Innehållsförteckning för February 2020 från The Caravan

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In early September 2019, the Central Public Works Department issued a press notice inviting competing proposals from architects for a project to redevelop Delhi’s Central Vista. The precinct came into being as a colonial project to symbolise British rule and was appropriated after independence to become the seat of the new nation’s power. It houses Rashtrapati Bhavan, the parliament building, major ministries, national cultural institutions and the iconic India Gate with its surrounding lawns. The government seems to be in a tearing hurry to execute the project. In the short space of seven weeks, it completed all stages of the competition: the submission of expressions of interest, the shortlisting of eligible architects, the preparation of designs by the candidates, the evaluation of those designs, financial bids and, finally, the selection…

THE USUAL BASE FOR INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISTS covering the Rohingya crisis is a hotel by the beach in Cox’s Bazar, a Bangladeshi resort town some sixty kilometres north of the vast refugee camps at Kutupalong and Balukhali. Every morning, they pile into SUVs, vans or pickup trucks, and join the stream of traffic taking aid workers, human-rights experts and other out-of-towners southwards. The typical media team bound for the camps includes a driver, a reporter, a photographer, sometimes a cameraman or two, and, almost always, a local journalist as an assistant. The local journalists—“fixers” in the lingo of the international media—are typically possessed of multiple talents. Conversant in English, Bangla, and, preferably, the Rohingya language as well, they serve as translators and guides, manage logistics and dispense security advice. They must…

TOWARDS THE END OF HIS LIFE, James Baldwin wrote a meditation on the polymorphous nature of human sexuality and the irrational fears awakened by it. For its title, he chose an old, possibly apocryphal phrase used in ancient maps to mark the region where America would one day be discovered: “Here Be Dragons.” For what are dragons but potent symbols of our deepest anxieties (and farthest hopes)? Some are ancient, others are new. None is as novel or as unprecedented as climate change, if only because there is nothing imaginary about its effects. Governments have been talking about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions for almost three decades, from the Rio Earth summit of 1992—on the whole, to very little effect. Some fifty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere since…

It seemed like any other day at the Shaheed Hemu Kalani Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya, a government school in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. The students sat attentively in class. They were wearing their uniforms, white shirts and ties, and the teacher paced through the classroom as he taught. But high in opposite corners of the room, one thing had changed: two newly installed closed-circuit television cameras watched over the class. The day, 6 July 2019, marked the official launch of the Aam Aadmi Party-ruled Delhi government’s plan to install two CCTV cameras in every government-school classroom. The decision came on the heels of a wider AAP push to surveil the city. In June, after a prolonged tussle with the lieutenant governor’s office, the government officially launched a scheme to fulfil the AAP’s…

The West Bengal government ran an ad campaign on local television channels in mid-December proclaiming its intention to resist the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the proposed nationwide rollout of the National Register of Citizens. The state’s governor, Jagdeep Dhankhar—a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party—castigated the move. The advertisements were “absolutely unconstitutional,” he said. “It is a criminal use of public funds.” Within a fortnight, the Calcutta High Court imposed an interim ban on the campaign. On the last day of 2019, the legislative assembly in Kerala adopted a resolution denouncing the CAA and demanding its repeal. Kerala’s chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, argued before the assembly that the CAA “contradicts the basic values and principles of the Constitution.” Arif Mohammed Khan, the governor of Kerala, and Ravi Shankar Prasad, the…

FUTURE TENSE Nitasha Kaul Kaul’s novel explores aspects of resistance, love and militancy in Kashmir through the trajectories of its many characters. These include the bureaucrat Fayaz, his nephew Imran, a young student in Srinagar, and Shireen, the granddaughter of a spy who unearths stories about her family. HARPER COLLINS INDIA, R 499, 308 PAGES MY SON’S INHERITANCE A SECRET HISTORY OF LYNCHING AND BLOOD JUSTICE IN INDIA Aparna Vaidik This book, framed as a message to the author’s son, delves into the history of lynching in India, using pamphlets and popular publications, as well as her own family history, to offer a cultural reading of violence. It also explores the history of the Arya Samaj, cow-protection movements and majoritarianism in the country. ALEPH, R 499, 173 PAGES THE EMPEROR…

Shyam Sunder Paliwal was the sarpanch of Piplantri, a village in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand district, between 2005 and 2010. His father helped a marble company establish a unit in the village. In return, the company let his family sell its scrap marble, making them affluent. Over the years, excessive marble mining and sporadic droughts caused a severe depletion in the village’s groundwater levels. Water could not be found in the area, even by drilling tube wells four hundred feet deep. On 21 August 2006, Kiran, Paliwal’s 16-year-old daughter, died of dehydration after suffering from diarrhoea. Devastated by her death and recognising the urgent need to rejuvenate the water table, Paliwal launched the Kiran Nidhi Yojana, in 2007. The KNY mandates that the parents of a newborn girl plant 111 trees. The…

Whatever trajectory the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act take, the moment when Chandrashekhar Aazad, the leader of the Bhim Army, appeared on the steps of Delhi’s Jama Masjid after the Friday prayer on 20 December, holding up a copy of the Constitution with a picture of BR Ambedkar on the cover and surrounded by predominantly Muslim protesters chanting slogans against the CAA and the National Register of Citizens, will be a beacon across the ages. Several factors conspired to make the scene iconic: Aazad’s flamboyance, his elusion of police trying to prevent any large gathering, live television coverage with anchors sounding like commentators at a sporting triumph. But perhaps most significant was the display of the Constitution and its imagery in a space where we were not accustomed to…

{ONE} WHEN THE INDIAN EXPRESS GROUP picked Ranjan Gogoi—the second-most senior judge of the Supreme Court at the time—to deliver the third Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture, in July 2018, few progressives questioned the choice. While introducing Gogoi, Raj Kamal Jha, the editor-in-chief of the Indian Express, showered praise upon the soon-to-be Chief Justice of India. He said that both journalists and members of the judiciary had to work “without fear or favour” to do their job well, which was how he believed Gogoi had conducted himself. Jha said that there could not be a more fitting tribute to Ramnath Goenka—the founder of the Indian Express. “One thick red line in the newsroom which we tell all our reporters is never impute a motive to a judgment or a judge,” Jha…

A ROAD SIGN FOR FARIDABAD, attached to a foot overbridge in the Delhi neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh, has been spraypainted over. The altered text reads “Zindabad,” and a white sheet, with “Inquilab” scrawled on it, hangs above it. A one-kilometre-long-stretch below this sign has been the site of a women-led sit-in protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act for over a month. The protest began on 15 December 2019, in the aftermath of police brutality against students protesting the CAA at Jamia Millia Islamia and Aligarh Muslim University. When I visited on the night of 18 January, it was the thirty-fourth day of the protest. Muslim women, particularly residents of the area, were at the forefront. The foot overbridge was lit up in neon-green and pink lights, and large banners bearing…

Music World Sacred Spirit Festival 13 TO 16 FEBRUARY MEHRANGARH FORT, JODHPUR The twelfth edition of the World Sacred Spirit Festival, organised by the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, features musicians from around the world. The artists this year include the Moroccan rapper Walid Ben Selim and the Iranian vocalist Mohammed Motamedi. For more information, write to kalpana.champawat@gmail.com Theatre That’s How We Feel 9 TO 29 FEBRUARY PUNE AND MUMBAI Directed by Rupesh Tillu, the play is a clown-show performance by seven teenage girls who grew up in Kamathipura, a red-light district in Mumbai. Performed in ten small theatres around Mumbai, with 20 shows for NGOs and schools around the city, the show questions and responds to the male gaze. For more information, write to kajal@mindworkz.in Art It’s a Normal Day 9…