Table of contents for September 2021 in The Caravan

When the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic unsettled Kashmir, in April, and the government enforced a lockdown, Mushtaq Mir feared for his livelihood. Every day, he would step outside his home to dust his grounded handcart. Lal Chowk, the usually bustling city centre of Srinagar where he had a kiosk selling second-hand clothes, was mired in concertina wires and drop-gates, with dozens of gun-toting troops enforcing the desolation in the streets. One night, some welfare workers appeared at his doorstep and left food packets. It uplifted the gloom of his family and helped them survive the crisis. Such help keeps coming every now and then. “If my godforsaken tribe is surviving today, the credit goes to these angels, who remain nameless and faceless,” he told me. “They’re holding the…

The deluge of revelations in France about suspected corruption in the Rafale deal began in 2018 with a seemingly unlikely protagonist—Julie Gayet, an actor and the partner of the former French president François Hollande. Word got out that, some two and a half years earlier, the Indian businessman Anil Ambani had stepped in as a patron for one of Gayet’s films. Just days after Ambani's generous gesture, Hollande, on a state visit to India, signed a memorandum of understanding for the delivery of 36 Rafale fighter jets, built by the French defence manufacturer Dassault Aviation. As part of the deal, worth a reported €7.87 billion, half of the purchase value was to be re-invested in India. Ambani’s debt-ridden Reliance Group, which had only the barest experience in defence manufacturing and…

PUNJAB’S BATHINDA DISTRICT was abuzz with activity in December 2015. The Shiromani Akali Dal was in power in the state, with Parkash Singh Badal as chief minister. The fledgling Aam Aadmi Party was trying to break into national politics beyond its Delhi stronghold. The Congress, the main opposition party, was beginning its campaign for the 2017 Vidhan Sabha elections by organising a massive rally, a show of strength at the holy town of Talwandi Sabo. The newly anointed president of the Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee, Amarinder Singh, was to make a speech. The deputy chief minister, Sukhbir Singh Badal, had claimed a month earlier that the Congress leader would not be able to draw a crowd. Bathinda is a stronghold of the Badals. The dais was crowded with Congress members…

SHORTLY AFTER the Supreme Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in September 2018, I said in a talk that I was better off when Section 377 was in existence. What I meant by this was that I preferred to continue to be a resisting subject in some sense rather than being co-opted by the state, which now saw me as a citizen with locus standi. I recalled this sentiment while reading a recent book by the academic Rahul Rao, titled Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality. One of the questions the book poses at the very beginning is articulated by the scholar Jasbir Puar: “What happens after certain liberal rights are bestowed, certain thresholds of parameters of success are claimed to have been reached.…

THE LEDE 8 Monika Mondal is an independent journalist who writes on agriculture, sustainability and environmental justice. 10 Mir Seeneen is a freelance feature writer based in Srinagar. PERSPECTIVES 14 Seema Chishti is a writer and journalist based in Delhi. She was the Delhi editor for BBC India and a deputy editor at the Indian Express. She is the co-author of Note by Note: The India Story (1947-2017). 18 Noopur Tiwari is a journalist based in Paris. She has covered Europe for the last 16 years for Indian media. 22 Nabeela Paniyath is the multimedia editor at The Caravan. 28 Sagar is a staff writer at The Caravan. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 34 Prabhjit Singh is a contributing writer at The Caravan. Jatinder Kaur Tur is a contributing writer at The…

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To be a woman, in most parts of the world, is to be at odds with the world around you. It is a state of combat in which freedom, for even the smallest things, has to be wrested. The details vary, but the struggle remains the same. From choosing what to wear and stepping outside the house to meet your friends to securing an education and building a career, everything is a negotiation. Over the past few weeks, as the Taliban, a radical Islamist group, took over Afghanistan at a staggering pace, it became clear that such negotiations will once again overwhelm the futures of the country’s women. It can be no one’s case that these futures were secured by foreign occupying forces—particularly the United States—fixated on the myth of…

AFTER PARTITION, 3.5 million Hindu and Sikh refugees came to India from West Pakistan. Several major cities, such as Amritsar, Jaipur, Ajmer, Alwar, Ludhiana, Jammu, Lucknow and Delhi, witnessed an influx of refugees. The Teen Murti residence of Jawaharlal Nehru—the prime minister of the interim Indian government—was also swarmed with refugees. The Kingsway Camp in the outskirts of Delhi, which had been reserved for the royal tents of the indigenous princes during the Delhi Durbar of 1911, now housed the tents of the refugees. On 24 January 1948, the press information bureau issued a press note. “At no time has the necessity of giving relief to vast numbers of our suffering countrymen been so great and urgent as it is today,” Nehru said in the note. “I feel that it…

CUTTACK, THEY SAY, is a thousand years old. Jayanta Mahapatra has spent nearly a century in the city. At first, it was birth, but life conspired to keep him there, and he wrestles with this idea time and again in his writing. In November last year, while I was shuffling through the day’s Odia newspaper, a short piece caught my attention. A few weeks after his ninety-second birthday, Mahapatra had decided to take his readers on a walk to chronicle the journey from his home to school that he undertook daily eighty years ago. “There are so many tales in Cuttack, the ones which have eluded me even when I thought I saw them and believed I understood them, and that is why I will return to those days and…

It was about a year and a half ago that 30-year-old Nayimuddin Ansari last looked at his three children without any problem in his vision. On a sunny afternoon in March last year, while Ansari was going home, something got into his eyes. He stopped on the side of the highway, next to the Triveni sugar mill—the largest in Asia—in the Uttar Pradesh town of Khatauli. He rubbed his eyes to try to get rid of the irritant. A few days later, he had pain, and then an infection, in his eyes. “The local doctor advised me to go to AIIMS, Delhi for free-of-cost operation,” Ansari told me. After five surgeries, for which he spent money on transportation, food and medicines, Ansari’s sight has not returned. He cannot travel and…

It was one of those hazy and dry Delhi evenings, in October 2019, when my sources approached me with some startling information. People they knew had had their cell phones, and all their data on it, compromised by a dangerous software for at least two weeks in May that year—around the time of India’s general elections. They were contacted by Citizen’s Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto focussing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement on information and communication technologies, human rights and global security. WhatsApp too formally alerted these individuals that they had been targets of state-of-the-art surveillance. After contacting two dozen academics, lawyers, Dalit activists and journalists, I finally wrote for the news daily I was working for at the time…

On 3 August, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) organised a 12-hour shutdown in the state to protest the Indian government’s inaction on a framework agreement signed on the same date in 2015. In the agreement—signed by NSCN(I-M) leaders and the Indian government’s interlocutor, the retired intelligence officer RN Ravi—the Indian government “recognized the unique history and position of the Nagas,” and both sides, “cognizant of the universal principle that in a democracy, sovereignty lies with the people,” resolved to reach an agreement over how to share sovereign power in order to ensure peaceful co-existence. Two weeks later, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took credit for having resolved the decades-long insurgency in Nagaland. In the six years that followed, such an agreement has not materialised. The Modi government opened talks…

“I was called a faggot before knowing my own sexuality.” IN HIS POEM “Seventh Circle of the Earth”—a reference to Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic Divina Commedia, in which gay men inhabit the seventh circle of hell—the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong responds to the 2011 killing of Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, a gay couple in Dallas who were stabbed and bludgeoned to death before their apartment was set on fire. The violence, however, is a brief punctuation in a tender account of love and intimacy: Another torchstreams throughthe kitchen window,another errant dove.It’s funny. I always knewI’d be warmest besidemy man. Samar Hazboun’s photo series Errant Doves, the title of which is inspired by Vuong’s poem, depicting the queer community of Palestine over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, takes a…

RADIANT FUGITIVES Nawaaz Ahmed This debut novel follows the life of the protagonist Seema, a consultant for a political campaign in the United States who grapples with pregnancy and being ostracised from her family after coming out as lesbian. The book explores family dynamics and themes of love, betrayal and forgiveness. WESTLAND, S699, 392 PAGES FUNERAL NIGHTS Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih This long debut novel, whose narrative frame is inspired by The Arabian Nights, follows a group of academics and writers from Shillong as they go to the West Khasi Hills for Ka Phor Sohrat—the feast of the dead—a six-day funeral ceremony. They end up reaching early and tell stories while stranded in the jungle. CONTEXT, WESTLAND, S899, 1,024 PAGES GENDERING MINORITIES MUSLIM WOMEN AND THE POLITICS OF MODERNITY Sherin BS…