Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i The Caravan

Transwomen have been a part of the Indian society for centuries, but they struggle with social acceptance. During the British era, they came to be associated with crime, which is a bias that continues till today. w w Soniya Pandey was struck by surprise as she saw a WhatsApp forward one afternoon in June 2019. Someone had leaked her application asking her employer, the Indian Railways, to change her name and gender in official records, along with two photos from before and after her sex-change operation. “I pulled up a few of them who were forwarding the message,” she told me. “But how many people could I stop? It was going viral across the country, in the social-media circles of railway groups. So I let it be.” Formerly known as…

In mid April, Adar Poonawala, the CEO of Serum Institute—a manufacturer of immunobiological drugs—announced that it would manufacture a vaccine against COVID-19 being developed at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University. Poonawala appeared on several news outlets and spoke of beginning production of 5 million doses a month of the vaccine by May, and scaling up to 10 million doses a month towards the end of the year. The vaccine had not yet completed clinical trials, but Poonawala said he was taking a risk and committing the company’s resources to start manufacturing the vaccine even before trials had been completed, so that if the vaccine was successful, it could be distributed immediately. In normal circumstances, this announcement would have been seen as premature, and a risky gamble for any company…

With symbols of power, context is everything. Imposing statues that serve to convey authority and set glorious legacies in stone are often placed in front of parliamentary buildings and in grand public squares. So how did a monumental statue of Henry Hardinge, the most powerful man in India from 1844 to 1848, end up in the garden of a home in rural Cambridgeshire? The statue in question is a colossal and striking bronze figure of the former governor general of India on horseback. It was created in the tumultuous year of 1857 to stand on the maidan in front of Government House in Calcutta—then the capital of British India. The British had used Calcutta as their primary trading post from the arrival of the East India Company in 1600, but…

On 6 April, Gandaye Potai, a 22-year-old pregnant woman from the village of Matla in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district, travelled seven kilometres to come to Benur’s early-referral centre—pre-birth waiting rooms. Her due date was four days later, but when the baby did not arrive, she stayed back at the ERC until delivery on 23 April. Pregnant women such as Gandaye have to take long journeys for healthcare facilities in remote tribal areas of the district, which has no proper means of transport or healthcare centres. A joint initiative led by UNICEF, in association with the NGO Saathi Samaj Sevi Sanstha and the district health administration, in the Narayanpur block of the district, has significantly improved the number of institutional deliveries in the region. An Adivasi-dominated district, Narayanpur lacks basic amenities and…

In 1996, Delhi saw a major outbreak of dengue haemorrhagic fever, the worst any city had seen for the disease since Calcutta in 1963. Roughly ten thousand people fell sick, and more than six hundred died. That year, the Delhi municipal corporation set up a unit called Domestic Breeding Checkers to perform important tasks needed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as dengue, chikungunya and malaria. Today, Delhi has 3,500 DBCs. “Our work begins in February every year when we go door-to-door to look for stagnant water in people’s houses and on terraces,” Debanand Sharma, who has been a DBC since the cadre’s inception, told me. “We make them aware of infectious diseases and the way they spread. Whenever needed, we also distribute temephos granules which helps in…

ON A WEDNESDAY EVENING in July 1967, two white police officers dragged a black man, John William Smith, into their precinct building in the city of Newark. Smith, a taxi driver, had just been arrested, for the alleged crime of improperly passing the officers’ car, and had been beaten so brutally that he could not walk. Residents of a housing project saw him dragged in, and a rumour set off: the cops had killed another black man. A crowd formed, and resorted to attacking the precinct building. For five days, violence tore through the city, with a toll of over two dozen lives. Some called it rioting—others a rebellion. That was just one flashpoint of what came to be known as “the long, hot summer of 1967.” The United States…

PHOTO ESSAY / CONFLICT MEN IN CORPORATE SUITS and military outfits, alcoholic drinks perched beside assault rifles—many scenes in the photographer Nikita Teryoshin’s work Nothing Personal–the Back Office of War present a theatre of masculinity. The setting and the actors resemble childhood games with GI Joes, but in this rendition the boys have grown into powerful men, and their toys have evolved from plastic models of soldiers to real missiles and rifles. The performance, no doubt, appears incomplete without a drink in hand. Photographed at various arms-trading fairs across 13 countries, including Poland, Peru and India, Teryoshin’s images take us “behind the curtains” of the global defence business. He began by shooting what he called the biggest fair in Eastern Europe, in Kielce, Poland, in 2016. Teryoshin’s characters are faceless…

THE CLIFFHANGERS Sabin Iqbal Moosa, Thaha, Jahangir and Usman are teenagers faced with having to prove their innocence when they are accused of raping a tourist in a fishing village in Kerala. The journalist Sabin Iqbal’s debut novel explores growing communal tension and religious fault lines, adolescent friendship and life near the sea. ALEPH, R 499, 184 PAGES GAY BOMBAY GLOBALIZATION, LOVE AND (BE)LONGING IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA Parmesh Shahani In this ethnographic memoir, Parmesh Shahani examines his past as well as what he calls the “imagined future” of gay life in India, looking closely at Mumbai, Section 377 and how online communities shaped queer experience. The book, first published in 2008, has been republished as a special edition, with an updated preface and introduction. SAGE SELECT, R 595, 344 PAGES…

Stephen Parshall, Andrew Lynam and William Loomis, arrested in Las Vegas on 30 May by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, allegedly dreamed of starting a bloody rebellion. According to federal prosecutors, the three men, all of whom have military backgrounds, planned to attack a local protest against police brutality in the wake of the killing, five days before, of George Floyd. By prompting police retaliation, they hoped to provoke a violent uprising that would engulf the entire United States, allowing a far-right state to emerge from the ashes. In March, Parshall commented on a Facebook post about the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: “Start. Fomenting. Insurrection.” His profile is adorned with a swastika and a Confederate flag. Parshall, Lynam and Loomis allegedly belong to the boogaloo movement, a…

At the turn of the twentieth century, India experienced the worst of a global plague pandemic, recording 95 percent of the world’s mortality and eventually a loss of over 12 million lives. The years immediately preceding the plague had seen localised experiments in native self-governance. In 1896, as the outbreak peaked, the colonial administration seized the pandemic as evidence of an Indian incapacity for self-rule. It instituted the Epidemic Diseases Act—an emergency measure that further extended its already authoritarian power in the colony. Cities were put under martial rule and military patrols conducted house searches, forcibly evacuating the infected to quarantined hospitals. Driven by public-health beliefs that the disease was a product of native “filth” and “darkness”—rather than zoonotic bacterial origin—they hosed down neighbourhoods with disinfectants, confiscated possessions, and tore…

In UP’s Taprana, Muslims forced to sell houses and flee after police crackdown SUNIL KASHYAP AND SHAHID TANTRAY Fact Check: The lies and misdirections of the Modi government during the coronavirus lockdown AHAN PENKAR The Bihar government failed at nearly every level to prepare for the annual AES epidemic SAURAV KUMAR We live in a castesist Hindu Nationalist state: Arundhati Roy on racism and casteism DALIT CAMERA Caste atrocities in Tamil Nadu have increased nearly fivefold in lockdown: Dalit organisations SUJATHA SIVAGNANAM Online classes a hurdle, future uncertain: UP, Delhi college students SUNIL KASHYAP  ongoing dispute in Ladakh follows repeated silence by Modi on Chinese incursions NILEENA MS His modus-operandi was to create a fear psychosis: Ex-Punjab DGP Sumedh Saini’s shadowy career JATINDER KAUR TUR What Solicitor General Tushar Mehta…

FOR A BIG CROWD at a book launch in late August last year, Amit Shah was the proverbial elephant in the room. The home minister was invited to be the chief guest of the high-security event, held at the NCUI Auditorium in Delhi. The occasion was the launch of The New Delhi Conspiracy—a political thriller, co-authored by the Bharatiya Janata Party MP and national spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi, about a plot to kill a beloved prime minister named Raghav Mohan, known to the people as RaMo. While the audience waited, there were fillers to keep them entertained, including refrains of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and a poetry recitation about Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A massive flex with Amit Shah’s face was on the stage. In some of the photos subsequently shared on…