Innehållsförteckning för January 2023 från The Caravan

“I was just a child when I left Mali,” Mamadou said. “I travelled a long way arriving in Libya, but after the fall of Gaddafi, the socio-political situation in the country…” His voice trailed off, as he stirred the remaining sugar at the bottom of his cup. “I ended up in prison. There, my body went through all the torture of the world.” He continued, “One day, the Libyans dumped us on the beach. I had never seen the sea.” From the coast, Mamadou saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. “Libyans ordered us to inflate the boat to enter the sea. Those who refused were killed. So, I trusted fate and I crossed the sea.” He boarded the boat with about a hundred people but, seven miles off…

The Bharatiya Janata Party foregrounded the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the recent Gujarat assembly election and swept aside the opposition. It fought the Delhi municipal election in his name and came close to winning. The oversized image of Modi has become a political free pass for the party, so much so that its campaigns often succeed in glossing over failures of governance. This image is not, however, permanently established in the public mind. It needs to be constantly nourished. Modi’s political genius lies in his ability to find ever new ways to do so. Even in a state where elections are not due anytime soon, the first image any visitor is likely to encounter is of Modi beaming down from posters celebrating India’s leadership of the G20…

{ONE} ARPUTHAM HAD WAITED for this moment for 11,299 days. A large crowd had gathered at her house—lawyers, journalists, local political activists and friends. Throughout the morning, more reporters came flooding into the small railway town of Jolarpettai, making their way to the beige-painted house where her family lived. But Arputham her-self was at a relative’s house nearby. She wanted to avoid the crowd and manage her expectations. For over three decades, she faced consistent disappointment, navigating her way through India’s labyrinthine court system. On that day, 18 May 2022, the Supreme Court was to decide whether her son, who had been out on bail since March, would finally be granted his freedom. AG Perarivalan had been convicted for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s sixth prime minister. He was…

A DISMANTLED STATE THE UNTOLD STORY OF KASHMIR AFTER ARTICLE 370 Anuradha Bhasin A book that confronts the disinformation in the official narrative after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir in 2019, looking closely at how the past three years have impacted the lives of Kashmiris. HARPER COLLINS, ₹699, 408 PAGES SWIMMING IN OUR OCEANS Pragya Bhagat A memoir that explores marriage, writing, notions of belonging and families, among other things, following the author as she moves to a village in Uttarakhand, and oscillating between her past and present. ZUBAAN, ₹495, 254 PAGES ANDHAR BIL Kalyani Thakur Charal Translated by Asit Biswas This novella narrates the stories of communities who settled near the Andhar Bil lake, in a place that has seen many migrations and lives being rebuilt in the aftermath…

THE LEDE 10 Shradha Triveni is an editorial intern at The Caravan. 12 Alessia Manzi is a freelance journalist based in Italy. Her work has appeared in El País, Die Tageszeitung and Balkan Insight, among others. She covers the environment, society, migrants and human rights. PERSPECTIVES 16 Sushant Singh is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and a visiting lecturer at Yale University. 18 Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan. 22 Dhirendra K Jha is a contributing writer at The Caravan. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 26 Eram Agha is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. 48 Sujatha Sivagnanam is a reporting fellow at The Caravan. PHOTO ESSAY 66 Kunga Tashi Lepcha is an independent photographer based in Gangtok, Sikkim. He works on identity, space, the environment and social…

A recent groundswell of protests to demand the Sarna code, a separate religious classification in the census for Adivasis, has the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates in a fix. In a special session held in November 2020, the Jharkhand Assembly passed a resolution asking the union government to introduce Sarna—a nature-centric form of worship shared across many tribes in Jharkhand and its neighbouring states—as an enumerated religion in the national census, due in 2021. The resolution marked a flashpoint in the long struggle by the region’s Adivasis for the recognition of their distinctive belief systems and culture. In late 2020, Adivasi groups across Jharkhand launched protests, urging the union government to respond to the resolution immediately. Speaking at a conference organised at Harvard University, in February 2021, Jharkhand’s chief…

IN SEPTEMBER 2018, a member of the skateboarding community in Gangtok invited me to photograph an event. That was my first glimpse into this small fraternity and the skateboarding subculture in the city. In the following months, I started getting more involved with the community and in 2019, I decided to pursue this as a photography project. In my photography work, I find it important to feel a personal connection with the subject—that is what attracts me to a project. As I witnessed the daily lives of the skateboarders in Gangtok, it echoed with the struggles of my youth. I found that I could relate to their experiences of growing up in this town. There is a marked dearth of facilities and open spaces for young people in Gangtok. There…

Daril Atkins sculpts parts of the human body. The life of this 77-year-old sculptor-turned-anaplastologist is marked by giving helping hands to people, literally. “I am a trained sculptor,” he told me at his lab, DA Anaplastology India LLP, in Bengaluru. “As an anaplastologist, I am expected to create a masterpiece that nobody would be able to detect.” When I entered his lab, Atkins was gazing intently at an object in his hand, with his back toward me. “Give me a minute,” he told me. Looking around, I saw parts of an eye, a nose, fingers and toes of various textures, skin tone and size—which were not merely the para-phernalia of an anaplastologist but also pieces of art, made by an artist. In a minute’s time, a sagely face greeted me.…

The questions are about China. The answers are about Pakistan. That seems to be the case when it comes to the Narendra Modi government’s designs for India’s security challenges. Even as the Chinese army clashed with Indian soldiers at Tawang’s Yangtse Ridge, in December, the Modi government was more focussed on issuing diplomatic statements against Pakistan. The charge was led by the minister of external affairs, S Jaishankar, in New York, using India’s turn at the presidency of the UN Security Council to converge attention towards countries harbouring terrorism—a thinly guised euphemism for Pakistan. That terrorism is a priority when no major terror attack has taken place in India since the 2019 Pulwama suicide bombing while the Chinese continue to militarily threaten India along the border makes this direction incomprehensible.…

A GROUP OF AROUND TEN PEOPLE arrived outside the Hyatt Regency in Ahmedabad early in the morning of 14 February 2016. Chanting “Jai Shri Ram” and “Shah Rukh Khan hai hai,” they threw stones into the hotel’s parking lot, shattering the windshield of a car that the actor had been using. They soon fled the scene but, after the hotel’s security officer filed a complaint, the police arrested seven activists of the Vishva Hindu Parishad on charges of rioting and property damage. Later that day, upon hearing that members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing were planning to burn an effigy of Khan outside the hotel, the police cordoned off the area and detained 17 protesters. Three months earlier, at a Twitter Townhall telecast on the news channel…