Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i The Caravan

Mohsin Dawar began writing in 2016. His first article, written on the encouragement of an academic friend, was about the new social contract being offered to internally displaced people returning to Waziristan, part of the Pashtun heartland of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, after the Pakistan army successfully concluded operations against militant groups in the region. Dawar had led the Awami National Party’s humanitarian efforts among the IDPs over the past three years, raising money, distributing rations and establishing a school. Now, in his writings and speeches, he raised a number of issues faced by the returnees, including the army’s demolition of thousands of shops in his hometown of Miranshah. Dawar’s great-grandfather had been close to the pre-Independence Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar Khan, whose son founded the ANP. While attending Gomal University, Dawar…

The COVID-19 pandemic has variously been called the “great equaliser”—by the singer Madonna as well as Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York—and a “social leveller,” by the public-health historian David Rosner. The grim reality, based on data from the United Nations and the World Bank, suggests it is anything but. The infection may hit just about anybody, but the pandemic has exacerbated existing social inequalities. In India, the migrant and refugee crisis reflects this grim reality. But less obvious is how unevenly the pandemic has affected men and women. The UN now calls gender inequality the “shadow pandemic.” India ranked 150 out of 153 countries in the health-and-survival parameter of the global gender-gap index in 2019–20. The global gender-gap means that women are less likely to have access to…

An ISRO scientist holding multiple positions, including the deputy director of LPSC and project director of cryogenic systems, at the time. He sought retirement ten days after Rasheeda’s arrest. According to IB reports, Narayanan and Sasikumaran were responsible for the collection of ISRO documents related to “Viking/Vikas engine, composites of Cryo engine and PSLV drawings,” which had to be handed over to one Habibullah Khan on three different dates. He allegedly confessed to being in contact with Khan to transfer Viking technology to Indonesia for 1.5 crore. They were allegedly exploring “the possibility of trade in Russia.” Based on statements made by Narayanan and his childhood friend Abu Baker, the CBI concluded that they did not know any Habibullah Khan and that no such transaction took place. The report states…

The general manager of the Proto Fabrication and Technology Division of the ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre at the time. He allegedly confessed to espionage and described his role in selling ISRO documents, according to the IB and the Kerala police. According to Siby Mathews, who led the Kerala police’s special-investigation team in the case, the police confiscated 34 items, including “secret and confidential reports of LPSC Valiamala,” during its search of Sasikumaran’s house and office. The CBI report confirms that the two Maldivian women were frequently communicating with Sasikumaran and that Rasheeda had had dinner with him twice. The CBI report does not provide a clear explanation about the confiscated documents but instead makes contradictory statements about the accessibility of ISRO documents. The CBI report states that the confession…

A Pakistani national and an employee of Habib Bank in Male who was, according to the IB report, using the bank job as a “cover” for spying. The CBI report states that Interpol found two Mohiyuddins: one an employee at Habib Bank in Colombo since 1990, and another who worked at Habib Bank from 1977 to 1992. The CBI report says that both denied knowing the accused women and other suspects. The closure report does not mention any further investigation into Mohiuddin’s identity or his role in the suspected espionage activities. The CBI relied on the statements of the accused and a few suspects to state that they did not know him.…

A Saudi national who was helping Iraq sell weapons, according to an entry in Rasheeda’s diary. The CBI report confirms the IB and Kerala police’s finding that Jizawi was paying for Hassan and Rasheeda’s hotel accommodation in Thiruvananthapuram. According to the report, he was the chairman of the Riyadh-based Al Foadia General Trading Contracting Company. Based on Jizawi’s statement to the Indian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the CBI said that he was in India to recruit workers and only had an accidental meeting” with Hassan and Rasheeda. The CBI closure report does not mention any independent inquiry into Jizawi’s connection with Hassan and Rasheeda, besides relying on Jizawi’s own statement.…

ON 20 SEPTEMBER, Princeton University’s Hindu Life Program held a discussion titled “Hindu-Americans and the 2020 Elections.” The virtual debate brought together Murali Balaji, the national co-chair of Hindu Americans for Biden, and Jay Kansara, a community organiser for Hindu Voices for Trump. In an electoral cycle marked by bitter partisan divisions, the event marked an unusually polite exchange between two men on opposite sides of the US political aisle. The host of the event, Vineet Chander, was aware that political debates in 2020 had the potential to turn ugly. “We were fully prepared to skip this opportunity if we couldn’t ensure that we had the right people at the table,” Chander said, before introducing Balaji and Kansara. “Murali and Jay are friends. They are former colleagues. Interestingly, both of…

The Chhattisgarh government decided to create a 450-square-kilometre elephant reserve in Lemru, located in Korba district, in 2005. Even though the union environment ministry, which has been releasing funds to state governments under Project Elephant since 1992, sanctioned the project in 2007, the Raman Singh administration shelved the project the following year. Media reports claimed that the decision was taken to facilitate coal mining in Korba, a major industrial hub. The state’s current chief minister, Bhupesh Baghel, decided to go ahead with the project upon assuming office, in December 2018. Wildlife activists and experts believe the reserve will benefit elephants and reduce conflict between the animals and humans. “There is considerable elephant movement in the state from Odisha and Jharkhand due to forest fragmentation and environmental degradation,” Prathmesh Mishra, a…

The compromise of India’s democratic institutions in recent years has been well documented in the national and international media. Since this threat to democracy has come from the executive, people have naturally looked to the judiciary to put the actions of the government under constitutional scrutiny. The characteristic function of a constitutional court is to be counter-majoritarian, so that it ensures the government treats all citizens fairly and not only those who voted it into power. The legitimacy of the courts is derived from independent and effective review of the state’s actions. However, over the last few years, the Supreme Court has failed in performing this primary function. The conduct of the apex court is not an aberration or an unintended mistake, but follows a pattern in which certain tactics…

ONE IN DECEMBER 1994 , MK Dhar, the joint director of the Intelligence Bureau, was travelling with Vijaya Rama Rao, the director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, on a special flight from Delhi to Thiruvananthapuram. Rao and other CBI officials were on their way to formally take over the investigation of a sensational espionage case that had taken political and media discussions in south India by storm. The case involved the suspected transfer of space technology and information about India’s defence establishments in Bangalore to foreign nationals with links to Pakistan and Russia. At the centre were six suspects: two Maldivian women named Mariam Rasheeda and Fauziyya Hassan, two businessmen named K Chandrasekhar and SK Sharma, and, most controversially, two scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation, S Nambi…

The inspector general of police for Kerala’s south zone at the time. Srivastava’s brother Vikram was part of the special protection group of the then prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao. Chandrasekharan and Sasikumaran named him as being central of various transactions of the espionage network, according to the IB reports. He would allegedly provide “necessary protection” and “transportation of documents” to a Russian national named Alexi Vassive. When the CBI questioned him, Srivastava denied being present at the meetings. The CBI alleged that his name was dragged into the case due to the internal politics of the Kerala police. In 1995, the Kerala High Court dismissed the CBI’s claim, stating that there was no evidence to back it up. Srivastava was never arrested. Regarding the tracking of a consignment that…

An Indian representative of Glavkosmos—a subsidiary of Russian state-run space corporation Roscosmos. Rasheeda, Sasikuraman and Hassan named him to the IB and the Kerala police. Chandrasekhar’s role was to allegedly make “infrastructural arrangements, coordination, money collection/conversion into Indian currency and distribution.” The CBI report suggests that Chandrasekhar met Hassan and Rasheeda by accident and agreed to help admit Hassan’s daughter to a Bangalore school. However, the date on the school’s admission records contradicts the CBI’s findings, as the admission was already done three days earlier. The CBI report also states that he was in discussion with Thomas Kurisingal, an exporter, for “sending of communication satellite either to Colombo or South-east Asian countries,” but the report does not mention any further enquiry into this.…

An employee at the Pakistani high commission in Colombo who, according to Hassan’s statement to the IB, asked her to work for him and to “target and cultivate suitable girls/women to be used for their work.” He allegedly gave Hassan three passports—one each for Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, under various names. The CBI report states that investigators showed Rasheeda and Hassan select photographs of 14 employees of the high commission, but they did not recognise any of them. It does not mention any further investigation and accepts their denials at face value.…

A Pakistani national who allegedly contacted Narayanan a man named Abu Baker. “The proposal,” according to the IB report on Narayanan, “was that the drawings of the Viking engine including strap-on-solid stage (S-9 stage), PSLV along with the fabrication drawings and solid propellant composition, have to be divided into three stages and handed over to Habibullah Khan at 3 different dates.” Khan allegedly agreed to pay J 1.5 crore for the whole deal. The CBI report states that Narayanan and Abu Baker denied knowing Khan, and does not mention any further investigation of this claim.…

“I HAVE A STORY I want to share with you,” popped up a message on Grindr, a gay male dating app. I had recently put out a request soliciting interviews for my research work on HIV and “high fun,” a phenomenon involving sexualised drug use. The message was from a copywriter who works in an advertising agency. When I met him at a café in Mumbai, he spoke for two hours straight. The copywriter met a man he described as “really handsome and super smart” at a party in 2018 and the two fell into a “fairy-tale romance.” Three months later, they flew to Amsterdam to get married. Back in India, the Supreme Court had just read down Section 377, a colonial-era law criminalising “carnal acts against the order of…

WHEN WE MEET MAALI ALMEIDA—an intrepid photojournalist and the protagonist of Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead, published earlier this year—he is recently dead. The novel is set in 1989, a time Karunatilaka chose because it was what he calls a “perfect storm of terrors.” The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan army, Indian peacekeepers, members of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party and the state’s death squads were all locked in conflict on Sri Lankan soil, running an obstacle course filled with curfews, bombs, assassinations and abductions. The story is told from Maali’s perspective, as he tries to navigate the convoluted landscape of the afterlife, and reconcile with his own death. He does not remember who his killer is—and so, in fact, has been effectively disappeared, both from…

On 29 December 2019, police in Japan’s Sado Island found the remains of at least five people, including two severed heads, in a wooden boat that had washed ashore. It was the second “ghost boat”—as battered wooden vessels containing the corpses of North Korean fishermen are popularly known in Japan—to wash up at Sado that month. Across the country, over a hundred and fifty ghost boats were found in 2019 alone, and there have been more than five hundred of them in the past five years. The Japanese coast guard stated that it had found over fifty bodies in such vessels last year. Encrusted with shells and algae, these flat-bottomed boats are typically around five metres in length. They have no toilets or beds, and typically contain just a few…

On 6 March, the Indian government reconstituted the Delimitation Commission for Jammu and Kashmir, and for four northeastern states: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Nagaland. Delimitation is the process through which boundaries are redrawn for state assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies, in order to reflect changes in population. This is done on the basis of the preceding census. While the last delimitation exercise was conducted across India between 2002 and 2008, it was held back for these states. Various political actors, especially from Assam, had strongly objected to the use of the 2001 census on the grounds that the National Register of Citizens had not yet been updated. Two shifts under the Modi administration—the revocation of Article 370 and bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories, and the…

A Maldivian national who was working with the country’s National Security Service. The CBI, agreeing with the IB and the Kerala police, said that Rasheeda “was collecting information and contacting various people” who were allegedly planning to overthrow the Maumoon Abdul Gayoom government. According to the IB and the Kerala police, Rasheeda confessed to being in contact with ISI operatives. She allegedly told the IB that she was working as a conduit in intelligence operations for Mohiuddin, a Pakistani employee of Habib Bank in Male. The CBI, in its closure report, relied primarily on information on Rasheeda provided to them by the Ministry of Defence and National Security of Maldives where she was employed. The CBI did not mention any independent investigation into Rasheeda’s suspected links with ISI operatives or…

A Maldivian national who frequently visited India and was in the circle of Ali Nasir, son of the former Maldivian president Ibrahim Nasir. According to the IB reports, Hassan confessed to working for ISI operatives and helping in the transaction of documents and photographs from defence establishments and the ISRO. One of Hassan’s daughters, Nasiha, an employee of Habib Bank, was a conduit for Mohiuddin, according to an IB report. Based on the statements of Hassan and her acquaintances, the CBI concluded that she did not have any role in transaction of documents or money. As in Rasheeda’s case, the CBI relied primarily on information provided by the Maldivian defence ministry, which said Nasiha had worked with Habib bank. The CBI ended the enquiry with the statement that “some years…

A Russian national working for Glavkosmos. According to an IB report, Sasikumaran and Narayanan used to pass documents to Vassive via Srivastava. Chandrasekhar told the IB and the Kerala police that drawings of the Viking rocket engine had been sold to Brazil in 1989–90, for which both Vassive and Narayanan had received payments. Chandrasekhar stated that he introduced Vassive to Sasikumaran. Vassive was allegedly further exploring the possibility of selling Viking technology to Indonesia, Taiwan and Brazil. The CBI ruled out the alleged meeting with Vassive, arguing that the hotel in Thiruvananthapuram named in the IB statement did not exist in 1990. The report does not explain how this rules out the possibility of the alleged meetings held in the city in 1992-93. The report, relying on information given by…

The son of the former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao. His name came up in connection with Hyderabad-based businessman Raveendra Reddy, allegedly involved in deals with Russians. Reddy and Rao were allegedly business partners. According to MK Dhar, a former IB joint director, Narasimha Rao interfered in the case after seeing an in-house working sheet with his son’s name in it. Rao was never questioned by the CBI. Based on Reddy’s statement, the CBI report says that he did not have any business partnership with Rao. The report adds that Reddy admitted to knowing Narayanan and other ISRO scientists, but argued that he was not involved in any business dealings. The report does not mention any further investigation into this.…

A Maldivian national, residing in Sri Lanka at the time, who was named by Rasheeda, Hassan and others during their interrogations. The IB alleged that she was a suspected ISI operative and worked closely with Mohiuddin and Pasha. She allegedly introduced Hassan to Mazhar Khan, an official at the Pakistani high commission in Colombo who was looking for conduits for espionage-related activities. The CBI report says that, although Zuheira was Hassan’s friend and had met Rasheeda, she did not have any connection with the rest of the accused and never participated in the alleged meetings. The report acknowledges that she was in Chennai at the time of the meeting, but says that she was there for a relative’s treatment. Based on the statements of Zuheira and her acquaintance, the CBI…

THE CURSE Salma Translated by N Kalyan Raman A young woman is caught between her desire for marriage and a dark family history that haunts her like a curse; a woman recounts how access to toilets, particularly during her periods, was mired in shame; the arrival of a television from Dubai creates a stir in the village. The stories in The Curse are loosely set in the Muslim communities of rural Tamil Nadu, and explore, among other things, the daily lives of women. SPEAKING TIGER, R 350, 192 PAGES ONE MAN, TWO EXECUTIONS Arjun Rajendran This poetry collection starts by excavating stories from the Carnatic Wars in colonial Pondicherry between 1739 and 1749, including those about a French ship trying to make itself invisible to the English fleet. The anthology…