Innehållsförteckning för April 2022 från The Caravan

A YouTube channel with almost eighty thousand subscribers, tommydan55, is particularly popular among connoisseurs of Indian films. Thomas Daniel, a 74-year-old living in Hawaii, owns it, along with a couple of other channels, all dedicated to classic cinema of the Indian subcontinent. There are mostly Hindi and Urdu films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s on his channel, but Bengali films have recently appeared as well. Daniel does not speak any of these languages. He told me he has south-Indian films too, but the subtitles are so poor that there is nothing he can do with them. “Apparently, a working understanding of English isn’t a requirement before becoming a subtitler for the Indian media companies,” he wrote in an email. Daniel, who developed an interest in film restoration while approaching…

Around the time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a roadshow in Ahmedabad after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s massive victory in the 2022 assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh quietly revived one of the most controversial formulations of MS Golwalkar during its annual conclave in the same city—the one that sought to strip Muslims of their rights as citizens. “Series of dastardly acts revealing communal hysteria, rallies, demonstrations, violation of social discipline, custom and conventions under the guise of the Constitution and religious freedom, inciting violence by instigating meagre causes, promoting illegal activities, etc. is increasing,” the RSS said in its annual report, released during the conclave on 12 March. “There appears to be elaborate plans by a particular community to enter the government machinery. Behind all…

For 11 days in May 2021, Razan Mad-hoon had the same nightmare. As Israel pushed ahead a military offensive against Gaza, she dreamt of missiles darting across the sky like shooting stars. She imagined her two young daughters running alongside her, hoping the missiles would miss them. As they searched for shelter, the sound became deafening, a missile hit one of her children—then she awoke in a cold sweat. Madhoon is a 33-year-old Palestinian refugee. She moved to the United Kingdom in 2015 and now lives in Scotland with her daughters. The escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in May last year triggered memories of an Israeli military operation in 2014, when she was still in Gaza and attempting to keep her daughters safe. “You never recover from such trauma,” she…

On 10 March 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party won the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and set a few records in the process. The BJP became the first party to win two consecutive assembly elections in the state since 1985, and Ajay Singh Bisht, popularly known as Yogi Adityanath, will become the first chief minister in the state’s history to complete a full tenure and win a second successive term. While the saffron party won fewer seats this time—255—compared to its tally of 312 in 2017, it increased its vote share from 39.67 percent in 2017, to 41.29 percent. This is a signal that the power equation in the state heavily favours the BJP despite the fight put up by the Samajwadi Party, which emerged as the principal opposition party…

{ONE} AT 11.01 AM ON 5 JULY 2019, amid the thumping of desks in the treasury benches, Nirmala Sitharaman rose to her feet in the Lok Sabha to deliver her maiden budget speech. It was only the second time that a woman had done so—Indira Gandhi presented the budget in 1970, during her first term as prime minister. While preparing for this historic occasion, Sitharaman had sought the blessings of two of her predecessors: an ailing Arun Jaitley, whom she would describe in an obituary the following month as “my guru, my mentor, my moral strength,” and Manmohan Singh, whose budget speech in July 1991 had begun an era of reforms that, she assured parliament, would see India “become a $3 trillion economy in the current year” and reach “$5…

The initial report that came out late on the evening of 9 March from Dawn, Pakistan’s most widely read newspaper, was confusing. It suggested that a private aircraft had crashed in Mian Channu, a city in the Pakistani province of Punjab, with its lone occupant safe. “Police cordoned off the area and did not allow rescue officials to come close to the jet,” the report said. “The rescue officials were asked to leave as the army authorities were coming to collect the evidence. Later, the army officers launched a search for collecting pieces of the jet.” There was greater clarity when a Pakistani military spokesperson held a press conference the next day. He said that the Pakistan Air Force had continuously monitored the complete flight path of the flying object,…

Amid protests on 23 December 2021, the Karnataka Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Bill got a nod from the state’s legislative assembly. Months before the bill was debated, the regional media had begun building a narrative of “forced mass conversions” by Christians, without making a distinction between conversion as a matter of choice and conversions that may be coerced. It portrayed Hindus as victims and demonised even the peaceful gathering of Christians. On 9 March, the Kannada news channel Dighvijay 24X7 aired an episode titled “Conversion is scarier than Terrorism! Do you know how much money is made when a Hindu converts to Christianity?” The programme was geared towards stoking communal animosity. The anchor, Mamatha Hegde, made references to a Supreme Court decision on the right to propagate—also…

WHY DO YOU FEAR MY WAY SO MUCH? POEMS AND LETTERS FROM PRISON GN Saibaba This book features the activist and academic GN Saibaba’s poems and letters about politics, injustice, hope, resistance and the conditions he faced in prison in Nagpur, where he is held under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. SPEAKING TIGER, ₹450, 224 PAGES PHANTOM PLAGUE HOW TUBERCULOSIS SHAPED HISTORY Vidya Krishnan In this social history of tuberculosis, which examines the origins of the disease as well as its recent reemergence, the author looks closely at the politics behind its treatment, particularly at how medical apartheid, inequality and governance impacted the way it was tackled. penguin viking, ₹399, 320 pages PLANNING DEMOCRACY HOW A PROFESSOR, AN INSTITUTE, AND AN IDEA SHAPED INDIA Nikhil Menon This book examines…