 1970s for having nothing to say about capitalism or consumerism. Today, concepts like ecological justice and degrowth are firmly established in the outer margins of academia. This amplifies their abstract, technocratic quality—the assumption that reform can be attained by expert knowledge wedded to enlightened policy. The celebrated utopias of European literature, from Thomas More on, had a practical function: that of criticising existing ideals and institutions. They were widely read by those who could read including rulers, nobles and tradesmen. By contrast, the Utopian manifestos of today are written by experts for other experts. In them, the usual pattern of social change is inverted: ends (blueprints) take precedence over means (political action). In What is Literature?, Sartre roundly declares that “for the Marxist militant, there is no doubt that only social transformations can make possible radical changes in thought and feeling.” This was in response to the Surrealists, who asserted that to change one’s life amounts to changing the world. I doubt if the matter is as clear-cut as that— whether social transformation can change thought ex nihilo, without some intellectual seeds sprouting below the ground. The problem, as always, is to discern the shoots that might, in time, come to fruition. The dominant current in European thought, beginning with Plato and the Stoics, enforces a sharp division between mind and matter, humankind and nature. This was assimilated into the ideology of industrial capitalism (where it mixed with many other elements). But the really striking thing about it is its success in leaping cultural barriers: the philosophical traditions of Buddhism or Hinduism proved no impediment to it. Pantheists or pacifists, Africans or Asians can be—and usually are—as heedless of the environment as anyone else. FEBRUARY 2023

Since 1945, the environmental havoc wreaked by ‘development’ and consumerism has spawned a new cycle of counter-ideas. Peter Singer sets out an intellectual defense of animal rights, Mary Midgley reimagines moral philosophy in the light of science. The westward spread of Zen inaugurates a new phase of cultural interpenetration. Biodiversity assumes a central place in the natural sciences. The Gaia hypothesis inverts Descartes’ theory of matter by showing that the earth acts, for all practical purposes, like a finely adjusted organism. Today, there is nothing particularly “Western” about the sciences or the arts, nothing but their provenance (with all its attendant borrowings). They have become universal—like industrial civilisation with its inherent capacity to build up and to tear down, to create and to destroy. In “The Crusade of Indignation,” Baldwin remarks that “the world in which people find themselves is not simply a vindictive plot imposed on them from above; it is also the world that they have helped to make. They have helped to make it, and help to sustain it, by sharing the assumptions which hold their world together.” Changing these assumptions is very hard. Perhaps that is why it seems tempting to believe that salvation lies in a realm untainted by “the West”, its methods and habits. But this is to succumb to a false illusion, not so much about the West as about ourselves. For the underlying assumptions of industrial production— like Janus with two faces, one material, the other cultural—have seeded the globe. Together they impinge on virtually every aspect of our existence, wherever we may be. It’s quite possible that no answer will be found at all: that the ideas and habits that made—and make—climate change also make it unstoppable. But it is fruitless to search for our secular salvation outside the concepts that order our daily lives. These—indeed, the human condition as we know it—were born in the fiery, blood-soaked crucible of the Industrial Revolution. If salvation exists at all, it can only be found by working through—and beyond—them. s 95

THE BOOKSHELF

UN/COMMON SCHOOLING

IMPRINTS OF THE POPULIST TIME

EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA

Ranabir Samaddar

Edited by Janaki Nair

This book examines the rise of populism as a historical phenomenon, looking at elections, populist language and governments’ attempts to gain legitimacy, while focussing in particular on West Bengal’s recent political trajectory since the end of the Left Front government in 2011.

Examining alternative schooling across India from the 1970s to the present day and drawing on interviews with educationists and students, this book reflects on how these organisations explored different methods of learning and institution-building.

orient blackswan, S1,105, 352 pages

orient blackswan, S1,145, 296 pages

PRIVATE AND CONTROVERSIAL

ANTHILL Vinoy Thomas Translated by Nandakumar K

WHEN PUBLIC HEALTH AND PRIVACY MEET IN INDIA Smriti Parsheera

An anthology of essays that explores how health data is collected, analysed and preserved, including aspects such as confidentiality, contact tracing, increased digitalisation and the deployment of artificial intelligence.

A translation of Thomas’s second novel Puttu, the book revolves around a village on the border between Kerala and Karnataka, and narrates how its inhabitants attempted to use their isolation to escape societal norms surrounding religion, family and other institutions.

harper collins india, S559, 572 pages

penguin random house india, S599, 352 pages

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THE CARAVAN

THE BOOKSHELF

THE CIRCUS TRAIN

WAYS OF BEING

Amrita Parikh

CREATIVE NONFICTION BY PAKISTANI WOMEN Edited by Sabyn Javeri

A debut novel about a circus troupe travelling across Europe in the late 1930s. As the Second World War begins to escalate, and impact the main characters, the book explores violence, magic, illusion and friendship.

An anthology compiling 15 non-fiction writers from Pakistan reflecting on questions surrounding nationality, belonging, language, gender, how a writer relates to her context and more.

sphere, hachette, S499, 416 pages

women unlimited, S450, 209 pages

THE BOOK OF DESIRE

A MOST NOBLE LIFE

Translated by Meena Kandasamy

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ASHRAFUNNISA BEGUM (1840–1903) By Muhammadi Begum (1877-1908) Translated, with additional material, by CM Naim

The author Meena Kandasamy’s translation of the KƗmattu-p-pƗl, the third part of Thiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, which includes 250 kurals and contemplates women’s desire, sensuality, agency and more.

A translation of Hayat-e Ashraf—the editor and writer Muhammadi Begum’s biography of the nineteenth-century teacher Ashrafunnisa Begum. It explores her life in Bijnor and teaching in Lahore, how she taught herself to read and write in secret and more.

penguin hamish hamilton, S499, 208 pages

orient blackswan, S630, 188 pages FEBRUARY 2023

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eddie adams / ap photo

Editor’s Pick

on 1 february 1968, NguyӉn Ngӑc Loan, the chief of the Republic of Vietnam National Police, summarily executes NguyӉn Văn Lém, an officer of the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, on the streets of the capital, Saigon. Two days earlier, the NLF and the People’s Army of Vietnam had launched the TӃt Offensive, a major military escalation timed to coincide with the lunar new year, when many south Vietnamese soldiers were on leave. Over eighty thousand troops infiltrated over a hundred cities and towns in the Republic of Vietnam, with 35 NLF battalions attacking key targets in Saigon, including the presidential palace and the US embassy. Lém was captured near the An Quan pagoda in the capital. He was alleged to have killed the family of a south Vietnamese colonel, though the US historian Edwin Moïse has described this charge as “a post-war invention.” Lém was handcuffed and taken to Loan, who immediately shot him

98

with his service revolver. The execution, which was illegal under Vietnamese law and violated the Geneva Conventions, was captured by the Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and an NBC television crew. Adams’s photograph, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, was published by newspapers around the world and helped turn public opinion in the United States against involvement in the Vietnam War. Loan did not face consequences in Vietnam for the execution. After the fall of Saigon, in 1975, he relocated to the suburbs of Washington, DC, where he opened a restaurant. In 1978, following public and congressional pressure, the Immigration and Naturalization Service sought to rescind his status as a permanent resident on grounds of moral turpitude. Loan’s lawyer argued that he had acted legally in accordance with martial law, and the US president, Jimmy Carter, quashed the proceedings, calling the charge “historical revisionism.”

THE CARAVAN