Table of contents for June 2020 in The Caravan

In his fourth address to the nation on the COVID-19 pandemic, on 12 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a headline-grabbing ₹ 20 lakh crore economic-relief package amounting to roughly ten percent of the GDP. The package was meant to provide relief after the economic destruction caused by the ongoing nationwide lockdown since 24 March. However, the details of the package, as revealed by the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, over the next few days, told a different story. The figure of ₹ 20 lakh crore included steps already announced by the government, what the people were owed anyway under existing schemes, money being offered as loans and various other elements that should not have been counted as part of a “relief package.” Neither Modi nor Sitharaman revealed when the central…

On behalf of the Indian government, in late April, the public-sector company Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited floated a tender for procuring devices to fight the COVID-19 outbreak. The devices included COVID-19 patient-tracking wristbands, fever-scanning tools and hand-held thermal imaging systems. The expectations from these devices, as per a report in the Indian Express, bordered on the magical: “detect, prevent and investigate threats to national security using call data records, internet protocol detail record, tower and mobile phone forensics data”; “geofence an area of interest, such as meeting place, airport, mosque, railway station, bus stand”; “advanced analytics and intelligence software that uses telecom & internet data to identify suspect locations, associations & behaviour”; monitor “everyday behaviour of the person, including where s/he orders food from and the places s/he regularly…

THE RICKSHAW PULLED UP a short distance away from our destination—the driver was reluctant to go any closer. I had arrived at Rampur, an area of Forbesganj, a city near the Nepal border in Bihar. With me was Sanju Jha, an employee of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an NGO with the stated goal of ending sex trafficking. Apne Aap operates a centre in Rampur’s red-light area, where it claims to have made great strides towards its mission. “We have not been able to stop it completely but we have saved the next generation from this work,” Jha told me on our rickshaw ride. “Now, women venture out into public spaces. They go to see a doctor. They even go to the bank.” At the centre, Jha told me that sex…

One morning in May, 40-year-old Anushabai woke up as usual at 5 am to head into the nearby forest to collect produce. After returning home, she prepared mahua pudding, which she served in sal leaves to her ten-year-old nephews, Jangu and Srinivas. The children enjoyed their breakfast, but Anushabai despaired that she could not give them more to eat. Since the nationwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic began, her village of Markaguda has battled a chronic shortage of food. The residents of Markaguda, 15 families from the Gond tribe, have migrated from nearby villages over the past thirty years in search of cultivable land. Markaguda and the families’ native villages were both part of erstwhile Adilabad district. However, after district reorganisation in October 2016, their native village falls…

Many in India have finally woken up to the precarious conditions in which a majority of the country’s workers live and work. Driven to starvation because of an abruptly announced lockdown, migrant labourers have had no option but to try to return to the safety of their homes in villages. As a callous government blocked all public transport, many decided to make the journey on foot or on bicycles, even as the police came down heavily on them. Several perished of starvation, or in mishaps, on the way. Most of them had led financially precarious lives even before the pandemic. The choice for migrant labourers was to either take the risk of contracting COVID-19 by venturing out or confront the danger of death by starvation. The lockdown has entered its…

IN OCTOBER 2015 , two Dalit manual scavengers named G Muniyandi and D Viswanathan died while cleaning an underground lift station—where sewage from nearby localities is collected before it is transferred to a pumping station—in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The days that followed saw protests demanding compensation for the families of the deceased as well as the arrest of the contractors involved. The activist and filmmaker Divya Bharathi, who was present at the protests, began working on a documentary titled Kakkoos—the Tamil word for “toilet.” M Palani Kumar, who worked as a cinematographer on the film, told me that at least eighteen more manual scavengers died by the time it was completed, in 2017. “This troubled me a lot,” he said. “I felt responsible to carry forward my work, so I…

A recent United States Commission on International Religious Freedom report, published in April, designated India a “country of particular concern” and recommended that the US government use “targeted sanctions on Indian government agencies and officials responsible for severe violations of religious rights.” During the release of the report, the vice-chairperson of the USCIRF, Nadine Maenza, said that the deterioration of religious freedoms in India was “perhaps the steepest and most alarming” of all the adverse developments identified around the world. The commission accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government of having “allowed violence against minorities and their houses of worship to continue with impunity and also engaged in and tolerated hate speech and incitement to violence.” The report was also critical of the home minister, Amit Shah, for referring to…

{ONE} THERE WERE BREATHTAKING SIGNS in that heady era, when India was celebrating 50 years of independence and a new millennium shone ahead, that a revolution was underway for the country’s sex workers. In November 1997, some five thousand women, hijras and men who sold sex reached Kolkata from far-flung parts for a national conference, the first of its kind, organised by the city’s pathbreaking sex-workers’ collective—the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee, or “indomitable women’s collaborative committee.” These thousands crowded into Salt Lake Stadium. This venue itself—an iconic football ground—spoke of the headway their cause had already made. It said that West Bengal’s Left Front government had, even if reluctantly, accepted the sex workers’ demands for rights and respect. Astonishingly, the union home minister, Indrajit Gupta, a legendary freedom fighter and…

KARACHI AND DHAKA SHARE THE DUBIOUS HONOUR of being failed capitals of Pakistan. Karachi served briefly as the seat of government for the newly created state, formed out of the 1947 partition of British India. In 1959, its crowded streets and seaside air were traded for green and mountainous scenery, a construction site near Rawalpindi, and the promise of straight and clean lines in the purpose-built Islamabad. Dhaka, meanwhile, was designated Pakistan’s “second capital” in 1962, as President Mohammad Ayub Khan sought to placate tensions in what was then the country’s eastern wing. Locating legislative power in East Bengal, two thousand kilometres from Islamabad, did little to stem a rising tide. In less than a decade, following a bloody liberation war, Dhaka would become the primary capital of a new…