Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i The Caravan

Category Crime Author Name Sagar Story Title Statements of 33 inmates belie the CBI’s claim of no murders in Muzaffarpur Shelter-home case SHORTLISTED 2021 Category Environment—Print Author Name Sushmita Story Title How Jharkand’s Mandal Dam could destroy the environment, livelihoods, and 3.4 lakh trees Category Politics Author Name Martand Kaushik and Anjaneya Sivan Story Title Bhima Koregaon Case: Prison rights activist Rona Wilson’s hard disk contained malware that allowed remote access Category The Arts Author Name Rohit Chakraborty Story Title Blending out - Salman Toor’s Paintings reveal a spectrum of queer lives Category Politics Author Name Kimi Colney Story Title Non-Naga communities fear the secrecy surrounding the government’s peace talks with the NSCN…

Around 5 pm on 4 February, roughly a hundred and fifteen kilometres north of Libya, a white reconnaissance plane with a camera on its underside circled a raft carrying a hundred desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. The surveillance footage from the airplane’s camera was transmitted live to an office in Warsaw, Poland, at the headquarters of the European Union’s border-patrol agency, Frontex. Two hours later, thanks to this surveillance footage, a Libyan coast-guard cutter caught up with the migrants and ordered them to stop, even though they were well outside of Libyan waters. Armed officers took the migrants on board, beat them savagely and carried them back to the one place they did not want to go: Libya’s gulag-like detention centres. Efficient and brutal,…

The annual Hornbill Festival in Kohima was going strong on the evening of 4 December when tragic news arrived. Six men of the Konyak tribe had just been gunned down by personnel of the Indian Army’s 21 Para Special Forces near the village of Oting, in northern Nagaland. The army said the men were suspected militants, but they were just civilians coming home from a weeklong shift at a nearby coal mine. A search party of villagers then clashed with soldiers departing the site, leaving another seven civilians and a soldier dead. As soon as they heard of the incident, the Konyak tribespeople performing at the festival stopped their songs of celebration and instead cried songs of lamentation, standing arm in arm. By morning, Oting had become a familiar name…

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, before he earned his renown as a painter and sculptor, Somnath Hore was dispatched by the Communist Party of India to document the Tebhaga Movement in the northern districts of Bengal. The movement took its name from the sharecroppers’ demand to hold on to two-thirds of their produce, rather than the customary half. The struggle first started in north-western Dinajpur, where the sharecroppers began moving the newly harvested paddy to their own threshing floors. Within a few weeks, Tebhaga had spread to 11 districts. Still only in his second year of art school, Hore received directives from party leaders. On 17 December 1946, he boarded the North Bengal Express from Calcutta, armed with just a diary and pen. The opening act of Hore’s journey sets the scene…

THE LEDE 10 Aashna Jamal is an economist from Kashmir who likes to tell stories of the places she lives in. She was posted as an overseas development fellow in the Timor-Leste government’s finance ministry between 2018 and 2020. 14 Joseph Galvin is a writer for the Outlaw Ocean Project, a journalistic non-profit based in Washington DC that focusses on human rights, labour and environmental abuses at sea. PERSPECTIVES 20 Sushant Singh is the Henry Hart Rice Lecturer at Yale University and a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. 26 Lalnunkimi Colney is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. 30 Manik Sharma writes on arts, culture, books and film. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 36 Dhirendra K Jha is a contributing writer at The Caravan. He is the author of…

In his latest film, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Ayushmann Khurrana plays a muscular gym trainer with a trans girlfriend, played by Vani Kapoor. Soon after Kapoor’s character comes out to him, Khurranna’s character is asked by his friends about the couple’s sex life: “Kiya kahan se?”—Where did you do it from? He replies, condescendingly, “Jahan se sab karte hain”—Where everyone does it from. The construction of this joke, which is also a highlight of the film’s trailer, is undeniably demeaning—a play for laughs at the expense of the trans characters. The underlying transphobia is “corrected” by the end of the film, but that is meant to be a surprise. What the audience expects, and what is meant to pull crowds to the cinema, is the cruel punchline and all that it…

ON 3 MARCH 2020, I boarded the pink line of the Delhi metro and headed to Maujpur, a suburb in the north-eastern part of the city. The metro coaches were sparsely occupied, and there was only a small trickle of people at the station, which was unusual for a Tuesday morning. Outside was a small group of members and volunteers working with ANHAD, an NGO that was coordinating relief work in the area. We split into two groups and set out. My group comprised four people: Tarun Sagar, a social activist working with ANHAD who was organising the relief effort, another ANHAD member, a journalist and me, a lawyer. We were slated to visit affected families in Shahdara, Jaffrabad and Kabir Nagar, the neighbourhoods bordering the epicentre of the riots…

As he closed up his tailoring shop in Abbottabad, one evening in 2013, Shoukat Hayat Khan received a phone call from an old friend. It was an invitation to relocate to Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste, where he could earn a guaranteed salary of three hundred dollars a month. Khan, who used to make uniforms for cadets at the nearby military academy, sold his shop and gathered around three thousand dollars to make the trip. He was soon making a thousand dollars a month in salary and commissions and, once his contract expired, he decided to open his own shop. The friend and his brother had been inviting Pakistani tailors to work in their shops since the early 2000s, tapping into their social networks—friends, family, acquaintances and even UN peacekeeping…

The untimely death last month of Bipin Rawat, the country’s longest-serving four-star military officer, attracted a lot of public attention, mostly laudatory and eulogising the current political dispensation’s favourite general. His legacy as the chief of defence staff, nearly two years after he became the inaugural incumbent in the post, however, remains contested. The burden of this contested legacy, both political and military, will be borne by his successor, who has an unenviable job on his hands. When Rawat was announced as the CDS, in December 2019, he was tasked with creating much greater synergy among the three armed forces, working on a three-year timeline. He specifically had to facilitate the “restructuring of Military Commands for optimal utilisation of resources by bringing about jointness in operations, including through the establishment…

IN 1963, the Indian People’s Theatre Association put on a play. Like most plays by the ideologically left-wing theatre group, this one, too, was about freedom. Since its inception twenty years earlier during the Indian freedom struggle, IPTA had been performing stories of revolution that were set in a young India that was fighting against, or just about free from, British rule. But this new play stood out in one crucial way. Located far away from home, it was not about India at all. It was about the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, in which the Kenya Land and Freedom Army led an armed revolt against colonial rule. This struggle was met with violent repression from the British, who set up prison camps where an estimated hundred and fifty…

MOBILE GIRLS KOOTTAM WORKING WOMEN SPEAK Madhumita Dutta Illustrated by Madhusree Dutta This book draws on encounters the author had with women working in an electronics factory in Tamil Nadu’s Kancheepuram district. These women gathered regularly, eventually producing a radio podcast titled Mobile Girls Koottam. The book has transcripts from the podcast, with conversations between five women who speak of their lives, work, politics and hopes for the future. ZUBAAN, ₹319, 258 PAGES GANGA’S CHOICE AND OTHER STORIES Vaasanthi The stories in this collection explore, among other themes, how women from different backgrounds struggle against oppression and social norms, and the impact a lockdown has on two migrant workers, who embark on a journey home. niyogi books, ₹450, 256 pages ADAM S Hareesh Translated by Jayasree Kalathil This collection of…