Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i The Caravan

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As the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections approach, there has been a flurry of activity among political parties. On 19 January, the Apna Dal and the Nishad Party, both regional parties with mainly Other Backward Class constituencies, agreed on seat-sharing at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in Delhi. The BJP’s national president, JP Nadda, tweeted a picture of the meeting and wrote, “Uttar Pradesh mein phir ek baar, NDA 300 paar”—Once again in Uttar Pradesh, the National Democratic Alliance will cross 300 seats. The non-Yadav OBC castes are numerically decisive in the state. In the last decade, the BJP has made deep inroads among these castes. Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh’s current chief minister, also tweeted to express his confidence that the alliance would help the BJP win two-thirds of assembly seats and…

Having been part of the television news industry for three decades, first as a reporter and then as a commentator and author, I have rarely witnessed the sort of outpouring of grief that followed the death of NDTV India’s Lucknow bureau chief, Kamal Khan. On 14 January, 61-year-old Khan died at his home of a heart attack. Khan was known for his reporting from across Uttar Pradesh. He joined NDTV in the 1990s, when it was still under the Star News banner, and began working as the head of the channel’s Lucknow operations. He moved to NDTV’s Hindi channel when it was launched, at the turn of the millennium. In all, he spent three decades working in the NDTV organisation. Khan had a deep understanding of Uttar Pradesh’s layered politics,…

“I’M MARRIED TO THIS CITY. Where’s the space for another relationship?” So opines Satyajit, one of the characters of Jayant Kaikini’s story collection, No Presents Please, who finds himself at home in Mumbai. Unlike Kaikini, Satyajit is not a foreigner to the city. He has shifted to different suburbs and locales in the city over the course of twenty years due to different job placements. At the same time, there is too much heart in the sentence for this thought to belong only to Satyajit. One cannot help but think of Kaikini himself, who transported himself from the Konkan Coast to live and work in Mumbai. It is the sort of thing that someone who found love in a city that they discovered later in life would say. Consider a…

“I have always been interested in theatre,” Ravi Kumar Otwal told me. “In fact, I was one of the best at mono-acting in school.” His voice, although acutely hoarse owing to the change of seasons and passive smoke, boomed with pride. Otwal owns a tea stall—a decrepit shack housed under a murkyblue tarpaulin awning supported by two creviced wooden poles, precariously withstanding the winter wind—in Shadi Khampur, a working-class neighbourhood of western Delhi. His tea stall is located opposite a bustling bank and a photography studio, which, he said, reminded him of his youthful passion for the arts. Beyond his tea stall, about a minute’s walk away, lies Studio Safdar. Studio Safdar was born out of the legacy of violence between governments in Delhi and working-class neighbourhoods such as Shadi…

In 2019, I spotted an infographic on Twitter that ranked a handful of countries by the number of weeks of paid maternity leave they mandated. It sought to make a case for paid maternity leave in the United States—where, according to the infographic, there was none. India occupied second spot, with 26 weeks, just behind the United Kingdom. What struck me was that even though the Maternity Entitlements Act benefits only women in formal employment in the organised sector—a very thin slice of Indian women—its provisions were being projected as a universal entitlement. In fact, the meagre entitlements for other Indian women—R6,000 per child in cash from the government, under the National Food Security Act passed in 2013—were not operationalised until 2017. That year, the government notified the Pradhan Mantri…

On the night of 6 August 2021, a 42-year-old farmer in Maharashtra’s Yavatmal district died from pesticide poisoning. Vinod Masram Chavan had been exposed to the pesticide Nuvacron while spraying his cotton crop to protect it from the deadly pink bollworm, the Times of India reported. The pesticide contained monocroto-phos, a toxic compound that is internationally classified as extremely hazardous and whose use had been restricted in Maharashtra. Chavan’s death was reported as the first from pesticide poisoning in the region in four years. It revived the spectre of the many casualties in the state in 2017, when more than sixty farmers died and hundreds suffered from pesticide exposure and poisoning. Deaths from pesticide poisoning are old catastrophes in India’s farmlands. Over many years, pesticides have posed an unacceptable risk…

AT 1.45 PM, on 15 January, an armoured cavalcade rolled onto the premises of the Kashmir Press Club—Kashmir’s largest body representing journalists—in Polo View, abutting Srinagar’s Lal Chowk. There had been heightened police presence at the club since the day before, with roving patrols across the road outside. That afternoon, a police officer had told reporters, “We will leave once sahab comes and takes charge.” Surrounded by paramilitary and Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel, Saleem Pandit, an assistant editor with the Times of India, got out of the Ambassador car at the head of the cavalcade and quickly went up to a conference room on the first floor. Eleven other journalists, many of whom were known to be close to the current unelected administration of Jammu and Kashmir, entered the…

On a blustery day in June, I stood in a park that abuts the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait between New York’s Staten Island and New Jersey. (The name is an Anglicisation of achter kille, used by Dutch colonists to refer to the water channel “behind” the island.) The grey sky portended rain; a cold offshore wind rustled the reeds lining the shore. My guide, John Pagani, and I walked down a steep dirt incline, shouldered on both sides by crabgrass. The outer perimeter of the beach was covered in detritus. The crunchy garbage gave way to wet, hard, hazelnut-coloured sand that bent to the green water laving against the shore. Just a few feet out, the water was opaque. A white-haired man stood on the dock and watched us…

As winter descended, and Delhi embarked on what has become its regular season of poisonous air—a malaise exacerbated by open violations of the ban on firecrackers during Diwali—sections of the press and the liberal elite enacted their annual ritual of outrage and helplessness. Environmentalists lamented the government’s fitful and ineffective action; pulmonologists saw their wards filling up; citizens of the national capital wheezed and choked as the Air Quality Index shot up to hazardous levels. The air crisis in Delhi, and large parts of north India, has come to be framed predominantly as a failure of environmental and public-health management. The intriguing puzzle, though, is not the repetitive nature of the crisis but the collective inability to fix—or even substantially mitigate—the problem. This is yet another sign of India’s failing…

“SUKHI PAAJI, even if I become the CM, you will only run the government. So you only take over as the CM,” Navjot Singh Sidhu told Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa on a chaotic day in the Congress’ Punjab unit, a party member who was present during the conversation recalled. “Let’s announce.” It was 19 September 2021, a day after Amarinder Singh, the Congress leader and two-time chief minister of Punjab, had resigned from his post following messy infighting in the party’s state unit. The rebellion against Amarinder was led by Sidhu, who had been appointed as chief of the state unit in July that year, and Randhawa, an old Congress hand and three-time member of legislative assembly for Gurdaspur. The Congress member who was present told me on condition of anonymity…

THOSE BOOKED UNDER UAPA AND PSA Masrat Zahra Freelancer Gowhar Geelani Freelancer Naseer Ganai Outlook Harun Lone Kashmir Dot Com Kamran Yousuf NewsClick Sajjad Gul The Kashmir Wala Qazi Shibli The Kashmiriyat Suhail Dar Freelancer Muhammad Manan Freelancer Aasif Sultan Kashmir Narrator THOSE BOOKED UNDER OTHER CHARGES Fahad Shah The Kashmir Wala Yashraj Sharma The Kashmir Wala Salman Shah Kashmir First Junaid Mir The Kashmiriyat Umaisur Gull Freelancer Qazi Shibli The Kashmiriyat Sajjad Gul The Kashmir Wala Sajid Raina Freelancer Suhail Dar Freelancer Saleem Pandit Times of India RAIDED BY THE J&K POLICE OR NIA Showkat Motta Kashmir Narrator Hilal Mir Freelancer Shah Abbas Kashmir Uzma Azhar Qadri Freelancer Mukhtar Zahoor Contributor BBC Kamran Yousuf NewsClick Pervaiz Bukhari AFP Mohd Aslam Bhat Kashmir News Service Qazi Shibli The Kashmiriyat Junaid Shafiq Peer Tameel I Irshad Fayaz Kalloo Greater Kashmir Rashid Makhdoomi Greater Kashmir SUMMONED FOR QUESTIONING Hakim Irfan Rashid The Economic Times Basharat Masood The Indian Express Naseer Ganai Outlook Masrat Zehra Freelancer Peerzada Ashiq The Hindu…

INDIA’S UNDECLARED EMERGENCY CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE Arvind Narrain Beginning with a history of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, Narrain draws parallels and notes differences with the climate of fear and repression under the Narendra Modi government. He examines censorship, crackdowns on freedom, the criminalisation of dissent, constitutional subversion and centralisation of power that occurred under the BJP government. CONTEXT, S699, 340 PAGES THE EASTERN GATE WAR AND PEACE IN NAGALAND, MANIPUR AND INDIA’S FAR EAST Sudeep Chakravarti This book examines in detail the Naga peace negotiations as well as the history of rebellions and the consequences of militarisation in the north-east. It offers a mixture of political analysis, dispatches and snippets from the author’s travel diaries, as also interviews with rebel leaders, policymakers and…