Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 7

Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath JULY 2022

cover story / crime

28

Falling in Line
The National Investigation Agency’s
loss of credibility
nileena ms

The National Investigation Agency was founded in 2008. In an

environment of declining professional standards among the country’s
many investigative agencies, some of the NIA’s early work was
marked by a rare hard-nosed competence. Under the Narendra
Modi government, however, the agency’s early promise and political
neutrality has withered away. India’s “most professional investigative
agency,” formed to deal with terrorism alone, has morphed into one
that is sent after inter-religious couples, human-rights lawyers and
octogenarian priests. Its handling of the Bhima Koregaon case reveals
many of the illegalities it once accused other agencies of. The story of
the NIA illustrates how quickly professionalism can be sacrificed at
the altar of political manoeuvring. The clearest demonstration of this
is in the about-turns it made in the investigations into the Samjhauta
and Malegaon bombings, where evidence pointed squarely towards
Hindu extremists.

perspectives

28

14

politics
14 Losing the Way
The Akali Dal no longer exists, and it may be
necessary to reinvent it
hartosh singh bal

communities
18 Write Off
The suffocation of indigenous-script
movements in the Northeast
58 manoranjan pegu

health
music 22 Memories of Loss
58 Hindu Rashtra OST A year after a summer of death, a COVID-19
The Hindutva pop singers fuelling a politics of hate survivor recalls trauma, helplessness and grief
samriddhi sakunia vineeta sharma

JULY 2022 3
 the lede

68
10

communities
8 Signs of Life
Folk tales help Rajasthan’s desert photo essay / communities
communities prepare for famine 68 The Widening Gulf
sharanya deepak A personal reckoning with
permanence, temporariness and
health spaces in between
10 The First Healers harsha pandav
Adivasi women in Jharkhand fight malaria
and witchcraft with Hodopathy
nazish hussain

books
98

literature
88 Turning All
History to Flesh
A biography of Agha Shahid
Ali portrays the poet without
paradox
abhrajyoti chakraborty

the bookshelf 96
88
editor’s pick 98

4 THE CARAVAN
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 editor Anant Nath
executive editor Vinod K Jose
political editor Hartosh Singh Bal
senior editor Roman Gautam
books editor Maya Palit
creative director Sukruti Anah Staneley
associate editor Puja Sen
web editor Surabhi Kanga
contributors senior assistant editor
Ajachi Chakrabarti
assistant editors Akash Poyam, Tusha
THE LEDE 8 Sharanya Deepak is a writer based in Delhi.
Mittal, Amrita Singh and Abhay Regi
10 Nazish Hussain is a freelance journalist from Ranchi. assistant editor (hindi) Vishnu Sharma
staff writers Sagar, Nileena MS,
Aathira Konikkara and Sunil Kashyap
PERSPECTIVES 14 Hartosh Singh Bal is the political editor at The Caravan. contributing writers Dhirendra K Jha,
18 Manoranjan Pegu is a Delhi-based writer who covers issues of labour and tribes. He is from Prabhjit Singh, Jatinder Kaur Tur and
the Mising community of Assam. Nikita Saxena
22 Vineeta Sharma is an associate professor of economics at Kirori Mal College, University of editorial fellow (health)
Nayantara Narayanan
Delhi. She also writes short stories and poems.
reporting fellow (health) Chahat Rana
editorial fellow (tech) Mehak Mahajan
REPORTAGE 28 Nileena MS is a staff writer at The Caravan. reporting fellow (tech) Rachna Khaira
AND ESSAYS 58 Samriddhi Sakunia is an independent journalist based in Delhi. Her work has been published reporting fellows Sujatha Sivagnanam
in many national and international publications. and Eram Agha
multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar
multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray
PHOTO ESSAY 68 Harsha Pandav is a photographer and visual artist interested in narratives around water, multimedia editor Nabeela Paniyath
home, identity, childhood, race and the politics of belonging. Currently based in Mumbai, she fact-checker Ahan Penkar
social media and audience editor
is part of the WomenPhotograph 2022 Mentorship program. Anandita Chandra
senior software engineer
BOOKS 88 Abhrajyoti Chakraborty is a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Anjaneya Sivan
photo researcher Utkarsh
Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. He was a Provost’s fellow at the Iowa senior graphic designer
Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Fiction. Paramjeet Singh
junior graphic designer
COVER Illustration: Pia Alizé Hazarika Shagnik Chakraborty
hindi translator Parijat P
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Subramanian and Salil Tripathi
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graphic design intern Varsha Govil
photo intern Vinati Sehgal

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THE LEDE
Signs of Life
Folk tales help Rajasthan’s desert communities
prepare for famine / Communities
/ sharanya deepak
On a dusty morning in Palasani, a vil-
lage near Jodhpur, 46-year-old Kaburi
Mirasi recounted stories her mother
told her about the Chhappaniya Akal—
the Famine of ’56. The famine occurred
in 1899–90, or 2056 in the Bikrami cal-
endar. Kaburi narrated how members
of her community of Mirasi Muslims,
a historically marginalised caste in
Rajasthan, would beg their landlords for
spare grain or how water from boiling
green pulses was preserved as a source
of nourishment. The famine spread
through north-western India and, in
Rajasthan, brought illness and hunger
like never before. “People left their
homes forever,” Kaburi told me. “Mil-
lions moved away to villages far away in
the hope of some work and a meal.”
In Rajasthan, famines are classified
into four types: a dearth of water, a
dearth of grain, a dearth of fodder and,
the most gruesome, trikal, or a lack of
all three. A nineteenth-century report
about famines in western India noted
that “distress came from a ‘famine of
wages’ not a ‘famine of grain’” and
that the “common peasant” remained
impoverished because of their lack of
agency over crop and land. So, even as
rainfall and floods triggered periods
of scarcity, famines were not simply
matters of natural intervention. When
scarcity arrived, kings did not create ir-
rigation channels, while moneylenders
from dominant-caste trading commu-
nities further ensnared farmers in debt
traps. Little has changed since, causing
the community to never forget its tradi-
tions of fighting food scarcity.
Kaburi abounds with lists of what can
be foraged during famines. “Take the
8 THE CARAVAN
flowers of the aak plant,” she said, pick-
ing up a handful of flowers from a small
tree which grows wild in Marwar. “In
dominant-caste Hindu communities,
the flower is auspicious, used in pujas
and ceremonies, but, for us, this can be
food at a time of need.” In the popular
imagination, the khejri tree, a recurring
theme in Kaburi’s stories, is associated
most often with ker sangri, a dish made
with dried berries and beans from the
tree, and eaten with hot bajra rotis.
“Usually, the barks of trees are harmful,
but khejri bark is good for rotis,” Kaburi
said. “You scrape it, soak it and then
pound it into a flour to make hard rotis
on whatever source of fire you have.” As
she walked to a khejri tree outside her
house, she talked about how it provides
shade to a weary traveller and how each
part of it is useful during famines. “Tell
me,” she said, pointing to the tree, “is
there more beauty than this anywhere
in the world?”
Like most in Rajasthan, Kaburi’s
family depends on a small-patch of land
and a couple of animals for food. They
have to feed the animals, being from a
community that is as pastoralist as it is
agrarian. “A famine of fodder can be as
difficult as one of grain,” she explained.
Ruksana Mirasi, Kaburi’s sister-in
law, who is in her early fifties, told me,
“Without our animals, we cannot eat.”
Even after Independence, union
and state governments have had a
poor track record of helping western
Rajasthan through famines. Ruksana
remembered the government sending
wheat during a famine in 1970. “It was
spoiled,” she said. “It is better to eat
wild grasses than spoiled wheat.” She
listed some on her fingers: boo-banwali,
a gummy shrub that is eaten as a last
resort, and makara, wrinkled seeds
of grains that are cooked into a thick,
gelatinous porridge to sterilise them
and make them edible for children. The
women spoke more fondly of bhurat,
grass seeds the size of a safety pin,
enclosed in a prickly husk. During fam-
ines, Ruksana said, it was equally im-
portant to know what to eat and what
not to eat. “One cannot be desperate.
One must know what to do.”
Throughout Rajasthan, stories of
great hunger are present in idioms and
folktales. Shafi Mohammed Langa, a
55-year-old member of the Barmer dis-
trict’s Langa Manganiyar community,
was a veritable encyclopaedia of folk-
lore about drought and famines. Langa
told stories until the day darkened. In
one, he narrated a tale from the Ch-
happaniya Akal, about a Bhil couple.
The man leaves for a faraway village
to work, and his wife is also forced to
leave behind two of her children. “It is
up to mothers to take care of their chil-
dren and carry the load of the famine,”
Langa concluded. “Imagine what she
must have gone through.”
Without referring to specific famines,
Langa’s stories focussed on the suffer-
ing experienced. They hold lessons—
not just utilitarian, but emotional—for
common people to survive periods of
scarcity. Even today, it is not rare for
rural Rajasthanis to migrate to work as
labourers in other parts of India during
times of drought and famine. Many go
to cities like Delhi for low-paying urban
jobs. Many are rendered homeless, liv-
ing by the highways.
The ethnologist Komal Kothari has
encountered many such tales. In a
book-length interview with novelist
Rustom Barucha, Kothari recounted,

gobindram oodeyram / wikimedia commons
for instance, the story of a boy from a
Bhambhi community, a marginalised
caste in Rajasthan, who protects the
village’s wealth when its residents flee
during a famine. Another story he nar-
rated about the same community was”
about a Rajput woman whose husband
had abandoned her during a famine.
In the folk tales lie not only hints of
history and survival but also accounts
of the oppression carried out by ruling,
landowning castes and how members
of toiling classes assisted one another
and persevered to survive.
While famines remain a rare aberra-
tion for urban, dominant-caste Indians,
people in rural Rajasthan routinely
walk long distances for just a pot of
water. Brackish water is still a resilient,
unforgiving curse. Both colonial and
post-colonial regimes in India have
treated the desert-dwelling communi-
ties of Rajasthan with neglect, while
historians have seldom considered the
region’s famines or the foods that sus-
tain people during times of scarcity. For
Rajasthan’s desert communities, hunger
remains perpetual and, outside the po-
litical and economic metrics of famine,
small and big hungers are knitted into
the majority of their lives. As in other
parts of the subcontinent, food remains
a matter of ownership and access, and
hunger a result of distance, topography
and the cutting realities of caste.
In 2020, IndiaSpend reported that,
in Dungarpur district, in Rajasthan’s
Adivasi belt, loss of work and reverse
migration from cities during the
COVID-19 pandemic had exacerbat-
ed extreme hunger. Aid from both
the union government and the Con-
gress-led state government remained
largely absent for rural families. “Akal
never leaves us,” Kaburi told me.
“Spoiled grain, water problems, hungry
JULY 2022
the lede
above: A lithographic postcards depicting
a poor rural community in early-1900s
Rajasthan. Little has changed about the
prevalence of hunger in the region since then.
children and weak animals—these are
all things we reckon with even now.”
When Langa narrated his stories, he
also spoke of signs, including the cries
of birds and desert animals, that signal
the coming of rain. “If a chameleon
climbs on the upper branch of the ker
tree and changes its colours, a famine
is on its way,” he told me. “If, on the
ninth day of the monsoon month, the
skies are clear, remove all hope of rain
on our parched earth. Make your seeds
your food, and your tools wood for fire.”
When a listener asked him what to
do if they did not see the signs, Langa
was undeterred. “If one cannot see the
signs,” he said, “that means they are not
looking.” s
9
the lede
The First Healers
Adivasi women in Jharkhand fight malaria and
witchcraft with Hodopathy / Health
gita raut
/ nazish hussain
In 2020, Lalita Boipai, a rural healthcare work-
er, was conducting tests with malaria kits in her
village, Bera Kundrijor, as part of a government
survey. She, however, was not prepared for its
findings. “Surprised at the zero cases of malar-
ia in my report, I got nervous thinking it would
raise questions from the higher authorities,” she
told me. “Out of panic, I reported two-three fake
cases.”
Bera Kundrijor is one of the 62 villages in the
above: Adivasi Noamundi block of West Singhbhum district in
women prepare Jharkhand. The district is highly vulnerable to a
herbal medicines malaria endemic. According to the National Vec-
for the prevention tor Borne Disease Control Program, Jharkhand
and cure of malaria
reported 37,133 malaria cases in 2019—in which
during training
conducted at
West Singhbhum alone reported 9,077 cases,
Baraiburu in the highest in the state. In 2020, the cases in
2002. Treating Jharkhand came down to 16,655.
with herbs has Astounded by the zero malaria cases, Boipai
been a traditional ascribed it to the “malaria kadha” drive in her
indigenous village. Malaria kadha is a syrup made from locally
knowledge and
available forest-based herbs to provide immunity
an integral part
of healing among against mosquito bites. Adivasi women groups
the Adivasi prepare this kadha at the beginning of each mon-
communities. soon season, which gets distributed among the
10 THE CARAVAN
villagers—the prescribed dose is half-a-glass for
three days on an empty stomach. The kadha has
become increasingly popular in the area.
Boipai testified to this success with her personal
experience. “Earlier, each month, one of my chil-
dren would fall sick of malaria. I had spent a lot of
money after them,” she told me. “Since I started
taking malaria kadha as a preventive medicine
against the disease, my family has been free from
malaria.”
Availability of medicines, access to healthcare
clinics, road connectivity and financial constraints
have been significant issues for the residents of
villages in Naomundi. Herbal medicines, on the
other hand, are readily available and affordable.
“I cured my children through herbal medicine
and could finally complete building my home,”
Binita Laguri, a woman from the Ho tribe in her
late-thirties, who resided in Sarbil village, told me.
“Earlier I faced financial troubles every month.
I had to spend money going to hospitals, buying
medicines and injections.”
Boipai added that there are discrepancies in the
distribution of medicine and vaccinations, which
are not always available. In Noamundi, Adivasi
health practitioners are instead turning to a med-
ical system named Hodopathy. Boipai, who got

her training in Hodopathy from Latar
Kundrijor, said that Adivasi women are
“filling this gap with their voluntary
support and work.” They learn to iden-
tify the herbs, plants and animal-source
substances, process these, and make
medicines for common illnesses like
malaria, anemia, cold and cough.
PP Hembrom, one of the system’s
key practitioners and trainers, said
that he has been training people since
1987. “The aim is to spread awareness
of Hodopathy in villages. I have trained
thousands of people in the tradition-
al medicine system across villages of
Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa,” he told me.
Based in Noamundi, Hembrom is 93
years old and belongs to the Munda
community. He has published four
books on Hodopathy and ethno-med-
icine. The term hodo comes from the
Mundari language and means “people.”
The training is based on the assessment
of common occurring diseases and
available resources for Hodopathy in
respective villages.
In 2000, Adivasi women in Noamun-
di formed Omon Mahila Sangathan
to help provide Hodopathy training.
“Public health in the region was in
shambles,” Pani Laguri, a woman from
the Ho tribe who works as an advisor
at the organisation, said. “Many people
were dying because of diseases, but it
was assumed to be the work of witch-
craft; as a result, witch-hunting was
also rampant.” Laguri, along with five
other Adivasi women, got together with
the researcher Ajitha Susan George to
mull over the existing health crisis in
Noamundi. George was living there at
the time and had just completed her
study on witch-hunting in the region.
They invited Hembrom to train the
first batch of 40 people, largely com-
prising women. OMS has now trained
Adivasi women in 52 villages. “In the
area, sixty percent of the residents are
Adivasi but we also take into account
the other population that lives here,”
George told me. “The Hodopathy
training is open for all rural women.”
Jayanti Kairam, a young woman in her
twenties from the Ho tribe, told me that
local residents are increasingly opting
for Hodopathy treatment. “When we go
to villages, the older generations remi-
nisce about ‘jadi-buti’”—herbs—“herbal
treatment and feel proud that we are
reviving the old practices,” she said.
The current practice of Hodopathy
among women in Noamundi does not
involve ritual sacrifices or prayers.
They prescribe medicine that aims
to diagnose and cure bodily diseas-
es only. “Sometimes, when jadi-buti
doesn’t work, it is important to do
puja,” 31-year-old practitioner Bamiya
Boipai told me. “It is part of the healing
culture among Adivasis. We have been
doing it since our ancestors’ time.”
In 2012, Adivasi women in Sarbil
village formed a group named Ugta
Suraj Samiti and received training at
Ajitha Susan George
explained the correlation
between diseases and
witch-hunting. “Without
health problems, death
or disease, you don’t see a
witch,” she said.
ww
OMS. “We have seen many people die
who relied only on exorcism or ritual
prayers,” Chunni Jerrai, a member of
the group, told me. “We try to discour-
age people from doing that. Relying
on puja distracts people from actual
diseases.”
George explained the correlation
between diseases and witch-hunting.
“Without health problems, death or
disease, you don’t see a witch,” she said.
Many in the region were malnourished
and vulnerable to diseases. With a
deep-rooted belief that witches caused
death and diseases, they began looking
for people to blame.
JULY 2022
the lede
“The accusations of witchcraft were
happening earlier. Now, Ojhas”—exor-
cists—“don’t allege anyone as a witch,”
Sanatan Boipai, a middle-aged Adivasi
man from Latar Kundrijor, told me. Su-
mitra Laguri, a Ho woman from Sarbil
village, added, “In the village, a fine is
imposed on whoever accuses others of
witchcraft. It is one of the reasons why
witch accusations have gone down.”
According to the National Crime Re-
cords Bureau in Jharkhand, 15 murder
cases were reported in 2020 related to
witchcraft. Jharkhand comes in the
third after Madhya Pradesh and Chhat-
tisgarh in witchcraft-related violence,
whereas Orissa comes fourth.
However, Adivasi women are still
vulnerable to allegations of witchcraft.
In one domestic dispute among rela-
tives, when Jerrai had tried to inter-
vene, she was accused of being a witch.
“You gave me a wound on my leg; you
cure it now. You have learned witch-
craft from your women’s organisation,”
one of her relatives told her. Jerrai told
me, “My husband was not at home.
They came with a weapon and gave me
death threats.” She was lucky to get
away from them alive. Later, the village
panchayat settled the matter.
Treating with herbs has been a
traditional indigenous knowledge and
an integral part of healing among the
Adivasi communities. But the knowl-
edge has been mostly confined to cer-
tain people or groups. In Ho language,
the one who performs ritual prayer
is called deon. When people fall sick,
they go to the deon for treatment, who
primarily carries out ritual prayer. He
also usually has knowledge of jadi-buti
treatment. However, the deons do not
share this knowledge with patients or
anyone else. Training Adivasi women of
Noamundi in Hodopathy has result-
ed in the sharing of this indigenous
knowledge. It has created a network of
women-led groups, generating aware-
ness about health and helping each
other out. s
11
The CaravanԝƹɨȈȶǼɰ
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ƃȶǁƃȶƃȢʰɰȈɰǹɨɁȴ
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ƺɁʤljɨȈȶǼɥɁȢȈɽȈƺɰӗǼȢɁƹƃȢ
ƃǹǹƃȈɨɰӗȃljƃȢɽȃƺƃɨljӗ
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ɽljƺȃȶɁȢɁǼʰƃȶǁȴɁɨljӝ

caravanmagazine.in/caravan-columns
 PERSPECTIVES
Losing the Way
The Akali Dal no longer exists, and it may
be necessary to reinvent it / Politics
narinder nanu / afp / getty images
/ hartosh singh bal
Simranjit Singh Mann’s astounding victory over
the Aam Aadmi Party candidate in the Sangrur
Parliamentary bypoll, coming on the heel of the
AAP’s victory in the state election months ago, is
representative of the turmoil underway in Punjab.
The virtual disappearance of the mainstream Aka-
li Dal has opened up a huge space in the politics of
the Sikh majority in the state and Mann, a maver-
14 THE CARAVAN
ick radical Sikh politician who has always been on
the extreme right of the spectrum of splinter Akali
groups, marks only the beginning of a period in
which various new alternatives will emerge to fill
this vacuum.
Based in Punjab as a reporter, over twenty years
ago, I found that, while reporting on elections in
rural areas, it paid to take the litany of complaints
voters had against the local Akali candidate with
a pinch of salt. This was especially true of the Jutt

Sikhs, who owned much of the land and provided
much of the resources—from money and muscle
to madira—that make for a successful campaign
in Punjab. After the vote, the most vocal critics
of the candidate would tell me, “Vote te panth nu
paya”—I have voted for my religious sect, meaning
Sikhism, hence the Akali Dal.
Today, in Punjab the easy identification of the
panth with a party no longer exists, even as the
Bharatiya Janata Party—representing the fledgling
Hindutva panth—rules the country.
The Akali Dal was born a century ago, out of
the non-violent Gurdwara Reform Movement that
wrested control of gurdwaras from the British-af-
filiated Udasi mahants. It led to the establishment
of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Commit-
tee to manage all historic Sikh shrines. The party
went on to play a prominent role in the independ-
ence struggle and initially had close links with the
Congress. In fact, many prominent Akalis, includ-
ing Parkash Singh Badal, began their career with
the Congress, while the most prominent Congress
chief minister of Punjab, Partap Singh Kairon,
began his career with the Akalis.
The Punjabi Suba movement spearheaded by the
Akalis saw the formation of the truncated state of
Punjab, in 1966, with a Sikh majority. The new de-
mographics ensured that the Akali Dal was a seri-
ous contender for power, in opposition to the Con-
gress. The party went on to provide the strongest
resistance to Indira Gandhi’s clampdown during
the Emergency, starting a cycle that led to the
Congress aligning with the hardline fundamental-
ist leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and trying
to break the Akalis’ hold over the Sikh vote. The
consequences of the disastrous Operation Blue-
star ordered by Indira Gandhi still resonate in the
country.
The decade and half of militancy that followed
led to the marginalisation or death of a number of
prominent Akali leaders, leaving only Badal and
Gurcharan Singh Tohra to battle for power by the
perspectives
mid 1990s. Subsequently, Badal outmanoeuvred opposite page:
Tohra, using the SGPC and the Akal Takht as mere Shiromani Akali
tools in the capture of power within the party. Dal’s president
Simranjit Singh
The emergence of Badal as the sole leader and
Mann (centre)
his son Sukhbir as the heir apparent was unprec- speaks to the media
edented in the history of the party. It created a on the thirtieth
situation where the party began to resemble the anniversary of
Congress, with the Badals acting like the Gandhis. Operation Blue
The problem with all dynasties is the eventual Star at the Golden
Temple in Amritsar
rise of an incompetent heir. This is true for Sukh-
on 6 June 2014.
bir as much as it is for Rahul. The fading away of
two very dissimilar parties is being played out in
similar fashion: corruption, nepotism and family
control leading to electoral irrelevance.
For the first time in a century, this has left
Punjab without the leadership of greybeards who
could channel and guide mainstream Sikh opin-
ion, shielding it from the ever present influence
of a more hot-blooded stream of Sikh politics.
This latter stream has always had an attraction
in Punjab, especially among the Jutt Sikh youth
nurtured on an ethos of martyrdom and rebellion.
The terms baghi—rebel—and shaheed—martyr—
figure prominently in the folklore, and these ideas
are associated with figures as widely divergent as
Bhagat Singh and Bhindranwale.
This was evident even in the farmers’ protest,
in which, despite a leftist leadership, the appeal of
Sikhism was also evident. The emergence of the
actor Deep Sidhu, with his garbled call for Khal-
istan, was emblematic of this dichotomy.
For the first time in a century,
Punjab is without the leadership of
greybeards who could channel and
guide mainstream Sikh opinion,
shielding it from the ever present
influence of a more hot-blooded
stream of Sikh politics.
ww
JULY 2022 15
losing the way · perspectives
The leftist leadership returned to political obliv-
ion once the protests were over. Despite its long
history of struggle in Punjab and its evident pres-
ence in many areas, the Left has never been a via-
ble contender for power because it lacks the means
and the vocabulary to engage with the call of iden-
tity. The protests allowed a number of young men,
and some women, mostly Jutt Sikh, to feel what it
means to tap into a cause larger than themselves.
They are now left with nowhere to turn to in the
landscape of contemporary Punjab.
For a short while, this yearning fed into the AAP
campaign. But, with the singer Sidhu Moosewala
being shot dead soon after the new state govern-
ment withdrew his security cover, there are already
signs of disenchantment with the AAP’s promise
among the Jutt Sikhs. This is a constituency that is
impatient and not easily satisfied, and it easily con-
fuses its Jutt ethos with the fact of being Sikh.
This attitude is evident in Moosewala’s music,
with its glorification of cars, guns, violence, rural
culture and Jutt pride. In him or in Deep Sidhu,
both Jutts, the failure to observe norms that have
come to define orthodox Sikhism, such as uncut
Sidhu Moosewala and Deep Sidhu both spoke
admiringly of Bhindranwale, even though
Bhindranwale’s orthodoxy would have had no
space for either of them.
ww
hair, is no surprise. They both spoke admiringly
of Bhindranwale, even though Bhindranwale’s
orthodoxy would have had no space for either of
them. Interestingly, the most vocal “Khalistani”
now being paraded by the Indian state, Gurpat-
want Singh Pannu, shares this trait. He is reminis-
cent of many of the militants who came to the fore
in Punjab after the death of Bhindranwale, ready
to fight to the death for a faith they did not really
seem to adhere to.
The overt and unapologetic assertion of a cul-
ture of patriarchy and caste pride is what sepa-
rates the Jutt ethos from Sikh tenets. Jutt domi-
nance and patriarchy are also very much part of
the Akali Dal’s structure but, since it can find no
defence for them within the faith, the party can-
not overtly proclaim support for such ideas.
This two-faced accommodation has been part of
the Akali Dal’s position for a considerable period
of time. Through the SGPC, Badal and the par-
ty would allow the veneration of Bhindranwale
within the Golden Temple complex but still large-
ly keep radical elements in check. Meanwhile,
within the parliamentary framework, it would ally
with the BJP and present a moderate face to the
Hindus of Punjab. However duplicitous, this com-
16 THE CARAVAN
promise was responsible for the party’s largely
successful participation in the electoral process.
This participation has helped steer Punjab
through the complexities of the post-militant
phase while keeping the Akali Dal firmly within
the bounds of constitutional propriety. The party’s
own history of success with non-violent methods
has ensured it has always kept away from any vio-
lent modes of protest. Such an accommodation of
disparate forces is essential, and the other major
political figure through this period, Amarinder
Singh, espoused the same mix of strong Sikh cre-
dentials and an adherence to constitutional limits.
Today, there is no such figure of prominence any-
where on the scene in Punjab to serve as a check on
the attraction that the Jutt ethos has for the young.
This combination of politics, gangs, police and
popular culture is an easy lure for young men.
Even the success of the farmers’ protests has not
encouraged saner, more workable modes of voic-
ing grievances, real or perceived. Radical Sikhs
in Punjab and abroad, lacking any real base, have
been opportunistic. Otherwise keen to proclaim
their faith, ready to raise tempers over sacrilege,
they are more than willing to suddenly term Deep
Sidhu and Moosewala—whom they would have
criticised as apostates—as “martyrs.”
Mann has been part of this bandwagon. Unsur-
prisingly, his rise to prominence first came in the
period of the the post-Bhindranwale militancy
when he won his Parliamentary election from
Tarn Taran. In the recent Assembly elections,
Deep Sidhu was his campaign manager, and even
Sidhu’s death in a road accident did not prevent
the AAP candidate from defeating Mann. But now
riding on the growing disenchantment with the
AAP, and the impact of the death of Moosewala,
Mann has once again made it to Parliament. He
is too much of a maverick in his pronouncements
and his politics to fill the space that has been va-
cated, but he is a sign of what is to follow.
In this environment, Sikh institutions, con-
trolled by the Badal-run Akali Dal with no po-
litical standing, can no longer act as moderating
influences. This is already manifest in the absurd
proclamations of the jathedar—head—of the Akal
Takht, who has asked Sikhs to arm themselves
with modern weapons. Given the rise of Hindutva
in the rest of the country, any new leaders seek-
ing to tap into the legacy of the Akali Dal, such as
Mann, will likely strike a more strident note on
the issue of Sikh identity than was possible when
the country’s politics did not so crudely echo a
majoritarian identity. The real tragedy, already
foreshadowed in Mann’s victory, would be if, fore-
going its legacy, the Akali Dal was reborn in the
image of the BJP as a new kind of unapologetic
panthic party. s
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 perspectives
Write Off
The suffocation of indigenous-script movements
in the Northeast / Communities
/ manoranjan pegu
On 7 April 2022, the union home
minister, Amit Shah, while speaking at
a meeting of parliament’s official-lan-
guage committee, described Hindi as
“the language of India.” He said that
Hindi, an official language, should
become an “important part of the unity
of the country.” When speakers of
different languages in India converse
with each other, he added, “it should
be in the language of India” and, in
keeping with this spirit, Prime Minister
Narendra Modi used Hindi for running
the government. Shah suggested that
Hindi, rather than indigenous languag-
es, should take the place of English. He
announced that all eight north-eastern
states had agreed to make Hindi com-
pulsory up to the tenth standard and
david talukdar / nurphoto / getty images
18
had recruited over twenty thousand
Hindi teachers.
This was not the first time that the
home minister had announced the
government’s intention to impose
Hindi upon those who do not speak the
language. “Every language has its own
importance, but it is very important to
have a language of the whole country
which should become the identity of
India globally,” Shah said on the Hindi
Divas in 2019. “Today, if a language
can keep the country united, it is the
spoken language, Hindi.” That year,
the Modi government also pushed for
Hindi to become compulsory as part
of its draft National Education Policy,
eventually dropping the clause after
massive protests.
Like its previous iterations, Shah’s lat-
est push for “one nation, one language”
THE CARAVAN
drew outrage from organisations of the
Northeast. The Northeast Forum for
International Solidarity, a sociopolitical
collective, issued a scathing state-
ment. It accused the home minister of
“exerting Hindi chauvinism over other
communities, especially marginalised
communities.” The NEFIS took issue
with how, instead of according formal
recognition and support to indigenous
languages, the centre was instead
forcing Hindi on marginalised groups.
It said that this was “not accidental but
the unfortunate result of the insolent at-
titude of an arrogant state that chooses
to impose its culture and language upon
marginal groups/communities in the
manner of a haughty conqueror.” The
statement reflected the frustration of a
majority of India’s tribes, who, for de-
cades, have been enmeshed in arduous

struggles to preserve their languages and,
by extension, their culture. The Roman
Script for Kokborok-Choba, a conglom-
eration of 56 indigenous sociocultural
organisations in Tripura, also opposed
the move.
In his speech for the parliamenta-
ry committee, Shah noted that nine
tribal communities in the Northeast had
converted their dialects’ scripts into
Devanagari, the script in which Hindi
is commonly written. For instance, the
Bodos, the largest tribe in Assam, now
use Devanagari to write their language.
Shah’s speech failed to capture the
complex history behind this outcome.
Devanagari was never a natural choice
for the Bodos, nor did it emerge from
within the community. It was a direct
result of the larger interplay of linguistic
politics in India.
Following Independence, the efforts of
many tribes to choose a script that best
suited their language became entan-
gled with majoritarian politics. Tribal
languages became imperilled not just by
the imposition of Hindi but also the ma-
joritarian languages within their states.
Assamese nationalists constantly opposed
indigenous groups adopting the Roman
script, which many tribes found easy and
suitable. State support to protect indige-
nous languages was sorely lacking. This
made it imperative for tribal languages in
Assam to depend on dominant mediums,
such as Assamese or Hindi, for their sur-
vival. I have witnessed this playing out in
my own community, the Misings, who are
still struggling to access basic education
in their mother tongue.
Yet, this nuance is missing from the
popular discourse in mainstream media,
which is often focused only on the push-
back against Hindi. Framing the indige-
nous-script movements in such a manner
fails to capture the full reality of the
threats to linguistic minorities, especially
in the Northeast.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the
case of the Bodos. They were among
the first plains tribes to form their own
literary organisation to protect their
language, in 1952. By the 1960s, the
Bodo Sahitya Sabha began to discuss the
issue of choosing a script. Bodo-medium
education was introduced in Assam in
the early 1960s, prompting the need for a
community-wide script. Until then, in the
absence of a common script, the Bodos
had used the Roman script, or the East-
ern Nagari script used by the Assamese
and Bengali languages, to write their
language.
In January 1966, the BSS began to
consider the feasibility of using the
Roman script. It first formed an expert
committee to look into the issue and, in
1968, a sub-committee to make a final
recommendation. The historian Redion
Narzary notes that the sub-committee
decided in favour of the Roman script
for a multitude of reasons. For one, it
was “advantageous for its quick and
easy learning” because it required only
26 letters, as opposed to the hundreds
of letters, including compound letters
and other variations, required in East-
ern Nagari or Devanagari. Moreover,
the sub-committee felt the Roman
script enabled easy and cheaper typing
and printing, and was suitable for sci-
entific or technical subjects. It also felt
that Roman would help maintain links
and uniformity in spelling and pronun-
ciation among Bodos living in different
places, such as Bangladesh, Myanmar,
Nepal and Bhutan.
The BSS accepted the Roman script
with a formal resolution, in February
1970. According to the historian Bijay
Kumar Daimary, an implementation
sub-committee suggested that the BSS
begin using the Roman script for all
its circulars and notices, and conduct
classes to familiarise Bodos with the
alphabet. It suggested that Bodos seek
government grants and support for
implementing Roman-script textbooks
and primary education.
However, a parallel Assamese
identitarian movement was ongoing
in the state, which subsumed the
Bodos’ choice. Organisations such as
the Assam Sahitya Sabha had consis-
tently campaigned for Assamese to be
a link language between tribes—that
is, a common language of communica-
tion among indigenous non-Assamese
communities. Assamese intellectuals,
politicians and the elite propagated
this demand as well. The historian and
ethnographer Jagdish Lal Dawar notes
that, following Independence, the ASS
began to take interest in bringing the
tribes of Nagaland and the North-East
Frontier Agency—which later came to
JULY 2022
perspectives
opposite page: Students of the tenth
standard at a government school in Assam
in Barpeta district, in 2021. Tens of thousands
of students from indigenous minorities in
the state receive education in Assamese
and its Eastern Nagari script, which are not
practised in their homes.
be Arunachal Pradesh—as well as tea
garden labourers, under the Assamese
fold. Ratnakanta Barkakati, an eminent
Assamese poet, “passionately appealed
for the rapid integration of NEFA with
Assam” in his presidential address to
an ASS meet in 1963. He advocated for
the Assamese language and script to be
used in the hill areas.
In the 1960s, there was a political
shift towards defining Assamese iden-
tity with the language, which led to the
passage of an act designating Assamese
the official language of the state.
Groups in Assam that did not speak
Assamese—hill tribes, plain tribes and
other linguistic minorities—began
resisting this development, terming
it an attempt to create a monolithic
identity. Daimary notes that an official
resolution was passed at the All Assam
Non-Assamese Language Conference
in Silchar, in July 1960, which opposed
“the move to impose Assamese as the
official language for the state of Assam”
and insisted “that the status quo based
on the intrinsically multilingual char-
acter of the state must be maintained
for the peace and security of eastern
region of India.” In 1966, the Plain
Tribes Council of Assam also launched
an agitation for a separate state.
The historian Satyendra Kumar
Sarmah notes that, in 1971, the BSS
formally placed their demand for
Roman script to replace the existing
Assamese script in Bodo-medium
schools. The state government reject-
ed this proposal “on the ground of its
foreign origin,” Sarmah writes. “It was
believed that the script would [vanish]
shortly from the country.” The gov-
ernments in Assam and at the centre
became concerned that this proposal
would cause “further fragmentation of
the state,” Sarmah adds. “In 1971, in a
meeting the then Prime Minister In-
dira Gandhi advised the Bodo leaders
to opt for any script that was used in
the Indian languages other than the
Roman script.”
19
write off · perspectives
Alarmed by the lack of government
support, the BSS decided to take mat-
ters into its own hands. In 1974, it intro-
duced a bithorai—primer textbook—in
the Roman script for use in all Bo-
do-medium schools. The state govern-
ment reacted sharply to this unilateral
decision and gave orders to stop grants
to Bodo-medium schools and halt the
salaries of Bodo teachers.
According to Narzary, the Assamese
elite and the ASS also opposed the
use of the Roman script, “having
seen anti-Assamese feeling in it.” He
writes that another reason that the
government opposed this choice was
perhaps “because a misconception is
widely prevalent in the Government
circles that a demand for Roman script
always arises out of pro-Christian
Missionary and anti-Indian attitudes.”
Sarmah notes that the ASS felt that
the Assamese script was “enough and
suitable” for “cultural integration and
development of tribal languages in
Assam.” Daimary states that the move-
ment for the Roman script was given a
“separatist colour.”
Owing to their strong numbers and
their presence in a strategically import-
ant location in the Northeast, the Bodos
have always enjoyed a political advan-
tage in comparison to other tribes. The
community launched a full-fledged
campaign for the recognition of the
Roman script, coming out in the thou-
sands for protests and boycotts. But the
movement turned violent. Fifteen Bodo
agitators died in police firing in 1974.
Over the next year, the BSS held
rounds of discussions with the state
and the centre. But, Daimary writes,
the talks with the state went nowhere
and the ASS, too, failed to suggest a
resolution. The Indira Gandhi gov-
ernment, on its part, mentioned a
preference for “closeness” between
The struggles of tribal
communities to preserve
their languages are not
attempts at dominance but
existential efforts to keep
their knowledge, language
and distinct identity alive.
ww
20
communities in the state. This created
pressure on the BSS. It suggested the
continuation of Assamese, a status quo
preferred by the majoritarian elites
as well. The centre also began to offer
Devanagari as an alternative. “The BSS
finally fell between the jaws of the two
Governments,” Daimary writes. In April
1975, it accepted the Devanagari script.
It stated, however, that it would return
to Roman if the central government did
not include the Bodo language in the
Eighth Schedule of the Constitution,
thereby according it the status of an
official Indian language.
The Bodo language was finally added
to the schedule in 2003, almost three
decades later. In 2020, the centre, the
Assam government and Bodo groups
signed a peace accord that made Bodo the
associate official language in the state.
The accord also afforded other protec-
tions to the language in education. One
scholar told the Indian Express, however,
“The problem is that many old-timers,
who started with the Assamese script,
find Devanagari tough; those who use
[Devanagari] find Assamese tough—and
many people stick to the Roman script
because it is much easier.”
Around the same time as the Bodo
script movement was taking off, the
Misings, a numerically smaller and
less influential group than the Bodos,
also began a script movement. It saw a
starkly different trajectory. The Misings
reside primarily in upper Assam, in the
districts of Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, Sonit-
pur, Tinsukia, Majuli and Dibrugarh,
among others—many of these areas are
relatively underserved. Around fifty
thousand Misings reside in Arunachal
Pradesh as well. Up until the late 1960s,
Mising writers had primarily been using
the Eastern Nagari script to write the
language, with some preferring Roman.
Though the history of the Mising script
movement is not well documented, a re-
cent book, Mising Bhaxar Lipi Achoni—
edited by the renowned Mising scholar
Nahendra Padun and published by the
Mising Agom Kebang, the communi-
ty’s literary organisation—gives a brief
overview.
In 1968, Padun, then a research
scholar at Gauhati University, and the
linguist Tabu Taid formed the Guwahati
Mising Kebang, a group meant to bring
THE CARAVAN
together Misings in the area. According
to the Lipi Achoni, a 1972 GKM meeting
subsequently became the foundation for
the formation of the MAK, which then
took on the search for an appropriate
script. Padun felt that it was important to
choose a script with a scientific basis and
to have the consent of the larger Mising
community. For the next few years, the
MAK held extensive debates on the sub-
ject. Padun and a few other scholars felt
that Eastern Nagari could be modified to
write the Mising language, while Taid
and others preferred Roman.
Finally, in 1974, the MAK established
a ru:seg kebang—decision committee—of
which Padun was a member. The ru:seg
considered the Devanagari, Eastern
Nagari and Roman scripts. Lipi Achoni
says that the committee decided against
the Devanagari script since the Misings
did not have any historical relationship
with the Hindi language—of the three
scripts and languages, Hindi was most
alien to the Mising community. The
committee also noted that Devana-
gari and Eastern Nagari had the same
parent systems. It finally chose Roman,
highlighting that the script had advan-
tages over the others. The phonetics of
the Roman script were already similar
to those in use among Mising tribes. Its
other reasons were similar to those of
the BSS: an ease of internationalising the
language and compatibility with existing
standards such as Unicode and technolo-
gy such as keyboards and typewriters.
The ru:seg foresaw that Assamese
nationalists would view this choice as
a threat. According to Lipi Achoni, it
cautiously wrote, “A community’s choice
of script can never be an obstacle to the
unity of the society … even though the
Misings have chosen the roman script,
they would continue to be an integral
part of the Assamese society.” To ensure
that “no misunderstanding” emerged
out of its decision, the committee wrote,
it would enter discussions with the ASS.
The recommendations of the ru:seg
were formally adopted in a meeting of
the Mising Bane Kebang, the oldest and
the largest organisation of the Mising
community, in early 1975.
Speaking on the condition of anonym-
ity, a former MAK office-bearer told me
that though the ASS did not formally
oppose the move, it did nothing to help

the Misings in their efforts. He did not see the
Roman script as foreign. “The Axomiya scholars or
the Sabha neither made any attempts to learn the
Mising language nor did they support any attempts
to develop Mising literature and language,” he said.
“On the other hand, the British had written dictio-
naries of the Mising language.”
Assamese opposition to the Misings’ choice man-
ifested in subtle ways. Since its formation, the MAK
and the Mising community at large had been raising
two key demands to the Assam government: that
their language be taught and adopted as a means of
instruction at primary schools in Mising-majority
areas. These demands are not merely an attempt to
preserve the language but are linked to the commu-
nity’s progress as whole.
In the 1980s, the government introduced Mising
as a subject in primary school, but little progress
has been made since. It is yet to appoint enough
Mising-language teachers or translate books
into the language. Every year, tens of thousands
of Mising students receive primary schooling in
Assamese-medium government schools. They are
forced to study in an alien language and script that
they do not use at home. To add to this, schools in
Mising-majority areas are in terrible shape, with
shoddy infrastructure and dwindling numbers of
teachers. The environment—both literal and figu-
rative—is hazardous to learning outcomes. Yearly
floods, such as the ones currently ravaging most of
Assam, shutter these schools for months or convert
them into relief camps.
Growing up in Dhemaji, a district known for
being severely affected by the floods, my family was
victim to such closures. Like many other Misings, I
took boats and crossed temporary bamboo bridges
to reach nearby towns and cities. To escape per-
sistent floods, my father moved our family from
our ancestral village of Maj Debera, in the Sissi
Tongani region, to a nearby town called Silapathar.
It was common for my relatives to travel from Sissi
Tongani to Silapathar and stay with us during flood
season. It was also common for my cousins’ educa-
tion to be paused until the waters receded.
It is no surprise, then, that, when subjected to
sporadic education in an unknown language, youth
from my village would simply drop out of school.
(While community-wise school drop-out rates are
not available, Assam registered the highest dropout
rates in India at the primary and secondary levels
in 2020.) Many migrated for work taking up wage
labour cities such as Bengaluru, Chennai and Kochi.
But concerns regarding education among Mis-
ings and other tribes are rarely the subject of public
debate. Linguistic nationalism has forced tribal
self-assertion into a corner, painting it as a move-
ment against the use of Assamese or Hindi. This re-
casting has relegated structural impediments to the
write off · perspectives
left: A recent book,
“Mising Bhaxar
Lipi Achoni,” gives
a brief overview of
the Mising script
movement. It is in
Assamese, in the
Eastern Nagari
script. In the 1970s,
the Misings chose
the Roman script for
their language. They
have since struggled
for state support
to implement the
decision.
courtesy manoranjan pegu
sidelines. For the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the imposition of
Hindi would complete the cultural integration of
the Northeast into the “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan”
goal set by VD Savarkar. That this may deprive
thousands of tribal children from a formal educa-
tion would be, to them, a small price to pay.
But the centre’s latest aspirations now seem to be
conflicting with those of Assamese nationalists. On
9 April 2022, after Shah’s speech, the ASS issued
a public statement condemning the decision to
make Hindi compulsory until the tenth standard
in north-eastern states. It claimed that, if Hindi
was made compulsory, the future of indigenous
languages, and Assamese as a “link language,”
would be endangered. Along with various national-
ist Assamese organisations, the ASS has, however,
continuously batted for compulsory Assamese ed-
ucation—it appears to have no issue imposing one
majoritarian language instead of another.
The struggles of tribal communities to preserve
their languages are not attempts at dominance
but existential efforts to keep their knowledge,
language and distinct identity alive. For me, the
need to preserve the Mising language is not just to
document it but to preserve indigenous knowledge
systems that have been passed down orally within
my community for generations. It is an attempt
to have this written knowledge and literature be
accessible to generations of Misings after us—a
feat impossible without an easy script and a formal
education. s
JULY 2022 21
perspectives

Memories of Loss
A year after a summer of death, a COVID-19 survivor
recalls trauma, helplessness and grief / Health

/ vineeta sharma

Between April and June 2021, India experienced the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a second wave
swept across the country, India recorded more than half of its total COVID-19 fatalities. The estimates
vary widely, with the most conservative figure being more than a quarter million deaths. It was a period of
extreme loss, angst, helplessness, mayhem and grief. Vineeta Sharma writes a personal account of that time
from Delhi, one of the worst affected cities in India, where hospitals were overfull, as were crematoria and
burial grounds. Sharma writes a lived account—a story behind the numbers and facts about failed institu-
tions—as she still seeks closure a year later.

In the second week of April 2021, my husband, our
two children—one still a toddler—and I tested pos-
itive for COVID-19. We immediately started medi-
cation on the advice of a doctor friend. The city was
under lockdown, which severely limited the avail-
ability of essentials and help with managing the
household. In the smouldering heat of that summer,
the decussate of multiple ambulance sirens outside
turned into screaming alarms inside my head. It
became the defining sound of those long days and
weeks, as the number of casualties grew.
Till days before the second nationwide
COVID-19 wave overtook the city, many people
were dismissive of the virus, calling it a hoax.
Others took the threat too lightly, relying on the
supposedly robust immunity of Indians. Misin-
formation masqueraded as news, and opportun-
ists touted ancient magical remedies. We had
believed that the worst would not happen to us.
That was before the pandemic struck my family.
As I recovered from the infection, I called my
mother only to find out that she was quite unwell.
My parents, both octogenarians, had been living
alone for several years after my two sisters and I
got married and moved into our own homes. My
elder sister and I live in the National Capital Re-
gion, while my younger sister lives in the United
States. My mother was someone who, before the
pandemic, would carry on with her work even
when she was unwell and never missed cooking
a meal. She had not cooked for two days. She had
not told anyone about feeling ill because she did
not want to worry us.
People had started COVID-19 kitchens to feed
those in isolation and quarantine, coordinating
through WhatsApp groups to deliver food free
of charge. Since the municipal corporation had
sealed my house from the outside as a containment
measure, I approached one such group to supply
food to my parents for two days. On the third day,
when my house was unsealed, I risked driving
without a permit to see my parents.
The streets were empty, as though humans
had suddenly vanished from the city. I reached
my parents’ house just as my sister also arrived.
She was in a PPE kit and drenched in sweat. We
imagined for a moment how doctors and medical
professionals were working in such uncomfortable
gear all day long. We found our mother lying face
down on the bed. Her oxygen saturation had fallen
to a dangerous 76 percent. By then, it was common
knowledge that lying prone could help relieve
this condition. I knew from YouTube videos that
doctors were recommending hospitalisation when
a person’s oxygen levels dropped to around ninety
percent. We ordered an RT-PCR test to check for
COVID-19 and a high-resolution CT scan of the
lungs for our mother. We decided that I would
take our mother home and that our father would
go with my sister. We thought our father was
asymptomatic but hoped that he had not been
infected. We did not know that this was to be our
last time together as family and we forgot to hug.
Once home, we focussed on getting my mother
better. It was the last week of April. Thousands of
people were falling ill across Delhi, overwhelming
its health systems. I found a serious dearth of ev-
erything my mother needed. I booked another RT-
PCR test. The lab took three days to collect a swab
and another three days to produce the report. We
only realised later that a six-day delay in deciding
a course of treatment could prove fatal. We started
my mother on medication before the report came,
but that might have already been too late. We had
been consulting a doctor friend, who suggested
that we keep looking for a hospital bed for her. It
was the peak of the wave and there were no avail-
able beds across Delhi. Those that became free due
to a sudden death or a slow recovery quickly filled
up again. The doctor friend recommended that

22 THE CARAVAN

illustration by parmarth rai
we immediately arrange for an oxygen
cylinder while we searched for a bed.
My husband and I spent an evening
and the entire next day frantically
making phone calls and sending out
WhatsApp messages, social-media
posts and emails, reaching out to
find a way to help my mother. We
only seemed to get fake numbers and
false assurances. After several hours,
we realised the extent of the crisis.
There were no hospital beds, oxygen
or medicines available in and around
the city. We could not even manage to
get an ICU-at-home service. We knew
that there were many like us, search-
ing in desperation. Some relief came
from friends and distant relatives, who
scrounged up medicines in remote cor-
ners of the city and dropped them at my
house. My sister sent across the first ox-
ygen cylinder she found. I did not know
how to use the cylinders and haphaz-
ardly followed the doctor’s instructions
to me over the phone. My hands felt
frozen by the need for haste and from
anxiety. Some oxygen hissed out of the
nozzle as I handled the cylinder, and I
JULY 2022
perspectives
shrieked as if a great treasure had been
lost. I had to manage other things I had
never imagined doing, such as giving
my mother steroid injections. I would
close my eyes tight and look away as I
pierced her flesh with the needle.
We spent every minute of the next
few days on the phone. My sister in the
United States had not slept for days.
She had been trying to coordinate
logistics for us and speak to doctors in
Delhi across the time zone gap. On the
evening of 26 April, a colleague of mine
helped us find a hospital bed in a small
23
memories of loss · perspectives
nursing home near Faridabad. We were
ecstatic. I spoke to a man on the phone
who claimed to be a doctor from this
hospital. He demanded a whopping
R50,000 per day just for the bed and
indicated that if my mother’s condition
worsened and she needed a ventilator,
we would need to find another hospi-
tal. He gave us ten minutes to respond,
as people were queuing up for that bed.
At home, my mother was groaning in
pain. We agreed hurriedly.
As we set out for the hospital, I saw
that my neighbours had left food for my
family outside my door. They had been
feeling helpless at not being able to do
more. It was 11 pm when my husband
and I left our children at home and
drove my mother to the nondescript
hospital, operating out of one floor
above a chemist’s shop. Policemen on
duty to enforce the lockdown stopped
our car but, seeing my teary eyes, let us
pass. The only people on the roads were
the ones carrying someone dying in
their vehicles.
My mother spent three days in the
hospital, during which doctors started
asking us to arrange for the drug
remdesivir. There was no scientific
evidence that remdesivir worked to
prevent death from COVID-19, and the
World Health Organisation had advised
against its use in November 2020.
Doctors were widely prescribing the
medicine as both a wonder drug and
a last-ditch attempt. The drug quick-
ly became unavailable in the entire
country. We tried contacting agents,
black-marketeers and doctors. We filled
up endless requisition forms. We even
tracked a medicine consignment that
was to reach the Mumbai airport. But
we could not find remdesivir anywhere.
My husband’s close friend, a bureau-
crat, finally helped us procure the drug.
It was to be delivered to us at the hospi-
tal in two days. By then, we had already
been duped of lakhs of rupees on the
black market.
My mother’s oxygen requirements
rose over the next few days. We learnt
more than we cared to about non-in-
vasive ventilation, positive pressure
ventilators and oxy-flow meters. We
became overly familiar with steroid
doses, plasma therapy and whole lists of
medications. At the same time, hospital
24
staff began dwindling. Some workers
went back to their hometowns. Some
perished from the infection. The young
nurse who used to tell me my mother’s
vital parameters died. As the number of
staff fell below capacity, we were told
to shift my mother to another hospi-
tal. We made frenzied calls for about
four hours. By some minor miracle, we
found another bed at a small hospital in
east Delhi, sixty-five kilometres away.
The next challenge was finding an
ambulance with oxygen to shift my
mother. She could not manage a minute
without oxygen support. Ambulances
were asking for R35,000. They would
be available one minute and gone the
next, leading to more rounds of frantic
calls. Some acquaintances arranged an
ambulance for us. In the ambulance, I
took a picture of my mother, knowing
somewhere in my heart that she was
giving up the fight. I video-called my
My grief at my mother’s
death was overpowered
by a sense of having been
betrayed. The state had
betrayed me and many
others by its failure and in
its apathy.
ww
children. My mother’s listless eyes lit
up on seeing them. The two young chil-
dren had been alone at home for more
than a week. They had been praying
for their grandmother in their own
innocent ways.
My mother was admitted to the east
Delhi hospital on 3 May—subject to us
arranging her oxygen supply. We again
sent out digital flares for help. We got
one oxygen cylinder from someone
who lost a family member and did not
need it any longer. I had never felt such
relief, selfishness, shame and guilt as
I did when I heard that piece of news.
My relief was short-lived. The oxygen
in that one cylinder would run out in
less than three hours. It would take at
least eight hours to refill another cylin-
der. We contacted people who prom-
ised to send large industrial oxygen
cylinders if we paid half the amount at
the time of booking and the other half
THE CARAVAN
after delivery. We knew these could
be fraudulent schemes but we had no
choice but to try. Nothing ever arrived
after booking. Deals were being made
over oxygen cylinders even within the
ICU at prices higher than what touts
outside were quoting. Through friends
and acquaintances, we finally man-
aged to refill some oxygen cylinders. It
seemed a luxury, at that time, to not die
on the street, gasping for breath. It was
what our privilege bought us.
Life became only about the back-and-
forth between the hospital and home.
We saw other struggling families. Young
women rented rooms near the hospital
to be able to visit their husbands and not
carry the infection home. Caregivers
sat in the waiting area and brought each
other tea and eatables. Every hour, we
would hear painful shrieks of shattered
people walking beside young and old
corpses wrapped in white.
Three days passed like this. On the
fourth day, we reached home after
arranging food and oxygen for my
mother to last until the following
morning. But the phone rang in the
middle of the night. It was from the
hospital. Oxygen had run out, again.
Surprised, we rushed back with
another cylinder. A number of empty
cylinders clanged against each other in
the back of our car. When we reached, I
saw my mother was gasping for breath.
I was allowed in the ICU to hold her
hand. Her jaws were locked with the
strain of trying to breathe, and she did
not look at me. I could not look at her.
Hospital staff hooked her up to the ox-
ygen cylinder we had carried in. I left
the ICU while she was still gasping. I
had just reached home again when the
hospital called again about my mother
having a cardio-pulmonary arrest—her
heart and lungs were failing. We drove
back at top speed. The only administra-
tive things that seemed to be working
in those dark days were the automated
traffic cameras—we later received a
challan for speeding that night. My
mother’s heart gave up at 12.50 am on 6
May. The night had finally taken her.
My grief at my mother’s death was
overpowered by a sense of having been
betrayed. The state had betrayed me
and many others by its failure and in its
apathy. To begin with, the government
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memories of loss · perspectives
did not pay attention to the severity
of the pandemic in other parts of the
world and implement precautionary
measures to prevent similar tragedies in
India. It did not issue appropriate warn-
ings or clamp down on misinformation.
Instead, it consistently underplayed
how fast the disease was spreading, how
severe illness could be and how many
people were dying. As a result, people
did not adopt behaviours that could
keep them safe. The authorities did not
strengthen medical services in anticipa-
tion of a bad COVID-19 outbreak in cit-
ies like Delhi, as a result of which there
were not enough beds or oxygen. And,
when people were suffering and dying,
those in power showed no empathy.
The state’s manipulations to main-
tain the illusion of having things
under control became evident to me
in the manipulations to my mother’s
death declaration. The hospital first
issued the document stating that her
death was due to COVID-19, then later
corrected the statement to a death
due to “COVID-related organ failure,”
which was corrected again to say it
was a death from “cardio-pulmonary
arrest due to COVID-19.” The doctors
were not available to tell us why these
changes had been made. A ward boy
simply handed the papers to us. As a
result, my mother’s death was not re-
corded as a COVID-19 casualty, and the
funeral was not conducted according to
COVID-19 protocols.
The funeral service, like everyone
else looking to make the most of the
crisis, charged five times its regular
price. The line outside the crematorium
stretched for kilometres. Even the cre-
matorium’s parking lot had been con-
verted into a temporary extension to
accommodate the dead. The stench of
burning flesh inside and decay outside
the crematorium was nauseating. The
air was heavy with ash and anguish.
My mother’s cremation was the last
time I met my older sister outside a
hospital. She was beginning to have
symptoms, with pain in her chest. I
performed our mother’s last rites while
my younger sister in the United States
watched online. I do not know what is
more difficult—to cremate your loved
ones with your own hands or to be
helpless at not being able to be there.
26
We three sisters longed to hug each
other tight. There had been no family
occasion before this that we had not
attended together. My husband and I
immersed my mother’s ashes in the Ya-
muna the next day. The virus had kept
family and friends, who would have
normally attended the ritual, away. I
watched from the bridge as my mother
entered the river and vanished forever.
My sister and brother-in-law had, by
then, tested positive for COVID-19 and
their condition had begun to deterio-
rate. They set up an ICU in their home,
and we began sending oxygen cylinders
there. They were admitted to hospital
with falling oxygen levels within two
days of each other. Their two children
and my father came to stay with me. My
husband and I resumed the process of
trying to find life-saving medicines, fill-
ing medical forms and making pleading
phone calls.
As doctors started losing hope, we
started praying for at least one of them
to survive. We looked for second, third
and fourth medical opinions. We tried
alternative medicines that did not
work. Elders in my family turned to
astrologers and priests. The phone rang
early in the morning on 27 May. My
47-year-old brother-in-law had died.
My sister was still in hospital. I did not
know how to tell their young children
that they had lost their father. My
husband and I acted like things were
all right and carried on with running
the crowded house. My sister was
moved to the non-COVID ward. At the
time, hospitals were prompt to shift
patients to non-COVID wards, where
the government price caps did not
apply. We made visits to the hospital
every alternate day. We found different
patients around my sister in the ICU
every day. Lives were being cut short by
COVID-19 complications such as black
fungus. We saw people suffering from
ICU-induced psychosis and trauma.
The ICU beeps mixed in my head with
the ambulance sirens from the streets
outside—a harsh accompaniment to our
grim surroundings.
My sister spent 43 days in hospital
and underwent several procedures.
Her arms were bruised blue-purple.
She was trapped in a cobweb of wires
running from her body to many ma-
THE CARAVAN
chines. Her tired eyes looked nowhere
as she lay motionless. She kept up a
tough fight even while worrying about
mounting hospital bills and her chil-
dren being orphaned. She desperately
wanted to go home.
On the forty-third day, 24 June, the
phone rang in the middle of the night. It
was the third such call we had received
in the last seven weeks. We drove to
the hospital in the darkness again. My
sister had died. She had suffered three
cardiac arrests. Hospital staff per-
formed CPR, which broke her ribs. But
it looked like her chest was still moving.
Suddenly hopeful, I asked the doctor if
he was mistaken. He switched off the
ventilator nonchalantly, and she lay
still. He had forgotten to do so earlier
in his hurry to attend to another dying
patient.
I filled up the mortuary form thrice,
making mistakes every time. I did not
know how to soothe the orphaned
children. I did not know how to tell my
father he had lost a child. In looking
after what was left of my family, I did
not have the luxury of time to grieve.
I remember how the ambulance from
the hospital arrived at the crematorium
bearing the cold, bruised body of my
elder sibling. I remember how a dust
storm blew some dead leaves over her
forehead. I remember numbly following
the priest’s instructions and how her
body went inside the pack of wooden
logs and a strong fire took her. Across
the haze above the fire stood a stranger
with another body waiting for the pyre.
We consoled each other with empty
eyes and hollow smiles. I just hoped to
see no more of it.
A year has passed since those events,
and it has been spent in fighting survi-
vor’s guilt and trying to process grief. I
have found myself in anguish, anxiety
and rage, often breaking down. For a
while, I was in denial, and the bound-
aries between real and imaginary were
blurred. It was arduous to move from
there to a place of acceptance. The
members of my diminished family have
spent a year that has felt like a decade
holding each other up and connect-
ing with friends and acquaintances
who had faced similar losses. We have
rebuilt our sense of community and
compassion for each other. s
reportage

28 THE CARAVAN
 reportage

FALLING
IN LINE

COVER STORY / CRIME

NILEENA MS

The National
Investigation Agency’s
ap photo

loss of credibility

JULY 2022 29
falling in line · reportage
the senior advocate a mariarputham
was all set for an important day in
court. He was to appear in front of a
division bench of the Supreme Court
on 15 April 2015, representing the Na-
tional Investigation Agency, India’s
primary anti-terror task force, against
five accused in one of the nation’s larg-
est terror attacks. On 29 September
2008, during the Islamic holy month
of Ramzan, two bombs concealed in a
motorcycle had exploded in the Mus-
lim-dominated town of Malegaon in
north-western Maharashtra, killing
six people and injuring more than a
hundred. Another bomb had gone off
on the same day, near a mosque in the
Muslim-majority Sukka Bazaar area of
Modasa, a town in Gujarat.
30
{ONE}
The accused were all members of a
Hindu militant group called Abhinav
Bharat, linked to several senior Rash-
triya Swayamsevak Sangh leaders.
By the time Mariarputham got up to
address the judges on the case seven
years later, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya
Janata Party—the political wing of the
RSS—had been in power at the centre
for nearly a year. The argument that
Mariarputham had prepared for court
that day was interrupted.
The hearing pertained to a case filed
by Pragya Singh Thakur and several
other key accused in the case, challeng-
ing their trial under the Maharashtra
Control of Organised Crime Act—a
stringent law against repeated unlawful
activity. Thakur had previously been a
THE CARAVAN
national executive member of the Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the RSS’s
student wing. For the prosecution, try-
ing Thakur under the MCOCA was vi-
tal, as the law allowed confessions made
to the police—which are otherwise in-
admissible in court because of the possi-
bility of being extracted by force—to be
used as material against those accused.
In their confessions, three of the ac-
cused claimed that Abhinav Bharat had
collected a large stash of weapons and
that Thakur had met the other members
of the terror cell at a training camp in
Pachmarhi, Madhya Pradesh, two years
before the attack. The confessions were
backed by witness statements, as well as
audio and video recordings seized from
the laptops of the accused.
 falling in line · reportage

Thakur’s bail would mean a major defeat for the NIA official to not appear on the agency’s behalf. previous spread:
NIA’s case, and the MCOCA was the primary tool Mehta, Singh and Mariarputham did not respond Officers of
to prevent it. Along with Aseemanand—a former to questions. the National
Investigation
national head of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, the Seven years later, the case is in shambles. Sever-
Agency collect
RSS’s tribal wing—Thakur was the most high-pro- al major witnesses in the case—20 at last count— evidence in the
file name tied to a string of seven bombings across have turned hostile. The NIA has now challenged debris at a bomb
five states, in 2007 and 2008, which the Abhinav the “questionable circumstances” under which the blast site, in
Bharat network had allegedly executed, killing a MCOCA was invoked against other suspects. The Hyderabad, on
total of 119 people, most of whom were Muslim. case all but unravelled by the NIA’s own doing. 22 February 2013.
India’s investigative
The bomb in the Malegaon blast had been left The trial in the case is still ambling along.
agencies had faced
outside a mosque on a motorcycle registered under In January 2017, the NIA recommended that a steady decline in
Thakur’s name. She had also allegedly attended Thakur be granted bail. Two years later, she was their professional
training camps, in which she and other accused elected to parliament on a BJP ticket. Mariar- standards and
planned all the attacks and were trained in putham’s role in the NIA appears to have faded democratic
bomb-making and the use of weapons. since. accountability. In
this environment
A year before the hearing, Thakur had chal-
some of the early
lenged the NIA’s constitutional validity and, by the year 2008 was a high point for the Con- investigations of
extension, its right to investigate the case. Rep- gress-led United Progressive Alliance govern- the NIA evidenced
resenting the NIA, Mariarputham made a strong ment. The economic boom triggered by liberali- a hard-nosed
case defending the agency, and the Bombay High sation in the early 1990s was reaching a peak. Sig- competence.
Court upheld the agency’s investigative powers. nalling the hopeful growth of a burgeoning Indian
The case to maintain the MCOCA against opposite page:
Then union
Thakur was not a hard one to make. The evidence Along with Aseemanand, home minister
against her was strong. Rohini Salian, the NIA’s P Chidambaram
special prosecutor in the case, had presented the Thakur was the most high- greets Narendra
evidence to the Bombay High Court only a year profile name tied to a string Modi, who was
Gujarat’s chief
earlier, and the court had found it sufficient to
deny Thakur bail since “a strong prima facie case” of seven bombings across minister at the time,
at the Conference
existed against her. Before Mariarputham could five states, in 2007 and 2008, of Chief Ministers
start his speech, however, a voice from the other
side of the room piped up. Tushar Mehta, a close
which the Abhinav Bharat on Internal Security,
on 7 February 2010.
confidant of the prime minister who had been network had allegedly Chidambaram, who
appointed as the additional solicitor general two led the creation
months after Modi assumed office, told the Su-
executed, killing a total of 119 of the NIA and
preme Court that Mariarputham could not appear people, most of whom were the passage of
the UAPA, also
in the case. He gave no reason for his objection.
Anil Singh, another freshly appointed additional
Muslim. created surveillance
infrastructure
solicitor general, appeared before the court to ar- that has cast long
gue on behalf of the state of Maharashtra. Singh middle class, Tata had launched the Nano, report- shadows over
stated that he had already made his argument, but edly the world’s cheapest car. It was a good year Indian democracy.
Modi further
Mehta said, “I will be appearing on behalf of the for government employees, who had been prom-
expanded their
state of Maharashtra in addition to Mr Anil Singh. ised a forty-percent raise by the sixth pay com- scope.
I’ll put forth all the facts.” mission. India’s first lunar probe was successfully
A visibly upset Mariarputham asked to be al- launched. In October that year, the United States
lowed to leave the court. The bench, however, and India signed a historic nuclear agreement, a
said that it would like to hear him. Mariarputham diplomatic coup that suggested the West’s recog-
argued that, due to the gravity of the offence, the nition of India as a stable democracy. The UPA, led
accused were not entitled to bail. Mehta, now rep- by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, had by then
resenting the NIA, undermined this argument by passed a series of progressive laws—particularly
saying that, “in the event of granting bail,” severe the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act,
conditions should be imposed. The division bench the Forest Rights Act and the Right to Informa-
ruled that there was “considerable doubt” about tion Act. There were renewed assurances that the
the involvement of six of the accused in the case, country’s most backward would not be left behind
including Thakur, and that the trial court ought to by what western analysts called the Indian eco-
hear their bail plea afresh and decide on whether nomic miracle.
atul yadav / pti

the MCOCA was applicable. Salian later told the This brief reverie came to a sudden halt in No-
media that, the day before the hearing, Mariar- vember. Two months after the blasts in Malegaon
putham had been unofficially asked by a senior and Modasa, India witnessed another deadly

JULY 2022 31
falling in line · reportage
opposite page: attack. Ten members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an
Malegaon residents Islamic militant organisation based in Pakistan,
near the Hamidiya went on a rampage across several key locations
Masjid and the Bada
in Mumbai, killing almost two hundred people
Kabarastan, on 9
September 2006, a and severely injuring three hundred others. The
day after two bomb three-day bloodbath was India’s most fatal terror
blasts killed 31 attack. It put an end to the mirage of domestic sta-
people and injured bility that India had successfully projected to the
over a hundred. world. Several members of the European parlia-
In a confession
ment were present at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel,
statement, Swami
Aseemanand one of the targets. A total of 29 foreign nationals
alleged that in a died in the attack.
meeting planning The Manmohan Singh government found itself
the blast, he working overtime to address domestic and inter-
suggested attacking national anger. In op-eds and television debates,
the town because
fingers were frequently pointed at India’s lack of
of its large Muslim
population.
a police force with federal jurisdiction that could
efficiently investigate offences with inter-state
and international ramifications. The BJP, then
in opposition, denounced Singh’s repeal of the
Prevention of Terrorism Act, insisting it was ev-
idence that his government did not have the will
to handle militant violence. The POTA had been
enacted by the BJP-led government of Atal Bihari
Vajpayee in the aftermath of the 2001 attack on
parliament. It was the most recent incarnation of
a set of laws that, since colonial times, had vested
the police with extraordinary powers to crack
down on movements that were seen as extra-con-
stitutional.
The Congress manifesto before the 2004 gen-
eral election promised to repeal the POTA, recog-
nising its frequent misuse against marginalised
communities, and Singh’s government did so soon
after assuming office. After a series of bomb blasts
struck Mumbai in 2006, Singh ruled out the pos-
sibility of bringing back the POTA. “It is far from
true that POTA is the only means to deal with ter-
rorists,” he told the media. “There are many other
ways. We will strengthen our intelligence-gather-
ing ability and we will look at the security appara-
tus, both at the central and state levels, to do that.”
Most security experts believed that the 2008
Mumbai attack was due to a complete failure to
act upon intelligence inputs. “In early 2008, intel-
ligence trickled in, primarily from US agencies,
that the LeT was planning to attack Mumbai,” the
investigative journalist Josy Joseph wrote in his
book Silent Coup. “Unfortunately, this information
flowed into a severely contaminated intelligence
set-up, where it mixed with unreliable inputs, and
often outrageous falsehoods, that were sending
Indian agencies on wild-goose chases. The secre-
tive world of intelligence, with almost no external
accountability and minimal formal audit of the
quality of its information and analysis, believed its
own lies and falsehoods, amplified its own biases
and justified its own mistakes.”
32 THE CARAVAN
On 29 November 2008, the day the siege in
Mumbai ended, the Congress leader P Chidambar-
am took charge as home minister. Besides amend-
ing the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to
bring back several provisions of the POTA, Chi-
dambaram created a surveillance infrastructure
that has cast long shadows over Indian democracy.
He first envisioned a National Counter Terrorism
Centre, whose mandate was to prevent and con-
tain terrorist attacks, and respond “by inflicting
pain upon the perpetrators.” The NCTC was
supposed to oversee a wide array of surveillance
infrastructure. This included the National Intel-
ligence Grid—an integrated database—and the
Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System, an
online tracking system that ties together fourteen
thousand police stations across the country. As of
early-2022, neither the NCTC nor NATGRID had
been fully operationalised, but their scope in a
panopticon of heavily centralised data-gathering
has only expanded under Modi’s rule.
India’s most professional
investigative agency, formed
primarily to deal with
terrorism alone, has morphed
into one that is sent after
inter-religious couples, cattle
smugglers, human-rights
lawyers, Rohingya refugees
and octogenarian priests.
The second step was the creation of the NIA, an
investigative agency that answered to the union
home ministry. In March 2008, a parliamentary
committee had recommended that the govern-
ment either create a new agency or reconstitute
the Central Bureau of Investigation along the lines
of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, “which
handles all terror-related and nationally impor-
tant cases.” A draft bill to constitute the NIA was
drafted two weeks after Chidambaram took over
the home portfolio.
“Even as I speak, the nation is watching us,” Chi-
dambaram said in parliament, urging members to
pass the bill. “They want a central agency for the
investigation.” The NIA bill gave the agency pow-
ers to investigate incidents across the country, as
long as they fell under the eight scheduled offences,
including those under the UAPA and acts dealing
with hijacking, explosive substances and atomic
energy. It also gave the central government powers
to direct the agency to register a case if it thought
that a scheduled offense had been committed.

The communist parties demanded
that the schedule be divided under two
parts, with the offenses under the sec-
ond section being jointly investigated
by NIA and state agencies. Chidambar-
am replied that “there have been cases
in the past and there may be cases in
the future where a terrorist crime takes
place in a state and there is suspicion
of the local police trying to cover up
that crime. In such a case, if you put
the UAPA in Part II, the NIA will be
completely hampered and completely
hamstrung in investigating that case.”
soumitra ghosh / hindustan times
Other members feared that that the
provision allowing the central govern-
ment to register cases would leave the
involvement of state governments in
investigations to “the sweet will of the
agency or whoever may be in power at
the centre at a particular time.” But,
after a single day of debate and without
a single change made to the draft bill,
it was unanimously passed. There was
no public scrutiny before the passage
of either the UAPA amendment or the
NIA bill.
Though Chidambaram did not ex-
press it at the time, he was secretly
concerned about the constitutional-
ity of the NIA Act and the agency it
created. In March 2009, according to
documents later published by WikiL-
eaks, Chidambaram said as much to
the FBI director, Robert Mueller. Re-
ferring to the NIA as a “new weapon
in hand to combat terrorism,” he told
Mueller that he was “perilously close
to crossing constitutional limits” in
empowering the NIA. He expected the
act to be challenged in court, as it as-
cribed “certain investigating powers to
the NIA which may be seen to conflict
with responsibility that is exclusively
JULY 2022
falling in line · reportage
with the states.” The act has since been
challenged several times over the years,
including by state governments. It has
passed judicial muster every time.
Nevertheless, when the NIA was
founded, it had a rare opportunity few
organisations in an ailing democra-
cy have: it started with a blank slate.
India’s investigative agencies—state
police forces and the Central Bureau
of Investigation—had faced a steady
decline in their professional standards
and democratic accountability. There
were frequent news reports of falsi-
fied evidence, targeted cases against
political rivals and the persecution of
minorities.
In this environment, a few of the
NIA’s early investigations, between
2009 and 2014, were marked by a rare
hard-nosed investigative competence.
This did come as a surprise, given that
33
falling in line · reportage
opposite page: a majority of the agency’s staff come on deputa-
Hemant Karkare tion from the state police. However, the new outfit
was the chief of seemed to make a difference. Its early probes into
the Mumbai ATS
the Malegaon and Modasa blasts, the Samjhauta
that doggedly
investigated the Express attack, the Mecca Masjid bombing and
2008 Malegaon the Ajmer Dargah terror attack were noticeable
blast and uncovered for their speed and willingness to doggedly pur-
a plot by Hindu sue the truth even if it pointed to powerful and
extremists with politically connected individuals. The NIA made
links to the RSS,
a quick series of arrests in these cases, collected
collecting troves of
valuable evidence. troves of evidence and presented a detailed inves-
tigation. In its early days, the NIA was willing to
even publicly rubbish false cases manufactured
by other agencies, an unprecedented choice. Its
effect was significant enough that even those
previously accused, from communities that had
been frequently falsely targeted by investigative
agencies, began welcoming the NIA’s intervention
in their cases.
A study by the Tata Trust
showed that only three to
four percent of Indian police
personnel were Muslim, and
this number is likely even
lower further up the police
hierarchy.
Since 2014, the NIA’s professional performance
and integrity in political neutrality have quickly
fallen. The agency has grown quickly—by 2020,
it had 796 officers and 18 branches—with several
new posts and branches sanctioned in Janu-
ary 2022. Under Modi, the NIA has been given
expanded powers following the passage of an
amendment to the NIA Act, leading to a mush-
rooming in the number of cases it handles. The
agency handled 92 cases in its first six years, an
average of 16 cases per year. Under Modi, that
number has risen to 373. This has included sev-
eral cases that are not strictly within the remit of
the NIA, but help legitimise conspiracy theories
of the Hindu Right that condemn many forms of
dissent as related to terrorism. India’s most pro-
fessional investigative agency, formed primarily
to deal with terrorism alone, has morphed into
one that is sent after inter-religious couples, cat-
tle smugglers, human-rights lawyers, Rohingya
refugees and octogenarian priests. Its handling
of the Bhima Koregaon case has revealed many of
the illegalities it once accused other agencies of.
The NIA’s history is a tale of how quickly profes-
sionalism can be sacrificed at the altar of political
manoeuvring. The most glaring demonstration of
34 THE CARAVAN
this is in the about-turn it made in the Abhinav
Bharat investigations.
“The act was intended to create an exclusive
agency to deal with terrorism and terrorism
alone,” Chidambaram told me. The Manmohan
Singh government’s response had been “neces-
sary, lawful and proportionate,” he said. “No part
of the NIA Act intruded into the normal ‘law and
order’ or ‘criminal law’ administration of the
states. The amendments to the UAPA made in
2009 carefully avoided the mistakes of TADA”—
the Terrorism and Disruptive Activities (Preven-
tion) Act, which was in force between 1987 and
1995—“and POTA. We had built in safeguards be-
fore a prosecution by the NIA could go forward.”
He did not respond to further questions about
his communication with Mueller, or the consti-
tutionality of the NIA. Manmohan Singh did not
respond either.
Sharib Ali, a co-founder of the Innocence Net-
work and Quill Foundation—both human-rights
advocacy groups—who is also working on a doc-
toral thesis about the NIA, disagreed with Chi-
dambaram’s assessment. According to him, the
UAPA amendment and the NIA marked a turning
point in the Indian state’s erosion of democratic
values. “The NIA represents the summation of the
developments of the last thirty years within the
criminal-justice system,” he told me. “The NIA
is a consolidation of all that has happened, be it
TADA, and its special courts that were tried and
tested, or POTA. The NIA brings all these together
and makes it a declarative act: ‘Now we are here
to stay.’ The TADA and POTA were clearly worded
to be temporary, but the UAPA amendments and
the NIA are marked in permanence.” He contin-
ued, “These are not special provisions. Now, they
are normal parts of the criminal-justice system.”
Atop the freedom the UAPA gives investigating
agencies, the morphing of the NIA has given union
governments a tool with which they can maintain
an overwhelming influence on the political reality
of the subcontinent.
{TWO}
for the number of violent incidents it has wit-
nessed, Malegaon, the second-largest town in Na-
shik district, is a nondescript place. Historically, it
was a resting stop on the route between the British
bastion of Bombay and the Mughal capital in Agra.
In the eighteenth century, a Maratha general
chose the village as a site for a large fort, which
still remains its primary tourist attraction. To con-
struct the fort, which took over two decades, the
general invited several thousand Muslim artisans
dinodia
from Surat and northern India, many of whom set-
tled in the village. During the British crackdown

following the 1857 mutiny and the af-
termath of Partition, Malegaon served
as a safe haven for Muslims, growing its
population severalfold.
The town saw major communal
clashes in 1963 and in 1992, following
the demolition of the Babri Masjid
by Hindu mobs. In 2001, the police
attacked around fifteen thousand
Muslims who were protesting the US
invasion of Afghanistan, killing 13 pro-
testers.
On 8 September 2006, Malegaon’s
Hamidiya Masjid and the Bada Ka-
barastan, the town’s largest Muslim
graveyard, were bustling. It was the
holy day of Shab-e-Barat, in which
Muslims commemorate their ancestors
by holding long vigils at graveyards. At
1.50 pm, four bombs exploded at the
two sites and at the nearby Mushawarat
Chowk, killing 31 people and seriously
injuring over three hundred.
The case was handed over to the
Mumbai police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad
on 23 October. Within a week, the ATS,
headed by KP Raghuvanshi, made its
first arrest. Noor-Ul-Hooda, a 23-year-
old, was allegedly an activist of the
banned Students Islamic Movement of
India. The police claimed that it had
arrested Hooda for planting a fake
bomb in a Malegaon shopping centre
five days after the attack and that the
bomb happened to have the same ma-
terial as the one used on 8 September.
More arrests soon followed: Shabbir
Ahmad Masiullah, Raees Ahmad
JULY 2022
falling in line · reportage
Mansuri, Farogh Iqbal Magdumi, Mo-
hammed Ali Alam Sheikh, Asif Bashir
Khan, Zahid Abul Majid and Abrar
Ghulam Ahmad, all Muslims from
Malegaon whom the ATS claimed were
SIMI members.
The evidence against the eight
was weak. The ATS relied heavily on
their confessional statements, legally
admissible under the MCOCA. Apart
from that, the case hinged largely on
soil samples the ATS claimed to have
collected from one of the blast sites.
The sample happened to have the
same RDX residue as one of the sam-
ples of soil allegedly collected by the
ATS in a godown owned by Masiullah.
This led the ATS to conclude that the
bombs had been manufactured in
35
falling in line · reportage
the godown, by Masiullah and two
unnamed Pakistani nationals. The
other evidence the ATS relied on was
a short phone conversation between
Majid and Ahmad—which the Bombay
High Court later ruled could not be
assumed to relate to the bomb blast—
and SIMI literature allegedly found in
the homes of Hooda and Magdumi. In
February 2007, the case was handed
over to the CBI, which presented little
new evidence.
India’s intelligence apparatus and
investigative agencies have repeatedly
demonstrated an Islamophobic bias
when it comes to terror attacks. Re-
search by the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies showed that near-
ly half of India’s police force thought
that Muslims are “naturally prone”
to committing crimes. A study by the
Tata Trust showed that only three to
four percent of Indian police person-
nel were Muslim, and this number is
likely even lower further up the police
36
hierarchy. In a 2014 interview with the
Times of India, the Mumbai ATS chief
Himanshu Roy admitted that only two
percent of his team were Muslim. The
same reflex bias evident in the han-
dling of the 2006 Malegaon case played
out in another terror attack a few
months later.
On 18 February 2007, bombs went
off in two carriages of the Samjhau-
ta Express, one of two rail links that
connected India and Pakistan. The
blasts killed 68 people, most of whom
were Pakistani nationals. The Haryana
police, under whose jurisdiction the
bombing fell, initially assumed that an
Islamic outfit was behind the attack.
It formed a special-investigation team
to probe the attack, headed by Vikash
Narain Rai. The SIT soon began dis-
mantling an unexploded bomb that was
recovered from the train and started
tracing the origins of the items that
were discovered. Nearly every item
they found—the bag the bomb was
THE CARAVAN
placed in, the newspaper and battery
used—was from Indore, in Madhya
Pradesh. One of the first people interro-
gated following the blast was the SIMI
general secretary Safdar Nagori. Indore
was notorious for SIMI operations, Rai
had initially reasoned. But Indore was
also a major centre for Hindu extremist
organisations.
“When Samjhauta happened, we also
thought that some Islamist group had
done it, and some of us in the police
immediately fell for it, like in the Mecca
Masjid case,” Rai told me. “In about ten
days, we realised that it was not Isla-
mist terrorist groups.” Another officer
from the Haryana police told me that
the local police in Madhya Pradesh,
which was ruled by the BJP, was not
very forthcoming with its help. “The
investigation just wasn’t moving ahead
beyond a point,” they told me.
A year and a half after the Samjhau-
ap photo
ta attack, the bomb on Thakur’s bike,
parked in central Malegaon, explod-

ed. Again, the ATS was called in to investigate. It
was led at the time by Hemant Karkare, who had
previously worked in the Research and Anal-
ysis Wing, India’s foreign-intelligence agency.
Karkare and the state’s deputy chief minister,
RR Patil, visited Malegaon a day after the blast.
They were greeted by protests and a complete
lack of faith among Muslims at getting any
semblance of justice. Following this reception,
Karkare told the Indian Express, “I told my men
that we have to pursue this case very objectively
and not start with assumptions that people of
this community or that community could be re-
sponsible.”
Karkare’s team had their first break in the case
the next month. The registration number and
chassis number of the motorcycle that had carried
one of the bombs was found to have been erased.
A forensics lab in Nashik found that the bike had
originally been registered under Thakur’s name.
She was asked to come to the ATS office in Mum-
bai for questioning, during which, she later al-
leged, she faced custodial violence.
Over the next two months, the ATS made two
more arrests: SP Purohit, a lieutenant colonel
in the army’s intelligence wing, and Dayanand
Pandey, a religious leader. Following the arrests
and Thakur’s allegation of torture, the RSS and
BJP, which had initially denied their association
with the suspects, began defending them. The
Shiv Sena agreed to extend legal aid to Thakur,
a move backed by the BJP. LK Advani, the BJP’s
prime-ministerial candidate in the 2009 general
election, demanded that the ATS team be changed
and that a judicial enquiry be conducted into the
allegations of custodial violence.
Karkare stood by his investigation. “I don’t
know why this case has become so political,” he
told the Indian Express. “The pressure is tremen-
dous and I am wondering how to extricate it from
all the politics.” He added that his team had been
doubly careful when drawing their conclusions,
but all the evidence pointed one way. “In fact,
when we want to question a suspect and if he or
she has any Hindutvawadi connections, we make
sure once, twice, thrice, that we have enough rea-
son and evidence to even question. Normally it is
not like that. We are able to freely question anyone
we suspect.”
The ATS’s efforts came to a halt when Karkare
was shot dead in the 26 November attack. In this
brief period, the ATS was able to ascertain that the
bombing was linked to a larger conspiracy of Hin-
du militants and that the same group could have
been involved in similar attacks. All three inves-
tigations—into the Malegaon blasts of 2006 and
2008, as well as into the Samjhauta blasts—stalled
over the next two years.
falling in line · reportage
the manmohan singh government appointed opposite page:
Radha Vinod Raju as the first NIA chief, in Janu- Malegaon blast
ary 2009. Raju had previously served as the vigi- accused Pragya
Singh Thakur,
lance commissioner of Jammu and Kashmir and
leaves the Nashik
had investigated the assassination of the former magistrate’s court,
prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, and the hi- on 3 November
jacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814, in 1999. 2008. Despite the
In April 2010, the names of several members NIA’s strongest
of the Abhinav Bharat network resurfaced in an case being against
Thakur the
investigation by the Rajasthan ATS, which was
concerted attempt
looking into the 2007 bombing of the Ajmer Sharif of the agency after
Dargah. Having regained its confidence after be- 2014 to not try her
ing re-elected with a larger mandate in the 2009 under the MCOCA
general election, the UPA government decided to eventually led to
allow the investigation to play out. In July, Chid- her release.
ambaram announced in parliament that the NIA
would take over the probe into the Samjhauta
bombing and investigate the links of the accused
to the 2006 Malegaon blasts, the 2007 attacks at
Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid. The following
year, the 2008 bombings at Malegaon and Modasa
The NIA, in its very infancy,
had already begun slowly
earning the trust of a
community that had been
repeatedly falsely targeted
by India’s intelligence and
investigative agencies.
were also handed over. RK Singh, the home secre-
tary at the time, said that the government had the
names of at least ten people associated with the
RSS who had been involved in the attacks.
Following Raju’s retirement, the NIA had come
under new leadership. Its new special director,
Sharad Chandra Sinha—who took over the agency
in February 2010—had served multiple tenures in
the CBI and was given the charge of setting up the
NCTC. He was generally judged to be an expert at
handling politically sensitive cases. (Sinha refused
to speak to me for this story and did not respond to
a questionnaire.)
One of the first moves that marked the NIA’s
approach as different from its predecessors was
its critical reinvestigation of the 2006 Malegaon
bombings. The NIA team that arrived in Malegaon
began by examining the key pieces of evidence
that the ATS and CBI had produced. By then, the
confessions of the accused, who claimed that they
had been tortured in police custody, had become
largely untenable in court. The SIMI itself could
not be linked to the case. The only remaining piece
of evidence was the soil samples from the blast site
and Masiullah’s godown.
JULY 2022 37
falling in line · reportage

For an investigative agency’s sei- mer RSS district leader from Indore The NIA’s charge sheet in the case
zures to hold up in court, they need named Sunil Joshi. establishes a clearer story of what oc-
to have been collected from the site of In his December 2010 confession, curred at Malegaon in 2006. According
the crime in the presence of witnesses. Aseemanand stated that he met Joshi to the charge sheet, on Joshi’s instruc-
When the NIA traced two of the wit- in June 2006, at the house of his close tions, two men named Ramchandra Go-
nesses that the ATS had claimed were confidant Bharat Rateshwar, in the pal Singh and Manohar Narwaria went
present when both soil samples were city of Valsad in Gujarat. The others at to the Hamidiya Masjid and Bada Ka-
collected, they denied having accom- the meeting were Kalsangra, Sandeep barastan with two bombs in a bag hung
panied investigators to either the blast Dange, Lokesh Sharma and a man on the bicycle. Later, Lokesh Sharma,
site or the godown. Another witness known only as Amit. Kalsangra, who another accomplice, called a media
was shown to be at two different loca- was allegedly recorded discussing the house from a Delhi payphone and in-
tions at the exact same time. 2008 Malegaon bombing with Thakur, formed them that the “Dharmasena”
The ATS’s case began unravelling was an RSS organiser in Indore, while claimed responsibility for the blast at
quickly. The NIA next began to look Dange was the Sangh’s district head Malegaon. The NIA said that both the
into the whereabouts of the suspects on for Shajapur, in Madhya Pradesh. At accused were identified by witnesses in
the day of the blasts. None of the five this meeting, Aseemanand said, he sug- January 2013. The NIA’s further inves-
accused the ATS claimed were near gested attacking Malegaon because of tigation identified a training camp at
the blast site, the agency said, were its large Muslim population. He added the town of Bagli, in Madhya Pradesh,
present at the spot. For instance, 12 that, several months later, Joshi vis- where the accused had conducted
witnesses confirmed to the NIA that, ited him at his ashram for Diwali and trainings and demonstrations before
on the day of the bombing, Ghulam told him that his boys had exploded the bombing.
Ahmad, who was accused of placing the the bombs in Malegaon. The NIA also Aseemanand’s confessions and the
bomb at Mushawarat Chowk, was over named several of Joshi and Aseem- investigation that followed allowed
four hundred kilometres away from anand’s co-conspirators in the 2006 the NIA to not only push to arrest his
Malegaon. Another accused was found Malegaon case. co-conspirators but begin batting for
to have been in judicial custody at the
time of the explosion. The NIA includ-
ed all this evidence in a charge sheet
it filed in May 2013. Three years later,
while discharging the accused, a desig-
nated MCOCA judge ruled that the ATS
had “fabricated false evidence against
all the accused to scot-free the real cul-
prits.” Raghuvanshi, who had headed
the ATS during its investigation, did
not respond to questions, stating that
the case was sub-judice.
In November 2010, the CBI arrest-
ed Aseemanand in the Mecca Masjid
bombing case. Aseemanand had been
on the run since one of his associates
was arrested by the Rajasthan ATS in
connection with the Ajmer Sharif blast.
The CBI successfully traced him to a
village outside Haridwar, where he
was living under a fake name. Over the
next two months, he made two explo-
sive confessional statements that laid
bare the inner workings of Abhinav
Bharat as well as their planning and
execution of five major terror attacks.
mohd zakir / hindustan times

(He would later retract these state-

ments, claiming he was coerced by
torture.) While Aseemanand seemed
to only be directly linked to the Mecca
Masjid and Samjhauta Express bomb-
ings, all the attacks seemed to be tied
together by one shadowy figure, a for-

38 THE CARAVAN

India’s intelligence apparatus
and investigative agencies
have repeatedly demonstrated
an Islamophobic bias when it
comes to terror attacks.
the release of the Muslim accused. In November
2011, the NIA told the MCOCA court that, after
Aseemanand’s arrest, it had reviewed the evidence
connecting the cases, as well as fresh documenta-
ry and oral evidence. “Investigations have brought
out several new facts and circumstances, in the
form of statements and forensic report,” Salian,
the NIA’s special prosecutor, told the court. “Fur-
ther investigation is in progress to collect more
evidence for arriving at definite investigation con-
clusion. Thus, there is no opposition to their bail
plea.” The MCOCA court relied on this to give bail
to the nine accused, who had spent four years in
jail. It would take another five years for them to be
acquitted.
The NIA’s handling of the Malegaon case gave
hope to several undertrials who had been arrest-
falling in line · reportage
ed by the Mumbai ATS. Months before the 2006 left: Sharad Kumar,
Malegaon bombing, seven explosions ripped who was the NIA’s
through suburban trains in Mumbai—colloquially chief at the time,
and his successor
called the 7/11 blasts. The ATS had blamed the
YC Modi at the
SIMI for the attack and arrested several Mus- inauguration of
lims. In this case, too, the accused alleged that the agency’s
the ATS had severely tortured them to extract headquarters
confessions—one of the accused claimed to have building at Delhi
been tortured continuously for 75 days. In De- on 10 October
2017. During their
cember 2010, an undertrial in the case wrote to
tenures, much
Chidambaram, requesting him to direct the NIA of the evidence
for a “thorough investigation of 7/11 blast case against Abhinav
and to unearth the false implication of innocent Bharat, mentioned
persons in the said case by Anti-Terrorism Squad in both the Mumbai
Mumbai.” ATS’s and their
own chargesheet,
Wahid Shaikh, a teacher and activist who was
has mysteriously
wrongfully accused in the train bombings, had disappeared.
already spent two years in jail when the NIA was
formed. At that time, he did not know that several
state police forces and the NIA had named anoth-
er set of accused for organising the attack. In 2014,
the NIA filed a charge sheet in a broader case per-
taining to the Indian Mujahideen, an Islamic out-
fit that the NIA determined was the actual culprit
behind the blast. “I didn’t know this at that time
but, after my conviction, while in jail, I came to
know that such a charge sheet has been filed nam-
ing another set of accused,” Shaikh told me. He
and his co-accused filed a petition before the Bom-
bay High Court, drawing attention to this charge
sheet and seeking further investigation by the NIA
in the case. The NIA, in its very infancy, had al-
ready begun slowly earning the trust of a commu-
nity that had been repeatedly falsely targeted by
India’s intelligence and investigative agencies.
“Frankly, at that point, after everything that
has happened, I didn’t have much hope from any
agency or that anyone will do justice,” Shaikh
told me. “We had nothing to lose, the worst had
already happened, but we thought that, since there
are different findings from different agencies, then
we need to take that chance. Even if one percent
of that chance is there, then we had to go for it.
We had already lost everything—trial happened,
conviction happened and we were facing death
penalty.” Shaikh was acquitted after nine years
in jail, but the petition is still pending, and his 12
co-accused remain in jail.
The NIA was an emergent success in pursuing
the network of Hindutva extremists involved in
the series of blasts. The NIA’s further investi-
gation into the Samjhauta and Malegaon cases
seemed promising. There were witnesses and
evidence in the form of bags, an unexploded
bomb and plastic bottles with finger prints recov-
ered from the site by the Haryana ATS. The ATS
was also able to trace phone records to suggest
that Joshi was in the market on the day the bag
JULY 2022 39
falling in line · reportage
opposite page: was purchased. The records also suggested that
RK Singh is a Thakur, Joshi, Dange and Aseemanand were in
BJP member of close contact with each other between February
parliament and
and March 2007, shortly before the blast. De-
a former home
secretary. From spite the delay in taking over the case, there was
stating that the enough material before the agency to scientifically
accused in the build the case. In the 2008 Malegaon blast too, ac-
blasts had a clear cording to an interview Salian gave to The Wire’s
link to the RSS, Sukanya Shantha, three senior NIA officers had
Singh has now
diligently investigated and finalised their findings.
wholly disavowed
evidence of saffron
terror. {THREE}
not all was well in the NIA’s Delhi headquar-
ters in the final months of the Manmohan Singh
government. “I sensed infiltration had already
begun into the NIA, and not everyone in the newly
formed team was in favour of building a strong
case,” Salian later told NDTV.
On 29 December 2007, Joshi, the one man
who could have clarified the links between the
five terror attacks of which members of Abhinav
Bharat were accused, was killed near his home
in Madhya Pradesh’s Dewas. Joshi was already a
wanted man when the bombings were planned.
In 2003, he was linked to the murder of the
Congress leader Pyar Singh Ninama and his son
Dinesh, and the Madhya Pradesh police had de-
clared him to be absconding. However, the BJP
government in the state appeared to have granted
him immunity from arrest. Deepak Joshi, a BJP
legislator from Dewas, told Rediff that he had met
Sunil at an event even while police asserted that
he was in hiding. Sunil Joshi also seemed to have
friends in very high places—several news reports
at the time said that his diary had the number of
the RSS leader Indresh Kumar saved as an “emer-
gency contact,” alongside the phone number of
Ram Madhav, a member of the RSS national ex-
ecutive at the time and a future general secretary
of the BJP.
After three years of investigation, the Madhya
Pradesh police arrested a man called Harshad
Solanki. Shortly after, it filed a charge sheet nam-
ing four Hindu suspects, including Thakur, who
had already been arrested for the Malegaon bomb-
ing. The NIA’s investigation showed that Thakur,
along with two others, had planned and carried
out Joshi’s murder. Following his death, Thakur
had collected Joshi’s phone as well as a brief case
from his residence which contained “bomb-mak-
ing material.” Ballistic reports confirmed that
the empty cases recovered from the crime scene
matched a weapon seized from the accused.
The NIA mentioned in the charge sheet that the
accused had also been named in its charge sheets
in the Samjhauta, Ajmer Dargah and Malegaon
bombings. Despite this, retracting the NIA’s ear-
40 THE CARAVAN
lier arguments of a larger terror conspiracy, the
charge sheet said that no scheduled offence had
been made out and the case should therefore be
transferred to a regular court. This stand con-
tradicted the agency’s own findings. The charge
sheet also failed to mention Joshi’s link to Indresh
Kumar.
The failure to establish these links meant that
the trial, which had started in a special NIA court,
was transferred back to the district court. The
scant evidence produced by the NIA became ap-
parent in later hearings. On 1 February 2017, the
magistrate declared that the “evidence is insuf-
ficient” and that the charges against the accused
“cannot be proved without reasonable doubt.” The
judgment added that “it is evident that the two
organisations, the MP police and the NIA, did not
conduct the investigations with the required se-
riousness due to reasons not known to this court”
and that the “conflicting evidence provided by the
two government organisations instead has the ef-
fect of placing doubt on the case presented by the
prosecution and is inadequate to prove the guilt of
the accused.”
In July 2012, the Supreme Court restrained
the NIA from interrogating Thakur about Joshi’s
murder, on the grounds that the case’s first-in-
formation report had been lodged before the
inception of the agency. The court also blocked
the agency from questioning Purohit and anoth-
er accused. Ahmed Khan, the NIA’s prosecutor
and legal advisor, had reportedly advised that the
“When they are with the ATS,
they say I am guilty, then they
go to the crime branch or NIA
and say that I am innocent.
These officers work according
to the collective stand taken
by these agencies.”
agency club the four cases together. This could
have widened the scope of the investigations to
look into a “larger conspiracy” connecting the
blasts. However, in June 2013, on the advice of the
law ministry, the cases were tried separately.
Wahid Shaikh told me that the police officers
changed their stand on the 2006 Mumbai train
bombings as they were transferred from one agen-
cy to the other. “The same police officers would be
working with different police agencies at differ-
ent points of time,” he said. “When they are with
the ATS, they say I am guilty, then they go to the
crime branch or NIA and say that I am innocent.
This has happened in the Malegaon case too, and

it’s really funny. These officers work
according to the collective stand taken
by these agencies.”
NR Wasan, a former special director
of the NIA, seemed to draw a similar
conclusion. “There is no difference
between a state police, NIA and CBI—
these are all same officers,” he told
me. “This is a wrong impression in the
mind of the public. They are in no way
superior. The only difference is they
have far fewer cases to investigate than
the state police or the local police.” Any
sonu mehta / hindustan times
central investigation agency, he added,
was “as good or as bad as the local po-
lice. Their corruption too is as good or
bad as local police.”
Salian argued that the initial phase
of the investigations into the bombings
was the first time that names of Hin-
du groups were probed as part of an
“organised crime syndicate” who were
trying to topple the sovereignty of the
country. “The arrest and subsequent
interrogation of one of the prime ac-
cused Dayanand Pandey had given us
clinching evidence against the other
accused,” she told The Wire. “The lap-
top recovered from him had videotaped
evidence of most conspiracy meetings,
minutes of those meetings and names
of some eminent persons.” The NIA did
not follow many of these leads.
Salian began to face pressure when
she tried to argue for the release of the
Muslims accused in the 2006 Malegaon
bombings, whom the agency had found
to be innocent. She told Mumbai Mirror,
in a 2019 interview, that certain “high-
er up Hindu officers” in the NIA had
blocked the discharge of the accused.
Salian had suggested that they be let off
before the NIA filed the charge sheet.
“The issue had received a nod up to a
certain level, but got blocked at later
stages,” she said. “There were some
Hindu officers who didn’t want the
Muslim accused to be freed. And the
same set of officers seems to be working
now to get favourable orders for the
accused in the second Malegaon blast
case.”
The home ministry’s functioning
during this period suggests that certain
JULY 2022
falling in line · reportage
bureaucrats were unhappy about prose-
cuting Hindu groups. After members of
the Sanatan Sanstha who were accused
of planting bombs outside theatres in
Thane, Vashi and Panvel, in 2008, were
arrested three years later, the govern-
ments of three states—Congress-led
governments in Maharashtra and Goa,
and the BJP government in Karnata-
ka—wrote to the union home ministry,
proposing a ban on the organisation.
However, the ministry replied that
there was not enough justification for a
ban. Prithviraj Chavan, Maharashtra’s
chief minister, claimed he had sent a
letter on 11 April 2011 to the home min-
istry. GK Pillai, the home secretary at
the time, told the Business Standard in
2015 that he did not remember any such
file. Contradicting this claim, RK Sin-
gh, who succeeded Pillai, told the me-
dia that the home ministry had written
back to the Maharashtra government
“asking certain queries related to the
proposal. But they never got back.”
“I cannot recall the details,” Chid-
ambaram told me. “Under the law, the
41
falling in line · reportage
naming/banning of a ‘group’ as a ter-
rorist group has to be based on strong
evidence that must be presented to a
Tribunal and the Tribunal must uphold
the action. As far as I am able to recall,
in some cases, the MHA asked the state
governments concerned to present the
evidence against the suspected terror
group(s).” He noted that the law “makes
a distinction between an ‘individual’
and a ‘group’. The evidence against the
suspected ‘group’ was not forthcoming.
It is at that point of time that I left the
Home Ministry.” I did not receive a
reply to a right-to-information request
about the home ministry’s communi-
cation regarding the banning of the
Sanstha.
The home ministry’s refusal to ban
the Sanstha had deadly consequences.
Members of the organisation are cur-
rently facing trial for the murders of the
activists Narendra Dabholkar, Govind
Pansare and MM Kalburgi. All three
cases are currently being investigated
42
by the CBI. An SIT probing the murder
of the journalist Gauri Lankesh found
that a “crime syndicate with links to
the radical right-wing organisation
Sanatan Sanstha was involved in the
killing of not just Lankesh, but also in
the murders of Dabholkar, Pansare, and
Kalburgi.”
If the UPA government failed in en-
suring the Sanstha was banned with
the emerging evidence, the Modi gov-
ernment went one step further, despite
the conviction of Sanstha members in
several terror cases since 2008. In its
response to a petition filed in the Su-
preme Court to seek an SIT probe into
Kalburgi’s murder, the NIA said that
it cannot investigate the murder as it
was not a scheduled offense under the
NIA Act. The additional solicitor gen-
eral Pinky Anand told the court that,
as a specialised anti-terror agency, the
NIA was not allowed to probe murder
cases. The days when it investigated
the Joshi murder because of the likely
THE CARAVAN
involvement of a terrorist organisation
had already been forgotten by both the
courts and the agency. More recently,
when two Muslims allegedly murdered
a tailor from Udaipur for allegedly
supporting blasphemy, on 28 June, the
case was immediately handed over to
the NIA.
at the same time, courts were also
pointing to the NIA’s falsification of
evidence against Muslims in other ter-
ror cases. This is clearest in the case of
Razik Raheem and four other Muslims
who were arrested by the Kerala police
on 15 August 2006. On that day, they
had been participating in a meeting
about the role of Muslims in the Indian
struggle for independence. The pros-
ecution claimed that the meeting had
been organised by the SIMI to “cause
disaffection towards Government of
India, to conduct jihad for cession of
Kashmir … and to bring back Muslim
rule in India.” The case was initially

investigated by the local police, then by an SIT. In
2012, the NIA took over.
Raheem told me that he and the other accused
were not very hopeful about the NIA’s involve-
ment. Within a week of taking over the case, he
recalled, an NIA officer told him, “We will pun-
ish the first five accused. So don’t waste money
in getting a good lawyer.” The NIA relied on the
evidence submitted by the SIT but added the
names of 13 more participants in the meeting to
the list of the accused. A special NIA court in
Ernakulam convicted all of the accused, sentenc-
ing them to twelve to fourteen years of rigorous
imprisonment.
The moment the case reached the Kerala High
Court, however, it fell apart. The high court’s
judgment notes that the case was largely built on
the statement of a witness, whom the NIA added
to the list of accused when it took over the case.
If the UPA government
failed in ensuring the
Sanstha was banned with the
emerging evidence, the Modi
government went one step
further despite the conviction
of Sanstha members in several
terror cases since 2008.
This is a common occurrence in the NIA’s cases.
The court ruled that this statement, “recorded
long time after the occurrence, cannot be treated
as substantive evidence without corroboration.”
Raheem told me that his fellow accused informed
the court that they had been approached by NIA
officers seeking to turn them into approvers.
“They approached everybody except the five of
us,” he said. “Everybody except one person re-
fused to do so.” He noted that the agency had re-
lied on approvers in several cases it investigated in
Kerala. “The main evidence they presented is the
approvers’ statements.” While acquitting them, in
April 2015, the high court observed that most of
the witnesses were police officers who could be
biased towards the prosecution. It also dismissed
an undated diary that was produced as evidence
for booking the auditorium where the meeting
took place.
Similarly, in a recent judgment regarding the
NIA’s investigations into twin blasts that took
place at Kozhikode in 2009, the Kerala High Court
said that the agency did not make a concerted
effort to “go out in the sun” to collect evidence
independent of what the accused had told them.
falling in line · reportage
The high court acquitted two key accused who opposite page:
were given life term by the NIA special court in Rohini Salian, the
Ernakulam. Coming down heavily on the NIA, the NIA’s special public
prosecutor in the
court said that the agency had “even recorded the
two Malegaon
confessions made by the accused [to NIA officers], cases, speaks to the
clearly inadmissible under the Evidence Act.” The media about how a
judgement did not spare the NIA special court ei- senior officer in the
ther: “The case has been set up by the prosecution agency had asked
merely on surmises and conjectures, which the her to go soft on
the case. Salian was
Trial Court swallowed without further ado and
unceremoniously
throwing to the winds the fundamental principles ousted from
of criminal jurisprudence.” handling the cases
During his forty months in Thrissur’s Viyyur when she refused to
Central Prison, Raheem found that those arrest- comply.
ed by the NIA faced the worst treatment in a jail
already infamous for mistreatment. “A member of
the state human-rights commission was earnest-
ly listening to an inmate’s complaint that he had
suffered due to delay in emergency healthcare as
the prison authorities waited for additional secu-
rity to take him to the hospital,” he said. “But the
moment he was informed that it was a UAPA case
investigated by the NIA, the member said, ‘Aiyo,
then I can’t do anything.’” Raheem added that,
in his experience, “the entire system—be it the
courts or prisons authorities or local police—they
function under the impression that the NIA is a
topmost agency in the country, and there is this
sense of fear and respect in interacting with it.”
This respect in the courts of the NIA and the pe-
nal system seems to hold despite its growing list of
failures.
Both Viyyur Central Prison and the Kerala
branch of the NIA failed to respond to questions.
the careers of some of the senior-most officers
and bureaucrats who worked with the NIA late in
the tenure of the Manmohan Singh government
waxed while the agency’s reputation for profes-
sional neutrality waned. Sharad Kumar, the NIA’s
director general since August 2013, reached the
age of retirement in October 2015. However, the
Modi government gave him extensions, on a con-
tract basis, for two more years, unlike many other
UPA appointees of his rank. Then, in June 2018,
he was appointed the chairperson of the Central
Vigilance Commission. He retired from that post
in October 2020.
The NIA’s conduct under Kumar’s leadership
became clear with the Samjhauta bombing case.
The agency’s charge sheet had specifically men-
tioned phone records confirming Joshi’s presence
in Indore, as well as his frequent contact with
Thakur, Dange and Aseemanand. However, when
asked by the court to back this claim, the NIA
was suddenly unable to provide the records or any
other evidence. The fingerprints found at the blast
site seem to have also disappeared. The judge ob-
JULY 2022 43
dainik bhaskar / ap photo
falling in line · reportage
served that the report of a fingerprint
expert had been deposited with the
moharrir head constable—the custodi-
an of material submitted to the court—
but did not figure in the evidence
produced by the NIA, and the agency
did not have proof of trying to compare
the prints with those of the accused.
The NIA also failed to conduct an
44
identification parade for the tailor of
the bag, a crucial step to proving in
court who the buyer of the bag was. “I
have to conclude this judgement with
deep pain and anguish as a dastardly
act of violence remained unpunished
for want of credible and admissible
evidence,” the judgment said. “There
are gaping holes in the prosecution
THE CARAVAN
evidence and an act of terrorism has
remained unsolved.”
Kumar, meanwhile, promoted anoth-
er theory. During a visit to the United
States, in April 2016, he sought the de-
tails of Arif Qasmani, an LeT operative
with links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban
who, the NIA alleged, might have fa-
cilitated the attack. The Intelligence

Bureau as well as local police had suspected the
LeT’s involvement in the aftermath of the bomb-
ing, but the evidence found at the blast site had
put this theory to rest. Kumar announced that he
would be submitting in court a US intelligence re-
port about Qasmani’s involvement in the bombing.
But the dossier on Qasmani, the Indian Express
reported, had been shared by India itself, through
the Indo-Pak Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism, and
falling in line · reportage
passed on to the US government. If that were the left: Survivors
case, the Indian government essentially shared look on as the
intelligence of questionable veracity with the compartments
of Samjhauta
United States, then claimed in an NIA court that
Express burn after
US intelligence backed its claim. Kumar did not an explosion in
respond to a questionnaire about this theory or his Haryana, on 19
conduct in the NIA. February 2007.
“There is no saffron terror threat in the coun- The Haryana ATS
try,” Kumar told The Week, a month later. “Since meticulously
collected evidence
2008, there has been no activity that has come
from the blast in
to the notice of the agency. Hence, there is no the form of bags,
question of any threat.” He also told the media an unexploded
that there was “no proof against Purohit in the bomb and plastic
Samjhauta blast case. He was never an accused. I bottles with finger
wonder why his name is being linked to Samjhauta prints. The NIA
has mysteriously
blast case.” Soon after, Kiren Rijiju, the minister of
lost much of this
state for home affairs, complained about the man- evidence or handled
ner in which the Manmohan Singh government it in such a manner
had “pressurised officers to get things done, which that it has become
is not good. They should have not done it.” inadmissible in
After Kumar’s retirement from the NIA, the court.
government appointed YC Modi, a controversial
Gujarat police officer, as his successor. YC Modi
was part of an SIT that probed several massacres
during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in the state,
including the Gulburg Society case, the Naroda
Patiya case and the Naroda Gaam case. The SIT
exonerated Narendra Modi, who had been the
state’s chief minister at the time, and 63 others ac-
cused in the cases, while facing heavy criticism for
ignoring crucial evidence and witness testimony.
YC Modi was also the head of the CBI team that
probed the murder of Haren Pandya, who was shot
dead shortly after deposing before an independ-
ent fact-finding panel about Narendra Modi’s role
in the pogroms. This investigation had arrested
12 Muslims and argued that some of them were
If that were the case, the
Indian government essentially
shared intelligence of
questionable veracity with the
United States, then claimed
in an NIA court that US
intelligence backed its claim.
trained at the behest of the Inter-Service Intelli-
gence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, to
spread terror in India. However, in 2011, the Bom-
bay High Court acquitted all the accused, saying
that the investigation had “been botched up and
blinkered and has left a lot to be desired. The in-
vestigating officers concerned ought to be held ac-
countable for their ineptitude resulting into injus-
tice, huge harassment of many persons concerned
JULY 2022 45
falling in line · reportage
and enormous waste of public resourc-
es and public time of the courts.” (This
acquittal was later overturned by a
controversial Supreme Court judge-
ment.) Despite this questionable track
record, YC Modi was picked to head the
country’s premier investigating agency.
YC Modi did not respond to emailed
questions about the conduct of the NIA
under him.
On 23 June this year, Dinkar Gupta
was appointed director general of the
NIA. Besides previously serving in the
home ministry, Gupta had also been
Punjab’s director general of police for
intelligence, a position through which
he controlled the state’s ATS, intel-
ligence wing and Organised Crime
Control Unit. His tenure was marred
by allegations of his involvement in
Punjab’s notorious drug trade. In De-
cember 2017, the Punjab and Haryana
High Court ordered the creation of an
SIT, headed by the DGP for human re-
sources, Siddharth Chattopadhyaya, to
look into the role of senior officials in
the Punjab Police in the drug trade. By
March 2018, the SIT had reportedly im-
plicated Gupta and sought records from
the income tax department on Gupta’s
properties.
On 15 March 2018, Chattopadhyaya,
alongside Punjab’s advocate gener-
al, complained to the judge who had
ordered the probe that he was being
falsely accused in a case “at the behest
of senior officials” his SIT was inves-
tigating. In February 2019, despite
being under the scanner, Gupta was
appointed the head of the Punjab Po-
lice, superseding five officers who were
senior to him. Chattopadhyaya and an-
other senior officer challenged Gupta’s
appointment in court, but it was soon
set aside by the Central Administrative
Tribunal. A Supreme Court order al-
lowed Gupta to continue his charge as
the state’s police chief. No action has
been taken against him based on the
SIT’s finding.
No official associated with the NIA,
however, would occupy as questionable
a role as RK Singh, the former home
secretary under the UPA, who joined
the BJP soon after his retirement and
is now the power minister in Modi’s
government. Singh was India’s home
secretary between 2011 and 2013. Dur-
46
ing this period, he was the senior-most
bureaucrat in the ministry that the
NIA reports to. Singh’s no-nonsense
approach to governance made him a
darling of governments throughout his
career. He rose through the ranks at an
astonishing speed, became a close con-
fidant of senior politicians across party
lines and handled briefs that were well
outside his purview.
After serving as the district magis-
trate of East Champaran, Singh was
transferred to Samastipur in 1989, just
as Bihar entered its most politically
critical period. On 23 November 1990,
LK Advani began his infamous Rath
Yatra, along with a large mob that in-
tended to demolish the Babri Masjid in
Ayodhya, a sixteenth-century mosque
that the Hindu Right claimed was built
on the birthplace of the deity Ram. In
October, after passing through nine
states untrammelled, Advani entered
Bihar.
Prime Minister VP Singh authorised
Bihar’s chief minister, Lalu Prasad Ya-
dav, to arrest Advani. On 22 October,
the day the Rath Yatra left Patna for
Samastipur, Yadav roped in his most
trusted officers to pull off an arrest that
much of his administration seemed
to be against. Singh and Rameshwar
Oraon, the state’s deputy inspector gen-
eral of police, were flown secretly by a
helicopter to Samastipur, where they
took Advani into custody. The group
then went to an undisclosed guesthouse
in Masanjor, a village in present-day
Jharkhand. Advani was later released,
and the Babri Masjid was demolished in
December 1992.
Singh’s performance during the ar-
rest earned him the trust of Yadav, who
gave him the coveted post of district
magistrate of Patna and later inducted
him into the state home department.
Singh became a valued aide to sever-
al politicians, including Advani, who
became the union home minister in
1999. Advani appointed Singh as a joint
secretary in the home department.
Singh held important positions during
Nitish Kumar’s tenure as chief minister
as well as under the Manmohan Singh
government. The defence minister, AK
Antony, appointed him head of the de-
fence production department in 2009
and, two years later, Singh took up his
THE CARAVAN
last administrative post as Chidambar-
am’s home secretary before entering
electoral politics.
Singh’s view of the NIA’s investiga-
tions seems to have undergone a com-
plete volte-face since he joined the BJP.
Despite having claimed, in 2013, that
the government had linked ten RSS
associates to the terror attacks being
investigated by the NIA, Singh reversed
his position soon after his election,
arguing that “the term saffron terror
was coined by Home Minister Sushil
Kumar Shinde. I never used that term.”
Singh also told Business Standard that
“terrorism had no religion and organi-
sations such as the Rashtriya Swayam-
sevak Sangh were driven by nation’s
interests.” Thakur, who was prosecuted
for terrorism during Singh’s tenure as
home secretary, is now his colleague
in the treasury benches of parliament.
Singh did not respond to a detailed
questionnaire.
{FOUR}
by late 2014, the NIA was presenting
radically divergent conclusions from
what it had previously asserted. Salian’s
career, too, was moving in a dramat-
ically different direction from that of
RK Singh and Sharad Kumar. In April
that year, a month before Modi came to
power, Suhas Warke, the investigating
officer in the 2006 Malegaon case, had
told Salian that “the findings of the NIA
showed that it was a Hindu extremist
group that was behind the crime.”
After going through the evidence, she
advised the NIA to be assertive about
which group of accused was behind
the blast. “And because I wanted the
chargesheet to have this clarity, so I
had asked for 15 days’ extension,” she
told the Indian Express in 2016. “But
that same afternoon, another in-house
prosecutor filed the chargesheet on
their behalf. I learnt of this only much
later.”
Salian later claimed to NDTV that,
shortly after Modi got elected, Warke
ordered her to “go soft” on the case.
Soon, Salian was unceremoniously
ousted from handling the two Male-
gaon cases. She said that several of-
ficers had diligently investigated the
case till late 2013, but “they too were

shunted out when I was asked to hand over the
case in June 2014.” Some of those officers, Salian
claimed, were either sent back to their parent
cadre or were sidelined within the NIA. Neither
Warke nor Salian responded to emailed question-
naires.
Salian’s accusations later became central to a
petition, which is still pending before the Supreme
Court, asking for an enquiry into the NIA’s alleged
attempts to tamper with evidence. On 12 June
2014, she said in an affidavit in the case, Warke
told her, “there are instructions from higher-ups,
that someone else will appear instead of you.”
The NIA refuted her allegations and said that she
was removed based on her performance review.
“During the review, we got information from the
Mumbai office that her performance was not up to
the mark,” Kumar told the Indian Express.
Salian’s work in the 2006 Malegaon case crum-
bled after she left. By April 2016, the new NIA
prosecutor, Prakash Shetty, told the court that
“three independent machinery” had investigated
Salian said that none of what
the ATS wrote in its four-
thousand-page charge sheet
had been “honoured and
presented to the court” in the
NIA’s version.
the case. The ATS and CBI had named one group,
but the “investigation by NIA is conflicting,” he
said. “The court will be looking into what evidence
has been collected, what is the evidence against
them.” He argued against the release of the Mus-
lim accused.
Shetty argued that the NIA’s investigation was
filed as a “further report” and not as a “fresh re-
port” and, therefore, should be seen in continua-
tion to the work of the ATS and CBI. The CBI had
previously distanced itself from the investigation,
submitting to the court in 2014 that, “since the
NIA has carried out that investigation and filed a
charge-sheet on the basis of the material collected
by them during further investigation, it would be
appropriate if NIA is directed to file their views in
the matter.” The CBI, which had felt that it did not
have a contribution to make in the hearing, was
suddenly brought in again by the NIA that had
once rubbished its investigation.
In the 2008 Malegaon and Modasa case, Salian’s
successor as the NIA’s prosecutor, Avinash Ras-
al, faced similar treatment in court. Soon after
Tushar Mehta’s appearance and Mariarputham’s
falling in line · reportage
exit from the courtroom, the Supreme Court had
observed that the agency so far had no evidence
to charge the 11 accused, including Thakur, under
the MCOCA. After the order, on the advice of the
state’s counsel Anil Singh, the NIA consulted the
attorney general, Mukul Rohatgi, on the applica-
bility of the law. “How can they ask the attorney
general?” Salian said in an interview with Scroll.
“How is he concerned with the case? The matter
is sub judice and the case is at framing of charges.
The court should decide the charges now. This is
all politics. I have disassociated myself from the
case now. They are cheating everyone.”
Rasal, unlike others in the agency, was still de-
termined to apply the MCOCA. “I have been argu-
ing on behalf of the NIA during which I showed
it to the court that MCOCA is applicable,” he told
Mumbai Mirror. His argument relied on the fact
that two dozen bail applications in the case had
been rejected by the court between September
2015 and 22 January 2016, showing that a prima
facie case was maintainable under the MCOCA.
“In my court appearances, I strongly said those
arrested conspired to revolt against the govern-
ment,” Rasal told the Economic Times. “They
wanted to have a Hindu Rashtra and they were
trying to overthrow this government and that is
why the provision of MCOCA is applicable.”
Rasal informed the court, in early May 2016,
that the charge sheet would be filed by the end of
the month. A week later, he was surprised to find
out that the NIA had submitted the charge sheet
without informing him. “I saw my junior counsel
Geeta Godambe submitting the charge sheet in
court,” he told the Indian Express. “I was taken
aback that the officials did not find it important
to apprise me of the development. I therefore left
and allowed the special counsel to continue with
the arguments.” Later in the day, Rasal added that
investigating officers had called him and apolo-
gised. “I accepted their apology. They explained to
me the circumstances in which they had to file the
chargesheet hurriedly, and therefore they failed
to inform me.” Rasal said he was “anguished” and
“disturbed” by the “turn of the events.” The NIA
gave no public explanation for the unusual haste
or agency’s disagreement with the public prosecu-
tor on the charges. Two months later, Rasal told
the media that his security cover was suddenly
withdrawn without informing him. He did not
respond to a questionnaire I sent him over email.
The charge sheet Godambe filed said that “suf-
ficient evidences have not been found against”
Thakur, Kalsangra and four others, and the
prosecution against them under the MCOCA was
therefore not maintainable. It allowed for some
charges under the UAPA and the Explosive Sub-
stances Act, but even this was weak because the
JULY 2022 47
falling in line · reportage
opposite page: evidence collected by the ATS and NIA suddenly
On 30 September seemed insufficient.
2008, one of the The charge sheet came after the NIA failed
units in a Malegaon
to produce crucial evidence in court, witnesses
hospital that is full
of patients after a turned hostile and evidence collected by Karkare’s
bomb blast. ATS team was undermined. The initial evidence
filed by the agency had pointed to a clear conspir-
acy that was spelt out by SD Tekale, a judge of the
special NIA court who heard the case in 2016.
Tekale’s judgment notes that Sudhakar Dwivedi,
a member of the Abhinav Bharat network, had re-
corded some of the meetings between the accused
that were held in Bhopal, Faridabad, Jabalpur,
Indore, Ujjain and Nashik. The prosecution had
mainly relied on the meetings at Faridabad and
Bhopal from a laptop seized from Dwivedi.
The judge said that the recordings and tran-
scripts of meetings, as well as witness statements,
show that Purohit had participated in these meet-
ings alongside several of the accused, including
Ramesh Upadhyay, a retired army major. After
going through these, the judge concluded that the
participants in the meeting wanted to establish a
Hindu Rashtra called “Aryavart,” in which there
would be no place for Muslims and Christians. To
achieve this, they had decided to establish a gov-
ernment in exile and prepare a new constitution
suited to their ideology. The judge also examined
intercepted telephone conversations between
Purohit and Upadhyay. In one conversation, after
discussing the news reports on Thakur’s arrest,
Purohit told Upadhyay that the “cat is out of the
bag.” They also discussed a probable defence
strategy of disowning the vehicles they had used
during the blast and plans to procure sim cards
in someone else’s name for future use. In another
conversation, Purohit told Upadhyay that “Singh
has sung quite a bit.” The judge agreed with the
prosecution’s argument that this subsequent con-
duct of the accused indicated that the bombing
was one step towards the establishment of a Hin-
du Rashtra.
While the ATS had emphasised that Abhinav
Bharat is an organised crime syndicate, the NIA
totally ignored this and exonerated the accused
from charges under the MCOCA. “The NIA did
not press for charges against the accused under
the MCOCA,” Ansari told me, and so the court too
did not charge them.
Between September 2015 and April 2016, the
NIA re-examined the ATS’s witnesses. Several
key witnesses retracted their statements when the
NIA questioned them and accused the ATS of elic-
iting false statements. The judge noted that one
of the witnesses was a doctor who had taken part
in the Bhopal meeting and previously claimed to
have been doing so on the insistence of the Intelli-
gence Bureau. The doctor was associated with the
48 THE CARAVAN
RSS and was a member of the World Hindu Fed-
eration, whose Indian chapter is headed by Adit-
yanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. After
the NIA interrogated the doctor, in October 2015,
he turned hostile. Another witness in the meeting
had overheard Thakur complain about “how there
were less causalities though her vehicle was used
for causing blast.” After the NIA’s interrogation,
this witness retracted their statement and filed
a complaint accusing the ATS of extracting it by
harassing and ill-treating them. The judge, howev-
er, decided to maintain the statement.
Two Madhya Pradesh police officers who had
served as witnesses to the ATS recovering electric
timer circuits for the bombs from Kalsangra and
his brother also retracted their statements after
the NIA interrogated them. Another witness, who
was the commanding officer for Purohit in the
army, also turned hostile. A letter written on 23
June 2022, by a lawyer representing a victim of
the blast to the NIA says, “He deliberately trav-
The judge concluded that the
participants in the meeting
wanted to establish a Hindu
Rashtra called “Aryavart,” in
which there would be no place
for Muslims and Christians.
elled beyond his statement to facilitate accused.
From his statement, it is amply clear that he was
privy to the information about the blast and all
the meetings held by Abhinav Bharat where the
preparations for the blast took place.” The letter
called for the investigation of the commanding
officer under Section 319 of the Code of Criminal
Procedure, which allows the prosecution to pro-
ceed against those who appear to be guilty during
the course of trial. The NIA has not yet responded
to this plea.
Further weakening its case, the NIA submitted
in court that traces of RDX recovered from a key
accused in the case had been fabricated by the
ATS. Two army officers who were witnesses to the
recovery retracted their statements and went on
to accuse Karkare’s team of illegally entering the
house. The judge noted that neither witness had
brought this alleged break-in to the notice of any
manoj patil / hindustan times
superior officer or the police and ruled that the
contention of the ATS planting the RDX was diffi-
cult to accept.
In early 2017, during the hearing of Thakur’s
bail plea before the Bombay High Court, the NIA
and ATS once again did not produce crucial evi-
dence. The NIA submitted the transcript of only

one of the meetings held in Faridabad,
in which Thakur did not participate.
The bench of Ranjit More and Shalini
Phansalkar-Joshi asked the investigat-
ing agencies to produce a transcript of
the recording made at the Bhopal meet-
ing in which Thakur was alleged to
have participated. “You have written in
your own charge sheet that you got the
transcripts from FSL and you studied
them so why don’t you have it? We want
to go through the transcripts, videos,
audio recordings, phone records, all
that you cited in the charge sheet.” The
bench noted that the Faridabad meet-
ing was held before the Bhopal meet-
ing. “The reference to the accused was
first made in the Bhopal meeting, so if
you have transcripts of the first meet-
ing, the transcripts of the subsequent
meetings must be there. What did you
do with them? These were crucial
meetings and the transcripts are im-
portant evidence, so how are they miss-
ing?” The NIA told the court that the
ATS had never handed the recordings
over to it.
Salian had personally perused the
evidence of the ATS, CBI and NIA. She
claimed that one of the videos showed
the accused conspiring to topple the
Manmohan Singh government and
form a government-in-exile in Israel.
She alleged that the findings of an NIA
team that investigated the case be-
tween 2011 and 2014 did not make it to
the charge sheet. “By the time the team
had finalised their findings and were
ready to file a supplementary charge-
sheet in 2014, they were stopped and,
soon after, also removed from the case,”
Salian told The Wire. She added that
JULY 2022
falling in line · reportage
none of what the ATS wrote in its four-
thousand-page charge sheet had been
“honoured and presented to the court”
in the NIA’s version. Kumar brushed
aside the criticism. “How can anyone
say we dismissed the ATS probe? Our
investigation, in fact, supports the
probe carried out by the ATS,” Kumar
told the Hindustan Times. “We cannot
base our investigation on statements
taken under coercion and recoveries
made using questionable methods.”
Following the NIA’s travails in court
and Salian’s public accusation that she
had been asked to go soft on the case,
a victim of the blast who had lost trust
in the prosecution joined the case as an
intervenor. Nisar Ahmed, a 71-year-old
who lost his son Sayyed Azhar in the
blast, had been knocking the doors of
courts for over a decade for an efficient
49
falling in line · reportage
investigation and fair trial in the case. “When the
NIA filed its supplementary charge sheet and said
that some of the accused including Pragya Singh
Thakur were not part of the conspiracy, we filed
intervention applications to oppose their bail and
discharge applications,” Ahmed’s lawyer, Shahid
Ansari, told me. “When the government changed,
the NIA’s stand also changed. In 2016, when the
NIA filed the charge sheet, it said that accused
Thakur was not part of the conspiracy and diluted
the whole case.”
as the trial dragged on, more witnesses in the
case started turning hostile. In December 2021,
after an eighth witness in the case had done so,
Ahmed wrote a letter to the NIA superintendent
for Mumbai, pointing out the “haphazard manner”
in which the witnesses were being called to the
court. “The witnesses are called on by the pros-
ecution without studying their statements and
without following any particular sequence,” he
wrote, adding that, while certain accommodations
can be made in exceptional cases when witnesses
are unable to be present, “it can be seen that such
lapses have become routine.” His letter said that
the court had also asked “the prosecution to study
the relevance of the witness and their documents
before calling them.”
Ahmed’s letter pointed out that 51 witnesses in
the Samjhauta case, 64 in the Mecca Masjid case
and 18 in the Ajmer Sharif case had turned hostile.
The letter also requested the NIA to take the as-
sistance of ATS offices “in clarifying statements,
investigation, and any other queries that the NIA
may have that is causing the prosecution witness-
es to turn hostile or for the purposes of an effec-
tive trial.” In February this year, the NIA declared
the eighteenth witness in the 2008 Malegaon case
as hostile.
According to the NIA charge sheet, the wit-
ness who owned a hotel in Madhya Pradesh
had admitted that, on Purohit’s request, he had
arranged a training camp for sixty people at his
hotel in October 2008 under the guise of an “Art
of Living” programme. The charge sheet said that
the witness “realised that the camps were not
related to ‘Art of Living’ but something else, but
did not question Purohit as he used to attend the
camps in uniform.” According to the witness’s
statement to the NIA, Purohit had even asked
him to procure air rifles for training, which he
failed to do. However, when presented before the
court, the witness failed to identify Purohit and
said he did not remember any of this. By March,
20 witnesses had turned hostile. The NIA also
chose not to appeal against the acquittals in the
Samjhauta, Mecca Masjid and Ajmer Dargah
bombings.
50 THE CARAVAN
Wasan, the NIA’s former special director, placed
the blame for this squarely on the agency. “Wit-
nesses turning hostile is very common,” he told
me. “Any good investigator knows that there is
every possibility of witnesses turning hostile. I
was not part of these investigations but, as a police
officer, I can say these cases were badly investi-
gated. Our investigation standards are very poor.
Political interventions and all will always be there,
whether I do my job properly, honestly and objec-
tively. If I don’t do my job properly, then it is very
easy to say that there is this interference and all.”
since his days as chief minister of Gujarat, Modi
has had a fondness for strict anti-terror laws.
Gujarat under Modi had the highest number of
detentions under the POTA in the country. The act
was widely used to target Muslims following the
2002 pogroms—an Amnesty International report
from 2006 notes that 280 were detained under the
law, against the official figure of 87. Of these, all
but one were Muslim. Speaking at a chief minis-
ters’ conclave, in 2009, Modi said that the Man-
mohan Singh government “lacked the resolve to
fight terror.” It was a shortcoming he promised to
address in his 2014 manifesto, which promised a
“zero tolerance” policy on terrorism. Modi hinted
at bringing in “stronger” anti-terror laws. A major
mover in this narrative has been Ajit Doval, who
Modi appointed India’s national security advisor
soon after his election victory.
Modi’s India witnessed a manyfold increase in
the number of cases filed by the NIA. The agency
registered 62 cases in 2019, after the government
expanded its powers by amending the NIA Act.
The amendment gave the NIA the powers to probe
cases committed outside the national borders and
extended its scope to investigate offences such as
human-trafficking, circulation of fake currency,
manufacture and sale of prohibited arms and cy-
ber terrorism. The government also amended the
UAPA, adding the provision that individuals, rath-
er than organisations, could be declared terrorists.
Following this, several human-rights activists,
journalists and political opponents have been
booked under terror cases.
Opposing the two amendments in the Lok Sabha,
the Congress MP Manish Tiwari argued that, “if
you read the NIA (Amendment) Bill in conjunction
with the UAPA Amendment Bill, in conjunction
with the Biotechnology Bill, in conjunction with
the Aadhaar Amendment Bill, you are seeking to
turn this country into a police state.” Tiwari fur-
ther pointed out that the UAPA does not define ter-
rorism. “Even till today, there is no laid procedure
that at what point of time does an act of violence
actually become a terrorist act,” he said. “How do
you designate an act of violence as a terrorist act?”

The NIA has given itself a rather liberal defini-
tion of the term. Kashmir has become a mainstay
in the cases it handles. In 2017, while inaugurat-
ing a new headquarters for the agency, the home
minister at the time, Rajnath Singh, claimed that
the NIA’s “crackdown on flow of funds” had dealt
a blow to terror groups. “You have seen the role of
the NIA in Jammu and Kashmir, where incidents
of stone-pelting have come down,” he said, in an
attempt to link civilian protests on the streets to
terrorism. The NIA has also been given cases that
have little to do with terrorism but help legitimise
conspiracy theories propagated by the Sangh Pari-
var. When, in 2016, a 24-year-old woman in Kerala
married a Muslim man and converted to Islam
of her own free will, the state’s BJP unit began
claiming it was part of a larger conspiracy to con-
vert Hindu women in the region. The NIA was
soon assigned the case. After a short investigation,
it informed the Supreme Court that there was a
well-oiled machinery working in Kerala indulg-
ing in the indoctrination and radicalisation of the
society in the state, where as many as 89 cases of
similar nature have been reported. The NIA final-
ly had to drop the case after finding no evidence.
Despite the vast powers given
to the NIA, it has done little to
prove its worth.
Despite the vast powers given to the NIA, it has
done little to prove its worth. On 21 April 2022,
marking the thirteenth raising day of the NIA,
the home minister, Amit Shah, said that the NIA
“has the highest conviction rate of 93.25 per cent
among all probe agencies in the country.” Though
the NIA claims to have high conviction rates, full
or partial judgements have been pronounced in
only 22 of the 446 cases it has taken up since 2009.
The 2019 amendment allowed the government to
designate sessions courts as special NIA courts.
This has led to a situation in which sessions courts
continue to be overburdened while also handling
NIA cases, resulting in inordinate delay in trials.
This is only worsened by the major increase in the
number of cases the NIA handles. As a result of
these inordinate delays, the accused often plead
guilty after spending several years in jail, awaiting
trial. Several lawyers handling NIA cases told me
that, after spending five to seven years in jail, it
is easy for the accused to be tempted to accept a
plea deal, rather than wait several more years for
a trial.
In a petition filed last year before the Bombay
High Court, seeking the court’s intervention to
prevent further delay in trials, Manzar Imam, an
falling in line · reportage
undertrial prisoner arrested in 2014 by the NIA
argued that “delay appears to be the norm and the
purpose of the NIA.” Imam was arrested in a case
against the Indian Mujahideen, registered by the
NIA in 2012, and has spent eight years awaiting
trial. The agency is yet to frame charges in his
case. Imam argued that “convictions on evidence
are rare in the Special Courts. Instead, accused
persons languishing in jail plead guilty.” He add-
ed that, as bail conditions are stringent under
the UAPA, the NIA was using the delay in trials
to “compel accused to plead guilty, and process
appears to be the punishment and the message.”
He also argued that the NIA was acting in a “mala
fide way with the sole aim of keeping” the accused
persons “out of the purview of the rule of law.”
“Apart from my client, all the 16 other accused
pleaded guilty,” a lawyer involved in another NIA
case told me. “This wasn’t because they actually
believed they were guilty, but because of pressure
tactics from the NIA. We have seen this in many
cases now, where people against whom there is
little hard evidence suddenly pleading guilty are
convicted.” Abu Bakr Sabbaq, Imam’s lawyer, told
me that in the thirteen years of the NIA’s exist-
ence, only twenty cases had resulted in a convic-
tion. Out of over three hundred and seventy cases
handled by the NIA since 2009, 265 have been reg-
istered at its Delhi branch. “In a significant num-
ber of NIA cases convicted by the special court in
Delhi the accused have plead guilty,” Sabbaq said.
“These cases have not concluded in a trial based
on evidence.” Following Imam’s petition, the Delhi
High Court transferred all non-UAPA cases out of
the NIA special court, in an attempt to speed up
trials.
The NIA failed to respond to a detailed ques-
tionnaire pertaining to all of the cases mentioned
in this piece as well as the agency’s statistically
poor performance.
{FIVE}
“my name is bhaktendra modi. My speech is sim-
ple. My living is simple. And the coat is also one in
lakhs. Hey, who is here? Don’t pay attention to the
opposition … So, my speech is simple, my living is
simple, but, if anybody comes after me, his elimi-
nation is certain.”
These were some of the lines the NIA submitted
to the courts as clear evidence of a declaration of
war against the country. The singers of the satir-
ical song, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor, are
members of the Kabir Kala Manch, a Marathi an-
ti-caste street theatre and music collective that has
long been in the cross hairs of police in India. On 31
December 2017, at Pune’s Shanivarwada area, the
KKM had sung the song—and several other songs
JULY 2022 51
indian express archive
falling in line · reportage
about vegetarianism, Modi’s monthly
radio programme and cow vigilante
groups, all of which the Pune Police and
NIA found “objectionable.”
The event Gorkhe and Gaichor had
sung at was called the Bhima Kore-
gaon Shaurya Din Prerana Abhiyan,
commemorating the two-hundredth
anniversary of a battle in which a small
contingent of Dalit soldiers had defeat-
ed a much larger Maratha army led
by the Brahmin Peshwas—a historic
event memorialised as a key victory
in the anti-caste struggle. The event
was organised by the Elgar Parishad, a
coalition of over two hundred and fifty
Dalit and other groups. It comprised of
cultural activities, such as songs, street
plays and speeches, calling for “inclu-
sive development and voicing concerns
against the Chaturvarna.” The former
Supreme Court judge PB Sawant and
the former Bombay High Court judge
BG Kolse Patil were among the event’s
coordinators. Sawant and two other
52
retired judges had previously been part
of an independent investigation of the
2002 pogroms, and their report had
severely criticised Modi’s actions.
On the day after the event, Ambed-
karite organisations made the annual
pilgrimage to the site of the Bhima Ko-
regaon battle. They were attacked by an
upper-caste Hindu mob led by Milind
Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide, the leaders
of two right-wing outfits, the Samasta
Hindu Aghadi and Shiv Pratishthan
Hindustan, respectively. In the melee
that followed, several were injured. In
relation to the Elgar Parishad and the
violence of the following day, the Pune
Police filed two cases that led to the
arrest of 18 of India’s most influential
lawyers, academics, human-rights
activists and Ambedkarite icons. The
accusations against them range from
being members of a banned Maoist or-
ganisation, conspiring to overthrow the
state and planning to assassinate the
prime minister.
THE CARAVAN
The first complainant was Tushar
Damgude, a Pune-based businessman
who alleged that the speeches and per-
formances of the KKM were provoca-
tive and created communal disharmony.
Damgude claimed that the event had
provoked the violence, “resulting in the
loss of life and property and creation of
social disharmony.” Meanwhile, a day
after the violence, another complaint
was filed by the anti-caste activist Anita
Sawale, who had witnessed the vio-
lence first-hand. Her complaint accused
Ekbote and Bhide of being the master-
minds of the attack. An FIR based on
Damgude’s complaint was registered
at the Vishrambaug police station. It
initially named Gorkhe and Gaichor, as
well as the KKM activists Sudhir Dha-
wale, Deepak Dengale, Harshali Potdar
and Jyoti Jagtap. In an FIR registered
in response to the second complaint, by
the Pimpri police station, only Ekbote
was mentioned, and he spent only a
month in jail. This was despite Deven-

dra Fadnavis, Maharashtra’s chief minister at the
time and a member of the BJP, himself stating that
the violence was started by the group carrying saf-
fron flags: Ekbote and Bhide’s mob.
The investigation was soon transferred to the
assistant commissioner of police for the Swargate
Division. On 16 April, the residences of the hu-
man-rights activist Rona Wilson, the literature
professor Shoma Sen and the Dalit-rights activist
Surendra Gadling, none of whom had been named
in either the complaint or the FIR, were raided. In
this raid, the police seized the laptops of Wilson
and Gadling. The three of them, and the forest
rights activist Mahesh Raut, were arrested two
months later. Gadling, Sen and Raut were due to
meet in Nagpur only a day later to discuss and fi-
nalise a legal strategy to demand a probe into the
Maharashtra Police and Central Reserve Police
Force’s alleged murder of 40 people in Gadchiroli
district earlier that year.
All three arrested activists had been part of a
fact-finding mission into the incident. “Mahesh,
In a statement to the media,
Deshmukh said that the Modi
government “wants to save
some people, and thus, the
probe was transferred to
NIA.”
who was staying at his sister’s place, had relevant
evidence and documents which he had brought
along with him,” Nihalsing Rathod, the legal
counsel for Raut, Gorkhe and Gaichor, said. “This
fake encounter had taken place under the supervi-
sion and command of IG (Naxal) Shivaji Bodkhe,
who now stands transferred to Pune, where he
has taken over the supervision of the investigation
in the case against activists.” By then, the police
account for the case was that the Elgar Parishad
event was organised by activists working along-
side the Maoist movement. The Pune Police also
alleged that it found electronic evidence that
showed that those arrested were involved in a plot
to assassinate Modi.
A second charge sheet filed by the Pune Police
named the Telugu poet Varavara Rao, the jour-
nalist and activist Gautam Navlakha, the trade
unionist Vernon Gonsalves and the human-rights
lawyers Arun Ferreira and Sudha Bharadwaj, all
of whom were put under house arrest. In October
and November 2018, the police added the names of
the Jesuit priest Stan Swamy and the Ambedkarite
professor Anand Teltumbde. The Pune Police did
not respond to questions.
falling in line · reportage
This targeting of civil-society organisations and opposite page:
activists appears to be the latest strategy adopted The Kabir Kala
by the Modi government. Speaking at the pass- Manch, a Marathi
anti-caste street
ing-out parade of police officers in Hyderabad, Ajit
theatre and music
Doval said that the “new frontiers of war—what collective that has
we call the fourth-generation warfare—is the civil long been in the
society.” This new frontier, Doval said, was char- cross hairs of police
acterised by uncertain outcomes. “It is the civil in India, performing
society that can be subverted … that can be divid- in Pune on 19 March
2017. Sagar Gorkhe
ed, that can be manipulated to hurt the interest of
(third from the
a nation. You are there to see that they stand fully right) and Ramesh
protected.” The NIA’s investigation into Bhima Gaichor (third from
Koregaon also lends credence to the term “Urban the left), the singers
Naxal” that BJP and RSS leaders have frequently of a satirical song,
used to target dissenting activists and critical were allegedly
asked by an NIA
journalists.
officer to confess to
As early as April 2018, three months after the in- being linked to the
itial incident, the NIA sent a proposal to the union Maoist movement
government to investigate the Bhima Koregaon following which
case. When the home ministry forwarded this to they would be
the Maharashtra government, the joint commis- released. The
sioner of Pune submitted a detailed report on the singers refused
saying they were
nature of alleged offenses, the role of each accused
“Babasaheb
and the evidence collected. After going through Ambedkar’s
this record, the home ministry decided to allow children.”
the state police to continue the investigation. The
Pune Police filed its charge sheet on 15 November
2018 and a supplementary charge sheet on 21 Feb-
ruary 2019.
Nine months after this, on 28 November 2019, a
coalition government of the Shiv Sena, the Nation-
alist Congress Party and the Congress was sworn
into power in the state. A week later, the state’s
new home minister, Anil Deshmukh, asked for a
detailed report on the Bhima Koregaon case. The
NCP chief, Sharad Pawar, had written a letter to
the chief minister, Uddhav Thackeray, asking that
the government constitute an SIT to look into the
actions taken by the Pune Police in the case. On
23 January 2020, Deshmukh and the deputy chief
minister, Ajit Pawar, reviewed the case at a meet-
ing with senior police officials that lasted for two
hours. Deshmukh told the media that a decision
on whether to constitute an SIT to look into the
police investigation would be taken after a second
meeting with police officials, to be held within a
week. The following day, the Modi government
transferred the case to the NIA.
The home ministry asked the NIA to take over
based on “the gravity of offence, involvement of
banned organisation CPI (Maoist) and to unearth
the larger pan-India conspiracy involved.” A state-
ment released by the ministry argued that “sen-
ior leaders of CPI (Maoist) were in contact with
organizers of the Elgaar Parishad to spread the
ideology of Maoism/Naxalism and encourage un-
lawful activities … The matter became abnormally
grave and spread not only in Pune district but to
JULY 2022 53
falling in line · reportage
next spread: many regions of India.” A petition challenging
A rally in Kolkata the transfer by Gadling and Dhawale argued that,
organised by according to the NIA Act, the decision to transfer
the Association
the case should have been taken within 15 days of
For Protection
of Democratic the receipt of the case report from the state gov-
Rights regarding ernment, which had been submitted in July 2018.
the NIA’s conduct Deshmukh said that the decision to transfer the
in the Bhima case, without even communicating it to the state,
Koregaon case, came when his government decided to get to the
on 10 September
“root of the matter.” In a statement to the media,
2020. The NIA’s
investigation he said that the Modi government “wants to save
into the case also some people, and thus, the probe was transferred
lends credence to to NIA. The case was handed over to NIA without
the term “Urban taking the state’s consent. … This comes at a time
Naxal” that BJP and when we were trying to find out the real reason
RSS leaders have
behind the violence. We were ensuring that no in-
frequently used to
target dissenting
nocent people should be convicted, but the Centre
activists and critical unilaterally transferred the case, which is against
journalists. the Constitution.”
Till then, the Fadnavis and Modi governments
had expressed complete faith in the Pune Police’s
investigation, which, Tushar Mehta argued in Au-
gust 2018, was “being conducted responsibly and
impartially and strictly in accordance with the
provisions of” the Code of Criminal Procedure. It
seemed something about the changing political
climate had necessitated that the NIA step in.
the nia’s investigation into the Bhima Koregaon
case is marked by a near complete lack of solid
evidence that remains defensible in court, a flimsy
understanding of the Indian Constitution and a
determination to expound far-fetched theories
about threats to national security in the face of
the facts. Worse, it remains numb to the growing
corpus of evidence produced by journalists from
India and reputed global publications, of how
malware planted in Wilson’s computer was linked
to the Pune Police, the very agency that arrested
him. The case needs unpacking to understand how
the NIA failed to live up to the function of its for-
mational mandate.
On 7 September 2020, a day before the arrest of
Gorkhe and Gaichor, the KKM activists recorded
a video that was released soon after. In the video,
they said that the NIA had summoned them for an
enquiry the month before. They alleged that the
NIA was pressuring them to admit to links with
Maoist groups. “Yesterday we were called again,
and told that, if we admit we have links with Mao-
ists, they will let us off,” Gorkhe said. “That, if we
write a letter of apology, they will let us off the
hook.”
In the video, the artists stood resolute. They
said they were “Babasaheb Ambedkar’s children”
and had done no wrong and, therefore, refused to
write any apology that the NIA had foisted onto
them. They alleged that the NIA’s intention was to
54 THE CARAVAN
somehow show that the Elgar Parishad was linked
to the Maoist movement. “They want to show
some link with us and declare the Elgar Parishad
as a Maoist event. We won’t let that happen. It was
an event by human-rights activists and the mass-
es.” Following their arrest, they have been await-
ing trial at Mumbai’s Taloja jail.
After a nine-month investigation that seemingly
added little to what the Pune Police already had,
the NIA filed its first charge sheet in October 2020.
The basic premise of the NIA’s charge sheet is that,
under the UAPA, “all the formations and front as-
sociations” of the Communist Party of India (Mao-
ist) are banned. The NIA’s charge sheet tried to
argue that all the organisations the accused were
involved with—the KKM, human-rights organi-
sations such as the Indian Association of People’s
Lawyers, the People’s Union for Democratic Rights
and the People Union for Civil Liberties, as well
as NGOs such as the Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas
Andolan—are all Maoist “front organisations.”
“These guys are not going
after terrorists. They’re going
after human rights defenders
and journalists. And it’s not
right.”
The NIA seemed to have done an extensive
reading of Maoist literature. The charge sheet cites
large portions from CPI (Maoist) texts such as
Strategy and Tactics of Indian Revolution, Special
Social Sections and Nationalities—Our Tactics and
Our Works in Urban Areas. It dedicates a lot of space
to elaborate on the organisation, vision, function-
ing and activities of the Maoists. It draws from this
literature and interpolates it with the professional
and public activities of the accused, but does not
provide any evidence to substantiate a link.
Beyond this, the NIA’s case relies only on elec-
tronic devices that the agency and the Pune Police
seized from the accused. The case largely pertains
to several letters that were found on the laptops of
Wilson and Gadling, one calling for a “Rajiv Gan-
dhi type incident” to deal with Modi and another
calling for a united “anti-Fascist front” in India by
bringing together the Dalit and Muslim commu-
nities. In collecting this evidence and measuring
its usability, India’s premier investigating agency
seems to have ignored even the most basic re-
quirements that Indian courts have enshrined for
admissible evidence. For electronic evidence to
be admissible in court, it is mandatory for a hash
value to be drawn and for it to be provided to the
accused at the time of the seizure. This is the most

basic way for a court to ensure that the electronic
evidence has not been tampered with by the inves-
tigating agency. The accused were not given the
hash values even months after their arrest.
The next crucial requirement under the Indian
Evidence Act is that evidence can only be relied
upon after a thorough forensic analysis to rule out
any malware in the system. However, according
to a petition filed by Wilson in August 2021, the
Forensics Science Laboratory in Pune, where the
evidence was sent, did not provide any response
to a query on this from the investigating officer.
In March 2020, The Caravan published an inves-
tigative report after analysing a copy of Wilson’s
hard disk that had been presented in the court.
It confirmed the presence of malware that can
remotely access the computer and plant files. The
Caravan’s analysis found that the letters, which
were found in the PDF format on the hard disk,
were composed on the 2010 version of Microsoft
Word, while Wilson’s computer only had the 2007
version of the software. The 2010 version had nev-
er been installed on Wilson’s computer.
A year later, Arsenal Consulting, a US-based
digital-forensics consulting company that con-
ducted a detailed forensic analysis of Wilson’s
computer, found that it was infected with a mal-
ware called Netwire, which was planted through
an email on 13 June 2016, two years before his
arrest. According to reports published in the
Washington Post, among others, in February 2021,
the hacker carried out surveillance and delivered
32 documents in a hidden folder. The last docu-
ment was added just a day before Wilson’s house
was searched and his laptop was seized, on 17
April 2018. There was no proof to say that these
documents had ever interacted in “any legitimate
way” on Wilson’s computer, Arsenal Consulting’s
reports said. Arsenal found similar fabricated
files on Gadling’s laptop. “This is one of the most
serious cases involving evidence-tampering that
Arsenal has ever encountered,” Mark Spencer,
Arsenal’s president, wrote in a report submitted to
the NIA court.
In June this year, the reputed technology jour-
nalism publications, WIRED, took the story even
further, bringing out some conclusive evidence
of the questionable conduct of the Pune Police.
According to the WIRED report, researchers at
the security firm SentinelOne uncovered that the
Pune Police had systematically run a hacking cam-
paign, which the firm calls “Modified Elephant.”
A report published by SentinelOne in February
showed that the hackers had targeted hundreds
of activists, journalists, academics, and lawyers
with phishing emails and malware since as early
as 2012. SentinelOne identified that, when Rao,
Wilson and Babu’s email accounts were hacked,
falling in line · reportage
the hacker left a recovery email address and phone
number to make them easier to access in the fu-
ture. Speaking to a security analyst at the email
provider, SentinelOne was able to identify that the
recovery email addresses and phone number be-
longed to a police official in Pune who was closely
associated with the investigation. “We general-
ly don’t tell people who targeted them, but I’m
kind of tired of watching shit burn,” the security
analyst at the email provider told WIRED, a US
tech-news outlet. “These guys are not going after
terrorists. They’re going after human rights de-
fenders and journalists. And it’s not right.”
In December 2021, Arsenal had also found that
Wilson’s mobile phone was targeted using the Pe-
gasus spyware. According to the Arsenal report,
his phone was targeted between July 2017 and
April 2018, a few months prior to his arrest. Many
of the accused in the case along with their law-
yers, friends and family were later found to have
been targeted by Pegasus. The New York Times
reported, in January 2022, that the Modi govern-
ment had purchased the Israeli spyware in 2017
as part of a $2 billion defence package. This added
strength to the accused’s argument that they were
selectively targeted by the government for their
activism and voicing dissent.
When some of these revelations were brought
out by investigative journalists and tech experts,
Wilson approached the Bombay High Court seek-
ing immediate relief and requesting that an SIT
be constituted to investigate “framing” and “tar-
geting” by planting incriminating material in his
laptop to frame him and his co-accused. Wilson
said that there had been no attempt to “prosecute
the real culprits of the violence.”
Unfazed, the NIA continued aggressively down
the path it had taken. Objecting to Wilson’s peti-
tion, Anil Singh, appearing for NIA, argued that
Arsenal’s report does not form a part of the charge
sheet and these arguments could be made only
during the trial. The report “is not maintainable
because it entirely revolves around this theory of
planting of evidence,” Singh said. “Whether we
have a case or not, the court will decide. As of now
we have a prima facie case. We are at the stage of
framing of charges right now.”
On 8 October 2020, the NIA made yet another
arrest in the case. Stan Swamy, a Catholic priest
in the Society of Jesuit order, became the oldest
person in the country charged under the UAPA, at
the age of 83. He was suffering from Parkinson’s
disease at the time and had applied for bail several
times on medical grounds, against which the NIA
argued vehemently. In July 2021, while demand-
ing more “conclusive proof” for Swamy’s medical
conditions, the NIA argued that he was part of
a “deep-rooted conspiracy to commit an offense
JULY 2022 55
falling in line · reportage

56 THE CARAVAN
 falling in line · reportage

against the state” and “disturb public

tranquillity.” His health deteriorated.
He died on 5 July 2021, one of the NIA’s
many undertrials who would never see
their case reach a fair judgment.
Vernon Gonsalves had been arrested
once before by the Maharashtra police.
In 2007, he was charged with being
a Maoist. When he secured bail in
that case, 16 others were foisted upon
him. All charges would eventually be
dropped after the police was unable
to furnish any evidence against him.
While in Mumbai’s Taloja jail after his
first arrest, Gonsalves was kept along-
side Farogh Iqbal Magdumi, falsely ac-
cused in the 2006 Malegaon case. The
two developed a fond friendship, with
Magdumi, a Unani practitioner, helping
Gonsalves with his medical ailments.
The cases of the two are a study in what
the NIA has become. One would be
charged by the NIA in a case with fab-
ricated evidence, while the other would
be exonerated by a very different NIA
that fought against the deep rot that
had become endemic in India’s investi-
gation agencies.
As the scope and impact of the NIA
grows, shaping right-wing narratives,
stunting the direction of regional pol-
itics and sharpening a crackdown on
dissent, so has the omertà around the
agency. Despite its track record increas-
ingly indicating the growing dysfunc-
tionalities in the professional conduct
of the agency, reports of this are rarer.
In its stead, the agency’s own narra-
tives gets amplified in the media. A sen-
ior national-security reporter told me
that the agency “has been very opaque.”
During my reporting, it was evident
that, even after their retirement, law-
yers and officers—as well as those ac-
cused by the agency—fear that criticism
would lead to dire consequences. This
fear of being under surveillance has in-
tensified after reports of Pegasus being
found on the phones of several lawyers,
activists and relatives of the accused
in NIA cases. “Silence is golden in the
agency,” a senior lawyer who had han-
samir jana / hindustan times

dled NIA cases told me while turning

down my request for an interview. Ad-
vising me “not to touch this topic,” the
lawyer said, “If we speak about this, we
are chased, and journalists who come
to speak to us are also chased.” s

JULY 2022 57
reportage

58 THE CARAVAN
 reportage

REPORTAGE / MUSIC

SAMRIDDHI SAKUNIA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TARA ANAND

Hindu Rashtra OST

The Hindutva pop singers fuelling a politics of hate

JULY 2022 59
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
during ram navami processions in
April this year, communal violence
broke out in several states across India.
In almost all cases, there was a similar
pattern. Hindu mobs entered Muslim
neighbourhoods, wielding swords and
sticks, shouting communal slogans and
playing loud music. They danced, wom-
en and children included, in front of
mosques as provocative songs, replete
with Islamophobic content, blared from
speakers. In most instances, this invar-
iably happened during the late after-
noon, when Muslims were performing
namaz or breaking their Ramzan fast.
Fights broke out between the
two communities, leading to arson,
60
stone-pelting and vandalism. Many
people suffered injuries, and there
were even reports of some deaths.
In Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and Madhya
Pradesh’s Khargone, men wearing
saffron scarves climbed mosques and
tried to plant Hindutva flags. Houses
were burnt down. Vehicles were ran-
sacked in Mumbai. In the aftermath of
the violence, state or local authorities
controlled by the Bhartiya Janata Party
sent in bulldozers to raze down homes.
They called it “anti-encroachment”
drives. These homes and shops be-
longed mostly to Muslims.
Our cultural memory is rife with
examples of religious processions
THE CARAVAN

preceding communal violence. The infamous Ram
opposite page: Rath Yatra led by Vishva Hindu Parishad and oth-
Kanhiya Mittal er affiliates of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid,
in 1992. The procession was fuelled by cries of
“Mandir vahin banayenge”—we will build the tem-
ple there. Conflagrations around rallies have been
a frequent feature even in the more recent past,
particularly around Ram Navami. But commen-
tators have noted that there was something dif-
ferent about the violence this time. A significant
catalyst for these violent activities were the songs
played from speakers in these rallies. Many vide-
os have surfaced from these processions showing
the charged atmosphere, the provocation clear in
the songs.
In Raichur, a city in Karnataka, the song “Ba-
nayenge Mandir”—We will build the temple—
played in front of the Osmania Masjid, while
people cheered and waved saffron flags. The
original music video of the song, by Tarun Sagar,
shows footage of the demolition of the Babri
Masjid. In Dada Jalalpur, a village near Roorkee,
in Uttarakhand, a procession marched through a
Muslim neighbourhood playing Kanhiya Mittal’s
“Jo Ram Ko Laye Hain, Hum Unko Layenge”—We
will bring to power those who have brought Ram.
This was followed by “Mullon Jao Pakistan”—
Mullahs, go to Pakistan—by Prem Krishnavanshi.
At a Ram Navami rally in Hyderabad, the BJP
legislator T Raja Singh sang “Jo Ram Ka Naam Na
Le, Usko Bharat Se Bhagana Hai”—Those who do
not take Ram’s name, we have to chase them out
of the country. In Delhi’s Jahangirpuri, boys and
young men holding swords and guns marched to
Laxmi Dubey’s repetitive chorus about Hindu
unity. In Rajasthan’s Karauli district, one could
hear Sandeep Chaturvedi’s “Topi Wala Bhi Sar
Jhuka Kar Jai Shri Ram Bolega”—Even those who
wear skullcaps will bow their head and say Jai
Shri Ram.
These songs are part of a cultural Hindutva
ecosystem that has emerged in the Modi era.
They belong to a genre that has loosely come to be
known as “Hindutva Pop” or “DJ Hindutva.” They
combine the traditional format of devotional songs
with electronic beats and autotune, resulting in
songs with poisonous, though catchy, refrains.
Songs of this new genre bring
together the greatest hits
of the BJP’s politics: hyper-
nationalism, war-mongering,
cow politics, Pakistan-baiting
and Islamophobia.
JULY 2022
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
Songs of this new genre bring together the great-
est hits of the BJP’s politics: hyper-nationalism,
war-mongering, cow politics, Pakistan-baiting and
Islamophobia.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Muslims
in the country find themselves cornered, subject
to perverse loyalty tests. Since Narendra Modi
was re-elected, in 2019, a series of measures have
edged Muslims closer to the precipice. This in-
cludes the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which
has created a foundational crisis for the country’s
minorities; the Ram Mandir judgment, in which
the Supreme Court allowed the construction of a
temple on the site of the demolished Babri Mas-
jid; and anti-conversion laws, which have been
used to target Christians and Muslims. “We are
warning that genocide could very well happen in
India,” Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide
Watch, said in January. An independent US body
recommended to the Biden government that India
be designated a “country of particular concern,”
given its tattered state of religious freedom. “The
government continued to systemize its ideological
vision of a Hindu state at both the national and
state levels through the use of both existing and
new laws and structural changes hostile to the
country’s religious minorities,” the report states.
It was released in the same month as the Ram Na-
vami violence.
When I visited Roorkee and Karauli in the after-
math of the violence, I found that most people who
took part in these rallies knew the songs by heart.
From young children to middle-aged men, they
could all rattle off the names of their favourite
songs and artists. These artists included Sandeep
Acharya, Laxmi Dubey, Prem Krishnavanshi and
Kanhiya Mittal, all of whom I had interviewed
before the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, earlier
this year, to understand their role in promoting
Hindutva politics. Ahead of the election—which
returned the militant Hindu monk Adityanath to
power—the use of these songs in campaign rallies
became very frequent. Many of these songs are
wildly popular and have millions of views on You-
Tube. They are played at temples, political rallies
and cultural functions.
Muslim residents I spoke to expressed their
discomfort about the lyrics. “Our issue is not with
the use of songs in rallies, but with the words used
in the songs,” Faiz, a resident of Roorkee, told me.
“I don’t understand why these songs haven’t been
censored.” Commentators from the Hindu Right
have tried to suggest the violence was instigated
by Muslims who threw stones at the processions.
“We accept that Muslims must have taken part
in the violence too, but the problem is the provo-
cation,” Abrar Ahmed, an activist from Karauli,
said. He reiterated that the lyrics were a problem.
61
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
“Above all, who are these people who make such
songs, songs against one community? What do
these singers even get from spreading hatred
against us?”
The Hindutva pop industry has a variety of
stakeholders trying to protect India from what
they call “terrorists,” “jihadis,” “Western culture”
and people trying to “destroy” Hinduism and its
Brahminical ethos. Its circulation is aided by the
BJP’s IT cell, which promotes many of these songs
on the party’s official channels. Many singers,
most of them upper caste, have personal connec-
tions with BJP leaders. I spent months trying to
understand the phenomenon and what motivates
these singers to write such songs. The patronage
of BJP leaders and their wide popularity among
young people, who use these songs as ringtones,
have ensured that this genre cannot be dismissed
as a subculture.
kanhiya mittal had a concert in Varanasi’s
Tridev Mandir on 13 February. He was running
late by two hours, and the crowd was growing
restless in anticipation. They jostled for space as
more and more people kept showing up. Outside,
the roads were congested with traffic. Big hoard-
ings displayed Mittal’s picture alongside that of
Ram. At around 10 pm, a ripple went through the
crowd as Mittal arrived. He was surrounded by
about fifteen people acting as security and walked
into a makeshift backstage area. He was wearing a
white kurta with a saffron scarf around his neck,
as well as a big golden locket, shiny enough to be
seen from a distance. “This is my attire for all the
shows,” he told me, as he pumped himself up be-
fore the event.
As Mittal stepped out into the middle of the au-
dience—there was no stage—he was greeted with
applause and cheers fit for a rockstar. He gazed at
the sea of faces and then turned towards a statue of
Shyam, a regional deity, behind him. He folded his
hands, which was the cue for his band to start. The
first few songs were devotional songs dedicated to
Shyam. Unlike the traditional bhajan, they were set
to pop beats. Mittal began swaying his head and
moving his body, and the crowd followed suit.
Mittal’s stage persona is captivating. He in-
tersperses his songs with commentary about
his relationship with god, keeping his audience
engaged. His message is not always spiritual. As
he prepared to sing “Jo Ram Ko Laye Hain, Hum
Unko Layenge”—his most famous song, with al-
most ten million views across his official YouTube
channels since being released in October 2021—he
spoke about the upcoming assembly election.
“When you vote on 7 March,” he told the audi-
ence, “keep in mind what government you want
for the next fifty years.”
62
The patronage of BJP leaders
and their wide popularity
among young people, who use
these songs as ringtones, have
ensured that this genre cannot
be dismissed as a subculture.
A rising Hindutva pop sensation, Mittal is
known as “Bhajan Samrat”—king of bhajans. He
has performed in various states, including all five
states where assembly elections were held this
year. “Jo Ram Ko Laye Hain” was played in several
BJP rallies. Mittal does not claim any direct affili-
ation with the political party, but his Twitter feed
is filled with pictures of him with BJP politicians,
such as the chief minister of Assam, Himanta
Biswa Sarma. He has collaborated on a song with
the Bhojpuri singer and actor Manoj Tiwari, a BJP
MP. The last stanza of his most famous song has
the refrain “Yogiji aye hain, Yogiji ayenge”—Adit-
yanath has come, Adityanath will come. He often
urged his followers to vote for Adityanath, claim-
ing in one pre-election tweet that the popularity of
“Jo Ram Ko Laye Hain” was an indicator that “Ba-
baji” would be re-elected. He even shared a clip of
Adityanath referring to his song.
The political messaging in Mittal’s concert was
deftly executed. He was careful to stick to his
forte: bhajans. Any endorsement of Adityanath
seemed almost incidental. “I don’t support any po-
litical party, but I’m for any party that stands for
my religion,” he told the audience. He reiterated
the same point when we spoke, four days later. “Jo
Ram Ko Laye Hain,” he said, “was sung to thank
the government for bringing us the Ram Mandir
and for Kashi”—referring to the BJP’s attempts to
replace Varanasi’s Gyanvapi Masjid with a tem-
ple. “Anyone who works for religion, no matter
what party it is, every Indian citizen should thank
them.”
Mittal grew up in a very religious family that
was not inclined towards music. He was never for-
mally trained. “I have been singing from the age of
seven and have learned it watching the great sing-
ers and priests of the country,” he told me. “It’s all
god-gifted.”
While the other Hindutva pop stars I inter-
viewed boasted about their connections with the
BJP and other right-wing political leaders, Mittal
downplayed his associations. There is a difference
between Mittal and other Hindutva pop stars.
While the others demonstrate open bigotry and
hate for Muslims in their songs, Mittal places
greater emphasis on his love for Hinduism. His opposite page:
Hindu supremacist views are more veiled. “There Sandeep Acharya
THE CARAVAN

is no need for those of us who adhere
to the Sanatan dharma to show our
Aadhaar cards,” he declared at the
Varanasi concert. “Our tikas will tell
you about our religion.” The underly-
ing assumption was that the country
belongs to Hindus, while others must
prove their citizenship. When I asked
him about this, he had a clear response:
“India is already a Hindutva country.”
sandeep acharya was about eight
years old when the Babri Masjid was
demolished. He had grown up in Ay-
odhya, in the politically charged at-
mosphere of the Ram Janmabhoomi
movement. “From childhood,” he told
JULY 2022
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
me, “I had been hearing, ‘Mandir vahin
banayenge, Ram Lalla hum ayenge”—the
temple will be built there; infant Ram,
we are coming. It seeped into his mu-
sic, which is blatantly Islamophobic.
Acharya is a member of the Hindu Yuva
Vahini, a militant organisation founded
by Adityanath and infamous for in-
stigating communal violence. When I
interviewed Acharya, he was with Ma-
hesh Mishra, the national convener of
the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
“The hatred was there even before
I started singing,” Acharya said. “I
remember my mother was sick and
wanted immediate blood for further
treatment. Even in that condition, when
63
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
the sole thing we were looking for was blood, she
stressed that it shouldn’t come from a Muslim.”
Acharya is known as the trendsetter in the Hin-
dutva pop genre. He emphasised that he had been
doing this before 2014, when “the national envi-
ronment changed.” Many devotional singers who
did not sing political songs earlier, he argued, have
seen a market for it and are seizing the opportu-
nity afforded under the Modi government. He de-
scribed Kanhiya Mittal as one such singer. “Mittal
used to sing Shyam kirtans only, but when he
started seeing songs like this being played, he sang
‘Jo Ram Ko Laye Hain,’ and that became a hit,” he
told me. Acharya thinks most of the new singers
do not go far enough. “If you notice, in a two-hour
set, the other singers use one or two political
songs in a mostly devotional repertoire,” he said.
“But, for me, if I had a show for two hours, I would
sing only my type of songs for the entire time: cow
slaughter, Ram Mandir construction, Krishna Jan-
mabhoomi, the lack of unity in Hindus.”
Acharya bemoaned his own late success despite
being ahead of the game. “I have been singing
for more than seven to eight years, but was able
to meet Adityanath only two months ago, with
difficulty,” he said, adding that the meeting was
arranged by Mrityunjay Kumar, the chief min-
ister’s media advisor, after Acharya released the
song “Gorakhpur Wale Baba”—The holy man from
Gorakhpur—referring to Adityanath’s power base.
Acharya grew up in a family with two other
siblings. His mother was fond of singing, and he
learnt music for six years. His career was enabled
by a technological shift, he said, pegging the start
of his journey to the rise of YouTube. He credited
Modi and the internet provider Reliance Jio for
creating the right conditions for musicians like
him to prosper. “Imagine how hard it would have
been to make, edit and publish albums within the
one-gigabyte data that we would have to save for
one whole month,” he said. The first thing he did
was to start a channel in his own name, to which
he uploaded songs on religion. This channel was
suspended by YouTube for violating its guidelines,
the first suspension of many. The most recent
channel he started, Rudra Music—named after his
son—was also suspended.
“It’s not hate speech, it’s the truth,” Acharya
said, “and the truth is bitter.” Since Muslims had
been “allowed” to stay in India after Partition, it
was right to expect them to “stay within their lim-
its,” he argued. “Is this hate speech? We were told
these people will stay with us, not that they will
dance over our heads after fifty years of Partition.”
His family did think he had crossed a line in
a song and were upset with him. The song ti-
tled “Bharat Mein Jo Deshdrohi Hain Unki Ma
Ka Bhosda” had an expletive in it. It was very
64
popular with young people, he said. “My family
scolded me. They said, ‘Till now Hindu–Muslim opposite page:
songs were what they were, but why are you using Prem Krishnavanshi
abuses?”
prem krishnavanshi was set for a career in com-
puter science engineering. Like Mittal, nobody in
his family had a background in music. His father
was a government servant. Krishnavanshi made
his father promise that he would support his musi-
cal career after he had completed his studies.
He met Sandeep Acharya in 2017. “He is my
guru,” Krishnavanshi said. “Under his guidance, I
started singing his songs, written by him.” Under
Acharya’s tutelage, Krishnavanshi’s songs became
more jingoistic. “People started calling me ‘Hindu-
wadi Singer,’ but it is very clear that in this entire
country there is only one famous and most popu-
lar Hinduwadi singer and he is Sandeep Acharya,”
he said. “Nobody is like him.”
Krishnavanshi said his first song for the BJP,
written by Acharya, was “Na Kamal Khilega, Na
Vote Milega”—The lotus will not bloom, nor will
you get votes. The song lays out the conditions
Modi must fulfil to earn votes and urges the BJP,
whose election symbol is the lotus, to keep its
promises. The opening lines are “Modiji Ayodhya
ao, mandir nirman karao”—Modiji, come to Ayo-
dhya and construct the mandir. The music video
features Krishnavanshi, wearing a saffron kurta,
singing and wagging his finger, interspersed with
images of Modi, Ram, BJP rallies and the destruc-
tion of the Babri Masjid. Krishnavanshi said it was
his first hit song, with over four million views.
“It was trending all over and, since then, I have
worked with different music companies: Wave Mu-
sic, Mayur Music, TF music.” He now has over sev-
enty thousand subscribers to his YouTube channel.
In his conversation with me, Krishnavanshi de-
nied having any hatred for Muslims, emphasising
that he had Muslim friends. But, when it came to
religion, he said, he would always side with the
Hindus. On 17 February, he uploaded a song titled
“Ek Din Wo Hijab Pehenaenge”—One day they
will make you wear a hijab. Referring to the recent
controversy over the Karnataka government ban-
ning hijabs in schools, the song warned Hindus
“It’s not hate speech, it’s the
truth,” Acharya said, “and the
truth is bitter.” Since Muslims
had been “allowed” to stay in
India after Partition, it was right
to expect them to “stay within
their limits,” he argued.
THE CARAVAN

about creeping Islamism: “Oh Hindus,
keep sleeping, they will make you per-
form namaz.”
Krishnavanshi boasted about cam-
paigning for the BJP during the Uttar
Pradesh assembly election. He had been
urging Hindus to vote for Adityanath
for about six months. His Twitter feed
was full of pro-BJP songs and Islamo-
phobic content. One of his most contro-
versial songs, “Mullon Jao Pakistan,”
was flagged by YouTube after The Quint
covered it in a video on Hindutva pop.
Krishnavanshi told me that the song
had over ten million views but, after he
spoke to The Quint, YouTube lowered
his channel’s reach and took down the
JULY 2022
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
video. “I still stand by my song,” he
said. “I didn’t utter any word that was
wrong. Pakistan became an Islamic
state, why can’t India become a Hindu
Rashtra?”
A few months before the elections,
Krishnavanshi told me, he and some
other singers received a call from some-
one connected to the chief minister’s
office. They were asked to compose
songs celebrating the chief minister.
Krishnavanshi said, subsequently, he
and other singers, including Acharya,
had a meeting with Mrityunjay Kumar.
The singers were felicitated and given a
book on Adityanath. On 28 September
2021, Krishnavanshi posted a photo of
65
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
him receiving the book from Kumar
on Facebook. The following day, he up-
loaded a song called “UP Mein Goonje
Do Hi Naam, BJP Aur Jai Shri Ram”—
Only two names echo in Uttar Pradesh,
BJP and Jai Shri Ram—while Acharya
soon produced a song called “Yogi Baba
Jaisa Koi Nahin”—There’s no one like
Yogi. Krishnavanshi said that he was
“asked to make a couple of songs, but
I work at my convenience. I will not
be restricted to one particular pattern
of music. I will write as I want to and
record whatever I feel is right.” But
when he does make songs for them, he
told me, he charged lower than his nor-
mal rates given the closeness of their
66
ideological positions. I reached out to
Kumar to find out about the patronage
he extends to Hindutva singers but re-
ceived no response.
Krishnavanshi said that his songs
are automatically picked up and pro-
moted on social media by the BJP’s IT
cell, which “is directly connected with
my YouTube profile.” On average, he
added, his songs reach more than fifty
thousand people a day, not counting
the organic views they get. His songs
are also shared on BJP pages that have
millions of followers. Once he started
making songs for Adityanath, Krishna-
vanshi said, his popularity soared, and
his phone started ringing off the hook.
THE CARAVAN

a significant amount of media attention has
opposite page: been reserved for Laxmi Dubey, not least because
Laxmi Dubey she stands out in a genre dominated by men. In her
videos, Dubey is featured wearing bright-coloured
turbans, a red tilak, dark lipstick and red, purple
or orange clothes, giving the impression of a fiery
religious preacher of the Radhe Maa variety. Her
songs are rousing and incendiary, frequently urg-
ing communal violence, and are often played in
political rallies. On the phone, however, she had a
quiet, calm voice. Echoing Acharya and Krishna-
vanshi, she kept referring to Partition and rhetori-
cally asked me, “If Pakistan can become a Muslim
Rashtra, why can’t Hindustan become a Hindu
Rashtra?”
Dubey and others of her ilk disregard the fact
that India chose not to become a theological na-
tion, so the comparison is erroneous. Instead, it
fuels their fear and loathing of Muslims. “Muslims
teach their kids to kill Hindus whom they consid-
er kafirs,” Dubey told me. “By doing so, they go
to heaven. Hindus need to be united. The youth
are quite active on this today. Nothing makes me
happier than seeing them all pumped up and en-
ergised.”
She had anecdotes of dangers posed by Muslims
ready at hand. “One of my younger sisters had a
friend who fell into the trap of a man who did love
jihad and married her,” she said. “He hid his true
identity, married and later murdered her. Such
incidents have shaken me to the core. This is when
I started working for Hindutva.” In several live
sessions on Facebook and other social media han-
dles, Dubey has criticised the idea of “secularism,”
often bullying those who support it.
Before she became a vengeful Hindutva pop
star, Dubey said, she had a career in journalism.
She refused to tell me which news outlet she had
worked for, citing security reasons, but said that
she had been drawn to the profession because of
her search for truth.
Dubey’s most famous song, “Har Ghar Bhagwa
Chhayega”—Every house will turn saffron—has
over sixty million views. She referred to it as
“the national devotional song.” Its lyrics include
“Bearing swords in our hands, we have come
with saffron flags” and “Those who wish to re-
Dubey and others of her
ilk disregard the fact that
India chose not to become
a theological nation, so the
comparison is erroneous.
Instead, it fuels their fear and
loathing of Muslims.
JULY 2022
hindu rashtra ost · reportage
main in India will have to say Vande Mataram.”
She told me that she often performs for the
BJP. “I was invited during the Chhattisgarh as-
sembly election and later for the Uttar Pradesh
elections. I get so many invites that I’ve had
to leave out a couple of states.” Her YouTube
channel has also faced multiple suspensions,
but the BJP’s IT cell has kept her songs in cir-
culation. “When my channel got suspended, the
central government came to my rescue,” she
said. “Ever since, my channel has been running
really well.”
Praveen Dubey, who said he oversees the BJP
IT cell in Ayodhya district, told me that songs
promoting aggressive nationalism and those that
are aligned with BJP’s Hindutva model get max-
imum play. He said that they ensure that such
songs are shared widely. “There are two things,”
he said. “Firstly, songs are an easy medium to
propagate the message that we want to. Second-
ly, songs generate energy like no other medium.
It helps pass on the message very easily.” I had
spoken to him before the Uttar Pradesh elections
and asked him what they were prioritising at the
time. “When it comes to the songs,” he said, “one
thing that is very clear between us is that we
need to pass on the message that Yogiji will win
the elections again.”
“The IT cell works in six layers,” Lovekush
Tiwari, the social-media in-charge for Ayodhya,
explained. “The first set of times when the con-
tent goes live is around 9 am, the next goes live
at 11 am, next at around 1 pm, then 4 pm, the
second last at 6 pm and the last set of content
that goes live at 8 pm. This is how we at the IT
cell group work.” He said that Acharya was the
Hindutva pop star of choice for him and many
other IT cell members, but “not from the front,
such as our leaders—as we are a political party,
we cannot afford to do that—but we do support
him from the backend via the party workers on-
ground.”
It is difficult to say how much of the popular-
ity of Hindutva pop is organic and how much of
it has been fuelled by the Hindu Right’s propa-
ganda machinery. However, that it has entered
firmly into our cultural fabric is unmistakable.
Music does many things for us. It appeals to
our sentiment, our emotions, uplifts our mood
or puts us in a state of melancholy. It can induce
calm or aggression. It can be a private joy as
well as a collective euphoria. But music har-
nessed by the ruling party, and based on violent
majoritarian sentiment, is a perverse cultural
expression of a grotesque politics. Most of
these singers are opposed to secularism, which
automatically puts them at odds with India’s
Constitution. s
67
PHOTO ESSAY / COMMUNITIES

PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY HARSHA PANDAV

The Widening Gulf
A personal reckoning with
permanence, temporariness
and spaces in between
from the writings of the explorer
Ibn Battuta to the tales of the One
Thousand and One Nights, references
to the Arab fondness for oudh have
persisted for centuries. Pungent yet
pleasing, the complex fragrance from
the agarwood tree permeates the
air with a sense of opulence. Used to
perfume everything from bodies and
garments to houses and palaces, oudh
has become undeniably synonymous
with the Arabian Gulf. Interesting-
ly, though, no agarwood-producing
species is known to grow anywhere
west of India. Deeply coveted within
Arab commerce for over a millenni-
um, oudh was always sourced from
South and Southeast Asia, its sillage
trailing long behind caravans on the
Silk Route and medieval ships on the
Indian Ocean.
An important entrepôt of mar-
itime trade, the Gulf historically
relied on pearling, which formed the
foundational basis for the cities of
Dubai and Abu Dhabi. By the early
twentieth century, fleets employing
over seventy thousand people would
remain at sea during the pearling
season, divers sometimes being paid
in pearls. South Asian merchants—
including my ancestors—established
themselves in the region for centuries
and eventually controlled the trade
as the chief financiers of the industry,
with Bombay emerging as the world’s
largest pearl market.
Although the natural pearl industry
eventually declined after the Great
Depression and the Second World
War, the discovery of oil provided
the most secure source of revenue
in establishing the region’s path to
urban development and industrial
expansion. By the mid 1970s, twelve
merchant houses—nearly all of
Persian, Pakistani or Indian ex-
traction—controlled import franchis-
es, constituting the commercial elite
in the United Arab Emirates, while
doctors and nurses in the region were
already overwhelmingly South Asian.
For example, in 1976, of two hundred
working physicians in Oman, only
twenty were Omani, most being Indi-
an or Pakistani.
These expat contributions in vital
sectors of the Gulf economy effective-
ly grounded the influx that occurred
post the oil boom of the 1970s. How-
ever, disproportionate studies on the
more recent South Asian migration
to the region have contributed to the
popular notion of this being a singu-
lar moment in history. There is a hier-
archy of factors to this occurrence.
While diaspora studies is an ex-
panding field in South Asian academia,
little attention is paid to the history
of merchant networks. This can be
attributed to the outbound move-
ments of early emigrants from South
Asia belonging more to the sphere of
“circulation” than “migration.” Unlike
European migrants heading to the
Americas to build a new life, most
South Asians, across class barriers,
left because they wanted to improve
their lives at home—a crucial point
often lost sight of. Reliance on colonial
archives limited studies to only the
processes of “formal” migration,
including indentured emigration,
regulated by the British colonial state,
while temporary migration actually
accounted for ninety percent of de-
partures from India between 1830 and
1950. Furthermore, it is well accepted
that there are few written records of
the cultural history of the UAE, the
country being instead reliant on the
oral tradition for its sources.
Another factor relevant here is the
lack of visual record-keeping around
South Asian life in the region. Indic-
ative of how the very act of photogra-
phy is political, socioeconomic factors
dictated access to film and camera
equipment for many, limiting their
ability to build personal archives of
life in the Gulf.
Coming to the descendants of these
early-migrant families, a lingering
preoccupation with survival in a
post-Partition and postcolonial India
becomes evident. Intergenerational
attempts to integrate within their
respective surroundings both inside
and outside of India leave little time
to be devoted to a search for one’s
roots. When spirited by a sense of
inquiry, it is usually driven by an
appetite for nostalgia rather than
historical curiosity.
Archives exist because some things
live within cracks and crevices of the
71
stories that survive over time, things that cannot
necessarily be articulated. This reconstruction,
hence, is necessarily personal and thus partial: far
too much has been irretrievably lost.
Westbound winds first brought my family to
the Trucial States—later known as the UAE—over
a century ago. Hailing from Karachi and That-
ta, their careers as the seafaring merchants of
Sindh saw them sailing away to distant lands with
pearls, spices, fragrance and textiles in tow, even-
tually establishing a presence widely across the
Gulf. When touched violently by Partition, those
who were already spending years at a time there,
such as my grandmother’s father and grandfa-
ther—both pearl traders, like my grandfather’s
father—decided to bring their families over and
base themselves more permanently in the region.
Decades later, born in Dubai, I still wonder where
I am from.

the cultural connections established between

Arabia and South Asia as a direct result of these
historical relations are more ubiquitous than one
might imagine. For example, mandi, a Khaleeji
staple, or the Yemeni and Kuwaiti versions of
machboos are modelled after biryani, from the
Indian subcontinent, exemplifying the region’s
historic dependence on trade for rice and spic-
es. Traditional Gulf food was simpler before the
introduction of South Asian imports such as dried
limes, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom and saffron.
The paratha evolved into a contemporary, nostal-
gia-inducing being called the Chips Oman sand-
wich—a paratha rolled with processed cheese,
hot sauce and Chips Oman crisps—a uniquely
Emirati amalgamation of Indian and American
influences. Chinese in origin, tea also travelled to
the UAE. Today, social gatherings planned around
a karak or a suleimani are standard protocol for
any self-respecting Dubai resident.
Karak—tea with generous helpings of
sugar, cardamom and evaporated Rain-
bow milk—has Indian and Pakistani
origins while suleimani—black tea
with mint and sugar—journeyed from
Kerala’s Malabar Coast. Older Emirati
citizens, once sailors and shopkeepers,
still speak the four languages of trade:
Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and Swahili. Some
words that crossed over into the every-
day vocabulary of the Emirati dialect
include seeda (to keep going straight),
darwaza (door or gate), banka (fan),
aloo (potato) and rubia or beza (money).
Bollywood, the first genre of cinema
introduced to the country, continues
to enjoy a legion of Emirati fans, with
programming subtitled or dubbed in
Arabic. Iranian, Pakistani and Indian
textiles and garments, as well as henna,
also quickly became integral to Emirati
wedding customs, developing their own
local aesthetics.
Culture evolves from the sense of
community born when roots are al-
lowed to grow deep, and ideas shared.
How could hosting a revolving door
of expats possibly compete? Seeking
stories from now-passed elders in my
extended community for this work, I
listened to tales of shared majlis, food,
language—a camaraderie in youth—be-
tween them and their Emirati coun-
terparts. However, as life sped up, and
class divides widened, this age-old
sense of allegiance between “local” and
“non-local” seemingly faded, like scent.
After Independence, Dada—my
grandfather Haridas Pandav—initially
moved to Bombay, where he would
soon marry my grandmother Laxmi.
Within a few years, however, subjected
to the sudden financial and emotional
shock of Partition and unable to rebuild
his career as an artisan in an India he
had not known before, he left for the
Trucial States in his early twenties to
join his father-in-law. He soon forged
his own path, working in maritime
logistics and later as one of the first
few employees of the National Bank
of Dubai. Having spent little youth
in the country of his nationality, he
acclimatised instead to the weather
and ways of the desert, only returning
to visit India once every five odd years.
My grandmother initially split her
time between Bombay and the Trucial
States, visiting with their children
when possible while also caring for his
ageing parents in India, before moving
to Dubai and Sharjah, where they lived
in houses made of coral and limestone.
Dada took great pride in sharing with
me what he discovered for himself in
this brand new city. He tried to teach
me Arabic and took me on after-school
walks every day through the old neigh-
bourhood. If I were to guess, I would
say the creek with its little wooden
abras—traditional ferries, now updated
to polished, contemporary versions—
and the ever-hungry fish was his favou-
rite spot in Dubai. As a child, I spent
many sunsets there with him, feeding
fish and pigeons and crows and mynahs
milky samoon—a type of bread—prob-
ably causing a lot of tiny belly upsets in
retrospect.
Grandma tells me stories about his
life there, one being about how, one day,
a colleague and he fell right off a heav-
ily loaded abra that capsized just as it
was leaving port, almost drowning be-
fore a kind Bedouin man quickly came
to their aid. With his head underwater
and an arm stretched overhead, Dada
had managed to hold up his accounts
ledger to “rescue” it. The incident did
not seem to persuade him to learn how
to swim nor could it pull him away
from his gravitation towards the old
waters for our evening walks.
when you are born in a place like this,
you do not have a straight answer to a
simple question like “Where are you
from?” Even as a child, a born-expat,
you live with the unspoken under-
standing that this is not your destiny or
destination; an impending decision is
waiting to be made. Friends, colleagues,
even family, are all transitory. An aver-
sion to attachment arises sometimes.
Monoculturists seem to find it diffi-
cult to comprehend that one’s very idea
of home could be transitory.
In a transient city, people move all
the time. The ground is forever, and
rapidly, changing. This is not the sort
of old city you can sink your feet into
and plant yourself emotionally in.
Because permanence is simply not
an option, you are constantly forging
new relationships more out of ne-
cessity than want. If you were part
of the millennial generation and saw
the infamous “boom,” relentlessly
discussed in pop culture, the city you
grew up in no longer exists. Watching
a whole city being born is a privilege
few can attest to witnessing, and it was
surreal while it lasted. It is only fair to
acknowledge the beauty in some of the
architecture that surrounds you here,
in spite of the urban planning drawing
the flak it does. However, when you
are an adolescent in a place that is also
growing with you, nothing prepares
you for the sort of loss you inherit with
it. Your childhood home is now a park-
ing lot. Your old neighbour’s mulberry
bushes are a manicured front lawn.
Your favourite spots in the school you
went to are now renovated into utili-
tarian spaces. Where the library with
the pretty window was is now a whole
new creek.
It is a most human tendency to seek
an anchor in the familiar during times
of uncertainty. Here, in so many ways,
this was simply not possible.
I spent a lot of time at this particu-
lar beach in Jumeirah. So much so, I
decided to sprinkle my pet’s ashes there
when she passed. One day, that beach
was suddenly closed for four to five long
years. It is now a sparkly waterfront
promenade, with only a slice of sand
left untouched. I have no idea where
my sacred spot is anymore. There is no
space for emotion in business.
Owing to Dubai’s global image as
a destination of a certain eccentric
sparkle, it is difficult to tease out
the necessary nuance in the sense of
privilege felt growing up there. As a
cis-het woman, I experienced the city
as a safe place to walk in at night, but
I was fortunate to live in a compara-
tively unproblematic neighbourhood.
Although my community was more
global—with friends from places as
distinct as Minsk, Nairobi, Kochi and
Basra—I did start working at the age of
18 to afford myself further access to the
adventure. A child’s life-world growing
up in this city, commonly experienced
as being sharply segregated econom-
ically and socially, shapes after their
family’s origin and economic situation,
and will translate as uniquely and sep-
arately as these. I did not understand
the systemics at play until my travels
outside offered perspective from a
bigger world.
Dubai being a truly 24/7, cosmo-
politan city, you are allowed to taste
wildly different cultures—just as long
as you can afford to access them, which
comes with many caveats that require
serious addressal. The geographical
organisation of the city makes this most
apparent. Residential zones are “visibly
organised” by people of either similar
nationalities, economic status or, some-
times, colour, while urban planning and
arbitrary laws regulate access to com-
mon spaces, leaving behind very few
places that truly allow a meld and lead-
ing me to reimagine the melting-pot
metaphor as something more akin to a
salad—everything exists together, but
neatly separated in a hermetic system
of organisation.
The one thing that unifies expat kids
across class, however, is the crippling
identity crisis that accompanies child-
hood here, a levelling sense of place-
lessness.
Even as they share the same scented
air, locals and non-locals are separated
by bureaucratic and cultural barriers,
creating invisible distances between
them. A language barrier, with many
expats only speaking a crude version of
Arabic, both exacerbates and is exacer-
bated by their limited interaction with
Emiratis, who make up only eleven per-
cent of Dubai’s population. Progressive
policies securing education, healthcare,
housing, employment and financial
well-being cover only Emiratis, while
you are permanently designated to—
and constantly reminded of—being an
expat in the only land you have known
as home, requiring a clean chit on your
biennial blood test to ensure renewal of
your visa.
What little job-security regulation
for non-locals exists on paper often
fails to materialise, as was seen during
the mass layoffs and resulting exo-
dus of expats during the COVID-19
pandemic. In May this year, a manda-
tory, flexible unemployment insurance
programme, meant to resemble a safety
net, was announced, requiring employ-
ees to pay into an insurance scheme
to qualify for sixty percent of their
salary for a limited time—the exact
period pending clarification—while
looking for re-employment. Scheduled
to be introduced in January 2023, the
implementation of the plan within its
challenges across class strata remains
to be seen. However, even with recent
amendments in related legislation, for
the large majority of the working pop-
ulation without the generous salaries,
decorated titles, investments in property, racial privilege
or access to generational wealth, residency remains inex-
tricably linked with employment status, and the possi-
bility of them—and their dependents, if present—being
asked to leave everything known to be familiar, at any
moment, looms large. You must comply to exist within
this delicate bubble through every aspect for a life here.
With complex socioeconomic factors at play, sometimes
little freedom of choice, many people do.
Retirement also presents a crucial turn. To continue life
in the UAE, expat retirees must obtain a five-year retire-
ment visa, by showing over 2 million dirhams in property
or 1 million dirhams in cash or an active monthly income
of at least twenty thousand dirhams whilst in retire-
ment—onerous financial benchmarks for most. All others
must leave for their country of citizenship, whether or not
they have lived there in years.
While some residents, who either have the privilege of
options or acknowledge themselves as migrants from the
start, accept their temporary status, the idea of leaving is
particularly painful for born-expats and others, like my
grandfather, who have, over decades in many cases, de-
veloped emotional relationships with a place where their
inputs were viewed only through a lens of transactional
unemotionality. At the age of 68, having no sustainable
options to retire there despite his four decades of service,
Dada left the UAE to start a new life in India, his country
of birth. Afflicted by dementia in his old age, sitting in bed
in the house he built with his remittances from the Gulf, he
imagined himself still in Dubai with us. He wrote me letters
and birthday cards as long as he could, before he slipped
away.
In a time that asked him to revel in the permanence of
his temporariness, Dada somehow built a world suspended
between sea and sky. Despite involuntarily-and-voluntari-
ly spending large sections of his life across colonial Sindh,
Dubai and postcolonial Mumbai, he always remembered his
way back home.

he is one of many put in the same situation every year.

With the world’s largest diaspora population, India relies
on remittances for three percent of its GDP. About half of this
comes from the Gulf, where the majority of the diaspora lives.
Most migrate alone, limited by family-reunification policies
based on income, and are further subject to informal housing
segregation, living in cramped bedshares or, if employed
in construction or similar labour, in neighbourhoods like
Sonapur, which houses almost two hundred thousand people,
some of them living fifteen to a room.
On one side, reminiscent of colonial-era oppressions, you
see certain labouring bodies worked to exhaustion, making
less in a lifetime than it would take to afford appropriate re-
course to protest their treatment, and on the other, an extor-
 Why didn’t the both of you come to Dubai then?
We couldn’t.

Why?

He didn’t have a visa then.. your grandfather..

My visa as well, was just a temporary (visit) situation for my visits..
My visa was canceled when I couldn’t make it back within the six months one time..
Earlier, you could keep your residence if you visited once every twelve months..
It was seven months since my last visit, then your father said the law had changed..
You had to travel there once every six months..
So I said I didn’t want the visa anymore.
You have to keep renewing my visa every few months for me and Dada wasn’t coming with me anyway..
I had his sister living at home to take care of him for months at a time..
The last time I went, I had my sister stay at home while I was gone for a month..
1PIL\W\ZI^MTJIKSQVÅN\MMVLIa[
I couldn’t just leave him alone in India for so long.

But why wouldn’t Dada travel then?

Dada said “I cannot go there anymore. I won’t go.”

Dada refused?

Completely refused. “I won’t travel there anymore.”

“It’s too stressful. The taxi’s, the commutes, going here and there, the planes, it’s too much trouble.”
“I won’t go anymore. I don’t want my visa.”
Two, three times, his sister came to stay here while I was away.. Months at a time..

But Dada missed the place.. he still wouldn’t go..?

Just towards the end, when he was hazy.. he would remember.. he’d talk about it then..
6W\W\PMZ_Q[M1\_I[IÅZUVWW\PMZ_Q[M

“I don’t have it in me anymore.”

“I won’t go anywhere anymore.”
“I’m sitting right here.”

One time, one of my last few trips there, I got my sister to stay with him here. It was Diwali then..
I would say to him, “Let’s both go..”.
“No.”.

Your father would say that he’d send for our visas, for us both to come.. He’d refuse.
He couldn’t anymore.
tionate excess, the unattainability of its
wealth paraded as a strength, altogether
presenting as an exceedingly dissocia-
tive state of being. It induces fantastical
landscapes, built for consumers, by the
consumed, directed by federal real-estate
interests here and “manpower” recruiting
firms there, while at the helm of both rest
people of the same skin. The identity of
the disposable worker is born, referred to
and defined wholly by their line of work,
ready to be replaced by the next, until the
robot revolution, old age or serious injury
negates their usefulness.
As mirrored in the protests over In-
dia’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act and
practices of withholding citizenship from
certain sections of domestic populations
in other places, migrant incorporation
is contentious because at stake is power
itself. Finding sustainable recourse in
bureaucracies of belonging, however, has
never been a more important conversation
to be had, since, as one migration scholar
put it, “There is nothing more permanent
than temporary foreign workers.”
After spending over three decades in
the UAE as a born-expat from India the
whole time, I have existed, in almost
every fathomable way, in the in-between
space of these two worlds—belonging to
both and neither, simultaneously. A visa
scare around my thirtieth birthday re-
minded me how easily my entire life could
be upended. A life of such transience had
me so used to leaving people and places
behind, that I had given up on the idea of
belonging to a group altogether, and the
unbelongingness had me exhausted. A
home should not make you feel like you
need to look for ways to stay in it. So, in
December 2020, I left.
Science around the subject says that,
of all the senses, smell has the strongest
link to parts of the brain that deal with
emotions and memory, the amygdala
and the hippocampus. Before you enter
a room, you become familiar with its
smell, not how it looks or feels. I am not
sure if this is rooted in science, or an
emotional attachment instead, but what
I miss most about Dubai is the way it
smelled—specifically, the scented wafts
of cold air that hit you on a hot summer’s
day when you enter what invariably, and
quite frustratingly, is a retail space. It is
a strange sort of trickery, because it gets
so hot most of the year that it is humanly
impossible to remain outside and there is
almost nowhere else to run to. I really do
miss that fragrance, though, the perfume
of deliciously smoky resins oozing with
body and soul, the sort of things the city
is frequently criticised not to have. Scent,
I feel, is the one place where Emirati
benevolence is lavishly abundant.
Sometimes, I perfume my hair with it.
Now we brought your grandfather home from the hospital..
.. and appointed three nurses.
One would come in the morning, one in the evening..
.. and one would come to sponge bathe him etc
Two months he was alright, recovering..
.. but the third month, he started really missing his children, he got hazy.
He would call out your name,
“Harsha!”
He would call out to your dad, your mother, everyone..
He’d say,
“Now we’re going to Dubai.”
I would agree with him.
He’d ask
“Have you packed a bag?”.
I’d always say yes.
Sitting on his bed, he would ask if he was on a plane..
The bed was railed on all four sides..
He’d grab on to the railings with both hands and ask,
“Are we on a plane?”
‘Yes, we are on a plane.’
He had to be oxygenated twenty four hours a day.
He couldn’t sleep at night, was awake all night those days..
All night, he would call out everyone’s names.
“We’re going to Dubai now?”. Yes, we are.
“Our home is near Al Madina”.
‘Yes, that’s where our home is.’
“We will go.”
This is all he spoke about towards the end, nothing else.
 illustration by shagnik chakraborty

88
BOOKS

THE CARAVAN
 books

Turning All History

to Flesh
A biography of Agha Shahid Ali
portrays the poet without paradox

in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell appeared to champion
something surprisingly un-Orwellian. You would think that the future au-
thor of Animal Farm and 1984—one of the twentieth century’s most raucous
moralisers, the writer who famously declared that “the opinion that art
should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”—would
dismiss a book like Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s lusty auto-fictional
journal about a group of idle Americans in Paris. Instead, he was taken in by
the novel’s “preoccupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief
side of life.” Years ago, the two writers had met in Paris, when Orwell had
stopped over on his way to join the civil war in Spain. Miller presented
Orwell with a corduroy jacket, but dismissed his political convictions. To
Miller, Orwell’s “ideas about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc,
etc, were all baloney.” For a writer to go to Spain in the 1930s and join a mili-
tia combating General Franco’s takeover of a democratic regime was, in his
view, not the best use of their talents.
In Miller’s political aloofness, Orwell could perceive a quieter assertion of
artistic temperament. Because “he is passive to experience,” he wrote, “Mill-
er is able to get nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive
writers. For the ordinary man is also passive.” The “more purposive writ-
ers”—and Orwell counted himself as one—were sometimes too overwhelmed
by what was happening in the world to be spontaneous on the printed page.
Miller and his kind—ensconced from reality, like Jonah in the Old Testament,
inside the whale’s belly—were in a better position to be artful, to imaginative-
ly portray how things were. Orwell may have ended the essay on a bleak note,
by predicting that no work of “major literature” would be produced until the
end of the Second World War, but only a guileless reader will conclude that
/ LITERATURE the piece is disdainful of politically committed artists. Miller is a straw man
for a somewhat basic argument: that a writer’s intentions, however lofty or
ABHRAJYOTI CHAKRABORTY noble, do not suffice by themselves in a novel or a poem. Orwell tips his hand

JULY 2022 89
turning all history to flesh · books
when he calls Miller “essentially a man
of one book.”
Sooner or later I should expect him to
descend into unintelligibility, or into
charlatanism: there are signs of both
in his later work … Like certain other
autobiographical novelists, he had it
in him to do just one thing perfectly,
and he did it. Considering what the
fiction of the nineteen-thirties has
been like, that is something.
Miller’s post-war reputation turned
out to be more or less as prophesied.
Scenes from his novels crumbled under
the searchlight of Sexual Politics, Kate
Millett’s withering study of misogyny
in male writers, and, these days, he is
remembered, if at all, as an ardent potty
mouth. But, beyond his logic of low ex-
pectations, Orwell seems to be getting
at something rarely acknowledged by
literary critics: that their judgements
are not impervious to the time period
in which they encounter a book. A writ-
er who seemed persuasive before might
later “descend into unintelligibility.”
Those who seem inside the whale today
might tomorrow seem outside.
orwell’s distinctions feel pertinent in
thinking about the poet Agha Shahid
Ali. Here is a writer who spent much of
his life committed to staying inside the
whale but came to seem, in the years
after his death, presciently outside. In-
dian millennials typically learned about
him in their school textbooks as the dy-
ing poet at the centre of Amitav Ghosh’s
essay “The Ghat of the Only World.”
It was entirely in keeping with the
glib ethos of pre-2014 India to expect
schoolchildren to read about a Kashmi-
ri poet before reading his poems. Every
novel that ever so briefly touched on
Kashmir would quote the same couple
of Ali’s lines as epigraphs. When words
failed an itinerant journalist in Srina-
gar, they could always fall back on the
title of one of Ali’s books, The Country
Without a Post Office.
Many laughed when, in 2016, Kanu-
muri Manikanta Karthik, an engineer
from Hyderabad, filed a right-to-infor-
mation query about the total number
of post offices in Kashmir, or when
Venkaiah Naidu, then a cabinet minis-
90
ter, spoke in parliament about a poster 1967. In an early poem, “Cracked Por-
inside the Jawaharlal Nehru University traits,” you meet a son scrolling through
campus: “The heading of the poster his hallowed family album and gradually
says: ‘A country without a post office.’ beginning to perceive himself as different.
Is India without post office?” But these
bad readings—or, rather, bad-faith read- I turn the pages,
ings—were in many ways the inevitable see my father holding a tennis racquet,
outcome of an education policy that ready to score with women,
prioritises knowledge over instincts at brilliance clinging to his shirt.
every step, the foreseeable denouement
of reading about a poet but skipping his He brings me closer to myself
poetry. In a country where Ali is studied as he quotes Lenin’s love of Beethoven,
mainly for his social and political rel- but loses me as he turns to Gandhi.
evance, could you fault an engineer for
interpreting a line too literally? This was no doubt Ali’s first bolt of
Reading Ali, you discover someone lightning: the realisation that art ap-
more elusive, a disposition more in line pealed to his imagination more than
with the critic Randall Jarrell’s idea any political precept. Beethoven would
of a “good” poet: someone “who man- forever matter more to him than Gan-
ages, in a lifetime of standing out in dhi. When he looked at his family of
thunderstorms, to be struck by light- luminaries through a poet’s eyes, he saw
ning five or six times.” The weather of his father “ready to score with women.”
Ali’s childhood may have been far from In “The Sound of Silence,” his activist
inclement—his father, Agha Ashraf grandmother is portrayed as a troubled
Ali, taught at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Is- wife, forced to step out on cold nights to
lamia and was, in 1952, appointed by bring home her hashish-smoking hus-
the Sheikh Abdullah government as a band. A lost heirloom sari, in “The Dacca
school inspector in Kashmir—but the Gauzes,” is redolent of something more
mood of the post-Partition years was tragic: “the hands/ of weavers … ampu-
politically purposive. There was the
pre-independence Progressive Writers’
Association, founded on the belief that
Indian literature should reckon with
“the basic problems … of hunger and
poverty, social backwardness, and po-
litical subjection,” spearheaded by the
likes of Munshi Premchand, Mulk Raj
Anand, Ahmed Ali and Ismat Chughtai.
Growing up as the second of four
children in Delhi and Srinagar—with
a year-long stint in London, where his
parents completed teaching diplomas—
Ali was too young to join the progres-
sive movement, but their influence
would have trickled through his father,
a socialist who “mouthed Freud and
Marx/ something about recognizing
necessity,” as well as his mother, Sufia
Agha, a convent-educated Sunni wom-
an who “had long since discarded the
veil” and loved quoting Begum Akhtar.
Ali’s ancestors were all public figures.
His great-grandfather was a courtier
during the reign of the Dogra ruler
Pratap Singh. His grandmother was
a popular activist and legislator. His
father was mentored by Zakir Husain,
who later became India’s president in
THE CARAVAN
 turning all history to flesh · books

tated,/ the looms of Bengal silenced.” The turn

away from public-mindedness was radical in a
post-imperial milieu where so many subcontinen-
tal writers had wilfully conscripted themselves to
the nation-building project. Here was a poet, com-
ing from a long line of upper-class leaders and edu-
cationists, clinging to a private vision, a Wildean
aesthete spilling family secrets in free verse.
Ghosh may have been honouring a deceased
friend when he called Ali “the closest Kashmir
had to a national poet,” but his essay effectively
froze a writer into a literary monolith. For a gen-
eration yet to encounter Ali’s work, he became a
poet you ought to read, someone who had written
prophetically about loss and suffering in the val-
ley. But this does not quite capture the experience
of reading Ali, at least in Bone Sculpture and The
Half-Inch Himalayas, his first two major collec-
tions of poems. You are swept away by a dabbling,
exuberant voice, with a propensity for what the
American poet James Merrill—later a friend and
mentor to Ali—once referred to as “entertaining
surfaces”: a weakness for rhymes, allusions, even
wisecracks; a delight in rich, fantastical meta-
phors; and a willingness to reconfigure landmark Orwell’s distinctions feel pertinent in
public events in breezily personal terms. In those
early poems, you do not come across people, but thinking about the poet Agha Shahid Ali.
presences or, more frequently, lingering absenc- Here is a writer who spent much of his life
es—“a tired eunuch/ aware only of an absence,” Ali
imagines a future version of himself in “A Mon- committed to staying inside the whale but
soon Note on Old Age.” History is not a burden to came to seem, in the years after his death,
this young Kashmiri voice; it is an inheritance,
yes, but also an occasion for literary experiment. presciently outside.
His images feel decadent, sometimes when the
larger theme is sober. (Notice how the lush “looms Each time I read these lines, I think of some-
of Bengal” is worked into a melancholic lament.) thing Ali once said in an interview. “Shahid’s
Both past and present seem replete, in Ali’s ren- environment,” he declared pompously, “is: Screw
dering, with imaginative possibilities. This is from and let’s screw.” The younger Ali’s characteristic
“After Seeing Kozintsev’s King Lear in Delhi”: mood, by turns operatic and unabashed, is at odds
with the popular conception of him as a narrowly
I step out into Chandni Chowk, a street once political poet. Glancing at old family photographs,
strewn with jasmine flowers or dreaming up the lost glories of Chandni
for the Empress and the royal women Chowk, he can be messy and playful while not be-
who bought perfumes from Isfahan, ing slight. The early poems have the same refresh-
fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul, ing disdain for polemic that Orwell approved of in
glass bangles from Agra. Tropic of Cancer. Ali was, in his own way, preoc-
cupied with the “dirty-handkerchief side of life.”
Beggars now live here in tombs
of unknown nobles and forgotten saints ali had his own fantasies of being perceived out-
while hawkers sell combs and mirrors side the whale. He claimed to be in “exile” in the
outside a Sikh temple. Across the street, United States, though he had lived there off and
a theater is showing a Bombay spectacular. on since he was twelve, when his father enrolled
in a graduate course and moved the family for four
Elsewhere, there is the suggestion that the lega- years to Muncie, Indiana—“expatriate” did not
cy of the Partition need not be definitive. sound romantic, “immigrant” was too assuredly
American.
My friend and I are rather simple: Ali returned in the mid-1970s as a PhD stu-
We never saw the continent divide. dent at Penn State (his thesis was on TS Eliot),

JULY 2022 91
turning all history to flesh · books

followed it up with a Master’s in Fine Arts from

the University of Arizona, and then spent the
rest of his adult life teaching creative writing
around the country, visiting his parents in Sri-
nagar and Delhi during the summer holidays.
His life, in some ways, prefigured the twenty-
first-century careers of many subcontinental
novelists settled abroad for decades now, those
who make the annual trip back home to look for
new material or promote their latest book, but
pretend to have never left in the first place. The
literary critic James Wood calls this phenom-
enon “homelooseness,” the entitlement with
which today’s jet-setting expats can inhabit “a
structure of departure and return that may not
end.” But it was Ali who wrote the poster poem
for homelooseness, “Postcard from Kashmir,”
years before globalisation and the end of the
Cold War made many borders porous for those
who could afford to cross them.

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,

my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold

the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.
This is home. And this is the closest
I’ll ever be to home. When I return,
the colors won’t be so brilliant,
the Jhelum’s waters so clean,
so ultramarine. My love
so overexposed.
It is not rare to find in a poet a simultaneous
yearning and wariness about home. But “neat-
ness” and “overexposed” also point to a fear of
exaggeration: “I overexpose/ your photograph,”
as the old man in “A Monsoon Note on Old Age”
chides his younger self. Ali seems sceptical here
about the untrammelled nostalgia that postcolo-
nial scholars would later emphasise in his poetry,
those shopworn references to exile, loss and
longing.
Some years ago, while subbing a freshman class
on literature at the University of Iowa, I was sur-
prised to find “Postcard from Kashmir” on the
syllabus. My students, most of them middle-class
and American, read the poem as a caveat on the
perils of leaving home. The word “Kashmir” did
not convey any unusual political or exotic charge.
Ali might as well have been talking about their
respective hometowns, somewhere in the Mid-
west, where they went back for Thanksgiving.
Indeed, when they glanced out of their classroom
windows, they saw a landscape not too different
from Ali’s images of Kashmir: the spotless Iowa
River, the suburban houses with their mailboxes
Reading Ali, at least in Bone Sculpture and The
Half-Inch Himalayas, you are swept away by a
dabbling, exuberant voice, with a propensity
for what the American poet James Merrill—
later a friend and mentor to Ali—once referred
to as “entertaining surfaces.”
far away, patches of sunlight making the snow eve-
rywhere seem even more pristine. Looking out of
the English–Philosophy Building in the mornings,
it was easy to imagine the campus being cut off
from the rest of the world.
To read Ali in Iowa was to rediscover him
as a curiously American poet. His alienation
seemed apiece with his “language games” and
love of surfaces. His anxiety about returning
to Kashmir now seemed like ambivalence. In
“Survivor,” Ali fears that someone else has
been living in his house, someone else who
shares his name and talks to his mother on the
phone in his voice. “He is breathless to tell her
tales,” Ali writes, “in which I was never found.”
In “The Previous Occupant,” a new landlady
fills him in on the outgoing tenant, and Ali is
haunted again by a spirit.
Now that he’s found me,
My body casts his shadow everywhere.
He’ll never, never move out of here.

92 THE CARAVAN

There is a sense in both poems of
other lives beginning to appear more
real than Ali’s own messy, migratory
self. But the metaphors are too neat:
a doppelganger, a ghost. They do not
quite fit in with the story of a man liv-
ing in a country where he partly grew
up. In order to accept Ali’s assertion of
self-estrangement, one must also ac-
knowledge the ersatz melodrama of his
pose. After all, a picture postcard can
eclipse your memory only within the
margins of a printed page. Ali’s poems
ultimately impress because of their
self-consciously literary indulgence.
Just as Miller turned away from the
clamour of the 1930s and withdrew into
a corner of Montparnasse to write his
novels, Ali chose a life of self-exile in
American university towns, obsessing
more over the logic of his lines instead
of that of the wider world. Zipping along
Route 80 in Ohio, he passed the exit to
Calcutta—a town in Columbiana Coun-
ty—and worried more about the “temp-
tation to write a poem.” Coming across a
reference to cashmere wool in an Emily
Dickinson poem, he added a few words
to his legendary rhyming dictionary:
“Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qash-
mir …” Many of the poems in A Nostal-
gist’s Map of America are set in Arizona,
where Ali is again attuned to absences—
the vanished Native American tribes,
the miles of endless desert. In “Leaving
Sonora,” he writes, “The desert insists,
always: Be faithful,/ even to those who
no longer exist.” Years ago, Ali would
distract himself with thoughts of
Mughal grandeur while walking past
a crowd in Chandni Chowk. Now he
heard faint echoes in the quiet expanses
of New Mexico, echoes that were “turn-
ing all history to flesh.”
By the time Ali came to write The
Country Without a Post Office, he had
perfected the art of listening from a
distance. Thanks to the hysteria of Hin-
du nationalists, the book now occupies
a contraband status in the mainstream
Indian imagination. But even Ali’s
liberal defenders miss the point that
these poems on curfewed nights and
“homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers”
were not conceived as eyewitness ac-
counts. They emerged from Ali’s efforts
to reconcile the tranquil mountains
of his childhood with desolate letters
from friends and parents. The book’s
antecedents are resoundingly literary.
“The Blesséd Word: A Prologue,” for
instance, is a poem about a poem. Ali
begins by riffing on the translated ver-
sion of a few lines by the Russian poet
Osip Mandelstam.
He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar),
an imaginary homeland, filling it,
closing it, shutting himself (myself)
in it. For there is the blesséd word
with no meaning, there are flowers
that will never die, roses that will
never fall, a night in which Mandel-
stam is not afraid and needs no pass.
The blesséd women are still singing.
It is impossible not to be moved by
the modernist underpinnings of this
passage. Amid dire reports of exoduses
and military crackdowns, Ali was hold-
ing on to the city he remembered in his
head. The image of the singing women
also reminds me that, characteristically
for an artist, Ali never quite made up
his mind about the political future of
Kashmir. In his essay, Ghosh records
a conversation in which Ali began by
advocating for autonomy within the
Indian state but later qualified his
support “because so many other com-
plications had entered the situation
that it was almost impossible to think
of a solution.” After the turbulence of
the 1990s, Ali could no longer think of
home as an overexposed photograph in
his mailbox. His vision was now closer
to something the poet WS Merwin once
wrote in his journal: “Home is a place
that does not exist, about which your
opinions are irrelevant.”
at one point in Philosophical Frag-
ments, Søren Kierkegaard claims that
the “thinker without paradox is like a
lover without feeling: a paltry mediocri-
ty.” Manan Kapoor’s A Map of Longings,
touted as the “first definitive biography”
of Ali, presents its subject as entirely
without paradox, shaped only by visible
currents. At just over a hundred and
fifty pages, the book does not even begin
to cohere into a point of view. Kapoor
is interested not so much in Ali’s life or
work but in a hazy idea of the poetic.
Everywhere that Ali went—Arizona,
Indiana, New Mexico—apparently left a
JULY 2022
turning all history to flesh · books
“profound” impact on him. Anyone that
he wrote a poem or an article about—the
poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the Hindu deity
Krishna—was, of course, “important” to
him. A poet so thoroughly consumed by
his specific tastes is portrayed as some-
one dull and indiscriminate, as a lover
without passion.
Much like a parent forbidding any
sex talk on the dinner table, Kapoor
writes in the introduction that he is not
interested in Ali’s “private life” because
it does not “lead the reader back to his
poetry.” How would Kapoor know? It
seems reasonable to assume that every
aspect of a poet’s life would show up on
the page in some way and, if any sug-
gestion of Ali’s crushes and boyfriends
is so beyond the pale, why call the book
a biography? We know far too little
about being gay, brown and Muslim
in the 1970s and 1980s—both in India
and the United States—and Kapoor’s
decision to ignore Ali’s queerness is an
obvious missed opportunity. Ali once
disclosed in an interview that he grew
“as a lover” after enrolling in Penn
State. Kapoor takes it to mean that he
had “no anxiety” about being gay. If
that were true, why did Ali not come
out to his family until his late thirties?
It is one thing for Ali to fret about being
perceived as a “gay poet,” quite another
for a biographer to not notice when Ali
addresses his “beloved” repeatedly in
ghazals. Or this, from “Dear Shahid,”
in which a friend writes to him about
returning to Kashmir:
Will you come soon? Waiting for
you is like waiting for spring. We are
waiting for the almond blossoms.
And, if God wills, O! those days of
peace when we all were in love and
the rain was in our hands wherever
we went.
Ali painted a rosy picture of his early
life in public—supportive parents,
unconflicted adolescence, the fam-
ily house in Kashmir replete with the
“possibilities of self-expression”—and
Kapoor lacks the nerve to probe deeper
for cracks. The young Ali was appar-
ently one of those privileged subcon-
tinental first boys, writing his first
poem—on Jesus Christ—at the age of
ten, rendezvousing with Jawaharlal
93
turning all history to flesh · books
Nehru and Zakir Husain before turning
twenty. A reader might wonder about
the wound—or rather, necessity—that
would drive someone so precocious
and well-connected to a career in po-
etry. The senior Ali approved of the
son’s poems, presumably because they
were seldom risqué. Kapoor insists that
Ashraf’s “value systems,” a liberal belief
in equality and freedom, are “present
in Shahid’s poems.” This has the effect,
among other things, of making Ali seem
like a dreary deferential figure. Kapoor
is perceptive about Ashraf’s career in
Delhi and Srinagar, but when he turns
to his subject you cannot help feeling
that he is on shaky ground.
Ali was plausibly guarded about his
secrets and insecurities, but how does it
not even occur to a biographer to poke
around? Kapoor writes that he was re-
fused a US visa once during the Trump
years, because of which he could not
access Ali’s personal papers at Hamilton
College in New York. Could he not have
waited and tried again? The literary
scholar Langdon Hammer delved into
James Merrill’s life for at least a decade
before publishing an eight-hundred-page
tome in 2015. The writer Robert A Caro
has been researching a multivolume
biography of the former US president
Lyndon B Johnson for over fifty years.
Does Ali’s life not merit similar patience
and diligence? A Map Of Longings reads
like a patchwork of random notes sewn
together in haste—notes, as it were, on a
longer, more intimate biography.
Kapoor appears overawed by the
idea of a poet “relentlessly writing” on
his desk or chatting away on literature
with fellow writers and thinkers. He
quotes mostly from Ali’s interviews to
literary magazines—interviews that,
lest we forget, are sometimes edited for
years in manuscript—and paraphrases
sedate testimonials from Ali’s father and
siblings, those who can be expected to
know only so much about the writing
life. When other writers do get quoted, it
is usually an essay they might have writ-
ten after Ali’s death or excerpts from
a careful email correspondence with
Kapoor. Kapoor’s allegiance, you soon
discover, is to his interviewees, to incor-
porating their decorous remarks, and
only partially to the book. The details
do not clarify much; they have not been
94
worked into a compelling story. There is
no effort to convey Ali’s anxieties, fears,
ambitions, regrets—and even circum-
stances, except in the broadest sense.
Kapoor often fails to keep track of the
chronology of Ali’s poems. The tragedy
of this short biography is that it falters
even as a Wikipedia entry.
The wonky research might have been
forgivable if Kapoor were insightful
about the poems. Midway through the
book, he suggests that The Half-Inch
Himalayas, together with Salman Rush-
die’s Midnight’s Children, proved that
English is a South Asian language, that
Ali’s background in “Hindu, Muslim
and Western cultures”—something Ali
had again said in an interview—sup-
posedly found fullest expression in
English. But the tradition of subconti-
nental writing in English goes back to
The Travels of Dean Mahomet, which
was published in 1794, and a concur-
rent exposure to Hindu, Muslim and
Western cultures is something that can
be said about anyone with roots in the
region. Ali’s remark seems to have been
intended to distinguish himself in the
US poetry scene, to slightly exoticise
himself away from home. In India, the
avowal of religious influence marks
him out as different from the subtler
and more cosmopolitan Bombay poets.
Ali, with his affinity for old Hindi films
and extravagant ghazals, was worlds
apart from someone like Nissim Ezekiel
or Adil Jussawalla, who dabbled as art
critics, or Arun Kolatkar, who wrote
an entire sequence of poems about a
trip to a Hindu pilgrimage town but
would have shied away from claiming
a background in “Hindu culture.” Ali’s
poems evince an apprehension about
belonging that is absent in the Bombay
poets. Think of those famous lines from
Ezekiel’s “In India”: “I ride my elephant
of thought,/ A Cezanne slung around
my neck.” Ali would have worried that
talking of Cezanne in Bombay might
imply the speaker is an outsider.
Kapoor thinks that Ali’s poems never
express a “spontaneous rush of emo-
tions,” but his best lines, despite their
technical veneer, are actually all spon-
taneity. There are the puckish rhymes,
the petulant awareness of things re-
membered, the flashbacks of memory
sometimes bursting through mid-
THE CARAVAN
stanza to guide a long poem to a glori-
ous resolution. “Snow In The Desert”
begins, for instance, with the speaker
driving his sister to the Tucson airport
early one morning. They drive past the
giant cacti along the sides of the road,
past the desert that looks “whitened
out, as if by cocaine” after a night of
snow. The sun appears to be “hurting
each cactus into memory”—the memo-
ries of the indigenous Papagos “vulner-
able to massacre,” prehistoric intima-
tions of the land once buried under a
sea. On the way back from the airport,
triggered by his surroundings, Ali, too,
is electrifyingly hurt into memory. You
realise that, while driving around the
bends, Ali has been burrowing deeper
into himself. The moment arrives in the
poem as a revelation.
In New Delhi one night
as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights
went out.
It was perhaps during the Bangla-
desh War,
perhaps there were sirens,
air-raid warnings.
But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she
went on
singing, and her voice
was coming from far
away, as if she had already died.
And just before the lights did flood
her
again, melting the frost
of her diamond
into rays, it was, like this turning
dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can be heard
Ali once said of a line in a student’s
poem that it “should be put against a
wall and shot.” One can imagine him
wincing on reading in a book that
his beloved Faiz was a “poet of world
stature” or that his own poems were
“a manifestation of his past experi-
ences.” That Kapoor lacks a discerning

ear—and a stern editor—is evident from his habit
of padding up a paragraph by repeating himself.
He begins one section, for example, by stating that
“nostalgia was all [Ali] found” in Tucson only to
reiterate a couple of sentences later that, “in the
poems written in Tucson, Shahid explores history,
myth and injustice with a subliminal nostalgia.”
Moments after learning that “at times it was simply
humour that drove” Ali, you learn again that “nat-
urally, humour found its way into his poetry.” Ali
reportedly “confessed” somewhere that he never
worried about rejections. Even if you believe Ali,
does that count as a confession? Pleonasms stalk
the reader on almost every page. There are the
gnomic allusions to “poetic pursuits,” “poetic con-
cerns and themes” and “poetic sensibilities,” just in
case you forget you are reading about a poet. And
what do the following sentences actually describe?
He took language very seriously and was so at-
tuned to the aesthetics of language that he had
A Map of Longings, touted as the “first
definitive biography” of Ali, presents its
subject without paradox, shaped only by
visible currents.
JULY 2022
turning all history to flesh · books
an emotional response to each word uttered
in his presence. As a poet, he was attentive to
each question or comment, which he could turn
around with his wordplay.
After years of writing in free verse, Ali rein-
vented himself in his last decade as a connois-
seur of other forms. He introduced the rhyming
ghazal to English—many American poets mistook
the ghazal earlier for a series of unconstrained
couplets. He shaped his elegies into canzones,
medieval Italian ballads that are notoriously
difficult to write; where most poets attempted
one canzone throughout their careers, Ali wrote
three. According to his close friend Christopher
Merrill, Ali also planned to write a novel about a
Saleem Sinai-like Kashmiri protagonist, whose
life “would intersect at decisive moments with
the history of his homeland.” This is the Ali you
encounter in his friends’ loving obituaries: the
gregarious, grandiloquent bard regaling his audi-
ences during readings; the professor who cooked
rogan josh for his students at dinner parties; the
son who did not want to get over his mother’s
death (“I swear, here and now, not to forgive the
universe/ that would let me get used to a uni-
verse/ without you.”); then, a few years later, the
patient diagnosed with the same brain cancer as
his mother, miraculously able to recite Milton’s
“Lycidas” despite losing much of his vision and
memory. After the final diagnosis, Ali told Ghosh
that he wanted to “die in Kashmir” but, in the
end, he was buried in a cemetery not far from
Emily Dickinson’s house in Northampton, Mas-
sachusetts.
His middle period, however, remains relatively
shrouded from view. What was he like as a less
purposive poet, when he was happy writing in
free verse, when he was yet to identify himself,
as Orwell noted about Miller, “with the histori-
cal process”? In 2011, the poet Akhil Katyal put
together an oral history of Ali’s Delhi years on
the blog Kafila. I remember finding out years
ago, from an article by the novelist Ranbir Singh
Sidhu, that Ali once had a job in Tucson that re-
quired him to come up with new street names
for the city. The information seemed weirdly
apposite to the man who paired up “cashmere”
and “Kashmir.” Last November, Scroll published
a personal essay by Padmini Mongia, who knew
Ali as a graduate student at Penn State. Mongia
provides a rare glimpse into the private life: Ali’s
uncertainty about coming out to those who knew
his family back home, the joys and torments of
a gay man discovering himself on the brink of
the AIDS crisis. The essay connects more dots in
three thousand words than Kapoor’s disappoint-
ing biography. s
95
THE BOOKSHELF

WRITER, REBEL, IN THE NAME

SOLDIER, LOVER OF THE LORD
THE MANY LIVES A NUN’S TELL-ALL
OF AGYEYA
Sister Lucy Kalapura
Akshaya Mukul Translated by
Nandakumar K

This extensive biography of the writer Sachchidanand Hi-
rananda Vatsyayan—also known as Agyeya—unravels his
“double life” and many myths surrounding impressions of
him as a stoic and austere writer. It unearths personal pa-
pers, letters, archival documents and records from his time
in prison, exploring his relationships, ideological beliefs and
literary legacy.
First published in Malayalam as Karthavinte Namathil, this
book puts forward an account of corruption, assault cases
and pervasive sexual harassment in the Church, while also
contemplating questions such as the imposition of celibacy,
the position of women and dissent within the institution.

penguin random house, S999, 808 pages harper collins, S399, 240 pages

HOW I BECAME A COUNTRY

A WRITER CALLED
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHILDHOOD
OF A DALIT A MEMOIR

Manoranjan Byapari Deepti Naval

Translated by
Arunima Chanda

A translation of the second volume of Manoranjan Byapari’s
Itibritte Chandal Jivan, this book recounts the author’s life in
Kolkata, his insights on caste, literature, identity and politics,
his interest in writing, the critical acclaim of his works and
more.
The actor, director and painter Deepti Naval recalls her
childhood growing up in Amritsar in the 1960s, recounting
anecdotes and stories from her family as well as her memo-
ries of political turmoil and India’s war with Pakistan in 1965.

sage samya select, S650, 376 pages aleph book company, S999, 388 pages

96 THE CARAVAN
 THE BOOKSHELF

THE WEIRD WORLDS WOVEN

WOMEN’S CLUB TOGETHER
ESSAYS ON POETRY
Aruna Nambiar AND POETICS

Vidyan Ravintharan

A novel about love, loss and hope that follows three charac-
ters, Hema, Avanti and Jeroo, as their lives turn upside down
and they grapple with grief, infertility and despair and even-
tually find solace in friendship.
A book of literary criticism that examines the work of a range
of poets including Mir Taqi Mir, Czeslaw Milosz, AK Ramanu-
jan and Vahni Capildeo in essays that produce close readings of
literary form, cultural connections, politics and the historical
moments in which the poets wrote.

speaking tiger, S499, 272 pages columbia university press, $29.99, 296 pages

DADAMONI WHERE THE

THE LIFE AND TIMES COBBLED PATH
OF ASHOK KUMAR LEADS 
Nabendu Ghosh Avinuo Kire

A biography that traces Ashok Kumar’s early life and journey
into the world of Hindi cinema, as he shunned law to become
a lab assistant with Bombay Talkies before he was cast in
films that became blockbusters. In following the various
phases of his career, it also explores the early decades of Hin-
di cinema.
A fantasy novel that engages heavily with Naga folklore, this
book follows an 11-year-old, Vime, struggling with grief in
the wake of her mother’s death. Her adventures begin as she
goes down a cobbled footpath, comes across forest spirits and
finds her way into the spirit world.

speaking tiger, S499, 232 pages hamish hamilton india, S499, 184 pages

JULY 2022 97
Editor’s Pick
bettmann / getty images
on 2 july 1964, after signing into law
the Civil Rights Act, the US president
Lyndon B Johnson shakes hands with
the activist Martin Luther King Jr. The
comprehensive legislation—the widest
expansion of civil liberties in nearly
a century—prohibited, among other
things, unequal voting laws, racial
segregation and employment discrim-
ination.
The end of the Civil War, in 1865,
was followed by the passage of several
anti-discrimination laws and constitu-
tional amendments, as radical Republi-
cans won state elections throughout the
former Confederacy and took control
of the US Congress. However, during
the disputed presidential election of
1876, the two national parties agreed
98
upon a compromise that included the
withdrawal of all remaining federal
troops in the southern states. Since
these soldiers had been crucial to
protecting African Americans from
political violence, their withdrawal
allowed Democrats to return to power
throughout the South and enact a series
of segregationist measures.
As millions of African Americans left
the South and, following the enactment
of the New Deal in the 1930s, began
supporting the Democratic Party, the
administrations of Franklin D Roos-
evelt and Harry S Truman passed some
integrationist measures. Then, in 1954,
after decades of fighting segregation
in the courts, the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People
THE CARAVAN
secured a landmark victory in Brown v
Board of Education. Over the next few
years, the civil-rights movement organ-
ised non-violent protests throughout
the country, culminating in the 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom.
The John F Kennedy administration
introduced civil-rights legislation in the
House of Representatives on 19 June
1963. Segregationist Democrats held
up the bill in committee, but, following
Kennedy’s assassination that Novem-
ber, Johnson successfully lobbied for its
passage, by 290 votes to 130. A group of
southern senators kept up a filibuster
for 54 days, but a weaker version of the
bill was finally passed, by 73 votes to 27,
on 19 June 1964.