Founder: Vishwa Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 08 • ISSUE 9

Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath SEPTEMBER 2016

cover story / politics

32

The Seeker
Asaduddin Owaisi’s ambition to unite
India’s fractured Muslim electorate
neyaz farooquee

No Muslim party has achieved national appeal in the

history of independent India. For any that can, the prize
is large: Indian Muslims number 172 million people,
and account for 14.2 percent of the population. The All
India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, rooted in a divisive
history in its home in Hyderabad, is the latest to try—and
Asaduddin Owaisi is its guide through the possibilities and
perils of today’s Indian polity.

perspectives

32

20

politics
20 Raging Fires
In Gujarat, the BJP’s ideology clashes
with its electoral politics
darshan desai

politics
24 The Family Way
Why political dynasties succeed in India
52 kanchan chandra

law
politics 28 A Rock and a Hard Place
52 In the Name of the Mother India’s myopic approach to recovering
How the state nurtures the gau rakshaks of Haryana the Kohinoor
ishan marvel prashant reddy thikkavarapu

SEPTEMBER 2016 3
 the lede

18

tourism
10 Ford Every Stream
A tussle over Meghalaya’s heritage
root bridges
deepika gumaste

history 64
12 Getting the Picture
The mystery of an iconic Partition
photograph
anhad hundal

crime photo essay / hobbies

14 A Sketchy Business 64 Pet Project
The trials of drawing suspects for The strange world of
police investigations Indian dog shows
basit malik karan vaid

arts
18 In Step With the Times
The fraught history of Chile’s national dance
gwendolyn harper

books
94

78 Body of Work
People, power and prophecy in the
writing of Mahasweta Devi
chitralekha basu

84 Singular and Plural

Krishna Sobti’s unique picture
78 of a less divided India
the bookshelf 92 trisha gupta
showcase 94
editor’s pick 98 NOTE TO READERS: THE “SPONSORED FEATURE” ON PAGE 63 IS PAID ADVERTISING CONTENT.

4 THE CARAVAN
 contributors
THE LEDE 10 Deepika Gumaste is a travel writer based in Mumbai. An offbeat travel enthusiast, she quit editor Anant Nath
her steady corporate job in 2015 to document and photograph earth-friendly and responsible executive editor Vinod K Jose
travel trails. She tweets as @feetonthemap. political editor Hartosh Singh Bal
12 Anhad Hundal is an intern at The Caravan. associate editors Ajay Krishnan
14 Basit Malik is an intern at The Caravan. and Roman Gautam
18 Gwendolyn Harper is a writer and translator based in Chile. books editor Anjum Hasan
copy editors Martand Kaushik and
PERSPECTIVES 20 Darshan Desai is a journalist based in Gujarat, with 28 years in the profession. He has Aria Thaker
worked as the resident editor of the Indian Express in Lucknow, and in various capacities with web editor Nikita Saxena
Outlook, Tehelka, The Hindu and other publications. assistant editors
Vivek Gopal and Surabhi Kanga
24 Kanchan Chandra is a professor of politics at New York University. Her most recent book is
contributing editors
an edited collection of essays, Democratic Dynasties.
Deborah Baker, Fatima Bhutto,
28 Prashant Reddy Thikkavarapu studied law at the National Law School of India University
Chandrahas Choudhury,
and Stanford Law School, and is currently a research associate at the school of law at
Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume,
Singapore Management University. He tweets as @preddy85. Siddharth Dube, Christophe
Jaffrelot, Mira Kamdar, Miranda
REPORTAGE 32 Neyaz Farooquee is a journalist based in Delhi. He is a fellow at the New India Foundation. Kennedy, Amitava Kumar, Basharat
AND ESSAYS He was previously a staff writer at Hindustan Times, and has contributed to the New York Peer, Samanth Subramanian and
Times, Al Jazeera and Tehelka. He is working on a memoir about growing up as a Muslim Salil Tripathi
in India. staff writers
52 Ishan Marvel is a web reporter at The Caravan. Praveen Donthi, Priyanka Dubey
and Atul Dev
PHOTO ESSAY 64 Karan Vaid is a photographer based in Delhi. web reporter Ishan Marvel
editorial manager
BOOKS 78 Chitralekha Basu is the author of Sketches by Hootum the Owl: A Satirist’s View of Colonial Anoop Sreenivas
Calcutta. She is an arts journalist with China Daily in Hong Kong. fact checker Kaushal Shroff
84 Trisha Gupta is an independent writer and critic based in Delhi. Trained as a cultural photo editor Srinivas Kuruganti
anthropologist at the University of Cambridge and Columbia University, she writes on books, photo coordinator
films, photography and art, with a particular interest in twentieth-century South Asia. Her Shahid Tantray
published work can be read on her blog, Chhotahazri, at www.trishagupta.blogspot.in. design FN
graphic designers
COVER Design: FN Photo: Vivek Singh for The Caravan Paramjeet Singh and
Sandhya Visvanathan
interns Anhad Hundal,
Sreshtha Sen, Basit Malik
and Andrew Fedorov
editorial management intern
Ahyaan Raghuvanshi
photo intern Revati Kulkarni

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8 THE CARAVAN
 THE LEDE
Ford Every Stream
A tussle over Meghalaya’s heritage
root bridges / Tourism
subhendu sarkar / lightrocket / getty images
/ deepika gumaste
Each week, residents of the village of
Kudeng Thymmai, in Meghalaya, hike
for about an hour through lush forests
to get to a bazaar in a neighbouring
village. On the way, they come upon
a bridge that seems to have emerged
from the earth itself—with moss-cov-
ered beams made not of steel or timber,
but of sturdy, growing tree roots.
The bridge is one of many “living-
root” bridges in Meghalaya. The north-
10
eastern state receives heavy rainfall,
which forms many streams and rivers
that surge along its forest floors. Long
ago, when Meghalaya’s indigenous
people tried building bamboo bridges to
cross these waters, the structures sim-
ply washed away. Then, they realised
that by binding the aerial roots of local
rubber trees together with bamboo or
betel-nut tree trunks, they could con-
struct better bridges—ones that would
get stronger as the roots grew. The
exact age of this construction practice
THE CARAVAN
is unknown, but the earliest known
record of it dates back to 1844, when
it was mentioned in a Kolkata-based
journal.
Over the years, the root bridges have
become major tourist attractions. Ac-
cording to government statistics, more
than 750,000 domestic travellers and
8,000 foreign ones visited Meghalaya
in 2015. Conflict has recently arisen
over the effects of this tourism, which
some locals claim damages the root
bridges. At the heart of this controver-

opposite page: Meghalaya’s indigenous
people realised that by binding the roots of
local rubber trees together with bamboo or
betel-nut tree trunks, they could construct
sturdy bridges that would get stronger as
the roots grew.
sy is one tourist’s plan to, in multiple
senses, put Meghalaya’s root bridges on
the map.
Patrick Rogers, a 29-year-old travel
writer from the United States, first
encountered the bridges on a week-
long hiking trip in 2011. He returned
to India for a month in 2015, intent
on learning more about them. Later
that year, in October, he launched an
ongoing crowdfunding campaign to
raise money for the Living Root Bridge
Project, an initiative to record informa-
tion about the structures, and to make
that information publicly available.
This would include mapping and shar-
ing the exact location of each bridge.
When I emailed him, Rogers told me
that one reason he started the project
was because, “to my knowledge, there
is no available reliable literature on the
living-root architecture.”
Rogers believes that Meghalaya’s
root bridges are in danger of being ru-
ined, and that fostering tourist inter-
est, which encourages maintenance of
the sites, is necessary to protect them.
He said, “Villagers in remote areas
simply assume that living-root bridges
are common elsewhere in India and
across the world,” and so “do not view
the loss of a single bridge, particularly
one that is damaged or not in common
use, as a major loss.” In January, Rog-
ers told the Deccan Chronicle that “any
outsider interest would help save” the
bridges.
Some locals disagree. While hiking
in Meghalaya, when I visited the state
this March, I met a social activist and
writer named Morning Star Sumer—a
lean 52-year-old with a wide smile. As
we walked across a root bridge, the
forest hummed with the sounds of
swarming bees and a singing magpie.
“The immediate impact of the influx of
tourists,” he told me, “is the impend-
ing destruction of the bridges owing
to the heavy footfalls on the bridges
every day.” Rogers’s efforts to increase
tourism, Sumer said, would only lead to
more damage.
In an April opinion piece in the
Shillong Times, Patricia Mukhim, the
newspaper’s editor, also expressed
concern about tourism. She noted that
many of the people who visit Megha-
laya’s most famous root bridge—a
double-decker one that can bear the
weight of 50 people—“have no sense
of respect for a destination.” Domestic
tourists especially, she wrote, “come in
hordes, make loud noises and are there
as if they are on a ‘Khatron Ki Khilari’
kind of trip where posing for pictures
is more important than the journey to
the destination.” What’s more, “Except
for little shops selling bottled juices and
the ubiquitous Uncle Chips,” the locals
“don’t really earn much.”
Still, Rogers believes that the core
goal of his project—documenting
information about the bridges—is
crucial. “Any conservation effort must
necessarily begin with a clear idea of
what exactly it is that needs to be con-
served,” he told me. “The threats that
living-root architecture faces can only
be addressed by actually going to those
places where the structures are in dan-
ger, and reporting what’s happening to
them.”
Sumer does, more or less, agree. The
government, he lamented, has failed
to adequately document, inspect and
preserve the bridges. But, he added,
“to suggest that GPS may do the trick
seems far-fetched. On the contrary, it
may surely close one means or channel
for helping local citizens to use nature
for bettering their economic condition.”
The only way to determine what
needs to be done for the bridges, Sumer
said, is to ask the locals. To this end, he
works with James Perry, a 50-year-old
SEPTEMBER 2016
the lede
of Canadian origin who was born and
raised in Shillong. The two often meet
with village headmen to help them
understand both the beneficial and
detrimental effects of tourism.
Perry and Rogers have publicly
confronted one another about the root
bridges. On 3 February, Perry wrote a
Facebook post that, without naming
Rogers, heavily criticised the latter’s
project. “This person is going around,
raising money from gofund site to doc-
ument these bridges, with little input
or information given to the local people
of the possible effects,” he wrote. Perry
added that he had recently spoken with
many local village headmen, and found
that not one was aware of the details of
the proposed project.
The next day, Rogers responded
with his own Facebook post. The fact
that local headmen did not know about
the Living Root Bridge Project was
“entirely to be expected,” he wrote,
because it hadn’t even begun. “I am ac-
cused of exploitation, but what I gain is
unclear,” he said. “The person attacking
me is a tourism operator, who makes
his living bringing tourists to Megha-
laya to, among other things, see living-
root bridges. It would seem, given his
reasoning and source of income, that he
is a far bigger exploiter than I.”
Perry does, indeed, work in tourism.
He coordinates homestay accommoda-
tions, encouraging travellers to learn
about local communities by interacting
with their hosts. The cottages have a
light ecological footprint; the energy to
power them comes from solar panels
and windmills, and the food served
there is made from local ingredients.
The root bridges are also an impor-
tant part of Perry’s work. On 7 July,
he posted on Facebook about a trip he
was organising, offering guests the
opportunity to “be with the village of
Kudeng Rim as they set up and train
the roots” of a bridge. On the same day,
he also organised a programme on “the
implications of mass tourism over qual-
ity tourism.”
It seems unlikely that Rogers’s project
will happen in the near future. His
crowdfunding campaign, which has
a target amount of $7,500, has not yet
raised $2,000. Meanwhile, the fate of
the root bridges hangs in the balance. s
11
the lede
Getting the Picture
The mystery of an iconic Partition photograph
/ History
david douglas duncan / time life pictures
/ anhad hundal
On 18 August 1947, the American
magazine Life carried a photograph of
BS Kesavan, who would soon become
the first national librarian of newly
independent India. Captured by the
photojournalist David Douglas Duncan,
the image shows Kesavan, a young man
with his hand buried in his hair, sitting
at a table between two large stacks of
books. The stack on the left is topped by
a white placard that says “PAKISTAN,”
while one atop the other says “INDIA.”
The caption reads, “In the Imperial Sec-
retariat Library, a curator tries to divide
a 150,000-volume collection into equal
Mukul showed the parts for each new state.” In August of
photograph to his father, 1997, Time magazine—by then Life’s par-
ent publication—reprinted the image in
saying “Look, there’s a
a commemorative issue for the fiftieth
picture of you apparently anniversary of Indian independence.
partitioning the National The photo has been the subject of con-
Library.” His father “just siderable confusion. In recent years it
laughed and said, ‘you know has gained prominence on the internet,
where it is often incorrectly described
that this never happened.’”
as having been taken in the National Li-
ww brary, in Kolkata—not the Imperial Sec-
12 THE CARAVAN
retariat Library, which is in Delhi, and
is now called the Central Secretariat
Library. When I contacted the Central
Secretariat Library, Y Avanindranath
Rao, an information officer, confirmed
that the photograph was taken in the
library, in 1947. BS Kesavan’s son, the
academic and essayist Mukul Kesavan,
confirmed to me that his father was a
curator there at the time.
Two years ago, The Guardian pub-
lished an article captioning the image
with the same wrong information about
it being taken in the National Library.
For this year’s Republic Day, Hindustan
Times ran it in a piece about iconic
Indian photographs, with the caption:
“An image from 1947 showing the parti-
tion of books from India and Pakistan,
at the Calcutta National Library.” Both
outlets cite the Twitter account @In-
diaHistorypic, which has over 200,000
followers, as the source for the image.
More is at stake here than the misi-
dentification of a library. In fact, the
partitioning of books that the picture
purports to depict never happened, at
either of the two libraries.

photo division
Anwesha Sengupta, a scholar who
has written about the administrative
fallout of Partition, told me over the
phone that the only libraries that were
divided were ones under the control of
individual provinces—not those under
central, or imperial, control. The Impe-
rial Library and the Imperial Secre-
tariat Library were both under imperial
control, and thus were not partitioned.
One collection that was divided, she
said, was that of the Calcutta Madrasah
Library, which boasted the world’s old-
est Persian manuscripts. “It is sad, be-
cause those manuscripts were taken to
Dhaka in open trucks, and the rain de-
stroyed many of them,” she said. “And
today, the Madrasah library in Kolkata
only has catalogues from after 1947.”
Mukul, too, said that the country’s
main libraries were never divided.
For the Imperial Secretariat Library,
he told me, “The division of library
resources was mooted but not imple-
mented.” He said there was initially
also a proposal to divide the books in
the National Library between India
and Pakistan, but “of course, that was
not successful. I mean, on what rule of
thumb would you partition books? It is
impractical.”
But that still left a question unan-
swered: how had his father appeared
in the photograph? Mukul was less
sure of this. He recounted seeing the
Time photograph in 1997 and showing
it to his father, saying, “Look, there’s a
picture of you apparently partitioning
the National Library.” His father “just
laughed and said, ‘you know that this
never happened.’” I asked Mukul if his
father meant to say that the partition-
ing never happened, or that such a
photograph had never been taken at all.
He confirmed that his father had meant
the former.
Initially, Mukul speculated that the
image might be doctored in some way.
“Look at the internal absurdity of the
photograph,” he said, adding that “the
boards on the books are so white”—
more so than is customary for pictures
from that period. “It is a bad photo-
graph” that is “framed ludicrously,” he
said. “I’m astonished that a magazine
like Time would publish it.”
SEPTEMBER 2016
the lede
left: The books of the Imperial Secretariat
Library, which is now named the Central
Secretariat Library, were never split between
India and Pakistan.
opposite page: Captured by the
photojournalist David Douglas Duncan, this
image of BR Kesavan ostensibly dividing
books in the Imperial Secretariat Library was
run in Life magazine in August, 1947.
But in a later email conversation,
Mukul conceded that it was possible
that the image was unedited—but still
staged. Perhaps “the photographer
wanted a dramatic picture illustrat-
ing the strangeness of partitioning a
country, so with the help of two white
boards marked PAKISTAN and INDIA
he persuaded Kesavan (in Delhi) to
participate in a dramatic enactment of a
book partition,” he wrote.
I contacted Rahaab Allana, a pho-
tographer and the curator at an arts
non-profit in Delhi, to get his opinion
on the image. He also suggested that
it seemed staged. “I was just looking
at the literal, physical location of these
placards—Pakistan on the left, India on
the right, which is very much the cor-
rect geography,” he said. The placement
of the books, he continued, also results
“in a very balanced kind of image—the
higher pile of books receding into the
back with Pakistan, and the foreground
of books with India, coming closer to
the viewer.”
But he said that the doubts about the
image’s veracity did “not take away
from the reality of the situation.” He
added: “That is about how you read an
image. The work of any photojournal-
ist includes editing and censorship.”
This particular photograph, Allana
suggested, strikes a powerful chord
about Partition itself. “The role of the
photographer is to suggest that this is a
farce,” he said. “You cannot really par-
tition India and Pakistan just like that.
You can do it in a library, but lives are
at stake.” s
13
the lede
A Sketchy Business
The trials of drawing suspects for
police investigations / Crime
/ basit malik
About two years ago, Rajesh Kumar, a
43-year-old artist who earns a liv-
ing by making drawings on commis-
sion, received a phone call from a
Delhi police station. “The police were
investigating the rape case of a minor
girl and they wanted my help,” he told
me last month, when I met him in his
tiny studio in Sarojini Nagar. Rajesh
sketched as he spoke, putting the fin-
ishing touches on a charcoal drawing
of Barack Obama. The officer on the
phone, he remembered, had “kept on
asking me about my experience in the
field of sketching, and also said that I
will get a prize if they catch the man.”
A few days after that call, Rajesh
went to Delhi’s AIIMS hospital. A
woman constable accompanied him to a
ward where the victim—a ten-year-old
girl—was recovering. Rajesh asked the
girl about the alleged rapist’s appear-
ance, trying to gather enough detail to
sketch his face. “Till the time the lady
constable was there, the child did not
say much,” he said. But after the consta-
ble left the ward, she began to open up.
“Whatever she told me, I drew that,” he
said. “After every stroke of the pencil, I
would show it to her.” He finished the
drawing in half an hour.
A month after Rajesh completed the
sketch at AIIMS, the police called him
again. “They seemed very pleased,” he
said. “I was told that the man had been
caught, and they will felicitate me.”
That sketch was one of eight that
Rajesh has done for the Delhi police
over the past three years. Artists like
him have long been instrumental in
investigations of heinous crimes—par-
ticularly rapes and murders. They
speak to witnesses and victims of the
crime, piecing together images of what
the culprits might look like.
But today, hand-drawn sketches
are commissioned much less often
than they used to be. Rajendra Singh
Kalkal, the inspector of research at
14
the Delhi Police Museum, told me that
now, “Rarely is a sketch artist needed,”
because since about ten or 15 years ago,
“the police have been using computer
programmes to make sketches of the
wanted people.” This development has
disappointed many, Rajesh included,
who insist that hand-drawn images are
superior to electronically generated
ones. Others disagree, saying there are
more pressing challenges involved in
the production of police sketches.
“All one needs is a seven-day in-
house training to use the department’s
software,” said Shivaji Chauhan, an
inspector at the Kamla Market crime
branch, who leads many computer-
related operations. The programme,
he told me when I visited the branch,
presents an array of features—different
pairs of lips, eyes, eyebrows and more.
The witness picks the features that best
fit their memory of the suspect, and the
police officer composes an image of a
face from those parts.
Rajesh believes this method often
leads to shoddy work. “The computer
programme can never match the skill
of a human hand,” he said, because “the
options in an artist’s head are infinite.”
This is especially important because
most victims are only able to provide
“impressions”—not detailed descrip-
tions—of criminals. “If impressions
are translated into something physical,
it cannot be a computer image. It will
always be a sketch by a professional,
who sketches every day.” He added: “If
this computer thing was so great, why
do people come to artists with CCTV
footages to make sketches?”
Anil Kumar, the head constable of the
Kamla Market crime branch, backed
Rajesh’s claim. “Handmade sketches
are any day better than the ones made
on a computer,” he said. When I asked
why, he responded: “I have been in this
profession for very long, sir. I am speak-
ing from experience.”
But Sanjay Kumar, another officer at
the same branch, didn’t agree. He told
THE CARAVAN
me that of the 311 cases in the depart-
ment that have required sketches since
the start of the calendar year, he has
prepared 264 of them—all on the com-
puter. “Accuracy mostly depends on
the witness,” he said. “It is very rare to
prepare a completely reliable portrait.
The only time that is possible is when
they are someone you already know.
Other than that, witnesses struggle
with memory and confusion.”
In Kalkal’s experience, many wit-
nesses have only been able to provide
vague descriptions, such as “Uska cheh-
ra Rajesh Khanna jaisa thha” (His face
resembled that of Rajesh Khanna, the
Bollywood actor.) Even that, he said, is
better than some other comments, such
as “Uska chehra normal thha” (His face
was normal).
“Prejudice, it creeps in, no
matter who you are,” said
Rakesh Shukla, a lawyer
and psychotherapist who
works at the Delhi High
Court. “You may be a judge,
a police officer or even an
artist.”
ww
Even trained artists can make errors
when sketching suspects. Before Rajesh
spoke to the girl at AIIMS, one sketch
had already been made for the same
rape case. But that artist, Rajesh re-
called, “had done too much of shading,
as if he had seen a photograph of the
person.” Shading, he said, “is problem-
atic. It creates a 3D effect—that is, the
illusion of depth made through light
and dark strokes of the pencil.” But this
can produce false images, because wit-
nesses “don’t give a 3D description of
the wanted man.” They simply describe
a person’s individual features.
Rakesh Shukla, a lawyer and a psy-
chotherapist who works at the Delhi
a sketchy business · the lede
High Court, told me that it is especially important
to not view sketch artists as completely objective.
“Prejudice, it creeps in, no matter who you are,” he
said. “You may be a judge, a police officer or even
an artist.”
One instance often cited as evidence of such
prejudice occurred after the 2011 bomb blasts in
the Delhi High Court. The sketches produced
by the Delhi police were quickly released to the
public and led to around 100 people being ques-
tioned on the basis of the images. The Jammu and
Kashmir police were unhappy with the sketches,
and wrote letters to various anti-terror squads to
express the worry that the images could result
in the “unnecessary harassment of Kashmiri
youth.” Shortly after that, the National Investiga-
16
tive Agency interviewed witnesses to create their above: Rajesh shahid tantray for the caravan
own sketches, which ended up looking nothing Kumar, who earns
like those prepared by the Delhi police. When I a living making
drawings on
asked Chauhan about the case, he said, “I can-
commission, has
not comment on that. What I can say is that we completed eight
cannot always be right, and a lot depends on the sketches of suspects
witness.” for the Delhi police.
For Rajesh, too, success has been elusive. Of the
eight sketches he has done for the Delhi police,
only the one he made in AIIMS helped contrib-
ute to the suspect being apprehended. He is also
still waiting to receive the prize money the police
had promised him. But, he said, “I was paid for
my work. I don’t need anything more than that,
though it is always good to get some encourage-
ment.” s
THE CARAVAN
the lede
In Step With the Times
The fraught history of Chile’s national dance
/ Arts
/ gwendolyn harper
On the evening of 7 April, El Rincón de
las Guitarras—a cozy dancehall in the
Chilean city of Valparaíso—was strung
with small coloured flags. These deco-
rations, usually reserved for national
holidays, had been hung in honour of
the evening’s musical act. An audience
of about 50 people of all ages sat around
tables and chatted. Around 10.30, a
singer, guitarist and pianist began to
perform a bright tune to an off-kilter
beat. Soon, pairs of dancers from the
audience ambled to the floor, twirling
handkerchiefs in the air, circling one
another coquettishly and marking the
rhythm with their feet.
The audience was dancing the cueca,
the national dance of Chile. René
Alfaro, the singer performing for them
that night, has frequented El Rincón for
over a decade. Beginning as a percus-
sionist for musicians from older gen-
erations, he now enjoys the limelight,
often sporting a fedora. In turn, he has
become a mentor for the musicians
who accompanied him that evening:
the pianist Manuel Hernández and the
guitarist Claudio Silva Rey, two young
men in their twenties.
The energy and flair of the per-
formance belied the dark history of
the dance, which is tied to one of the
bloodiest chapters of Chilean history.
Alfaro, Hernández and Rey are part of
a new generation that is reviving lost
versions of the cueca, eager to preserve
a past that is in danger of slipping away.
The cueca originated from a mix of
traditions from the Spanish region of
Andalusia and Afro-Peruvian com-
munities. It first appeared in Chile
shortly after the country declared
independence from Spain in 1818. The
form soon acquired a Chilean flavour,
especially in the then booming port city
of Valparaíso, whose diverse culture
infused its cueca with a jazzy edge.
Rural areas of Chile also developed
their own variations of the dance. The
18
cueca continued to flourish and evolve
for over a century—the 1960s and early
1970s, in particular, were a period of
cultural blossoming, during which
cueca musicians in both Valparaíso and
the nation’s capital, Santiago, put out
major records.
But in 1973, the military took over
the country in a brutal coup, killing
the president, Salvador Allende, and
installing the general Augusto Pinochet
as dictator. Musicians, artists and writ-
ers were among the first people killed
under Pinochet. The mutilated corpse
of Victor Jara, the folk singer who
wrote Allende’s campaign song, was
found just after the coup. Though cueca
musicians were not the primary targets
of this crackdown, they did suffer
greatly. The bohemian cueca nightlife
of cities was wiped out through the
LETTER FROM
CHILE
army’s imposition of a nightly curfew,
which closed most dancehalls—driving
away the working-class audiences that
had frequented them, and putting most
musicians out of their jobs. The urban
cueca became relegated to the homes of
musicians, where only trusted friends
were invited to hear clandestine, after-
dark performances.
Meanwhile, the dictatorship em-
braced the cueca of rural communi-
ties. In 1979, the cueca huaso—or “the
country cueca”—was declared the
national dance of Chile. It was taught in
every school, danced on every national
holiday and televised in heavily pro-
moted competitions. The cueca huaso
“imposed an identity on Chile of the
humble, dignified peasant,” Hernández
explained. “It was a poor man’s cueca,
poor in the sense of content, a stupid
cueca.” The men dressed in sombreros
THE CARAVAN
and ponchos, the women in floral dress-
es—costumes inspired not by Chilean
culture, but rather by the clothing from
Mexican ranchero films. The dance’s
central metaphor was that of a master
seducing a reluctant-yet-willing servant
girl. Andrea Martinez, a 31-year-old
singer and co-author of two books on
the cueca, recalled having to dance the
cueca huaso as a schoolgirl. “I started
to move my shoulders a bit, like the
older styles, and the professor whacked
me on the back,” she told me. “There’s
a whole generation, from the 1980s and
1990s, that hates cueca.”
Under Pinochet, the cueca became
a symbol of cultural conservatism
and repression. The artist and activist
Pedro Lemebel and his collaborator
Francisco Casas famously danced the
cueca before the 1989 Chilean Commis-
sion on Human Rights, stomping out
the steps barefoot over a map of South
America made from broken glass, their
feet trailing blood everywhere. But
while Lemebel chose the dance partly
to evoke Pinochet’s repression, he was
also citing an iconic form of resistance
to the dictatorship called the cueca
sola. In this, women whose husbands
or sons had been “disappeared”—kid-
napped and killed by the authorities—
would dance alone in public spaces,
staging a bold protest.
Pinochet’s rule ended in 1990, but the
cueca continued to represent repression
in the few years following that, when
a democratically elected president as-
sumed power. Things began to change
in 1995, when Los Tres, a popular
Chilean rock band, was invited to per-
form on the American television show
MTV Unplugged. Halfway through the
set, the lead singer announced, “These
next songs we’re about to play are
cueca. They were written by Roberto
Parra, a great musician and mentor.”
The band played old-school cueca for
a North American audience: not the
kind promoted by the dictatorship, but
something that reached further back, to

In the cueca sola, women whose husbands or sons had been
“disappeared” by the dictatorship would dance alone in
public spaces, staging a bold form of protest.
ww
three lions / getty images
The cueca, which originated from a mix of Andalusian and Afro-Peruvian traditions, acquired
a Chilean flavour after the country declared independence from Spain in 1818.
urban styles. Back in Chile, Los Tres’s
album—which had the same songs as
their MTV set list—went quadruple
platinum.
Since then, the cueca has experi-
enced a revival in Chile. A new genera-
tion of musicians began learning to
play the dance in styles that predated
the dictatorship, often apprenticing
themselves to artists who had played
through the 1960s. Many of these new
musicians had heard the cueca in the
houses of their elder relatives, but
thought little of it. Alfaro, for example,
had a grandmother who sang, but he
wasn’t hooked until, at the age of 19,
he heard Los Trukeros, a group that
formed in 1997 and is now Chile’s most
successful contemporary cueca ensem-
ble. “There was something powerful,
something Chilean about the way they
sang,” he recalled. Hernández began
learning cueca songs after hearing the
piano part in the little-known original
recording of “La Consentida,” a tune
that many associate with the dance les-
sons imposed in schools under Pino-
chet. “I heard it and thought, ‘This is
Chilean.’ There’s nothing from Peru or
Argentina or anywhere else about this
style of playing,” Hernández said.
Today’s cueca movement is driven
by the search for an authentic Chilean
identity, along with a sense of urgency
to recover lost cultural history. The
website of Los Trukeros describes how
the band has “constantly directed their
energies towards the research, musical
and poetic creation, interpretation,
and dispersion of traditional Chilean
culture ... in one of the most representa-
tive and identifiable expressions of our
SEPTEMBER 2016
the lede
tradition: the Chilean cueca.” Yet many
still struggle to understand the cueca in
any context other than the dictatorship.
“People still hear La Consentida and
think I’m a Pinochetist for playing it,”
Hernández told me.
But in their search for tradition
and roots, today’s musicians are also
creating something new. “The cueca
is a communal genre by definition,”
Martinez said—especially in the format
commonly performed by the younger
generation. “The songs can’t be sung by
one person.”
Many are also writing new cueca
songs, and women like Martinez are
breaking into a traditionally masculine
musical form. In the past few years,
young filmmakers have produced docu-
mentaries and public television specials
about the urban cueca, capturing this
process of cultural recuperation.
Around 1.30 am, after Alfaro,
Hernández and Rey finished perform-
ing, I tagged along as they took a cab
to the Liberty, one of the oldest bars in
Valparaíso. Inside, around 20 musi-
cians, both professional and amateur,
had taken over the space, surrounded
by a crowd of young admirers wearing
leather and plaid. A few elderly patrons
leaned up against the bar. Standing in a
circle, the performers played the same
style of cueca that I had heard earlier
that night, but they took turns sing-
ing song verses. This gathering, which
occurs weekly, was started by a group
of young cueca musicians in 2011. Mar-
tinez, who is one of the founders, said:
“We didn’t always sound great, but it
was a space for teaching ourselves.”
I watched as Alfaro patted one of
the musicians on the shoulder and
stepped into the circle of performers,
tipping the brim of his hat as he began
to sing. When I turned to Hernández
to ask what he thought of the gather-
ing, he shrugged and smiled. “Some of
the musicians are better than others, I
suppose,” he said. “But I’m glad they’re
here.” s
19
 PERSPECTIVES
Raging Fires
In Gujarat, the BJP’s ideology clashes
with its electoral politics / Politics
ajit solanki / ap photo

above: Thousands of protestors took to the

streets in Gujarat in July after Dalit men
were flogged in the city of Una for skinning
a dead cow. The agitations continued for
weeks, as the BJP and its affiliate groups
failed to signal support for the community.

20 THE CARAVAN

/ darshan desai
On 6 August, at a town-hall-style meet-
ing in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi spoke out against self-styled gau
rakshaks, or cow protectors, declaring
that 80 percent of them were fake. “I
feel angry when people, in the name
of cow protection, do business,” the
Indian Express reported him as saying.
It had been nearly a month since seven
Dalits were flogged in the city of Una in
Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow. Since
then, the state had witnessed a storm
of protests by Dalits, who took to the
streets in rage against the assault. The
agitations refused to die down in the
weeks that followed, building pressure
on Modi to address the issue.
The prime minister’s comments on
the matter, however, both in Delhi and
in Telangana the next day, were not an
outright condemnation of those who
unleash violence in the name of protect-
ing cows. Rather, he directed his ire
specifically at what he claimed were
fake gau rakshaks—suggesting, perhaps,
that there were also genuine vigilantes
whose aggressive tactics of cow protec-
tion he found acceptable.
The prime minister’s remarks were
followed by a quick succession of reac-
tions from the Hindutva camp—spe-
cifically the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad—
that were indicative of the push-and-
pull negotiations that take place within
these organisations on key issues. The
senior RSS leader Suresh Bhaiyyaji
Joshi issued a statement the day after
the Delhi meeting that broadly support-
ed Modi’s views. Joshi called on people
to separate the “condemnable efforts of
a few opportunists” with those carry-
ing out “the good work” of gau raksha.
The harmony was short-lived. The
VHP soon took a far more hostile stand
on the matter, with the senior leader
Sunil Parashar issuing a statement on
the same day as the RSS, declaring, ac-
cording to the Indian Express, that “The
Prime Minster has hurt the sentiments
of gau rakshaks and he will have to
pay for it in next Lok Sabha polls.” The
RSS modulated its own response the
very next day, with its spokesperson
Manmohan Vaidya declaring, accord-
ing to the Indian Express, that Modi’s
“80 percent remark should have been
avoided,” and asserting that the organ-
isation remained committed to the gau
raksha movement.
But the VHP continued to rattle its
sabre. A few days later, the Times of In-
dia reported that the senior VHP leader
Pravin Togadia had attacked Modi at a
press conference in Delhi, accusing him
of betraying those who had helped him
become prime minister, and demanding
that he withdraw his comments. The
organisation also issued a call for a rally
in Delhi to mark the fiftieth anniver-
sary of a 1966 attack on the Indian par-
liament by gau rakshaks. On 20 August,
the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, spoke
out, declaring that gau raksha remained
firmly on the organisation’s agenda—a
marked change in tone and emphasis
from the RSS’s initial response.
The Una flogging, the ensuing pro-
tests and the sequence of statements
from Hindu organisations were a stark
reminder of these groups’ struggles to
balance their ideological commitments
with the need to secure the support
of Dalits to win elections, both at the
centre and in states. Dalits make up
a sizeable portion of the electorate in
states such as Uttar Pradesh and Pun-
jab, which, like Gujarat, go to elections
in 2017. As protests by Dalits continued
for weeks, the failure of the Bharatiya
Janata Party and its Sangh affiliates to
assuage the anxieties of Dalits was laid
bare.
Historically, Dalits have not been a
significant constituency for the BJP,
which emerged in the 1980s as a pri-
marily forward-caste party. Dominated
by leaders and members from the Brah-
min and Bania castes, the party was
SEPTEMBER 2016
perspectives
essentially unwelcoming to Dalits. This
was starkly visible in the early 1980s,
when the new party led agitations
against reservation policies that were
introduced in Gujarat for government
jobs and admission to educational insti-
tutions. Anti-reservation violence broke
out in 1981 and 1985, in which Dalits
were targeted, and many killed. Cover-
ing the agitations as a Gujarati journal-
ist of a privileged caste background,
I saw at close quarters the toxic bias
among forward castes against Dalits.
This bias was also apparent in a
memorandum that was prepared by the
anti-reservationists to submit to Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi on his proposed
visit to Ahmedabad in March 1985.
The opening line of the memorandum
stated: “This is the last-ditch effort
by the students and people in Gujarat
to save meritocracy.” It viewed the
beneficiaries of reservations with utter
contempt, asking the prime minister:
“Would you yourself have 49 percent of
the doctors on your medical panel from
these reserved classes?” If not, it contin-
ued, “why should you treat the citizens
of India as guinea pigs for social experi-
ments?” The memorandum claimed that
reservation not only produces “one bad
professional, it generates a nexus of nin-
compoops at a higher decision-making
and administrative level which will ulti-
mately paralyse the whole nation.”
“It is a preposterous proposition,” the
memorandum went on, “that reserva-
tion will uplift the standards of the
backward classes and help them to
integrate with the mainstream of the
Indian middle class.” On the contrary, it
claimed, reservation gave beneficiaries
“a false sense of security and content-
ment, which are the enemy of a progres-
sive and competitive society.” It added:
“Just as a single polluting chemical
factory upsets the ecology of the whole
surrounding natural environment, such
unnatural reservations pollute, corrode
and ultimately destroy the very social
fabric of the Indian society.”
The anti-reservation protests were
led by forward-caste students and their
parents, most of whom were from the
Gujarati middle class and had formed
groups such as the Akhil Gujarat
Navrachana Samiti and the Akhil
Gujarat Vali Mandal to bring attention
21
raging fires · perspectives
to the issue. But they also had political
support from the Sangh, particularly
from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad, the Sangh’s student wing. Lo-
cal leaders of the BJP, including Ashok
Bhatt, Harin Pathak and Ghanshyam
Mehta, also participated in the protests.
In mid 1985, Pathak and Mehta were
arrested under the National Security
Act for their role in the unrest—they
were BJP municipal corporators at
the time. A month earlier, three other
local BJP leaders had been arrested,
including another municipal corpora-
tor named Praful Barot. These leaders
were later rewarded by the party with
important posts, including city mayor-
ships, state and central ministerships,
and opportunities such as parliamen-
tary tickets.
The anti-reservation agitation of 1985
began in February and continued into
July that year, forcing the Congress
chief minister, Madhavsinh Solanki, to
resign. The accompanying bloodshed,
which was of a greater scale than in
1981, originated from the protests, but
was also backed by logistical support
that suggested a high level of planning.
“Shattering of Gujarat,” a compilation
by independent social researchers of
information about the violence, noted:
“There seems to have been an organ-
ised, planned, prepared, intimidatory,
almost terrorist quality to the violence.”
According to the report, “Arsenals were
stocked, weapons—crude (nail-studded
cement balls, molotov cocktails) and
relatively sophisticated (bombs and
country-guns)—were prepared obvious-
ly in advance, masses were used (par-
ticularly women) as shields for armed
detachments, justifiable grievances as
facade for subversive and punitive vio-
lence, judicial procedure as protection
against administrative action.”
The Congress had the electoral ad-
vantage during these years. In the state
election of March 1985, the Congress
relied on a tested strategy of wooing
a vote-bank comprising the state’s
Kshatriyas (many of whom are deemed
other backward class, or OBC, in Gu-
jarat), Dalits (also known as Harijans
then), Adivasis and Muslims—termed
the KHAM formula. The strategy was
boosted by Solanki, who, before the
elections, announced an 18-percent
22
After losing to the Congress
in the 1985 elections, the
BJP realised that an anti-
reservation stance wouldn’t
fetch it political power in
Gujarat.
ww
hike in the existing 10 percent reserva-
tion for OBCs, in government jobs and
educational institutions in the state—a
move aimed at pleasing Kshatriya vot-
ers. With this, Gujarat had a 28 percent
quota for OBCs, 14 percent for sched-
uled castes, and 7 percent for scheduled
tribes. Even as the BJP was beginning
to launch its opposition to reservations,
the Congress won 149 seats in the 182-
seat assembly. The BJP and the Sangh
Parivar quickly realised that an anti-
reservation stance would never fetch it
political power in Gujarat.
In the years that followed, the
party and its affiliates sought to drive
a wedge into the Congress’s KHAM
grouping. The Sangh Parivar, particu-
larly the VHP and the Bajrang Dal,
launched a massive drive to recruit
Dalits into Hindu organisations. Many
Dalits were given positions in the
organisations, as mohalla presidents or
street chiefs of the VHP or the Bajrang
Dal. Many were also absorbed into Hin-
du sects such as the Swaminarayan and
Brahma Kumaris sects. Some Dalits
found jobs in these offices, and were
gradually co-opted under the larger
umbrella of Hindutva.
This process allowed the Hindu
groups to break the bonds that had
once existed between Dalits and
Muslims. Since large sections of both
communities were poor, and lived in
neighbouring slum areas, a kinship
existed between them, with Muslims
often supporting Dalits when they
came under attack from forward castes.
This unity was reflected in a popular
slogan of the time: “Dalit-Muslim bhai-
bhai.” But over the years, as Dalits were
wooed into the Hindutva fold, the com-
munities were driven apart. The extent
of this split was apparent in the Gujarat
pogrom of 2002: as first information re-
ports were filed in the aftermath of the
violence, one of the major revelations
THE CARAVAN
that emerged was that Dalits—along
with other marginalised communities—
were some of the most active foot-sol-
diers in carrying out the massacres.
But the 2002 violence also left many
Dalits feeling betrayed, as they found
little support from those in power in
avoiding the clutches of the law. Their
original patron, the Congress party,
which had once used them as a valu-
able vote bank, had begun to recede in
prominence as the BJP, led by Modi, rose
to power. The community’s resentment
was compounded by the fact that their
economic and social conditions had seen
little improvement despite their sup-
posed acceptance into Hindutva groups.
The story of Ashok Parmar, a Dalit,
also known as Ashok Mochi, is indica-
tive of the community’s experience.
Parmar became one of the most famous
faces of the 2002 violence after he was
photographed wearing a saffron head-
band and triumphantly brandishing a
metal rod as a fire raged behind him. In
an interview to the website Indiatimes
in August (in which he also denied par-
ticipating in any violence), he asserted
that “nothing has changed for the poor”
in the state under Narendra Modi. “My
financial condition is so bad I can’t even
get married. People more educated than
me are driving rickshaws because they
cannot get jobs. All I have seen in the
name of development in this area is the
riverfront being made like Chowpatty
(Mumbai) and two over-bridges. It has
nothing to do with poor people like me.”
The Una flogging, which followed nu-
merous widely publicised incidents of
brutal violence by gau rakshaks across
the country, heaped further humilia-
tion on a community that had long been
simmering with such resentment. As
thousands took to the streets in pro-
tests, which occasionally spilled over
into violence, the BJP was once again
faced with a familiar paradox: how can
it win the vital Dalit support it needs
to hold on to power in states and at the
centre, even as it clings to programmes
such as cow protection, which form
part of the core agenda of Hindutva
groups? The conflicting signals on the
issue that emanated from the prime
minister, the RSS and the VHP, showed
that the party is nowhere close to re-
solving this question. s
perspectives
The Family Way
Why political dynasties
succeed in India / Politics
/ kanchan chandra
When India attained independence 69
years ago, it broke free from two kinds
of dynastic rule. It severed ties with the
British crown, and it integrated more
than 500 princely states into the Indian
union. But over the decades, another
form of dynastic rule emerged in the
country: that of elected political dynas-
ties. The best known of these dynasties
is the Nehru-Gandhi family, which
dominated the prime ministership and
the leadership of the Congress party
after Independence.
But looking only at the Congress can
obscure the fact that political dynas-
ties, in different forms and to different
degrees, exist in a number of political
parties in India. Some of these dynas-
ties are at the helm of their parties,
among them the Karunanidhi family
of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam,
the Yadavs of the Samajwadi Party, and
the Badals of the Akali Dal. But many
other families are found burrowed
within parties, dominating units at
the local level, or occupying positions
in party organisations. They are less
well known, but no less important. So,
to fully examine the extent to which
Indian politics is dynastic, we have to
look beyond the Congress and the high-
est echelons of other parties.
I began to examine this question in
2009, when I started collecting data on
the family backgrounds of Lok Sabha
MPs in the twenty-first century (in
the 2004, 2009 and 2014 parliaments)
in collaboration with fellow political
scientists Anjali Bohlken and Simon
Chauchard. We defined a dynastic poli-
tician as one who had a family member
precede them in electoral politics. This
included family members holding posi-
tions in directly elected political bodies
such as the Lok Sabha or the Vidhan
Sabha, indirectly elected bodies such
as the Rajya Sabha, and in political par-
ties, as office-bearers or electoral can-
didates. Using this definition, we began
24
tracing the family backgrounds of MPs
by reading national and regional news-
papers, memoirs and biographies, Lok
Sabha Who’s Whos, previously pub-
lished work on political parties, and the
returns published by the Election Com-
mission of India. Some of this research
culminated in my recently published
edited volume, Democratic Dynasties.
The data and arguments cited in this
essay appear in that book, and in joint
work with Bohlken that appears in a
separate statistical paper.
Our data showed that in the 2014 Lok
Sabha, 22 percent of MPs have a dynas-
tic background. The data also provide a
clearer picture of the dynastic tenden-
cies of different parties. If we look at
the larger political parties—those with
at least ten seats in the 2014 parlia-
ment—the Congress is, as we would
expect, the most dynastic: 48 percent
of its current MPs have a dynastic
background. And if we pool the data
on Congress MPs across the twenty-
first century parliaments, the Congress
remains the most dynastic of the larger
political parties.
The Bharatiya Janata Party is often
described as a non-dynastic party. But
that’s just not true—though it is, indeed,
true that the BJP is less dynastic than
the Congress. The BJP’s prime minister
and president are not from political
families, and only 15 percent of its
current MPs are dynastic, compared
to the Congress’s 48 percent. But the
BJP controls the majority of seats in
parliament, and it, not the Congress,
currently has the largest number of
dynastic MPs.
Further, many of those who have held
prominent positions in the BJP in the
past have had family members follow
them into politics. This includes the
BJP’s previous prime minister, Atal Bi-
hari Vajpayee, who has had several fam-
ily members, including a niece, Karuna
Shukla, and a nephew, Anoop Mishra,
follow him into electoral politics. Shuk-
la is a former BJP MP who later joined
THE CARAVAN
the Congress, and Mishra is a BJP MP
from Madhya Pradesh. The current
home minister and the party’s former
president, Rajnath Singh, was followed
into politics by his son Pankaj Singh,
who has twice served as the general
secretary of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.
And a large number of previous or
serving BJP chief ministers have also
orchestrated the entry of their children
or other family members into politics.
This includes Kalyan Singh, Vasund-
hara Raje, Raman Singh, Prem Kumar
Dhumal, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat,
Sahib Singh Verma, BS Yeddyurappa,
Babulal Gaur and Sunderlal Patwa.
Why are dynasties so common across
parties? One argument is that they are
a product of India’s unique cultural val-
ues. The former BBC journalist Mark
Tully, for example, has argued that “It
is India’s strong family traditions, so
different to the nuclear families in the
West, that justify dynasts in the eyes of
voters. In India, it’s widely thought to
be natural and acceptable for a father
or a mother who has any form of power
to want to hand it over to a son or a
daughter.”
But a look at the facts shows that
India is hardly unique. There is now a
wealth of data on dynasticism in mod-
ern-day democratically elected legisla-
tures that shows how India lies in the
middle of the spectrum of democracies
for which comparable data are avail-
able. This spectrum is bounded at one
extreme by the Philippines, in which 50
percent of all congresspersons in 2007
followed a relative into elected office,
and at the other by Canada, in which
3 percent of the House of Commons in
2011 was dynastic. Japan, Iceland and
Ireland, in which between a third and
a fourth of elected legislators in 2009
were dynastic, occupy the middle,
along with India. Belgium, Israel, the
United States and Norway, in which
the proportion of dynastic legislators
ranged between 6 and 11 percent over a
comparable time period, are at the lower

subhankar chakraborty / hindustan times / getty images
end. If dynastic politics is alive and well in many
modern democracies, including several in the West,
each distinct in their cultural features, it can hardly
be attributed to India’s cultural peculiarities.
A second argument is that dynasties exist in
Indian politics because voters prefer them. But the
data, at least when it comes to parliament, don’t
support this claim either. The principal survey
to ask voters about their preferences for dynas-
ties nationwide, conducted by the scholars Milan
Vaishnav, Devesh Kapur and Neelanjan Sircar in
the 2014 elections, found that 46 percent of voters
preferred candidates from political families. That
still left 54 percent who did not believe dynastic
representation was preferable. And the constitu-
encies from which dynastic MPs are elected,
and the nature of political competition in these
constituencies, suggests that this is hardly a stable
preference: only 5 percent of India’s parliamentary
constituencies have been continuously represent-
ed by a dynastic MP between 2004 and 2014. Oth-
erwise, the same constituencies often switch from
a dynastic to a non-dynastic MP and back again.
Another way of putting it is to say that dynastic
MPs routinely lose to non-dynastic candidates. So
it would be hard to claim that voters in India have
some strong and stable preference for dynasties.
The best explanation for the presence of dynas-
ties in Indian politics, we argue, comes from the
role played by political parties. India’s political
perspectives
parties habitually give dynastic contenders a above: While
leg-up in the ticket allocation process. In the 2014 dynastic politics
parliamentary elections, for example, all parties, in India is most
strongly associated
taken together, renominated 75 percent of their
with the Congress
dynastic MPs, compared to only 65 percent of and the Gandhi
their non-dynastic MPs. This is a consistent pref- family, other parties
erence: they showed a similar favouritism in the and families engage
2009 elections. in it too. The BJP
Parties favour dynastic candidates as a way to leader and current
home minister
ensure loyalty. They have few formal measures
Rajnath Singh (left),
they can rely on to ensure cohesiveness in their for instance, has
local units. Existing anti-defection laws in India been followed into
punish elected MPs for crossing the floor after an politics by his son
election, but do not protect local party units before Pankaj (centre), who
or after an election. Party constitutions also rarely has twice served as
the party’s general
impose penalties for defection. Some parties,
secretary in Uttar
such as the BJP, the Communist Party of India Pradesh.
and the Communist Party of India (Marxist),
have ideologies that can help foster cohesion in
their local units, but there is substantial variation
even within these parties in the extent to which
their local units are ideologically indoctrinated.
Consequently, parties are constantly fearful about
the likelihood of rebellion in their local units,
especially against their chosen candidates.
When parties use dynasty as the principle of
ticket allocation, the likelihood of rebellion is not
eliminated, but it is reduced. As one former MP,
whose family ties bagged him a Congress nomina-
tion for a parliamentary election when he was un-
SEPTEMBER 2016 25
the family way · perspectives
der 30 years old, told me, “The biggest
criterion was that this family will not
ditch party under any condition. When
I got this ticket, it was a big thing for
me. I never imagined I would contest
the Lok Sabha. It was a huge election
for a first timer.” In nominating him,
the party was not responding to any ob-
vious cues about electoral performance.
His father had been an MLA, but never
an MP, and so even the candidate was
unsure about how he would fare in a
parliamentary contest. He was a politi-
cal unknown. But, as he noted, loyalty
was the party’s paramount concern in
nominating him.
The Congress has been frank about
its reliance on factors other than
prospects of victory in allotting tickets.
In a 2015 declaration, it noted that
“Winnability alone should not be the
benchmark for deciding nominees of
the party during elections. Rather, a
balance is required between loyalty
and winnability.” The BJP has not
made such an explicit statement, but
its actions have spoken clearly. In the
2014 election campaign, despite its
stated opposition to dynastic politics,
it renominated all but one of its locally
rooted dynasties—that is, dynastic MPs
who had been preceded by family mem-
bers in the same constituency. These
included, for example, GM Siddesh-
wara, whose father, G Mallikarjunappa,
was an MP from the same constituency
in Karnataka; or Anurag Singh Thakur,
an MP from Himachal Pradesh, whose
father, Prem Kumar Dhumal, was also
a several-term MP from the same seat.
Such local dynasties, even when not
well known on the national or interna-
tional stage, could significantly affect
the BJP’s prospects in their home
constituencies. Consequently, the BJP
could not afford to alienate them, as it
could more prominent, but less locally
powerful, dynasties.
Once their party backs a dynastic
candidate, voters often fall in line and
follow the party preference. The major-
ity of Indians, as the national election
surveys conducted by the Pune-based
Centre for Study of Developing Societ-
ies have shown us, take party affilia-
tion into account when deciding how
to vote. In fact, candidates who run as
independents rarely win in India, and
26
no dynastic MP in the twenty-first cen-
tury parliament has won as an indepen-
dent. So when dynastic aspirants, even
poorly performing ones, repeatedly get
a party ticket, it eventually gives them
a leg-up among voters. For example,
in the 2014 parliamentary elections,
Poonam Mahajan, the daughter of the
deceased BJP leader Pramod Mahajan,
was nominated by the BJP from the
Mumbai North West constituency, even
though she lost the 2009 assembly polls
on a BJP ticket by a margin of over
26,000 votes. Mahajan went on to win
the 2014 election.
The party-assisted entry of dynasties
into the Indian political system has had
effects that run in opposite directions.
Perhaps most predictably, we found
that it gives an unfair advantage to a
host of MPs who are no better qualified
than their non-dynastic counterparts
according to some standard indicators,
such as performance in parliament, or
utilisation of their allotted develop-
ment funds, or political experience. We
also found that those who benefit most
from this preference among parties are
Hindu males from dominant castes.
A dynastic system, thus, results in a
double form of exclusion: it creates a
birth-based ruling class, and, within
that class, also amplifies the represen-
tation of dominant groups.
But, paradoxically, dynastic politics
also has an inclusive effect. Specifically,
we found a high incidence of family
connections among MPs of some social
categories that struggle to find repre-
sentation in politics through normal
channels: women, Muslims, backward
castes and youth—none of whom have
reservation in parliament. In this
sense, dynastic ties in India appear to
perform a similar function to quotas for
members of under-represented social
groups.
This does not mean that dynastic
politics is a normatively desirable chan-
nel to bring about political inclusion.
But in an unequal polity, in which there
are already high barriers to the entry of
new groups into politics, dynasticism
has become an informal, second-best
means of overcoming some of them.
To examine this, we compared the
re-election rates of dynastic MPs and
non-dynastic MPs from the same social
THE CARAVAN
In an unequal polity, in
which there are high
barriers to the entry of
new groups into politics,
dynasticism has become
an informal, second-best
means of overcoming some
of them.
ww
groups. The lower down we went on
the socio-economic ladder, the more
dynastic ties made a difference in re-
election. In the 2009 parliamentary
elections, for example, dynastic MPs
from forward castes were 1.3 times as
likely to get re-elected as non-dynastic
MPs from the same category. But dy-
nastic MPs from backward castes were
almost twice as likely to get re-elected
as non-dynastic backward-caste MPs.
Dynastic MPs from scheduled castes,
and Muslim ones, also had a greater
edge in re-election than dynastic MPs
from forward castes. In the 2014 polls,
re-election rates for all MPs dropped
significantly compared to 2009, and
dynastic MPs did not have an edge.
But dynastic MPs from most subaltern
groups were still slightly more likely to
be re-elected than dynastic MPs from
forward castes.
This suggests that dynastic ties
matter more for subaltern rather than
privileged groups, because they have
less to work with. For forward-caste
candidates, family ties are simply one
among the portfolio of resources that
can give a candidate an edge in winning
elections in India. They also possess a
greater share of other resources, includ-
ing wealth, education, and powerful
positions in the factional structures of
India’s largest political parties. For sub-
altern candidates, however—who are,
on average, less wealthy or well educat-
ed, who occupy subordinate positions
in these factional structures, and whose
own parties are weaker and smaller—
family ties can make a larger difference.
But for dynastic ties, there may well
have been even fewer subaltern MPs in
parliament. In an unequal society, then,
not having dynastic ties can itself serve
as a form of inequality. s
perspectives
A Rock and a Hard Place
India’s myopic approach to recovering
the Kohinoor / Law
/ prashant reddy thikkavarapu
On 18 April, the Supreme Court heard
a Public Interest Litigation seeking the
restitution to India of, among other cul-
tural artefacts, the Kohinoor diamond,
which is currently part of the British
crown jewels. Arguing on behalf of
the Indian government against any
official action, Ranjit Kumar, the solici-
tor general, told the court, “Kohinoor
cannot be said to be forcibly taken or
stolen as it was given by the successors
of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to East India
Company in 1849 as compensation for
helping them in the Sikh wars.” This
caught many by surprise. Though the
government had not actively pursued
the return of the diamond in recent
years, it had consistently asserted In-
dia’s claim to the gem since very shortly
after Independence. Kumar’s position
was lambasted by the media, which
took it as an Indian surrender.
The next day, the government de-
clared “its resolve to make all possible
efforts to bring back the Kohinoor dia-
mond in an amicable manner.” On 23
July, it convened a meeting to discuss
potential strategies, which involved the
ministers of both foreign affairs and
culture. Among the options reportedly
considered was a treaty with the United
Kingdom to give up Indian claims to all
other artefacts misappropriated by the
British in exchange for the return of
the Kohinoor.
This was a startling proposition. Un-
like the Kohinoor, which is just a rock,
several of these other artefacts are
pieces of exceptional workmanship.
Take the Amaravati Marbles, a collec-
tion of 120 Buddhist sculptures and
inscriptions displayed in the British
Museum. These were part of a ruined
stupa dating back to the second century
BCE in what is now Andhra Pradesh,
and were excavated and shipped to
Britain in the nineteenth century.
Recently, the government of Andhra
Pradesh has sought their restitution.
28
And these marbles are only a small part
of the British Museum’s extensive col-
lection of objects taken from India dur-
ing colonial rule. Elsewhere, there is
also Tipu’s Tiger. This mechanical toy,
commissioned by the eighteenth-cen-
tury monarch Tipu Sultan, is currently
one of the more popular exhibits at the
Victoria and Albert Museum—which
also holds a large number of looted
Indian artefacts. Unfortunately, most
Indians place little value in the return
of these objects, if they are aware of
them at all.
That the government would even
consider giving up other artefacts for
the Kohinoor reveals the poverty of
India’s approach to seeking the restitu-
tion of its cultural artefacts—particu-
larly from the United Kingdom, which
has long remained an outlier in the
international framework on the trade
and protection of cultural artefacts.
But even such a craven offer is unlikely
to yield any results with the United
Kingdom, which has consistently main-
If India is to recover the
Kohinoor or anything
else, it needs a long-term
diplomatic strategy that
expressly links demands
for restitution to the
immorality of colonialism.
ww
tained that India has no legal grounds
for the restitution of artefacts that
came into British possession under co-
lonial rule. In light of this, if India is to
recover the Kohinoor or anything else,
what the country needs is not a quick
compromise of the kind the govern-
ment considered, but rather a long-term
diplomatic strategy that expressly links
demands for restitution to the immo-
rality of colonialism. Building such a
strategy is no easy task, and in order
to understand the complexity of the
THE CARAVAN
Indian position, it is necessary to first
understand the international law on
cultural restitution.
Since time immemorial, conquerors
have seized artefacts from subjugated
peoples with impunity, whether out
of greed or a desire to make apparent
their control. But the Second World
War changed the rules of the game.
Adolf Hitler and his minister Hermann
Goering organised the systematic
plunder of artwork throughout terri-
tories under German occupation, in-
cluding from famous French museums
(which themselves contain art looted
by Napoleon) and from Jewish fami-
lies. Many of these objects made it to
German museums, or into the personal
collections of Nazi leaders such as
Goering. In 1943, even before the war
ended, the Allies, including the United
Kingdom, issued the Inter-Allied Dec-
laration against Acts of Dispossession
committed in Territories under Enemy
Occupation and Control, also known
as the London Declaration. This stated
that the Allies could declare invalid
all transfers of property, including of
artwork, executed by the Axis powers
in occupied territories. The declara-
tion covered even “those transactions
apparently legal in form, even when
they purport to be voluntarily ef-
fected”—that is, even in cases where
art was supposedly sold voluntarily by
the owner, it would be presumed that
the sale occurred under duress. During
the war, the Allies constituted a spe-
cial unit, nicknamed the Monuments
Men, to retrieve stolen art; and, after
the war ended, Germany was forced
to return the cultural property it had
looted. The international acceptance
that the German plunder was illegal
has helped Jewish families reclaim
art even many decades after the war
ended. In 2006, the ‘Portrait of Adele
Bloch-Bauer I,’ by the Austrian painter
Gustav Klimt, was returned to a de-
scendant of the family that owned the
painting before the Nazis stole it, fol-
 perspectives

all images courtesy donald heald rare books

above and right: The Amaravati Marbles,

removed from India under colonial rule, are
among the hundreds of misappropriated Indian
artefacts that remain in British possession.

SEPTEMBER 2016 29
a rock and a hard place · perspectives
lowing a long legal battle in the United
States and Austria.
In the years after the Second World
War, the newly created United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation, or UNESCO, spear-
headed the creation of the Convention
on the Protection of Cultural Property
in the Event of Armed Conflict, which
was signed by 49 countries at The
Hague in 1954. This treaty created a
legal framework that recognised the
importance of cultural property, and
required its signatories to protect
cultural property from destruction
during armed conflict. The United
Kingdom signed the convention, but,
crucially, did not sign its First Proto-
col. Scholars have speculated that the
country’s specific concern was a clause
stating that cultural property “shall
never be retained as war reparations,”
and that such property would be re-
turned to competent authorities in
its country of origin after a cessation
of hostilities. The British were likely
worried that agreeing to this would
open the door for its former colonies
to reclaim cultural artefacts, reason-
ing that their independence struggles
were wars of liberation against colo-
nial rule, and could be equated, for
instance, to resistance to German
occupation during the Second World
War. This obligation under the First
Protocol, however, was no different to
the one imposed by the London Decla-
ration of 1943—an instrument that the
British did sign.
Another international treaty pertain-
ing to cultural property is the UNESCO
Convention on the Means of Prohibit-
ing and Preventing the Illicit Import,
Export and Transfer of Ownership of
Cultural Property. This focusses on
preventing international commerce
in cultural artefacts that have been
stolen rather than seized during war,
and came into force on 24 April 1972,
with clear conditions that it applies
only to objects stolen after that date.
The record of the negotiations for the
treaty show that China had demanded
that it also deal with earlier cases, but
UNESCO rebuffed it by stating that
its treaties normally do not apply ret-
rospectively, and that countries could
reach bilateral agreements to handle
30
older thefts. The United Kingdom only
signed this convention in 2002.
India cannot press any claim to res-
titution against the United Kingdom
under either the 1954 convention or
the 1972 one. But though these instru-
ments leave India without a basis for
legal action, they offer the foundation
for a strong moral claim. Both of them,
and also the London Declaration, con-
cede the principle that cultural arte-
facts removed from a country or taken
from their owners under coercive
circumstances should be returned by
those who now hold them. What they
fail to do is to treat colonialism as an
illegitimate political project, the same
as any act of territorial aggression. In-
dia must act specifically to change that
skewed standard, on the part of the
United Kingdom and of the West more
generally.
There are plenty of examples of how
the legal basis for cultural restitution,
or the lack of it, depends on govern-
ments’ moral positions regarding the
circumstances under which the arte-
facts in question were taken. Consider,
for instance, that Jewish claims to
artwork looted by Nazi Germany have
been met with deserved sympathy in
the West, while those by former colo-
nies seeking the return of objects taken
from them by the West have not. Many
governments recognise how claims of
cultural restitution must necessarily
draw power from an acknowledgement
of the wrongs of colonialism. Between
1972 and 1977, the UN general assembly
passed multiple resolutions on the issue
of restitution. Resolution 3187, passed
in 1973, “recalls” an earlier resolution,
the Declaration on the Granting of In-
dependence to Colonial Countries and
Peoples, while affirming the need for
“prompt restitution to a country of its
objets d’art by another country,” and the
“special obligation in this connexion
of those countries which had access to
such valuable objects only as a result of
colonial or foreign occupation.” When
the assembly passed the Declaration
on the Granting of Independence to
Colonial Countries and Peoples, in
1960, several colonial powers, includ-
ing the UK, abstained from the vote.
On Resolution 3187, the UK once again
abstained.
THE CARAVAN
None of these apologies
were won overnight. Each
was the result of sustained
political and diplomatic
campaigns.
ww
Getting the UK to acknowledge the
illegitimacy of colonial rule will be dif-
ficult, but it is not impossible. Other
countries have already achieved land-
marks in that project. In 1997, the Brit-
ish prime minister apologised for the
Great Famine in Ireland under British
rule in the mid 1800s. In 2004, the UK
parliament enacted the Human Tis-
sue Act, allowing the return of human
remains displayed in British museum
to their native communities. One of the
groups behind this was the Tasmanian
Aboriginal Centre, an Australian or-
ganisation that had been demanding
the return of the remains of 17 Tasma-
nian Aborigines. In 2013, the British
government apologised to Kenyans who
suffered torture and abuse during its
suppression of a rebellion in the 1950s.
None of these apologies were won
overnight. Each was the result of
sustained political and diplomatic
campaigns. India’s pursuit of redressal
for colonial wrongs requires such cam-
paigns too, yet neither the government
nor civil society has pushed to make
this a significant foreign-policy goal.
India hasn’t even bothered to seek of-
ficial apologies for specific atrocities
such as the Bengal famine of 1943,
which killed an estimated 3 million
people. Private groups have pursued
apologies for the Jallianwala Bagh
massacre of 1919, but the UK has re-
fused them.
In the recent fracas surrounding the
Kohinoor, too, neither public commen-
tators nor the government proposed
any long-term approach to eroding the
UK’s resistance to addressing the injus-
tices of the colonial era. Yet that is an
essential step in laying the ground for
the restitution of misappropriated arte-
facts. The government might consider
an immediate return of the Kohinoor in
exchange for giving up all other Indian
artefacts in the UK a victory, but in fact
that would be a ringing defeat. It should
not entertain any such deals. s
reportage
{ONE}
the results of the 2014 Maharashtra election
were announced on 19 October of that year. The
vote, alongside another in Haryana, was part of
the first round of state elections since Narendra
Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party to a resound-
ing victory in the national election five months
earlier. With momentum behind it, the BJP won
122 of the 288 seats in the Maharashtra legislative
assembly, more than doubling its previous total.
The Indian National Congress, in keeping with
its countrywide decline, won only 42 seats—half
of what it previously held. The Shiv Sena, earlier
the BJP’s partner in the state, registered a modest
gain, securing 63 seats; and the National Con-
gress Party, earlier partnered with the Congress,
registered a modest loss, keeping 41. These par-
ties’ fortunes received, expectedly, a great deal of
public attention.
There was another party that got a lot of at-
tention too—and largely out of the blue. The All
India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, a virtual
unknown in Maharashtra, won two seats—one in
the heart of Mumbai, and the other in the district
of Aurangabad—outperforming even the regional
chauvinist Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, which
won only one. AIMIM candidates were also
runners-up in three other constituencies, and
came third in eight. The party contested 24 seats
in all, making its first big foray outside its strong-
hold in Hyderabad, in Telangana. At the time,
the AIMIM had just retained seven legislative
assembly seats from the city, and had a large pres-
ence in the Hyderabad municipal corporation. But
The
S e e ke r
32 THE CARAVAN
that, excepting a smattering of seats in other local
bodies, primarily in Telangana and Maharashtra,
was as far as its power went.
The AIMIM—the acronym is sometimes trun-
cated to MIM—received more scrutiny than per-
haps any other party has in recent times for win-
ning just two seats in a state election. The reason
for this was clear. The AIMIM is, unabashedly and
controversially, a Muslim party, and no Muslim
party had shown any sign of pan-Indian appeal
since the Muslim League in the days before Parti-
tion. The question on many minds—in some mo-
tivated by hope, in others by alarm—was whether
the AIMIM could unite India’s 172-million-strong
but politically scattered Muslim population, and
whether the party’s leader, Asaduddin Owaisi,
could become a national Muslim champion.
late on the sunday morning of 1 November 2015,
I stood outside Asaduddin’s room at a modest hotel
in the district of Kishanganj, in the north-east
corner of Bihar. The state was several weeks into a
legislative assembly election, and its fifth and final
phase of voting, which would include Kishanganj
and the three neighbouring districts of Araria,
Katihar and Purnea, was just days away. Together,
the four districts, wedged between Bangladesh
and Nepal, form the region of Seemanchal—one of
the poorest areas in all of India. Muslims comprise
roughly a sixth of the electorate in Bihar, and in
Seemanchal that proportion goes up to roughly
half. This was the AIMIM’s next testing ground,
and it was vying for six seats in the region.
pti
 reportage

Asaduddin Owaisi’s ambition to unite

India’s fractured Muslim electorate
COVer STOrY / POLITICS
NEYAZ FAROOQUEE

SEPTEMBER 2016 33
the seeker · reportage
“It is our tradition that we respect our
guests,” the announcer said. “We helped
elect Syed Shahabuddin. We helped elect
MJ Akbar. And, by mistake, we once even
elected Shahnawaz Hussain.”
I had shown up uninvited. Through one of his
media managers, Asaduddin had politely turned
down my requests to interview him and follow
him as he campaigned. I introduced myself to one
of his staff, and tried to convince him to let me
have a seat in a convoy preparing to ferry Asadud-
din to a series of rallies.
At about 11 am—late by rural standards, but not
by those of Asaduddin’s largely Hyderabadi entou-
rage—he emerged from his room, surrounded by
people. He was dressed as he always is in public:
in a stern sherwani and a skullcap, with a neat
beard and rectangular glasses. He overheard me,
and turned to give me a brief, inscrutable glance
on his march down the stairs and into one of the
waiting vehicles. In a moment, the car raced away
towards the noise and chaos of Kishanganj town,
the district headquarters.
Asaduddin’s staff raced to catch up. All the
vehicles were full, but after some wrangling and
a few phone calls to Hyderabadi acquaintances,
I managed to secure a cramped spot. We crossed
Kishanganj town to emerge onto a newly, and
barely, paved highway headed south, towards
West Bengal. The way was lined intermittently
with frail huts and half-built concrete houses—
testament both to Seemanchal’s enduring poverty
and gradual, recent progress.
A swarm of young men in party-issued green
caps accompanied the convoy on motorbikes,
shouting slogans and waving the party flag:
seven stars and a crescent moon in white on a
green background, with the party’s name in Urdu
and its initials in Roman script. One motorbike
sported a large board on its side. On one face, it
promised voters “Financial development. Health
service. Education.” On the other, it had almost
life-size portraits of Asaduddin and his brother,
Akbaruddin—the party’s number two. Pictured
beside Asaduddin, Akbaruddin stood glaringly
clean shaven, with his head uncovered. At a rally
in Kishanganj in early October, he had called
Modi a devil and a tyrant. An arrest warrant was
issued for him on charges of hate speech, and he
had stayed away from Bihar since. The portraits
were a reminder of how, in appearance and
demeanor, Akbaruddin serves as a foil to his ap-
parently more pious and measured brother; and of
how, even in his absence, Akbaruddin’s firebrand
34 THE CARAVAN
ways provide a constant undertone to the politics
of the AIMIM.
After driving for about half an hour, we pulled
in at a two-storey government middle school.
About a thousand people huddled in what shade
they could find in the grounds—under trees or a
tarpaulin, or on the school veranda. The veranda
wall was painted with quotes and poetry, and I
noticed an Urdu couplet from the poet and phi-
losopher Iqbal:
Sabaq fir padh sadaqat ka, shujaat ka, adaalat ka,
Liya jayega tujhse kaam duniya ki imamat ka
(Read again the lessons of truth, of valour, of
justice,
As you will be given the responsibility of leading
the world)
Asaduddin sat on a dais, next to several local
leaders. Each took a turn to address the crowd
and introduce their guest. Over loudspeakers,
they blared out superlatives—“the lion-hearted
leader,” “the frank and fearless,” “the messiah of
the oppressed,” “the upholder of the constitution.”
Young men crowded in close and cheered, excited
to see Asaduddin in the flesh after having heard
him online. One of them showed me a video on his
phone, of pictures and footage of the Owaisi broth-
ers set to a Bollywood soundtrack. Older listeners
stood farther from the stage, squinting ahead and
seeming circumspect.
Finally, the announcer invited Asaduddin to
speak. “It is our tradition that we respect our
guests,” he reminded the audience. “We helped
elect Syed Shahabuddin”—a former diplomat
and a vocal defender of Muslim rights, who won
several Lok Sabha terms from this area between
the late 1970s and early 1990s. “We helped elect
MJ Akbar”—a journalist turned politician, now in
the Rajya Sabha, who won here with the Con-
gress in 1989, quit the party, and joined the BJP
in 2014. “And, by mistake, we once even elected
Shahnawaz Hussain”—a BJP politician now
serving as the party’s spokesperson, whom local
voters supported in 1999, and rejected in 2004.
The crowd laughed. As the announcer reminded
them, all of these three had relied on Seeman-
chal’s Muslims to launch or revive their political
careers, but had done little afterwards to repay
them.
Asaduddin rose up and approached the front
of the stage. He stood over six feet tall, and had
to adjust the microphone to his height. He began
gently, offering salaams and thanks, then changed
his tone and tempo. “You have voted for these
parties”—the Congress, and Bihar’s major state
parties, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata

pti
Dal (United)—“for 50 years,” he said. “What did
Seemanchal get?” The crowd remained silent.
“This is being done in a planned manner,” Asadud-
din roared. “There is no one in the Bihar assembly
who can raise our concerns.”
He talked about the oft-repeated claim by
the BJP, and by its parent outfit, the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, that this region was being
overrun by illegal Bangladeshi migrants—a claim
used to cast doubt on the national allegiance of all
local Muslims and stoke communal polarisation.
“We have lived here for 1,200 years,” Asaduddin
said. “We don’t need a certificate of loyalty. … We
are born here, and when we die our graves will be
witness to our loyalty.”
A few days earlier, Amit Shah, the BJP’s presi-
dent and the head of its campaign in Bihar, had
told a crowd that if his party lost in the state, there
would be celebrations in Pakistan. “Arre, Amit
Shah, what has happened to your brain?” Asadud-
din said. “What do we have to do with Pakistan?
Elections are happening in Bihar, not some state in
Pakistan.” The crowd loved the jibe.
Next, Asaduddin brought up Narendra Modi’s
recent assertion that the incumbent Bihar gov-
ernment wanted to take away educational and
employment opportunities reserved for other
disadvantaged groups and transfer them to “a
particular community”—Muslims. “India’s PM
threatens that reservations would be removed,”
Asaduddin said. “Aey, Modi, it is our constitutional
the seeker · reportage
previous page:
When Asaduddin
Owaisi’s AIMIM won
two assembly seats
in Maharashtra in
late 2014, many
wondered if it
might become
the first Muslim
party with national
appeal since
Indepedence.
left: The BJP, in
search of a Muslim
antagonist, uses
Asaduddin as
a convenient
punching bag. The
party’s president,
Amit Shah, told
voters in Bihar that
Asaduddin was his
real opposition in
the state.
right. The constitution guarantees it to Dalits and
other backward groups.”
Asaduddin went on for about 40 minutes, and
then rushed, after a quick stop at a local mosque
for prayer, to his next rally. Campaigning was to
end soon, and the pressure was on to address as
many voters as possible. Through the afternoon
and into the evening, he moved from place to
place, repeating, more or less, his speech from
the school. In two places, Dalit leaders shared
the stage and addressed the crowd, and spoke
of Dalit-Muslim unity. The AIMIM had nomi-
nated a Dalit in one of the constituencies it was
contesting.
By the end of the evening, Asaduddin was ad-
dressing his fifth and last rally of the day, in the
glare of flourescent lights set up to dispel the
surrounding darkness. Reactions to Asaduddin’s
speeches through the day had been reserved,
except among some enthusiastic youngsters. My
conversations with those who came out to hear
him confirmed what many already knew: that
the Grand Alliance, which brought together the
Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Janata Dal (United),
had mustered enormous popular support, includ-
ing among Muslims in Seemanchal. One common
question I heard was what the AIMIM, even if it
won all six of the seats it was contesting, could
really do in the state assembly with just a hand-
ful of representatives. Many were saying that the
party stood some chance in just a single constitu-
SEPTEMBER 2016 35
the seeker · reportage
below: Asaduddin ency—Kochadhaman, where it had fielded its state
consistently thrusts president, Akhtarul Iman.
himself into the It seemed Asaduddin had also resigned himself
limelight in matters
to this. He made a pitch for that one possible seat.
of importance
to Muslims, and “People say, what will one do?” he asked. “It was
to the Indian One who created the world. It was One whose
mainstream’s view followers we all are. Everything will fall in place
of them. When beginning from one, Inshallah.” He ended with an
a Muslim man appeal for mutabadil—change.
was lynched in
The mutabadil never came. The Grand Alliance
Uttar Pradesh last
September on the secured a massive majority, to the embarrass-
suspicion of eating ment of the BJP. The AIMIM did not win a single
beef, Asaduddin seat. Even in Kochadhaman, where it had its best
was among the first showing, Akhtarul Iman fell short of the winning
politicians to visit candidate’s nearly 56,000 votes by almost 20,000.
the victim’s family.
{TWO}
after partition, those Muslims who chose to stay
in India were left leaderless. The Muslim League,
under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, never had univer-
sal Muslim support, but was still the only Muslim
party with a national base in British India. At
Independence, the Muslim League moved to Pa-
kistan, taking its most prominent figures with it.
With no real alternative available, Indian Muslims
turned to the Congress.
The Congress did boast some credible Muslim
leaders, most notably the independence hero Abul
Kalam Azad. Azad was vocal on Muslim issues,
but had strong differences with more powerful
leaders in the party, such as Vallabhbhai Patel, and
was gradually sidelined.
36 THE CARAVAN
Azad died in 1958, and was followed in 1964 by
Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru’s departure marked a
generational change in the Congress’s leadership,
but even after his daughter, Indira Gandhi, took
over, no strong Muslim leaders emerged, although
Muslims largely continued to vote for the party.
The backlash against Gandhi after she imposed
the Emergency in 1975 opened the door to Muslim
organisation outside Congress control. As the
popular vote shifted strongly away from the Con-
gress, the Muslim vote did too, and many Muslim
politicians joined the opposition, under the Janata
Party. One of them was Syed Shahabuddin.
Shahabuddin inspired tremendous enthusiasm
among Muslims well beyond his constituency. His
star rose particularly high after the controversial
Shah Bano case, when he spoke out against a 1985
Supreme Court judgment that required a Muslim
man to pay alimony to his divorced wife, which
many took as an affront to Muslim personal law.
He took a strong stand on another major issue of
Muslim politics in the 1980s too—the Ram Janma-
bhoomi movement, spearheaded by the RSS and
the BJP, to demolish the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya
on the belief that it stood on the birthplace of the
Hindu deity Ram. In 1986, Shahabuddin opposed
a district-court decision that, with the backing of
the ruling Congress, allowed Hindus to worship in
the mosque. By now, he was being viewed as a man
capable of uniting the national Muslim electorate.
To resist the Ram Janmabhoomi movement,
Shahabuddin formed and led the Babri Masjid
burhaan kinu / hindustan times / getty images

Asaduddin spoke in chaste Urdu sprinkled with
religious references, dressed and groomed to
display his piety, with no attempt to play down his
identity as a Muslim.
Movement Coordination Committee,
which brought together Muslim leaders
from across the country. But, following
disagreements over how to respond to
the decision to allow Hindu worship in
the mosque, the committee split, and a
rival group called the Babri Masjid Ac-
tion Committee was formed. With vari-
ous Muslim groups backing one side or
another, Muslim opinion split too. In
1992, Hindutva activists demolished
the mosque. Shahabuddin continued in
politics for some years, but never recov-
ered his earlier stature.
Meanwhile, the rise of regional par-
ties and continued disaffection with
the Congress shifted the allegiances of
many Muslim voters. In some places,
such as Hyderabad and Kerala, they
found specifically Muslim parties to
represent them. Elsewhere, as in Ut-
tar Pradesh and Bihar, they looked to
formations such as the Janata parties,
which emerged from the resistance to
the Emergency. The Congress contin-
ued to field some Muslim faces, but
these tended to be chosen by the party’s
high command and lacked broad appeal.
Through the early part of the 2000s,
Muslim parties continued to emerge—
the All India United Democratic Front
in Assam, and smaller outfits such
as the Peace Party of India in Uttar
Pradesh. But still, no party or person
managed to consolidate the Muslim
vote beyond isolated pockets. Kashmiri
parties, locked in their own complex
politics, have never operated on the
Indian mainland. The Indian Union
Muslim League, founded in 1948, re-
tains a bastion in north Kerala, and the
AIUDF has established a firm foothold
in Assam. Only the AIMIM has made a
concerted effort to reach out beyond its
home base.
The prize the party is aiming for is
tempting. Muslims account for 14.2
percent of the Indian population as per
the last census, from 2011. For context,
consider that the BJP won the 2014
general election with 31.3 percent of the
popular vote, and the Congress won in
2009 with 28.6 percent. Muslims also
comprise large parts of the popula-
tion in several highly populous, and so
politically crucial, states—16.9 percent
in Bihar, 19.3 percent in Uttar Pradesh,
34.2 percent in Assam, 27 percent in
West Bengal and 11.5 percent in Maha-
rashtra. Any party that could win even
roughly corresponding vote shares in
each place would have a great say in
these states’ and the country’s politics,
particularly when it comes to forming,
or undermining, coalition governments.
Asaduddin’s Bihar campaign might
have come to nothing, but it played on
a host of themes that speak to Indian
Muslims today no matter where they
live. He tapped into Muslim frustration
at being left behind by India’s economic
growth in the last decades—something
confirmed by the Sachar Committee,
constituted by a Congress-led gov-
ernment in 2005, which found large
inequalities in education, employment
and earnings between Indian Muslims
and other demographic groups. He
played up resentment against parties
and politicians that had won Muslim
backing in the past but failed to deliver
on promises of uplift for the commu-
nity. He spoke of Muslims asserting
their constitutional rights—a departure
from the language of victimisation that
defined much of Muslim politics during
the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and
through the end of the last century. He
cultivated a partnership with Dalits,
who also feel hard done by India’s
present political establishment. He
displayed his willingness to take on the
BJP and other Hindutva organisations,
countering their persistent questioning
of Muslim loyalties with assertions of
the community’s patriotism. And he did
it all in chaste Urdu sprinkled with reli-
gious references, dressed and groomed
to display his piety, with no attempt to
play down his identity as a Muslim.
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
All of these themes form a founda-
tion for an aspiring Muslim mass leader
to work from. Asaduddin also has the
advantage of fluent English, from his
days studying law in the United King-
dom. This adds to his appeal among
young Muslims, who often see him as
a symbol of their own aspirations, and
allows him visibility in the influen-
tial English-language national media,
particularly its prime-time talk shows.
He has added to this by consistently
thrusting himself into the limelight in
matters of importance to Muslims, and
also to the Indian mainstream’s view
of them. For instance, when a Mus-
lim man was lynched near the Uttar
Pradesh town of Dadri last September
on the suspicion of eating beef, Asadud-
din was among the first politicians to
visit the victim’s family and denounce
Modi’s silence on the incident. In 2013,
he accepted an invitation to Pakistan—a
tricky proposition for any Indian Mus-
lim leader, and particularly so for one
from Hyderabad—to appear on a televi-
sion panel alongside representatives
from the Congress and the BJP. When
challenged on the position of Muslims
in India, Asaduddin told his Pakistani
interrogators, “You stop worrying
about Indian Muslims, they decided
60 years ago that India is their nation.”
He also defended India’s constitutional
order, reminding the audience that
“our preamble is secular” and that “we
all abide by our constitution.” Back in
India, footage of the event went viral.
His projection is also helped by the
fact that other parties have sometimes
used him as a convenient punching bag
in promoting their own politics. During
campaigning in Bihar, for instance,
Amit Shah, in search of a Muslim vil-
lain, proclaimed that his real opposi-
tion was not Lalu Prasad Yadav of the
Grand Alliance, but Asaduddin. And
the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh
alleged that Asaduddin was colluding
with the BJP to siphon away Muslim
votes from other parties.
But Asaduddin’s style of politics also
places him in a fraught position. To
remain viable and visible as a politi-
cal leader on the national stage while
retaining credibility among Muslims,
he must walk a fine line between the
Indian establishment and Muslim vot-
37
 the seeker · reportage

unfurl the Indian tricolour there instead of the

Pakistani flag.”
Such views have not won Asaduddin many
friends among Kashmiri Muslims, but they are not
his target voters. Past his occasional pronounce-
ments, he has kept the issue of Kashmir at a dis-
tance—much as Muslims on the Indian mainland
now do, by and large separating their politics from
those of Kashmiris.
How far a Muslim leader in the mould of Asa-
duddin can go—or, for that matter, a Muslim party
in the mould of the AIMIM—is unclear. Any vic-
tory for the party in Bihar would have been largely
symbolic, but, as with its limited but eye-catching
success in Maharashtra, its value would still have
been immense. The lack of anything to show for its
campaign in that election cooled the buzz of the
party possibly gaining national status. Earlier this
year, the AIMIM faltered again, when it contested
and lost two seats in the Tamil Nadu election.
Since 1984, the party has held just a solitary Lok
Sabha seat, from Hyderabad—occupied by Asadud-
din’s father until 2004, and now by Asaduddin
himself—despite efforts to contest more constitu-
encies in recent general elections.
There also remains the question of just what
kind of politics the AIMIM would practise on
the national level if it ever did gain greater sway.
Its approach to power in Maharashtra is a test of
bettman / getty images

if and how it can translate what it professes into

action, but its tenure there is still too short to offer
real insight. The best place to look for answers
is the city that, over the last half-century, the
AIMIM has made its fortress: Hyderabad.

above: The ers. His constant defence of Muslim patriotism, {THREE}

freedom fighter for example, is a concession to the now deeply in- the majlis-e-ittehadul muslimeen was founded in
Abul Kalam Azad grained suspicion of Muslims in the Indian public 1926, in the princely state of Hyderabad, as a Mus-
was the Congress’s
mind. And it is hard to imagine the national me- lim organisation to support the Nizams, who ruled
most prominent
Muslim figure after dia allowing Asaduddin the airtime he currently the territory as vassals of the British. In the ap-
Independence, receives if his views on Kashmir were not, unlike proach to Independence, as religious polarisation
but had strong those of many Muslim leaders in the past, broadly increased across India, the MIM gravitated ever
differences with in line with the Indian nationalist insistence that more towards Muslim supremacism, and towards
more powerful the valley is an integral part of the country. Amid asserting itself in politics. A crucial figure in this
leaders in the party
the raging protests in Kashmir in 2010, Asadud- was Qasim Razvi, who first headed the MIM’s mi-
and was sidelined.
din said in parliament, “Kashmir is part of our litia, called the Razakars, and then the MIM itself.
opposite page: India. We love Kashmir, but why don’t we love the When the British left in 1947, the Nizam, with
The AIMIM’s Kasmiris?” He also travelled to Srinagar with a the MIM’s support, chose to defy the new Indian
precursor, the parliamentary delegation and met the separatist government’s attempts to incorporate Hyderabad
Majlis-e-Ittehadul
leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. “I disagree with into its territory. The Razakars went on a rampage
Muslimeen,
controlled the Geelani-ji on many issues,” he later told reporters. against those they saw as enemies—primarily
Razakars, who “We don’t believe in his idea of azadi for Kash- Hyderabad’s Hindu majority, but also communists
fought against mir.” This July, with Kashmir gripped by another and Muslims in favour of the merger—raping and
the integration of cycle of repression and defiance, he spoke in par- killing many thousands of people, and setting off
Hyderabad into liament against the excessive violence of Indian reprisal attacks.
independent India.
security forces, and added, “We all have to think The Indian government sent in its military,
about how can we remove the slogans of ‘Azadi’ under what was euphemistically called a “police
from the minds of Kashmiri youth, how we can action.” Now there were widespread reports of

38 THE CARAVAN

atrocities against Muslims by Indian
forces, and by Hindu groups too, but
these were largely suppressed. Abul
Kalam Azad tried to visit Hyderabad,
but was stopped by Vallabhbhai Patel,
then the minister of home affairs. The
Razakars were swiftly crushed, and
Razvi was imprisoned. A government
report later estimated that between
27,000 and 40,000 people lost their
lives in the violence. The MIM’s head-
quarters, Darussalam, was seized, and
later turned into a fire station.
MIM leaders were either packed
away to Pakistan or barred from public
life, and for about a decade the organi-
sation remained inactive. In 1957, Razvi
was released from jail and given just
two days to migrate to Pakistan. Before
he left, he called a meeting of the gov-
erning council of the MIM. With many
of its leaders already in Pakistan and
others scared to reassociate them-
selves with the controversial group,
only about a third of the old council
turned up. Razvi offered to hand the
leadership of the group over to anyone
willing to accept it, but, the story goes,
no one came forward. Finally, a young
barrister by the name of Abdul Wahid
Owaisi agreed to take it on. That man
was Asaduddin’s grandfather.
Abdul Wahid went about transform-
ing the MIM into a party geared to
the demands of electoral politics. He
jack birns / the life picture collection / getty images
renamed it the All India Majlis-e-
Ittehadul Muslimeen, and changed its
constitution, to now swear allegiance
not to the Nizams but to the Indian
republic.
But with the trauma of the preced-
ing decade still fresh, there was strong
resistance to the revival of the group.
Muslim leaders from the Congress, and
from other organisations across the
country, issued statements against the
AIMIM. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind
warned against associating with the
party, “lest there be dangerous conse-
quences to which the activities of such
organisations led in the past”—an obvi-
ous reference to the “police action.”
Abdul Wahid took to the streets,
speaking to crowds at chowks and
bazaars. Within months, in 1958, he
and three of his AIMIM fellows were
arrested, and he was charged with
hate speech. He remained in jail for
almost 11 months. After his release,
the AIMIM put forward candidates in
almost half of the 64 constituencies for
Hyderabad’s 1960 municipal corpora-
tion election. It won 19 of them—includ-
ing a constituency reserved for Dalits,
where the party fielded a candidate to
blunt charges that it was communal.
The AIMIM seemed to have arrived.
The Congress, the leading party of the
time, won only 33 seats in that vote. But
to counter its new rival, it suddenly and
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
controversially merged the municipali-
ties of Hyderabad and neighbouring
Secunderabad, where the AIMIM had
not fought the vote.
Elections followed in 1962, both for
the Lok Sabha and the state assembly.
Abdul Wahid decided that the party
would contest nine assembly seats, all
from Hyderabad, and that he would
fight for a Lok Sabha seat from the city
himself. The results were dishearten-
ing. Abdul Wahid lost, and only one
AIMIM candidate made it into the
assembly—Salahuddin Owaisi, Abdul
Wahid’s son (officially, he ran as an
independent candidate).
Meanwhile, there was speculation
that the AIMIM was being covertly
encouraged by the Congress, which had
ruled the state since its creation. At the
time, both parties had a common ad-
versary in the city—communists. A 1962
article in the communist weekly New
Age said, “a section of the Congress
leadership in (Hyderabad) City felt
that the Muslims were rallying behind
the Communist Party for a positive
economic programme and this could be
prevented if a Muslim organization like
the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen came onto
the scene.”
Abdul Wahid continued to groom
Salahuddin as his successor. In 1967,
the young scion was again elected to
the state assembly, this time from the
Charminar constituency in the centre
of old Hyderabad—which the party
has since come to consider its electoral
heart.
The AIMIM’s usefulness to the
Congress came to the fore in 1969,
when Andhra Pradesh was gripped by
a movement demanding that part of
its territory be ceded to create a new
state, Telangana. The state government
struggled to contain the unrest, and 369
people were killed by police fire. The
AIMIM backed the Congress and op-
posed the Telangana movement. It got
Darussalam back as a reward.
Through the 1970s, Andhra Pradesh’s
Congress rulers, lacking confidence in
their stature in Hyderabad, suspended
municipal polls. Still, the AIMIM kept
gaining strength there.
Abdul Wahid died in 1975. Salahud-
din took over the party, and quickly
imposed his own style of politics. He
39
the seeker · reportage
below: Abdul was more assertive than his father, and employed
Wahid Owaisi took a more provocative rhetoric, often accusing the
over what remained Indian state of abandoning Muslims.
of the MIM in
These were volatile times in Hyderabad. Com-
1957, renamed it,
and changed its munal tensions had remained high ever since
constitution to Independence, but now they became particularly
swear allegiance to aggravated. In 1978, a Muslim woman was alleg-
the Indian republic. edly raped, and her husband was killed, in police
custody. Salahuddin demanded an official inquiry,
opposite page: but the state’s chief minister refused. Muslims
Salahuddin Owaisi came out in protest, and a police station was burnt
took over the down. The entire episode earned Salahuddin and
AIMIM during a
the AIMIM greater visibility than ever before.
period of immense
communal hostility Through the following decade, Hyderabad
in Hyderabad. He witnessed what seemed to be at least one major
was first elected to communal clash every year. Often the spark came
the Lok Sabha in from religious celebrations, such as Hindu pro-
1984, an especially cessions for Ganesh Chaturthi, which were also
bloody year.
displays of communal strength. As a tit for tat, the
AIMIM encouraged showy celebrations of Muslim
holy days, and so fuelled a cycle of provocation and
retaliation.
Salahuddin’s reputation as a rabble-rouser
burgeoned. He was arrested multiple times on
charges of provoking violence, but was discharged
every time. It helped that the AIMIM had some
powerful friends. In a show of the strength of its
partnership with the Congress, in 1978 Indira
Gandhi visited Darussalam—and, the party folk-
lore has it, presented Salahuddin with a Quran.
In 1983, the newly founded Telugu Desam Party
defeated the Congress in the assembly elections—
cc by-sa 3.0
40 THE CARAVAN
a first in the history of Andhra Pradesh—and the
AIMIM supported the TDP’s leader, NT Rama
Rao, in his bid to become the state’s chief minis-
ter. As a reward, the Andhra Pradesh government
helped the AIMIM establish a party-affiliated
medical college in Hyderabad. This furthered
another plank of Salahuddin’s politics: he gave the
city numerous beneficial institutions, including a
cooperative bank and a polytechnic institute, and
spurred a rise in philanthropy.
Meanwhile, the communal clashes kept coming.
With the Ram Janmabhoomi movement growing,
1984 was especially bloody, with some 200 people
killed in the city. The Andhra Pradesh Civil Liber-
ties Committee, in a report released in December
that year, was clear as to whom it held responsible.
“The worst culprits in this regard are the MIM
and the BJP,” it wrote, “but they are by no means
the only culprit. Congress (I)”—Indira Gandhi’s
faction of the Congress—“and both the factions of
TDP have utlilised the opportunity for their own
ends. The leaders of these parties (particularly
MIM and BJP) make unbelievably provocative
speeches, full of lies and slander against the other
community, which have often directly resulted in
communal violence.”
That same year also saw a Lok Sabha election.
Salahuddin, who had remained in the state assem-
bly throughout, contested the Hyderabad con-
stituency, and was elected to the Lok Sabha. The
AIMIM has not relinquished that seat since.
In 1986, municipal polls returned, under court
orders to the state’s TDP government. The AIMIM
won the largest number of seats of any party, and,
over the next five years, appointed the city’s may-
ors. It has remained a major power in the munici-
pality ever since.
For a few years, the city had a respite from com-
munal bloodshed. But in 1990, with the country
in a ferment over the Babri Masjid controversy,
clashes erupted again. Several hundred people
were killed over multiple weeks, and the city was
regularly placed under curfew.
After the mosque was demolished in 1992, ten-
sions within the AIMIM over its position on the
Babri Masjid movement spilled out into public
view. In December that year, Mohammed Aman-
ullah Khan, the party’s leader in the Andhra
Pradesh assembly, accused Salahuddin of remain-
ing silent on the demolition—implying that he
had colluded with the Congress in allowing the
Ram Janmabhoomi movement to proceed. The
AIMIM had, in fact, been noticeably reluctant to
join protests against the mosque’s destruction,
even though Salahuddin was then the chairman
of the Babri Masjid Action Committee, the group
that had broken with Syed Shahabuddin. Salahud-
din had returned to Hyderabad from Delhi within

days of the demolition, and led a rally
from the airport in celebration of hav-
ing secured official recognition for the
party’s medical college. Amanullah
termed the recognition a reward for
Salahuddin’s silence.
Amanullah might have had ulterior
motives. He and Salahuddin both had
sons arriving at full adulthood, and a
showdown between their two families
over future control of the party seemed
inevitable. Still, the perception that
Salahuddin had betrayed the Muslim
community gained traction.
Salahuddin’s response was audacious.
He went to the Mecca Masjid—old Hy-
derabad’s iconic seventeenth-century
mosque—put a Quran on his head, and
swore in the name of Allah that he had
not collaborated with anyone to ignore
the Babri Masjid’s demolition. “If I have
done anything like this, then may I and
my progeny be ruined,” he declared.
“Otherwise, may Amanullah Khan and
his progeny be ruined.”
The dispute split the AIMIM, and
Amanullah formed a new party, the
Majlis Bachao Tehreek. After some
initial success, the MBT lost its sheen,
and last year it lost its last seat on the
Hyderabad municipal council. In the
city’s drawing rooms, people still talk
about Salahuddin’s curse.
asaduddin agreed to an interview on
the morning of 19 March, at Darus-
salam—the “abode of peace.” This is a
two-storey building all in white, in the
middle of a complex that houses several
of the AIMIM’s offshoots—colleges, a
medical centre, a newspaper. A covered,
colonnaded verandah opens out onto
a large ground in front of the building,
where party leaders often gather and
address their followers. Some young
men in colourful uniforms were using
it for a cricket match that day, and their
friends sat by the verandah, hooting.
The state assembly was in extended
session that Sunday, so the party’s sev-
en MLAs were not expected at Darus-
salam. But its 44 corporators were, and
they kept arriving, one by one, and tak-
ing their seats at their desks—the men
in a hall on one side of the verandah,
the women in another just opposite. A
board on one wall listed the names and
phone numbers of all AIMIM corpora-
tors, and the dates that each would be
available for public meetings. Fridays
are holidays, and everyone is expected
to be present on Sundays.
Asaduddin was a few minutes late.
He called me to apologise, and said that
he was on his way. I joined a crowd of
petitioners waiting on the verandah.
He arrived soon afterwards, accom-
panied by his four-year-old son—he
and his wife, Farheen, were married
in 1996, and also have five daughters.
Everyone stood up and shuffled out of
his way. As is customary in Hyderabad,
the men bowed quarter-way, and raised
their right palms close to their faces.
Asaduddin responded in kind.
He sat down at a bench behind a
cc by-sa 3.0
long desk near the back wall, and a
line formed before him. A student’s
scholarship funds from the government
had not reached his school. Asaduddin
asked his staff to call the school and
find out what was going on. A woman in
burqa complained, very quietly, that the
police were refusing to file an FIR, and
Asaduddin leaned in to hear her better.
He called the station in question to
make an appointment on her behalf.
After he had heard the crowd out,
Asaduddin asked me, and another
reporter whom he had invited that
morning, to follow him through a door
at the back of the verandah, into Darus-
salam’s main hall. Inside, white walls
rose up to a high ceiling, their tops
detailed with golden paint. A full-sized
portrait of Salahuddin greeted us as we
entered, and unlit chandeliers dangled
overhead. A clay tiger sat in one corner
in a frozen roar.
Asaduddin relaxed on a sofa. “These
are all Akbar’s choices,” he said, smil-
ing, as I surveyed the hall. “Chandelier
from some place, curtains from some
other place.” He asked his son, fid-
dling beside him, to greet me. The boy
bowed, and softly pronounced, “Sala-
malekum.”
Asaduddin, the oldest of Salahud-
din’s four children, was born in May
of 1969. He was followed a year later
by Akbaruddin, and later by another
brother, Burhanuddin, and a sister,
Amir Sultana. As children, Asaduddin
recalled, he and Akbaruddin would
accompany their father to rallies near
Hyderabad during summer vacations.
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
“But it didn’t last for more than two to
three days,” he said. “He knew as kids
our excitement would not last for long,
and we would get bored.”
By his telling, he first tried his hand
at public life early on. “I gave my first
speech at the age of ten,” he said, “in
Owaisipura”—a Hyderabad neighbour-
hood named after the Owaisi family.
“There was no one to speak, so I rose
up and spoke. But when my father got
to know about it, he got furious. He
told me to instead concentrate on my
studies.”
Asaduddin went on to join the pres-
tigious Nizam’s College, in Hyderabad,
where he indulged his love for cricket.
He was a good bowler, and once, he told
me, at an inter-university tournament,
even squared up against Venkatesh
Prasad, who went on to bowl for India at
the international level. He often bunked
lectures to play. “It was a BA without
going to classes,” he said. (Asaduddin’s
love of the game endures, and he often
tweets in support of the Indian cricket
team. An annual cricket tournament is
held in Hyderabad in his name.)
One of Asaduddin’s teammates at
college was CV Anand, now the police
commissioner of the Cyberabad area in
the south of the city. Anand, who was a
bowler himself, told me in mid March
that Asaduddin was “reasonably good
at it,” though he had a funny bowling
action. Just a few days before we met,
Anant said, he had hit a century in a
41
the seeker · reportage
right: Darussalam,
the AIMIM’s
headquarters, was
seized in 1948, and
returned some two
decades later to
reward the party for
standing with the
Congress against
the Telangana
movement.
police championship, and Asaduddin had called
him to joke that his juniors must have bowled him
lollypops—“Bhaaya, how did you hit a century
at this age? Did you put a gun to your juniors’
heads?”
Salahuddin wanted his son to study law. “For
some reason,” Asaduddin said, “he would always
say he wanted me to go to Lincoln’s Inn”—one of
the leading law colleges of the United Kingdom,
whose alumni include Margaret Thatcher and
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Asaduddin was packed off to
London in 1989—the same year Akbaruddin was
sent to Gulbarga, in Karnataka, to study medicine.
London was a world removed from Hyderabad.
Asaduddin relished his city’s famous food, but
London had nothing like it. He didn’t know how to
cook for himself, “not even omelettes.” His saviour
was a fellow law student named Abhishek, from
West Bengal.
Asaduddin struggled to find friends in London.
While there, he added with regret, he also became
a chain-smoker. (He has since quit.) Like many
other Indian students, he said, he worked part-
time at stores and restaurants to help pay his bills.
He once joined a McDonald’s on Oxford Street.
“On the very first day,” he said, “they asked me to
mop the toilet floor.”
Another of his enduring memories of London
was visiting Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park,
where the atmosphere of rebellion surprised him.
“They spoke openly against the queen,” he said. “I
couldn’t imagine doing that in India.”
42 THE CARAVAN
pti
In 1994, Asaduddin sat for his exams. With that
done, he decided to travel to Chicago. “I thought I
would flunk the bar, so I thought, let’s go on a trip
to the US,” he said. He called Abhishek in Lon-
don to check on the results when they came out.
Abhishek’s wife answered, and Asaduddin asked
if her husband had passed. He hadn’t, Asaduddin
recalled her saying, “but you have.”
Asaduddin called his father, who was ecstatic.
Salahuddin wanted to fight the jibe, popular
among Hyderabad’s intelligentsia, that the AIMIM
was “a party of rickshaw-pullers.” Asaduddin’s
foreign degree could be a big selling point. Though
it was 1.30 am in the city, the family began distrib-
uting sweets in celebration.
On his return home, Asaduddin was sent
straight into battle. He fought for the Charmi-
nar seat in the 1994 state assembly election, and
won it handsomely. But that was the only seat the
AIMIM won that year, losing three seats that it
previously held. Amanullah’s new MBT won two.
The MBT had become a headache for the
AIMIM. To hit back at it, the party turned to
another young Owaisi. Akbaruddin, who already
had a bad-boy reputation, never completed his
degree at Gulbarga, and had become estranged
from the family after marrying a Christian
woman. But now the Owaisis were reconciled,
and, in 1999, Akbaruddin stood against Amanullah
in Chandrayangutta, a constituency that the MBT
leader had won in the last four assembly elections.
Akbaruddin defeated him, and has not lost the seat

since. Asaduddin defended Charminar,
and two other AIMIM candidates were
elected too. The MBT faded away.
Asaduddin played a big part in the
AIMIM’s gains. With his mix of West-
ern education and display of religious
values, he proved very popular among
young Muslim voters, who swelled the
party’s cadre. He also tried to emulate
his father, who had a reputation for
rushing on a motorbike to the site of
any communal confrontation in his
younger days, without fear of reper-
cussions. In 1998, Asaduddin spent six
weeks in prison on charges of rioting
and looting—which a court eventually
dismissed, he told me, because police
documents claimed he was present at
five different places at the exact same
time.
One day in 1999, Asaduddin recalled,
he heard that “sanghis were pelting
stones and had eve-teased a few wom-
en” in the old city. He went straight
there. Tensions were high. The Andhra
Pradesh chief minister, N Chandrababu
Naidu of the TDP, had allied with the
BJP, and was bidding to be re-elected
in an upcoming assembly election. The
AIMIM, partnered with the Congress,
was campaigning against him. As
Asaduddin was leaving a meeting with
the allegedly molested women, a group
of men from a Special Task Force of the
state jumped him. “They beat me to the
ground,” Asaduddin told me. “I would
stand and drag myself away to escape.
It kept on going for about 40 yards.” He
heard one man say, “Aise nahi marta.
Goli maro ise.” (He won’t die this way.
Shoot him.)
To his luck, a sub-inspector and a ha-
waldar from the local police—“a Hindu
SI and a Muslim hawaldar,” Asaduddin
emphasised—came to his rescue. They
dragged him into their car, “but the
STF guys kept pounding.” Eventually,
he got away. The attack left him with
13 stitches and persistent back pain. “I
remember it well,” he said. “It was 22
September.”
A report on the incident in The Tel-
egraph read:
Eyewitnesses, including policemen,
said: It was not just a random beat-
ing. He was beaten clinically to cause
internal injuries. When they saw
Salahuddin wanted to fight the jibe, popular
among Hyderabad’s intelligentsia, that the
AIMIM was “a party of rickshaw-pullers.”
Asaduddin’s foreign degree could be a big selling
point.
there was no blood gushing out of his
injuries, one of the policemen beat
him on his forehead. They also tried
to scare him by firing a bullet on his
right shoulder.
Asaduddin was admitted to a hospi-
tal. His father arrived soon afterwards,
and then his wife, with their young
twin daughters. Salahuddin told her
that she could go home, that her hus-
band was fine and would be discharged
in two hours. Asaduddin didn’t know
how to react. “We exchanged glances,”
he said, “and I assured her I am all
okay.” She left, and Salahuddin did
too. “I could hardly turn, stand or sit,”
Asaduddin told me.
AIMIM supporters were calling for
a bandh the next day in protest, but
Salahuddin did not allow it. Asaduddin
remained in hospital for the night, and
the next morning got a call from his
father. “What are you doing there?” he
remembered being told. “Get out. The
party workers are demoralised.”
When Asaduddin left the hospital, he
asked his father why he hadn’t called
for a bandh. What if we call a bandh,
Salahuddin asked, and someone else
gets killed?
Asaduddin said his father had already
told him, “You have to leave your an-
grezpana”—your English ways. “There
is nothing called ‘my time.’ ‘I’ ends
here.” Now, he received another lesson
in fortitude and responsibility. “I knew
what Baba meant when he warned me
before I joined politics, but I didn’t
know it would be this difficult.”
In 2004, after four decades in
elected office, Salahuddin decided to
step down. Asaduddin contested the
Hyderabad Lok Sabha seat in his place.
He had spent a decade in the Andhra
Pradesh assembly by then, and had
experience to show, but he still lacked
the stature of his father, and needed to
shore up support. Asaduddin managed
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
to rally a large group of Hyderabadi
clerics from several denominations,
getting them to issue statements and
take out newspaper advertisements in
his support.
Asaduddin’s overt religiosity certain-
ly helped. He had cultivated it carefully,
both in his appearance and his habits.
The first thing he did when he came
home from London, for instance, was to
go to the Mecca Masjid to offer namaz.
But it had taken some time for him to
arrive at the kind of pluralist view of Is-
lam that could bring together a variety
of clerics behind him. The Owaisi fam-
ily, like most Hyderabadi Muslims, has
long followed local Sufi traditions. Two
close associates of Asaduddin from the
time he returned from London told me
they believed he had veered towards
a more literalist interpretation of the
Quran while he was abroad. Over time,
he returned to his family’s old beliefs
and practices.
Today, the AIMIM takes in a di-
versity of Muslim backgrounds and
orientations. Its MLAs include Sunnis
and Shias, and also a Barkas repre-
sentative, from a community brought to
Hyderabad from Yemen by the Nizams.
In his addresses, Asaduddin avoids
talking about Sunnis versus Shias, or of
any other divisions within the Muslim
community. In recent years, he has fol-
lowed Nu Ha Mim Keller, an American
Sufi preacher living in Jordan, whom
Asaduddin hosts in Hyderabad every
year.
With the clerics’ backing, Asadud-
din was elected to parliament. In the
concurrent state election, the AIMIM
retained its four seats in the Andhra
Pradesh assembly.
salahuddin died in 2008, at the age of
77. Another round of national and state
elections followed the next year, and
Asaduddin faced another test. With
his father gone, there were questions
43
the seeker · reportage
In 2012, Akbaruddin delivered a vicious
rant at a rally in Adilabad. “These people
have so many gods,” he said. “Ram, Laxman,
Durga, Laxmi … They have such strange
names. I don’t want to ruin this sacred
gathering by taking their names.”
over how many of the AIMIM’s old voters would
still stand by the party. And Asaduddin went up
against a more credible opponent that he had five
years earlier: Zahid Ali Khan, who enjoyed the
support of much of the city’s intelligentsia.
Zahid, the editor of the local Urdu paper Siasat,
was once an AIMIM loyalist, as was his father
before him. But in 2005, he and Asaduddin fell
out, for reasons that have never been fully clear,
and he joined the TDP. Zahid told me earlier this
year that he left after a disagreement over suspect
donations to the AIMIM’s medical college. But
controversy over such donations was nothing
new—Siasat itself ran a campaign in 1999 against
donations being made in exchange for admission
to the college.
After the split, Siasat published several allega-
tions of corruption in the AIMIM, and went after
Asaduddin personally. On one occasion, it claimed
he had never passed the bar in the United King-
dom. Asaduddin produced his academic papers,
and took Siasat to court.
In March 2007, as Zahid was being driven home
one evening, a young man on a motorbike knocked
on his car window. As he lowered it, an autorick-
shaw pulled up, and someone inside it drenched
him in sewage. In 2009, a group of men attacked
him and two Siasat reporters as they were leaving
a wedding.
Zahid pointed fingers at the AIMIM, and Asa-
duddin condemned these actions. But the attacks
on Zahid continued; he was pelted with stones
during the 2009 campaign. Asaduddin himself was
caught on camera around this time thrashing a
TDP worker with a stick, and booked for rioting. He
said that the man was involved in rigging the vote.
There was also another headache for the
AIMIM. Between 2004 and 2009, leftist parties
tried to re-establish themselves in Hyderabad,
decades after they had been frozen out. The
AIMIM did not tolerate their presence. “They
beat our workers,” M Srinivas, a local leader of
the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told me
in March. “They beat even our Rajya Sabha MP, P
Madhu.”
Asaduddin retained his Lok Sabha seat, with
a greater share of the vote than in 2004. The
44 THE CARAVAN
AIMIM won seven constituencies for the state
assembly. But though the challenge of Zahid had
been firmly rebuffed, the party was struggling
with its response to unprecedented events that
would raise questions over its credibility and con-
duct in the coming years.
On the third Friday of May in 2007, a bomb had
ripped through the Mecca Masjid near the end
of the noon prayer, killing 11 people and injuring
scores more. Demonstrations gathered, and police
were deployed across the city. By evening, they
had shot five demonstrators dead.
Television channels were soon reporting that
the blast was the work of Shahid Bilal, an op-
erative of a fundamentalist outfit working from
Bangladesh. Police claimed that the attack was the
result of hostility between rival Islamic schools of
thoughts, and the Andhra Pradesh home minister
said it could be the handiwork of foreign elements.
In the coming days, security forces raided several
locations, particularly in the old city, and detained
over 70 young Muslim men. Over the next few
weeks, 20 of them were formally arrested, and the
rest were released. Many Hyderabadis refused to
believe Muslims could have bombed the mosque,
and there were fears that confusion and rumours
could spark communal fighting. Asaduddin had
often questioned the arrests of Muslim youth on
suspicion of terrorist links, but here he repeated
the official line, telling the Hindustan Times in
September that he believed the attack was mas-
terminded by Shahid Bilal. (He later published
a rejoinder in Etamad, a newspaper run by his
brother Burhanuddin, claiming that his statement
had been distorted.)
As holes emerged in the initial official account
of the blast, Asaduddin changed tack, speaking in
the state assembly to demand the jailed men’s re-
lease. He and Akbaruddin also made public state-
ments to the same effect. But many in Hyderabad,
particularly young Muslims, were disappointed
that the AIMIM could not spur immediate gov-
ernment action.
The men were released on bail after one and a
half years, carrying with them stories of ille-
gal detention, torture and coerced confessions.
The AIMIM was quick to claim credit, but not
everyone was convinced. “They were nowhere,”
Lateef Mohammed Khan, the general secretary
of the Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee,
a Hyderabad-based human rights organisation
that campaigned for the men’s release, told me in
March. But “when it became clear that the youth
are being released, they appeared, flaunting the
bond money.” He also alleged that Asaduddin
had unnecessarily hurried up the burials of those
killed in the explosion. One of the arrested men
told me that his parents had visited Asaduddin

noah seelam / afp / getty images
above: The Mecca after he was arrested to ask for help, but were
Masjid bombing shrugged off.
was initially blamed In 2010, investigators linked the Mecca Masjid
on Islamists, and
bombing to Hindutva militants. The falsely ac-
scores of Muslims
were detained cused men received government compensation for
for alleged their ordeal—a first in all of India for a terror-
involvement in it. related faux pas by the police.
Investigators later But what some see as Asaduddin’s pussyfoot-
linked the attack to ing, others see as a desire to keep the peace. “He
Hindutva militants.
helps,” a senior police officer in Hyderabad told
me, asking to remain anonymous. “He helps
soothe tempers.” The officer recalled an instance
in the old city in the early 2000s, when a Ganesh
pandal collapsed and crushed a Muslim ragpicker
to death. If not handled carefully, the situation
could have set off communal rioting. Asaduddin,
he said, “helped bury the boy before dawn.”
But Asaduddin isn’t always so careful to play
down communal tension. On the night of 1 No-
vember 2012, talk spread that the caretakers of
the Bhagyalakshmi temple in old Hyderabad were
expanding it. The temple sits at one corner of the
Charminar, a sixteenth-century Muslim monu-
ment, and has been a cause of contention for years.
Some Hindus claim that it predates the Charmi-
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
nar, even though photos suggest it didn’t exist
until the 1960s. The temple’s caretakers claimed
that they were only decorating it for Diwali, but
the AIMIM claimed there was a plan to enlarge it
under the guidance of Andhra Pradesh’s Congress
chief minister, Nallari Kiran Kumar Reddy.
Akbaruddin and his MLAs organised a rally in
protest, and were detained. There was sporadic
violence across the city. Within days, the AIMIM
announced that it was withdrawing its support for
the Congress in the state and at the centre, ending
the two parties’ long association.
The Charminar dispute triggered the separa-
tion, but disagreements may have been brewing
behind the scenes for some time. In July, Akbarud-
din had written to Kiran Kumar Reddy to ask that
a plot of land be alloted to a party-affiliated edu-
cational trust. The following month, Asaduddin
repeated this request in a letter of his own. Also in
August, Burhanuddin wrote to the chief minister,
asking for land to be leased to his newspaper. And
in September, Akbaruddin wrote to ask that the
state government transfer to the AIMIM’s medical
college a plot of land leased to a charitable hospi-
tal. According to government records, the chief
minister directed government officials to look into
these requests and brief him. Eventually, the gov-
ernment turned the Owaisis’ appeals down.
“We are disappointed with the state govern-
ment’s inaction over several minority issues,”
Asaduddin told the media. “We will expose the
Congress government in Andhra Pradesh.” With
elections coming up in 2014, he suggested a new
alliance with the YSR Congress, led by the dis-
gruntled former Congressman YS Jaganmohan
Reddy. “Jagan Reddy is a friend,” he said. “Kiran
Kumar Reddy was a friend.”
More tumult followed. In late December 2012,
Akbaruddin delivered a vicious rant at a massive
rally in the district of Adilabad, about 300 kilo-
metres north of Hyderabad. “These people have
so many gods,” he said. “Ram, Laxman, Durga,
Laxmi … They have such strange names. I don’t
want to ruin this sacred gathering by taking their
names.” He also compared the numbers of Indian
Muslims and Hindus, and said, “Take the police
away for 15 minutes, then we’ll show you who has
more courage and strength.”
Footage of the Adilabad speech was soon all
over television news and social media, and Akba-
ruddin faced charges of hate speech and inciting
communal discord. He left for London, citing
health reasons. But the matter did not die down,
and pressure for his arrest kept mounting.
Akbaruddin returned to Hyderabad in the early
hours of 7 January 2013. Thousands of supporters
gathered to meet him at the airport, and formed
a rally to escort him home. Police arrived, but he
45
the seeker · reportage
right: Akbaruddin
serves as a foil
to his apparently
more pious and
measured brother.
His firebrand ways
provide a constant
undertone to the
politics of the
AIMIM.
evaded them, still citing this health. He was ar-
rested a day later.
Now, Kiran Kumar Reddy also dug up old
cases against other AIMIM leaders—including
one against Asaduddin from eight years earlier,
in which he was accused of obstructing officials
from demolishing a mosque in Medak district.
Asaduddin was briefly imprisoned. The AIMIM
shut down the old city of Hyderabad in protest,
and bandhs also followed elsewhere, including in
Adilabad.
Asaduddin spent two weeks in jail. Once out
on bail, he went to meet the Congress president,
Sonia Gandhi. What was said at the meeting has
never been made clear, but, a few weeks later,
Akbaruddin was let go on bail too. He had spent
40 days in jail. The case against him is still in
the courts. (I asked to interview Kiran Kumar
Reddy about the events of this time, but he did not
respond.)
The split with the Congress meant that the
AIMIM could more openly vie for Muslim support
outside Hyderabad, particularly in areas where
the community traditionally leant towards the
grand old party. Through late 2012 and early 2013,
the AIMIM had already established a presence
in municipal bodies in Maharashtra and Karna-
taka, especially in areas that were once part of
Hyderabad state. This served as a prelude to the
party’s push for seats in the Maharashtra election
in 2014.
In Andhra Pradesh, the AIMIM contested 35
assembly seats and six Lok Sabha seats in 2014.
46 THE CARAVAN
manjunath kiran / afp / getty images
It managed to win exactly what it already had:
its seven assembly seats, and the Lok Sabha seat
from Hyderabad. Soon after the vote, the state
of Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh,
taking Hyderabad with it. The YSR Congress
had its stronghold in what remained of Andhra
Pradesh, and the AIMIM now partnered with the
Telangana Rashtra Samiti—even though it had
earlier opposed the TRS’s demands for Telangana
statehood.
{FOUR}
asaduddin’s re-election in 2014 extended his
time in the Lok Sabha into a third term. This was
crucial as the AIMIM looked to expand from its
Hyderabad base. No matter how the party had
fared in the city over the last decade, anything it
did there got it, at best, sporadic flashes of national
attention—and that mostly when it stirred up con-
troversy. But in Delhi, Asaduddin had managed
to use his position in parliament and access to the
national media to maximum advantage.
Asaduddin came to Delhi at a fortuitous time.
His election to the Lok Sabha in 2004 coincided
with the surprise defeat of the previous BJP-led
government, which brought the Congress-led
United Progressive Alliance to power. The AIMIM
joined the UPA, allowing Owaisi, as a member of
the ruling government, unprecedented exposure.
Ever since, he has commanded outsized attention
in proportion to his party’s numerical presence in
parliament—perhaps more so than any other In-
dian politician today. This has only been helped by

the BJP’s projection of him as a prime
antagonist since it returned to power
in 2014.
Part of this is down to Asaduddin’s
performance in the parliament itself. In
2014, he was one of 12 MPs to receive
the Sansad Ratna, an annual award
from a civil-society group, for top
parliamentarians as judged by their at-
tendance and participation in debates.
Asaduddin is known for his eloquent
and often fiery speeches on the parlia-
ment floor, which are popular online.
It helps that he is the only prominent
Muslim in an assembly where the
community is badly underrepresented.
In 2014, for instance, only 23 Muslims
were elected to the 545-seat Lok Sabha.
With Muslims accounting for 14.2 per-
cent of the population, the proportional
number of representatives, not count-
ing the 133 seats reserved for specific
other communities, would be about 60.
Beyond the parliament, Asaduddin’s
high profile owes much to his relation-
ship with the Delhi-based media. He
often brings chefs from Hyderabad
to the capital with him, and puts his
city’s legendary cuisine to good use. In
a Hindustan Times piece denouncing
Akbaruddin’s Adilabad speech in 2013,
the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai could
not help but note how Asaduddin, dur-
ing parliament sessions,
invites journalists and fellow MPs for
a Hyderabadi daawat and is always a
gracious host. Since my gastronomic
habits are distinctly secular (I have
had crabs and red wine with the
Thackerays and jalebis with VHP
leaders), the haleem at Owaisi’s lunch
is always a delight.
Last month, I spoke with Asadud-
din again at his official residence in
Delhi, at 34 Ashoka Road, where he
hosts these feasts. He told me he always
keeps his door open. “It’s part of Mus-
lim culture,” he said. “If a guest comes,
whoever comes—even if an enemy
comes—we will serve them. What’s
wrong with that?”
Asaduddin is regularly invited to
prime-time talk shows, where he is
expected to represent the Muslim
view. He has consistently been a hit in
this role, though not always because
Asaduddin has not shied away from the projection
of himself as a national Muslim spokesperson. He
has increasingly taken it upon himself to weigh
in on issues affecting Muslims well beyond his
electoral constituency.
popular audiences approve of him.
“Hindu interlocutors want to dominate
him, and it is difficult to dominate him
because he has logic,” the journalist
Saeed Naqvi told me. “Therefore, they
find him extremely difficult to handle.
Since politics and public mood is today
shaped by two or three TRP-chasing
channels, and in that he is very effec-
tive, that is why he is disliked.”
Asaduddin has not shied away from
the projection of himself as a national
Muslim spokesperson. He has increas-
ingly taken it upon himself to weigh
in on issues affecting Muslims well
beyond his electoral constituency. In
July, Asaduddin announced that the
AIMIM would provide legal aid to five
Hyderabadi men arrested on charges
of associating with the Islamic State—
something that prompted charges of
sedition against him. This was part of
his long-standing criticism of Indian
security and intelligence agencies’
habit of arresting Muslim men on
unfounded terrorism charges. Subse-
quently, Asaduddin loudly denounced
the Islamic State at a public meeting,
calling its members “dogs of hell.”
He has repeatedly spoken out against
creating a uniform civil code, which
would abolish special personal laws for
Muslims, pointing to how other groups,
such as the Nagas and Mizos, are also
allowed exceptional provisions under
the constitution. He has also made
headlines for saying that the govern-
ment should scrap its subsidy for hajj
pilgrims, and use the money on scholar-
ships for Muslim girls instead.
But for all his suave manners,
Asaduddin continues to be dogged by
uncomfortable questions over his style
of politics. For instance, there are the
concerns over the AIMIM’s use of
violence. Just this February, AIMIM
cadres assaulted members of the
Congress’s Andhra Pradesh leadership
in the run-up to municipal polls in Hy-
SEPTEMBER 2016
the seeker · reportage
derabad—Shabir Ali, a senior Congress
leader, alleged that Asaduddin took
direct part—and were involved in at
least four cases of hooliganism on the
last day of campaigning and on voting
day. There are also the worries about
the AIMIM stoking communalism.
These have not been helped by Asadud-
din’s stubborn defence of Akbaruddin
regarding the hate-speech case he faces
for his remarks in Adilabad. To date,
there has been no apology from the
AIMIM for Akbaruddin’s speech.
I put these issues before Asaduddin
in Delhi. On allegations of the AIMIM’s
hooliganism, he told me, “No case has
been proven. Sab khatam. It’s all lies. …
It’s all political.” About the case against
Akbaruddin, he said, “Let the court
decide. Why should someone, sitting in
a TV studio, or in an interview or in a
column, decide that?”
There are other questions too, which
go beyond just the public face of the
AIMIM’s politics. In April 2015, in the
village of Aler in Telangana, police
shot dead five alleged Islamists in their
custody while taking them to court,
claiming to have acted in self-defence.
Lateef Mohammed Khan, of the Civil
Liberties Monitoring Committee, told
me when we spoke in Hyderabad that
Owaisi had tried, just as he allegedly
had after the Mecca Masjid bombing,
to hurry up the burials of the victims—
three of whom were from Hyderabad.
Asaduddin denied these allegations,
both in the case of the Aler encounter
and of the Mecca Masjid blast. “How
can I stop someone if they say, ‘We will
do it in the afternoon or evening, our
relatives are coming,’” he said. “I can’t
say no to them, I have to go along with
their wishes.” He also insisted that he
had worked to ensure justice for those
detained after the blast. As for accusa-
tions that he conspires with the police,
he said, “I don’t help any police … but
as far as I am concerned and my party
47
the seeker · reportage

is concerned, we have always tried to

ensure that peace prevails.”
Other suspicions have come up over
the AIMIM’s alleged hand in shady
land deals. The most dramatic instance
of this came in 2011, when Akbaruddin
was ambushed and shot in his con-
stituency. Security guards of a fellow
AIMIM MLA fired back, killing one of
the assailants—a relative of Mohammad
Pehalwan, a real-estate dealer, who
was reportedly angry over a property
dispute. The attack left Akbaruddin
hospitalised for 19 days.
Earlier this year, there were conspir-
atorial whispers in Hyderabad regard-
ing the AIMIM’s involvement in the
sudden removal of a government officer
involved with administering waqf prop-
erties—mortmain holdings, donated by
Muslims to endow religious or charita-
ble institutions. Telangana is a waqf-
rich state, and Hyderabad a waqf-rich
city, and the AIMIM’s opponents have
accused the party of abetting, and ben-
efitting from, the misuse of waqf land.
On 22 February—a day before he was
due to meet Telangana’s chief minister,
Kalvakuntla Chandrasekhar Rao of
the Telugu Rashtriya Samiti—Asadud-
din wrote to the state’s chief secretary
to ask for the removal of the director
of minority welfare, MJ Akbar (not to
pti

be confused with the BJP politician of
the same name). Akbar’s responsibili-
ties included serving as the competent
authority of the state waqf board, and
as the survey commissioner for waqf
properties. He had a reputation as an
upright officer, but Asaduddin accused
him of misusing government money,
underutilising funds for minorities,
and even using more government diesel
than was allotted to him. Akbar was
transferred shortly afterwards.
As it emerged, Akbar had earlier
issued notices to multiple people and
institutions for squatting on waqf land.
Among them was the Dargah Shah
Khamosh, located just a few hundred
metres from the AIMIM’s headquar-
ters. The dargah’s main caretaker is
Akbar Nizamuddin—the chairman
of the AIMIM-affiliated Darussalam
Cooperative Bank, and an officer on
several other institutions linked to the
party. He is also the head of the Jamia
Nizamia, an influential Hyderabadi
After the AIMIM withdrew its support for the Congress, in December 2012, Asaduddin was
briefly imprisoned on years-old charges of obstructing officials in the demolition of a mosque.
seminary, and has long been crucial
in marshalling clerics behind Asadud-
din. In 2014, Akbar Nizamuddin was
suspended as the dargah’s caretaker
after investigators found that he had
sold waqf land. He was also accused of
collecting rent on waqf properties, the
proceeds from which should have been
administered by the waqf board.
Asaduddin dismissed suspicions of
wrongdoing by his party and associates,
or that he had unfairly targeted Akbar.
He said that although the charges
against Akbar Nizamuddin are several
years old, “Nothing has happened. It
was mischief done by the waqf board.”
He reminded me that the matter came
up while Kiran Kumar Reddy was in
power, and after the AIMIM had with-
drawn its support for the Congress.
“The ball is in their court. Let them
prove it.”
The AIMIM’s rough-and-tumble
politics, which has proven so fruitful
for it in Hyderabad, draws no end of
criticism from outside observers. The
veteran politician Arif Mohammad
Khan told me, “If these people were
honestly communal, I would have said
it’s a problem of mindset. But their
communalism is commercial com-
munalism. They are traders. Ask them
only one thing: how much money do
they take for admission in their medical
college?” Khan, whose decades-long
career started with the Congress and
ended with him quitting the BJP, was
scathing of the AIMIM on multiple
fronts. The party’s language, he said,
“doesn’t match with our constitution.
This constitution doesn’t allow Muslim
and Hindu politics.”
Indresh Kumar, an RSS leader who
heads the Sangh-affiliated Muslim

48 THE CARAVAN

Rashtriya Manch, told me that Asaduddin “gives
some bizarre statements,” and that Muslim leaders
should think about how to “live like true Indians.”
The use of the community as a vote bank, he said,
created “more fundamentalist Muslims, more
communalists.”
Even more dispassionate commentators, such
as Saeed Naqvi, take issue with the AIMIM’s
ways. “Their politics is basically that of a Muslim
ghetto,” he told me. “There is no such thing as a
Muslim leader in India, and there should not be.”
Adnan Farooqui, a professor of political science
at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university who
has followed the AIMIM closely for many years,
offered a more nuanced take on the party’s ways.
“Its initial success in providing, or at least promis-
ing, physical security to the Muslims of the old
city is still paying off,” he told me. “They have not
been able to do what they have been promising”—
bring in lasting prosperity—“but they have done
at least something.” And that, he said, connects to
“the larger problem of Indian Muslims: that par-
ties can benefit by doing so little. The community
is still demanding the basic necessities.”
What puts Asaduddin in “a category of his own,”
Farooqui continued, “is that he is asking for more
now. And here he is not asking for more madrasas,
he is asking for more schools, and more primary
health centres, asking for abolition of the hajj sub-
sidy.” Asaduddin, Farooqui stressed, “is not asking
for special treatment. He is only asking for what
the constitution guarantees.”
Farooqui argued that the image of Asaduddin
as a polarising communal leader has been exag-
gerated. He put part of the blame for this on the
popular media. “For 50 minutes he will talk about
substantive issues”—education for girls, consti-
tutional rights—but “no one would focus on these
issues. But the last 15 minutes, when he is address-
ing his political agenda, that gets highlighted.”
Much of the talk about polarisation, he said,
amounts to “blackmailing tactics against Muslims
by mainstream political parties.”
Asaduddin told me almost the same thing. “As
long as I was with the Congress I was secular, but
the moment we left the UPA at the centre and in
Andhra Pradesh we immediately became politi-
cally untouchable,” he said. “If you are with them
you are holy, and the moment you oppose them
you become untouchable, you become communal,
you become someone’s agent.”
He also dismissed the common accusation that
the AIMIM is “the RSS of the Muslims.” “I do not
believe in, do not aspire to, make India a theocrat-
ic country,” he told me. “I want India to remain a
pluralistic and diverse country. … The RSS and all
these right-wing groups want India to become a
theocratic country. This is the basic difference.”
the seeker · reportage
As for the persistent accusations that he has col-
laborated with the RSS or the BJP—including the
one by the Congress leader Digvijaya Singh, dur-
ing the Bihar campaign—he found them laughable.
When I asked if he has ever spoken with Amit
Shah, he said, “Yes, I met him at Digvijaya Singh’s
house in Delhi. And if you want the menu also, I
will send you the food menu.” He told me he has
never met Narendra Modi.
In occasionally testing, even if cautiously,
the limits of what has traditionally constituted
Muslim politics, Asaduddin has the capacity to
surprise. In December last year, the Hyderabad
municipal corporation issued an eviction notice to
Lamakaan, a cultural centre located in one of the
city’s poshest neighbourhoods, and with a reputa-
tion for its liberal leanings. The centre has held
events on such things as LGBT issues, tribal rights
and conservation, and has often faced opposition
for it. Ashhar Farhan, who runs Lamakaan, told
me that the eviction notice was prompted by an
old couple living across the street complaining
that “women smoke in the building.”
Farhan wrote about the notice on Facebook. To
his surprise, the first person to respond to his post
was Asaduddin. The AIMIM leader had attended
Lamakaan events several times, just to listen
quietly, but his politics, Farhan said, “clashes with
the politics of this place.” Farhan had also written
against the AIMIM—especially after an infamous
incident in 2007, when a group of the party’s
MLAs attacked Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi
writer and vocal critic of Islam, when she visited
Hyderabad to launch a translation of her work.
After the Facebook post, Farhan said, Asadud-
din tweeted about the issue, and took it up with
the chief minister’s son. “Within minutes, every-
thing was sorted out.”
one way Asaduddin is pushing the frontiers of
Muslim politics is by courting Dalit voters. In
the Maharashtra election in 2014, the AIMIM
tried out a new slogan: “Jai Bheem, Jai Meem”—
“Bheem” for the Dalit hero Bhimrao Ambedkar,
and “Meem,” phonetically, for MIM. I saw a poster
with the same slogan on my visit to Darussalam.
Before the Bihar election, Asaduddin told a news-
paper, “I definitely see a future where Muslims
and Dalits should come together socially and po-
litically.” And this January, after the suicide of the
Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula on the University of
Hyderabad campus, he was one of the first politi-
cians to visit protesting students at the university,
and also Vemula’s mother.
The AIMIM has some history of Dalit engage-
ment. It fielded Dalit candidates during the days of
Asaduddin’s father and grandfather, but this was
rare and largely for appearances. In the late 1980s
SEPTEMBER 2016 49
the seeker · reportage
and 1990s, though, when the party had
the numbers to appoint the mayor of
Hyderabad, three of the five people it
elevated to the post were Dalits. Under
Asaduddin’s leadership, it has contin-
ued to field Dalit candidates in small
but noticeable numbers—especially in
municipal elections, where they have
had some success. In assembly elec-
tions—as in Maharashtra, where it
fielded Dalits in five of the 24 constitu-
encies it contested—no Dalit has yet
won on an AIMIM ticket, even in the
party’s home state.
I spoke to the Dalit scholar and activ-
ist Kancha Ilaiah about Asaduddin’s
prospects with Dalit voters. Asaduddin,
he said, is “willing to address ideologi-
cal issues of non-Muslims,” and has a
politics that “runs counter to Hindutva
nationalism.” Muslim leaders from
mainstream political parties have, by
and large, not taken any ideological po-
sition on caste, he said, but Asaduddin
has. The AIMIM leader still has a long
way to go in winning Dalits’ confidence,
but “he seems to approve of Ambed-
kar’s role more than Gandhi’s role in
India. That is common ground.”
As part of this strategy, Asadud-
din has actively reached out to young
Dalit leaders. At a small gathering in
Hyderabad before the 2014 election, he
met Naliganti Sharath—a Dalit activist
at Osmania University, who took part in
the Telangana movement, has organised
against Hindutva, and has spoken out
for women’s and transgender rights. At
the gathering, Sharath sang against pro-
hibitions on beef. Asaduddin “liked my
song,” he told me at his university hostel,
“and asked me to visit him if I wished.”
Sharath did, and Asaduddin of-
fered him a ticket for the upcoming
Telangana assembly election. “I took
some time, asked my seniors for advice,
before I said yes,” Sharath said. But
he had a condition. “I said I will fight
against the state BJP chief, G Kishan
Reddy,” in a constituency in Hyderabad.
Sharath remembered Asaduddin’s
reaction. “He smiled and said, ‘Be re-
alistic. It’s your first election.’” But the
young man was adamant, and Asadud-
din relented. “It was a fight between
Rama and Ravana,” Sharath joked.
Sharath didn’t stand much of a
chance. But the fear that he might
50
Kancha Ilaiah said Asaduddin still has a long way
to go in winning Dalits’ confidence, but “he seems
to approve of Ambedkar’s role more than Gandhi’s
role in India. That is common ground.”
woo Dalit voters away made the BJP
leader go to Dalits’ homes and “touch
their feet,” Sharath said. Seeing that,
“Asaduddin-bhai hugged me, and said,
‘Bhai, hum jeet gaye.’” (Brother, we have
won.)
Sharath received almost 19,000
votes, compared to Kishan Reddy’s over
81,000. Still, the AIMIM succeeded in
catching Dalits’ attention.
And that, for now, seems to be
Asaduddin’s most realistic goal. The
AIMIM’s next electoral battleground
is Uttar Pradesh—with 38.5 million
Muslims, comprising 19.3 percent of the
population—which votes for its state as-
sembly early next year. Ilaiah told me,
“In Uttar Pradesh, he may not get votes,
but he will get ideological footing.”
Asaduddin would perhaps settle for
that. He is fond of repeating the Dalit
leader Kanshi Ram’s line that “The first
election is for losing, the second elec-
tion is for making someone else lose,
the third election is for winning.”
In Delhi, Asaduddin told me the
AIMIM is open to alliances in Uttar
Pradesh, and that the party’s state
president “is in touch with some like-
minded leaders of Dalits and some
parties.” But, he added, “It would be
wrong on my part to even talk about an
alliance with this party or that party. It
is too early to say anything about that.”
In his comments on Uttar Pradesh,
Asaduddin has been critical of the
Congress, the BJP and the state’s rul-
ing Samajwadi Party—leaving only the
Bahujan Samaj Party, which champions
the Dalit cause, as a potential partner.
Another hint that the AIMIM is trying
to woo Dalits came this February, when
it put forward a Dalit candidate in an
assembly by-election in the state.
But the BSP’s leader, Mayawati, has
not shown any sign of reciprocating
interest. Meanwhile, the Samajwadi
Party, whose electoral strategy relies
heavily on Muslim votes, appears
intent on keeping Asaduddin out, and
THE CARAVAN
has denied permission for several
AIMIM rallies.
Naqvi also told me that the AIMIM’s
current chances in Uttar Pradesh are
very slim. His advice to the party was
to diversify its appeal. “You cannot
operate from a ghetto,” he said, and you
cannot go national “unless you ap-
peal to the Hindus also.” Even Indian
Muslims, he said, are not monolithic.
“Bengali Muslims are different. Tilak
Rai Muslims are separate. Assamese
are separate.” Asaduddin “has linked
them all up in the English language on
social media,” he said, but that does not
amount to actual social integration. If
Asaduddin embraces a more secular
and integrationist politics, Naqvi said,
“if he keeps aside his topi, he will be
acceptable to me as well.”
Farooqui told me he “will be sur-
prised if the party succeeds even in
opening its account in Uttar Pradesh.”
In Maharashtra, he said, “they had
local presence, which is not the case
in Uttar Pradesh,” and some Dalits
voted for the AIMIM in Maharashtra
“because the traditional claimants of
Dalit votes—like the National Congress
Party, at least in Aurangabad—had be-
come obsolete or weakened.” Establish-
ing a Dalit base for the AIMIM in Uttar
Pradesh would have to mean Dalit vot-
ers moving away from Mayawati’s BSP,
and not gravitating instead to the BJP.
“That’s a big thing to expect.”
Farooqui argued that the AIMIM’s
hold even in places where it has Muslim
votes is partly down to the absence of
other parties with a strong traditional
claim on them. The party’s national
prospects, he said, will “depend on
the Congress party. If at all there is a
revival of the Congress, especially in
northern India, I am not sure where
Owaisi will stand.”
at one stage in my conversation with
Asaduddin at Darussalam in mid
March, the other journalist in the

neeraj priyadarshi / indian express archive
room, from a national news website, pushed him
to speak about the latest controversy spinning
around him. Just days earlier, at a rally in Maha-
rashtra, Asaduddin had waded into the debate
on nationalism gripping the country in the wake
of allegedly seditious sloganeering at Delhi’s
Jawaharlal Nehru University in February. Mohan
Bhagwat, the chief of the RSS, had recently said
that “the time has come when we have to tell the
new generation to chant ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’”—
Hail Mother India. Asaduddin told his audience in
Maharashtra that he refused to repeat the slogan,
which has taken on Hindutva connotations. “What
are you going to do, Bhagwat sahab?” he said.
“I won’t utter that even if you put a knife to my
throat. … Nowhere in the constitution does it say
that one has to say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai.’”
Now, Asaduddin explained his view that
“Bharat” stood for the Indian nation as a secular
entity, but “Bharat Mata” deified it, thus running
counter to the tenets of Islam. Muslims, he said,
have long favoured the nationalist slogan “Jai
Hind” as an alternative.
He picked up his phone, and after a brief search
pulled up a text by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the
seminal Hindutva ideologue, describing his view
of Indian Muslims. Asaduddin read it out:
Ye, who by race, by blood, by culture, by na-
tionality possess almost all the essentials of
Hindutva and had been forcibly snatched out of
our ancestral home by the hand of violence—ye,
the seeker · reportage
left: Particularly
since 2014,
Asaduddin has
commanded
outsized attention
in proportion
to his party’s
numerical presence
in parliament—
perhaps more so
than any other
Indian politician
today.
have only to render wholehearted love to our
common Mother and recognize her not only as
Fatherland (Pitribhu) but even as a Holyland
(punyabhu); and ye would be most welcome to
the Hindu fold.
Putting the phone aside, he asked whether, in
light of such views, he was wrong in refusing to
bow to Hindutva impositions. He added, wryly,
“Aap bole to chamatkar. Hum bole to hahakar.”
(What they say gets taken seriously. What I say
becomes a joke.)
The interview carried on for over an hour and
a half before Asaduddin wrapped things up, with
a promise that we would meet again. Meanwhile,
more people had gathered on the verandah to meet
him. As Asaduddin stepped out, about half a dozen
media people pushed forward. “No, no. I won’t
talk,” he said. A few voices asked him for at least
one sound bite. “Ok,” he agreed. “No questions on
‘Bharat Mata ki jai.’”
Moments later, he was back to hearing griev-
ances and petitions from his constituents. A
group of bearded, middle-aged men asked him to
intervene in a land dispute involving a mosque.
He reacted furiously. “Go get orders from court,”
he told them. The men persisted. “I don’t want to
get involved in the case. Go get orders from the
court, otherwise people will say AIMIM men have
squatted on the property.”
The time struck 1.10 pm. Asaduddin headed back
inside Darussalam to offer the noon prayer. s
SEPTEMBER 2016 51
reportage
In the Name
of the Mother
How the state nurtures
the gau rakshaks of Haryana
/ POLITICS
ISHAN MARVEL
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHAHID TANTRAY
on a saturday night in april, at around 9 pm, I
rode a motorcycle to the outskirts of Haryana’s
Jhajjar town, 20 kilometres west of Delhi, accom-
panied by a photographer.
“Bhrata shree,” an enthusiastic Gau Raksha Dal,
or GRD, activist had addressed me over the phone
earlier that evening, using the Sanskrit word for
brother. “Come whenever you want. We’ll start
the gasht”—patrol—“once you’re here,” he said.
The location he had called us to was an unlit
and isolated stretch of road, right before National
Highway 334B, about a kilometre from Jhajjar
bypass. I stopped the motorcycle after spotting a
group of 20 men, all gau rakshaks, or cow-protec-
tion vigilantes, milling about near two parked SU-
Vs—a Tata Scorpio and a Mahindra Bolero. Close
by, there was a police control room van with five
uniformed policemen. Some of the vigilantes, too,
were in a uniform of sorts: white T-shirts bearing
the insignia of GRD Haryana—a bejewelled cow,
framed by a pair of crossed daggers, and flanked
on each side by AK-47s. Under this was a couplet:
Apni laashon se gaumata ke gulshan ko aabaad
rakhenge! Woh ladai hogi ki gaumata ke dushman
bhi yaad rakhenge!—Our corpses shall keep the
cow mother’s garden flourishing! We’ll give the
enemies of cow mother a fight they’ll never forget!
After a quick round of handshakes, the leader
of the group, 35-year-old Rinku Arya, whom I
had spoken to on the phone, described the plan
for the night. We would roam the state highways
in a packed SUV, armed with lathis, rods, hockey
sticks, baseball bats, stones and spike strips,
looking for gau taskars, or cow smugglers. Each
time Rinku brought up the prospect of catching
52 THE CARAVAN
a few, the group cheered him on, and described
what they would do to their victims. “Chutade sek
denge”—we’ll grill their asses—one yelled out from
the crowd.
I asked some of the policemen for their names,
but they refused to reveal them. My photographer,
who is a Kashmiri Muslim, masqueraded as Cyril,
an Israeli photographer who did not know a word
of Hindi. He put the passing headlights to good
use, herding the GRD vigilantes together for a
photo op. They obliged with warlike poses.
The same lighting helped me catch a glimpse of
a policeman’s name tag, which said “ASI Sonbeer.”
“We have been working with the GRD for a while,
especially since the BJP came to power in the
state,” Sonbeer told me, reeking of whisky. He said
his team had been deployed to coordinate with
the gau rakshaks for the night.
“We put up checkpoints and wait. The vol-
unteers”—the GRD vigilantes—“keep driving
around, and call us when they find something,”
Sonbeer said, adding, “See, we have a hundred
other things to think of beside cows. These guys
do the job. It’s good, right? Prashasan bhi poora
saath de raha hai ab”—now, the administration is
also supporting them fully.
The volunteers then broke into two teams, one
per SUV. Rinku asked me to park my motorcycle
at the police post near Jhajjar bypass, and then
travel with his team in the Scorpio—four in the
back seat, four in the middle, the photographer
and I huddled together on the passenger seat,
with Rinku at the wheel. Thus, at about 9.30 pm,
we set out into the night, on gasht with the gau
rakshaks of Haryana.

cow vigilantes, such as Rinku and his gang, have
become known for their penchant for violence.
Tales of their brutality against those they pro-
nounce guilty of killing a cow, or of even possess-
ing the intent to do so, are available all over the
Indian media. They often make videos of their
barbaric exploits and upload them online.
One such video shows gau rakshaks force-feed-
ing a pair of alleged cattle smugglers cow dung; in
another, they can be seen thrashing and urinating
on a group of men, including a physically disabled
man, for the crime of transporting meat that may
or may not have been beef. Armed with a skewed
sense of justice, and a variety of weapons—some-
times even guns—gau rakshaks are not beyond
killing the men they believe to be the enemies of
the cow mother. Even as I was writing this piece,
the national president of the GRD, Satish Ku-
mar, was arrested on 20 August on charges that
included rioting, extortion and “unnatural sex.”
His team allegedly sodomised cattle traders in
Punjab, after they refused to pay up R30,000 in
extortion money.
Numerous Hindutva groups across the country,
such as the GRD, indoctrinate young men into
deifying the cow, and into being willing to kill or
die protecting it. The groups also provide arms,
reportage
funds, cars and even salaries to these vigilantes, above: Every night,
who then go about hunting the so-called cow members of the Gau
smugglers. Often the victims of such vigilantism Raksha Dal Haryana
patrol the highways
are outsiders to mainstream Hinduism, such as
in SUVs, armed with
Muslims and Dalits, who do not share the religious lathis, rods, hockey
sentiments associated with the animal. Since gau sticks, baseball bats,
rakshaks are not equipped to ascertain if cows be- stones and spike
ing transported are indeed meant for slaughter, or strips, looking for
whether the meat they confiscate is actually beef, cow smugglers.
these vigilante patrols are often simply an absurd
excuse for engaging in communal violence.
Historically, the evolution of cow vigilantism
into what it has become today has run parallel
to the rise of Hindu nationalism and the rul-
ing Bharatiya Janata Party since the late 1980s.
Such extreme-right Hindutva groups have grown
exponentially in strength and audacity after the
BJP’s unprecedented success in the 2014 Lok
Sabha polls.
While the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra
Modi have, at best, prevaricated on such hooli-
ganism, recent events in Gujarat made the issue
unavoidable. On 11 July 2016, a group of vigilantes
in the state’s Una city stripped and flogged seven
Dalits for skinning a dead cow, and uploaded the
video of the incident online. The video went viral,
and sparked one of the biggest protests by the
SEPTEMBER 2016 53
in the name of the mother · reportage
While reporting on the Haryana wing of
the GRD, I found that they were working
under the complete protection of the BJP
government, receiving public funds,
using state machinery and collaborating with
the police.
Dalit community in recent times, as thousands of
Dalits from across the state embarked on a mas-
sive rally, marching towards Una on 31 July.
As the protests snowballed, several media
reports surfaced connecting cow-protection vigi-
lantes to the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, headed by
the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. On 5 August,
Times Now broadcasted a sting operation, show-
ing interviews with five top leaders of the Vishva
Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal—both promi-
nent factions of the Sangh Parivar. The footage
showed the leaders admitting, and at times gloat-
ing over the fact that their organisations fostered
such vigilantism among their ranks, and that the
GRD had the full support of the BJP government
and the RSS.
The next day, Modi—in a town hall meet-
ing—finally broke his silence on gau rakshaks, in
an attempt to reach out to the Dalit community,
among whom the BJP doubled its vote share in
the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, to 24 percent. But
also reluctant to alienise his hardline Hindutva
support base, and to contradict his earlier stated
position on cow slaughter, he came up with a con-
venient distinction between “good” gau rakshaks
and “bad” ones. He accused the latter of “running
their own shops” in the name of cow protection,
hinting at some of the sketchier dealings of gau
rakshaks, such as running organised beef rackets
and extorting cattle-traders. This seemed to be
in line with a proposal being considered by many
BJP state governments, including Haryana and
Gujarat, to legitimise “good” gau rakshaks by pro-
viding them ID cards.
But several right-wing groups across the coun-
try protested Modi’s accusation, asking him to
name or investigate such gau rakshaks, with the
warning that such remarks might cost the BJP the
next Lok Sabha elections, in 2019. Ironically, even
as Modi appeared to condemn gau rakshaks, a
report published in Hindustan Times on 9 Au-
gust revealed how cow vigilantism flourished in
Gujarat during his tenure as chief minister from
2001 to 2014. According to the report, apart from
introducing tougher laws against cow slaughter in
2011, the Modi government increased the annual
grant to the Gauseva and Gauchar Vikas Board—a
state-run organisation whose main objectives are
54 THE CARAVAN
“to coordinate with groups involved in preventing
slaughter of cow and progeny” and to ensure “ef-
fective implementation of cow protection laws”—
from R1.5 crore to R150 crore. Moreover, between
2011 and 2014, the state government disbursed R75
lakh in cash rewards to 1,394 gau rakshaks. It went
on to say that “to provide further motivation to the
cow protection volunteers, R3.75 lakh was given to
the ‘top performers,’ which included recipients of
the biennial Best Cow Protector award.”
Even if one were to overlook Modi’s past, his
comments seem mere rhetoric. After all, what is a
good gau rakshak? Doesn’t the idea of a self-styled
cow protector, acting outside of the law enforce-
ment system, inherently imply vigilantism?
Since the BJP came to power in Haryana, in
October 2014, the state has emerged at the fore-
front of bovine politics, with stricter laws against
cow slaughter being introduced and funding for
cow-protection initiatives being increased. While
reporting on the Haryana wing of the GRD, I
found that they were working under the complete
protection of the BJP government, receiving
public funds, using state machinery and collabo-
rating with the police. With the plan to further
legitimise cow vigilantes by issuing them identity
cards, gau rakshaks are now likely to function as
an extended arm of the state.
the patrol i accompanied in April mostly followed
NH 334B, which runs north-east from Jhajjar
towards Sonipat, about 60 kilometres away, near
the Uttar Pradesh border. The vigilantes specu-
lated out loud about potential clues that might give
away a cattle cargo—such as number plates (they
told me smugglers’ vehicles usually bore a UP or
Rajasthan registration), sunken tyres (indicated
a heavy or uneven load), dripping liquid (could
be cow urine), the odour of dung, and so on. In
the next three hours, at the slightest suspicion,
we flagged down vehicles, or overtook them and
forced them to stop. Our group would then rush
out of the Scorpio, pull the driver out, and proceed
to search the vehicle. The vigilantes would climb
onto the back of trucks, or beat the sides with
sticks to stir any hiding animals.
All the commitment to the cow mother aside,
it was clear that this was the vigilantes’ idea of
fun—cruising through the nights in their SUVs,
hunting supposed cow-killers. When asked who
they were, pat came the arrogant reply: “Gau
Raksha Dal se hain ji”—not unlike the way FBI IDs
are brandished in Hollywood films. Moreover, all
the nine vigilantes in our car came from landown-
ing households in Panipat, and money was not a
major concern for them—however, owing to lack of
proper education, jobs and other avenues, finding
a productive outlet for their energies beyond the

crop cycles was. Thirty-two-year-old
Ashok Arya summed it up from the
back seat: “Accha kaam karte hain, aur
bhaiyon ke saath hansi-mazaak rehta
hai. Ghoomte-ghoomte timepass bhi ho
jaata hai” (We do good work, and have
a good time with friends. Roaming
around helps pass the time as well).
Plus, there were stipends for food, fuel
and other expenses.
While driving, Rinku filled me in on
recent happenings. “You should have
come last night, bhrata shree,” he said.
“We caught three trucks at Rewari,
containing 53 cows and 17 smugglers.
It was a big catch after a long time. You
should have seen the action live. We
even threw one of the smugglers off the
roof of a truck, and smashed his face.”
I asked him if the man was alright.
“Must be in some hospital,” Rinku
replied dismissively. He then showed
me photographs on his phone from the
previous night’s haul, which showed
the GRD men standing on top of the
seized trucks.
Rinku was recruited into the or-
ganisation 20 years ago at the age of 15
by Azad Singh Arya—the 48-year-old
leader of the Panipat chapter of GRD
Haryana. He got married the year
after, and now has three children. In
the daytime, he works as Azad Singh’s
driver for a monthly salary of R12,500.
His wife doesn’t want him to go on the
night patrols. “But this is my dharma,”
he told me.
Besides the patrols, he said, he also
contributed to the prachaar, or public-
ity, for the organisation. “We go to
villages, schools and colleges, and tell
everyone about the cow mother’s im-
portance,” Rinku told me. “We are also
supported by the local media. TV chan-
nels like Siti Cable broadcast our ads
and phone numbers, while newspapers
such as Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran,
Amar Ujala and Punjab Kesari run our
ads—paid by Azad-ji.”
The other eight volunteers—ranging
from the ages of 19 to 40—had similar
stories about how they were recruited.
Many had been gau rakshaks for over
a decade. The youngest was a 19-year-
old, baby-faced Goliath called Vikram,
who bragged that he had been associat-
ed with the GRD since the age of nine,
when he first met Yogendra Arya—the
in the name of the mother · reportage
current president of GRD Haryana.
(Most activists of GRD Haryana are
followers of the Arya Samaj move-
ment, and have given up their last
names, using “Arya” instead.) Vikram,
too, was employed by Azad Singh, as
a bodyguard for R8,000 a month, and
was enrolled as a first-year student at
Arya College, Rohtak. But when I asked
him what course he was studying, he
could not remember. After struggling
for about a minute, he finally answered,
“BA . . . Yes, BA!” and then sheepishly
added, “Thing is, I never go there. But
I’ll get a degree.”
I proceeded to ask Rinku questions
about the gau rakshaks’ work. What if
Rinku Arya, the 35-year-old leader of our patrol, joined the Gau Raksha Dal at the age of 15.
someone they catch was just transport-
ing his own cows from point A to B?
“Get a permit from the government.
No GRD member will touch you,” he
said, before adding, “One can tell—
an innocent guy won’t be a Muslim
for instance—aam banda hoga”—he
would be an ordinary guy. “Also, they
will be milk-giving cows, not old and
dried-up ones—those are just carried
for slaughter, to make leather or beef,
at the illegal slaughterhouses across
the UP border.” From the backseat,
Ashok added, “Mostly, the smugglers
are young Muslims looking to earn
some quick money—and the occasional
Hindu. Them, we beat even more for
doing such dirty work.”
When I brought up the violence
involved in the activities of the GRD,
SEPTEMBER 2016
Rinku got defensive. He claimed that it
was mostly the smugglers who attacked
first and tried to run away. “They carry
country-made guns, or stones,” he said.
“Sometimes, they ram into us with
their trucks.” Later, Rinku showed me
a bullethole in the front bumper of the
Scorpio. When I asked him whether
they too damaged the offending vehi-
cles in turn, he replied, “Before the BJP
brought in the new law against cow-
slaughter, the vehicles were returned
to the owners. So, we used to get angry
and burn the trucks. Now, we don’t
have to. The vehicles become govern-
ment property. So we just hand them
over to the police.”
Like everyone else I spoke to from
the GRD, Rinku and his teammates
were happy with the BJP government.
Yet, he stressed, “We are not political,
we only stand for the cow, and the na-
tion. Aur jo bhi gai ki baat karega, woh
hi desh pe raaj karega.” (Only the one
who talks about the cow can rule this
nation.) He then told me that he had
met Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief
minister of Haryana, several times
while accompanying Azad Singh. “The
CM is happy with our work, and we
have his blessings and full support,” he
said. “I even met Modi-ji once when he
came to promote his Beti Bachao cam-
paign.” Recalling the days of Congress
rule, he said, “Before the BJP came to
power, we used to have a lot of trou-
ble—the police would arrest us in false
55
in the name of the mother · reportage
below: Vikram cases. In September 2014, when Azad-ji protested
Arya, a 19-year-old against such behaviour, the police stripped him
member of the on the road and beat him up.” But now, times have
Gau Raksha Dal
changed, Rinku said. “Now, Azad-ji runs three
Haryana, works as
a bodyguard for schools and a college in Panipat. There are around
Azad Singh Arya, 8,000 children studying under him, and he in-
the leader of the spires them to work for the cow mother. Everyone
organisation’s respects him.”
Panipat chapter.
the gau raksha dal currently has branches in
nine Indian states and two union territories—Pun-
jab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal
Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Ma-
harashtra, Goa and Delhi. The GRD Haryana is
among the biggest, with branches in each of the
state’s 21 districts, and more than 5,000 vol-
unteers, mostly between the ages of 18 and 40.
Almost every night since 2011, armed GRD vol-
unteers have been patrolling the state highways,
with two or three teams per district.
On 9 February 2016, I met Yogendra Arya,
the Haryana president of both the GRD and the
Gaushala Sangh, or cow-shelter association. After
a brief conversation on the phone, he invited me
to their headquarters at Dayanand Math, Rohtak.
Both the organisations claim to follow the prin-
ciples of the Arya Samaj movement, founded by
Dayanand Saraswati in 1875.
I found Yogendra, dressed in a track suit, sip-
ping chai at a white plastic table with matching
chairs on the front lawn of Dayanand Math—a
sprawling, tranquil ashram with blocks for
residence, worship and other activities, as well
as an artificial reservoir. The beefy, 34-year-old,
long-haired brahmachari—a man who has taken a
vow of celibacy—hails from Kinana village in Jind
district. During our two-hour conversation, he of-
56 THE CARAVAN
ten played with his tresses, while talking in a mix
of Sanskritised Hindi and Haryanvi, like other
GRD vigilantes, with stray English words thrown
in. Yogendra told me that the origins of the gau
raksha movement could be traced to the efforts
of a self-styled godman named Baldev Maharaj,
whose disciples included the yoga entrepreneur
Baba Ramdev and Yogendra himself. Baldev had
passed away on 28 January, two weeks before my
conversation with Yogendra.
In 2011, Yogendra was elected the national
vice-president of the GRD, and the president of its
Haryana wing, as well as the Gaushala Sangh. He
has also been one of the 12 non-official members
of the state’s Gau Seva Aayog, a government body
devoted to the welfare of cows, since its inception
in January 2013 under the Congress government
in Haryana, led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda. In
November 2015, the BJP chose new members for
the Aayog, nine of whom had associations with the
RSS, VHP or Bajrang Dal, including the chairman
and vice-chairman.
When I spoke to local journalists and politi-
cians from Rohtak, all of them claimed they hadn’t
heard of Yogendra before the past couple of years.
“It’s only after the BJP government that these
things have started, and people like Yogendra are
becoming strong—of course, they are supported
by the government and the Sangh,” Sunit Dhawan,
who writes for The Tribune, said. Anand Singh
Dangi, a Congress MLA, echoed him: “Where
were these gau rakshaks before 2014?”
At Dayanand Math, Yogendra told me that the
strength of the organisation lies in its volunteers.
“We tell them about the importance of the cow
mother, and show them pictures and videos of
how Muslims and foreigners torture and kill cows
for meat. We make them realise it is their prime
duty to protect the gauvansh”—or cow dynasty—
Yogendra explained.
Once indoctrinated, the volunteers take up
patrolling. “We have a huge network of volunteers
and informants,” Yogendra told me. “As soon as
someone sees something fishy, they call us up,
and we then inform the volunteers of the relevant
district, and the local police, who then set up joint
nakas”—checkpoints—“to catch the smugglers.”
He added that the GRD activists reach the spot
before the police. “Police can’t do what we do,
they have to follow the laws. They don’t have the
resources and network we have,” he said. “Besides,
our boys work with great religious zeal.”
on 5 august, I met Swami Agnivesh—a former
president of the World Council of Arya Samaj, the
highest body of the Arya Samaj movement—at his
office in Jantar Mantar, Delhi. He told me that
such “overzealous” tendencies in the name of cow

protection in Haryana could be traced as far back
as the late 1960s, when Baldev was still under the
tutelage of Swami Omanand, the leader of an Arya
Samaj sect in the state. According to Agnivesh,
these sects had perverted the teachings of the
Arya Samaj. “Dayanand Saraswati never invoked
emotionality with regard to the cow, and never
used the words “gau mata,” he said. “He only
spoke of the animal’s importance in economic and
scientific terms. Moreover, he always wrote ‘gau,
adi’”—cow, etc—“that is, he never excluded other
domestic animals like sheep, goats and buffaloes.
For Saraswati, cow was more of a symbol, but
these people interpret him literally.” He also said
that things had become worse over the years due
to “large scale infiltration of RSS into Arya Samaj.
They have diluted Saraswati’s teachings and prop-
agandised them for issues like Ram temple and
cow protection. This is not the real Arya Samaj.”
Agnivesh said that the Una incident was similar
to an incident in Haryana that took place nearly
14 years ago. He recalled the lynching of five Dalit
youths by a mob for purportedly skinning a dead
cow, on 15 October 2002, at a police post in Jhaj-
jar’s Dulina village. According to the Indian Ex-
press, this was one of the earliest reported instanc-
es of cow vigilantism in India. There were protests
back then as well, but after the arrest of five of
the gau rakshaks on 13 November 2002, the VHP
and the Bajrang Dal, along with the local khap
panchayat, organised a demonstration against the
police that brought Jhajjar to a standstill—result-
ing in closure of all schools, colleges and shops.
in the name of the mother · reportage
left: After coming
to power, the BJP
government set up
“cow task forces”
of the Haryana
Police, who work in
tandem with gau
rakshaks.
Baldev, who was then heading an organisation
called Gauraksha Samiti, played a prominent role
in the protests. Things finally returned to normal-
cy a week later, on 19 November, when the local
administration negotiated a compromise with the
agitators. Fourteen years later, the perpetrators,
who had been awarded life sentences by a lower
court, are out on bail. They have challenged the
verdict in the Supreme Court.
on 16 march 2015, the Haryana state assembly
unanimously passed the Gauvansh Sanrakshan
and Gausamvardhan Bill—five months after
Khattar, a former RSS member, took over as chief
minister, in October 2014. The new law banned
the slaughter of “cow”—an umbrella term that in-
cluded “bull, bullock, ox, heifer or calf and a disa-
bled, diseased or barren cow.” It also banned the
sale, consumption and storage of its meat within
the state, and made these offences punishable by
between three and ten years’ imprisonment and a
R30,000–1,00,000 fine. In addition, Section 16 of
the Act stated that only a “police officer not below
the rank of Sub Inspector or any person author-
ised in this behalf by the Government” had the
authority to “enter, stop and search any vehicle” or
premises, and seize cows over suspicion of illegal
slaughter or export.
While unveiling the party’s manifesto for the
2014 assembly polls, the Haryana BJP president
Ram Bilas Sharma had vowed to make the pun-
ishment for cow slaughter the same as that for
murder. After coming to power, the BJP govern-
SEPTEMBER 2016 57
in the name of the mother · reportage
ment set up “cow task forces” of the Haryana
Police under the supervision of the IPS officer
Bharti Arora, and the superintendent and special
cell of each district. Comprising a PCR van, one
officer and three constables from every police sta-
tion, these task forces work in tandem with GRD
vigilantes. As I witnessed during the patrol, there
was free exchange of information, infrastructure
and manpower.
On 7 June, I spoke to Rahul Sharma, who was
appointed the superintendent of police of Panipat
after the BJP came to power in the state. “I don’t
have the exact figures, but many cases have been
filed and we have caught many gangs,” he bragged.
“We have even recovered cows and vehicles from
places in UP, such as Muzaffarnagar and Meerut.”
On the coordination between the police and the
GRD, he said, “We ask all the SHOs and DSPs to
remain open to information, and make joint teams
with GRD volunteers. We have also asked the
GRD to inform the police as soon as possible, so
we can send a PCR from the nearest checkpost.
But of course, if they take the law into their hands,
they too will be punished.”
Bhani Ram Mangla, the chairman of Haryana’s
Gau Seva Aayog, had similar views. He, too, was
happy about the cow-protection initiatives taken
by the government, pointing to the increasing
number of stray cows in the state. It didn’t matter
that these are mostly sick, emaciated animals
abandoned by their owners because there was no
profit in caring for them—and with the new law,
they could not even be sold for slaughter.
Mangla added that the Aayog would soon set
up a toll-free “cow helpline,” where people could
report cows in trouble. He went on to boast about
a number of other cow-protection policies the
state had adopted since 2014. Regarding the sup-
port of the Sangh Parivar, he said, “We have the
same objective. Their means are social, while ours
are political.” But, he, too, questioned the zeal
of gau rakshaks: “Where were these people two
years ago? Now that the government is all about
cow protection, these people have come forward
for money and politics.” However, when I pointed
out that the GRD president was also a part of the
Aayog, Mangla replied, “Yogendra-ji sahi se kaam
karte hain”—Yogendra-ji works through proper
means. “None of his gau rakshaks are criminals.”
“sometimes our boys make mistakes,” Yogendra
told me at Dayanand Math. “They bash up the
drivers without looking, or else they break the
windows, or burn the vehicle or something. So,
there were a few cases filed against us. But now we
have police cooperation, so we manage to sort the
trouble without much hassle. Plus, we have our
own lawyers now. And it’s all for a bigger cause.”
58 THE CARAVAN
“Police can’t do what we do,
they have to follow the laws,”
Yogendra Arya, the president
of the GRD Haryana said. “They
don’t have the resources and
network we have.”
I asked him whether there had been times when
it turned out that the seized consignment was
not cow meat. Instead of answering my ques-
tion, he said, “The problem is that we don’t have
proper labs for testing. So, we’ve sent a proposal
to the Gau Seva Aayog to set up labs in Mewat and
Gurgaon.”
Yogendra claimed that all of the GRD’s funding
came from donations, which he called “gau-daan,”
collected from supporters across the state, or
from the government. At the time, he said, the
GRD was in talks with the government for a grant
of R5 crore and at least 50 acres in each village
for gaushalas as part of a gau abhiyaan, or cow
mission. For the moment, Yogendra told me, apart
from purchase and maintenance of vehicles, fuel
and volunteer stipends, funds were mostly spent
on the upkeep of cows at the various shelters.
On 11 June, I spoke to the mahamantri, or sec-
retary general of GRD Haryana, Sarvamitra Arya,
who expanded upon the logistics of the organisa-
tion. “We don’t get much donation,” he repeated
a few times during the interview, before finally
giving me some numbers. Each year, the GRD re-
ceives between ten and 15 lakh rupees and several
cars as donations from individual supporters, he
said. As for the state government, he claimed that
this year, the organisation had so far received R7
lakh from the Haryana government, along with
an additional R3 lakh as fuel subsidy. At present,
he told me that the GRD owns between 60 and
70 gun licences, and around 60 cars—on each of
which they spent R30,000 a month on fuel and
maintenance—making for a total expenditure of
around R2 crore each year on the vehicles. He re-
fused to answer how much the organisation paid
in taxes, saying that the GRD was trying to push
for tax-free status.
On the subject of the Gaushala Sangh, Sar-
vamitra told me that at present, Haryana had 428
registered gaushalas, sheltering around 3.5 lakh
cows. “It’s all thanks to Baldev Maharaj,” he ex-
plained. “When he became our leader in 1998—we
were called Gauraksha Samiti back then—there
were around 80 cow-shelters in Haryana. By the
time Yogendra took over in 2011, we had 350. We
have only carried forward the work.” He told
me that when the Gau Seva Aayog was set up in
 in the name of the mother · reportage

2013, the government had promised an

annual sum of R5 lakh for each shelter.
Gradually, the number was raised to
the current annual sum of R150 per
sheltered cow, which came to over
R5 crore for the mentioned 3.5 lakh
cows. As I probed into the details of
the expenses incurred by the organisa-
tion, Sarvamitra gave me figures on the
fodder needed for the upkeep of cows,
that, when I later calculated, came to
more than R1,000 crore. Thus, there
seemed to be a massive discrepancy
between the expenses and the sources
of revenue. When I called up Sarvami-
tra later, he clarified that most of the
fodder came from Hindu farmers as
donations.
But during our conversation, Ag-
nivesh seemed to have an alternate
explanation. “Who are selling these
cows to the butchers in the first place?
Hindu farmers!” he said. “And these
gaushalas—how much money do they
earn, how many cows pass through
their hands? There are never any
records. In fact, in some places, it is
these very gau rakshaks who first take
the seized cows to a gaushala, and then
quietly sell them for slaughter.”
On 5 August, Firoz Khan—a gau rak-
shak and gaushala-owner based in UP’s
Sambhal district—spoke to me over
the phone, claiming that the majority
gau raksha dal haryana

of gaushalas operating in Haryana,

Punjab and Rajasthan were running
a clandestine beef racket. He echoed
Agnivesh: “They accuse us Muslims,
but who is bringing the cows to UP
slaughterhouses? If not Hindu farm-
ers, it is these pseudo-gau rakshaks
themselves,” he said, before adding,
“And RSS, VHP and all these holy
men—none of them actually care about
the cow—it’s just politics and business
in the name of gau mata.”
Over the next couple of days, he sent
me several news clippings from Hindi
newspapers such as Dainik Jagran
and Hindustan over WhatsApp, which
seemed to affirm his claims about
beef rackets. In April this year, the
Haryana police busted a gang of “fake
cow protectors,” who extorted R8,000
from each vehicle transporting cattle
in Hisar district. On 7 August, the
Indian Express also reported on how
gau rakshaks in Punjab were running
The cover of the 12-page brochure of the GRD Haryana, which is distributed across the state.
an extortion racket, targeting cattle
traders, by charging fixed amounts for
safe passage.
as several grd leaders told me, the or-
ganisation devotes a good deal of atten-
tion to spreading its propaganda. One
of Yogendra’s assistants handed me a
12-page brochure for the GRD, meant to
be distributed across Haryana. The in-
formation inside is also freely available
on the GRD Haryana website, which
opens with a paean to the cow mother
that copies a Bollywood song from
the 1968 movie Raja Aur Runk, with
the word “gau” strategically inserted
into the lyrics. The cover showcased
the same bejewelled cow, along with
pictures of Hindu gods, and of course,
AK-47s and daggers.
The brochure had graphic photo-
graphs of cows supposedly being traf-
ficked or slaughtered, a district-wise
list of around 500 GRD members along
with their phone numbers, and photo-
graphs of 18 senior members. A call for
donations on the final page exhorted,
“What sort of a Hindu are you? You
spend thousands on petrol, cigarette,
tobacco, alcohol. Can’t you save 20
rupees each day for the cow? If you can,
donate 500-600 rupees each month at
a cow shelter so that the COW DOES
NOT GET BEHEADED.”

SEPTEMBER 2016 59
in the name of the mother · reportage
The back cover reiterated the point
with details of a Punjab National Bank
account, along with photographs of
five young men listed as “gau shaheed,”
or cow martyrs. Yogendra told me
that they had died on the job during
patrols and raids. He then described
some of his own encounters with the
cow-smuggling bogeymen, involv-
ing 100-kilometre-per-hour chases,
vehicles ramming into each other, and
flying bullets and stones—“just like in
the movies.”
Yogendra told me he had no plans
to enter electoral politics. “Politicians
do these things for votes, we do it
for faith. We only support those who
stand for the cow mother,” he said. “If
tomorrow, Khattar does not defend
the cow, we will protest against him as
well. We belong to the Arya Samaj. We
don’t play caste or religion games. We
don’t believe in anything but humanity
and the Vedas.” Hearing this, I brought
up the Dadri incident, where a man
was lynched for allegedly consuming
beef. “It’s unfortunate,” he replied,
nodding gravely. “But then it’s for the
60
cow mother. Some sacrifices will have
to be made.”
on the night of the patrol, a little past
midnight, we arrived at a police check-
post in the city of Kharkhoda, Sonipat
district. Here, the GRD activists first
chatted up some of the policemen, and
then began stopping vehicles, even as
the policemen sat and watched.
Suddenly, a truck bearing a Himachal
Pradesh registration number rammed
through the barricade, and escaped
even as the police and the GRD vigi-
lantes hurled lathis, stones and hockey
sticks at it, shattering its windshield. A
frenzy ensued as all of us scrambled to
get back into the Scorpio. After a brief
chase, where we touched 100 kilome-
tres per hour, the truck pulled over.
The gau rakshaks rushed and dragged
the driver out. The truck, however,
turned out to be empty. Apparently,
the driver was drunk and, at the sight
of the police, got scared that he would
be fined or his vehicle impounded. The
activists let him go after a bit of scold-
ing and shoving. Rinku turned to me
THE CARAVAN
and said, smiling, “He was a poor guy.
The police would have fined him. So
we spared him. We only care about the
cow mother.”
At around 1 am, we retired to a dhaba
in Jharoth village, Sonipat, for dinner.
About half an hour later, as we were
finishing, Rinku received a call from
a volunteer in Panipat. Apparently,
people in Alukpur village had seen
some men gather a few stray cows into
a pick-up van, which was now believed
to be heading towards UP via Soni-
pat. Rinku immediately dialled 100 to
inform the police, before we started
driving towards the Gauri Pul border-
checkpost—one of the main exit points
for cattle smugglers, I was told, and our
last stop for the night.
in ancient times, according to many
historians, such as DN Jha and Romila
Thapar, beef was a part of the diet of
most communities living on the sub-
continent, including Brahmins. Cows,
among other animals, were also sacri-
ficed for many Brahminical rituals. The
popular sentiment against cow slaugh-

ter began to reify in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, with the emergence of Hindu national-
ism. By the early twentieth century, organisations
such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS had
started using the cow as a political tool to mobilise
Hindus.
In late 1948, during the constituent assembly
debates, a few members demanded that cow
protection be made a fundamental right. However,
among others, BR Ambedkar, the chairman of the
drafting committee, opposed the idea, preventing
India from becoming the first country to provide
a fundamental right to an animal. Eventually,
a compromise was reached, as a ban on cattle
slaughter was declared one of the Directive Princi-
ples of State Policy—guidelines to be kept in mind
by central and state governments while framing
laws. The resulting Article 48 of the Constitu-
tion reads, “The State shall endeavour to organise
agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and
scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps
for preserving and improving the breeds, and
prohibiting the slaughter, of cows and calves and
other milch and draught cattle.”
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the cow mother
motif was used by Hindutva groups to rouse reli-
gious sentiments among the Hindus.
On 7 November 1966, a movement for a nation-
wide ban on cow slaughter, led by these organisa-
tions, culminated in a massive demonstration,
when a crowd of nearly 125,000 descended upon
Delhi. It was an unprecedented attack on the
Indian parliament. (It would be 35 years before
the next one, orchestrated by Lashkar-e-Taiba
and Jaish-e-Mohammed in 2001.) The proces-
sion started from Roshanara Garden, Red Fort
and Ajmal Khan Park. According to archival news
reports from The Tribune, around midday, as the
mobs neared the legislative centre—with “saf-
fron-robed sadhus” carrying swords, spears and
trishuls in the vanguard—“a day of violence and
vandalism” began to unfold as the demonstrators
laid siege to the surrounding areas of Connaught
Place and central Delhi, attacking two electrical
substations, Irwin Hospital, the Government of
India Press, Delite and Odeon cinemas, and other
establishments.
The “focal point of the demonstration,” how-
ever, was right before the Parliament House,
where “the demonstrators, who filled the mile-
long Parliament Street, were addressed from a
huge platform by leaders of the organising parties,
Members of Parliament and religious leaders.” At
around 1.25 pm, the demonstration took a violent
turn after a “highly inflammatory speech” by the
Jana Sangh MP Swami Rameshwaranand, who
at the time had been suspended from the Lok
Sabha for unruly behaviour. Incited by his call
in the name of the mother · reportage
to surround the parliament, the crowd rushed to opposite page:
break the police cordon, hurling stones and other During the patrol,
missiles. The police resorted to tear gas and lathi- there was a
free exchange
charge, before finally opening fire to keep the
of information,
demonstrators from entering the building. infrastructure and
The foiled mob then again went on a rampage, manpower between
throwing lit petrol-soaked rags at neighbouring the police and the
buildings such as All India Radio, Press Trust vigilantes.
of India, Press Information Bureau, Transport
Bhawan, Shram Bhawan and Gol Dak Khana.
According to The Tribune, there was “extensive
damage and destruction,” so that by 3 pm, “there
was hardly a building in Parliament Street or
Connaught Circus which did not bear evidence
of vandalism.” Government vehicles, including
a mail-van and four buses; an Indian Oil petrol
pump; and several milk booths belonging to Delhi
Milk Supply Scheme were set on fire, and “even
traffic lights were not spared.” In addition, the
houses of the then Congress president, Kumarasa-
mi Kamaraj, and the then union minister of supply
and technical development, Kotha Raghuramaiah,
were attacked.
Though the situation was officially declared
under control by 7.30 pm, the army and the
Central Reserve Police Force were called in to
help guard important government buildings, and
localities around central Delhi. “By the evening
the army was patrolling the streets, for the first
time since the dark days of 1947,” Ramachandra
Guha noted in India After Gandhi. Additionally,
a 48-hour curfew was announced under Section
144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which deals
with “unlawful assembly,” and was finally lifted
on the morning of 9 November, since no unto-
ward incidents were reported in the preceding
24 hours. According to a UNI report, dated 8 No-
vember, over 250 private cars and two-wheelers
were damaged the previous day, mostly within a
two-mile radius of the Parliament Street police
station, at a loss of about R90 lakh. The report also
mentioned that no compensation would be paid
to the owners since rioting was not covered under
comprehensive insurance. Another PTI report
stated that 830 persons—mostly sadhus—had been
taken into custody, including Rameshwaranand.
On 9 November, the then home minister,
Gulzarilal Nanda resigned after his colleagues
in the Congress demanded that he do so during
a meeting of the Congress parliamentary party
executive.
The next day, the minister of state for home
affairs Jaisukh Lal Hathi released an official
statement, according to which, out of the 40-odd
persons who received gunshot injuries, eight had
died, including a constable. Opposition leaders,
especially those belonging to the Jana Sangh,
demanded a judicial inquiry into the killings. Atal
SEPTEMBER 2016 61
in the name of the mother · reportage
Reacting to Modi’s comments against gau rakshaks,
one of the members posted a poem in Hindi:
“Abhi samay hai, maafi maang lo/ Varna desh ki gaddi
se/ Ab tumhein utaara jaayega/ Patna toh tum haar
chuke/ ab UP haara jaayega”
Behari Vajpayee, then a Jana Sangh
MP, lamented that “the undesirable
elements, who resorted to violent
activities in the demonstration against
cow-slaughter, had done a great harm
to the pious cause.” Even now, half a
century later, a rally is held each year
in November at Ramlila Maidan in
Delhi to commemorate the 1966 dem-
onstration. This year, the VHP plans
to organise a mega rally to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of the agitation,
and to renew the call for a nationwide
ban on cow slaughter.
At present, the export of cow meat is
prohibited in India, while most states
have restrictions of varying degrees
on cow slaughter. Only eight out of
29 states in India freely allow cow
slaughter—Kerala, West Bengal, Sikkim,
Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Naga-
land, Mizoram and Tripura. In April, a
Times of India report noted that despite
a ban on cattle slaughter in UP, the state
has 126 slaughterhouses—thus attract-
ing cattle traffickers along its borders,
especially through Haryana, given the
large number of stray cows there.
at around 3 am, the Scorpio reached
Gauri Pul border-checkpost in Sonipat.
Apart from six policemen, the Bolero
team had also reached there, along with
another Sonipat-based GRD team. As
the policemen watched, the gau rak-
shaks laid out the spike strips and the
barricades, before walking around with
their weapons, stopping and check-
ing vehicles at will. At the checkpost,
Assistant Sub-Inspector Baljeet Singh
and Constable Vinod Kumar from Rai
Thana, Meruthpur, told me that cow
smuggling was rampant till the end
of last year, but now it had reduced
significantly. Like the other policemen,
Singh stressed, “There are uncountable
trucks. Who can check them all? So,
we provide supervision while the GRD
boys use their fervour to do the job.”
62
We could not find the pick-up van
with the stray cows, and the patrol
was finally called off around 4 am. By
this time, the volunteers had stopped
and searched at least 30 vehicles. All
of them were either empty or carry-
ing buffaloes. Towards the end, out of
boredom and for a few laughs, some of
the volunteers began to enact what they
would have done to the smugglers with
their hockey sticks, if they had found
any. The sinister pantomime occurring
by the light of passing headlights made
me feel relieved that no one was caught.
“It’s a wasted night,” Rinku lamented,
the disappointment visible on his face.
This, then, was the usual life of a
GRD volunteer from 8 pm to 6 am.
“We conduct the patrols for three,
four nights at a stretch, and then take
a day off to catch up on sleep. During
the rounds, we sleep in the daytime
for a few hours. Now, we’ll finally
head home after three days,” smiled
Surinder Kumar, a 23-year-old resident
of Dikadla village in Panipat. I asked
the volunteers whether there would
be a party to celebrate the previ-
ous night’s catch at Rewari, and they
grinned. “Yes, definitely,” Rinku said,
“We’ll get twenty litres of milk from
a gaushala, and mix dry fruits worth
1,000-1,500 rupees in it—and we’ll eat
good vegetarian food.”
The conversation then moved on to
the benefits of cow products. Among
other things, the volunteers believed
that American scientists had proved
that cow urine can cure cancer. Ashok
explained how cow-urine therapy
works: “Each morning, collect the
first urine of the cow. Then, strain it
through a cloth, and drink a 30 ml shot
on an empty stomach. Your body will
never go wrong.” Surinder showed me
photographs on his phone of seized
cows and vehicles, and smiling group
shots with leaders such as Ramdev
and Khattar. A couple of days later, he
THE CARAVAN
added me to a WhatsApp group called
“Gau Bhagat.”
Half an hour later, the photographer
and I were on our way back to Jhajjar
after a series of hitched and hired rides
on the deserted night roads. We finally
reached the police post after daybreak,
and proceeded to ride back to Delhi via
NH 9.
On 2 June, I skimmed through
the 500-odd unread messages on
Surinder’s WhatsApp group. They
mostly contained details about rallies,
orders, patrols and achievements, apart
from sundry jokes and nationalistic
propaganda, with dubious arguments
and statistics. There were also memes,
videos and songs hailing the cow
mother. Most of the messages ended
with “Jai Gau Mata Ki.” A few weeks
thence, Surinder changed the name
of the group to “Gau ma da ladlaa,”
or beloved son of the cow mother.
Recently, on 9 August, reacting to the
prime minister’s comments against gau
rakshaks, one of the members posted a
poem in Hindi:
Ek arab ki umeedon ne
Tumko vahaan bithaaya tha
Saare desh ke gaubhakton ne
Milkar jor lagaya tha
Abhi samay hai, maafi maang lo
Varna desh ki gaddi se
Ab tumhein utaara jaayega
Patna toh tum haar chuke,
ab UP haara jaayega
(The hopes of one billion people
Got you the PM’s seat
The country’s cow-devotees
Had all put in the effort
There is still time, apologise
Or else, from the country’s throne
Now you shall be uprooted
You’ve already lost Patna
Now you’ll lose UP) s

cardiac ScienceS
Heart diseases, prevalent in most com-
munities, are one of the commonest and
ever-growing cause of death, disability
and loss of working hours in India across
genders and rural areas and cities alike.
Trends indicate that these diseases have
found their way into the younger popula-
tions too.
Sleep apnea and itS
riSkS to increaSed
heart diSeaSe
Snoring is the first indication of sleep
apnea and cardiologists indicate its con-
nection with heart diseases.
Among people suffering from problems
such as high blood pressure, heart failure
and stroke, there is a high prevalence of
sleep apnea. Whether it actually causes
heart diseases is still unclear, but cardi-
ologists do maintain that if an individual
has sleep apnea today, the chances of
developing hypertension in the future
increases significantly.
What causes blood pressure to soar
when your sleep is disrupted by sleep
apnea?
An individual’s blood pressure goes
through interruptions in sleep because
of lack of breathing. The oxygen level
falls rapidly and excites receptors that
alert the brain to stimulate signals to
“tighten up” blood vessels in order to
maintain oxygen flow to priority organs—
the heart and the brain. The condition of
“restricted” blood vessels at night gets
carried over to the daytime because the
low oxygen level in the night triggers
multiple mechanisms that persist during
the daytime, even when the patient is
breathing normally.
Available evidence shows that among
individuals suffering from sleep apnea
and treated using CPAP (Continuous Posi-
tive Airway Pressure), blood pressure is
under control while they are asleep, and
also lower during the daytime.
lateSt in
aortic ValVe replacement Most bioresorbable stents are made of
Aortic valve replacement, is typically polylactic acid, a naturally dissolvable
an open-heart surgery. But a mini- material that is used in medical implants
mally invasive method using surgery or such as dissolving sutures. The drawbacks
a catheter procedure might be an option of using polymer are—recoil after expan-
for some. sion, stent thickness causing manoeu-
The latest procedure involves replace- vrability, crossing issues, difficulty in
ment of an aortic valve that treats aortic seeing fluoroscopy, and no firm crimping
valve stenosis, which means that open- on delivery balloons.
heart surgeries might not be required. It There are advantages of not implanting
uses a thin, flexible tube called a catheter a permanent metal prosthesis. The stent
which is inserted through a small incision dissolves after about two years; it elimi-
into a blood vessel, typically through the nates the cause of potential inflammation
groin. It is then moved upwards through that can lead to late-stent thrombosis
major blood vessels to reach the heart. A and restenosis; it restores the vessel to
specially designed artificial valve, fitted a natural state of vasoconstriction and
inside the catheter, is moved inside the vasodilation; and the disappearance of
damaged aortic valve. When the artificial the device also leaves open all options
valve expands, it works as the aortic for future interventions, if needed.
valve.
 This procedure, available in a handful
of centres, might not be right for every-
one. A person who cannot have surgery
or has a high risk of serious complica-
tions arising post-surgery can avail this
option.
Although this procedure is minimally
invasive, it can pose serious risks includ-
ing stroke, heart muscle damage, heart
blockage, kidney problems, and even
death if the procedure is not carried out
correctly or the patient is not selected
with proper evaluation. The long-term
results of this procedure are not yet
known.
BioreSorBaBle StentS
are the Way of the future
Bioresorbable stents are envisaged to
replace conventional metallic stents in
the future. However, some cardiologists
argue, these stents might have some
drawbacks. But with technological ad-
vancements such issues will be resolved
because, experts say, clinical data shows dr. Sanjeev chaudhary
Director and Unit Head (Cardiology)
that the benefits of bioresorbable stents Fortis Memorial Research Institute,
may outweigh its drawbacks. Gurgaon
Pomeranian
Gurgaon, Haryana
January 2016
Rottweiler
Bengaluru, Karnataka
November 2015

Pet Project
The strange world of Indian dog shows
PHOTO ESSAY / HOBBIES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARAN VAID

65
karan vaid spent much of his boyhood, in the
1970s and 1980s, being shepherded to dog shows
all around India by his dog-enthusiast parents.
Decades later, Vaid, by then a photographer, found
pictures from those trips while digitising old fam-
ily albums. “I decided that I should revisit these
shows and see what was going on,” he said. Thus
was born the Indian Dog Show Project, a series that
captures scenes from dog shows held across the
country, from Chennai to Amritsar. Vaid has been
working on it since October 2013.
When shooting the series, Vaid wanted to avoid
taking the “classical documentary approach.” He
was struck by how many dog owners “loved the
camera on them,” and how some enjoyed quasi-ce-
lebrity status “at the top of the dog-show fraterni-
ty.” This, he said, inspired him to assume the role
of a paparazzo, and to take pictures “in the genre”
of entertainment photography. His photographs,
shot through with a voyeuristic but affectionate
tone, depict obsessive handlers, quibbling judges
and sinewy dogs competing for fame and fortune.
Vaid quickly became familiar with the dog-
show subculture’s internal politics. “Judges are
respected and most contestants treat them like
rock stars,” he said. But, sometimes, dog own-
ers—who can be “very passionate people”—do not
hesitate to “vent their anger (however misplaced)
by confronting judges during the show.” He also
witnessed the seedy underbelly of these events,
and remarked on how, especially in north India,
they “sometimes attract unscrupulous puppy-mill
breeders who camp just outside the venues, trying
to sell the popular breeds of that state.”
Even while Vaid witnessed all of the dog-show
world’s oddities, he became one himself. “I have
become a bit of a permanent fixture at these dog
shows,” he said. “Sometimes people come up to me
and ask me about what I am doing, and don’t usu-
ally understand why.”
Pug
Ludhiana, Punjab
November 2013
Pakistani Bully Kutta
Patiala, Punjab
November 2014
 Judge
Jaipur, Rajasthan
January 2014
 Miniature Pinscher
Dehradun, Uttarakhand
December 2014
 Great Dane
Kolkata, West Bengal
January 2016
Beagle
Ludhiana, Punjab
January 2016
Japanese Akita
Dehradun, Uttarakhand
December 2015
 Cocker Spaniels
Kolkata, West Bengal
January 2016
 Great Danes
Chennai, Tamil Nadu
September 2014
Staffordshire Terrier
Amritsar, Punjab
December 2015
joanna hellgren

Body of Work
People, power and prophecy in the
writing of Mahasweta Devi
CHITRALEKHA BASU
sometime in 2000, I watched the actor
Sabitri Heisnam play the eponymous
protagonist in a stage adaptation of Ma-
hasweta Devi’s 1976 story ‘Draupadi.’
Set against the backdrop of the Naxalite
movement in the late 1960s and early
1970s, ‘Draupadi’ tells of a woman Adi-
vasi insurgent in the fictitious but rec-
ognisable forested belt of “Jharkhani”
on the Bengal-Bihar border, working
in tandem with a group of communist
guerrillas from the city. Draupadi gets
caught by the military, and is serially
raped as part of a ritual chastisement
session. Then, in a throwback to the
public shaming of Draupadi from the
Mahabharata, to which Mahasweta
adds a defiant twist, the woman casts
off her sari, refusing to cover up the
wounds inflicted on her by the state.
The audience gasped in disbelief as
Heisnam stood completely naked on
stage, her slight frame suddenly grown
bigger against the dark backdrop. Then,
like a predatory bird, she unfurled
her arms, taking slow, measured steps
towards her uniformed attackers. The
soldiers recoiled in horror as Draupadi
thrust her mangled body towards them,
wearing her scars like weapons more
powerful than their bayoneted guns.
The play attracted its share of contro-
versy for showing a woman actor nude
on stage. Four years later, in July 2004,
members of a women’s social movement
group in Manipur stripped down to
their bare skin to protest the custo-
dial rape and death of the 34-year-old
Thangjam Manorama. A few days ear-
lier, on the night of 10 July, Manorama
had been picked up by the Assam Rifles,
a state paramilitary unit, from her
Imphal home, for her supposed links to
the banned People’s Liberation Army.
Around forty women demonstrated in
front of the Assam Rifles headquar-
ters, naked, holding up banners saying
“Indian Army Rape Us.” The radical
protest made media headlines, but
probably not that much difference to
the lives of women in Manipur, where
the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act,
which allowed the Assam Rifles to act
with such impunity, still prevails.
Many remarked on how Mahasweta
seemed to have anticipated the future.
Since then, there have been other such
instances of foresight, just as remark-
able, though the connection between
them and Mahasweta’s writing may be
less obvious.
Earlier this year, Rohith Vemula, a
Dalit PhD candidate at the University of
Hyderabad, hanged himself, leaving be-
hind a note that included the line, “My
birth is my fatal accident.” Vemula’s
death stirred memories of 1992, when
Mahasweta ran a sustained campaign
in support of 27-year-old Chuni Kotal,
the first woman university graduate
SEPTEMBER 2016
BOOKS
from the Lodha-Shabar community, an
Adivasi group from rural West Ben-
gal. The Lodha-Shabar people, listed
as a criminal tribe in British India,
have since been “de-notified,” but the
stigma still sticks—or, at any rate, did
in 1990s Bengal. During her Masters’
course at Vidyasagar University, 150
kilometres west of Kolkata, Kotal was
systematically harassed by professors
and administrators, who openly chal-
lenged an Adivasi woman’s aspirations
to higher education. As it became clear
that the university-appointed com-
mission of inquiry set up on the basis
of her complaints would do nothing to
restrain her bullies, and her dream of
attaining a postgraduate degree might
never materialise, Kotal took her own
life on 16 August 1992.
Afterwards, a state-appointed com-
mission of inquiry reported that only
Kotal herself was responsible for her
death. Mahasweta found this unac-
ceptable and resolved to have the case
reinvestigated. She wrote scathing
articles in the Economic and Political
Weekly, and in the Bengali magazine
Bortika, whose editorship she had taken
over in 1980, turning it from a journal
of poetry to a platform for communities
largely ignored by the media. In 1982,
Kotal herself had published an account
in the magazine of her journey—from
a poor Adivasi family to clearing her
79
body of work · books
school-leaving exams against seem-
ingly insurmountable odds. Mahasweta
criticised the government’s apathy,
questioned the indifference of Kolkata’s
intellectuals to Kotal’s death, wrote to
the state’s chief minister, Jyoti Basu,
and did everything she could to initiate
a Central Bureau of Investigation or
judicial inquiry, which never happened.
Kotal became yet another statistic in
the history of prejudice towards India’s
Dalits and Adivasis, but not before, or
so Mahasweta wrote in EPW, she had
“ripped off the mask” of a supposedly
tolerant, liberal, aesthetically inclined
and egalitarian West Bengal.
mahasweta devi, who passed away
on 28 July this year, was born to two
writers, Manish and Dharitri Ghatak,
in 1926. In an article in Anandabazar
Patrika, Mahasweta reminisced about
growing up in Dhaka surrounded by a
library of several thousand titles, main-
tained by her maternal grandmother,
Kironmoyee Devi. She went to study at
Tagore’s Shantiniketan, and at 21 mar-
ried Bijon Bhattacharya, a playwright,
actor and frontman of the Indian Peo-
ple’s Theatre Association—the cultural
wing of the Communist Party of India.
Sachin Chaudhuri, the founder-editor
of the Economic Weekly, which later
became EPW, was her maternal uncle.
Given such a background, it is not
surprising that Mahasweta would go
on to write politically charged fiction.
Still, having full-on, parallel careers as
a writer and a social activist was un-
precedented, not only in her illustrious
family but also for a Bengali woman.
Since the publication of her first
novel in 1956, Mahasweta produced
about a hundred novels and collec-
tions of stories, along with scores of
essays, newspaper articles and col-
umns, as well as plays, translations
and children’s textbooks. The prolific
output has partly been in aid of paying
the bills. She would often take long,
unpaid leaves from teaching English
at Kolkata’s Bijoygarh College to do
research and write, at a time when the
remuneration for writers was paltry
and irregular. In 1984, she quit the post
to write full-time.
Despite her deep commitment to
writing, unlike many of her fellow lit-
80
terateurs, Mahasweta has never been
only a writer. Her compassion for the
marginalised and dispossessed com-
munities she wrote about led her to
participate directly in their lives. The
dividing line between creative space
and social concern did not exist in Ma-
hasweta’s world.
As her long-time research associate
Maitreya Ghatak writes in his intro-
duction to Dust on the Road, a set of
Mahasweta’s essays that he translated
and collected,
Mahasweta Devi is a one-person
resource centre for people in distress,
a role that started demanding a
considerable part of her time in 1981
and still continues, with no signs of
abating, sometimes leaving her little
privacy or time for other activities,
particularly creative writing. A large
number of people from many parts
of the state, mostly remote villages,
approach her with their problems ...
Many of them stay with her during
their visits.
Although, in an interview a few years
ago, Mahasweta insisted that she did
not set out to be a writer with a social
agenda—that she just “felt compelled”
to write about the inequities she saw
around her—from the 1990s onwards
she produced less fiction than she
used to because most of her time was
taken up with activist writing. Then
again, perhaps the difference between
literature and journalism is in this case
irrelevant. Mahasweta was, at the end
of the day, a seeker of truth. Urgency
and passion underlie each piece of her
writing, whatever form it takes.
In her teens, Mahasweta rejected
the advances of a cousin who tried to
court her. To an emerging Left-leaning
intellectual with friends in the Com-
munist Party of India, the notion of
middle-class romantic love seemed at
odds with her politics. Successively, her
commitment to social activism took
precedence over family, relationships
and personal time, gradually elbowing
out writing that was not necessarily
meant to serve the less privileged. The
attention she started giving to her ever-
growing family of people in distress
meant that she no longer had time to
THE CARAVAN
write voluminous historical novels
such as the 1964 Amrita Sanchay, or the
achingly beautiful short stories about
the adventures of teenage protagonists,
which she published in Sandesh, a
magazine edited by the filmmaker Saty-
ajit Ray, in the 1980s. Until a few years
ago, she would be seen at handicrafts
fairs selling decorative items made
from grass and bamboo by Adivasis
from the Kheria-Shabar community.
Naveen Kishore, a close confidant of
Mahasweta’s and the publisher of most
of the English translations of her work,
mentioned while introducing her at
a literary festival in 2013 that when
she decides to put her weight behind a
social cause, her favourite slogan has
always been “Body phele debo” (I will
serve with my body for as long as it
holds together).
In 2006, 80-year-old Mahasweta
travelled with the social activist
Medha Patkar to Singur, a village in
the Hooghly district of West Bengal,
in a show of solidarity with a peasant
resistance against the state government
effort to redistribute land. Nearly a
thousand acres of fine agricultural land
were seized by force from peasants and
turned over to the Tata group, which
wanted to set up a small-car factory.
Mahasweta was, at the time, writing a
daily column in Dainik Statesman, criti-
cising West Bengal’s ruling Left Front
alliance for its “extreme arrogance
and anti-people policies.” She felt it
was important to be physically present
alongside Singur’s dispossessed peas-
ants, to demonstrate her support for the
unregistered sharecroppers, who were
not eligible for compensation for the
land they were set to lose.
I remember watching her speak
on 14 November the following year,
standing on a makeshift platform in
Kolkata’s Esplanade area. Nearly a
hundred thousand people were out on
the streets for a spontaneous citizens’
march after villagers in Nandigram—
like Singur, marked for land acquisi-
tion as part of the state government’s
industrialisation drive—opposed the
setting up of a Special Economic Zone
and were forcibly evicted. Addressing
the rally, Mahasweta said, “Today, we
are all called Nandigram,” bringing to
mind 1970s Kolkata, where the slogan

Naveen Kishore said that Mahasweta’s favourite
slogan has always been “Body phele debo” (I will
serve with my body for as long as it holds together).
“Amaar naam, tomaar naam, Vietnaam”
(My name, your name, we are all called
Vietnam) was often raised in solidar-
ity with Vietnam’s anti-imperialist
resistance against the US invasion of
the country.
One of Mahasweta’s most widely
read novels, Hajar Churashir Ma
(Mother of 1084), published 1974, is set
in that era of dissidence and repres-
sion in West Bengal. In 1971, after
Naxalite rebels started annihilating
class enemies, many young people with
tacit or suspected Naxalite connections
were rounded up by the police, maimed
during interrogations and murdered
en masse in staged encounters. The
Naxalites approached Mahasweta to
write a tell-all account of the state’s
actions. She chose to present the story
through the viewpoint of a griev-
ing mother, who learns of her son’s
revolutionary links only after he is
killed by the police. Overnight, Sujata,
a society hostess and self-assured
career woman, is reduced to being the
mother of corpse number 1084, made
to deal with a set of new realities in her
life. She must visit the morgue, answer
calls from the police at ungodly hours,
step inside a slum to meet the family of
her son’s dead colleague. These jarring
experiences, signifying the end of the
world as Sujata knew it, also bring into
focus the fragile nature of her afflu-
ent and therefore apparently secure
life. The pent-up anguish of having
to put up with an unfaithful husband
and grown-up children eager to hush
up rather than mourn the death in the
family eventually bursts out.
The politically unstable, violence-
prone and morally coruscating milieu
in West Bengal’s cities and small towns
in the 1960s and 1970s appears again in
stories such as ‘Dheebar’ (Fisherman),
‘Chhuri’ (Knife) and ‘Shareer’ (Body),
included in the collection Bait, trans-
lated by Sumanta Banerjee. In these
urban noir tales, peopled with gang-
sters, prostitutes, desperate policemen,
debauched politicians and fresh-faced
revolutionaries, Mahasweta recreated
the tensions between an aspirational
middle class and an emerging under-
class often engaged in dodgy occupa-
tions, as both tried to make a living in
post-Partition West Bengal. She ob-
served with an unsparing gaze how the
former, earlier revolted by the very idea
of having anything to do with the latter,
began grudgingly admitting them into
their own spaces. Her stories about
the collapse of the old social order and
changing middle-class values were told
in a precise and direct, if somewhat
uneven, language.
Around the same time, in films
such as Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal
Gandhar and Jukti Takko Aar Gappo,
Mahasweta’s paternal uncle, the
maverick filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak,
was tackling similar themes about
the Bengali middle-class intellectual,
caught in an existential crisis. Both
Ghatak and Mahasweta evolved their
own aesthetic vocabularies, which
were rather similar in ethos. Ghatak
filmed with handheld cameras, using
unconventional framings and low-
angle shots, sometimes reducing his
protagonists to heads pushed down to
the bottom of a panoramic screen, or
fragmenting and exaggerating their
unbeautiful features in extreme close-
ups. Mahasweta, too, did not shy away
from admitting the imperfect into
her work. She wrote in a rough-hewn
Bengali, full of terse, stichomythic
dialogue. The strategic juxtaposition
of academic jargon, media-speak and
the language of the street, peppered
with mangled derivatives of English
words (such as “bodar” for “border”)
and colloquialisms (such as “con-
troller,” meaning a local mafia don)
creates a postmodern world of sounds
and images, challenging the reader’s
assumptions about standard, literary
Bengali. It is as if Mahasweta wanted
to mock the urban Bengali bhadraloks’
tendency to theorise and quote from
books, while remaining alienated from
the ground realities.
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body of work · books
in 1956, Mahasweta’s first novel,
Jhansir Rani (The Queen of Jhansi),
offered a peek into the inner courtyard
of a spirited leader of India’s first war
of Independence, in 1857. Lakshmi Bai,
who ruled the state of Jhansi, went
down fighting, trying to defend Gwalior
against the British, in June 1858. Hav-
ing read several accounts of her life in
English and Marathi (with help from
Maharashtrian housewives living in
Kolkata), Mahasweta tried to imagine
the private world of the woman who
was a single mother to an infant son,
and who also rode a horse and fought
on the front lines of battle. Looking
to write an alternative biography of
Lakshmi Bai—who was either lionised
as a nationalist hero, or relegated to
the footnotes of history by historians
such as RC Majumdar, who held that
the 1857 uprising suffered from a lack
of leadership—Mahasweta travelled to
Gwalior and Jhansi. To her pleasant
surprise, most people she met in the
region seemed to have inherited memo-
ries connected to Lakshmi Bai. This
included a bunch of women hairdress-
ers and manicurists whose ancestors
attended on the queen. They showed
Mahasweta the spot where Lakshmi
Bai hosted the Haridra Kumkum fes-
tival, to which each woman in Jhansi,
regardless of caste or class, was invited.
Under the queen’s watch, the ritual,
traditionally observed by women to
wish each other a long, uninterrupted
married life, turned into a celebration
of happy sorority.
“In all my writings I have tried to
present the subaltern point of view,”
Mahasweta said in an interview pub-
lished as an appendix to The Queen
of Jhansi, translated into English by
Sagoree and Mandira Sengupta. “To
evaluate a war in history one has to
take into account the views of the peo-
ple who pay for that war; emotionally,
physically and financially.”
Mahasweta’s connection with
grass-roots India intensified when she
travelled to Singhbhum, in Bihar, to do
the groundwork for Aranyer Adhikar
(Right to the Forest), published in 1977.
This is a work of historical fiction based
on the life of the Adivasi leader Birsa
Munda. In the 1890s, Munda spear-
headed an uprising against a British
81
 body of work · books
renuka puri / indian express archive
“In all my writings I have tried to present the subaltern point of view,” Mahasweta said in an interview published as an appendix to the English
translation of her first novel.
attempt to replace the traditional sub-
sistence farming system practiced by
Santhals with commercial agriculture.
An expert in guerrilla warfare, Munda
gave his mighty adversaries a hard time
until his capture and somewhat myste-
rious death in a Ranchi jail in 1900, at
the age of 25. The extensive research
and travel Mahasweta undertook to
write Aranyer Adhikar inspired her to
go even deeper. Travelling across large
swathes of India’s Adivasi hinterland,
in Bihar and West Bengal, she stumbled
upon unlikely heroes, who did not have
the mythical aura of Birsa Munda. A
whole new world of narratives, myths,
rituals and ethnocultural experiences
opened up, and Mahasweta felt a moral
responsibility to bring these to a wider
audience. This she did, in a number of
her subsequent works.
“I believe in documentation,” Ma-
hasweta writes in her introduction to
Bitter Soil, a collection of four stories
set in Bihar, translated into English
by Ipsita Chanda. “After reading my
work, the reader should be able to
face the truth of facts, and feel duly
ashamed of the true face of India. ...
82
I say ‘India’, though the location of
these stories is Palamau. Palamau is a
mirror of India.”
Bengali writers had been there
before her, but Mahasweta came away
from the Adivasi belts with very dif-
ferent stories from theirs. Palamau, an
extremely readable 1882 travelogue by
the writer and journalist Sanjibchan-
dra Chattopadhyay, an older sibling
of the more widely known novelist
Bankimchandra, is still regarded as a
remarkable study in cultural anthro-
pology. But Mahasweta’s take on the
lives of Adivasi women is the antithesis
of Chattopadhyay’s gentleman-tourist
marvelling at the strangeness and
beauty of the bare breasts of dark Kol
women etched against the moonlit sky.
Chattopadhyay would probably have
baulked at the scarred naked breasts
in Mahasweta’s stories, where they are
often reduced to expendable, truncated
body parts on which men have left the
imprints of their power and owner-
ship. The theme of tortured, lacerated
breasts figures in ‘Draupadi,’ and again
in the 1987 story ‘Stanadayini’ (Breast-
giver). Jashoda, the main character
THE CARAVAN
of the latter story, is used like a milch
cow, to suckle the children of her rich
employers—and a sizeable brood of her
own, as she has to keep breeding chil-
dren to continue to lactate. This goes
on for 30 years, until she gets breast
cancer. The woman once venerated as a
miracle for perennially supplying milk
is reduced to a revolting mess of burst
capillaries and putrefaction, dying
alone in a hospital, shunned by her fam-
ily and her long line of “milk-sons.”
In the 1996 short story ‘Choli ke
Peeche’ (Behind the Bodice), a high-
profile photographer, Upin, clicks Gan-
gor, a wage labourer in a brick kiln in a
fictitious small town, possibly in Bihar,
breastfeeding her baby. When the pho-
tos are published, Gangor is taken to be
a loose woman—and so becomes easy
prey for the local policemen. She gets
gang-raped over and over again, until
only “two dry scars” are left where her
breasts used to be. When Gangor meets
Upin again, she forces him to look at
the ruin he has brought upon her. Over-
whelmed by guilt and remorse, Upin
loses his mind, running amok until he
meets with a gory end.

As Mahasweta wrote in her introduction to Bitter Soil,
these stories were written, primarily, to expose the
failure of successive governments in India to create
an equitable society.
Aranyak, a novel by Bibhutibhushan
Bandyopadhyay, serialised in the
magazine Prabasi from 1937 to 1939,
offers another telling comparison.
Bandyopadhyay was one of Bengal’s
finest exponents of modernist prose,
replete with tender descriptions of the
minutiae of daily life. He mined his own
experiences as a land dealer’s agent in
forested, Adivasi areas of Bihar to cre-
ate Satyacharan, the novel’s protagonist.
Satyacharan, like Upin, suffers from
guilt over his inability to protect the
vulnerable, but his romantic brooding at
being complicit in the rampant defor-
estation of a pristine, virginal landscape
would be out of place in Mahasweta’s
unsparing fictional universe. His utopi-
an fantasy—he imagines the home of an
Adivasi princess in a clearing deep in-
side the forest, protected, as if by magic,
from the tentacles of the realtor—is very
different from what Mahasweta’s urban
characters would take home from a
brush with Adivasi life.
The city-bred, do-gooder protago-
nists of Mahasweta’s stories who arrive,
armed with university degrees, in
the primordial world of unmitigated
hunger, deprivation and blind faith, are
usually far more down to earth than the
dreamy-eyed Satyacharan. In ‘Drau-
padi,’ the Naxalite leader Arijit is quick
to rationalise sacrificing his Adivasi
colleague when he senses the military
dragnet closing in on her. “If Comrade
Dopdi arrives late, we will not remain,”
he says. “No comrade will let the others
be destroyed for her own sake.”
Of course, the inscrutable ways of
India’s indigenous cultures can baf-
fle even genuinely well intentioned
outsiders. In the 1987 story ‘Pterodactyl,
Puran Sahay and Pirtha,’ Puran Sahay,
a journalist, arrives in a famine-riddled
Adivasi pocket of Madhya Pradesh,
intent on “putting Pirtha on the map.”
Through his reports, Puran hopes to
draw the attention of the powers that
be, and so bring aid to Pirtha’s suffer-
ing population. But he gets distracted
by mysterious drawings on a cave wall,
depicting a giant winged creature. The
drawings seem prehistoric, but could
just as well be the work of a young lad
from the village. Unable to decode the
images, a restless Puran—exasperated at
the failure of his university education to
provide useful leads—turns to his friend,
the local sub-divisional officer, who
helps to put the situation in context,
asking, “You will understand them with
your urban mentality? You will fathom
the Indian Ocean with a foot-ruler?”
Puran leaves Pirtha, still confounded,
wondering if there was anything to infer
from the strange images in the first
place, or if they weren’t their own foot-
note, “at once both myth and analysis.”
The scholar Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak writes in her introduction to
Imaginary Maps, a collection of her
translations of Mahasweta’s stories that
includes ‘Pterodactyl,’ “I have no doubt
that we must learn to learn from the
original, practical, ecological philoso-
phers of the world, through the slow,
attentive, mind-changing singularity
that deserves the name of love.”
Indeed, Mahasweta’s band of unlet-
tered repositories of wisdom, those
men and women who seem to have
issued out of the rough, unfarmed soil
of India’s Adivasi outback, are some-
times capable of not just changing
how we see, but also ushering in a new
world order for us to experience and
acknowledge. Like Draupadi, who has
the “black blood of Champabhumi”
coursing through her veins, endowing
her with an intuitive ability to inter-
pret cues provided by nature, being
unconstrained by the baggage of book
learning, the unlikely Adivasi heroes in
Mahasweta’s stories bring about drastic
changes in the old dispensations that
have allowed the unmitigated dehu-
manisation of the marginalised. These
dramatic reversals are sometimes
achieved through acts of violence.
Mary Oraon, in the 1978 story ‘Shi-
kar’ (The Hunt), is twice marginalised,
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body of work · books
being the offspring of unmarried par-
ents, a Santhal woman and an Australi-
an man. She is an Adivasi and a bastard.
Mary’s cold-blooded murder of a timber
smuggler, who lusted after both her
body and the natural resources of the
aboriginal landscape she inhabits, helps
her transcend these twin, imposed
social identities. She takes a ritual bath
in a canal after the assassination, and
sheds the last traces of the humiliations
she has suffered as she walks, alone and
unafraid, towards a new life, following
railway tracks under a starlit sky.
The story ‘Bicchan’ (Seed), from 1977,
focusses on Dulan Ganju, who comes
from a tribe that has traditionally
made a living skinning dead animals.
Dulan, like Mary Oraon, goes through
a cathartic experience, in his case after
executing his upper-caste landlord to
avenge the killing of his son Dhatua.
Earlier, the shrewd landlord had
palmed off to Dulan a sterile, arid plot
of land. Post-murder, Dulan revisits
the patch, which is now growing tall,
healthy rice plants, its soil apparently
made fertile by the bones and flesh
of assassinated peasants, including
Dhatua.
Slowly Dulan climbs up to the
machan. A tune in his heart. Stub-
bornly disobedient. Returning time
and again. Dhatua made up the song.
Dhatua, Dulan’s voice trembles as he
says the name. Dhatua, I’ve turned
you all into seed.
As Mahasweta wrote in her introduc-
tion to Bitter Soil, these stories were
written, primarily, to expose the failure
of successive governments in India to
create an equitable society. Told with
virtuosic precision and control, they
anticipate a world in which the poor
and oppressed people of India, whose
existence often goes unnoticed, will ar-
rive to claim their rightful place at the
centre of the nation’s consciousness.
Like the image of a naked Draupadi,
spotlit against a dark backdrop, arms
outstretched like the wings of an alba-
tross, the progeny of India’s original
people assume larger-than-life dimen-
sions in Mahasweta’s stories, waiting
for the arrival of a day that will be
different. s
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 BOOKS

Singular and Plural

Krishna Sobti’s unique picture of a less divided India
TRISHA GUPTA

krishna sobti watched the television screen

intently, from her usual place on the worn
brown sofa in her compact east Delhi apart-
ment. As each new talking head appeared,
she either bid me to listen carefully, or else
gently resumed our conversation until the next
section she deemed important. The scratchy
DVD was something the doyenne of Hindi
literature knows inside out: a Doordarshan
programme about her, from the mid 1990s. We
watched as the male interviewer and a series
of male interviewees gave way to footage of
Sobti delivering a literary speech: “Bhasha ki jo
oorja hai woh maatra lekhak ke antar mein sthit
nahi hai”—the energy that a language has is
not located only in the interiority of the writer.
“Chup reh!”—shut up!—said the old lady on the
sofa to her younger self on screen. “Main iska
bada mazaak udaati hoon”—I make fun of this
one a lot—she added, turning down the volume.
Sobti laughs a lot. Even when she is the
butt of her own jokes, it’s nearly impossible
to stop yourself from laughing with her. She
is 91, and finds it difficult to walk unassisted,
even from the bedroom to the living room. But
once comfortably ensconced on her sofa, she
can talk for hours, reminiscing about all sorts
of things and people, only stopping when she
gets anxious about having forgotten a name.
Her stories may ramble, but her capacity for
writerly labour seems undimmed, as does her
courtesy krishna sobti

political sharpness. On my three visits to her

house, between March and June this year, I
learnt that she is in the process of readying not
one but two manuscripts for publication: an au-
tobiographical novel called Gujrat Pakistan Se

84 THE CARAVAN

opposite page: Krishna Sobti’s public persona is that of a grande dame, and perhaps nothing
signals it more than her sense of style. “Yaar, I wish I was a dressmaker!” she said.
Gujarat Hindustan Tak, and an illustrat-
ed edition of poems by the pioneering
modernist poet Gajanan Madhav Muk-
tibodh, selected and annotated by Sobti.
On one occasion, she handed me two
recently published pamphlets: one on
the writer’s relationship to power and
citizenship, and the second an impas-
sioned criticism of the recent human-
resource development ministry injunc-
tion that Urdu writers must certify that
texts they have submitted for awards or
grants do not contain anything against
the government or the country.
Over the hours we spent together,
Sobti received phone calls from pub-
lishers, illustrators, magazine editors,
writer friends and admirers, who often
wanted to make appointments to visit
her in Mayur Vihar. In May, as the
long-awaited English translation of
her magnum opus, Zindaginama, was
finally published, interview requests
from English-language journalists
increased. One evening, after the phone
rang two or three times in quick suc-
cession, with her housekeeper-cum-
cook-cum-assistant, Vimlesh, having
to juggle her various appointments for
the week, Sobti turned to me, raising
her eyebrows in a gesture of happy dis-
belief: “Main inactive hoon!” (And they
say I’m inactive!).
Sobti has never been one to mince
words. The author of eight novels,
two novellas, one collection of short
stories, two works of non-fiction and
three volumes of literary sketches, she
has a long-standing reputation as one
of Hindi’s most outspoken writers,
unafraid to court controversy both on
and off the page. Yet, she has also often
been sidelined and attacked for her
unconventional characters, and for her
language, which many have perceived
as unliterary. Today, Sobti’s work is
worth reading not only for the pungent
originality of her Hindi, but also for
how she cultivates that language in
order to envision the unity of, rather
than the fissures between, South Asian
communities.
Even as a young writer, Sobti never
lacked for confidence. Her first pub-
lished short story, ‘Lama,’ about Tibet-
an Buddhist priests, came out in 1944,
as did another story called ‘Nafisa,’ the
same year, both in the weekly Vichar.
Then came the story that first brought
her literary acclaim, and still remains
in circulation 65-odd years later: ‘Sikka
Badal Gaya.’ “It was a Partition story. I
wrote it in 1950–51, and sent it to a high-
profile Hindi magazine called Prateek,”
Sobti recounted. Prateek was edited by
the leading modernist writer Sachchi-
danand Vatsyayan, better known as
Agyeya. The daughter of a central gov-
ernment employee, Sobti was then liv-
ing with her parents in the Atul Grove
Road area in Lutyens’ Delhi. Vatsyayan,
who happened to live nearby, sent her
an invitation to tea, where he gave her
a copy of the issue. Sobti was happy but
guarded. “I was afraid that he would
have changed the language—there
were some expressions used typically
by Punjabi Muslims... But he had not.
The next evening, I looked at it again,
and thought, hmm, the whole text is
good. Only my name is old-fashioned!”
She celebrated in a non-old-fashioned
way: by treating herself to coffee at
Wenger’s—the famous Connaught Place
pastry shop, then an elegant sit-down
place with a live band—and flirt-
ing mildly with the bandmaster, “He
always had very polished shoes... So I
asked them to play ‘My shoes keep on
walking back to you.’”
SEPTEMBER 2016
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Sobti’s stories of her youth and child-
hood are full of similarly infectious
enthusiasm. She and her three siblings
went to school in Delhi and Shimla,
the whole family moving bag and bag-
gage between the two cities that were,
respectively, the British government’s
winter and summer capitals. But while
her father, and her grandfather before
that, were employed in the colonial ad-
ministration, the family’s proximity to
the British social scene seemed only to
sharpen their sense of segregation from
it. Sobti’s eyes lit up as she remembered
an open-air skating rink in Shimla, a
magical sight that the children could
see from their house—but from which
they, as Indians, were barred. “You can
imagine how we felt. We absorbed a
lot from the British, but we were very
much Indian. There was a national-
ist atmosphere at home. But we were
told not to say too much outside!” She
recalled a nationalist slogan from the
streets of her childhood: “Up up hai
Gandhi sachcha/ Down down hai toady
bachcha” (Up, up with the truthful
Gandhi/ Down, down with toadies). A
note of pride crept into her voice as she
told me that she saw Mohandas Gandhi
twice as a child—“Once in Girja Maidan
in Shimla, when he was speaking. And
another time when he was staying in
the home of Mohanlal Sood, a lawyer
in Chhota Shimla. All the government
families went to see him.”
Some of Sobti’s fondest reminiscenc-
es are reserved for Lahore, where she
spent her college years at Fatehchand
College (“I was never a good student”)
amid girlish good cheer. She recounted
her last birthday in Lahore, when she
used her birthday money of R50 to
organise a picnic on the Ravi river for
her classmates, with catering from
Standard Restaurant, then the epitome
of style. It was February 1947, and Sobti
remembered that youthful idyll as
85
singular and plural · books
tinged with melancholy, a fear of what
the future held. Sure enough, Partition
disrupted her studies, and she found
herself having to take up a job as gov-
erness to the child Tej Singh, then the
maharaja of Sirohi. It is these two years
in Rajasthan that are the basis for her
forthcoming novel, Gujrat Pakistan Se.
But Sobti’s earliest writing drew
more on her experience of rural Gujrat
(now in Pakistan), where she had spent
many childhood vacations. Her mother,
Durga, came from zamindari lineage,
and the home of her maternal grand-
parents had been the hub of village life.
But two months after Partition, her
grandmother found herself gently but
firmly escorted out of the village by a
Muslim police inspector. That mo-
ment was the one Sobti enshrined in
the story ‘Sikka Badal Gaya,’ where we
meet a similar grandmother, Shahni, in
her old age. It would be nearly three de-
cades before her readers met Shahni in
her younger avatar: in Sobti’s landmark
1979 novel, Zindaginama.
Sobti had first put that story into
writing as a 500-page manuscript
called Channa, which she submitted
to Allahabad’s famous Leader Press in
1952. “They accepted it, but sent me the
proofs very late. Opening them, I found
they had Sanskritised the language—
turned ‘trikaal bela’ into ‘sandhya,’
‘Shahni’ into ‘Shahpatni,’ and so on.
I sent them a telegram saying, ‘Com-
ing tomorrow. Stop printing.’” When
Sobti arrived, the publishers claimed to
have printed half of the planned 5,000
copies. “They didn’t take me seriously. I
was in my early twenties, very young to
be writing such a big fat novel. Upar se
I was Punjabi.” The text as it stood was
unacceptable to her. In one of the first of
many instances of her famous stubborn
streak, Sobti insisted the publishers
destroy the printed copies. “I actually
paid them to do it. Can you imagine?”
Then she came home to Delhi and put
her manuscript away in a box.
It was Sheela Sandhu, her publisher
at Rajkamal Prakashan and a close
friend, who persuaded her to look at
it again in the mid 1970s. “I took it out
one night, and concluded that it has all
the possibilities of a good novel, but it
86
was written when I did not know how
to write.” Being Sobti, this harsh self-
evaluation led her to write the book
again, from scratch. Zindaginama came
out in 1979, and won the 1980 Sahitya
Akademi award for Hindi. Sobti was
the first woman to have won it, and is
still one of only three. A vast, often un-
wieldy tapestry, the book is impossible
to summarise. Ostensibly centred on
the life of a landed family in the village
of Shahpur, it actually tracks a whole
villageful of characters and conversa-
tions to recreate the universe of rural,
undivided Punjab. The celebration
of Baisakhi and Lohri, women spin-
ning thread and dyeing cloth, caste
feuds and religious harmony, the hold
of the land, the yearning for sons, the
powerful grip of colonial modernity
on Punjab in the shape of the army and
the law—all these and more are cap-
tured in vivid, vocal detail. This time,
Sobti wasn’t unhappy with the results:
“Because there was a distance, all the
images were ekdam fresh.”
The poet Ashok Vajpeyi, one of
Sobti’s staunchest admirers, is un-
equivocal: “Zindaginama is not merely
a great novel, it is one of the few great
novels this country has,” he told me on
the phone. The novel, he said, ensures
that “an area that has disappeared
from Indian geography will always live
in the Indian imagination.” When I
met the literary scholar Alok Bhalla at
Delhi’s India International Centre in
May, he told me, “Writers like Krishna
Baldev Vaid or Bhisham Sahani or
Kamleshwar wanted to think about
Partition in terms of the stories of those
who were uprooted and moved across
borders, and who may or may not have
then succeeded in creating new lives.
Krishna Sobti was not interested in
that.” Instead, Bhalla pointed out, “she
was interested in the life of a place, the
border towns of west Punjab, where
these different languages and peoples
and local legends intersected and
formed a living civilisation, that had a
past and could have had a future—be-
fore it was broken.”
Today, 35 years after it was published,
Zindaginama is a universally acclaimed
part of the Hindi literary canon. At the
THE CARAVAN
time, however, there were many who
questioned the highly unconventional
and distinctive register in which it was
written. Studded with proverbs, poetry
and songs that captured the vibrant,
unexpurgated oral culture of Punjab in
the 1910s—from sitthanis, teasing ditties
about family members, to grandiose
laam-ghodis, wedding songs composed
for troops—Zindaginama was a stun-
ning linguistic achievement. But ac-
knowledging that fact about the novel’s
language did not prevent the question
from being asked, or at least strongly
implied—was it Hindi?
sobti has always had a complicated
relationship with Hindi, and writing
in it was not an automatic choice for
her. She said, “Hindi was not my first
language. It was English. In the sixth
or seventh class, I read Mary Elliot and
novels like The Rains Came”— a 1937
bestseller by the American writer Louis
Bromfield, set in the fictional colonial
town of Ranchipur. “The Shimla crowd,
they were government families: khoob
English aur Bangla padhne wale” (big
readers of English and Bengali). So
what made a young woman from a Pun-
jabi family, with Urdu-literate parents,
who was brought up in Delhi, Shimla
and Lahore and educated in English
at the Harcourt Butler High School,
choose Hindi?
In this, Sobti was a product of her
time and place. The scholar and trans-
lator Daisy Rockwell has persuasively
argued in her 2004 biography of the
writer Upendranath Ashk that the
story of Hindi’s rise in the twentieth
century “is as much social history as it
is artistic and literary.” Most educated
Hindus in nineteenth-century north
India were literate only in Urdu. The
Arya Samaj, with its mandate of creat-
ing a reformed Vedic Hinduism, was
crucial in changing things, particularly
in Punjab. The Samaj discouraged the
use of Punjabi and helped popularise a
version of khadi-boli Hindi in which a
Perso-Arabic vocabulary gave way to
a Sanskritised one. Rockwell suggests
that the combined push for Hindi as a
national language, from Gandhi as well
as the Progressive Writers Associa-

“I took it out one night, and concluded that it has all the possibilities of a good
novel, but it was written when I did not know how to write.” Being Sobti, this
harsh self-evaluation led her to write Zindaginama again, from scratch.
tion, plus the lure of a potentially huge
readership, propelled many writers
“through the thirties to fifties in the
regions of what is now the Punjab,
Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Mad-
hya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar” into
careers in Hindi.
It was an unpredictable time. The
1880-born Premchand, who had begun
his career writing in Urdu, famously
switched to the Devanagari script and
Hindi around 1915 and influenced the
1910-born Ashk to make the same move
in the 1930s. Krishna Baldev Vaid, born
in 1927, and Bhisham Sahani, born in
1915, were among others from Punjabi
family backgrounds who chose to write
in Hindi. Rajinder Singh Bedi, born in
1915 in Sialkot—now in Pakistan—con-
tinued to write in Urdu, although after
Partition he joined what is usually
called the Hindi film industry.
So while Sobti’s father, Prithviraj
Sobti, had grown up reading Urdu, and
shared his love of it with his daugh-
ter, her own schooling did not include
the Urdu script. “He had many Urdu
books,” she said. “At night, when my
brother and I were in our room, he
would often read aloud from his own
room.” Her mother also knew Urdu,
but had been shaped by the Arya Samaj.
“She brought ten or 15 books in her
dowry,” Sobti told me. Among them
were Satyarth Prakash—the Samaj’s
founder’s treatise on Vedic Hindu-
ism—the Ramayana, Suhaag Raat and
Stree Subhodini. The latter two, Sobti
said, smiling, contained “what you are
supposed to know when you get mar-
ried.” The family often attended Arya
Samaj and Brahmo Samaj festivals, and
Sobti remembers them buying Bengali
books translated into Hindi and Urdu
by authors such as the celebrated poet
and playwright Dwijendralal Roy, and
Usha Devi Mitra—an early woman
writer in Bengali who later switched to
Hindi. Because of her father’s govern-
ment job, Sobti could access the Central
Secretariat Library, borrowing books as
well as the leading progressive publica-
tions of the day: Hindi magazines such
as Vasudha and Vishal Bharat, and the
Modern Review, an English-language
journal published from Calcutta. This
constellation of influences, at this
historical moment, could only have pro-
pelled Sobti in the direction of Hindi.
Yet she did not write in a language
that everyone recognised as Hindi.
Having successfully pushed it as the
national lingua franca, some of the lan-
guage’s advocates were now intent on
guarding its borders. Those controlling
the Hindi canon crafted for it a medi-
eval heritage drawn from languages
in the Uttar Pradesh region (Awadhi,
Brajbhasha), while insisting on its dif-
ference from Urdu. As Rockwell points
out, this heritage, constructed “in cities
like Allahabad and Banaras” would
have been “a closed book” to those who
grew up outside them. Authors who
were natives of Punjab or Delhi would
not have grown up hearing the poetry
of Tulsidas, Mirabai or Kabir, for in-
stance. A writer such as Ashk expanded
the scope of Hindi by writing about his
Punjabi small-town milieu, a milieu
viewed as peripheral by the so-called
“centre” of literary Hindi.
Sobti went further. In her first novel,
the 1958 Daar Se Bicchudi, and later in
the novels Mitro Marjani and Zindag-
inama, she wrote about Punjab in the
language of the Punjabi village—but in
Devanagari. But Sobti also wrote in as
wide a variety of different linguistic
idioms as might be contained under the
rubric of Hindi. She mixed the lilting
rhythm of Rajasthani with pithy Pun-
jabi in the 1966 Mitro Marjani, captured
the English-tinged slings and arrows
of office banter—alternately coarse and
unctuous—in the 1968 Yaaron ke Yaar,
and recreated a 1920s Delhi Kayastha
family’s civilised battles in a chaste,
SEPTEMBER 2016
singular and plural · books
Urdu-inflected tongue in the 1993 Dil-
o-Danish. As the literary scholar Nikhil
Govind wrote in an article in The
Hindu last year, “hers was no provincial
nationalism of linguistic geography, but
rather a display of a mastery of tech-
nique.”
Although she has always refused the
safety of “standard Hindi,” Sobti has
never been classifiable as an aanchalik
(regional) author who wrote about a
specific local milieu. If there were read-
ers amazed at her chameleon-like abili-
ty to inhabit registers and idioms, there
were also gatekeepers reluctant to let
her enter the hallowed halls of literary
Hindi. Sobti’s skills in transmitting the
spoken word were acknowledged, in
backhanded fashion, by labelling her
style “colloquial” or “earthy.” That at-
titude carried over to English-language
scholarship, as with Susie Tharu and K
Lalitha’s influential early-1990s anthol-
ogy Women Writing in India, where
they explained their exclusion of Sobti
on the grounds that “she writes in a
dialect translators felt would be dif-
ficult to render into standard English
and uses an earthy, lewd diction.” More
recently, however, the anthropologist
Rashmi Sadana, in her 2012 study of
Hindi- and English-language publish-
ing in Delhi, described Sobti’s ear for
colloquial speech as having “pushed
the idea of ‘writing on the margin’ to
the point where her oeuvre is consid-
ered central to the literary significance
of post-independence Hindi.”
That path—from being on the periph-
ery to redefining the centre—has not
been smooth. “It is not easy for a writer
from a non-Hindi state to achieve what
she has—and to be a woman on top
of that,” Nirupama Dutt, a journalist,
Punjabi poet and translator, told me
over the phone in May. “The tendency
was to dismiss women writers, or allow
only those who wrote as women were
supposed to. But Krishna-ji, with her
87
singular and plural · books
historical research and her feel for lan-
guage, really wasn’t that. No one likes a
strong woman.”
Sobti’s early experience with Leader
Press inaugurated a relationship with
the UP-centric Hindi establishment
that has remained guarded at best, and
rocky at worst. A first instalment of
Mitro Marjani, published in the literary
magazine Sarika, was attacked as ob-
scene by “some literary biggies in Alla-
habad”—Sobti refused to name names.
Under pressure, Sarika announced they
were discontinuing Mitro Marjani be-
cause the author had decided to publish
elsewhere. Sobti promptly sent them a
legal notice. “The Times of India group
issued an apology,” she said, smiling
with satisfaction. Soon after, Sobti told
me, the author and screenplay writer
Kamleshwar became editor of Sarika,
and he published Mitro Marjani.
Yaaron ke Yaar, which portrayed a
1960s Delhi government office in all
its hierarchical, corrupt, caste-riven
glory, also ruffled feathers. It was first
published in Nayi Kahaniyan, a re-
puted journal then edited by the writer
Bhisham Sahni. “The inspiration was
my own office,” Sobti said, referring
to her long-time day job in the Delhi
administration’s adult literacy depart-
ment. Sahni’s 2004 memoir describes
the stir it created:
One reader went so far as to write,
“Until now your journal has been a
family-oriented journal but this story
is extremely provocative. This story
is an outrage to traditional family
values.” A few others said vulgar
things.
When the debate refused to die
down, Sahni called a meeting of some
twenty prominent Hindi writers and
critics, including Jainendra, Namvar
Singh, Nemichand Jain, Nirmala Jain
and the German scholar Lothar Lutze,
and published a detailed piece about
their discussion in the journal. “No
one thought the story was obscene,” he
writes in his memoir.
But her unabashed replication of a
masculine milieu continued to raise
hackles among a section of Hindi read-
88
ers. “Male gatherings in the Hindi belt
were appalled, sometimes challenging,”
Dutt said. “Once, someone demanded
she ‘repeat that gaali she gave so many
times in Yaaron ke Yaar.’”
“I never identified with the Hindi-
wallahs; unki thinking bahut traditional
thinking thhi,” Sobti admitted to me.
Yet, she did associate with the Hindi
literary world. Her circle included
contemporaries such as Bhisham Sahni,
Nirmal Verma (“Hamara vaise bahut
competition thha, he was also a Shimla
boy”) and Krishna Baldev Vaid, as well
as younger writers such as Vajpeyi.
“Many of my good friends are writers.
That’s because we meet very little!”
Sobti joked.
After the noted poet Mahadevi Ver-
ma, who reminisced about her contem-
poraries in Path Ke Saathi, Sobti might
be the only Hindi writer to have put her
thoughts on her literary peers to paper.
Her columns under the male pen name
Hashmat are a remarkable set of pro-
files—generous as well as mischievous,
her observations sharp as a knife, but
with a light touch. “Nobody has written
so endearingly of writers. Not intended
to demolish or to criticise, but to show
how a particular person operates,” said
Vajpeyi, who is among her subjects. The
writer Sukrita Paul Kumar described
Ham Hashmat—a three-volume compi-
lation of these columns—as “evidence
of her desire to transcend gender: to
speak of male writers not as a woman
is expected to of men, but say whatever
she wants, without inhibition.”
Sobti’s closest friend in the world
of Hindi letters was Sheela Sandhu,
another feisty Punjabi woman who felt
at odds with it. Sandhu was a former
academic who found herself in charge
of the Hindi publishing house Rajkamal
Prakashan after her husband bought it.
In an essay in a 2002 anthology called
Women Who Dare, Sandhu described
the Hindi literati’s initial reaction to
her as “contempt laced with bewilder-
ment.” She gradually befriended many
of Rajkamal’s writers, but reserved her
greatest warmth for Sobti. “Like a sign-
post at a crossroad, I found the greatest
affinity with Krishna Sobti who writes
in Hindi with the sensibility of Urdu
THE CARAVAN
and the impertinence that comes from
being a Punjabi.”
While too outspokenly Punjabi for
the Hindi-wallahs, Sobti remained an
outsider to Punjabi circles, particularly
after she filed a copyright-infringement
case against the Punjabi writer Amrita
Pritam for titling a book Hardutt ka
Zindaginama. “I said, if Amrita-ji uses
‘Harduttnama,’ I won’t lose anything,
and she won’t lose anything,” Sobti
told me. But Pritam dug her heels in,
and reached out to what Sobti calls the
“Punjabi lobby.” The case dragged on for
over 25 years, and was eventually decid-
ed against Sobti. Among Pritam’s prize
witnesses was Khushwant Singh, who
cited evidence that the words “zindagi”
and “nama” had previously been com-
bined in Sikh texts. But those who had
painted the case as a literary catfight
were surprised when Khushwant
Singh’s dismissive, gossipy obituary of
Pritam in 2005 earned Sobti’s principled
ire. “These are the kind of objectionable
ways in which men patronise women
writers,” she told Outlook magazine.
if sobti has forged her own path,
so have her characters. Linguistic
freedom apart, her books are known
for female protagonists with complex,
human love lives—and yes, sexual
selves. From the rustic, rough-tongued
declarations of Mitro to the unspoken
sensuality of Mehek Bano in Dil-o-
Danish, from the aching loneliness of
the fiercely independent Ratti in Sura-
jmukhi Andhere Ke to the older, wiser
Aranya, who steps gingerly towards
companionship in Samay Sargam,
Sobti’s women think freely even when
they do not have the liberty to act. And
their freedom does not necessarily toe
an uncomplicated line about achiev-
ing independence from men. Mitro, for
all her unprecedented openness about
physical desire, clings fiercely to her
husband. Mehek Bano may stake her
very existence on regaining control of
her tawaif mother’s jewels, but throw-
ing off one man’s guardianship only
leads her to another’s. These are real,
flesh-and-blood women, for whom
yearning for autonomy does not pre-
clude a desire for companionship.
 singular and plural · books

Other themes recur across Sobti’s wide range of

milieus. One is the joint family. “Our chachas and
our dadasahab only dropped in two or three times
a year. There was no interference from extended
family in our lives. Not being a product of the joint
family, I was fascinated by how people live togeth-
er,” Sobti said. Her observations from a distance
inspired several books, including Zindaginama
and Dil-o-Danish. More recently, in her 2000 novel
Samay Sargam, the joint family appears as a rot-
ten, dysfunctional thing: the ageing protagonists
Ishan and Aranya—both without families—find
their contemporaries being threatened, spied on
and even killed off by money-grabbing offspring.
But if Sobti’s sharp eyes take in the hierar-
chies that define the patrilineal joint family, the
emotional core of her books is often the mother-
daughter relationship. In both Daar Se Bicchudi
and Mitro Marjani, the wilful young woman
protagonist is shaped by the potent figure of a
free-spirited mother: Pasho’s mother leaves her in-
laws’ home to marry a Sheikh, and Mitro’s mother
has never married. An older woman defying social
norms to follow her heart also appears in Zindag-
inama, with the character of Chachi Mehri. In
Dil-o-Danish, Mehek Bano finds herself excised
from her daughter’s life as the condition for young
Masooma making a societally respectable match.
Perhaps the most powerful of Sobti’s mother-
daughter pairs are the unnamed, apartment-
bound protagonists of her 1991 novel Ai Ladki: the
babbling, bedridden old woman who oscillates be-
tween hectoring her single, middle-aged daughter
courtesy krishna sobti

for knowing nothing of womanhood, and grudg-

ingly acknowledging that she envies her freedom.
Sobti refuses to say so, but the details suggest that
the novel has an autobiographical core.
Beyond familial and filial faultlines, Sobti has an
abiding interest in relationships between commu-
nities. Her women can be bridges between them,
but can also be caught in the crossfire. In Daar Se
Bicchudi, Pasho must choose between her Punjabi
Hindu Khatri family and the Muslim Khoja house-
hold her mother has joined, while Mehek Bano’s
children in Dil-o-Danish must suffer the ignominy
of being insulted as “Musalmani ke” by their own
Hindu half-brother. Zindaginama is her deeply
felt paean to a shared world, in which Dussehra
and Eid celebrations reach out to each other, and
Maulvis urge Hindu landlords to help pay for a
new masjid. Dil-o-Danish, too, Bhalla believes,
likely originated in Sobti’s desire to “show a Delhi
in which a sympathetic relationship could exist
between Hindus and Muslims.”
Sobti’s evocation of community is all the more
powerful because she has no pious pretence that
South Asians are unmarked by difference. Her above: Sobti is one
books display a fine-grained recognition of the of the only Hindi
way caste and community identities are constantly writers who has put
her thoughts on
deployed in everyday life on the subcontinent.
her literary peers
Zindaginama’s Punjabi village is replete with to paper. She did
instances of this: Bhattis and Virks sorting out so especially in her
caste differences in the army, “the Baloach mind” columns, which
being seen as vengeful. If the Aroras are mocked were written under
for money-mindedness in one scene (“They hold a male pen name.
coins in their teeth”), elsewhere an Arora woman
taunts Khatri women for hesitating to send sons
to war: “We are mere shopkeepers, behna, but why
are Khatrani mothers so scared?” Yaaron ke Yaar,
set in 1960s Delhi, shows how caste networks—and
so caste stereotypes—have made their way into In-
dian modernity: the novel’s Kayasths are political
creatures, controlling the office bureaucracy. “In

SEPTEMBER 2016 89
singular and plural · books
Tales abound of Sobti urging gifts upon people she takes a liking to, refusing
favours when she thinks them manipulative, yet taking umbrage when she
perceives her status slighted. “She has never been a court writer,” Dutt said.
our office it was the belief that Pun-
jabis couldn’t possibly compete with
the seasoned Kayasths!” Sobti told me,
laughing.
Talking about caste and religion
today elicited a much sadder, more
anxious mode, with Sobti raging
against the current era of nationalism-
at-gunpoint. “Aise toh aap mujhi ko
bolenge, toh main nahi bolungi ‘Bharat
Mata ki Jai’” (If you insist on it like
this, even I wouldn’t say ‘Bharat Mata
Ki Jai.’) “There is a crack she sees now,
between communities,” Paul Kumar
said. “People who have suffered Parti-
tion are nervous today. They think, ‘Is
it going to happen again?’”
As a woman who lived alone for most
of her life—until she married the late
Dogri writer and translator Shiva-
nath at 70—Sobti has long dealt with
prurient north Indian curiosity. Mostly
she responded with dignified silence,
but sometimes her impishness got the
better of her. She gave me a gleeful
example of this: “One gentleman at a
function said to me, ‘You never tell us
anything about yourself. We have even
heard that you once had a love affair?’ I
said, ‘Listen, and listen carefully: I have
never led so ordinary a life as to have
merely one affair at a time.’ Saale Hindi-
waale, I thought, enjoy yourself!”
Sobti’s public persona is that of a
grande dame, and perhaps nothing
signals it more than her specially de-
signed look—flowing ghararas instead
of ordinary salwars or churidars, heels,
a dupatta draped over her head, and
prescription sunglasses. But speak to
her of her style and she turns almost
schoolgirlish: “I designed all my own
outfits. Yaar, I wish I was a dress-
maker!” “The ‘imperious’ image was a
necessary defence for that generation,
part of a refusal to accept male diktats
about what a woman writer ought to
be like,” Bhalla said. But once Sobti lets
her guard down, she is an enthusiastic
90
and generous host. She is no longer in
a position to entertain at coffee shops,
but she gets Vimlesh to ply her guests
with fresh-cut fruit, fried snacks,
Darjeeling tea and biscuits—and even
the odd glass of rum-and-pani, if the
evening has run into night.
Paul Kumar, a frequent visitor to
Sobti’s house, described her as “fiercely
autonomous.” Sobti’s account of resign-
ing from her government job just before
retirement could offer her a pension
(“I did not want to be pensioned off!”)
displays her almost irrational interpre-
tation of freedom. “She has the dignity
of a begum, always more of a giver than
a taker,” Paul Kumar said. “Yet she has
a deep respect for the other person,
whether they are younger doesn’t
matter.” Tales abound of her urging
gifts upon people she takes a liking to,
refusing favours when she thinks them
manipulative—and yet being quick to
take umbrage when she perceives her
status slighted. “She has never been a
court writer,” Dutt said.
Sobti’s political radar remains as
keen as ever. In 2010, she refused the
Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest
civilian award, saying that she needed
to keep a distance from the establish-
ment. In 2015, she was among those
who returned her Sahitya Akademi
award in protest of the Dadri lynching
of Mohammad Akhlaq for supposedly
consuming beef, and the Akademi’s
refusal to honour the Kannada writer
MM Kalburgi, an Akademi member
who had recently been shot dead. Sobti
also returned the Akademi’s fellow-
ship, its highest honour. When I asked
Sobti about returning awards, she
turned playful: “The Birlas gave me an
award when I was 80. I said, I am too
old! Give it to someone in their forties
or fifties, who is doing good work. It
can give them a push. Instead you have
created this, ki writer marey, toh uska
hospital bill pay kar do”—awards that
THE CARAVAN
will only pay a dead writer’s hospital
bills. But her words from 1977, in the
first volume of Ham Hashmat, still ring
out with bell-like clarity: “If a writer
struggles, battles her circumstances,
she is not doing a favour to anyone
else—only to her pen. A good pen must
write for values, not for those who lay
claim to values. Else writers and ar-
tistes will end up as mere decorations
in shamiyanas and vigyan-bhavans.”
Sobti has always been intrepid, in
her acts as in her words. Practically
housebound now, she still spoke of her
love of the mountains, showing me a
picture of herself with a rucksack in
Shimla. These reminiscences invariably
come to rest on a memory of stand-
ing on the Khardung La in Ladakh,
among the highest motorable mountain
passes in the world. “One side, Ganga.
Ek Brahmaputra, ek Sindhu, ek Satluj...
Over there, you feel so proud of being
an Indian. You almost feel you know, ki
this is my land, and the highest peak in
the world is ours. But instead of taking
joy all this, aap dusron ko tang karna
chahte ho?” (you want to bother other
people?). At a time when only the loud-
est, most divisive forms of patriotism
take shape around territorial borders, I
found myself enchanted by Sobti’s old-
style variety: a geographical national-
ism that somehow does not preclude
cross-national solidarities.
Despite her enormous stature, only
six of Sobti’s books have been trans-
lated into English. We have come some
distance from the 1990s, when her total
inaccessibility outside Hindi allowed the
well-informed editors of Women Writ-
ing in India to think that she wrote in a
single dialect. Still, much of her work
remains to be translated—and some of
the existing efforts leave much to be
desired. Despite her complex relation-
ship with Hindi, therefore, Sobti’s books
remain among the best reasons to learn
to read it. s
& Windows PC
THE BOOKSHELF

GRASSROOTS WHO MOVED MY

INNOVATION INTEREST RATE?
MINDS ON THE LEADING THE
MARGINS ARE NOT RESERVE BANK OF
MARGINAL MINDS INDIA THROUGH FIVE
TURBULENT YEARS
Anil K Gupta
Duvvuri Subbarao

For over two decades, the
scholar Anil K Gupta has
travelled through India, re-
searching innovations made
by people living in rural communities. Detailed in this new
book, the inventions he learnt about range from the Mitti
Cool refrigerator, created after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake,
to the root bridges of Meghalaya, which are constructed
from living tree roots. Gupta, who runs a network of innova-
tors across India, believes that to fight the world’s largest
problems, we must look towards not only the ideas born in
expensive research labs, but also those of ordinary folk.
The years from 2008 to 2013,
when Duvvuri Subbarao
was governor of the Reserve
Bank of India, were an
incredibly turbulent period for India and the world—with the
global financial crisis of 2008, decade-high levels of infla-
tion from 2009 through 2011, and finally a sharp deprecia-
tion of the rupee that started in 2012. In this book, Subbarao
provides an insider’s account of the dilemmas he confronted
while leading the RBI through these extraordinary economic
and political challenges.

penguin books, 288 pages, S599 penguin books india, 400 pages, S699

RED LIPSTICK THE PANAMA

THE MEN IN MY LIFE PAPERS
Laxmi, Pooja Pande
BREAKING THE STORY
OF HOW THE RICH
AND POWERFUL HIDE
THEIR MONEY
Frederik Obermaier and
Bastian Obermayer

Growing up in a male body, Late one evening in 2014,

Laxmi Narayan Tripathi
was haunted by gender
trouble. Not only was she
often taunted for being “girl-
ish,” she also sensed that she was, emotionally and mentally,
a woman. Later, Laxmi discovered and openly expressed her
true identity as a hijra, and became an activist for transgen-
der rights. In this dark and honest memoir, co-authored with
the writer and editor Pooja Pande, Laxmi recounts the story
of coming into her identity—discussing with particular empa-
thy and nuance the stories of the men who have shaped her,
among them her benefactors, lovers and abusers.
the German investigative
journalist Bastian Obermay-
er received an anonymous
message offering him access
to secret data. Soon, Obermayer and his fellow journalist
Frederik Obermaier found themselves immersed in an un-
derground world where complex networks of shell companies
help the world’s super-rich hide their money. This book is an
account of their experiences uncovering a system set up to
benefit the global elite, directly implicating prime ministers,
dictators and celebrities.

penguin books india, 129 pages, S399 pan macmillan india, 384 pages, S499

92 THE CARAVAN
 THE BOOKSHELF

RAGE OF THE RIVER TIGER

THE UNTOLD STORY THE LIFE OF TIPU
OF THE KEDARNATH SULTAN
DISASTER
Kate Brittlebank
Hridayesh Joshi

In June of 2013, the nor- For over 200 years, Tipu

mally calm Mandakini Sultan, who ruled Mysore in
river rushed down from the the late eighteenth century,
hills of Uttarakhand and has been a controversial
destroyed everything in its figure. Was he a cruel and
path: houses, bridges, dams bigoted tyrant or a wise and
and almost the entire town just ruler; an enlightened
of Kedarnath. Thousands of people perished in the floods, thinker or an obscurantist who looked for portents in his
and hundreds of thousands lost their livelihoods. Three dreams; a reckless adventurer or a proud nationalist deter-
years later, Hridayesh Joshi, a journalist who reported on the mined to throw the British out of India? This short account
disaster, relates previously untold stories from the Kedar- of his life cuts through the myths to sketch a portrait of this
nath valley about corporate mistakes, the state government’s enigmatic monarch and his times, exploring his tumultuous
continued indifference, and the courage shown by the locals youth, complex family life, bold military exploits and dra-
in the face of catastrophe. matic swings of fortune.

penguin books, 152 pages, S399 juggernaut, 188 pages, S399

ENCOUNTERS ABHIJNANASHAKUNTALAM
Ramnika Gupta THE RECOGNITION OF
Translated from Hindi SHAKUNTALA
by Probir Ghosh
Kalidasa
Translated from
Sanskrit by Vinay
Dharwadker

Encounters is a political Kalidasa’s most famous play,

autobiography that traces written sometime between
Ramnika Gupta’s transition the first century BCE and
from being part of the social the fourth century CE, re-
elite in pre-Independence fashions an episode from the
Patiala to working in political and social service in Bihar and Mahabharata to dramatise
Jharkhand—particularly as a trade-union activist in coal- the love story of Shakuntala,
mining areas. Gupta details the difficulties of political life a girl of semi-divine origin,
as a woman, including her experiences overcoming hostility and Dushyanta, a noble human king. After a passionate,
from those who called themselves her political comrades. secret union, Dushyanta promises Shakuntala he will marry
The book also describes her cultural contributions as a poet, her. But later, a curse makes him forget her. Will the lovers be
writer and essayist, as well as her founding of the All India reunited? Vinay Dharwadker’s new translation, alongside his
Tribal Literary Forum. detailed commentary, make this the definitive version of the
play for the twenty-first-century stage.

authorsupfront, 364 pages, S395 penguin books, 368 pages, S499

SEPTEMBER 2016 93
SHOWCASE

Visual Art

Mapping Stillness
23 JULY TO 31 AUGUST
NINE FISH ART GALLERY, MUMBAI
In a gallery located in the
recesses of an abandoned mill,
this exhibit explored various
interpretations of stillness,
through the work of the artists
Madhu Das, Prathap Modi and
Sujith SN. All three are known
for depicting fictional land-
scapes, but their styles differ
widely—particularly in their
choices of media, which range
from watercolour to wood-
block to woodcut print. In a
particularly affecting series
of paintings by Das, a man lies
curled up in the foetal position.
A large, siren-hued woodcut
print by Modi shows a man sit-
ting in a meditative pose atop
a red lotus. And a melancholy
watercolour painting by SN
shows a line of people waiting
in a queue, the dark sea roiling
in the background.
~ aabha joshi
images courtesy nine fish art gallery

94 THE CARAVAN
 SHOWCASE

Theatre

Gandhi –
The Musical
13 TO 21 AUGUST
NATIONAL CENTRE FOR PERFORMING ARTS, MUMBAI

Gandhi – the Musical, co-produced by Silly Point Pro-

ductions and the National Centre for Performing Arts,
reimagined the life of Mohandas Gandhi, from his time
in South Africa until his assassination. To present its 16
original songs and 12 dance sequences, the production
drew on frenetically diverse musical genres—jazz, bhajan,
even dubstep. The musical’s director, Danesh Khambata,
made clever casting picks, featuring the theatre actor
Chirag Vohra as Gandhi, and even the Bollywood star
Boman Irani as the voice of the British Raj.
~ tejaswini kale

Visual Art Rhetorical

Amendments to
the [REDACTED]
18 JUNE TO 30 SEPTEMBER
THE GUILD ART GALLERY, MUMBAI

Rhetorical Amendments to the [REDACTED]

showcases work about censorship and free
expression, highlighting how art can be an act
of political resistance. For instance, Sreshta Rit
Premnath’s ‘To Destroy is Also to Make Visible’
image courtesy sreshta rit premnath, 2016

presents a still from a video of Hindu fundamen-

talists vandalising a gallery that displayed paint-
ings by the artist MF Husain. The scene Prem-
nath has frozen depicts a moment of destruction.
But, crucially, he has cut out the images of the
canvasses in the photograph, letting the bare
white wall of the gallery peek through to convey
utter emptiness.
~ tasneem pocketwala

SEPTEMBER 2016 95
showcase

Dance
It is likely the house will be
dismantled piece by piece
with a large crane and a
scaffold to support the
remaining structure
29 JULY
KHOJ STUDIOS, DELHI

Much like its title, this dance performance was abstract, long and per-
plexing. The three performers were artists from drastically different
backgrounds: the Goa-based painter Nikhil Chopra, the French cinema
and theatre artist Romain Loustau and the Japanese butoh dancer Yuko
Kaseki. Wearing loose clothing smeared with red-brick paste, the trio
led the audience out of the studio and into the narrow gully outside.
People and objects on the street were quickly absorbed into their act.
Kaseki climbed on to the first floor ledge of a vacant, decrepit building,
her body moulding itself into its jagged edges. At the end of the perfor-
mance the artists writhed under a blue plastic sheet, then lifted it up to
reveal a mountain of garbage.
~ uttara c chaudhuri image courtesy suresh pandey / khoj international artists' association

Conference

Experimenter
The sixth edition of the Experimenter Curators’ Hub gathered premier art curators
from all over the world to discuss their craft. In one evening of the conference, the

Curators’ Hub veteran curators Naman Ahuja, Cosmin Costinas and Maud Page spoke about pro-
jects they had worked on that involved deep political engagement. Ahuja presented
on his landmark exhibition about the body in Indian art and thought; Costinas
28 TO 30 JULY spoke about his exhibit on the racial dynamics of Hong Kong’s SARS outbreak; and
EXPERIMENTER, KOLKATA Page discussed challenges involved in curating indigenous art from Australia and
New Zealand.
~ prerita sen images courtesy experimenter

96 THE CARAVAN
 showcase

Visual Art

images courtesy the raja ravi varma heritage foundation; collection of hemamalini and ganesh shivaswamy, bengaluru
Raja Ravi Varma: Royal
Lithography and Legacy
8 JULY TO 31 AUGUST
NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART, BENGALURU

The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, in its first endeavour, dis-
played 131 of Varma’s lithographs—the largest exhibition of the painter’s
work ever organised. It began with Varma’s depictions of the avatars
of Vishnu, and moved on to works of other deities and characters from
Hindu epics. While most of Varma’s paintings depict subjects sitting
in isolation or in conversation with each other, some capture dynamic
moments, such as ‘Jatayu Vadha’—in which Ravana kills the deity Jatayu
before abducting Sita. The final section of the exhibit displays Varma’s
portraits of celebrated personalities, from the Nizam of Hyderabad to the
theologian Adi Shankaracharya.
~ rishiraj bhagawati

SEPTEMBER 2016 97
 Editor’s Pick
sovfoto / uig / getty images

in late 1948, troops from the Soviet Union march out of the
city of Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of the withdrawal
of Soviet forces from the country. Their exit established the
independence of North Korea.
Starting in 1910, the Korean peninsula was occupied by
the Japanese empire, but that power collapsed at the close of
the Second World War, in 1945. After that, two armies from
the Allied forces set up parallel governments in Korea—the
Americans in the south and the Soviets in the north. When
the Soviets left, they placed control of North Korea in the
hands of the Communist Kim Il-Sung. American forces
stayed in South Korea a year longer, incrementally withdraw-
ing their troops before transferring power to the anti-Com-
munist Syngman Rhee.
Soon after the occupiers pulled out, both nascent govern-
ments laid claim to the entire peninsula. This led to a bloody
war, in which each side was militarily aided by its former oc-
cupier, and about 2.5 million people perished. A ceasefire was
announced in 1953, though hostilities continued at a low level
for years afterwards. No peace treaty was ever signed.
Today, the relationship between North and South Korea
remains hostile. The landmine-littered strip of land running
between them—ironically called the Demilitarized Zone—is
the least permeable border in the world.

98 THE CARAVAN