Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i The Caravan

In the shadow of Pune’s Trump Towers lies a little bakery. Its décor, which includes frosted pillar lamps, cast-iron sconces, Eiffel Tower chairs, and name—Le Flamington, inscribed in calligraphic gilt—are airy homages to the iconic Paris patisserie. What sets it apart from the hundreds of francophilic cafes strewn across the country is the fact that it is owned by a pair of gay men in a long-term relationship, one of them a Muslim, the other a Parsi. The continued audacity of its existence in an atmosphere of minority-silencing makes Le Flamington a monument to food, faith and forbidden love. Khuzaan Dalal, who manages the business, and Taha Khan, who handles the cooking, welcomed me to the bakery, all smiles and good cheer. They offered me their signature dish, known as…

The COVID-19 crisis has been punctuated by frequent protests from healthcare workers—most often nurses and ASHA workers—complaining about unacceptable working conditions, inadequate staffing, low salaries, long hours of work, lack of personal protective equipment and so on. Instead of obtaining any respite, they have faced threats of dismissal or disciplinary action. Other than people clapping for them, and military helicopters showering petals over hospitals at the government’s command, almost nothing has been done for health workers during the pandemic. Faced with a chronic shortage of staff, state governments are looking at short-term measures to shore up the public health system. In May, the Maharashtra government asked Kerala to lend it some nurses for a few months. Tamil Nadu has hired additional nursing staff, as well as doctors, on six-month contracts;…

I FIRST VISITED the neighbourhoods of northeastern Delhi, a city I have known for the past two decades and lived in for the last four years, in February, immediately after the area had witnessed a spate of anti-Muslim violence. I had been photographing protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act across the city in the months prior, and so my visit to this area was a natural progression of the work I had been doing. I had become interested in the protests particularly because they were women-driven forms of resistance, with participants cutting across ages and backgrounds. As I spent time sitting among them, and listening to the speeches, I was moved by their solidarity towards each other and their vision for India. Despite having worked for 15 years on health…

On 11 August, three journalists from The Caravan were following up on a story they had recently reported from northeast Delhi. Two Muslim women and a teenager had stated that they were sexually harassed while attempting to lodge a complaint at the Bhajanpura Police Station. The complaint was about a Hindutva mob—drawn from local residents of the area—that had marched through the neighbourhood, raising communal slogans to celebrate the bhoomi poojan for the construction of the Ram temple, which took place in Ayodhya on 5 August. Instead of registering a first-investigation report, the women told the reporters, the police assaulted them. After speaking to the complainants again for the follow-up story, the reporters had stopped to take photographs of a street adorned with saffron flags. In a matter of minutes,…

{ONE} SHADAB ALAM BEGAN his day as usual on 24 February 2020. He woke up at his house in Old Mustafabad, in northeast Delhi, where he had been living for more than half a decade, and left by 10 am for Samrat Medical Store, on Wazirabad Road, near Brijpuri Chowk. He had worked at the pharmacy for many years, and it was his job to open it every morning. The previous afternoon, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra had delivered an incendiary speech near the Jaffrabad metro station, a few kilometres away. Hundreds of women were staging a sit-in at the station to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed last year by the Narendra Modi government, and the proposed National Register of Citizens. A wave of demonstrations against the…

UNLIKE IN THAT ONE FAIRYTALE where a lost shoe portends a happily-ever-after, in The Tide Will Turn, the photographer Shahidul Alam’s post-pris on almanac of Bangladesh’s political and cultural scene, missing shoes convey a very different sensibility: they are (missing) props for the macabre. On the day of Alam’s presentation at court in 2018, a day after his state-led abduction from home, he was seen in the same kurta he was wearing the night before. In custody of the notorious Detective Branch, which tortured and threatened him, Alam records how his wardens washed and ironed the bloodstained tunic for the court appearance. Politesse must have been the least of the abductors’ priorities, as we all witnessed how the arm of the law gagged and dragged him from a van to…

On 9 July, Nepal’s cable operators suddenly announced that they would stop airing all private news channels operating from India. The decision had come in response to a Zee News show that claimed the Chinese ambassador in Kathmandu, Hou Yanqi, had enticed—or, as they put it, “honey trapped”—Nepal’s prime minister, Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, into acting at China’s behest. The story was one in a series of unsubstantiated, and often absurd, reports that have emerged from a section of Indian media following the territorial disputes of May. Less than a week later, cross-border tensions between the two countries flared up once again, when Oli remarked that the real Ayodhya lies near Birgunj—making Nepal, and not India, the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. More recently, only days after India’s prime…

ON 23 FEBRUARY, as brutal assaults on Muslim communities began in northeastern Delhi, I was in Kashmir. I did not have access to the internet—it was the seventh month of the communication blockade, which, along with an increased military presence and an intensified crackdown on politicians and activists, accompanied the revocation of Article 370 in August 2019. I left home in the morning, to meet journalist friends at the media centre set up by the Indian authorities, the only facility where you can access the internet and social media via a virtual private network. When I reached Polo View, the city centre of Srinagar, a journalist asked me, “What are you doing here? Delhi is burning!” When I asked what had happened, he broke the news of the communal violence…

THE MAN WHO LEARNT TO FLY BUT COULD NOT LAND Thachom Poyil Rajeevan Translated by PJ Matthew This 2013 novel, newly translated, follows the trajectory of its protagonist, KTN Kottoor. Born into affluence in the Malabar district during the British Raj, he gets embroiled in the struggle for Independence, becoming an activist, communist and writer. HACHETTE, R 450, 336 PAGES THE PLAGUE UPON US Shabir Ahmad Mir Mir’s debut novel, written in Kashmir during the recent internet blockade, begins with angry people on the streets, and men in khaki trying to stop them with bullets. It follows the characters Oubaid, Sabia, Tufail and Muzzafar as they encounter betrayal, massacres, militancy, loss and friendship. HACHETTE, R 550, 241 PAGES RESISTING DISAPPEARANCE MILITARY OCCUPATION AND WOMEN’S ACTIVISM IN KASHMIR Ather Zia Ather…