Books

Locking Down the Poor: The Pandemic and India’s Moral Centre

Published by Speaking Tiger, 2020

On 24 March the country’s prime minister announced a nationwide lockdown, giving the population of over 1.3 billion just four hours’ notice. Within days, it became evident that India had plunged into its biggest humanitarian crisis since Partition.

In this powerful book, Harsh Mander shows us how grave this crisis was and continues to be, and why it is the direct consequence of public policy choices that the Indian government made, particularly of imposing the world’s longest and most stringent lockdown, with the smallest relief package.

The Indian state abandoned its poor and arginalized, even as it destroyed their livelihoods and pushed them to the brink of starvation. Mander brings us voices of out-of-work daily-wage and informal workers, the homeless and the destitute, all overwhelmed by hunger and dread. From the highways and overcrowded quarantine centres, he brings us stories of migrant workers who walked hundreds of kilometres to their villages or were prevented from doing so and detained.

He lays bare the criminal callousness at the heart of a strategy that forced people to stay indoors in a country where tens of crores live in congested shanties or single rooms with no possibility of physical distancing, no toilets and no running water. Combining ground reports with hard data, Mander argues with great clarity and passion that India is in the middle of a humanitarian catastrophe, the effects of which will be felt for decades.

Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India
Published by Penguin Books India, 2019

In Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India, human rights and peace worker Harsh Mander takes stock of whether the republic has upheld the values it set out to achieve and offers painful, unsparing insight into the contours of hate violence.

Through vivid stories from his own work, Mander shows that hate speech, communal propaganda and vigilante violence are mounting a fearsome climate of dread, that targeted crime is systematically fracturing our community, and that the damage to the country’s social fabric may be irreparable.

At the same time, he argues that hate can indeed be fought, but only with solidarity, reconciliation and love, and when all of these are founded on fairness.

Reconciliation: Karwan e Mohabbat’s Journey of Solidarity through a Wounded India (with Natasha Badhwar and John Dayal)
Published by Westland Publications, 2018

On 4 September 2017, a group of volunteers led by Harsh Mander travelled across eight states of India on a journey of shared suffering, atonement and love in the Karwan e Mohabbat, or Caravan of Love. It was a call to conscience, an attempt to seek out and support families whose loved ones had become victims of hate attacks in various parts of the country.

In Assam, the group met the families of two young cousins who had been attacked and killed on suspicion of being cow thieves. In Jharkhand, they spoke to Usman Ansari, who had been beaten nearly to death by his neighbours, for allegedly killing his own cow. In Rajasthan, they were met by a belligerent mob that did not want them to revive memories of the lynching of Pehlu Khan, a cattle trader, by a cow-vigilante mob.

Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance
Published by Speaking Tiger, 2016

This volume collects seventeen stories of women and men who, simply because they were born poor, or a particular gender, or into a certain caste or religion, fell prey to the many atrocities and indignities endemic to contemporary India. Some resisted, survived, and soldier on. Some did not.

Lachmi Kaur lost almost all the male members of her family in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. She then overcame despair to singlehandedly bring up her children and grandchildren with fierce love and pride. With great courage of conviction, Krishan Gopal, a Dalit man from Nimoda in Rajasthan, decided to build his own shrine to Hanuman after being forbidden from the village temple by his upper-caste neighbours. What followed was persecution, violence and exile from the village which lasted all his life.

Invisible People: Stories of Courage and Hope(co-authored with Shekhar Singh,
Published by Duckbill Books, 2016

Have you ever really looked at the people who live on the streets around you?

Many of them have fought against unimaginable odds to live a life of dignity and courage. Some have emerged from their sufferings with greater strength and gone on to help others like them.

Harsh Mander writes with compassion and deep sensitivity about these unsung heroes of India—Mogalamma who cannot walk and yet is a pillar of support for others like her; Rajmane who was wrongfully imprisoned and now assists other poor prisoners get justice—and helps us see that there is another India around us, if only we would stop and look.

Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India
Published by Speaking Tiger, 2015

This feeble blemished light, this dawn mangled by night, This is not the morning we had all so longed for… —Faiz Ahmed Faiz

In the two decades since the early 1990s, when India confirmed its allegiance to the Free Market, more of its citizens have become marginalized than ever before, and society has become more sharply riven than ever.

In Looking Away, Harsh Mander ranges wide to record and analyse the many different fault lines which crisscross Indian society today.

There is increasing prosperity among the middle classes, but also a corresponding intolerance for the less fortunate.

State Food Provisioning as Social Protection: Debating India’s National Food Security Law
Published by FAO, Rome, 2015

This publication provides an overview of the most important debates which ensued in the four and a half years of the official writing of the India’s National Food Security Act (2013). The Act is legally binding for national and federal state governments to further extend the outreach of social protection to the country’s population.

These discussions cover several questions about the nature and extent of the state’s duties and possible strategies for food provisioning as part of a larger framework of social protection.

The debates summarized are based on the author’s participation in many of the processes related to the right to food in India over the last decade and more, in many different capacities, as the Special Commissioner to the Supreme Court in the PUCL Right to Food Case, as Member-Convenor of the Working Group of the Prime Minister’s National Advisory Council…

Living with Hunger (with M Kumaran, Archana Rai and Arpan Tulsyan)
Published by National Book Trust, New Delhi, 2013.

This book documents many painful stories ofliving with chronic, hopeless hunger; the anguish of not being able to feed oneself or one’s loved ones; the impact of prolonged deprivation and recurring uncertainty about food availability; the loss of dignity in securing food through foraging and begging; the desperation of debt bondage and low end, humilating and exploitive, highly underpaid work; and the sacrifice of other survival needs like medicine. It attempts to understand these through listening to the experiences as recounted by destitute persons from intensely food insecure social groups themselves – specifically aged people without care givers, single women headed households, and adults with disability – in villages in Orissa, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh.

A Fractured Freedom: Chronicles of India’s Margins
Published by Three Essays, 2012

Freedom remains bitterly contested in Independent India. Democracy works only for some, who thrive in its liberties, security and choice. Others are condemned to life-sentences variously of hunger, homelessness, stigma, fear, penury and neglect.

In this collection of essays, written between 2004 and 2011, we encounter many of these exiles from India’s secular democracy – children living on the streets, households battling hunger, communities battling the politics of hate; we encounter injustice and suffering, but also resistance and hope. These essays straddle many subjects – people and policies, books and films. Within these pages, we witness a giant nation – at once old and new, dark and shining, cruel and compassionate, unfree and free.

Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger
Published by Penguin Books India

Ash in the Belly is a penetrating account of men, women and children living with hunger, illuminated by their courage in trying to cope and survive. It is simultaneously an investigation into the political economy of hunger whereby one in every two children is malnourished despite the creation of wealth and economic growth. Mander critically examines the increasing economic inequalities, the range of State failures and public indifference, in general, and brings out how they have contributed to creating this grim situation. While doing so, he argues passionately for the passage of a universal right to food law which guarantees food to all persons not as State benevolence but as a legal entitlement.

Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre
Penguin Books India, New Delhi, 2009.

‘Human history is not just a history of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, [and] kindness. What we choose to emphasise in this complex history will define our lives…’—Howard Zinn In February 2002, a violent storm of engineered sectarian hatred broke out and raged for many months in Gujarat; blood flowed freely on the streets and tens of thousands of homes were razed to the ground. An estimated 2000 men, women and children, mostly from the Muslim community, were raped and murdered, and more than two hundred thousand people fled in terror as their homes and livelihoods were systematically destroyed. However, Gujarat abounds with thousands of untold stories of faith and courage that endured amidst the fear and hate—Dhuraji and Babuben Thakur who sheltered 110 Muslims for ten days in their home; of Rambhai Adivasi who restored his Muslim neighbour’s roof in the face of local opposition, Rabiya of Ratanpur who waits in the hope that the people from her village…

Towards Healing: Seeking Paths for Justice and Reconciliation in Gujarat
WISCOMP, Foundation for Universal Responsibility, New Delhi, 2008

The book is the result of the engagement of a bureaucrat turned activist with issues of justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of the carnage that swept Gujarat in early 2002. The outcome of a research project facilitated by WISCOMP, it raises fundamental questions about the possibility and ethicality of processes of dialogue in a situation fraught with fear, violence, suspicion and persecution. The book is divided into two sections. While the first by Harsh Mander documents the Nyayagraha experiment, the second section is photographer and filmmaker Akanksha Joshi’s exploration of photographs and stories from Gujarat.

Untouchability in India, co-authored with Ghanshyam Shah, SK Thorat, Satish Deshpande and Amita Baviskar
Sage Publications India, New Delhi, 2006

This book is focused and systematic documentation of the incidence and extent of the practice of untouchability in contemporary India. Based on the results of a large survey covering 565 villages in 11 states, it reveals that untouchability continues to be widely prevalent and is practiced in one form or another in almost 80 per cent of the villages. Field data is supplemented by information about the forms of discrimination which Dalits face in everyday life, such as:

• The ‘unclean’ occupations open to them
• The double burden of Dalit women, who suffer both gender and caste discrimination
• The upper-caste violence with which any Dalit self-assertion is met

The Ripped Chest: Public Policy and Poor People in India
Books for Change, Bangalore, 2003

A book like The Ripped Chest might cover any one of the major groups of those who suffer poverty, discrimination and marginalisation. Instead, it covers them all the rural poor, or slumdwellers and the homeless or tribal people, or dalits from dams and other projects and with convincing detail. The evidence is that, however benign the intentions, what happens on the ground is often perverse, leaving poor people not empowered and prospering but weaker and poorer than before.

Cry, My Beloved Country: Reflections on the Gujarat Carnage, 2002 and its Aftermath
Rainbow Publications, 2004

The book deals with the carnage that swept through Gujarat in February 2002 and its aftermath. The author narrates with painful and meticulous honesty the complex events the Godhra targedy and the planned pogrom that was unleashed on a hapless minority who were turned into refugees in their own land, the frightening complicity of the state, its institutions of governance and its officials, the transformation of the state from protector to that of predator and the defeaning silence of a majority of Gujarat civil society organisations and individuals. The book however, does not paint a picture of unredeemed gloom. It speaks of the hundreds of lamps that were lit in the darkness of Gujarat, maps of hope and compassion both among the ravaged, the dispossessed as well as among ordinary citizens who were moved to action by the plight of fellow human beings and who stood tall to withstand the tornado of hatred.

Good Governance: Resource Book (with Asif Mohammed)
Books for Change, Bangalore, 2004

Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives
Published by Books for Change, Bangalore, 2004

The Bhopal gas tragedy, the communal carnage of 1984 and 1989 in Delhi and Bhagalpur, the Orissa super cyclone, among others, are part of collective memory, But, often forgotten are those who actually were affected by thee happenings, and others like them, street children, sex workers, dalits, HIV and leprosy patients, the homeless and the famine-stricken. These are people who in many ways are pushed to the outermost, most hopeless margins of society in the name of development and progress. In Unheard Voices, civil servant and social activist Harsh Mander draws on his own and his colleagues’ experiences to explore the lives of twenty such people who have survived and coped despite all odds. In Bangalore, for instance, a onetime street child now counsels other such children seeking education and self-employment; in Bhopal, and eleven year-old has brought up two of his siblings after they were orphaned in the gas leak, at great emotional cost.

Strengthening Conservation Communities;  Local Communities and Biodiversity Conservation. (co-authored with Shekhar Singh, Vasumathi Sankaran and Sejal Worah)
Published by UNESCO, Pari, 2001.

The growing global concern for conserving biodiversity is paralleled by an increasing realisation that conservation can only be effective if there is a meaningful involvement of all the stakeholders. Of course the most important of the stakeholders, especially in countries of the South, are the local communities who live in and around protected areas and other wilderness areas and have often had age-old relationships with the ecosystems. Not only are these communities dependent on the resources of such areas, they have also contributed to the conservation and maintenance of the biodiversity there. However, with the sudden spurt in human population, with rapid growth in technology and with increasing aspirations, many of these wilderness areas are today threatened.

Reaching Health to the Poor: Source Book on District Health Management (co-authored with Dr T. Sunderaman, Dr. R. Srinivasa Murthy and Dr. Alok Shukla),
Published by Voluntary Health Association of India, New Delhi, 1996.

An Agenda for Caring: Interventions for Marginalised Groups (co-authored with Dr. Vidya Rao)
Published by Voluntary Health Association of India, New Delhi, 1996.

This book describes the special problems and suggests a wide range of interventions for the most marginalised groups, such as the disabled, mentally ill, children in institutions, street and working children, women victims of violence and desertion, commercial sex workers, women in custodial institutions, the uncared aged, destitutes and beggars, alcoholics and drug addicts and undertrial prisoners. The interventions suggested in it are mostly in the context of a small district town or large unreached countryside in mind, without presuming the prior existence of professionals or specialized institutions.

Rebuilding Hope and Justice: Handbook for Aid Workers in Natural Disasters
By Harsh Mander

Prashant was only in middle school when he returned home, seven years earlier, to find the doors to the house barred. He kept knocking and no one responded. He panicked and called his friends. They helped him squeeze into the house through a window. When his eyes got used to the light, he began to scream. His mother was hanging dead from a rope tied to ceiling. His father was a Bengali prawn fisherman in a village coastal Orissa. Life had been uneventful until just two months earlier, when his mother had taken to weeping and fighting because his father had taken a mistress.