It was on March 31 that the government told the supreme court that there were no migrant workers on the road any more. “They have been taken to the nearest available shelter,” and 2.3 million were being fed, India’s solicitor general told the judges, who—in a now-familiar routine—took the government at its word.
Last week, I exited a family WhatsApp group after listening to a particularly inaccurate, agitated and rambling rant—falsely attributed to the steel baron Laxmi Mittal (debunked last year)—about how Hindus have been “humiliated, subjugated and massacred,” how Narendra Modi is relentlessly criticised because he stands up for Hindus; absurd arguments about how secularism isn’t for India (“who the f*** cares if you are a secular state or not, Britain is not a secular state, it is a developed country”); and how we were ruled by “marauders” for 1,000 years.
Last week witnessed several of India’s festering, usually ignored problems exploding into prominence. Here are three issues that made it to the news—not in a meaningful enough way to be of widespread public interest but adequate, at least, to be dragged into the public eye. These are culled from news reports. The wider perspective is mine:
In the liberal view of things, the ongoing Lok Sabha election will decide India’s future. It will decide whether India will become a Hindu-first state with reduced civil liberties and intolerance of minorities or be dragged back to its old state of sometimes wavering secularism but a general agreement to co-habitation and tolerance.
The Hindu ascetic Pragya Singh Thakur—who is out on bail, supposedly because of “health issues”—is due to stand trial on numerous grounds, including murder, criminal conspiracy and promoting enmity between communities. These are not unusual charges for an Indian politician, who sometimes uses involvement in such crimes as a badge of honour.
When I began writing this column, Mughalsarai had become Deendayal Upadhyay Nagar, Allahabad had become Prayagraj, and Faizabad district had become Ayodhya.
My wife, Priya [Ramani], is amongst the 14 women journalists who have named union minister MJ Akbar for a range of inappropriate workplace behaviour.
My excitement at being on the banks of the mighty Brahmaputra for the first time lasted all of two minutes.
It was dark, and the elevated expressway connecting Bengaluru to its information technology heartland was slick from the rain, but the teenage drivers of three cars did not think it was a bad idea to race one another. They had apparently, the police said, done this often.
Take a close look at the photograph. I know it is disturbing, but you should be disturbed. It is not a photograph you will see on the front pages of newspapers and on your television screens, not because it is disturbing but because it does not matter very much in modern India if two young Muslim men are lynched for no other reason than the fact that they were transporting cows.
Prime minister Narendra Modi wants a “new India” built by 2022. “By then the poor shall have concrete houses, the farmer shall double his income, youths and women will get ample opportunities, and India [will be] free of casteism, terrorism, corruption,” he said during his Independence Day speech on August 15.
Mannu gela majhya kannut. Mud went into my eye. An amalgam of Marathi and Kannada—mannu and kannu are Kannada words, the rest Marathi—was what I spoke when I was about four, says my mother.
He was an upper-caste Hindu from a village outside the holy city of Varanasi. “Yes,” he said, before I could ask, “the constituency of prime minister Narendra Modi, the man I voted for.” As his taxi hurtled over the Sealink, a cable-stayed bridge spanning a part of Mumbai’s western seaboard, the driver listed his reasons for turning from the Congress to Modi: the promise of vikas (progress) and the possibility that desh ka sthar uncha uthe (India’s position would rise). After a minute’s silence, he spoke again.
The reason for the attack, as is usual these days, was trivial—an argument over a seat on a train. The victims, as they usually are these days, were Muslim. In this case, three brothers on their way home from Delhi, after Eid shopping, to the holy city of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday. The argument quickly escalated, as is usual these days in north India, into the religious identity of the three brothers.
In balmy Goa, from June 14 to June 17,150 Hindu organisations (I did not know there were that many, but this is what they claim) will meet to discuss how their common goal can be achieved—the creation of a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu nation, by 2023. That is six years away.
Her Facebook photos reveal a young woman who liked to travel, dress up, pose, and smile. You see her patting her hair and sticking a hip out like the Marilyn Monroe wax statue behind her; in a business suit with San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge as the backdrop; in a black leather jacket and pink scarf in Las Vegas; in a skirt at a Delhi mall; in oversize sunglasses and picnic hat at a Mughal monument; and as a glowing bride in a green-and-gold-bordered pink silk saree, dangling gold earrings, and armloads of bangles.
“The prohibition for slaughter of cow (sic) and its progeny, which would include bull, bullocks etc, should be included in fundamental rights or as a constitutional mandate anywhere else, as an article of constitution. It should not be kept only in the directive principles or/fundamental duties as neither of these are enforceable by the courts. The amendment of the constitution should also be made for empowering the parliament to make a central law for the prohibition of slaughter of cow and its progeny and further for prohibition of their transport from one state to another. The parliament should then make a central law, applicable to all states, prohibiting slaughter of cow and its progeny. Violation of the law should be made a non-bailable and cognizable offence.”
To discuss Narendra Modi’s historic opportunity, allow me to take you back to my recorded family history, which appears to begin in 1760, when the British subdued the last remnants of the naval fleet of that great Maratha, Shivaji. Deprived of their livelihoods, these Aarmari Marathas—of the navy, the aarmar—took to piracy. It took the British until the 1830s to end their forays into the creeks and bays of the Konkan coast. The Gabits—as the Aarmari Marathas were called, the term emerging from the Arabic Gurab, or gunboat—were not a caste, but were known as backward Marathas.
Every day, as I left home and walked along the footpath near my house, battling cars that try to occupy it, I glanced irritatedly at the little mess of leftover rice and god knows what that I shuddered at and jumped over. I was delighted when the WhatsApp group of the local residents’ associations posted photos of the dirty patch I encountered and others like it. The unanimous decision: We will ask residents to stop creating this mess that attracts dogs and crows. Why, I mused, must people make this mess on our already crumbling footpaths?
During my morning run recently, I felt a great sadness as I paused at a 10-foot-high stump of a tree I once knew well. You see, this is the season for Bengaluru’s gulmohars—or mayflower trees—to bloom and lay a flame-orange carpet of flowers. That is what the magnificent, old specimen on the corner of Davis Road and Charles Campbell Road would have, had it been allowed to live.
At traffic intersections, drivers in Delhi tune out the brown-haired, snot-nosed waifs who tap and scratch insistently at their car windows. Sometimes, the children are joined by equally ragged parents, mostly in their 20s, trying to sell cheap Chinese-made junk—from plastic flowers to cellphone and steering-wheel covers. The defining feature of destitution in North India appears to be youth. These are the people who should—but are unlikely to—fuel India’s great demographic dividend: The productivity and energy that should ideally flow from a country where more than half the people are under 25 years of age. Much has been written about that dividend and how India could be on the cusp of letting it lapse, as it fails to adequately educate and keep healthy the million young people who join the job market every month.
