The Caravan - September 2022 8688065543, 9529020226

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

VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 9 SEPTEMBER 2022

cover story / law 32

Infirm Logic How the SIT report gave the Modi government a free pass on the 2002 Gujarat violence hartosh singh bal A recent Supreme Court judgement dismissed charges of criminal conspiracy against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others in relation to the 2002 Gujarat violence. To arrive at this conclusion, it relied extensively on a closure report submitted by a special investigation team in 2012. A close study of the report, however, shows that the SIT, time and again, attempted to dilute the seriousness of the evidence it collected. This ranges from Modi being allowed to get away with meaningless clarifications about provocative statements he made to dismissing the transfer of good officers who contained the violence as simply a matter of government prerogative. Such reasoning makes little sense in a case where the government itself is the accused. Still harder to accept is the argument that the disproportionate number of Muslim casualties in police firing was a matter of chance. All of this raises questions about the investigation’s methodology, which repeatedly undercuts the evidence the SIT has marshalled and reaches conclusions that defy logic.

perspectives 32

conflict

12 Old Sins It is time for Punjabis to atone for the crimes of 1947

amarjit chandan caste

17 Road to Nowhere Why Dalits must abandon the Kanwar Yatra

sagar politics

20 The Wages of Solidarity What victorious farmers’ unions owe Dalit communities

shivam mogha crime

25 Standing Still

48

The absence of justice for the Maliana massacre is a blot on our democracy

prabhjit singh education

film

48 Class Apart

28 Setting the Scene

The murky world of Delhi’s private-school admissions

How Hindi film adaptations align with the Hindutva project

neha mehrotra

akshat jain SEPTEMBER 2022

3

the lede

60 10

art

8 Lost and Found Tracing personal histories through everyday objects

photo essay / conflict

lajja mistry art

Found objects, found images and new portraits to record the disappeared in Kashmir

10 Moving Pictures

siva sai jeevanantham

60 Albums of Evidence

A digital encyclopaedia attempts to transform the study of Indian art

tanisha saxena

books 98

politics

84 Words and Bullets The unacknowledged role of women who shaped people’s movements in Telangana

sai priya kodidala

the bookshelf

96

editor’s pick

98

84

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contributors THE LEDE

8 10

Lajja Mistry is an education reporter at the Pittsburgh-based news website PublicSource. Tanisha Saxena is a Delhi-based journalist who covers arts, queer culture, travel and lifestyle. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Hindustan Times, Outlook, Deccan Herald, The Hindu and the New Indian Express.

PERSPECTIVES

12

REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS

32 Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan. 48 Neha Mehrotra is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

PHOTO ESSAY

60 Siva Sai Jeevanatham is a documentary photographer based in Chennai.

BOOKS

84 Sai Priya Kodidala is a student at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

COVER

Illustration by Radhika Dinesh

Amarjit Chandan is a writer and activist who has lived in London since 1980. He co-edits Baramah, an annual Punjabi magazine in the Farsi script, published in Lahore. 17 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. 20 Shivam Mogha is a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for the Study of Social Systems. He is a co-editor of Trolley Times, a newspaper that emerged from and documented the movement against the Modi government’s farm laws. 25 Prabhjit Singh is a contributing writer at The Caravan. 28 Akshat Jain is an editor at the Centre for Science and Environment. He studied media and cultural studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Corrections: Nileena MS’s “Falling in Line,” published in July 2022, incorrectly stated that Manzar Imam’s petition was filed in the Bombay High Court instead of the Delhi High Court. The story wrongly identified Tushar Damgude as the first complainant in the Elgar Parishad case. It also mistakenly stated that Shoma Sen’s home was raided. Shiv Inder Singh’s “Guns, Jutts, Glory,” published last month, incorrectly stated that Sidhu Moose Wala’s family owned large tracts of farm land at the time of his birth. The story also incorrectly transliterated “joba” as “joban” and mistakenly omitted “kar” from the line “Hijr teri di kar parikrama” in a poem by Shiv Kumar Batalvi. In a description of Surjit Bindrakhia’s lyrics, the story incorrectly transliterated “pacchiyan” as “panchiyan” and mistakenly translated it as five instead of twenty-five. It also incorrectly transliterated a line in a song by Miss Pooja as “bari kara lun aape ton” instead of “bari kara le aape tenu.” Due to a translation error, the story also contained a misinterpretation of the lyrics of the song “Levels.” The image credit for the second photograph accompanying “Tricks of the Trade,” published last month, misspelt the name of Naveen Kishore.

editor Anant Nath executive editor Vinod K Jose political editor Hartosh Singh Bal senior editor Roman Gautam books editor Maya Palit creative director Sukruti Anah Staneley associate editor Puja Sen web editor Surabhi Kanga senior assistant editor Ajachi Chakrabarti assistant editors Tusha Mittal, Amrita Singh and Abhay Regi 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 (health) Nayantara Narayanan reporting fellow (health) Chahat Rana editorial fellow (tech) Mehak Mahajan editorial fellow Jessica Jakoinao reporting fellow (tech) Rachna Khaira reporting fellows Sujatha Sivagnanam and Eram Agha multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray multimedia editor Nabeela Paniyath 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 Sanya Chandra, Ishika Chauhan, Vatsa Singh photo intern Priya Thakur social-media intern Sushmita Balakrishnan

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Last month’s Bookshelf misspelt the name of Tridip Suhrud, the translator of Lilavati: A Life. The Caravan regrets the errors. They have been corrected online.

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THE LEDE Lost and Found Tracing personal histories through everyday objects / Art

/ lajja mistry How often do you sit and think about the objects that surround us in our homes? How often do you think about the memories attached to them? What role does an object’s material memory play in sparking conversations? These questions are the driving force behind the Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository that traces family history through personal antiquities and social ethnography. Founded in 2017 as a passion project by Aanchal Malhotra and Navdha Malhotra, the museum is a digital crowdsourced platform for contributors to submit stories related to objects—from the 1970s or earlier—that they find in their homes. The stories narrate the history of the object and, with it, reveal the customs of its time. The objects seem outwardly ordinary, ranging from old photographs and jewellery to utensils and books. For Aanchal and Navdha, who were friends in school, the most important thing was to keep the platform digital and accessible to all. The idea for the museum emerged when Aanchal, a Delhi-based historian, was conducting research for her

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debut book, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory, published in 2017. The book revisited the history of Partition through personal objects. During her research, which took over five years, Aanchal realised that people had innumerable other objects that were old but not related to Partition. “It seemed to me that there were a lot of caged artifacts in the subcontinent area that the younger generations didn’t know enough about,” she told me. “While we seem to collect objects quite easily in the subcontinent, we may not assert the same importance to them if they are mundane or objects that are not monetarily valuable anymore.” The museum thrives on the stories people submit. Willing contributors are sent a guiding document that can help them answer important questions about their object. Questions range around materiality, ownership, look, time period, usage and origin. Aanchal and Navdha, an aspiring ceramicist and the global head of campaigns at the advocacy group Purpose, corroborate the origin of each object through archives, popular media and intensive research. Contributors work with the founders to create a narrative about their family

THE CARAVAN

history. “It is difficult to get people to slow down to be able to see these inanimate objects as potential receptacles for stories,” Aanchal said. “It is not in everybody’s nature to immediately stop and pause and think about generations that have come before them. This takes persistence on your part.” The museum also attempts to talk about the impact of Partition through personal stories. When people had to leave their homes, the objects that they carried along became a special part of their lives. The project is about the rediscovery of the same object through another perspective. “We do intend to use the museum as a way to pause and think about objects and memories attached to them,” Aanchal said. “And it’s been fairly successful.” The museum started to flourish during the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial lockdown in India gave people a lot of time to go through stuff lying around in their homes and open up to their families about it while learning to spend time together. A traditional majnu khes—cotton bedspread—revealed the history of the cloth being woven only in parts of Punjab that are now in Pakistan. A closet full of old clothes led to a conversation

all images courtesy museum of material memory

the lede

between a granddaughter and her grandmother. A pair of panjeb—anklets—passed down through generations of women laid out the social hierarchy of that time. A hand-crafted cigarette case became a cherished heirloom and carried with it the fond memory of a grandfather. Many such objects are routinely found throughout the Indian subcontinent but have different memories attached to them. Navdha brought up the story of a bonti—a traditional kitchen instrument used to cut fish in Bengal. “The moment we put up an Instagram post, people started commenting, saying, ‘Oh my god, I have this in my house but we use it for this, and it’s called that,’” she told me. “So apparently, the bonti exists in different parts of India with different names and it’s used for different things.” The museum wants to give people a reason to start intergenerational conversations, which are increasingly rare. Often, the people who possess old objects do not talk about them, thinking of them as prosaic things. Before the museum started receiving contributions, many objects in it belonged to Aanchal and Navdha themselves. Their families were both impacted by Partition and old artifacts gave them a way to talk to their families about this history. “The museum for me is almost a way of quenching that curiosity,” Navdha said. “My older sister never asked these questions and my parents never spoke about it … I think their concern was just providing for their kids. Because they have probably grown up hearing stories, but when I ask my parents, they don’t remember. They don’t talk about it either.” Shubham Das, a contributor to the museum, recalled how his discovery of some old books led to a conversation with his father about a difficult part of his life. “I realised that there was more to it than just these books,” he told me. “There was my life and the lives of people who are not around anymore behind these things. So it was like a meditation of sorts. I was meditating on what had happened to those people, or how my society was at that time. It was personal, but that is what gave the jolt—that I came to know more about myself.”

The COVID-19 lockdown gave people a lot of time to go through stuff lying around in their homes and open up to their families about it.

ww Since its inception, the museum has used oral and informal storytelling as a means to record and preserve personal histories that are often rendered invisible by traditional history books or museums. With every story, the founders want the reader to learn something new about the object or the time and community that it belongs to. “I feel like a lot of those personal histories get lost within the traditional museum space because of bigger things like colonisation or the way in which they were taken,” Aanchal said. Going forward, the founders want to build a complete landscape that focusses on communal histories not only from India but the entire subcontinent, to create an inclusive framework without boundaries. While they want the museum to remain crowdsourced, they are also contemplating physical pop-ups or video storytelling to take it a step or two further. For now, they just want to provide a platform for people to share and learn meaningful things. “I remember one time someone had asked us, ‘If you and Aanchal are working on the stories with the people, are you adding your list of biases to it?’” Navdha said. “And we were like, ‘Well, we try really hard to not do that.’ But, at the end of the day, our work is based on oral histories, and oral history is anyway full of whatever biases anyone has, whoever is transferring that information to the other person, it’s someone’s perception.” Nevertheless, she added, “I think we’re also giving people the space to tell the stories they want to … and there’s an abundance of stories and abundance of great things that people have done.” s SEPTEMBER 2022

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the lede

Moving Pictures A digital encyclopaedia attempts to transform the study of Indian art / Art

India has rich traditions of art that stretch back ten thousand years to the prehistoric cave paintings at Bhimbetka. What came as a shock to Nathaniel Gaskell, the director of the Museum of Art and Photography Academy—the research wing of the MAP, Bengaluru— was the dearth of authoritative information on Indian art. “I also realised that the information that is available has been long narrated through the Western lens, and the language is full of jargon that not everyone can understand,” Gaskell told me. On 22 April 2022, in an attempt to do something about this relative paucity of literature, Gaskell launched an encyclopaedia of Indian art, a digital platform that endeavours to transform the way South Asia’s art histories are accessed, taught and discussed—both regionally and globally. With over two thousand entries, the platform allows anyone to systematically approach the breadth of the region’s art histories. “I came up with the idea around three years ago and I had broadly two goals: first, providing a wider access to the people, and secondly, to make the writing jargon-free and unbiased,” Gaskell said. “Up till now, people are reading about Indian art from Western perspective. With the encyclopaedia, we want to bring a shift.” It took nearly two years to complete the first iteration of the encyclopaedia. A team of about two dozen early-career

“We make it a point to look for sources that contain comprehensive, up-to-date scholarship and, wherever possible, to also mention the history of changing scholarship on a subject,” Khanbhai said.

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researchers and editors from across India and the world worked remotely, writing, editing and peer-reviewing content that covered everything from artists’ biographies, important works, craft traditions, themes, movements, monuments and cultural sites, as well as contemporary debates involving appropriation, surveillance, digital intervention and exchange. Gaskell explained that the first step was to build an exhaustive list of potential entries, which involved “systematically referring to a varied range of existing writing and research on the subject, including anthologies, textbooks and university curriculums.” This was followed by a shorter selection, which was “created with an eye on inclusivity, variety, breadth and scope.” The first draft of each entry, written by a researcher, would be edited for concision, structure, length and factual accuracy. The edited article would then be reviewed by the director and an academic review panel, composed of specialists, academics and scholars from different disciplines. Besides aiming to make the content available in an easy-to-understand format, the MAP team also wanted to ensure that they filled the gaps in the way Indian art history has been taught. “The biases of Western institutions are that they’ve focused only at certain things and neglected a lot of regional art work,” Mustafa Khanbhai, the head of research at the MAP Academy, told me. These biases, he said, “form part of the problem of outdated information. Colonial writing and education has also dictated what the ‘mainstream’ idea of Indian art is.” In this regard, the encyclopaedia has a dedicated segment: Living Traditions, covering regionally specific folk and indigenous art and performance. Other segments cover several local court traditions, styles and textiles. “We make it a point to look for sources that contain comprehensive, up-to-date scholarship and, wherever THE CARAVAN

possible, to also mention the history of changing scholarship on a subject, so that readers understand how such analyses change with time,” Khanbhai said. “It’s true that interest to read and represent the story of Indian art systematically, per se, is a colonial venture, because it was necessary for the colonial rulers to ‘know’ it to govern it farther,” Saswata Bhattacharya, an associate professor at Delhi University’s Deshbandhu

courtesy map academy

/ tanisha saxena

College, told me. The error in that, he said, “was to have Europe as the measuring scale to read and determine the merit of Indian art.” This led almost all major art historians writing about it to either follow “the colonial/Orientalist perspective to Indian art” or adopt a “nationalist point of view.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he added, a few individuals attempted to engage with the sociopolitical context of Indian art. This was a significant shift, as it

the lede

allowed Indian art to be “read along the texts of Indian life, ancient or contemporary.” Bhattacharya said that the encyclopaedia was a welcome initiative, in an era of digital accessibility, but was not the first attempt at representing the vast and the complex area of India’s rich history of art and craft. Nevertheless, he said, it would “definitely give more encouragement, inspiration and, support to all those who wish to pursue the subject more seriously, maybe from an advanced academic interest.” The project also allows schol-

feature stories on art, culture, practices, rituals and communities, and contextualise the presence, role and impact of the Indian subcontinent within global history. The encyclopaedia intends to document the crafts and living traditions of marginalised communities, as well as lesser-studied facets of regional art history, from folk dramas and embroidery to Indian board games. The MAP’s main structure in Bengaluru, which houses the permanent collection, will also be opened to the public on 11 December this year.

ars a certain “autonomy of engagement in areas of special interest,” he added, which made him hopeful about the outcome. “Since it is a private initiative, one can also be relaxed about the fact that the project does not necessarily have to align with the pressure of producing a ‘nationalistic’ view of ‘Indian’ art.” The MAP Academy also offers a blog, which includes writing on a range of subjects exploring the histories of art in the region, by the encyclopaedia’s researchers and editors. The team has been working on putting together a podcast, which will

Appreciating the initiative, the visual artist and researcher Jyothidas KV told me that it is “important for museums to establish their roles as centres of cultural discourse and engage their potential audiences with their curatorial ambitions.” He observed that, in India, where museums have long been understood as “holding stations of static collections,” the MAP’s focus on museum education and expansive knowledge outreach programs, such as the encyclopaedia, “is trying to shift the outlook of what museums can be and do.” s SEPTEMBER 2022

this spread: The encyclopaedia has a dedicated segment on Living Traditions, covering regionally specific folk and indigenous art and performance. Other segments cover several local court traditions, styles and textiles.

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PERSPECTIVES Old Sins It is time for Punjabis to atone for the crimes of 1947 / Conflict

above: A still from a video of the Karachibased artist Roohi S Ahmed’s performance art piece, “Sow and Sew,” from 2012. Her work has featured in various exhibitions on Partition and the India-Pakistan relationship. 12

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perspectives

/ amarjit chandan The renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a short poem in Punjabi about the Partition of 1947: Kise beejiya ae, tusan waddhna ae Kise keetiyan ne, tusan wartana ae Aap wele sir puchhna gichhna si Hun kise theen ki hisab manggo

courtesy roohi s ahmed

Someone sowed, and you shall reap. Someone did, and you deal with it. You did not probe, and question either when it was time. From whom will you seek explanations now? Faiz was right. What the earlier generations did, the later generations have to suffer and endure. The partition of India, and, therefore, the partition of Punjab, was carried out by outsiders, without asking the Punjabi people. But history—the public record or reality—keeps seeking answers from the dead and the living. It is a creature that never shuts up. It sees everything and rubs salt into wounds. It is as the German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote: “When the wound stops hurting, what hurts is the scar.” Punjabis often refer to the partitioned regions as “east” or “west” Punjab, not by the names of the nation states these

were included in. Many, especially the families of the displaced, do not commemorate the events of 1947 as azadi, or Independence. They call it vaddey raule—the big riots, the holocaust. Punjabi authors, writing in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English, have published hundreds of books mourning it. Academic researchers produced, and continue to produce, stacks of theses on it. Painters paint, and there is no count of films. There are five evildoers in these narratives: the viceroy Louis Mountbatten, Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Akali leader Tara Singh. Every Punjabi chooses a villain and placates themselves by accusing him. The scenes, accounts and records of the tale are always the same: murder, mayhem, rapes, looting, arson. In the end, the author or the director uses these events to deliver grand messages on the importance of humanity, goodwill and other lofty ideals. Many historians incriminate mobs belonging to the Muslim League as having started the violence, in March 1947, by setting fire to Tara Singh’s ancestral home and killing his uncle. Patronised by the nawab of Mamdot, located near present-day Firozepur, Muslim Leaguers, local Muslim policemen, ex-soldiers and village thugs orchestrated more such incidents. In

SEPTEMBER 2022

retaliation, to avenge the killing of Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, the Hindu and Sikh thugs in East Punjab re-enacted pages from the same playbook, by killing double the number of Muslims. The number of human lives lost during this exodus is commonly considered to be a million, and the number of refugees is said to be 10 million. Just after the exodus, both sides presented the details of the devastation focussing on the crimes of the other. In 1948, the Pakistan government published a booklet titled The Sikh Plan. In 1950, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandhak Committee, the organisation heading Sikh shrines, published a report titled Muslim League Attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947. But no one speaks, really, of their own crimes. Seventy-five years on, the ruling political elites of all communities—Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims—and the governments of both nations show a complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own misdeeds. The Guru Granth Sahib includes a verse by the saint-poet Kabir: “Where there is falsehood, there is sin. Where there is greed, there is death. Where there is forgiveness, there is God himself.” During my long career and frequent visits to both East and West Punjab, I had many conversations with those belonging to these groups.

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old sins · perspectives The film ended. The lights switched on. A death-like silence filled the room. An agitated Punjabi woman, who was then a professor at a university in Lahore, shouted at me: “Why did you show this film?” I told her, “We in East Punjab are looking to seek atonement for our sins in the Partition violence. You should do the same. Someone on your side should also make a film … who were the people who spilt the blood of thousands of Sikhs and Hindus? What harm had they done to them?” In March 2012, newspapers in East Punjab were awash with pictures of Mohammed Khursheed Khan, the then deputy attorney general of Pakistan. He could be seen cleaning the shoes of devotees of the Golden Temple in Amritsar to atone for the killings of innocent Sikhs in Peshawar, in present-day Pakistan. It is a tradition among Sikhs that, to atone for their sins, one should sweep the gurudwara, clean the shoes of the devotees or clean the dishes in the community kitchen. In August, news arrived that his higher-ups had sacked him.

fe chaudhary / amarjeet chandan / nca archive, lahore

I brought up the idea of remorse and forgiveness in the context of Partition. In response, I received only refusal or reluctance. In September 2007, I invited about forty people to Lahore Chitrkar, a recording studio and art gallery in the neighbourhood of Gulberg, for the screening of Ajay Bhardwaj’s film Rabba Hun Kee Kariye. The film, whose English title is Thus Departed Our Neighbours, records testimonies of witnesses to attacks on thousands of Muslims by the Hindus and Sikhs in the princely state of Patiala and the Khanna regions of Ludhiana, in East Punjab. It speaks of how the Sikh rulers of Patiala and Faridkot gave their police and military support that allowed them to hunt and kill Muslims. They distributed weapons and vehicles to the ex-soldiers all over eastern Punjab. In one of the final scenes of the film, the professor and activist Karam Singh, who had studied Persian in Lahore, goes to a railway line in Mansa district. He reads a kalma—a verse that marks Islamic faith—in memory of Muslims killed in that area during the carnage.

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In September 2017, a small event was held at the Punjabi Bhawan in Ludhiana. The Naib Shahi Imam of Ludhiana read the khatum dua, a prayer for the dead from the Quran, in memory of the victims of Partition. Barely thirty people attended the event. The 2018 book Sann Santali, which I edited, is an anthology of poems written in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English about the partition of Punjab. It includes over fifty Punjabi poets. The only Muslim poets in the anthology, who lamented the division, were Ustad Daman, Ahmed Rahi and Shareef Kunjahi. The poet Mazhar Tirmazi told me: “The Pakistani state claimed the partition violence as qurbani, or ritual sacrifice, so that no one can raise a finger on the Two-Nation Theory. In the newly formed nation, even the writers began beating the drum of qurbani as it was benificial for them, and this includes both Urdu and Punjabi writers. Only Ustad Daman kept lamenting the sorrow of Partition.” Punjabi qissas, though one-sided, were a tad closer to social reality than the work of stage-performer poets.

old sins · perspectives Qissas, or tales, contained unfettered accounts of violence against the Hindu-Sikh combine by Muslims. Their narrative is a specimen of local history but eventually worked as propaganda, presenting only the crimes of one side. More than ten such qissas were published in East Punjab between 1948 and 1950. In the same period, Charaghdin Junei-ke-wala published his qissa Khoon Deeyan Nadian Yaani Zulm di Hadd—Rivers of Blood and the Extremity of Oppression—in Lahore, which discussed the violence against Muslims. He gave detailed accounts of brutal killings by the Akal Sena—a group of religious Sikh fighters under Tara Singh—and Hindu fanatics of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh against Muslims in the Patiala and Ferozepur regions, in the Qadian region of Gurdaspur district, in Valtoha and Kotli Pathana near Ajnala in Amristar district and in Mohalla Sharifpura of Amritsar city. Many such writings have been published in periodicals and book form. No academic research has cared to scrutinise them too much. Tara Singh’s younger brother Niranjan Singh was a follower of Gandhi. He taught Chemistry at Khalsa College in Amritsar for many years. Then, he founded the Sikh National College in Lahore, in 1940. In his autobiography Jeevan Vikas, written in Punjabi, he recounted his brother’s misdeeds. In the leadership of [the Muslim] League, Muslim thugs went to such an extreme that there is no such example of barbarity in human history. The Hindus and Sikhs arose as well. They formed a committee and deemed Master Tara Singh as their leader. Master Tara Singh was a brave man of vicious disposition. Akalis were quite organized and Master Tara Singh was their sole leader. Then it became a fight between equals. The Muslims would kill 10 Hindus or Sikhs there. Master Tara Singh got 10 Muslims killed here. 1000 refugees crossed over from there. Master Tara Singh expelled 1000 Muslims from here. There, the women were dishonoured. The same treatment for women here. Both sides committed innumerable atrocities. Around 70 lakh Hindu-Sikhs would have come here and the same number of Muslims would have been sent to Pakistan. … Master Tara Singh saved the Sikhs but gave up Sikhi. The Sikh religion is not about persecuting the poor and the destitute. Sikhi is about sacrificing like martyrs Bhai Mani Singh and Bhai Taru Singh. According to multiple accounts, communists in Punjab worked to shield Muslims from Hindu and Sikh mobs. The Akal Sena murdered thousands of

Muslims. In Amritsar district, it was also after the activist leader Saifuddin Kitchlew. In 1919, Kitchlew had gathered Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to unite in protest against the Rowlatt Act. His arrest had inspired the protest gathering at Jallianwala Bagh in April that year, where British officials then opened fire, killing hundreds. During Partition violence, the communist leader Teja Singh Sutantar’s men evacuated Kitchlew from Amritsar and took him safely to Delhi. Sikh and Hindu communists formed peace committees to safeguard Muslims in many places. These events are detailed in Anfolia Varka—Unopened Pages—a biography of the communist leader Inder Singh Murari published in 1979. In Bleeding Punjab Warns, a report on Partition violence compiled by the communist leader Dhanwantri, it is reported that in the villages close to Bhakna, the native village of the Ghadar Party’s founding president Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna, the communists hoisted red flags to demarcate safe spaces to protect Muslims and distributed food. The Ghadar Party was founded in the early twentieth century, to overthrow the British government using violent means. But according to the historian Ali Raza’s book Revolutionary Pasts, in stark contrast, in the villages of the Akali leader Udham Singh Nagoke, Akal Sena mobs massacred Muslims. In his au-

opposite page: The Akali leader Tara Singh addressing a public meeting in Lahore, in 1946. He later led the Akal Sena, which carried out brutal violence against Muslims during Partition.

Seventy-five years since Partition, the ruling political elites of all communities—Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims—and the governments of both nations show a complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own misdeeds.

ww tobiography, renowned writer Gurbakhsh Singh, who founded and edited the literary magazine Preetlarhi, recounted how he protected Muslims in the area around Preet Nagar—a community-living town that he had built, located near Amritsar and Lahore. Its residents “Preet Sainiks,” or soldiers of love, helped Muslims cross safely over the newly formed international border. The Akal Sena leader Jiwan Singh Umranangal’s conscience awoke after thirteen years. In 1960, he presented himself at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to pray for forgiveness. He cleaned the shoes of devotees to atone for his role in killing Muslims. It was this remorse that made him oppose the Khalistani separatists in the 1980s. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes claimed that one of the difficulties of dealing with evil is SEPTEMBER 2022

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old sins · perspectives the absence of tragedy. “Tragedy in the past could establish the relationship between good and evil,” Fuentes told The Guardian in a 1987 interview. Referring to the Greek tragedy play Antigone, Fuentes said, “Greek tragedy is able to see that both sides may be right, that Creon the tyrant is right to hold the primacy of the state’s laws, and Antigone is right to uphold the rights of the individual. But when you have a society that believes in the possibility of creating paradise on earth, tragedy disappears. Crime replaces tragedy and the crimes of the 20th century are without parallel.” The partition of Punjab, too, was a crime. Punjabis have spent seventy five years justifying this collective wrongdoing of 1947 by citing subjective sources. The Punjabi peoples’ minds still carry the weight of these evil acts. It is rare individuals, like Karam Singh, from Bharadwaj’s film, and Pakistan’s Mohammed Khursheed, who act on the voice of their conscience. A museum on the partition of Punjab has opened in Amritsar. It will not open in Lahore, where Pakistan’s narrative of qurbani still holds fort.

The burden on the Punjabi consciousness can only be lifted by pleading guilty to our crimes, taking collective responsibility for these actions and seeking atonement and forgiveness.

ww Often, it is leaders of communities or nations who atone for the sins of their people. In 1997, Britain sought forgiveness from the people of Ireland for the Irish potato famine in the nineteenth century and from Kenya for injustices carried out during the Mau Mau rebel uprising under British rule. In 2010, the Russian government admitted its culpability in the Katyn massacre in the Second World War, in which thousands lost their lives on Stalin’s orders. In 2016, the Canadian government sought forgiveness for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914, where it turned away Indian immigrants, many of whom lost their lives when the British police opened fire on them upon their arrival back in India. In 2019, Reverend Justin Welby, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury and therefore the head of the Church of England, went to Jallianwala Bagh to plead forgiveness for the 1919 massacre. He said it was a “deeply humbling” experience and provoked “feelings of profound shame.” These examples of our times do not suit the leaders of East or West Punjab. The irony for the leaders of East Punjab in particular is that, were it not for the violence of Partition, the Sikhs could never have 16

THE CARAVAN

maintained a hold on political power in Punjab, as they have done since 1966. The Akali-led Punjabi Suba movement led to the formation of Punjab that year, which is now a de-facto Sikh state. The burden on the Punjabi consciousness can only be lifted by pleading guilty to our crimes, taking collective responsibility for these actions and seeking atonement and forgiveness. But they have no platform to meet and talk. There is no Punjabi leader; there is no conscience keeper of the Punjabi community; there is no central moral authority that can reconcile the Punjabis devastated by history. Punjab is not a united nation. We do not have a collective consciousness. What is there, on both sides of the Wagah border, the ruling elite has made ugly like themselves. They do not represent the histories and ideologies of Punjab, from the words of the Sufi saints to the Sikh gurus. It is unlikely that many Punjabis, especially the political class and public intellectuals, will themselves buy the idea of apology and forgiveness. When I shared the original Punjabi version of this article with Tarlochan Singh, a former member of the Rajya Sabha and the former chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, he at first said that such a debate would be futile. “Who should apologise and from whom?” he asked. When I responded that we Punjabis needed to apologise to each other, he did not agree. He blamed the Muslim League for the violence and said that Tara Singh was blamed “for no fault of his.” In a later exchange, Tarlochan appeared to have changed his mind. He now said that he thought an apology was a good idea. He blamed the British rulers for their haste in carrying out the partition. “Apology from the nation can come if the houses of Parliament of both sides come forward for such resolution,” he said. But even if Punjabis do want to come forward to seek forgiveness, then who from the Muslim League will come forward? Who from the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, and who from the Akalis? Where will they sit together? Where is that place? The Sikh historian Mohinder Singh, the director of the National Institute of Panjab Studies, in Delhi, wrote to me that he did not think any of these representatives would come forward. He felt that “there would be support from individuals and not organisations.” Mohinder Singh lamented that the idea of resolution for the crimes of Partition had been reduced to performative acts, such as the ceremonies at the Wagah border. He said, “How disgusting and how helpless one feels.” s A version of this article first appeared in the literary magazine Preet Lahri, in November 2020, in Punjabi. It has been translated to English by the author along side the writer Jasdeep Singh.

perspectives

Road to Nowhere Why Dalits must abandon the Kanwar Yatra / Caste

/ sagar I have a flickering memory of wading through the Phalgu River in Bihar’s Gaya district, a few hours’ journey from my home, when I was ten or twelve. The current was strong and I could barely keep my head above the water. My father, ahead of me, held me by one hand, and my cousin Gautam held me by the other. Around us were dozens of kanwariyas, including my father’s friends, each ferrying water from a tributary of the Ganga in small pots tied to a wooden pole. We were on our way to a temple on Barabar Hill, north of Gaya, to offer the water to the god Shiva. After emerging from the river, we walked on along the bank. The hill—a mountain to my young eyes—looked like a giant stack of boulders that someone had carelessly thrown down. Gautam and I, after much discussion, agreed that it must have been Hanuman, the monkey god from the Ramayana. We knew he was capable of lifting mountains and that he was an incarnation of Shiva himself. For us as children, this was a journey full of myth and wonder. Whenever we felt weary and faltered on the climb, a cry from behind would encourage us to go on: “Bol bam!” Sometimes this came from my father and his friends, who let us walk ahead so they could keep an eye on us, and sometimes from other kanwariyas passing by. We felt like we were being taken care of by every one of them. We knew that kanwariyas often used “bam” to address each other, but we had never been addressed that way before. Every time one of us got called a bam, it left us in splits. At the hilltop, we found a small temple with a tiny door. The little space there was before it was packed with kanwariyas, and we could not get to the temple or even see the idol inside. Many pilgrims, in the same predicament, just

threw their water towards the temple door with a loud “Bol bam.” Our group did that too, before moving off to one side to avoid being trampled. It was one of our best times together, an experience we talked many years about repeating but never did. I look back at it with some fondness even now—but always with a sense of remorse as well. This is not the typical shame attached to the Kanwar Yatra, where dominant-caste “liberal” Hindus complain about kanwariyas’ sensationalised wild side: raucous crowds, blaring music, marijuana smoke. For these dominant-caste Hindus, even if they couch their annoyance in the language of civic order, the problem is a crack in their illusion of Hinduism as a moral and genteel religion. For me, it is something else entirely. What I see in the Kanwar Yatra is what they conspire not to see everywhere around them: caste. Every rainy season, just like this year, millions of kanwariyas weave across the Gangetic plains, picking up water from the Ganga or one of its tributaries and delivering it to Shiva temples. The majority of them are Dalits or members of the backward classes, just like my father and his friends; this is not a favoured ritual of the caste elite. It is no wonder that many liberal Hindus, overwhelmingly from the dominant castes, feel disdain for the kanwariyas’ ways. Implicit in this is a conceited pride in what they think are their superior religious practices. The contemptuous view of the kanwariya is as someone with low intellect, unemployed or with nothing better to do, prone to disorder or even violence. Again, the prejudice is clear. Our party for the yatra was made up of educated, working men just like my father. The regular kanwariyas from our mohalla are mostly backward-classes men who run their own businesses and provide for their families. I can say about my father and his friends that what mattered SEPTEMBER 2022

to them on the journey was company more than god. My father has no problem with Hinduism, though he is not a practicing Hindu. He went on the occasional pilgrimage only because his friends planned them. Where I come from, going on vacation means going on pilgrimage, unless someone is off on their honeymoon. Time off from work for marginalised people almost always means a loss of pay, and when they make this sacrifice they feel like giving time to god. Kanwariyas’ reputation for unrest comes primarily from the ruckus they create on the roads and their reputation for getting high. Yes, some kanwariyas will take things to extremes, but the blanket vilification is an overreaction. I remember blaring Bhojpuri music in the jeep that carried us on part of our journey, but there were never any fights. And while it is true that many kanwariyas smoke marijuana on their journeys, for them this can be an expression of faith. Marijuana is believed to be an offering from Shiva, who himself has a wild reputation in Hindu texts. Kanwariyas draw justification for their actions from their god, thinking that Shiva’s followers are supposed to behave like him. They are not mindless addicts. But it is not my goal to defend the Kanwar Yatra against liberal scorn.

Climbing a few rungs of esteem in the eyes of the Hindu elite will not bring dignity for the oppressed castes that make up the mass of kanwariyas. The only path consistent with self-respect is to abandon the Kanwar Yatra, a rite founded on Brahminical belief and power.

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road to nowhere · perspectives Climbing a few rungs of esteem in the eyes of the Hindu elite will not bring dignity for the oppressed castes that make up the mass of kanwariyas. The only path consistent with self-respect is to abandon the yatra, a rite founded on Brahminical belief and power, and reject those religious practices that make us participants in our own caste oppression. There is not much available, whether in myth or the historical record, on the origins of the Kanwar Yatra. One significant mention of it is in Volume 3 of The Indian Empire, written by Robert Montgomery Martin and published in 1858. Martin, a civil servant in colonial India, never uses the word “kanwar,” but his description makes it clear he is writing of what we now call kanwariyas. Martin travelled to Haridwar, where the Ganga emerges from the hills to join the plains—still the single most popular destination for kanwariyas today. There, “persons journeying from a great distance are anxious to fill their jars with water, that their homes may be hallowed by a portion of the sacred element,” Martin recorded. “The water-pots are often times conveyed to their destination in a picturesque manner, being enclosed in a framework decorated with flowers and feathers, and slung upon bamboos resting on the shoulders of long files of men, who will

sunil ghosh / hindustan times / getty images

below: The majority of kanwariyas are Dalits or members of the backward classes. It is no wonder that many liberal Hindus, overwhelmingly from the dominant castes, feel disdain for the kanwariyas’ ways.

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convey it thus, without contamination, for several hundred miles.” Martin also mentioned an accompanying practice of ritual suicide. Many devotees, believing that “a blessed immortality is secured to the person who shall thus end his earthly career … will cheerfully commit suicide, or if too weak to perform the act themselves, will prevail on their nearest friends to accelerate the progress of dissolution by leaving their bodies to float down the sacred stream.” Martin said nothing about the origins of this custom, but his account of a similar ritual at Gangasagar, where the Ganga empties into the Bay of Bengal, offers a glimpse of how it might have started. Instead of adults ending their own lives, here devotees apparently threw their children into the water. This ritual infanticide, Martin wrote, continued at Gangasagar until the close of the eighteenth century, when the British viceroy “abolished this wickedness.” It was Brahmins who “persuaded tens of thousands of Hindoos to assemble in January annually on the island” and induced parents to “cast living into the torrent” their children. Martin writes that Brahmins managed to do so by “taking advantage” of a “superstitious idea.” That idea is the same one at the heart of the Kanwar Yatra—belief in the holiness of the Ganga

road to nowhere · perspectives and its waters. How that belief has survived into our time is not in doubt. This superstition is enshrined in ancient Hindu texts prepared and propagated by Brahmins through long ages when the oppressed castes faced the threat of mutilation or death for so much as trying to read them. Its primary beneficiaries today remain Brahmins, who hold a casteist monopoly over temple priesthood. The religion kanwariyas pay allegiance to sees the majority of them as lesser beings, unfit by birth for spiritual offices. The growing popularity of the Kanwar Yatra is closely linked to the patronage it enjoys from many governments. At Haridwar, the Uttarakhand government organises a mela for kanwariyas every year, at public expense. (The West Bengal government does the same at Gangasagar every January.) This year, the Ajay Singh Bisht-led government in Uttar Pradesh put the state administration at the service of kanwariyas, provided them with security cover and reserved two lanes of a major highway for them. Numerous govern-

In the Kanwar Yatra and in any compromise with Hindu rituals and beliefs, Dalits risk betraying Ambedkar and undermining our civic and political rights.

ww ments and parties, including ones that are part of the Hindutva project, have seized upon the yatra as an opportunity to promote the idea of Hindu strength and glory. Within the logic of Hindutva, this serves to reinforce the oppressed castes’ unthinking acceptance of both the spiritual and political supremacy of the dominant castes, which also control secular power. The Kanwar Yatra is a trap laid by Brahminical interests for the oppressed. I know this trap well because I also grew up with Hindu customs, believing that Ganga water was holy and pure. When my grandfather was on his deathbed, my parents gave him water from the river, with the belief that this guarantees a departed soul’s passage to

heaven. Many oppressed-caste families store Ganga water in their homes for this and other religious purposes. But I no longer hold such superstitious beliefs. Between the child that climbed Barabar Hill and the adult writing this today lies a university education, many hardscrabble years in journalism, and a long process of discovering my identity as a Dalit. This meant understanding that the many instances of discrimination I have faced through my life were not accidental or unconnected, that the violence, deprivation and suffering of the marginalised that I have reported on has everything to do with the castes they were born into. My confusion over what I lived through and saw turned to clarity after I began reading BR Ambedkar and embraced the truth of what he taught—that as Dalits we are different to and separate from Hindus, and have always been. That was when I stopped associating myself with yatras or any other Hindu rituals. Hinduism is based on a graded society, with differing grades of liberty and oppression assigned to all who live in it. As Ambedkar wrote, Caste and Untouchability are not innocuous dogmas to be compared with other dogmas relating to the condition of the soul after death. They are parts of the code of conduct which every Hindu is bound to observe during his life on earth. Caste and Untouchability far from being mere dogmas are among the foremost observances prescribed by Hinduism. It is not enough for a Hindu to believe in the dogmas of Caste and Untouchability. He must also observe Caste, and Untouchability, in the conduct of his daily life. Ambedkar argued that participation in Hindu cults is the only limited association Dalits have with Hinduism. He made clear that this association does not imply that Dalits are part of Hindu society: caste and untouchability, both central to Hinduism, separated Dalits from “social union” with Hindus, as clearly seen in caste Hindus’ aversion to intermarriage and inter-dining with Dalits. It is social union that enfolds people into the same religion, AmbedSEPTEMBER 2022

kar held, and not the mere fact of worshiping the same gods or being accepted in certain religious ceremonies. Dalits were recognised as a separate political minority in the Government of India Act, 1935, as a result of these arguments. Dominant-caste Hindu leaders had argued that Dalits are Hindus and should not have any separate status or rights—Gandhi even went on a hunger strike to force Ambedkar into a concession. If Ambedkar had not fought for separate status for us, it is unlikely that, after Independence, the Constitution would have made room for the safeguards we now have. In the Kanwar Yatra and in any compromise with Hindu rituals and beliefs, we risk betraying Ambedkar and undermining our civic and political rights. Ambedkar also wrote that though Shiva is a “non-Vedic god” once scorned by Brahmins, today Brahmins have appropriated him and brought his cult under their control. Dalits will remain subjugated in it unless they can wrest this control but the chances of doing this are zero. So what should Dalit devotees do? Atheism, an easy option for the privileged and the rich, is not a natural choice for the masses of the oppressed, who have little power but to pray for food, shelter and a better life. Ambedkar understood this need for religion but he also put every religion on trial. He searched for an alternative to Hinduism—and for the alternative to be accepted it had to pass a test of equality and rationalism, it had to confront the problems of this life instead of preaching about former lives or the afterlife. He settled on Buddhism, converted, and inspired thousands of other Dalits to convert as well. The path to dignity and freedom for Dalits leads away from the Kawar Yatra. Kanshiram, the Dalit leader who united all the downtrodden as Bahujans, once spoke of his pain at seeing people across the country walking with a wooden pole, a pot-full of water tied to either end. “Mujhe aisa lagta hai ke ye Manuwaad ko apne kandhon par lekar ghum rahen hain,” he said—I feel like they are carrying Manuwaad (the caste beliefs of the Manusmriti) on their shoulders. We must throw this burden down. s 19

perspectives

The Wages of Solidarity

shahid tantray for the caravan

What victorious farmers’ unions owe Dalit communities / Politics

/ shivam mogha

above: Farmers’ union leaders addressing protestors at the Tikri border of Delhi in 2021. The Left-leaning Punjabbased unions were far more open to the farm labourers’ unions that joined the movement. 20

There was an air of jubilation among the five hundred or so farmers who attended a Sankalp Sabha in Rohtak, a town in Haryana, on 27 December 2021. A month earlier, in Delhi, seventy kilometres to the south, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the withdrawal of the three farm laws that had sparked a gruelling yearlong protest movement. The rally was one of many held in solidarity to mark the movement’s victory. It had been organised by the Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Sahyog Manch, a civil-society group from Rohtak, as well as local professors, university students and factory workers. These were all communities that had regularly joined and aided the massive sit-in at Delhi’s Tikri border. Along with the singing of Haryanvi ragnis—folk songs of protest—remembrances were held for farmers from the state who had died in the agitation. THE CARAVAN

At the event, Inderjit Singh of the All India Kisan Sabha spoke about an incident that took place on the day when the protest sites at Singhu and Tikri were dismantled and the victorious farmers began returning to their villages. While a few farmers were packing up a statue of Chhotu Ram, a Jat leader from the early twentieth century who united farmers and labourers in Haryana and Punjab, he said, they chanted the slogan “Kisan ekta zindabad”—Long live farmers’ unity. An agricultural labourer who was standing nearby asked them, “Where is the labourer in that slogan?” Almost immediately, all of the farmers changed their slogan to “Kisan mazdoor ekta zindabad.” This was a snippet of the solidarity and respect for labouring Dalit communities that I saw so often in the farmers’ protest sites at Singhu and Tikri, which were mostly organised by Punjab-based, often Left-leaning, farmers’ unions. But that same solidarity was lacking at the protest on

perspectives

the Ghazipur border, which was organised by the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Tikait), whose cadre largely hail from the region around Muzaffarnagar, in Uttar Pradesh, that I call home. I had joined the farmers’ movement, in December 2020, as a co-editor for the bi-weekly newspaper Trolley Times, brought out by like-minded writers, artists and activists. During those uncertain times, when the government shut down the internet at protest sites and much of the mainstream media limited itself to parroting the government’s talking points, Trolley Times emerged as one of the main grounded sources of information about the movement. It served to educate the farmers about the dangers posed by the farm laws and published a breadth of reportage about larger societal issues related to farming and rural society, as well as interviews and profiles of leaders and participants of the movement. Despite playing a fairly central part in the cultural space of the protests myself, I noticed that I had religiously avoided going to Ghazipur, instead reporting mostly about Singhu and Tikri. This was despite my cultural and linguistic ties to the area that many of the Ghazipur protestors came from. This was no accident. I come from a family of agricultural labourers—and farmers have historically not paid any heed to the interests of this section. Labourers demanding dignity and higher wages have either been ignored by landholding farming communities or faced violence for these demands. The farmers’ unions from Punjab recognised this animosity but also realised that the struggle to repeal the farm laws could not succeed without the support of the labouring communities, who make up the rural majority. The slogan “Kisan Mazdoor Ekta” was popularised by artists and activists, and took months to be accepted by protesting farmers. While the slogan may not have been accepted by many as a call to

eradicate unjust social divisions at the village level, many at least saw its need in winning the battle against neoliberal agricultural policies. Punjab had seen an unprecedented mobilisation of agricultural labourers for the protest. Left-affiliated organisations that work on issues of minimum wages, social boycotts and the rights of labourers over common lands—such as the Zamin Prapti Sangharsh Committee, the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union, the Mazdoor Mukti Morcha, the Krantikari Pendu Mazdoor Union and the Dehati Mazdoor Sabha—had joined the movement, with their members often attending the Tikri and Singhu protests. The BKU (Ekta Ugrahan), the most Left-leaning Punjab-based farmers’ union, also organised a major rally in Barnala, alongside the Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union, at which over two hundred thousand farmers and labourers united under a single banner. There were also attempts at making the space of the protests more inclusive. The Samyukt Kisan Morcha—the coordinating body of the movement—decided to celebrate events related to Bahujan heroes. A celebration of Ravidas, a fifteenth-century Dalit mystic and poet, was attended by many farmers and Dalits. Even Sikh organisations organised a nagar kirtan—a religious procession—at the Singhu border to mark Ravidas Jayanti. There were many protest songs that mentioned the desired unity of farmers and labourers. The Ambedkar Students’ Association at Panjab University organised a Bahujan library at Singhu. Gurdeep Singh, the ASA member who led the team at the library, stayed at the protest site for nearly a year, despite it endangering his attempt to finish his MPhil. He told me he was proud to fly the Ambedkarite blue flag high at the library and ensure that everyone at the protest could have access to over two thousand books about BR Ambedkar, people’s rights and the history of Punjab. SEPTEMBER 2022

In contrast to this, I viewed the Ghazipur sit-in with suspicion and nervousness. From the outside, it seemed to be a simple extension of the social system I had grown up in. All those who led the protests from the stage were from the same dominant-caste communities that my mother had to work under for her daily wages. Rakesh Tikait, who led the protest, was a figure of suspect motives for us, given that his father, Mahendra Singh Tikait, had a long history of antagonism and violence towards Dalit communities and social movements. The Ghazipur protestors actions often hurt Dalit sentiments too. When the chief minister of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, was due to unveil a statue of Ambedkar at a village near Sonipat, on 14 April 2021, Rakesh Tikait opposed the move, claiming that Khattar was trying to “disrupt the amity among people.” A few Dalit organisations were incensed by Tikait’s use of khaps—caste assemblies—to block Khattar’s entry to the village where the inauguration was to take place. My mother had a few warnings for me—legitimate fears she had gained from decades of living in semi-rural Muzaffarnagar. As an agrarian labourer, she worked for big farmers and always talked about them with a certain distaste and disdain. During my childhood, in the 1990s, Muzaffarnagar seemed bigger than it does to me now. Back then, the region was divided for us not only in terms of rural and urban landscapes but also in the experience of opportunities and misery. Rural life

At the Ghazipur protest, all those on the stage were from the same dominantcaste communities that my mother had to work under for her daily wages.

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the wages of solidarity · perspectives was not a romantic idea but a portrait of utter ruin. While the children of rich farmers could comfortably go to school, I had to work to keep our family afloat after my father died when I was twelve years old. I often missed school as a result. My first job introduced me to the press and to the state I lived in. Every morning, it was my job to go to a newspaper vendor and insert fliers into broadsheets as they were made ready for distribution. The headlines of the newspapers were a picture of the Muzaffarnagar my mother had tried to protect me from: they described rape, murder, burglary, caste and communal violence, often against those very similar to me. It was my mother who kept pushing me back to school, knowing it was the only route for social mobility for someone from our background. At the same time, agrarian politics in western Uttar Pradesh was undergoing a transformation. In this region the farming life is not just an element of identity but the dominant determinant of social consciousness. Historically, farmers’ leaders such as Charan Singh, Mahendra Tikait and Ram Chandra Vikal have grown to not only exercise immense power at the village level in these districts but also leverage this influence to grow their presence in national politics. Not too long ago, farmers’ union in western Uttar Pradesh were some of the most powerful political pressure groups, which determined everything from electricity policy to the maintenance of law and order. At the same time, they at least nominally tried to inculcate a sense of bhaichara— brotherhood—between various caste and religious groups. This bhaichara, however, never hid the reality of Jats taking primacy in determining the social and economic future of the village. In his book Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, Ramnarayan S Rawat notes that, when India became independent, most Dalit communities in western Uttar Pradesh were engaged in agriculture and, with landlessness being as common as it is, most worked under Jat landlords as agricultural labourers. This direct relation between both the communities gave 22

birth to contestation that created deep rural fault lines. It also often relegated Dalits to being important only for the consolidation of votes rather than giving them a meaningful role in political decision-making. There were many attempts made by leaders from farming backgrounds to acquire Dalit votes. Charan Singh, Mahendra Tikait and Vikal created political parties aimed at Dalits, a term they used interchangeably with agricultural labourers. The Tikaits, by far the most influential clan in the region, made two such attempts. First, in 1996, Mahendra Tikait and Charan Singh’s son Ajit Singh formed the Bhartiya Kisan Kamgar Party, which eventually evolved into the Rashtriya Lok Dal. Eight years later, Rakesh Tikait formed the Bahujan Kisan Dal, which is now largely defunct. These forays into Bahujan politics did not represent a fundamental change in their understanding of caste or social justice. Mahendra Tikait, for example, still maintained power through the Baliyan Khap, which he was able to make more powerful than all the other khaps of the region. Any challenge to this power was cracked down upon with a ferocity born of the khap consolidation that only he could achieve. When his BKU was leading farmers’ protests in the region in the late 1980s, agricultural labourers also mobilised themselves for minimum wages under the banner of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Union, co-founded by the Muzaffarnagar-based advocate Jaipal Singh Mithariya. Mithariya’s largely Dalit organisation grew quickly in Muzaffarnagar, Meerut and Bagpat, and the BKU

The solidarity extended by Chandra Shekhar Aazad and the many Dalit youth at Ghazipur does not ignore the casteist histories of these farmers’ unions or their members but recognises the need for unity without compromising on identity or ideology.

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often started violent clashes against the BMU in these districts. Mithariya himself was attacked several times. I met Mithariya, in August 2021, at his home in Karhera, a village in Muzaffarnagar district. In his younger days, he had worked with both the All India Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation and the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti— organisations founded by the Bahujan leader Kanshi Ram. Mithariya founded the BMU to unite agricultural labourers across caste lines. He said that, in the late 1980s, Jat members of the BKU even opened fire against labourers who refused to work for Jat landholders. The BKU (Tikait) would also lose its secular appeal following its lack of action in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal violence, something I had seen while volunteering in rehabilitation work after the carnage. Despite this violent history, Mithariya told me, he still supported the farmers’ movement on the borders of Delhi because, when it came to the privatising of agriculture, labourers and farmers were in the same boat. I felt comfortable going to the Ghazipur protest site only on 6 December 2020, when some protestors organised a small event marking Ambedkar’s death anniversary. There, I saw many Dalit youth from western Uttar Pradesh who were working in the National Capital Region, especially its industrial areas, and used to visit the protest site regularly. The NCR affords a certain social and economic mobility for Dalit youth, who are also politically mobile and have historically been able to organise movements in villages against unequal structures. The formation of the Bhim Army and the Azad Samaj Party under Chandra Shekhar Aazad attests to this. Despite this upward mobility, many of the Dalit youth at Ghazipur told me that they were still proud of their rural lives. Several of them, including school friends I chanced upon, still felt strongly attached to an agricultural identity. They travelled on flashy bikes, some of which had stickers of Ambedkar on the front and “gaama aale”—village people—painted with a flourish on the back. When I asked them what drove them to join the protests, they said they

pradeep gaur / sopa images / getty images

the wages of solidarity · perspectives

had come in support of tau—uncle—Rakesh Tikait. This support particularly grew after Tikait made an emotional appeal to the public on 28 January 2021, when the police made attempts to shut down the protest and he told the watching cameras that he would rather kill himself than end the agitation. This call also urged Aazad and the Bhim Army to extend their support to the protests and strengthen their ranks. The solidarity extended by Aazad and the many Dalit youth at Ghazipur does not ignore the casteist histories of these farmers’ unions or their members but recognises the need for unity without compromising on identity or ideology. The slow ending of attached labour in the region has meant that Dalit communities are not as beholden to landlord communities as they once were. Nonetheless, they show solidarity based on a moral position. In an editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly, the political scientist Gopal Guru wrote about the participation of marginalised communities in the protest: Minorities and Dalits showed their association with the protests not only because they would expect a trickle-down or positive impact on their wages in the aftermath of the success of

the protest, but much more importantly, they see in such protests—driven by moral hegemony—a promise of social solidarity expressed in equal social standing against the authoritarian tendencies that are increasingly undermining democratic and constitutional principles. Guru talks about a framework for “solidarity in itself” which also needs to be extended to “solidarity for itself” and adds that any alliance with farmers must be matched with the long-term aspirations of socially marginalised communities. Only this, he argues, will be a socially equitable victory for all the agrarian castes. My mother constantly urged me to be cautious in this solidarity. My support for the protests could not come with the security that many others in it enjoyed. As the protests intensified, my mother worried not just about what a victory for the khaps would mean at home but also for my safety. We were living already precarious lives and, if something were to go wrong, we could not afford the same medical expenses or legal fees that others in the protest could. Alongside this, Dalit youth who participated in the farmers’ movement had to contend with the fact that the government was making an active attempt to cause divisions between the farmers’ SEPTEMBER 2022

above: Protestors reading the Trolley Times during a demonstration. The newspaper emerged as one of the only grounded sources of information about the movement.

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manish rajput / sopa images / getty images

the wages of solidarity · perspectives

above: A library at the Tikri protest site. A member of the Panjab University Ambedkar Students Association risked the completion of his MPhil to maintain a Bahujan library at the Singhu protest site, one of the many Dalit youth who gave up a year of their life for a struggle that was not ultimately theirs.

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movement and Dalit communities. This was alongside an attempt by the government to encourage counter-mobilisation against the protests, primarily led by the Hind Mazdoor Kisan Samiti and the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Bhanu). The Bharatiya Janata Party’s SC Morcha also played a key role in trying to create an air of distrust between Dalit communities and the farmers’ movement. Following a clash between protesting farmers and BJP cadre at Ghazipur, on 30 June 2021, the BJP claimed that its cadre were attacked because they were welcoming the appointment of Amit Valmiki, a Dalit, as a general secretary of the party’s Uttar Pradesh unit. This led a Valmiki group in the state to oppose the farmers’ protests and burn effigies of Tikait. They later restated their support for the farmers’ movement. Despite many unsuccessful attempts to break Dalit resolve in the farmers’ protests, the moment that truly put a wedge between farmers and labourers was the heinous murder of Lakhbir Singh. Lakhbir, a Mazhabi Sikh protestor, was murdered and mutilated at the Singhu protest in the early hours of 15 October 2021 by several Nihang Sikhs. While farmers’ union leaders might not have condoned the killing, the reluctance and slow pace with which they condemned it drew the ire of many Ambedkarite activists. THE CARAVAN

My mother, for her part, continued to have the same worries. She reminded me that, at the end of the day, my position in the protests could so quickly be reduced to my caste alone. She said that this movement would only benefit the zamindars, with labourers returning to the same position of economic exploitation and social marginalisation. There was very little I could offer her in the form of explanations for why I continued fighting what was, in all honesty, someone else’s battle. She had, after all, a deeper experience of the farming economy and the daily abuses of landlords than I could ever dispel. I thought her arguments were driven by the past alone, without trying to envision a hopeful future. But now, eight months after the farmers’ movement won its victory, little has changed in her life. It is not for me to convince my mother— that is a task for the farmers’ unions that relied on our support to achieve their victory. An uncountable number of Dalit youth put their economic and educational prospects on the line to join the farmers in their struggle. They gave a whole year to a movement that was not ultimately theirs. It is time to begin asking what land-holding dominant-caste farmers will now give back to the many labourer communities without whom they have no future. s

perspectives

Standing Still The absence of justice for the Maliana massacre is a blot on our democracy / Crime

/ prabhjit singh It has been thirty-five years since 72 Muslims were brutally killed in the small town of Maliana, in Uttar Pradesh, during communal violence in Meerut district. Their families still await even the first glimmer of justice. The Maliana case, pending in a local court, stands as a blot on our criminal-justice system. Tensions had been high in Maliana due to the riots in Meerut that followed protests against the unlocking of the Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, for Hindu worship. However, residents of Maliana described the violence in the town as the targetted killing of Muslims by state forces. A day earlier, at least 42 Muslim men had been killed in Hashimpura, a neighbourhood in Meerut. The testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses detail the horror of what transpired in Maliana. It is appalling that there has not been a single conviction for these murders. I spoke to survivors who recounted how, on 23 May 1987, members of the Uttar Pradesh Provincial Armed Constabulary surrounded the town from all sides and shot at Muslim men, women and children. The PAC’s firing also provided cover for Hindu mobs that looted and burnt Muslim homes. Among those who died was Mohammad Ali, then 80 years old, and ten members of his family. Ali’s grandson Ismail Khan, as well as Ismail’s wife, survived. The couple was not in town that day as they were distributing invitations to the wedding of Ismail’s younger brother Yusuf, who was also among those killed. Ismail told me that all the bodies—of his grandfather, mother, father, five siblings and three cousin sisters—were thrown into a well in their courtyard. “This all is the handiwork of the PAC,” Ismail said. “They first facilitated the mob to loot a liquor shop. The rioters then consumed the liquor and then headed towards our localities.” He now lives in a humble dwelling in the suburbs of Ghaziabad. He has never returned to Maliana following the massacre. “I was told that the hospital authorities had conducted the postmortem of only five of the 11 killed in my family,” he said. His father, Abdul Sattar, was a head carpenter at the army ordnance factory in Muradnagar, in Ghaziabad district. Ismail spelled out the challenges he faced in his pursuit of justice. “I entered Maliana with my lawyer only thrice,” he told me. “My bag was once

snatched inside the Meerut judicial complex, and I was followed by some men on another occasion when I had gone to the court.” He said that he did not know what had happened to their house in Maliana, “whether it is now a dumpyard or occupied by someone.” Many survivors were driven to poverty. The killings deprived many in the next generations of the opportunity to get an education or build a better life. Ismail said he was unable to educate his three sons due to financial hardships. Two of them now drive municipal garbage wagons, and one is a daily-wage labourer. Ismail is one of the four petitioners in a recent public-interest litigation that sought a fresh investigation into the massacre. The other petitioners are the senior journalist Qurban Ali, the retired police officer Vibhuti Narain Rai and the social activist MA Rashid. Rai was instrumental in taking the Hashimpura case to its logical end, with the conviction of 16 PAC personnel in October 2018. The petition was filed in the Allahabad High Court, in July 2020. Astoundingly, the petition stated that the original first-information report filed in the case had gone missing. It noted that the trial had been pending for more than three decades, “with crucial documents like FIR missing from court and police records.” Nearly half of the accused had already died, it noted. “Trial is at a standstill.” It asked that a special investigation team, headed by a senior officer of “impeccable integrity and independence,” be constituted to open a fresh investigation and expedite the prosecution. It also asked the high court to direct the state government to reconstruct the court record in the missing FIR 136/1987, filed in Meerut’s TP Nagar police station. In August 2021, the station house officer at TP Nagar told the trial court that the FIR had been found and may be taken on record. The petitioners also sought directions to the state to make public the reports of the GL Srivastava commission and the Gyan Prakash committee, which had been constituted to collect the facts of the massacre.

The testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses detail the horror of what transpired in Maliana. It is appalling that there has not been a single conviction for these murders.

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“The indiscriminate firing continued for three to three and a half hours,” Vakeel Ahmed, a tailor who survived gunshot injuries, told me. “After the men were shot dead, the women told the PAC personnel to shoot them as well.” Vakeel wept twice as he recollected the events of that day. “We saw how the PAC allowed the poor Dalit men of a nearby locality to loot a liquor shop before they resorted to the rioting and the killings, along with the PAC men,” he said. “Around twenty-five people died in indiscriminate firing in the beginning, when the firing began in the afternoon between 2 pm and 2.15 pm.” Vakeel recounted that he was shot around 3 pm. “I was injured in my back and waist. I lay down after my hands could not bear my weight to get up.” Mohammad Yaqub, another eyewitness, told me that the PAC personnel started firing around 2 pm, as the rioters kept looting and burning houses. He said an eight-year-old girl was also gunned down. The firing and the looting continued for at least two hours. “We were six men who were apprehended and handcuffed by the police, and an officer came and yelled at his platoon to shoot us,” Yaqub said. “They then started beating us with batons and broke our bones. Both my legs were broken.” He added that a police jeep soon arrived. “A Sikh sub-inspector, whom we knew as Grewal Sahib, alighted from the vehicle and asked us to climb into his jeep.” Yaqub said that the sub-inspector had a heated argument with the PAC personnel. He was carrying a loaded revolver and warned the PAC against any further shooting. “We were offered tea in the midnight hours at the police station, and the military took us to the hospital the next morning,” Yaqub told me. “As we reached the hospital premises, the media persons began interviewing us.” Before he could utter even a sentence, he said, some men in police uniform “pounced” upon the journalists and broke their cameras. “They also slapped me twice, saying I was a loudmouth, and made me sit outside the hospital ward.” He added that the police made him put his thumbprint on some documents. “Later, I came to know that my 26

thumb impressions were taken on the papers that were used as a complaint to lodge an FIR. Now even the copy of our FIR has also gone missing.” Qurban Ali told me that the original FIR did not mention the PAC at all. “This FIR itself is a farce and was made the basis of the trial,” he said. “When the prosecution witnesses began giving their statements as part of the trial in the court of Meerut, the state suddenly halted the proceedings by stating in the court that the true first copy of the FIR had gone missing.” Qurban pointed out that only three witness statements have been recorded so far from over fifty prosecution witnesses, in more than three decades of court proceedings. “It is a long legal battle,” he said. However, Qurban believed that the 2020 petition holds some hope for justice. In an affidavit submitted to the high court, the state government asked for the petition to be dismissed, since the Supreme Court had decided to award compensation for the deaths, in 1990. It added that “the matter is at the stage of trial and some prosecution witnesses have been examined.” The petitioners filed a rejoinder to this, emphasising the role of the PAC, which had been ignored so far. “The issue was presented to the Supreme Court as a riot between communities where the State was not involved,” the rejoinder said. “The present petition deals with the PAC leading the rioters, aiding the rioters in a communal massacre which was certainly not a ‘riot’ but a planned attack by the PAC against the minority community aided by other elements. Therefore, compensation for a massacre willfully done by an arm of the State should be very different from a riot between two communities where the State forces are not partisan.” The petitioners also pointed out that the compensation given so far was grossly inadequate. It stated that the official communications submitted in court to explain the compensation granted are themselves evidence that the state government has “admitted that at least 56 persons, all of the minority community, have been killed during the Maliana killings.” The compensation amount of R40,000 each THE CARAVAN

ck vijayakumar for the caravan

standing still · perspectives

above: Residents of Maliana visit the graves of those killed in the antiMuslim violence. More than three decades on, the families of the deceased still wait for justice.

standing still · perspectives

to the kin of the deceased, they said, “is illusory and insulting to the memories of the deceased. Petitioners have sought for R5 crore each to all the 72 deceased persons and R1 crore each to all the injured persons.” They added that, as per official submissions, only 56 of the 72 aggrieved families had been paid the compensation amount. The rejoinder also challenged the state’s investigation into the killings. “The Counter affidavit provides no

details of the number of prosecution witnesses,” it said. “It does not produce their testimonies. It does not produce the record of proceedings of the Trial Court from 1998 to 2000. Even for the Court proceedings from 2000 onwards the record produced is incomplete. The charge sheet is not produced. The framing of charge order is not produced.” The petition and subsequent proceedings paint a picture of what SEPTEMBER 2022

appears to be a callous investigation on the part of the state and a disregard for the value of Muslim lives. That there has been no justice for the Maliana victims 35 years on is a comment on both our criminal-justice system and the seriousness with which the state machinery seeks to hold to account people responsible for the targetted killing of 72 Muslims. This absence of justice is a dark spot on our constitutional democracy. s 27

perspectives

Setting the Scene How Hindi film adaptations align with the Hindutva project / Film

/ akshat jain The most famous line from the 1992 film A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth,” is aimed at the average American who wants their country to be both secure and free but does not ever wonder about the inherent contradiction. In the climax, Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by a snarling Jack Nicholson, has been cornered in court over a cruel hazing practice that led to the death of a young marine. Defending this method of instilling discipline in marines, Jessup claims that the lawyer questioning him, played by Tom Cruise, cannot handle the reality that the young man’s death, “while tragic, probably saved lives.” Jessup alleges that, deep down, the average American knows that the price of their freedom is a functional military, whose undemocratic character become necessary to maintain power, but they are incapable of accepting this about themselves. Jessup is eventually jailed, leaving viewers with the impression that army leaders like him—who commit or defend such excesses—are a few bad eggs, set right by a few good men. This, as critics pointed out and human-rights organisations reported, is a blatant lie. Jessups are more the norm than the exception. In the Indian adaptation, Shaurya, Jessup’s counterpart, Brigadier Rudra Pratap Singh, played by Kay Kay Menon, also insists that the average Indian cannot handle the truth. Singh, whose unit is shown to have committed human-rights abuses in Kashmir, is revealed to be an Islamophobe who claims that “no Muslim can be trusted, because they are only faithful to their community, which is full of poison.” Therefore, someone—the brigadier himself—must take the responsibility of eliminating this threat to the country. The uncomfortable truth in one case is that an undemocratic military maintains American power. In comparison, 28

the truth in India is that a bigoted military paints all Muslims as suspected anti-nationals in the name of national security. This bias has been borne out in Kashmir, despite every union government’s claim to the contrary. In Shaurya, Singh is punished for his excesses against Kashmiris, a fate that is yet to befall any senior officers of the real Indian Army. As collective endeavours, films have been widely studied as repositories of national culture. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls Hindi cinema “a prism that reflects dominant psychological concerns … of the millions of men and women who constitute a faithful and devoted clientele.” It follows the rich and ancient tradition of myth-making, which provides solutions to real social problems through parables and stories. According to Kakar, Hindi films create “new myths” to offer “solutions for conflicts that are being generated by new political, economic and social forces.” Films, he adds, are a “collective fantasy” that allow the visualisation of the audience’s desires, which are often limited by reality. “The power of fantasy, then, comes to our rescue,” Kakar writes. The fantasy of Hindi cinema reflects ways in which Indians desire to change the world, “remaking the past and inventing a future” to make it more satisfying. Kakar also writes that Hindi films are “a humble representative of the Hindu cultural ideal,” reflecting the fantasies of dominant-caste Hindus. But what is that ideal? How does Hindi cinema feed it? What differentiates “Indian” films from global culture? Indian adaptations of foreign films are a ready resource for this analysis. The filmmaker Rakesh Roshan once argued that, while adapting foreign films, “a frame-to-frame copy will not work at all. One needs to adapt to the taste of our Indian audience.” These changes reveal the specific psychological concerns of Indians and their THE CARAVAN

cultural desires. Spoiler alert: more often than not, these tweaks just echo Brahminical beliefs. Aside from the rejection of democracy, this includes demonising Muslims, erasing caste and subjugating women. Take the recently released Laal Singh Chaddha, the official adaptation of the 1994 Hollywood classic Forrest Gump. The original film is based on a simple-minded white man who inadvertently influences US history by the virtue of his kind-heartedness. The most natural translation for this white man from the rural South might have been a dominant-caste Hindu from Uttar Pradesh or Haryana. But Chaddha, played by Aamir Khan, is a Sikh man from rural Punjab. This choice seems to be motivated only by the fact that, in US pop culture, white boys from the South are stereotyped as slow while, in India, regressive jokes about the intellect of Sikhs abound. Gump’s childlike innocence allows him to subvert the evils of US society, such as racism. He is named after an ancestor who was one of the founders of the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan but, when posted in Vietnam, he befriends Bubba, a Black man from the same state, setting aside the racial tension and history between their communities. Laal Singh Chaddha conveniently removes this progressive underpinning. Bubba could have been translated into a Dalit, so that the two could be shown to bridge the most pervasive structural divide in Indian society. Instead, Bubba becomes a Savarna man from Andhra Pradesh. As with most mainstream Hindi films, caste is completely ignored. The film is replete with other characters that suit Hindu sensibilities. Gump’s love interest, Jenny, an anti-war hippie with a tragic childhood, becomes Rupa D’Souza, an aspiring actress who falls in with the wrong crowd. Jenny’s white father beats and abuses her. By contrast, Rupa is the

courtesy shafilm productions

perspectives

above: The actor Aamir Khan during the making of the 2022 film, Laal Singh Chaddha, an official remake of the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster Forrest Gump. The film conveniently removes the progressive underpinnings of the original and contains garbled Hindu nationalistic coding.

child of an inter-faith marriage. Her father is a Christian who beats her mother. This coding adds little beyond acting as a subliminal PSA against inter-faith marriages and conversions. Similarly, while Jenny dates a communist intellectual who also physically abuses her—reflecting US attitudes towards communism—Rupa’s abuser is a Muslim gangster. In Forrest Gump, the character of Lieutenant Dan is a humane portrayal of a privileged, able-bodied man who is injured in battle and then forced to come to terms with his disability. His Indian counterpart, Mohammed, is a garbled mess of Hindu nationalist coding. He is shown to be the leader of a military outfit from Pakistan or Kashmir—his origins remains ambiguous. Despite being the supposed enemy, Chaddha saves Mohammed’s life during battle. His kindness transforms Mohammed from a brainwashed hater of India to an enlightened fan, who then makes it his life’s aim to educate others like him on “the other side.” The portrayal completely washes away any complexity of his Muslim identity, whether Pakistani or Kashmiri. At the same time, by projecting the benign Chaddha as representative of Indians, it absolves them of their anti-Muslim views.

Hindu anxieties towards Muslims are perhaps why, while adapting the 1995 film The Usual Suspects into Chocolate, in 2005, the Hindutva propagandist director Vivek Agnihotri transformed Keyser Söze, a drug baron from Turkey, into Murtaza Arzai, a terrorist who could be from anywhere in the Muslim world. The plot of The Usual Suspects rests on the believability of Söze’s existence. US political expediencies during its War on Drugs made the international drug baron a plausible mastermind. India’s political biosphere, meanwhile, has always hosted fears about powerful Muslims, who are often projected to have animalistic tendencies and strongholds within terror groups. This intensified in the 1990s. For one, the Bombay blasts occurred in 1993. Another factor was the rise of a militant movement for self-determination in Kashmir, which was attributed entirely to mindlessly violent Islamists. Hindus justified draconian laws such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002, by citing an imminent threat to the nation from Muslim terrorism. Added to this were the events of 11 September 2001: if Muslims could attack the United States, what could they not do? Arzai’s characterisation in Chocolate echoed this fear. Pipi, played by Irrfan Khan, states that any Muslim, even one SEPTEMBER 2022

who rides a donkey, can be an Osama. He then asks his lawyer—and, by extension, the audience—about the connection between Al Qaeda, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He claims that Murtaza Arzai is the link connecting all the world’s terrorist attacks, an assertion that would be considered incredibly inane were it not possible to convince the Indian audience, and the film’s fictional Hindu lawyer, of the existence of an omnipotent, criminal Muslim mastermind. It was easy to suggest that this Muslim super-criminal could be anybody—your neighbour, your friend, even Pipi himself. Indian cultural visions often project extrajudicial authority figures, from dictatorial rulers to avenging heroes, as welcome contraventions of law and order. This is in line with Hindu ideals, where self-styled protectors of dharma are seen to have inherent characteristics that make them capable of not just ruling over society but acting outside its laws. Parallel scenes in the 1972 film The Godfather and its hit Hindi adaptation from 2005, Sarkar, fit this idea. The sons of the titular gangsters, Michael Corleone and Shankar Nagre, are confronted by their respective girlfriends. When Kay tells Michael that she did not expect him to become like his father, Michael defends Vito Corleone. “My father’s no different than any other powerful man,” he says, “any man who is responsible for other people. Like a senator or a president.” His father kills in order to maintain his power, he says, no different from a president who wages war. (The film was released at the height of the Vietnam War, making this comparison a significant critique of the powers of the day.) Kay does not seem convinced, so Michael tells her the Corleone family is going to be completely legitimate in five years. He then proceeds to spend the rest of his life trying to make it so. Even as they break the law, the Corleones recognise democracy and the rule of law as the only legitimate exercise of power, flawed as their conception of these may be. By contrast, in Sarkar, Shankar unequivocally asserts that his father, Subhash, is a cut above other powerful 29

setting the scene · perspectives people because he uses unlawful means for the common good. Shankar tells his girlfriend, Pooja, whose father is a businessman, “Your dad stays in the system and works for himself; my dad stays outside the system and works for others.” Kakar writes that, in the Hindu cultural ideal, “Neither the State, nor the majority of the people, nor the government, is sovereign. The force that is sovereign above them all is dharma.” Subhash Nagre is the embodiment of this, a protector of the masses who rejects the system of law and order and draws power by creating a parallel one. Pooja asks Shankar whether he thinks his father is above the law. “My dad does not think so, but the people he works to help certainly think that about him,” Shankar replies. Subhash’s godlike status is signalled by

The fantasy of Hinduism is a world in which different people are treated differently, where the powerful few—usually upper-caste Hindu men— rule over the rest. By feeding a Hindu cultural ideal, Hindi cinema has long aided this project.

ww chants of “Govinda”—another name for the Hindu deity Krishna—whenever he appears on screen. The upper-caste Nagre family does not harbour any dreams of going legitimate. Subhash’s “dharmic” qualities mean that it does not need to bother. The 1999 cult classic Fight Club is about those men who feel cheated by civilisation and capitalism. The promise of the American Dream was that one could achieve material success by working hard. Its failure meant that people “felt stuck in jobs they don’t need,” since their conditions were not going to improve no matter how hard they worked. The film represented these people, who were driven to mayhem because they saw no future for themselves in the society they were given. 30

This did not translate in the Hindi adaptation, which erases its anarchist themes. Hindus accept their svadharma, or social duty, to do the work assigned by their caste location, which is allotted on the basis of karma. Since Hinduism never promised otherwise, people do not hold society’s oppressive structure responsible for their misery. This is why the protagonists in the 2006 Hindi film, Fight Club: Members Only, show no leanings towards revolt, even though most of them are employed in service sector jobs—two bartenders, one gym trainer, and a bouncer—with no long-term prospects. Instead, they turn towards earning money to make the best of their situation. Even contemporary remakes that are otherwise projected as progressive espouse conservative, Hindu ideas. In the 1998 German experimental thriller Run Lola Run, the protagonist and her partner try to save their lives after a criminal caper goes awry. Lola is a principal actor of the drama, and is as responsible as her lover, Manni, for the adverse situation they find themselves in. The film shows different iterations of the same twenty minutes, with minute changes. In the first two runs, Lola goes to her father for help but fails to achieve her desired outcomes. Only in the third run, when she is unable to go to him, is she able to save Manni. Lola’s successful run involves the rejection of the male authority in her life and elevates her individual choice. In its official remake Looop Lapeta, released earlier this year, Savi, the protagonist, played by Taapsee Pannu, is unaware of her boyfriend Satya’s criminal undertaking but still has to clean up his mess. Savi and Satya are shown as modern young adults living in Goa who spout liberal ideas, consume drugs and live together without being married. Yet, Savi is eventually cast as the ideal wife who is merely tasked with unquestioningly helping her male partner make it out alive from a criminal escapade. Savi and Satya are based on the Hindu mythological story of Savitri and Satyavan. Savitri is a devoted wife who uses her wit to transcend the earthly realm and save her husband Satyavan from an untimely death. The story THE CARAVAN

is retold in the film and borne out in the plot. Unlike Lola, Savi goes to her father in all three loops. It is only in the final loop, when, instead of rejecting her father’s authority, she apologises and symbolically receives his blessings for her relationship, that she is able to save Satya’s life. Lacking the concept of a universal morality, morality for Hindus is indelibly linked to the identity of the person in question. Any challenge to upper-caste Hindu identity is considered immoral. Nagre is considered a good man when he uses violence to protect his Hindu followers in Sarkar, but Kashmiri leaders are branded as evil for doing the same. Treating all Muslims as suspected terrorists is deemed necessary for the unity of the Hindu nation in Shaurya—an approach that has become par for the course in the Indian state in recent years—but Ambedkarites who classify all Hindus as suspected casteists are accused of dividing the nation. This morality is deeply rooted in Hindu beliefs such as svabhava—the supposed intrinsic quality of persons. In Oldboy (2003) and Memento (2000), the revenge-seeking protagonists are complex characters who are irrevocably transformed by their deeds, despite their well-intentioned beginnings. But their upper-caste Hindu counterparts in Zinda (2006) and Ghajini (2005) are easily assured of their place as “good” men, who can return to their respectable lives as soon as their violent revenge-taking is complete. Instead of upsetting the balance of a lawful society, revenge becomes a vehicle to restore the balance of the dharmic world. The fantasy of Hinduism is a world in which different people are treated differently, where the powerful few— usually upper-caste Hindu men—rule over the rest. In the Hindu Rashtra, this is not only possible but regularised as state policy. By feeding a Hindu cultural ideal, Hindi cinema has long aided this project. In that sense, adaptations of foreign films are no different culturally from original Hindi cinema. But, when compared to their international counterparts, they reveal the Brahminical project that is Bollywood. s

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COVER STORY / LAW HARTOSH SINGH BAL

How the SIT report gave the Modi government a free pass on the 2002 Gujarat violence

ami vitale / getty images

INFIRM LOGIC

infirm logic · essay previous spread: Police stand near a burning Muslimowned shop on 1 March 2002 in Ahmedabad. opposite page: Protestors hold placards demanding the release of activist Teesta Setalvad. Along with RB Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt, she has been named in an FIR for forgery and fabricating facts relating to the 2002 Gujarat violence.

in june this year, the Supreme Court dismissed charges of criminal conspiracy against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others in relation to the 2002 Gujarat violence. Immediately after the judgment, the Gujarat police arrested the activist Teesta Setalvad and RB Sreekumar, a former director general of the state police. Along with the former police officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who is already in jail, Setalvad and Sreekumar were accused in a first-information report, filed by a police official, of forgery and fabricating evidence, among other things, to implicate “innocent” people. On 27 February 2002, the Sabarmati Express carrying Hindu karsevaks returning from Ayodhya, caught fire near the Godhra railway station. Gujarat witnessed intense communal violence for three days, which spilled over into the following months. Mobs killed over a thousand people, most of them Muslims. Many more people were injured, and over a hundred and fifty thousand people were displaced. Modi, who was the state’s chief minister at the time, faced severe condemnation both at home and internationally for his government’s inaction to stem the violence. The anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 remains a bloody stain on Modi’s career, despite his meteoric rise to political power. Zakia Jafri, whose husband, the former Congress member of parliament Ehsan Jafri, was brutally murdered by a mob, filed a petition in 2006 against Modi and 63 others. The Supreme Court set up a special investigation team in 2008. The SIT submitted its closure report in 2012, rejecting criminal charges against Modi and the others for lack of “prosecutable evidence.” Apart from a protest petition, which is more than five hundred pages long, that she filed in 2013, Jafri filed another plea to the Supreme Court, in 2018, against its acceptance of the SIT report. The recent judgment, dismissing Jafri’s 2018 petition, has relied heavily on the investigations carried out by the SIT. The court expressed appreciation for the SIT’s “indefatigable work” and declared “that no fault can be found with the approach of the SIT.” It stated that the final SIT report, “discarding the allegations regarding larger criminal conspiracy (at the highest level),” was “backed by firm logic, expositing analytical mind and dealing with all aspects objectively.” While it is the judges’ prerogative to choose to rely on the SIT report in reaching their conclusion,

Time and again, the SIT undercuts the evidence it has marshalled, often reaching conclusions that defy logic. 34

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no court judgment can put the SIT report itself beyond public scrutiny. A detailed study of the report makes it difficult to agree with the claim that there was no fault in the SIT’s approach or that the report was indeed guided by objectivity or “firm logic.” To begin with, even if the court, relying on the SIT report, has found no evidence of “a larger criminal conspiracy,” this is not the equivalent of absolving the Modi government for its conduct during the pogrom. The very fact that communal violence took place over a prolonged period is suggestive of command failure at the highest levels. This conclusion is further strengthened by the evidence gathered in the SIT report itself, which raises serious question about the actions and the intent of the Gujarat government during this period. For instance, a look at the transfer of a number of officials who did their duty during the violence suggests a pattern. Good officers who contained the riots were posted out, while ineffective officers continued to remain in place. But the SIT chooses to dismiss this by claiming transfers are the prerogative of the government. This reasoning makes little sense in a case where the government itself is the accused. A close reading of the report also does not support the idea that the policing failure was merely a case of the Gujarat government being overwhelmed by the suddenness and the extent of the violence. It suggests that, during the first two months, Muslims were so disproportionately targeted in police firing that this cannot be explained as mere chance. The Bharatiya Janata Party government selectively chose to favour the appointment of public prosecutors from its allied organisation, the Vishva Hindu Parishad, even in cases where those accused belonged to the Sangh Parivar. During this period, Modi gave at least one interview that sought to explain the violence as a reaction and used dogwhistles about Muslims in his public speeches. The SIT glossed over these statements by repeating a meaningless clarification by Modi. Further, the evidence gathered by the SIT in the immediate aftermath of the Godhra fire, regarding the handling of the dead bodies, suggests undue interference of the VHP in violation of all norms and even provides evidence of a funeral procession of 12 bodies during the day in Ahmedabad. But the SIT blames the handover of bodies to the VHP on a junior official and does not even discuss the procession. Finally, the SIT report itself provides numerous instances where observations and allegations made by Sreekumar hold up. The SIT uses the fact that he was overlooked for a promotion to cast

ashish vaishnav / sopa images / getty images

infirm logic · essay

doubt on his credentials but omits to note that he was overlooked only after it became clear he was not willing to toe the government’s line on the 2002 violence. The petitioner, then, had good reason to come to court and ask the judicial system to look into her allegations. But the Supreme Court judgment has instead chosen to come down hard on “disgruntled officials of the State of Gujarat alongwith others,” noting their “audacity to question the integrity of every functionary involved” and accusing them of keeping “the pot boiling, obviously, for ulterior design.” The judgment makes a forceful recommendation: “As a matter of fact, all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law.” This observance has served as the basis for the FIR filed by the Gujarat police following which Sreekumar and Setalvad were arrested. But, surely, if the petitioners have good reasons for

challenging and questioning the conduct of the government during the 2002 violence, it is difficult to agree with the court’s conclusions that there is an “ulterior design” at play. Even when we set aside those documents that the SIT claims are forged and rely only on the evidence it has collected, there is enough reason to raise serious questions about the conduct of the Modi government in 2002. It also raises questions about the investigation’s methodology, which time and again undercuts the evidence the SIT has marshalled, often reaching conclusions that defy logic. Of the 32 allegations the SIT was tasked to investigate, I examine its handling of six that stand out as the most egregious. there are at least two instances in which the SIT has examined statements about the 2002 violence made by Narendra Modi when he was chief minister. In both cases, it has taken Modi’s obfuscations at face value. The proceSEPTEMBER 2022

dure followed by the SIT in this case flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s judgment that it dealt with “all aspects objectively.” The first case involves an interview given by Modi to Zee News’s Sudhir Chaudhary, on 1 March 2002. According to the SIT, “as per his recollection,” Chaudhary questioned Modi about the Gulburg Society massacre, in which Ehsan Jafri was killed, along with many others. Chaudhary told the SIT that Modi “replied that the mob had reacted on account of private firing” by Jafri. “After refreshing his memory from the Editor’s Guild report, Shri Sudhir Chaudhary has stated that the Chief Minister was of the view that he neither wanted action nor reaction,” the report states. The document carries Chaudhary’s recollection of Modi’s answer about the widespread violence post Godhra: “Godhra mein jo parson hua, jahan par chalees mahilaon aur bachchon ko zinda jala diya is mein desh mein aur videsh 35

infirm logic · essay denied making that statement but he had said as much, and worse, in his Zee interview. Not only had he termed the brutal violence in Gujarat a “reaction,” he had also gone on to ascribe “criminal tendencies” to a group of people. This was hardly language that could be countenanced from a chief minister at a time when his own administration was unable to control the violence in the state. The SIT later examined Modi over this interview. According to its report, Modi “stated that those who have read the history of Gujarat would definitely be aware that communal violence in Gujarat has a long history and the State had witnessed serious incidents of such communal violence.” Since it

amit dave / reuters

mein sadma pahunchna swabhavik tha. Godhra ke is ilake ki criminal tendencies rahin hain. In logon ne pehle mahila teachers ka khoon kiya. Aur ab yeh jaghanya aparadh kiya hai jiski pratikriya ho rahi hai”—It is natural that what happened the day before yesterday in Godhra, where forty women and children were burnt alive, has shocked the country and the world. The people in that part of Godhra have had criminal tendencies. Earlier, these people had murdered women teachers. And now they have done this terrible crime, for which a reaction is underway. Modi was also asked by the SIT about a statement he had given to the Times of India describing what had happened in Gujarat as “action-reaction.” Modi

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had been eight years since the interview, Modi claimed that “he did not recollect the exact words, but he had always appealed only and only for peace.” He added “that he had tried to appeal to the people to shun violence in straight and simple language. He had also stated that if his words cited in this question are considered in the correct perspective, then it would be evident that there is a very earnest appeal for people refraining from any kind of violence. He had denied all the allegations against him in this regard.” None of what Modi says here tallies with the statement he had made to Zee, a statement that even Chaudhary did not deny Modi made. The SIT made no attempts to examine Modi’s

infirm logic · essay clarification, repeated it verbatim and then gave him a clean chit. As for the actual interview, which would have settled the matter once and for all, the SIT report notes that “a requisition was sent” to Zee for a copy of the interview. “Despite two reminders and a notice” under Section 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which empowers the police to demand the handover of documents pertinent to an investigation, “the CD has not been made available,” the report says. Once again, the SIT leaves this as is, with no mention of whether Zee replied to the notice and no explanation of what, if any, action was initiated against the channel for noncompliance. Another allegation concerns a speech Modi made at Becharaji, a temple town in Mehsana district, on 9 September 2002. “When we brought water in the month of Shravan, you feel bad,” Modi said. “When we spend money for the development

To use a single data point as a counter to a data pattern collected over a longer period of time is an error that would not be allowed in any basic class of statistics. Simply put, the data leads to no other conclusion than the selective targeting of Muslims in police firing. of Bahucharaji also, you feel bad. What brother, should we run relief camps? Should I start children producing centers there? We want to achieve progress by pursuing the policy of family planning with determination. We are 5 and our 25!!! On whose name such a development is pursued? Can’t Gujarat implement family planning? Whose inhibitions are coming in our way? Which religious sect is coming in the way? Why money is not reaching to the poor? If some people go on producing children, the children will do cycle-puncture repair only?” The allusions to relief camps as child-producing centres and opposition to family planning are Islamophobic dogwhistles that are so loud that no one can escape their implications. Yet the SIT goes on to conclude that Modi had “explained that the speech did not refer to any particular community or religion.” Modi told the SIT that “this was a political speech in which he has pointed out the increasing population of India and had remarked that ‘can’t Gujarat imple-

ment family planning?’ Shri Narendra Modi has claimed that his speech was distorted by some interested elements who had misinterpreted the same to suit their designs. He has also stated there were no riots or tension after his election speech. No criminality has come on record in respect of this aspect of allegation.” The SIT did exactly what it had done in case of the Zee interview: it allowed Modi to evade responsibility by denying the straightforward implications of the speech he had made. This seems like a procedure that was designed not to get at the truth but to obfuscate it.

opposite page: Narendra Modi after casting his vote in Ahmedabad on 12 December 2002, ten months after the anti-Muslim pogrom. Modi returned to power as chief minister.

“the fact that victims of riots and police firings were predominantly of the Muslim community, will establish that the rioters, the administration, cohorts of the ruling party (BJP) were moving in collaboration for achieving the satanic objectives of the CM,” the SIT report states as one of the allegations. It goes on to refer to statistics provided by RB Sreekumar to the Navavati–Shah commission of inquiry that followed the pogrom. The numbers listed by Sreekumar to back his allegation, in a report submitted to the government on 24 April 2002, make for stark reading: the loss of life and property was heavily weighed against Muslims inasmuch as 636 Muslims were killed (including 91 killed in police firing) as against 181 Hindus, (76 killed in police firing). 329 Muslims injured as against 74 Hindus and loss of property of Muslims came to R600 crores as against 40 crores to Hindus. It was also mentioned that in Ahmedabad City 278 Muslims were killed in the riots (including 57 killed in police firing) as against 91 Hindus (Including 30 persons killed in police action) Further, the figure amongst Muslims injured in Ahmedabad was 408 as against 329 Hindu victims of incidents of stabbing and arson. The Ahmedabad police commissioner at the time, PC Pande, told the SIT that, “during the riots, it is difficult for the police to identify as to whether any individual belongs to a particular community.” Pande attempted to prove that there was no overt discrimination by pointing to one date: 28 February 2002. On this day, he said, the 17 people killed in police firing included 11 Hindus and six Muslims. “He has also stated,” the SIT adds, “that in the succeeding days, the retaliation started from the Muslim side also and therefore, wherever force was used by the police casualties resulted on both ‘the sides.’” Pande also told the SIT that 442 people—113 Hindus and 329 Muslims—died between 28 February and 30 April. “These figures included over SEPTEMBER 2022

37

100 dead in police firing and over 33 in private firing,” the report notes. “He has further stated that during this period 780 criminal cases were registered and 2862 persons arrested of whom 1755 were Hindus.” From this Pande concluded, “it is incorrect to say that the administration and police were moving in collaboration with the rioters and were targeting the persons from the minority community with an intention to achieve the alleged objective of the CM.” This is subterfuge. You cannot use a single day’s statistics to counter a pattern that is available in data collected over a period of time extending into months. It is worth examining what Pande’s words do suggest. The overall figures for Ahmedabad given by Pande and Sreekumar are close approximates, given that Pande’s figures include the additional period of 24–30 April 2002. 38

Interestingly, Pande’s figures do not give the overall breakup of the Muslim and Hindu dead due to police firing, choosing to conduct that analysis only for a single day. If 11 Hindus and six Muslims were killed in police firing on the first day, then it suggests—if we take Sreekumar’s breakup of 30 Hindus and 57 Muslims for Ahmedabad—that at least 51 Muslims and 19 Hindus were killed in police firing in Ahmedabad between 1 March and 24 April. Again, if we go by Pande’s words and assume the police showed no discrimination, since they could not identify members of any particular community, then these numbers suggest Muslim mobs outnumbered Hindus by a ratio of five to two. Even though Pande has claimed that more Muslims came out on the streets on subsequent days, this ratio is unTHE CARAVAN

tenable. It is difficult to imagine how the SIT could take this at face value if it were dispassionately examining the evidence. We do not even have to look at the demographics of Ahmedabad or the testimony of eyewitnesses to challenge this claim. Given this ratio on the streets, it is impossible that, once we leave aside those killed by police firing and once again consider Sreekumar’s figures, the clashes resulted in 221 Muslims being killed as against 61 Hindus, or that 408 Muslims were injured against 329 Hindus in incidents of stabbing and arson. When we examine Sreekumar’s numbers for the entire state, the figures suggest that, setting aside deaths caused by police firing, 545 Muslims and 105 Hindus were killed in the communal violence. This indicates that Hindu mobs far outnumbered Muslim ones. Given this, it is impossible to com-

sebastian d’souza / afp / getty images

infirm logic · essay

infirm logic · essay pute how 91 Muslims were killed in police firing as against only 76 Hindus, if the police was not actively choosing its targets. To use a single data point as a counter to a data pattern collected over a longer period of time is an error that would not be allowed in any basic class of statistics. Simply put, the data leads to no other conclusion than the selective targeting of Muslims in police firing. This fact is further bolstered by a damning disclosure made by a superintendent of police about Gordhan Zadafia, Modi’s junior home minister at the time, who was keeping a tab on the number of Hindu and Muslim deaths. many police officials were transferred from field postings immediately after they had taken effective action to stop the violence in the areas under their jurisdiction. Among the officials was Rahul Sharma, Bhavnagar’s superintendent of police. This is the situation Sharma described to the SIT: Bhavnagar police had succeeded in controlling the communal riots by the evening of 02-032002. Shri Rahul Sharma has stated that Shri Gordhan Zadafia spoke to him over phone on 16-03-2002 and informed him that he had done a good job in controlling the communal riots but the ratio of deaths, as a result of police firing in the riots was not proper, i.e., more number of deaths of Hindus than Muslims. Shri Rahul Sharma has also slated that on 23-03-2002 a mosque was attacked by a riotous mob following which 21 persons were arrested and that he was pressurised by the local leaders to release them, to which he did not agree. As a result, of which he had difference of opinion with the Collector, IGP, Junagadh Range and DGP. Shri Rahul Sharma was transferred as DCP, Control Room, Ahmedabad City and he was relieved from the charge of post of SP, Bhavnagar from 26-032002. Here is a serving police officer who goes on record to say that Zadafia was actually keeping tabs on the ratio of Muslim and Hindu deaths in police firing and that he was explicit about how the ratio was not skewing as intended—there were “more number of deaths of Hindus than Muslims.” This fact has a bearing on one of the key allegations the SIT had to consider: the question of police bias against Muslims. The SIT report chooses not to even engage with the claim. Instead, it simply says: “However, Shri Rahul Sharma has stated that he would not be able to comment on the circumstances that led to his transfer/posting from Bhavnagar to Ahmedabad City as transfer posting is the prerogative of the Government.”

The word “however” is itself indicative of the problem with how the SIT makes its case. Sharma was a serving police officer who could in no way impute motives to a government. What he could do was describe the circumstances that led to his transfer. The SIT asked him a question that he could not possibly answer in good faith and used that answer to summarily dismiss his testimony. Far from displaying “firm logic” or “analytical mind,” here too the SIT’s method suggests the suppression of an uncomfortable truth. This becomes more glaring when we consider the testimony of Vivek Srivastava, another police officer. Srivastava told the SIT about an incident at a dargah outside Nakhatrana, a town in Kutch district. A Muslim family had been attacked by “sharp edged weapons.” In the subsequent investigations, a commandant of the home guard, who was affiliated to the BJP, was arrested. Srivastava told the SIT that “he got a few phone calls from

opposite page: A Hindu mob waving swords at Muslims on 1 March 2002 in Ahmedabad.

A serving police officer went on record to say that Modi’s junior home minister was actually keeping tabs on the ratio of the number of Muslim and Hindu deaths in police firing, and that he was explicit about how the ratio was not skewing as intended. the office of Home Minister and Chief Minister asking him about the details of the case and also as to whether there was adequate evidence against all the accused to which he confirmed that sufficient evidence was available against all the accused persons for effecting their arrest.” Towards the end of March 2002, he was transferred to a different post. “However, Shri Vivek Srivastava was unwilling to comment upon the reasons, as according to him, transfers were the prerogative of the Govt,” the SIT report states. The SIT made no attempt to examine why the chief minister’s office and the home minister’s office were so interested in this case. Was it common for these offices to be calling about the evidence in every serious case relating to the violence? Another testimony, by the police officer Satish Chandra Verma, bears witness to the same approach. Between 2003 and 2005, when Verma was posted as deputy inspector general at the Kutch–Bhuj headquarters, a criminal case registered in the Radhanpur police station was brought to his notice. In the communal violence that ensued SEPTEMBER 2022

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infirm logic · essay opposite page: The SIT report states that the bodies of many of the people who were killed in Godhra were handed over to Jaydeep Patel, the general secretary of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. One of the allegations was that the bodies were brought to Ahmedabad with a view of parading them.

after the Godhra incident, two Muslims had been reportedly killed in police firing. Shankar Chaudhary was the BJP legislator representing Radhanpur at the time. Verma told the SIT that “the death of these two Muslims by police firing was not substantiated by available evidence and instead evidence was available against private individuals including Shri Shankar Chaudhary, MLA for committing acts, which led to the death of these persons.” He added that he ordered Chaudhary’s arrest and was later transferred to Junagadh, as the principal of a police training institute. “However, Shri Verma has stated that he can not say that this transfer was a consequence of this aforesaid order,” the SIT notes. “He has also stated that he cannot call the post of Principal of a training institution unimportant.” Based on these accounts, the SIT concludes that, even though the statements of Sharma, Srivastava, Verma and others “would go to show that though their transfers were immediately after certain events in their jurisdiction,” their admission that postings and transfers are the prerogative of the government meant that “the same cannot be linked to certain events that took place immediately before their transfers.” This is a non sequitur. The officers are duty-bound not to comment on the government’s intention. This can by no means lead to the conclusion that the transfers cannot be linked to certain events that took place immediately before them. In fact, the nature of statements where the officers mention specific incidents of the government being concerned about their actions is enough to substantiate the allegation the SIT was examining, not to dismiss it. another allegation the SIT was tasked to investigate had to do with advocates associated with the Sangh Parivar being appointed as public prosecutors in cases pertaining to the communal violence. This allegation is of particular interest given that the SIT was investigating the possibility of a criminal conspiracy by those in power. The SIT report lays out the procedure for the appointment of public prosecutors. Enquiries revealed that the procedure for the appointment of a Public’ Prosecutor in a town is that the vacancy is notified by the Collector & District Magistrate in the local news papers. In response to the advertisement a number of eligible candidates are interviewed by a Board comprising Principal Sessions Judge and District Magistrate. Thereafter, a panel of three or four advocates selected by the Board is forwarded to the Govt. for the appointment of the Public Prosecutor. The Govt. exercises its own discretion, select and notify one of the empanelled

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candidates as a Public Prosecutor for a period of three years. It may thus be seen though the selection procedure is transparent yet the Govt. has got the discretion to appoint a particular lawyer out of the panel of 3-4 advocates forwarded to them. After sifting through the backgrounds of the public prosecutors appointed through this process, the SIT concludes that, although it appeared that political affiliation had held weight in the selections, no specific allegations of the prosecutors “showing favour” to the accused, either during bail hearings or trials, had come to light. However, it is difficult to point to a specific favour in such a situation. It makes more sense to consider the overall impact on cases when there is a possible conflict of interest in the work of the prosecutors. Equally important is the fact that the SIT has been forced to admit there was intent in the government to favour those with a background in the VHP or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Having established this general intent, the SIT should have ensured that every act of the government at this time judged against this fact. Given this, it becomes even more difficult to see how the SIT could have concluded there was no wrongdoing in the transfer of certain police officials. As we have seen above, in each case there was specific reason for a government inclined to

The SIT has been forced to admit there was intent in the government to favour those with a background in the VHP or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. favour the RSS and VHP to act against them. Once it has been established that the intent of the government is questionable, it is impossible to dismiss the charge simply by saying transfers are the prerogative of a government. the transport of the godhra dead to Ahmedabad is another instance in which the Gujarat government was accused of obscuring its motivations. This allegation involved two charges: that the bodies of the Godhra dead had been handed over to the VHP and that they were subsequently brought to Ahmedabad with a view to parade them. These are the facts collated by the SIT. On 27 February 2002, Jaydeep Patel, the VHP’s state general secretary, arrived at Godhra at 12.48 pm.

infirm logic · essay

sam panthaky / afp photo / getty images

has filed an affidavit before Nanavati Commission of Inquiry to this effect on 05-09-2009.

That evening, between 8.03 and 9.15 pm, he remained in constant touch through phone calls with Zadafia. He also received calls from RJ Savani, the deputy commissioner of police, throughout the day. “The aforesaid call detail records establish that Shri Jaydeep Patel remained at Godhra till about 2358 hrs on 27-02-2002,” the report states. It establishes that the bodies were then officially handed over to Patel—the executive magistrate of Godhra, ML Nalvaya, “issued a letter addressed to Dr. Jaydeep Patel of VHP, in which he had mentioned that 54 dead bodies were being sent through five trucks.”

The report further elaborates: One Shri Hasmukh T. Patel of Vishwa Hindu Parishad had acknowledged the dead bodies. It may be mentioned here that the handing over of the dead bodies to their legal heirs/ guardians was the duty of the railway police, who had registered a case in connection with this incident. Shri M. L. Nalvaya has stated that these dead bodies were handed over officially to Shri Jaydeep Patel and Shri Hasmukh T. Patel of VHP as per the instruction given by Smt. Jayanti S. Ravi, DM and Late B. M. Damor, ADM, Godhra. Shri M. L. Nalvaya SEPTEMBER 2022

This testimony implicating the district magistrate is undercut by the following sentence: “However Smt. Jayanti Ravi has stated that no such instructions were given to Shri Nalvaya to hand over the dead bodies to Shri Jaydeep Patel or Shri Hasmukh T. Patel of VHP and that Shri Jaydeep Patel was merely to accompany the dead bodies to Ahmedabad.” Anyone who knows the Indian bureaucracy will find it difficult to believe that on a day when national attention was focused on Godhra, with the chief minister himself present and overseeing arrangements, an executive magistrate would act on his own. Even more astounding is that he should put this down on paper, all the while defying the instructions of the district magistrate. Further, Nalvaya’s testimony directly indicts Ravi and suggests that there is evidence that the bodies were formally handed over to the VHP. For the SIT to accept Ravi’s denial of giving Nalvaya instructions as final—when she is the one being indicted—cannot be easily reconciled with claims to logic and objectivity. Ravi also denied to the SIT that the decision to transport the dead to Ahmedabad by road was taken against her wishes, which was also one of the allegations. The SIT report says that, “though a letter had been addressed by Shri M.L. Nalvaya in the name of Shri Jaydeep Patel of VHP and the dead bodies were acknowledged by Shri Hasmukh T. Patel of VHP, yet the dead bodies were escorted by the police upto Sola Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad situated on the outskirts of Ahmedabad City.” There, it adds, Patel “handed over the letter to the hospital authorities and the local police as well as the hospital authorities took charge of the dead bodies.” The SIT argues that a police escort was provided to the convoy carrying the bodies after they were handed over to the VHP. It uses this technicality to suggest that no handover to the VHP actually took place and that it was Patel who happened to be accompanying the police, not the other way round. Again, 41

infirm logic · essay opposite page: Crowds throng the funeral procession of the Godhra dead in Ahmedabad on 28 February 2002.

this has to be read against the fact that the intent of the government to please and oblige the VHP, even when it went against the interests of impartiality and justice, has already been established by the SIT. The SIT concludes: the allegation that CM’s decision to bring the dead bodies of those killed in Godhra carnage to Ahmedabad was with a view to parade them in the City is not established. Further, the allegation that the dead bodies were handed over to Shri Jaydeep Patel, is also not established, inasmuch as he only accompanied the dead bodies from Godhra to Ahmedabad, and that the custody of the dead bodies remained with the police escort and thereafter with the Sola Civil Hospital Authorities, Administrative and Police authorities. The allegation that the dead bodies were transported to Ahmedabad against the wishes of Smt. Jayanti Ravi is proved to be incorrect. Shri M.L. Nalvaya Mamalatdar had acted in an irresponsible manner by issuing a letter in the name Shri Jaydeep Patel in token of having handed over the dead bodies, which were case property, is being dealt with departmentally for this lapse. Even as all the evidence clearly shows the bodies were indeed handed over to Jaydeep Patel, the SIT also cites evidence about a procession of bodies through Ahmedabad on 28 February. The SIT report states that “twelve (12) charred dead bodies of Godhra carnage were brought to Ramol, Ahmedabad City from Sola Civil Hospital.” All of them were from the area, and officials made sure that the bodies were carried in vehicles and not on foot, “as the same would have escalated the tension,” the report says. The deputy commissioner of police, RJ Savani, “succeeded in persuading the relatives and the wellwishers of the deceased to take each body in a vehicle and the funeral procession was guarded by the police up to Hatkeshwar cremation ground, about 4 kms away from Ramol-Khokhra. The funeral was over by about 1400 hrs. and the crowd which had gathered on the highway dispersed thereafter.” What this seems to suggest is that, sometime in the late morning or afternoon that day, a procession of 12 vehicles, each carrying a body, proceeded four kilometres through the streets of Ahmedabad while guarded by the police. Since the SIT makes no mention of this procession apart from in this paragraph, we are left in no position to decide what the impact of this procession was, what the nature of the vehicles carrying the bodies was and whether this amounted to a parade of the bodies.

42

THE CARAVAN

rb sreekumar is a key figure through much of the SIT report, and a great deal of it is devoted to examining the allegations that have surfaced due to official notes written by him while he was heading the state intelligence bureau and affidavits submitted by him before the Nanavati–Shah commission. In effect, the SIT report is, in part, a response to all the evidence that has been put forth by Sreekumar. Sreekumar told the SIT that, between 9 April and 18 September 2002, he had sent to the government and the director general of police several reports that implicated supporters of the Sangh Parivar, demonstrated the anti-Muslim bias of government officials and showed “the general subversion of the Criminal Justice System.” One of these reports, titled “Current Communal Scenario in Ahmedabad City,” speaks of how “of late the minority community was found to be taking an increasingly belligerent postures as they felt themselves, as a section of population left at the total mercy of the radical communal elements of Bajrang Dal and VHP,” the SIT notes. After listing the statistics on the number of Muslims and Hindus killed in the violence, the report goes on to elaborate what Sreekumar told

Looking at the evidence the SIT has gathered, we get a picture that strongly endorses Sreekumar’s version of a police force in collapse, biased against Muslims and ineffective in stopping the violence. the government. This makes for damning reading about the actions of leaders of the VHP and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal. The SIT does not mention that the BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal are allied organisations within the Sangh Parivar or that, in effect, Sreekumar, the serving head of the state intelligence wing, was indicting the government. Thus, it was a given that the government would begin taking a hostile stance towards his actions in the aftermath of the violence. The report notes: Shri Sreekumar had further observed that the Muslim Communities being the major victims of the riots had developed a major grudge against the Criminal Justice System, which they felt was highly biased against them. In addition, it was mentioned that the Muslims alleged that the po-

pti

infirm logic · essay

lice officers were not fair in recording the FIRs lodged by them inasmuch as they had used pressure tactics to dissuade the complainants from giving the complaints, reduced ingredients of an offence and sometimes the police officers themselves became the complainant and also omitted the names of specific accused persons with a view to favour them. Further, many different acts of crime pertaining to different transactions were clubbed together to register a single FIR … Shri Sreekumar had further mentioned that the majority of Muslims complained that the police officers avoided the arrest of Hindu leaders, though they had been named in the FIR.

Sreekumar’s report also suggested a number of concrete measures to deal with the issues he had raised. But Ashok Narayan, the additional chief secretary for home affairs at the time, told the SIT that the “letter contained general observations and concrete details were missing.” Narayan then discussed the matter with Sreekumar and asked him to “take action at his level as far as possible.” The report states that Narayan “does not recollect having shown or put up this letter to the Chief Minister.” K Chakravarthi, the director general of police, told the SIT that most of points raised by Sreekumar had been “dealt with by him in the months of SEPTEMBER 2022

March and April 2002.” He said that the Ahmedabad police commissioner, PC Pande, had earlier sent a report about “the undesirable activities of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal in indulging in extortion of money and publishing/distributing pamphlets containing the elements of communal instigation,” and that he had shared this report with Narayan, “who said that he would bring it to the notice of the Govt.” In subsequent reports, Sreekumar repeated some of these points and suggested that the annual Rath Yatra in Ahmedabad should not be taken out in July 2002. The government disagreed. By 20 August 2008, Sreekumar had 43

infirm logic · essay

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written another letter stating that “the communal tension continued and the communal gap between Hindus and Muslims had widened to an unprecedented degree.” Narayan responded to this letter on behalf of the government, stating that Sreekumar’s assessment was “not in tune with the feedback received from other agencies like Revenue and District Officials.” The SIT report notes that the file containing these letters could not be traced. “However, keeping in view the versions of Shri Ashok Narayan and Shri K.Chakravarthi, the facts about RathYatra and discussions that took place between ACS(Home) as well as reply sent to Shri R.B. Sreekumar … it cannot be said that no action had been taken on (the) letters.” The report does not make any mention of the disappearance of the file, which would actually have contained notings, details of who saw the letters and the action taken in this regard. Neither does it mention what action was taken against the VHP and Bajrang Dal. In the convenient absence of the file, we only have the word of Narayan and Chakravarthi for the actions that followed the first letter. Given that the letter indicted the police force for the manner in which the law-and-order machinery was biased against Muslims, in effect, the testimonies of those accountable—the senior-most bureaucrat in the home ministry and the

44

chief of the state police—are then used to dismiss its contents. These same officers are invoked while dealing with another allegation based on what Sreekumar revealed, which is based in part on the same report that is no longer available on file. The state intelligence bureau had recommended that certain officers should be transferred. In a note to Narayan and Chakravarthi on 24 April, soon after he took over as the additional director general for intelligence, Sreekumar suggested “the replacement of the present incumbents from executive posts at the cutting edge level from those cities and districts, where police either remained inactive during the riots or played a collaborative role with the rioters.” But, according to Sreekumar’s affidavit to the Nanavati commission, the report notes, this was not done until the veteran police official KPS Gill arrived in the state. (Disclosure: The writer is related to Gill, but all the information used here is drawn directly from the SIT report.) On 4 May 2002, Sreekumar told the SIT, Gill, who had been appointed as a security advisor to Modi, held a meeting with senior police officials. Besides Chakravarthi, Sreekumar and Pande, the attendees included Maniram, the additional director general for law and order, and MK Tandon, the joint commissioner of the Ahmedabad police. Chakravarthi and Pande “observed that the situation was normal due to effective police, measures but Maniram, who was responsible for maintaining Law & Order in the state, totally disagreed with their assessment,” Sreekumar said. Sreekumar’s claim is backed by Maniram’s own statement to the SIT, in which he says that he informed Gill that “tension continued to prevail in Ahmedabad city amongst the Hindus and Muslims” and that the police officers “who were responsible for not preventing the riots resulting in loss of life and property in their jurisdiction should be transferred immediately irrespective of their status and good officers posted in their place.” Maniram also stated that “wherever effective officers had been posted,” such as Saurashtra and south Gujarat, “the Law & Order situation was under control.” Sreekumar further testified that Gill had told him, on 8 May, that most police officers at decision-making levels in Ahmedabad would be transferred and replaced by a new team. In response, Chakravarthi said that, during initial discussions with Gill, he and Narayan “were given to understand that CM wanted to transfer the senior officers of Ahmedabad City and wanted alternate proposal.” Chakravarthi said he gave his suggestions to Narayan, who prepared a note that was THE CARAVAN

below: RB Sreekumar, additional director general of police of Gujarat, appearing before the Nanavati-Shah commission of enquiry on the Godhra train case and Gujarat pogrom in Ahmedabad on 21 august 2004. He is a key figure through much of the SIT report because of the evidence he put forth. opposite page: It had been suggested that the annual Rath Yatra in Ahmedabad should not be taken out in July 2002, given the bloody communal violence the state had witnessed a few months before. The Gujarat government disagreed.

infirm logic · essay

This analysis has been criticized amongst others on the ground that Mr. K.P.S. Gill has not been examined by the SIT. Non-examination of Mr. K.P.S. Gill by the SIT can have no adverse impact on the otherwise well-considered opinion arrived at by the SIT in the final report on this aspect. In any case, not translating the recommendation of SIB (dated 24.4.2002) into transfer order until end of first week of May, 2002, does not provide any direct link regarding the allegation of hatching larger criminal conspiracy at the highest level for causing or precipitating the violence across the State from February, 2002 onwards. Viewed thus, no fault can be found with the opinion of the SIT … The opinion of the SIT in this regard is a plausible view and had rightly commended to the Magistrate, as well as, the High Court. But we are not seeking to determine whether there was a criminal con-

amit dave / reuters

approved by Modi, and the transfers came into force at the end of the first week of May. He added that “the matter relating to the shifting of jurisdictional officers was already under consideration and was not taken up at the insistence” of either Maniram or Sreekumar. “In view of this, the allegation of Shri Sreekumar that the transfers of the jurisdictional officers as suggested by State IB on 24-04-2002, were not carried out till the arrival of Shri K.P.S Gill, an Adviser to CM, is therefore, without any basis,” the SIT concludes. This is not an obvious conclusion. In this case, Sreekumar’s version is backed by Maniram. Moreover, at the meeting where the transfers were suggested, Chakravarthi and Pande, who would be one of the officials transferred, claimed there was no issue with the policing in the state. If this was the director general’s view, how did he end up recommending the transfer of many senior officers shortly after? There was a simple way in which this issue could have been resolved: by taking Gill’s testimony. But the SIT chose not to do so. In this context, the Supreme Court judgment states:

spiracy. Rather, we seek to determine what conclusions can be reached based on the evidence the SIT has marshalled. When we do so, we get a picture that strongly endorses Sreekumar’s version of a police force in collapse, biased against Muslims and ineffective in stopping the violence. It is only with the arrival of Gill that the transfers took place, in keeping with Sreekumar and Maniram’s advice, and, in fact, shortly after these changes, the communal violence in the state tapered off. The case made out by Sreekumar against the Modi government does not SEPTEMBER 2022

end here, but, since the register he kept through this period has been called into question by the SIT, no reliance is placed on it in this report. the sit has put on record a lot of evidence related to the 2002 Gujarat violence but has used that evidence to come to several unsound conclusions. It has repeatedly placed complete reliance on the very officials who would be held directly responsible for the failure of law and order in the state if those charges were established. In contrast, when Sreekumar’s testimony undermines the government’s narrative, he is 45

infirm logic · essay treated as an unreliable witness whose words must be discounted. The testimony of Shri R.B. Sreekumar is motivated inasmuch as he had started collecting data/evidence during posting as Addl. DG (Int.). Even subsequently, he clandestinely recorded his conversation with Shri G.C. Murmu, Home Secretary and Shri Arvind Pandya, Govt. Advocate

46

before the Commission with a view to level the allegation of pressure tactics against him. He had also recorded his conversation with Shri Dinesh Kapadia, an under Secretary, Budget and Co-ordination in the Home Department to be utilized subsequently, as evidence against the Govt. Surprisingly, he kept all these things a well guarded secret till he was superseded in promotion in February, 2005

THE CARAVAN

and made it public in his third affidavit filed before the Commission on 09-04-2005. All these actions on the part of Shri R.B. Sreekumar therefore, appear to be motivated. This analysis completely ignores the fact that, from April 2002 onwards, Sreekumar had taken enormous risks to point out the failure of the police under the Modi administration as well as the

infirm logic · essay

arko datta / reuters

below: A police stands near charred trees and destroyed buildings at a locality in Ahmedabad that saw communal violence during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom.

immunity enjoyed by the VHP and Bajrang Dal. It would not be unsurprising for him to try and anticipate action by the government and prepare for it. “As regards the allegation leveled by Sreekumar, that numerous illegal verbal instructions were given by CM and that he had maintained a register in this regard, Shri O.P. Mathur, the then IGP (Admn.), has stated that the register was totally blank on 18.04.2002, when he had certified the number of pages in the same and that Shri Sreekumar had not disclosed the purpose of maintaining such a register,” the report says. “According to Shri Mathur, the register did not contain the ‘secret’ stamp and also did not have any title as well as the circular stamp of the office of the Addl. DG, CID (Int.). According to Shri Mathur, Shri Sreekumar had recorded the first entry as on 16.04.2002, the second and third entries on 17.04.2002, and the fourth entry on 18.04.2002, which goes to show that Shri Sreekumar had not only antedated these entries, but also affixed the stamps subsequently.” Interestingly, while the report has several statements given by Sreekumar to the SIT, there is not a single place where Sreekumar has been asked to clarify these charges. What the SIT has compiled is but his word against that of Mathur, a serving officer under the same government that the register indicts. Sreekumar is not given a chance to respond to Mathur’s claims. Yet, at the same time, Sreekumar’s word is relied upon to dismiss the testimony of his co-accused Sanjiv Bhatt. The report cites a 2011 media interview in which Sreekumar said that Bhatt had never informed him about attending a meeting at Modi’s residence on 27 February 2002. It adds that Sreekumar “has further stated that at that time of filing an affidavit before Nanavati Shah Inquiry Commission, he had asked all the officers of State IB to provide him with the relevant information and documents in respect of Godhra riots but Shri Sanjiv Bhatt did not give him any information about the said meeting.” In an earlier piece on the enquiry commissions into the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, I wrote about the reports of two commissions: “Each recorded testimonies from numerous victims and witnesses, and took depositions from some of those accused, including police officers who had been on duty in badly affected areas. Yet there is not just a complete mismatch between the testimonies recorded and the conclusions reached—the commissions’ own observations contradict their findings.” Similarly, here, the SIT has time and again attempted to dilute the seriousness of the evidence it has collected. Modi is allowed to get away with a clarification that does nothing to address the actual content of the interview he had given. Serious charges SEPTEMBER 2022

of the government moving to transfer those who had taken firm action during the violence and attempted to hold people from the Sangh Parivar responsible were dismissed by claiming that this was the government’s prerogative. The easy dismissal of the disproportionate number of Muslim casualties in police firing is even harder to accept. Going by these arguments, it would seem that the government can do no wrong. The mandate of a commission of enquiry into communal violence, such as the Misra commis-

Interestingly, while the report has several statements given by RB Sreekumar to the SIT, there is not a single place where Sreekumar has been asked to clarify these charges. sion for 1984 or the Nanavati–Shah commission for 2002, differs greatly from the job entrusted to the SIT by the Supreme Court, which was to look into specific allegations. But the gap between the evidence collected and the conclusions reached is apparent in all of these. It has been nearly four decades since the events of 1984, and two decades since the violence of 2002. In both cases, the person bearing overall responsibility for governance either held charge as prime minister, as in Rajiv Gandhi’s case, or went on to become prime minister, as with Modi. Both of them made public statements dismissing the gravity of the killings as a reaction and both benefitted from a subsequent election campaign built around dogwhistles about a minority. Even if we set aside the question of political culpability, how is it possible that no senior police officer has been taken to task for the force’s failure to tackle the violence? Perhaps what we are now witnessing is a new step in the process of denial of justice. It is an irony that the director general of the Gujarat police and the police commissioner of Ahmedabad at the time of the pogrom have not spent a single day in jail for running a police force that managed to selectively target a disproportionate number of Muslims, while the man who took enormous personal risks to expose their failure is in jail. The experience of 1984 has not made our justice system better. It has made it worse. In the case of 1984, the state and the justice system were unable to provide satisfactory answers to the questions raised about the government’s conduct. With regard to 2002, have we reached a point where even the process of raising questions is being criminalised? s 47

CLASS

The murky world of Delhi’s private-school admissions

REPORTAGE / EDUCATION NEHA MEHROTRA ILLUSTRATIONS BY JIGNESH CHAVDA

APART

class apart · reportage karan kalucha woke up early on the morning of 9 February and did something he rarely does: he prayed. His son’s future was at stake. The drawing of lots for admission to Kalucha’s “target school,” Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in Lodhi Estate, was scheduled for 9 am. Kalucha was seated in the school auditorium an hour in advance. Before long, the room was humming with anxious chatter from the parents of around three hundred prospective students, all waiting for their children’s fates to be decided. Some faces exhibited anticipation; others, resignation. There was justifiable cause for the latter. Of the 1,844 children who had applied to SPV, 63 had been admitted while 310 others had been shortlisted for the lottery. Of these, 34 would be selected in the drawing of lots, and only 11 of those would be offered admission. If you were a parent applying to SPV, the odds were abysmal: almost twenty-five to one. By 1 pm, the verdict was out. Kalucha’s son had not made it. Kalucha was disappointed, but it was not like he had not anticipated—and even planned for—such a scenario. Why else had he applied to 19 schools across the city? “Honestly, in a place like Delhi, you don’t have the luxury of choice unless you’re an alumni or have certain credentials,” he told me. “So the strategy everyone follows is that they apply to the maximum number of schools, knowing fully well that their name might not appear in certain schools due to lesser points. But they still apply, they take a chance.” Kalucha’s son was selected by four schools: Delhi Public School, Mathura Road; KR Mangalam World School in Greater Kailash; Amity International School in Saket; and Birla Vidya Niketan in Pushp Vihar. Kalucha ultimately decided on DPS Mathura Road. In addition to being the closest of the four to their house—a mere two kilometres away—DPS had the added advantage of being Kalucha’s old school. Both these “credentials” had secured his son an impressive 85 points out of 100 in Delhi’s points-based system of admissions, Kalucha said, making his a “very strong candidature.” Delhi’s elite private schools can be a murky realm, and entry to it is jealously guarded. On the face of it, the process is supposed to be transparent: it follows a system that allots points to applicants based on government-approved admissions criteria. The highest weightage is usually given to proximity—the closer to the school you live, the more points you score. This is followed by bonus points if either or both of your parents are alumni of the school, or if you have a sibling already studying there. Some schools also allot additional points to girls, adopted children, relatives of staff, regional minorities and children of single parents. Ties are broken by drawing lots. 50

This seems straightforward enough, but things often do not work quite this simply. Children are admitted to schools an hour away from their home but not shortlisted for the one across the road. Results of the drawing of lots are not always honoured. Admissions criteria deemed unfair, unreasonable and opaque by the Delhi High Court— such as parents’ professions, whether they have won national awards and what transport arrangements they can make—remain in use. An element of mystery still pervades management quotas—a proportion of seats that the school administration can fill as it sees fit—while some schools allegedly continue to ask for donations in exchange for admission. For parents on the other side of this inscrutable system, the stakes are high and extremely personal. It is easy to be confused over who is the actual candidate for admission: the child or their parents. After all, the school a child gets into often says less about the child and more about the parents. Most times, it is a direct reflection of the parents’ social, cultural and economic standing in Delhi society. Parents throw themselves into the process with frenzied fury. The more one delves into this world, the more bizarre it seems. There are dress codes and social cues, right and wrong professions. Parents make Excel sheets, shift houses and conduct “principal prep,” sharing information on what to expect during interviews. They are no strangers to the importance of schooling in a status-steeped society like Delhi’s. They know that when someone asks you which school you attended, they are asking about your family background. As one parent put it, “It’s not just a school, it’s a lifestyle.” a corporate lawyer told me that, until 2020, she and her husband used to live in the western Delhi neighbourhood of Janakpuri. Shortly before their daughter’s third birthday, they uprooted their entire lives and moved to Noida, just across the Yamuna in Uttar Pradesh. “One of the main reasons was schools,” she told me, on condition of anonymity. “I never wanted my daughter to go to a local west Delhi school.” With Delhi’s pointsbased admissions system, she feared her daughter would end up attending “any random school.” Over the past few years, such strategic moving of addresses has become an increasingly common phenomenon. Parents prefer travelling an hour both ways—or, like the lawyer, moving out of Delhi entirely—to send their children to “good schools” in Noida and Gurugram. The reason is simple: the uneven distribution of schools in the capital. The best private schools are concentrated in south and central Delhi, leaving parents in the rest of the city very few options to choose from. One of the biggest drawbacks of neighbourhood schooling is that THE CARAVAN

class apart · reportage it discourages intermingling of children from different localities and, in the process, furthers ghettoisation. The neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have no such binding restrictions. Schools in Noida and Gurugram continue to rely on interviews with prospective students and their parents. Although the governments of the two states have made some attempts in recent years to replicate aspects of Delhi’s admissions policy—as well as to prevent children from the capital joining schools in the satellite cities—the new rules are rarely enforced. The lawyer was selected by a prominent Noida school for an exclusive group discussion. “I think they look at the education of parents and the pocket,” she told me. (The school’s annual fees total over R2 lakh.) Her

schools also look at the clothes they wear, their proficiency in English and whether they can hold a conversation. “We also have students coming in from the UP side, who are from this zamindar kind of background,” the administrator said. “These families have earned a lot of money and they want to send their children to the best of schools,” but their “children are usually very desi and ganwar”— rustic—“and, if such children start coming here, they will spoil that entire lot.” Instead, she said, schools would rather select parents they are comfortable with. “Try to understand, we have to deal with that parent for the next fourteen years.” The difference between admissions processes in Delhi and its satellite cities represents a fundamental fault line,

that best serve their needs. Partisans of this approach argue that this is the only way both can preserve their autonomy. The present tussle between the two sides can be traced back to an order passed by the Delhi High Court. In 2006, after a number of parents complained about allegedly unfair—and, at times, discriminatory—selection practices, the court ruled that private schools in the capital should have a common admissions process based on three basic principles: ensuring transparency, eliminating interviews and minimising the discretion of the school management. It constituted an expert committee headed by the chairperson of the Central Board of Secondary Education, Ashok Ganguly, to look into the matter. The Ganguly committee recommended the complete aboli-

For parents on the other side of this inscrutable system, the stakes are high and extremely personal. It is easy to be confused over who is the actual candidate for admission: the child or their parents.

husband is a filmmaker. “Perhaps that’s what interested them,” she speculated. “Schools nowadays are more into creative professions like filmmaking.” An administrator associated with another Noida school, who asked for anonymity fearing backlash from her employers, reinforced this view. “The first thing these schools do is they look at the profile of the parents, to decide whether they will be able to continue with the fee structure,” she told me. (The school charges around R3 lakh in annual fees.) “Secondly, they look for parents who are educated and are from upper service classes, and then parents from business families. They want to make sure the right kind of people are coming to their school.” Parents’ professions play a pivotal role in the segregation process, but

marking two very divergent approaches to the concept of schooling. Both have long legitimising histories that have often done battle in the courts of the national capital. The first approach emphasises education as a fundamental right. It puts the onus of ensuring this right on the state, which must afford equal opportunity to every child. This necessitates fixed criteria for who gets selected—transparency and objectivity are of utmost importance. Delhi, with its points-based system, adheres to this approach. The second approach, used in Noida, Gurugram and most other cities, stresses that both schools and parents have the right to a free choice, that schools can choose the parents who best align with their values and that parents can choose the schools SEPTEMBER 2022

tion of interviews in order to curb the seemingly arbitrary selection of some students over others. Instead, schools were to rely on a points-based system. In December 2013, the lieutenant governor of Delhi, Najeeb Jung, passed an order stating that “there shall be no management quota in admission in any private unaided recognised school of Delhi.” The order further mandated that schools divide their available seats into four categories. A quarter would be reserved for the Economically Weaker Section and Disadvantaged Groups—as mandated by the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. Five percent of seats were to go specifically to girls, and another five percent to children of school employees. The remaining seats would be filled using the points system. 51

class apart · reportage Private schools were outraged. What irked them most was the abolition of the management quota, which was a lucrative source of revenue. They filed writ petitions in the high court against Jung’s order, arguing that it completely took away their ability to function as autonomous institutions of learning. In November 2014, a single-judge bench quashed the order, ruling that it violated “the fundamental right of the school management to maximum autonomy in day-to-day administration including the right to admit students as well as the fundamental right of children through their parents to choose a school.” Incidentally, the judge, Manmohan, was an alumnus of Modern School, Barakhamba Road—two affiliates of which were part of a consortium of schools that had filed one of the petitions.

Once again, the schools asked the high court to reinstate 11 of the 62 parameters, including the management quota. The court again ruled in their favour. This, then, is the status quo. Private schools have the freedom to set their own admissions criteria, as long as they steer clear of the 51 parameters banned by the directorate of education. when bhavna saberwal applied to have her three-year-old daughter Mahima admitted in DPS, Vasant Vihar, in 2002, the world of Delhi’s private schools was very different. Like their counterparts in Noida and Gurugram today, they still relied on interviews with children and their parents. Bhavna spent days preparing for the interview. Other parents had warned her, she told me, that it was very important

you like?’ She must have said rasgulla. And then they asked her, ‘What colour is it?’ I think she was confused between rasgulla and gulab jamun, and she said orange. They just laughed.” Bhavna thought the interview went well. On the way out, she ran into her niece, who was the school psychologist. “My niece was like, ‘Oh, this is your daughter?’ And then she told me that, yeah, they just observed the children in a group. They leave three–four children together and observe how they behave. Mahima was very good, quite confident.” Her niece told her not to worry. A few days later, the Saberwals received a letter congratulating them on Mahima’s admission. “We were delighted,” Bhavna said. “Everyone was asking us, ‘Arre, how did you get admission? Did you know someone?’”

The admissions processes in Delhi and its satellite cities represent two very divergent approaches to the concept of schooling. Both have long legitimising histories that have often done battle in the courts of the national capital.

It seemed that the private schools had won. But, in 2016, the Delhi government’s directorate of education issued another order. It began by quoting from Manmohan’s judgment, which had emphasised that, though private schools had the right to devise their own admissions criteria, these should be clear, well defined, equitable, non-discriminatory, unambiguous and transparent. Several schools, the order stated, were relying on criteria that were contrary to the principles laid out by the high court, such as the economic and social status of the child, their proficiency in music or sports, the size of their family unit, whether their parents smoked or drank or ate meat, and whether the parents would be able to pick the child up from school. It listed 62 parameters that should be removed. 52

how she presented herself, “because they look at the parents and particularly the mother—how the mother is interacting with children, in general what kind of attitude she has.” On the day of the interview, Mahima was taken to a separate room while Bhavna and her husband, Vivek, headed to meet the principal, Shobha Banerjee. “When we went in, we talked of this and that,” Bhavna recalled. “Mrs Banerjee appreciated what I was wearing—she was like, ‘Where is it from?’ Just general conversation. She asked me what I am doing, what my husband is doing. Like my friends had warned me, they spoke more to me than to Vivek.” Eventually, Mahima was brought into the room. “Then they asked Mahima a few questions,” Bhavna said. “‘Where do you live?’ ‘Which sweet do THE CARAVAN

V Mohana had a similar experience when she applied to admit her son Kartik in Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School, the primary wing of Modern School, Barakhamba Road. Mohana is a senior advocate in the Supreme Court and moved to Delhi, in 1991, after getting married. When she was called for an interview at RSJMS, she had no idea what to expect. Her husband was out of town for work, so she took Kartik alone. Like most parents, she still remembers the name of the principal who conducted the interview: “Mrs Geeta Dudeja. Excellent lady.” Dudeja asked her what she did, how she was able to give time to Kartik as a working mother and whether they employed a fulltime domestic worker. Apart from that, Mohana recalled, they just had a “casual conversation.” That was it. The family

class apart · reportage went south for the winter holidays. When they returned, a card from RSJMS was awaiting them, informing them that Kartik had been selected. But, for Mohana, the matter did not end there. She had her doubts. “We come from Tamil Nadu, from a very different cultural background,” she told me. “And what I heard about Modern School was that it is a very big-society kind of school, lots of high-profile people study there. I was a bit worried about that.” Her friends dispelled her doubts, telling her that she was “crazy to think so much.” Nevertheless, she waited until the last day to pay the school fees. And then it was done. The decision was made—until Kartik unmade it, six years later, by deciding to leave Modern School. “I would see all my friends getting the fanciest gadgets,” Kartik told me. “I’d see them getting albums’ worth of Pokémon cards, the best toys, the best bags, the best water bottles, shoes. And, as I grew up, I started seeing a difference in the kind of stuff I was consuming versus my peers. And it hit me very hard that, at some point, I’ll have to ask for all these things from my parents.” He knew his parents came from a relatively humble background and that, by continuing at Modern, he would be imposing an unfair burden on them. “So I realised this is just not the place for me.” Mohana and her husband were dumbstruck. They could not fathom what had happened to make Kartik suddenly want to shift schools. “He was a prefect, he was doing very well,” Mohana said. “We hadn’t found anything wrong with the school.” But Kartik had made up his mind and, in the sixth standard, he transferred to SPV. Stories like this are not uncommon. Many students who studied at some of Delhi’s most elite private schools divulged similar experiences that have stayed with them long after they graduated. “The first question I got asked when I entered Shri Ram was, ‘How many cars’—plural—‘do you have?’” Harish Sai, who graduated from The Shri Ram School, Gurugram, in 2015, told me. “I walked in, new kid. The first thing they asked me was not my name but ‘How many cars do you have?’” Ankita Nanda joined Sanskriti School, Chanakyapuri, in 2010, when she was in the ninth standard. Her father was in the army, and she had spent the last two years in Rajasthan. Sanskriti was a big culture shock. When students asked her to introduce herself, she would explain that she came from Bikaner. “It’s quite a big town, not some unknown place,” she told me. “But all of my ninth and tenth grade, they used to call me a villager.” Though Aakanksha Jadhav had always hated the Vasant Valley School uniform—a beige salwar and kameez—she knew it represented a particular philosophy. The idea behind the uniform was that students should be judged on their intellect and SEPTEMBER 2022

not their appearance. But Jadhav was sceptical. It was hard to deny that Vasant Valley—established in 1990 by the founder and editor of India Today, Aroon Purie, and his wife, Rekha—was one of the most elite schools in the capital. (It charges over R2 lakh in annual fees.) “It definitely had a lot of industrialists’ kids,” Jadhav told me. “I grew up in a proper bubble. My friends were from a very specific socioeconomic bracket. Interaction with people who were different from me, who spoke different languages, was just not there. All my friends were north Indian. I had no Muslim friends, absolutely no ‘quota’ friends at all.” Anant Shah moved from The Shri Ram School to SPV in 2010. While everyone had only ever spoken English at Shri Ram—even the Hindi teacher, he recalled, instructed students in English—Hindi was the lingua franca at SPV. “My first day,” Shah told me, “they were like, ‘Chaliye, sab apni bhugol ki kitab nikaliye’”—Please take out your geography textbooks—“and I was like, I don’t know what bhugol is.” There were differences in the schools’ philosophies as well. While Shri Ram emphasised the importance of winning, SPV abhorred the very notion of competition. Even on sports day, Shah said, there were no prizes. During races, they were given a time to beat, and everyone who did so would be awarded a certificate. But he soon saw that the two schools were more similar than they appeared. “At the end of the day, there are enough rich and influential kids at both schools,” he told me. He noted that he had studied with the children of the Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra at Shri Ram and was studying with those of the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Smriti Irani at SPV. “That’s the thing with Delhi private schools: it’s the same people everywhere.” When Ishita Gupta was a young student at Modern School, she realised that all her school friends were also her family friends. “But it’s not like they’re my family friends because we became friends at school,” she told me. “It’s because our parents are friends, our grandparents are friends. It’s this weird way of segregation. It keeps you in the same social circle for the rest of your life.” Her father lived in Civil Lines and owned a business; most of her classmates’ fathers also lived in Civil Lines and owned businesses. “Just imagine, you don’t know of a world where people do not own businesses.” Gupta said that these networks only solidified further over time. She gave the example of the Modern School Old Students Association—one of the oldest and strongest alumni networks in the country. She had seen the effects of this network during job interviews. If a recruiter turned out to be a fellow Modernite, there was an instant connection. “Schools like Modern are very close 53

class apart · reportage and tight,” she said. The alumni “have a strong allegiance to each other.” Over time, Gupta had come to realise certain truths. “In Delhi, it’s extremely set,” she said. “Every school represents what family background you belong to, and it’s pretty clear. So, if you’re from an upper-class business family, you will go to Modern. If you’re from a bureaucratic, diplomatic family, you’ll go to Sanskriti. If you’re from a businessclass family with some bits of parents who work in the corporate sector, then you go to Vasant Valley or Shri Ram. So it’s become like that, and it has been like that for the longest time.” for those who do not belong to these stratified circles, elite school life can be quite alienating. A former student of DPS, RK Puram, told me about a system of segregation that began from the tenth standard. “Based on an exam in Class 10, they used to get kids who would stay in a hostel on campus,” the former student said, on condition of anonymity. “They were called the ‘boarders.’ A lot of these boarders were not from Delhi. If you were from Delhi, you’d not be staying

54

on campus. These were people from smaller towns. So there was always this thing that, ‘Oh, they’re externals.’” The “internals” and “externals,” the former student added, rarely socialised together. “There was generally a tone of, ‘We’re better because we were here before.’ There were also differences in the level of English spoken. So these kinds of things used to translate into the way people treated each other.” Ujjwala Prasad experienced some of this herself. Her father was a part of the school’s custodial staff, and she was admitted, in 2001, under the quota for staff members’ children. She recognised that this was a unique opportunity, that most children like her could never afford to study at a place like DPS. (The school’s annual fees currently amount to around R2 lakh.) But she did not feel lucky, just different. Her parents had come to Delhi from villages in Bihar and Jharkhand; her father had been educated only till the eighth standard, while her mother had never set foot in a school. They had met while employed as domestic workers for the principal at the time, Shayama Chona.

THE CARAVAN

As the first person in her family to get a proper education, Prasad tried her best but soon realised that, no matter what she did, there seemed to be a gaping chasm separating her from her classmates. Often, it was the little things that made her aware of this. Her classmates hosted big birthday parties at their houses, but she could never invite anyone over as her house was just not big enough. She had always loved to dance but, when she enrolled in dance class at school, she found that most of the other children were attending lessons outside school. “So the dancing period was dominated by kids who went to Ashley and Shiamak Davar”—choreographers who run popular, and expensive, dance academies—“because they already knew things,” she told me. “During dance competitions, these kids used to do the choreography and all on their own. And so, they were always in the limelight. All this used to really affect my confidence level. For a large part of my childhood, I just accepted this, that they have all these resources and I don’t.” The chasm felt deeper right after summer vacations. Most of her class-

class apart · reportage mates would go abroad, while Prasad would visit her parents’ villages. In the third standard, she discussed her trip home with a classmate who had spent the holidays in France. “At the time, I never had this thing that someone would judge me, or anything like that,” she recalled. “But, when I told him about the village, this guy was clueless. He was like, ‘Huh, where is that? What is that?’ That was when I realised that it might be best not to share some of my life experiences so openly.” As she grew older, she began keeping things to herself, “because I assumed that they wouldn’t understand.” It has been a long time since Prasad, who is now a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, completed school, but she still thinks about that time in her life a lot. “It would have been better if I had gone to a school where everyone was like me,” she said. “If everyone’s background was similar, no one would have felt like an outcast. There’s a basic understanding, a basic similarity, and so you don’t feel out of place.” According to the right-to-education act, private schools in Delhi must

reserve a quarter of their seats for students from Economically Weaker Sections (families with annual incomes lower than R1 lakh) and Disadvantaged Groups (including the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes). These are filled via a centralised system, with students applying on a Delhi government website and seats allocated through a computerised lottery. The students’ tuition is paid for by the government, while schools are meant to provide them with free uniforms, books and stationery. Over the years, thousands of parents have complained to the government about schools not fulfilling their end of the bargain. A 2016 study based on fieldwork carried out in a Delhi slum found that parents of EWS/ DG students incurred an average outof-pocket expenditure of over thirteen thousand rupees per year. In the 2021–22 admissions cycle, the directorate of education received 126,061 applications for around thirtythree thousand EWS/DG seats in over two thousand schools. If the odds of selection were not already slim enough,

SEPTEMBER 2022

only 21,699 of those seats were filled. This April, the Delhi government threatened to derecognise more than a hundred schools if they did not meet the quota. It told the high court that schools were using the number of unreserved seats filled, rather than the total number of seats advertised, to calculate the requisite number of EWS/DG admissions. This has created a massive backlog of unfilled seats. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights noted, in June, that private schools should have admitted around eighteen thousand additional EWS/DG students over the past two admissions cycles. “For the last eight months, private schools and the government have been fighting over this,” Yogesh Pal Singh, the Delhi government’s deputy director of education responsible for private schools, told me in June. When parents speak of Delhi’s private schools, he said, they are usually referring to the top 25 schools in the capital. “So what about the rest of the schools? Their seats go empty year after year, and this has gotten worse since the pandemic. That’s the case going on in the high court right now, where

55

class apart · reportage private schools are saying that ‘we’re not being able to fill our existing seats,’ and the government is saying that, ‘regardless of other admissions, you have to fill all EWS seats.’” On 26 May, the court ordered the government to ensure that schools fill the backlog of EWS/DG seats over the next five years in addition to the mandatory 25-percent quota. Two months later, after several schools appealed that the decision undermined their autonomy, the Supreme Court issued a stay order. Singh appreciated that private schools were finding it difficult to admit EWS and DG students when their unreserved seats, which provide them with greater revenue, were lying empty. He noted that the government had even put out advertisements for private schools. “What else can we do?” he asked. In June, Modern School reportedly asked EWS/DG students to pay nearly seventy thousand rupees in fees if they wished to remain enrolled in the eleventh standard. An activist who sent a legal notice to the school on behalf of affected parents described the move as “illegal, arbitrary, unjust, unethical, discriminatory, unconstitutional and tantamount to contempt of the Delhi High Court.” There have also been allegations of corruption in the EWS/DG selection process. In 2015, the Delhi Police found that hundreds of students had applied using forged income certificates, which could cost as much as R5 lakh. According to media reports, one such “EWS student” commuted to school in a Jaguar, while others were children of industrialists and international traders. Athar Ilahi Khan, a career counsellor who works with EWS/DG students through the education rights NGO Mission Taleem, told me that things like this continue to happen. Last year, he said, a parent told him that they had been approached by a tout who offered to have their child added to the EWS shortlist for a payment of R1 lakh. “And, because this means that parents will get free education for the next twelve years, they happily pay,” he added. “It’s a small price to pay for twelve years.” Those who do get through this flawed process often find, like Ujjwala Prasad did, that private schools exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the psychological impact of socioeconomic divides. A 2015 study found that most school administrators believed that EWS/DG students failed “to cope with the demands put on them by the school” and that many of these students faced discrimination in the classroom—other students did not share their lunch with them, and they were often bullied and subjected to lewd comments. “A lot of times, this leads to an inferiority complex in these children,” Khan told me. “Instead of uplifting them, these schools subdue them even more.” This was a consequence, he said, of schools operating as 56

businesses and ignoring their social and moral responsibilities. “The solution is not to abolish EWS quotas. The only way to solve the problem is by changing people’s mindsets. Until people see that every child is equal, nothing will change.” the ganguly committee’s recommendations were meant to shake up this status quo of entrenched privilege and exclusion. By doing away with interviews and insisting on transparent and equitable criteria for admissions, they were supposed to prevent schools from safeguarding their own exclusivity and make the education system more democratic. Sumit Vohra thinks that has not ended up happening. Vohra runs Admissions Nursery, an online support group for parents navigating the byzantine processes of school admissions. He started the group in 2009, and it now has over a hundred thousand members. Saket Chaudhary, the director of Hindi Medium, a 2017 film that delves into the elite world of south Delhi’s private schools, was part of the forum for two years. The stories he heard there, as well as Vohra’s book 7/11—which chronicles his experiences getting his daughter admitted into seven out of 11 schools—provided Chaudhary with many of the film’s plot points. “Schools are basically thugs,” Vohra told me. “Poori manmani karte hain”—They do whatever they want. “I’m not saying all schools are like that, but ninety percent of schools still do some mischief or the other.” A resident of Mayur Vihar experienced this first-hand. She was never an “Excel sheet mom.” These, she told me, are the kinds of mothers who make a comprehensive spreadsheet of the twenty best schools, complete with deadlines, criteria and strategies for admissions. Instead, she applied to only three schools for her son. One of these was located a hundred metres away from her house. She was sure her son would have enough proximity points to be selected. “But here is the strange thing: we didn’t even make it to the cut-off,” she told me, on condition of anonymity. “On the other hand, we made it to the next round of another school, almost twenty-five minutes away from our house.” When Bindesh Pandey applied for his son’s admission, in 2014, he noticed that different schools measured proximity differently. Some used aerial distance, while others used Google Maps. There was no consistency. He then experienced something that completely shook his belief in the system. Pandey and one of his closest friends had both applied to Indraprastha International School, in Dwarka. “We had this system between the two of us, that some schools I went for the draw of lots, some schools he went,” he told me. When it was THE CARAVAN

class apart · reportage time for the lottery at Indraprastha, it was Pandey’s turn. He recalled that the proceedings had been recorded on video. Since 2016, the directorate of education has instructed all private schools to record their lotteries—if a parent complains, the directorate can ask the school for a copy of the recording. The name of his friend’s child was announced, Pandey said, but, when the friend went to the school, “they told him, ‘Nahin ji, your child’s name didn’t come at all.’” The friend insisted that Pandey had been present at the draw of lots, but the school management did not budge. It even refused to review the video footage. (The management did not respond to my request for comment or to a questionnaire I sent.) “So that’s how it is,” Pandey said. “They’ve made

told me. “But now, every parent knows about this cold chit, perforated chit trick. So who will let it happen?” The most the directorate could do, he said, was to ensure that parents are present during the drawing of lots. “This way, it becomes a kind of auto-monitoring. If parents are suspicious, they can ask schools to pick the chits again or ask to pick the chits themselves. And if the schools still don’t listen, then the directorate can intervene.” December to February, the official admissions season, is peak time for Vohra, who keeps getting complaints from parents about schools using one or the other of the parameters banned by the Delhi government. The 2022–23 cycle was no different. Some parents complained that Ahlcon Public School

concerns to the directorate of education. “We highlighted everything in our complaints, even sent screenshots as proof,” he told me. “But no action was taken against any school.” “If a parent comes to us, saying this school asked for donation or that school asked for donation, we need proof in order to take action,” Singh said. “Without proof, we can’t do anything. We don’t even ask for complete proof. If parents have even a little proof—halka sa bhi—we’re willing to take action.” In 2015, the government ordered all private schools to allow parents to carry their mobile phones during the admissions process, so that they could record any incidents of malpractice. When I asked Singh about schools using criteria banned by the high court,

Those who do get through this flawed process often find that private schools exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the psychological impact of socioeconomic divides. A 2015 study found that many EWS/DG students faced discrimination in the classroom.

these criteria very simple, but they don’t always follow them.” His friend thought about suing the school but eventually gave up on the idea. It was too much of a hassle. Vohra has been getting complaints about the lottery system for a long time. Several parents have told him about schools cheating the system. “Some of the chits are cold,” he said. “So, what they do is they keep the chits in the fridge at night. The next day, they know exactly which chit to pick from the bowl, because they are cold to the touch.” Another tactic he had heard of, he said, was writing the names of preferred candidates on perforated paper. Yogesh Pal Singh said that such complaints were outdated. “This used to happen ten–fifteen years back,” he

was reserving five percent of seats for staff members over and above the 20-percent management quota. Others informed him that Tagore International School had designated 50 points for children living along the school’s bus routes—“declaration regarding pick up or drop” was one of the prohibited criteria upheld by the high court. Another parent complained that St Mark’s Senior Secondary Public School and KR Mangalam World School were asking for donations. (A representative from St Mark’s told me that the school follows the guidelines issued by the directorate of education and has “never asked any parents for donations to secure admissions.” None of the other schools responded to interview requests or questionnaires.) Vohra forwarded these SEPTEMBER 2022

he said that these things are never black and white. “See, the court has not said that these should be the criteria and all schools have to follow them. Schools are allowed to set their own criteria. The only stipulation is that these criteria should be uniform, transparent and reasonable. Yes, the court has banned particular parameters, but there is a lot of ambiguity around which criteria really violates the court’s instructions.” beyond concerns over enforcement, Delhi’s points-based system has more fundamental problems. In many ways, it perpetuates the same privileges as the old system did. Proximity is one of the most significant criteria, usually accounting for the bulk of points. 57

class apart · reportage This is meant to ensure that children go to school in their own locality. But, as anyone living in the capital knows, different parts of Delhi have specific demographic compositions. The Ganguly committee recommended that the proximity criterion should be flexible, providing points to applicants living up to ten kilometres away from the school, “to provide for the uneven distribution of schools in different localities of Delhi.” In a subsequent report, it cautioned against significantly increasing the weightage for proximity, since it “might discourage intermingling of children from different social and economic backgrounds. It would go against the principles of diversity and heterogeneity.”

Her decision seemed to reflect anxiety over the changing demographics of the neighbourhood. “There is an influx—it just happens to be a religious influx,” she said, requesting anonymity so that her son would not face repercussions at his current school. “There are new habits coming in, there’s nonvegetarian food. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. It’s different, which is why the kind of backgrounds kids here come from is different from what we would prefer our son to be surrounded by.” Such prejudice is a common experience for the capital’s Muslims, who are often denied housing in neighbourhoods with good private schools. Although Muslim children made up about a sixth of Delhi’s under-five population

how this system perpetuated privilege. “Why can’t a friend of mine who didn’t go to that school, and who is not a national-award winner, get her child through?” she said. “That’s just unfair.” Despite its shortcomings, however, the points-based system is an improvement on the previous regime. Most parents readily admit that it is a standardising mechanism that starts everyone off on a level playing field, as long as they can afford to pay the school fees. One parent who navigated the 2022–23 admissions cycle told me, on condition of anonymity, “Supposing there were no points and no draw of lots, where would I send my child? At least with this, I have somewhere to go. If you leave it at the level of PR and

“Schools are basically thugs,” Sumit Vohra said. “Poori manmani karte hain”—They do whatever they want. “I’m not saying all schools are like that, but ninety percent of schools still do some mischief or the other.”

The neighbourhood of Daryaganj straddles the walled city of Shahjahanabad and the imperial capital built by the British. Since Partition, the portion of Daryaganj in New Delhi has had a substantial Jain population. In recent decades, as many of them have moved to other parts of the capital, many Muslims from the old city have moved in. A Jain resident told me that, although her husband had studied in the nearby Happy School, they preferred to send their son to a school in Noida. “You see, Happy School has a large Muslim population,” she told me. “So the language, technique, lahaja”— accent—“everything is different from what we prefer. People there also come from a particular economic strata.” Even the teachers at Happy School, she said, urged them to enrol their child elsewhere. 58

in the 2011 census, a recent study found that they accounted for only 2.7 percent of the students admitted by 28 private schools in 2018–19. “This data can then imply that ‘quality’ private schooling in Delhi is an option only for elitist, privileged families with social capital,” the authors, Jannat Fatima Farooqui and Sukanya Sen, wrote. Another problem with the pointsbased system is the alumni criterion, under which applicants are allotted extra points if their parents went to that school. “Now, if I didn’t go to DPS or Bal Bharati, I’ve minimised my child’s chance of getting into these schools right there and then,” Bindesh Pandey said. “It’s like a dynasty thing, right? If you studied there, your child will also study there.” Another parent, whose son had benefited from the alumni points, told me that she could not help seeing THE CARAVAN

influence, Delhi has enough and more rich people who will grab the seats.” Ashok Ganguly agreed that the system is not perfect. Nursery admissions, he told me, are a high-stakes issue. And whenever something has high stakes, there are bound to be ambiguous practices and people with vested interests. The long-term solution, he said, is universalising excellence. “We have created islands of excellence. This has created a problem where parents think that, ‘Oh, that’s an excellent school. I will not send my kid anywhere else.’ So much so that they even take up a new residence next to this school.” This is a problem, he added. “Unless we bring all schools to the same level—whether they are public, private or Kendriya Vidyalayas—unless we universalise the quality framework for all schools, this situation will continue.” s

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A LBU MS OF EV I DENCE Found objects, found images and new portraits to record the disappeared in Kashmir

PHOTO ESSAY / CONFLICT PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY SIVA SAI JEEVANANTHAM

previous spread: Mountains in Bandipora district, June 2017. (inset) Clothes belonging to Manzoor Ahmad Khan, who was disappeared on 31 August 2017.

above: Family photographs of Ghulam Mohiuddin Dar. Dar was taken from his house by unidentified men on 6 June 1994 as he was about to have lunch. His brother Ali Mohammad Dar believes the men were from the Indian military because they were not Kashmiri.

opposite page: A chinar tree in Srinagar’s Nishat Gardens casts a shadow on a shamiana erected beneath it. 62

in january 2020, I visited the house of Irfan Ahmad Khan in Srinagar. Khan had gone missing in 1994 when he was still a schoolboy. His family suspected that he had been picked up by the military. As I listened to his family narrate stories about him, I flipped through an album of their photographs. I saw a black-and-white photo of Khan as a baby and then a few more photos of him growing up. The last photo of him was taken on his fourteenth birthday, the year that he disappeared. At the same point that Khan disappeared, evidence of him disappeared from the family album. My visit to Khan’s family was part of the project I was working on along with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir. The APDP is a movement against the many enforced disappearances that have been rampant in the valley for decades. An enforced disappearance occurs when a person is detained or abducted and there is subsequently no information provided about the person’s whereabouts or fate. The association estimates that between eight thousand and ten thousand people have been disappeared since the start of the insurgency in Kashmir, which since 1989 has resulted in the massive militarisation of the valley. The APDP documents disappearances and provides support to families of the disappeared. As a photographer, I worked with them to preserve the memories of the disappeared by gathering visual evidence from their families. Khan was the youngest victim of enforced disappearance that I came across. I began documenting disappearances in Kashmir in 2017. Till then, my understanding of state oppression came from the other side of the subcontinent, through stories of the Lib-

this spread: An eagle flying over a mountain in Baramulla district. Locals allege that there are unidentified graves in the area’s mountains.

eration Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which fought for a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Growing up in Tamil Nadu, I heard about the methods the Sri Lankan state employed to suppress the Tamil Eelam movement. In 2009, during the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka and in the course of studying about the conflict, I learnt about how the police and army in India also employ torture, particularly in Kashmir. I was struck by the parallels between north-eastern Sri Lanka and Kashmir. When I got an opportunity to study outside Chennai, in 2015, I chose a journalism course in Jammu. At the time, I had never stepped out of Tamil Nadu. The state of Jammu and Kashmir was as alien a terrain to me as possible. Over the next five years of meeting the families of disappeared persons and visiting mass graves, I came to see Kashmir as a symbol of resistance similar to other disputed regions. I have had many meetings that have challenged my understanding of what it means to live an entire life under duress. I once visited the house of a man who was arrested under the Public Safety Act. One of his younger sisters—a woman in her early twenties—narrated what happened during a midnight army raid on their house. She told me how the military tortured their father and abused everyone in the house. Throughout her narration of these traumatic events, she did not cry or grow emotional. As I was about to leave, I asked

top left: (inset) A photograph of Mohammad Ramzan Sheik hangs in his house. Sheik was detained by security forces on 13 April 1997 and is still missing. His family fought a legal battle for seven years to get a Srinagar district court to order the state administration to pay them compensation.

above: (inset) Irfan Ahmad Khan disappeared in 1994, when he was only 14 years old. His family still keeps a box of his things in a cupboard in the attic of their home.

this spread: On 31 August 2017, Manzoor Ahmad Khan took a shortcut through the woods near his house in Kupwara to go to a village in Bandipora. Khan and a friend were detained by an officer of the 27 Rashtriya Rifles. His friend was released. Army officials denied the detention of anyone named Manzoor Ahmad Khan. Khan was, at the time, engaged to be married the following month. His family album had many pictures of him in his late teens.

next spread: Portraits of people who suffered pellet-gun injuries, torture and violence at the hands of security forces. Many of these people described sitting for long hours in various kinds of detention centres suffering indignities. Here, they sit dignified—in chairs instead of on the ground—to draw a contrast between the humiliations inflicted upon the bodies of Kashmiris and how they use their bodies as tools of resistance.

what she was studying. On hearing the question, she broke down uncontrollably. She said that she could not go to college because her brother was the one who used to pay her fees. He was now in prison. Even as she maintained equanimity about the past, her disrupted education and uncertain future haunted her. Despite the constant nature of conflict in Kashmir, almost all children in the valley are sent to school and get at least a basic education. I remember noting how well-informed people in the villages of Kashmir were when an auto driver in Budgam remarked about the police shooting civilians protesting against the Sterlite Copper plant in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi in 2018. There were many people in mainland India who knew nothing about the issue. In my many visits to the families of the disappeared, I have been struck by their use, storage and presentation of photographs. Families would often cut out old photos of disappeared persons and add them to current family photographs, as if to keep them alive and present. Parveena Ahanger, the founder of the APDP, would often tell me

that this kind of transposing of a person into the present was a form a resistance by not accepting that the person might be dead. Since I came from a Dalit family, I had seen my relatives preserve photos of my cousin who was killed in a caste feud. They made a collage of his photos and paid homage to it. But in Kashmir, I saw many family albums that displayed photos of the dead bodies of loved ones alongside family photographs. I once asked the mother of someone who had been killed why she kept a photo of his body. She told me that future generations in her family should know what happened to him and what India did to Kashmiris. In Kashmir, I saw the lines between family photographs and forensic documents being blurred.

One family from Srinagar submitted the first family photograph they ever took as evidence to the erstwhile State Human Rights Commission. They were trying to prove the number of heirs of a man who had been disappeared by the Indian army, following which they could get the compensation due to them. Ahangar, whose 16-year-old son went missing in 1990, used to carry multiple photographs of her son to prove he existed. I had never seen personal photographs become so political. These same family photographs have become evidence in the APDP’s archive. Personal photographs that were once taken only for nostalgia’s sake are now evidence of the existence of a Kashmiri.

below: The first photo taken of Irfan Ahmad Khan as a baby. Khan disappeared in 1994. A peon at his school told his parents that he had been taken away by an unknown person. Officers at a police control room only told his parents that he had been taken away by the 7th Jat Battalion of the 20th Rashtriya Rifles.

opposite page: A photo of Irfan as a child with his father, Habibullah, and sister Rabeena; a photo of Irfan with them at Nishat Gardens; and a photo of Habibullah. According to Rabeena, Habibullah tried to file a complaint with the police about Irfan’s disappearance but was charged with assisting kin with subversive activities. She said soldiers raided their house and tortured Habibullah while the rest of the family was locked in another room. They took him into custody, continued to torture him and released him a month later.

Enforced disappearances, detentions and custodial torture have been a reality in Kashmir for decades, going back to the eruption of armed conflict in 1989. The evidence that the APDP has been trying to document is sometimes more than twenty years old. The photographs and visual evidence I have been trying to gather can similarly be two or three decades old. The longer a person had been missing, the larger the files of documents their families maintained. The files consisted of court documents, multiple copies of old paperwork that had started fading, newspaper clippings on disappearance cases, diary entries, State Human Rights Commission orders, requisition letters to human rights bodies, and photographs. Families would often make multiple copies for fear that someone from the army might confiscate and destroy a set of documents. In early August 2019, the Indian government under Narendra Modi announced the abrogation of Article 370. A few days later, Modi announced the advent of a Naya Kashmir—New Kashmir—that would see the end of militancy in the valley and the beginning of justice, the rule of law and economic prosperity. The promises did

opposite page: A site that locals allege is an unidentified mass grave. The locals say that there are more than two hundred unidentified graves of Kashmiris, some who may have been involved with militant organisations, who were killed by security forces during the 1990s and early 2000s.

this page: Photographs of Ghulam Mohammed Bhat taken before his detention and after his death. Bhat was detained by officers of the Special Operations Group. His son Haneef remembers how the officers had politely asked to take his father. Haneef later learnt that his father was constantly shifted between detention centres and finally to a prison in Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad. The officers repeatedly asked Haneef to meet his father who was experiencing problems with his health. Haneef did not have money to travel to Allahabad so the SOG sponsored his travel. Haneef found his father dead in the Allahabad prison, his body barely clothed. He saw that his father’s arms were fractured and saw blue-black discolouration on his body. Haneef was asked to take his father’s body and leave.

this spread: School children playing in Nishat Garden in Srinagar in June 2017.

this page: Mushtaq Ahmad Dar was arrested by the 20 Grenadiers on 13 April 1997 after a midnight raid at his house. His mother said Dar was tortured during the raid while the rest of the family was locked in another room. She visited the regiment’s military camp the next morning and was told that Dar would be released soon. He remains missing.

opposite page: A photograph of Mushtaq Ahmad Dar’s father, Ghulam Mohammad, who died after Mushtaq disappeared; and a photo of his mother, Azrah, during a protest. The family filed a habeas corpus petition to find Mushtaq. The High Court of Jammu and Kashmir observed that he was taken into custody by the 20 Grenadiers, that the respondents were guilty of custodial disappearance and that this was a gross violation of Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. The court ordered compensation of C10 lakh to be paid to the family.

not square with the fact that the drastic change in Kashmir’s status had been implemented under intense militarisation, a draconian lockdown and without any consultation with Kashmiris. Justice for the families of the disappeared would mean finding their loved ones or at least finding some answers about what happened to them. Instead, the APDP was forced to retreat in some of its work. The association used to hold peaceful, silent sit-ins on the tenth of every month. Families, wives and mothers of the disappeared would gather in Srinagar’s Pratap Park to support and commiserate with each other and to keep their missing family members visible in some way. Authorities in Kashmir have not allowed the APDP to hold its sit-ins since August 2019. In the face of such setbacks, it has become even more imperative to continue to document disappearances. Even as I continued my project, I was aware that I had to be careful with the use of photographs since many families had suffered retribution for sharing their stories publicly. Although the methods of keeping records and memories alive are similar for many Kashmiri families, their outlook on their disappeared family members differs. Some think that those missing will never

this spread: Parts of a report of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir in Srinagar in the case of the disappearance of 32-yearold Abdul Rashid Wani on 7 July 1997. The court observed that Wani had allegedly been arrested and detained by an officer named Captain Yadav of the Gorkha Rifles. The court said the case needed to be treated as a custodial disappearance. When Wani’s wife, Shabnam, and other family members tried to find him, they were shown photographs at a control room in Rawalpora of people who had been killed. Shabnam identified her husband’s feet in one of a set of photos of a man whose face has been disfigured. The family refused a DNA test. opposite page: (inset) A photograph of Shabnam and her children submitted to the erstwhile State Human Rights Commission as part of documentation for compensation. Shabnam has lived a life of a half-widow, a woman whose husband has disappeared but not confirmed dead. She has raised her children to become graduates and support the family.

right: A photocopy of a CT scan belonging to a boy studying in the tenth standard, who was injured when the army fired pellets into his face during a protest in Sopore in 2016. The scan showed that his left optic nerve had been damaged.

return. Others hold out hope that they might come back. I met a family whose son disappeared 14 years ago. They met someone who had been arrested and released, and who had met their son in prison. Even though they could get no more information from the authorities, their hope had been rekindled when they found out he had been alive for all that time. For many families, conceding that their loved ones are dead is more political than personal—it means conceding to oppression. Such families resist the acceptance of a likely death and resist closure for themselves as a political stand. My project is to bring the reality of these families in Kashmir to those in mainland India who are barely aware that such cruelties are perpetrated in their name. After a few exhibitions in Chennai and Hyderabad, I sensed that my photographs could create a dissonance in the minds of people with longheld prejudices about Kashmir, Kashmiris and the role of the military. At one exhibition, I met a teenage girl who closely read every photo caption and asked me probing questions. This gave me hope that my work could spark deeper thoughts and empathy. After all, whether taken in Kashmir or elsewhere, what family photos mean to people is universal.

left: Unused shikaras floating on Dal Lake in 2018.

above: A file bag of a pellet-gun victim. File bags maintained by victims and their families contain important, carefully gathered pieces of evidence against security forces. Families often make multiple copies of these documents and store them in different places in case any one set is destroyed during a raid.

this spread: “What heart is that which doesn’t pray to be with you? God forbid, shall I be away from you and alive? Never let that happen!”—Hajra Begum’s poem about missing her son Basheer Ahmad Sofi. Sofi was her last surviving son. He was picked up by the military from a baker’s shop in Onagam village in Bandipora district. He was last seen in an army camp in the Chitternar forest region. He was not involved with any militant organisations but most of his brothers were. They were all killed in instances of crossfire with the military. Hajra Begum recounted how she had been taken to the army camps many times and tortured, including being burnt with cigarettes.

WORDS AND BULLETS The unacknowledged role of women who shaped people’s movements in Telangana

/ POLITICS SAI PRIYA KODIDALA

courtesy wikimedia commons

words and bullets · books opposite page: Chityala Ailamma, from Palakurthi in Nalgonda district. Her remarkable story presents one of the rare acknowledgements of Bahujan women in the Telangana movement.

the statue of chityala ailamma is a recent addition at the Krishna Kanth Park junction, close to my working-class neighbourhood in Hyderabad. The arrival of the towering statue, with her hand holding up a baton, emphasises the mainstreaming of Telangana icons following the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh. In the 1940s, Ailamma’s fight for her land became the tipping point for the Telangana People’s Struggle against the Nizam. Long before the appearance of such statues, however, the legend of Ailamma rolled off the tongues of people in the region through songs and stories told by women. Her remarkable story presents one of the rare acknowledgements of Bahujan women in the movement. Public meetings held by sangham members—as people associated with the communist-dominated Andhra Mahasabha were referred to at the time— typically included songs and performances modelled after the region’s folk culture. These became the cultural medium for the people’s struggle: Tiragabaddanadu uyyalo, undura ee doralu uyyalo Oorelli povuduru uyyalo, ee bhumi manadamma uyyalo The day we revolt, o’ cradle, will these landlords be around, o’ cradle? They will flee the village, o’ cradle, this land is ours, o’ cradle In April 1944, various sangham members and residents of the Jangaon taluk, in Nalgonda district, gathered at the inauguration of a public library at Palakurthi. The atmosphere was tense because they were anticipating a backlash from feudal landlords and the police. Mallu Swarajyam, a young communist leader, sang at the event before it was disrupted by goons sent by Visnur Ramachandra Reddy, a landlord who owned around a hundred and sixty square kilometres of land across Jangaon. The event resulted in violence and the eventual arrests of 12 people, including Ailamma’s husband and sons, and Swarajyam’s brother. The attack was an attempt to intimidate Ailamma and stop her from cultivating land. She had leased farmland from a neighbouring landlord. Swarajyam recollected in a 2015 interview that this had enraged Reddy: “How can a Chakali cultivate land?” Chakali was a reference to her caste— she was often called Chakali Ailamma—whose traditional occupation was washing clothes. When Reddy threatened her, Ailamma stood her ground and cursed him. “I have the sangham chitti”—membership slip—“in my kongu”—hem. “If you shoot me, my four sons will cultivate my four acres of land. You have thousands of acres of land

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and only one son. The sangham will distribute this land, and you and your son will flee this fort.” In the 1940s, feudalism in Telangana was signified by the practice of vetti-chakiri—forced labour. Under vetti, peasants were expected to labour in the landlords’ fields before they worked on their own, and were compelled to share a part of their crop with the landlord. The exploitation was not limited to agricultural production alone. Members of Bahujan communities were expected to perform unpaid or poorly-paid labour at the landlord’s house. They were expected to declare, “Nee banchenu dora, nee kaalmokkuta”—I am your slave, I will touch your feet. As a general rule, the village was bound to the landlord, whose ownership extended to property, as well as people and their labour. Ailamma’s refusal to perform vetti had angered Reddy as well. In her memoir Naa Maate Thupaki Toota—My Words Are Bullets—Swarajyam describes how, after her husband and sons were arrested, Ailamma packed a bundle of cold rice and left for Hyderabad to meet the prominent communist leader Ravi Na-

In the 1940s, feudalism in Telangana was signified by the practice of vetti-chakiri—forced labour. Peasants were expected to labour in the landlords’ fields before they worked on their own, and were compelled to share a part of their crop with the landlord. rayan Reddy. There, she “spoke to all the leaders, put it in papers, prepared petitions, got our people together at the police station to enquire into the harassment, made arrangements for their bail and so on.” Back in Palakurthi, sangham members camped at Ailamma’s house for months to protect her harvest from the landlord’s goons. When “Dunne vadide bhoomi!”—Land to the tiller!— became the call for the revolution, those who joined the movement largely came from communities that had been denied land rights over centuries, such as Dalits and women. Although land was a central demand, the people’s movement was not just an economic struggle. It was also a social one, against a deeply entrenched system of caste and patriarchy. Under this system, Bahujan women faced extreme violence and abuse and also figured as foot soldiers of the struggle. The Telangana movement evolved in multiple phases, with considerable shifts occurring

words and bullets · books

courtesy k lalita

Second, the crucial role played by women who were part of these successive people’s movements is significantly absent from existing popular narratives. Women were active participants, providing food and shelter to the dalams, stitching flags and relaying messages to underground members at great risk to their lives. Most importantly, they held down the fort in households where men joined as “active” members. They were also at the receiving end of extreme violence from the state and quasi-state forces. As a result, the portrayal of women has often remained restricted to atrocities committed against them and their bodies. While it is true that the stakes were especially high for Bahujan women associated with the movement, violence has become the defining factor in reductive descriptions of their involvement, whittling down their role to one of victimhood. These tendencies have resulted in a considerable gap in our understanding of women’s involvement in the struggle, as well as their motivations and aspirations for joining it and the impact that their participation had on their lives.

between 1946 and 1951. Although it had started as a people’s movement against atrocities committed by feudal landlords, it later had to confront the paramilitary force associated with the nizam—the Razakars—as well as the Indian Army. The later phases took the shape of an armed struggle through dalams—guerrilla squads—in retaliation to suppression by these forces. The depiction of the struggle in recent Telugu popular media, including in film, literature and the news, has two noticeable aspects. First, its focus has been limited to the violent conflict between the dalams and the state police. This tendency precludes an understanding of the context in which successive peoples’ movements

in the Telugu regions evolved and how this led to an armed resistance during their later phases, particularly in Telangana. The rebellion of the 1940s was followed, two decades later, by the peasant uprising in Srikakulam, which was also inspired by the Naxalbari movement. By the end of the 1960s, it had spread across undivided Andhra Pradesh. This was promptly followed by state repression. By the 1980s and 1990s, the Naxalite movement swept the regions through an armed struggle, albeit in a fragmented fashion owing to fissures within the party. These movements brought to the fore issues that had hitherto been spectacularly ignored, including land rights, forced labour, agricultural levy, and caste- and gender-based violence. SEPTEMBER 2022

the history of people’s movements and communism in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh has been disproportionately dominated by narratives of upper-caste, upper-class men in the Communist Party of India. Much documentation of the movement either portrays women’s contributions largely as efforts to support men or implies that the women were either influenced or indoctrinated by men. For instance, Putchalapalli Sundarayya dedicates a chapter of his book Telangana People’s Struggle and its Lessons to the women in the movement but recognises their participation only through the men in their family, speaking of their roles as wives, sisters and mothers and the “sacrifices” associated with these gendered roles. Since the late 1980s, though, there have been many attempts to revisit this movement through the oral histories, memoirs and autobiographies of women. We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana People’s Struggle, compiled by six contributors associated with the feminist 87

words and bullets · books collective Stree Shakti Sanghatana, offers a remarkable account of oral histories of women who were part of the movement between 1946 and 1951. Dedicated “to the unknown women and their unnamed struggles that created history,” it aims to “broaden the history of that struggle by recovering the subjective experience of women; to capture women’s voices from the past and to present issues as they were perceived by women.” Published in 1989, these 16 interviews, including one group discussion, make it clear that women in the movement had a range of experiences during and after their involvement in it, with complex variations and contradictions based on their backgrounds and experiences. It centres the women included as “makers” of history, with free-flowing narratives that preserve the diversity of their voices. What is, however, left wanting is a proportionate inclusion of Bahujan and Muslim voices, as the majority of the narratives included

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focus on the experiences of upper-caste women. In 2012, the Hyderabad Book Trust published Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s autobiography Nirjana Varadhi—A Bridge Abandoned. The book received an overwhelming response and was followed by an English translation, by Sowmya VB, titled The Sharp Knife of Memory. In writing her story, Koteswaramma traces experiences from “the social reform movement, the freedom struggle, the communist movement and the Naxalite movement.” Before the publication of her memoir, or possibly prior to her interview in We Were Making History, Koteswaramma was largely known to the general public as the wife of the prominent communist leader Kondapalli Seetharamaiah. However, her memoir provides insights into her journey, starting from the influence of communist ideals since her childhood, her inter-sub caste marriage to Seetharamaiah, her role as a party

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member and artist, and tragic developments in her private and public lives. It introduces us to a woman of utmost “grace, dignity and resilience,” as Gita Ramaswamy, the writer and founder of the Hyderabad Book Trust, describes her. Koteswaramma explains, too, the importance of writing her story at the age of ninety: Am I not the only one left now as everyone who walked with me has gone away? Yet, my loneliness does not wish to stay alone in a corner. It weeps like the river Godavari when it hears of tragic events. It gets emotional when I think of my revolutionary past. It wants to preserve our past ideals for future generations. It derives satisfaction in writing about our past so that the present generation can read it. Until her death, in March this year, Swarajyam was a fiery and active pres-

words and bullets · books ence in Left politics in Telangana. A veteran communist leader, state legislator and former dalam member, she was a key leader during the armed struggle in Telangana. Naa Maate Thupaki Toota, published in 2019, recalls her involvement in the movement at length. It is particularly significant since it covers the armed struggle of 1946–51. Born into a family of landlords, Swarajyam entered the struggle against the Nizam by the time she was eleven years old. (At one point, the Hyderabad government announced a prize of R10,000 on her head.) The memoir traces her family’s initiation into communist politics, her training in the Andhra Mahasabha, the beginning of the peasant struggle in Telangana, her campaign work and her role as a prominent dalam leader. When a family came under the influence of the sangham, the women of the family also invariably took part in the movement. Swarajyam, however, recognises the way backgrounds shaped the reasons women had for joining the movement. While upper-caste women joined the movement to protest traditional family structures, forced marriages and the absence of property rights, she writes, women from marginalised communities joined to fight feudal oppression. “Women who work for a daily

courtesy arjun reddy

Historical accounts of women in the Telangana movement are typically marked by a certain valorisation of their sacrifices, while the history of the movement itself tends to be hagiographic. wage face exploitation similar to the men in their families. In addition to this, they face the brunt of domination of men at home leaving them in a helpless situation even when facing domestic abuse. The movement gave these women the strength to fight both these issues.” It is also worth considering other recent memoirs that are not directly connected to the Telangana movement itself but are nevertheless critical revelations. For instance, Namburi Paripurna’s autobiography Velugu Daarulalo—In the Paths of Light—released in 2017, is a narrative centred around the experiences of Dalits within communist politics. Her account provides a rare glimpse into the life of a Dalit activist and prolific writer. Paripurna offers an enduring critique of caste and the ways in which it permeates personal and party relationships. Even as she acknowledges the progress communist politics enabled for women,

she identifies how patriarchy and casteism plague the party and its politics. The party facilitated her inter-caste marriage with an upper-caste leader, Dasari Nagabhushana Rao, upon his proposal. A few years down the line, when Rao refused to speak to her or their three children, she wondered, “Would he have been affectionate with the kids if they belonged to the same caste? Maybe it is his deeply entrenched casteism and her own caste position which led to his contempt and carelessness for their kids?” Rao went back to his first wife, whom Paripurna and party members had not known about previously. Gita Ramaswamy’s memoir Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary, published this year, recalls her experiences and participation in student communist politics in the context of Naxalbari and the Emergency. While she was a student at Hyderabad’s Osmania University, she was drawn to campus politics, which had been influenced by the murder of the popular student leader George Reddy. Although chronologically much ahead of the previously mentioned memoirs, Ramaswamy’s book covers the after effects of a lapsed land struggle in Telangana, the various internal fissures that led to the disintegration of the CPI and the consequent circumstances that shaped her work during and after the Emergency. It follows her journey from an orthodox Brahmin household to her life as a rebellious college student during a tumultuous era and her later disillusionment with the party’s internal functioning. Ramaswamy established the Hyderabad Book Trust, in 1980, before setting up the Ibrahimpatnam Taluka Vyavasaya Coolie Sangham, an organisation that worked to implement existing land rights and laws. In her memoir, she is conscious of her privilege as a university-educated Brahmin woman, offering a critique of herself as well as the elision of caste within the Left:

opposite page: The communist leader Mallu Swarajyam, on the left, sitting with Manikonda Satyavati, during a meeting held by a women’s organisation.

Caste for me, and for many like me, did not become a serious question until 1985, when the Karamchedu massacre took place. Class was what occupied our minds. Till then, caste, unlike class, was relegated to the quirks of one’s private life; a set of idiosyncrasies. Caste, even in radical left circles, was not an ideological issue. It was everywhere, yet rarely discussed. historical accounts of women in the Telangana movement are typically marked by a certain valorisation of their sacrifices, while the history of the movement itself tends to be hagiographic. The memoirs, therefore, offer a glimpse, even if a limited one, into the movement as experienced by women and the tricky relationship between the SEPTEMBER 2022

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For many generations my mother’s people had worked as slaves in the landlord’s houses. By then three generations had existed like this. My mother, her mother and grandmother, had all been slaves in the same landlord’s house … My mother’s sister also lived in that house and she died there … None of them was married … If we combed our hair neatly and walked down the street, if any dora saw us, he would not leave us alone. Along with her husband, Appanna, Kamalamma left their child behind and joined the movement to escape vetti and the frequent attacks the Razakars and the police. As a member of the cultural squad, she travelled across villages, campaigning through songs, plays and stories. She later worked as 90

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communist movement and women’s political participation in Telangana. More importantly, they introduce us to women who made extraordinary choices, and provide insights into their motivations, aspirations, struggles, confusions and political understanding. To an extent, it is true that women in upper-caste, upper-class or zamindar families were introduced to the movement by the men in their families. However, the assumption that women flocked to the movement solely as “supporters of their husbands and brothers” does not hold true through these first-person accounts, which instead indicate that several women made independent choices to redefine their lives and futures on their own terms. For many women from marginalised castes who joined the struggle, such as Ailamma, land was at the centre of the struggle, but so were the objectives of subverting caste and gender-based oppression. “My caste work did not interest me,” Ailamma recalls in We Were Making History. “There were no farmhands and no sons. No daughtersin-law, no daughters. I used to work in the fields, sowing, reaping, I used to go round for everything, used to go about quite well, used to do quite well.” The repression they faced was the cruellest, at the intersection of caste and gender under the feudal structure, as Kamalamma, a dalam member recollects:

a nurse, providing first aid to injured comrades. The women whose voices are captured in the form of memoirs are not blind to caste. Their interactions with caste come at various points during their work within the party and outside their usual circles. Despite a sense of solidarity, there is also a palpable distance apparent between women of different castes when they narrate their THE CARAVAN

experiences. Those coming from uppercaste families often remark at their independence and fearlessness. It often comes across as a surprise to find such strength among women they thought required their saving and enlightenment. “Madiga women were more independent than the other women I knew,” Ramaswamy writes. Mingling among people who were unaware of their caste locations is a recurring theme in upper-

words and bullets · books caste women’s memoirs. During an election campaign in 1952, Koteswaramma and Tapi Rajamma, another member of the cultural squad, travelled to villages in Krishna district. The landlady who was arranging lunch for them was instructed to not cook eggs, expecting a Brahmin. She arranged segregated leaf plates for Koteswaramma inside her house, while leaving Rajamma and an accompanying driver to eat at the porch. She assumed that Koteswaramma was a Brahmin and Rajamma was a Mala. Koteswaramma quickly corrected the landlady, indicating that, in fact, it was Rajamma who was the Brahmin. Experiences related to caste often feature as a second-hand experience or a later reflection across memoirs of upper-caste women, usually limited to instances where they speak of the experiences of women from different communities than their own. Ailamma and Kamalamma’s stories in We Were Making History offer us a vibrant flavour of the overall movement and their unique position within it. It is also true that capturing such voices, which are not traditional and whose narratives span many themes, can be challenging, as opposed to the more linear and thematic interview that is plausible with educated upper-caste, upper-class urban women. For instance, the writers of We Were Making History acknowledge the tremendous difficulty in capturing narratives, especially those considered “unfamiliar and marginalised,” by way of transcribing or translating into conventional formats in English or perhaps even what is considered “standard” Telugu. Unfortunately, this leaves us with a disproportionate absence of firstperson narratives and histories of Bahujan women in the Telangana People’s Struggle. in march 1943, 13-year-old Namburi Paripurna received a letter from Darsi Chenchaiah through the CPI office in Bezawada (later known as Vijayawada). Chenchaiah offered to sponsor her education, promising to enrol her in a hostel in Madras. He asked her parents to “send her along with a pamphlet with the hammer and sickle symbol” so that she could be recognised at the railway station. “I was schooled by the communist party,” Paripurna once said in an interview. She grew up immersed in communist ideology, particularly because of her elder brother Namburi Srinivasarao, a well-known revolutionary who was detained for seven years before the Second World War. The communist leaders Mahidhara Jaganmohan Rao and D Parthasarathi became involved in Paripurna’s education too. As early as 1937, there was an understanding among communists that there was a need to focus on providing political training to women. They believed that the wives and sisters of sangham

members were central to ensuring that a specific political consciousness permeated into the domestic sphere. Popular leaders such as Chandra Rajeswara Rao delivered classes on socialism and the Soviet Union for women from all over Telugu regions. When the ban on the CPI was lifted, in 1942, it decided to involve women in party activities. A mandate was issued, requiring “wives and sisters” of all party workers to join the movement. The availability of the writing of Gurajada Apparao and Maxim Gorky also opened up a new literary world and progressive sensibilities. Women who had previously been restricted by traditional boundaries began accessing newspapers and books, organised themselves into mahila sanghams and launched campaigns for women’s education, widow remarriage, a ban on child marriages and domestic abuse across districts. Swarajyam, who came from a feudal family that observed the purdah system for women, joined the classes in Vijayawada. Kondapalli Koteswaramma, along with other women, sold copies of the party’s weekly magazine Prajashakti on the streets of Vijayawada. Women travelled from one village to another as campaigners for vetti abolition, widow remarriage, divorce and property rights. They also held training for women on giving birth, healthcare and better childbirth facilities. Communist political self-fashioning overlooked the unique placement of women in the social and personal spheres, however. Despite attempts to advocate for an equal society, women participating in the party activities had to deal with confusion, gossip and hostility due to the lack of consistent

opposite page: Kondapalli Koteswaramma, whose autobiography Nirjana Varadhi—A Bridge Abandoned— was published In 2012 by the Hyderabad Book Trust.

Memoirs offer a glimpse into the movement as experienced by women and the tricky relationship between the communist movement and women’s political participation in Telangana. policies across the party regarding issues such as the role of women within the party as well as relationships, sexuality and motherhood. Moreover, women faced moralistic judgement as a result of their association with the party. In We Were Making History, Manikonda Suryavathi recalls how, during a campaign in a village, men and women abused them: “Like vagabond widows, is it not enough that you are ruined? Have you come to ruin our children also?” Despite encountering such hostility, there is also a strong recognition across the narratives featured in the book that the party enSEPTEMBER 2022

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words and bullets · books opposite page: Kondepudi Radha, Tapi Rajamma and Veramachinene Sarojini, pictured here from left to right, who performed Burrakatha, a popular folk-art form involving performances of epic poetry, in various villages.

abled their liberation, giving them the confidence to mingle equally with men, participate in political discussions and organise themselves. Women not only participated in economic struggles but also brought a wide range of skills to the cadre. Komarraju Acchamamaba, a Londontrained doctor, trained multiple women in the party to become nurses. She held training sessions on women’s health, family planning, childcare and maternity care. Women performed Burrakatha—a popular folk-art form involving performances of epic poetry—and wrote and sang songs and plays traveling from one village to another. While in hiding, they worked as cooks and caretakers of the safehouses for their comrades, besides working as copiers and couriers. Women also demanded that the leadership allow them to work in the dalams in the forests. They underwent extreme physical and mental torture at the hands of the Razakars,

Song and performance hold a crucial place in the existing documentation of women in the Telangana movement, and this is especially true for Bahujan communities. police and the Indian Army. Women in dalams made difficult decisions—they underwent unsafe abortions or gave away newborn children as they moved from one place to another. Numerous women suspected of being sangham sympathisers underwent torture. As the movement progressed, gender inequalities posed difficulties for the leadership. While there was some acknowledgement of this problem, as Sundarayya reflects almost two decades later in his book, solutions to combat it seemed distant over multiple iterations of the movement. The issue of marriage, for instance, became an uncomfortable question within the party. CPI leaders “arranged” several marriages among party members, and inter-caste marriages held in a communist fashion with exchange of garlands were encouraged. Koteswaramma was married to Kondapalli Sitaramayya. Namburi Paripurna was married to Dasari Nagabhushana Rao. Some of these marriages later led to estrangement and abandonment, for which the party had no solutions. Life underground was further complicated with young unmarried men and women and “some who had left their wives behind” living in close quarters. This led to uncomfortable circumstances for women such as S Sugunamma. “We thought they were all like our brothers,” she later recalled in We 92

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Were Making History. “Two or three men wanted to use me. Some of them were married. I felt greatly troubled that Party people could be like this.” After considering suggestions by the party and her family, she decided that the only way to deal with this would be to accept the proposal to marry a 30-year-old party member. As women left their unhappy marriages and families to join the movement in the hope for a new life, the party worried about its reputation. It could not support them and did not know how to approach the problem. Women were active members of the dalams during the armed struggle. Moving as part of the squads, which were deeply entrenched in the forests, became difficult for women during the armed phase of the struggle in the late 1940s, especially for those who were pregnant. Kamalamma, for instance, left her son behind before joining the cultural squad. But when she became pregnant, she was faced with the choice of either giving her child away or getting an abortion. She recalls that the leadership told her, “Kamalamma, either you must give this child away to someone else or else you must leave us and go live in a village with your son … if you go, they will chop you up to bits, they will put chilli powder on you. They will torture you, they will kill you. It’s your decision. Think about it.” Kamalamma decided to give the child away. Even though women were considerably active in the squads, they were conscious of the difference in treatment between male and female cadre. According to Sundarayya’s account, a squad member named Narasamma observed, “We women are still being looked down upon with the old outlook, that we are inferior. Any slips or mistakes we commit, our leaders come down heavily on us. It becomes a subject of open gossip and scandal. We must be guided and improved and not derided.” Narasamma articulates the importance of proper training and protection for the cadres. The responsibility of children and caretaking was often looked at as solely an issue for women to contend with. When state repression increased, Dronavalli Anasuya was arrested. In the absence of external support, she fought to keep her children, a two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son, with her in jail. They fell very ill because of the lack of rations for children in jail, and had to be taken to Madras. When they came out of jail, the boy was two years old. Sundarayya’s account is perhaps the only source that documents the involvement of Koya women in the movement. In the Godavari forest area, several Koya women were part of the dalams as couriers, organisers and commanders. In Nalgonda and Warangal, Lambadi women joined the movement in protest against the oppression under the land-

courtesy k lalita

words and bullets · books

lords. Kamalamma recollects her squad commander Venkatamma, a Koya woman, “who wore men’s clothes, put her weapon on her shoulder and went with [the men]. No one could discover that she was a woman.” Even though the CPI introduced the concept of equality among its cadres, it was not always an easy one to implement. While educated women formed mahila sanghams in every district, these sanghams held no place for peasant women and labourers. In one instance, the women in Guntur went as far as denying entry to women who paid subscriptions of one anna to join the sangham, as opposed to the four annas paid by upper-class women. There was limited acknowledgement of peasant women during the movement within and outside the party, despite their contributions to the movement at great risk to their lives and livelihoods. As Dayani Priyamvada, who travelled across villages mobilising women and discussing wage problems, childcare and family problems, as well as preparing families to provide proper

shelter to the cadre, remarked in We Were Making History, “The women who came forward like that would feed the comrades, giving up their own meals. They used to feed us, carry letters for us, get beaten up because of us, and yet there was no question of membership for these women.” song and performance hold a crucial place in the existing documentation of women in the Telangana movement, and this is especially true for Bahujan communities. There is a traditional culture of storytelling about women’s social and domestic lives, through songs that cover a range of themes: cradle songs, harvest songs, as well as Bathukamma and Burrakatha songs. Consequently, when the movement attempted to spread its campaign, songs became a key vehicle for speaking of these issues to the masses. Several women, such as Koteswaramma, Swarajyam, Rajamma and Paripurna, joined the movement and gave performances as they travelled. They articulated their campaign SEPTEMBER 2022

messages in local idiom, through Bathukamma and Burrakatha performances. Koteswaramma, along with Tapi Rajamma, was part of one such Burrakatha troupe that travelled and performed across villages and invited women into the movement. Ninnu abalanu vaaru nirvinnulai chooda, paara chetanu battave chellamma, matti tattanu ettave chellammaa Lift the shovel in your hands, little sister, lift the basket of mud, little sister, and stagger those who think that you are weak “Although there were a few songs in general at the time, the tunes sung by the people there were not like usual songs,” Swarajyam writes in Na Maate Thupaki Thoota. “We did not know the right language. … In those days, Dalit and Bahujan women sang songs that were sung at night. How beautiful were they on moonlit nights? Women 93

words and bullets · books sing on many subjects, be it gods or their lives, their troubles at home and outside.” Song became the medium of the movement and its calls to action. Troupe members composed songs in local styles weaving stories typically starting with the atrocities committed by the landlords and the nizam and ending with the communist call to the revolution. Slowly, these songs also became drivers and a way for women to document the movement in the villages. Women often sang this popular cradle song written about Ailamma: Naizaamu rajyana uyyalo, nalgonda rajyana uyyalo vetti chakaldamma uyyalo, ettaina manishamma uyyalo karigipoye manasu uyyalo, odigipoye gunam uyyalo palakurtilona uyyalo, gattide ailamma uyyalo samgambu pettimdi uyyalo, dorala sangate chusindi uyyalo

Folk songs later proved to be a time capsule of sorts, containing many of the stories of Bahujan women in the movement, and they continue to present an alternative to the mainstream written mode of narration. They represent the social, cultural and political experiences and aspirations of women in a way that is accessible but absent from mainstream narratives. by the end of 1951, the CPI leadership called for an abrupt withdrawal of the Telangana People’s Struggle. Confusion and a sense of betrayal permeate the accounts of several women. A sense of immense respect for the party and its discipline is coupled with a disorienting lack of understanding about why

courtesy wikimedia commons

Under Nizam rule, uyyalo, in Nalgonda district, uyyalo,

Vetti chakalamma, uyyalo, she was a tall woman, uyyalo, She has a melting heart, uyyalo, she mingled with everyone uyyalo, In Palakurti, uyyalo, she was strong, uyyalo She set up a sangham, uyyalo, she fought the landlords, uyyalo

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the movement was called off. Even Mallu Swarajyam, who was dubbed the iron lady of Telangana, struggled to cope with the sudden shift. “When the struggle was over they decided that the unmarried women should go and marry, the married ones should go back to their families and the men should study law,” she recalls. “We didn’t have a say at all. Till then we never thought of families or children or of holding on to them!” She adds that: the question came up of why it was always the women who had to make the sacrifices. The reply was “if you consider this struggle as a whole though it is a struggle of the working classes, the peasantry is also involved and they are making sacrifices that will ultimately benefit the proletariat. That is how the women should also regard this sacrifice.” It was difficult to swallow this. ... What did we fight for all these days? ... But gradually it became necessary for us to give it up. We never got the freedom we wanted.

words and bullets · books For some women, the expectation for them to return to their previous lives also provoked them to reflect. Priyamvada, for instance, writes, “But repression came so soon that we never had the time to question whether that equality was there in the Party itself!” Many women had hoped to find work after returning to their previous lives. Even within the gendered roles that the party offered them and the roles they forced the party to include them in, women expected to build on their learnings and contributions. Women previously involved in campaigning, till the movement was called off in 1951, wondered whether there were programmes for them to participate in and contribute to. Sugunamma, who realised she was left with no money, property or jewels, was shocked when she was asked to stay at home by party leaders. “What! They’ve used us for so long and now say stay at home,” she recalls thinking. “How could they even understand what the situation was like at home. How could one even tell them? What suffering! What mental torture!” Women took up odd jobs, trained to work as nurses and teachers or returned to agricultural labour to sustain themselves and their families. Koteswaramma joined the programme for widows at the Andhra Mahila Sabha. Kamalamma left with her children while her

While it is true that the stakes were especially high for Bahujan women associated with the movement, violence has become the defining factor in reductive descriptions of their involvement, whittling down their role to one of victimhood. husband was in jail, sold their house and “virtually went begging from house to house to keep her children fed and clothed.” Swarajyam went back to domesticity, wondering whether the birth of her child was the “end of her political career.” Paripurna took up a job as a teacher to support her children. Gita Ramaswamy reflected in her poignant foreword to Koteswaramma’s memoir: Those who have worked in radical movements but have been forced into inactivity due to various reasons face great unhappiness—a fact often not acknowledged. Nervous breakdowns and depression are very common. Those who leave are unable to return to their past lives and, very

often, their families do not want them either. They are unable to become steady wage-earners due to lack of qualifications and experience, being too old for the job market and having a radical reputation behind them. Their personal relations remain in the shadow of the party or the movement where their friends were. When they leave all this behind, there are few people to share their grief with. Their values of fighting for change, organising people, practising compassion and selflessness become out of place, and they find it difficult to accept the outside world’s values of consumerism, commercialism and so on. What they need is time. Time heals and it gives them the ability to make the change, to attune themselves to fighting for change in the small world around them, to help others in their little areas, and to make the necessary compromises with the revisionist world around them. On the other hand, peasant women lamented as they were left with little to no land. The returns of the movement seemed scarce for the women involved after the withdrawal. The sangham that they nurtured and fed disappeared. Ailamma, for instance, whose actions had sparked the movement, wondered, “Even if they fought for land, do I have land now?” Gajjela Balamma from Akkirajupalli, who lost her husband, a party member, to Razakar violence, did not mince her words in disappointment: “They speak of faith and loyalty don’t they? Then will I get even this handful of rice [today]?” The stories of these women, ranging from memoirs to oral accounts with an unconventional narrative style, are largely missing from the mainstream public imagination. Bahujan women who formed the significant base of the people’s movement go unacknowledged in their contribution and their aspirations remain unaccounted for. While legends of women such as Ailamma and Swarajyam have been popular as “heroines” of the struggle, there remain innumerable rich and spirited stories across towns and villages of Telangana absent from mainstream media. However, capturing more narratives of women who were in the villages and active on the field is critical too. Perhaps there is an immediate need to capture their voices and stories in an idiom that is home to their spirit. As Swarajyam remarked in We Were Making History, “There are hundreds of people like Ailamma. Their history has vanished without trace. Who can do this? Only people like us. Only the people who took part can do it. My life never gave me the chance—to listen to the radio, to read books, to take up the pen and write. I worked twenty-four hours in the field.” s SEPTEMBER 2022

opposite page: Guerilla fighters involved in the Telangana movement, in May 1951. The struggle had started as a people’s movement against atrocities committed by feudal landlords. In its later phases, it took the shape of an armed struggle through dalams— guerrilla squads.

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THE BOOKSHELF

THE EDUCATION OF YURI

NIGHTS OF PLAGUE

Jerry Pinto

Orhan Pamuk

Jerry Pinto’s newest novel, set in Bombay in the 1980s, revolves around the character Yuri Fonseca from Mahim. It explores themes including friendship, adolescence, love, politics and loss.

Pamuk’s newest novel is set in the 1900s against the backdrop of a deadly plague on an imaginary island named Mingheria. As many refuse to quarantine, and tensions escalate between different communities, the book delves into themes that speak to our times.

speaking tiger, S599, 408 pages

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BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

LIBERALISED INDIA, POLITICISED MIDDLE CLASS AND SOFTWARE PROFESSIONALS

WRITINGS ON THE INDIAN HILLS Edited by Ruskin Bond and Bulbul Sharma

Anshu Srivastava

An anthology that brings together forty-one pieces of writing about hill stations and towns in India, including by the authors Jim Corbett and Keki Daruwalla, which provide insights into the regions’ complex histories, communities, flora and fauna.

This volume examines technological developments, the emergence of the middle class in India. It does this through a close study of software professionals that analyses their identities, political convictions, notions of democracy and contribution to civil society.

speaking tiger, S699, 432 pages

routledge, india, S995, 164 pages

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THE BOOKSHELF

BUILDING A FREE INDIA

THE SHAPING OF MODERN CALCUTTA

DEFINING SPEECHES OF OUR INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT THAT SHAPED THE NATION

THE LOTTERY COMMITTEE YEARS, 1817-1830 Ranabir Ray Choudhury

Edited by Rakesh Batabyal

A collection of historic speeches by figures associated with India’s freedom struggle as well as its Constituent Assembly. It includes speeches by BR Ambedkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu and Maulana Azad, among others.

This volume, based on archival material, traces the impact of the Calcutta Lottery Committee on the city between 1817 and 1830, studying how, among other things, it built major roads across the northern and central parts of the city.

speaking tiger, S599, 368 pages

niyogi books, S1,250, 516 pages

THE LAST WHITE MAN

THE OTHER IN THE MIRROR

Mohsin Hamid

STORIES FROM INDIA AND PAKISTAN Edited by Sehyr Mirza Illustrations by Priya Kuriyan

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel follows the protagonist Anders, from an unnamed American town, who wakes up to find his white skin has turned brown. Soon reports emerge of similar transformations, and through the unrest that follows the novel reflects on race, conflict and fiction itself.

This anthology of twenty stories compiles writing by authors from India and Pakistan, including Gulzar, Anushka Ravishankar, Shazaf Fatima Haider, Farrukh Nadeem and Ranjit Lal, and explores themes such as loss, divides and discrimination.

penguin random house india, S599, 192 pages

yoda press, S595, 234 pages SEPTEMBER 2022

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cpa media pte ltd / alamy photos

Editor’s Pick

on 21 september 1898, conservative opponents of the Qing emperor Guangxu, led by his aunt Cixi (above), seized power in a coup d’état. Cixi was a consort of the emperor Xianfeng and the mother of his only son, Tongzhi, who ascended to the throne, in 1861, at the age of six. A few months later, along with the senior consort Ci’an and Xianfeng’s half-brother Gong, she orchestrated a coup that deposed the regency council and ruled in her son’s name until his eighteenth birthday. Following Tongzhi’s death, in 1875, she adopted her sister’s threeyear-old son and declared him emperor. The triumvirate again assumed the regency. Ci’an died in 1881. After

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dismissing Gong, three years later, Cixi ruled alone. In 1889, when Guangxu came of age, Cixi nominally relinquished power but continued to influence policy. The Qing army’s defeat in 1895 to Japan, which had undergone three decades of modernisation under the emperor Meiji, sparked a reform movement among the educated classes in China. Guangxu’s advisors, most of whom were loyal to Cixi, resisted proposals for reforms until 1898, when the threat of the empire being partitioned by Western powers seemed imminent. On 11 June that year, after appointing several leading reformists as his advisors, Guangxu began issuing a series of edicts—which came

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to be known as the Hundred Days’ Reform—establishing a constitutional monarchy, abolishing civil-service examinations, overhauling the education system, adopting rapid industrialisation and modernising the military. Cixi did not initially oppose the reforms, but conservative officials sought her intervention by arguing that the edicts would jeopardise the empire. After they uncovered an alleged plot to remove her from power, Guangxu was placed under house arrest and several leading reformists were executed. Cixi repealed most of the edicts. She died in 1908, a day after Guangxu was allegedly poisoned to death while still in her custody.