Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2015 i The Caravan

AS HE STRUGGLED TO READ the first lesson in his Marathi textbook, Swapnil Keye Wadde tugged repeatedly at a frayed handle of the thick nylon carrying bag he uses for school. Rucksacks are an extravagance for children here in Midadapalli, a small village deep within a swathe of east Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district with a strong Naxal presence. When I visited, on a mid-December morning, Wadde, seated in a multi-grade classroom at the village’s government middle school, pored laboriously over the words, failing to recognise even individual letters. He was not exceptional in this. Another student, Sapna Wachami, sat silent when I asked her to read out the word “metre,” written in Marathi on a flashcard. A large chart of the Devanagiri alphabet on one wall had clearly not helped the…

BY THE TIME the rath yatra arrived on a cold January morning in Jawalakhel, in the south of Kathmandu, it was an hour late. A man dressed in a daura suruwal—traditional Nepali Brahmin garb—had been apologising profusely to a waiting congregation of about 250 people, trying to keep them occupied. At one point, a demonstration had marched past double-file, raising expectations that the rath had arrived; it turned out to be a protest by the city’s street vendors. When it did appear, the procession was unmistakable. The rath itself was a small cargo truck, superimposed with an oversize cow sculpture painted generously with religious iconography, and with three white plastic horses attached to its front. Two jeeps followed, one disguised as a Hindu temple and the other a Buddhist stupa,…

IN SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR, a five-judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court of India rendered a momentous verdict in a case that dealt with important aspects of the judiciary’s independence. The petitioner, the Madras Bar Association, challenged the central government over the National Tax Tribunal Act, 2005, under which a purportedly independent body had been established to rule on substantial questions of tax law. The petitioner argued that such tribunals, a relatively modern phenomenon, impinged on the constitutionally sanctioned authority of the country’s high courts, and they were not competent to decide on matters of law. More damagingly, the petitioner asserted that such tribunals would be under the control of the executive branch of the government. Given the weighty legal issues at stake, the ruling would have proved noteworthy whichever…

ON MANY MORNINGS, especially in winter, a pall of smoke hangs over the villages of Palwal district in Haryana, a landscape of tractors, brick kilns and new colleges. It’s the haze of thousands of hearth fires burning in the courtyards of homes, boiling dal, baking rotis, and producing fine particles of soot and other pollutants at levels as high as that of Delhi—arguably the world’s most polluted city, only a few hours’ distance from here. Indian cities don’t have perfect services. Electricity may vanish for hours, and piped water is supplemented by tankers. Yet the urban elite can take one thing for granted: cheap cooking gas. Those who’ve grown up and live in well-off city homes can hardly imagine life before LPG: the long hours over slow stoves, the smells…

A BOY PRAYS AT A 1994 RALLY organised by the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging—the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB—in Rustenburg. Now in the North West Province of South Africa, the city was once part of the South African Republic—an independent Boer state that, along with the neighbouring Orange Free State, was annexed by the British at the end of the Second Boer War, in 1902. The AWB was formed in 1973, with the purpose of re-establishing a Boer-Afrikaner republic. Starting with only seven members, it attracted thousands more through the 1980s. Its leader, Eugène Terre’Blanche, preached a racist philosophy that prohibited, among other things, interracial marriage, the mixing of different races in a group, and political rights for Indians, blacks and mixed-raced people. The AWB was party to much of the violence…

AT LAST NOVEMBER’S CAMEL MELA in Pushkar, the animals didn’t look happy. Some stamped restlessly and brayed in distress, and others sat bored on folded limbs. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a global champion of pastoralists’ rights and a Pushkar regular, picked her way through the annual throng of herders and tourists. Dark glasses shielded her blue eyes against the desert sun. “This is the lowest turnout of camels at Pushkar,” she said, in her slight German accent. “I don’t think there are more than 2,500 camels. In previous years, there were 50,000 camels. The draft bill has definitely scared everyone.” The Rajasthan Camel Bill, pending before the state legislature, proposes a blanket ban on camel slaughter, and on the export of camels from the state. Its provisions are meant to stem a…

ON THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON of 13 December, two large public events jostled for space in Manhattan. One was the Millions March, a peaceful demonstration of outrage at police violence against “people of colour”—most notably the fatal shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, in a suburb of St Louis in August, and the choking and subsequent death by heart attack of a 43-year-old black man, Eric Garner, in the New York borough of Staten Island in July. In both cases, the civilians were unarmed. Grand juries in Missouri and New York had recently refused to indict the white officers involved in their killings. Chanting “Black lives matter!,” the marchers wound through downtown streets to Foley Square, near City Hall. Close by, revellers in Santa Claus suits and skimpy elf costumes…

FEW ISSUES ARE AS EMOTIONALLY CHARGED as the state’s involvement in an individual’s right to take his or her own life, particularly when faced with circumstances, medical or otherwise, that make continuing to live untenable. Yet while India’s legislative and judicial branches are poised to make momentous decisions relating to the right to die with dignity, the debate about euthanasia has been relatively muted. This is due, in part, to the complexity of the matter, and the lack of clarity on the legal status of euthanasia. Four years ago, the Supreme Court laid out guidelines to regulate passive euthanasia, bringing India into a select group of countries that, explicitly or implicitly, have legal precedent for the withdrawal of life-prolonging medical treatment for terminally ill patients. In 2011, in a landmark…

LAST SPRING, the Italian photographer Nicola Zolin joined a group of about 20 young men and women from Tehran on a beach camp on the island of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf. They spent a day swimming and partying, savouring a freedom from the social control of the capital. But the good times did not last. On the second day, police arrived, and demanded that they leave. Zolin, as the sole foreigner, was singled out for particular attention. He recalled being screamed at: how dare he be in the company of Iranian girls in such a situation? The camp broke up. Zolin was on a three-month trip right across Iran, moving from the country’s north-west to its deep south-east, meeting and photographing ordinary Iranians—particularly urban youth. His approach, as on…

ABOUT THE POEM The Tamil poet Kutti Revathi is widely recognised as the maker of a vital new idiom, both within the poetics and politics of the Tamil literary tradition and in that borderless space we now think of as “world poetry.” As these two poems demonstrate, Revathi can take up that oldest of poetic subjects, the sea, and generate from its agitation a completely original and convincing linguistic, metaphorical and ideational schema. Her image, in ‘First Mother,’ of raging waves as a sign of the sea’s search for justice is unforgettable, as is the much more muted, but no less dextrous, metamorphosis of the sea into a fish. The poem’s movement, at first world-spanning but then content to work itself into something very small and humble, is paralleled in…

THE TRIAL OF ANDIMUTHU RAJA came to an impasse on 27 January 2013 when his lawyer, Sushil Kumar, was questioning Goolam Vahanvati, then the attorney general of India. Raja, the former telecom minister, had claimed that the policy decisions that led to his indictment in what is now called the 2G spectrum scam were not taken independently. Vahanvati was aware of the changed policy, he said; and so was Pranab Mukherjee, the head of the Empowered Group of Ministers responsible for spectrum allocation. Since Vahanvati denied that any such discussions had taken place between himself, Mukherjee and Raja, it was impossible to establish the truth of the matter. Only three people, Kumar said with a dramatic flourish, were aware of the details. “One is him,” he said, pointing to Vahanvati.…

ONE AFTERNOON IN JUNE LAST YEAR, the union health minister, Dr Harsh Vardhan, paid a visit to the offices of the National AIDS Control Organisation, or NACO, in the heart of central Delhi. He was received by Dr VK Subburaj, then the secretary of the health ministry’s Department of AIDS Control, under which NACO functioned. The senior officials of the organisation who were present assumed that the visit was a routine meet-and-greet and photo opportunity with the new minister. Some of the gathered officials made a presentation about the AIDS programme, after which Vardhan addressed the group. The staff expected him to make a standard statement about the ministry’s commitment to the organisation. To their surprise, however, the minister took the opportunity to air his own views on the matter…

A VIDEO DOCUMENTING “The Negotiating Table,” Mona Hatoum’s landmark performance piece, opens on a breathing, bloodied mass of what looks like flesh, pulsing under a layer of plastic. Over 20 minutes, the camera slowly zooms out to reveal the Palestinian artist’s body, constrained by surgical gauze, foil and cling film. Hatoum’s original performance was accompanied by snippets of politicians’ speeches promising to bring peace to the Middle East. The video’s grainy quality and glacial pan heighten an intense sense of foreboding: Is the performer alive or dead? Is that bulbous red mess her entrails? I might have pegged the piece as a comment on recent events in West Asia, until I checked the label accompanying the video at In Order to Join: The Political in a Historical Moment—a hefty exhibition…