Karwan e Mohabbat, which started its journey at Nagaon in Assam on September 4, travelled across the country, offering atonement and solidarity to families battered by hate violence. The journey is a small tribute to the valiant love of Mahatma Gandhi’s last and finest months.
This 26 year-old university student cries easily. We meet Sumit in a story front-paged in The Indian Express: “He cried that day in 2015 when he travelled from his hometown Hisar to Delhi and found his name on the admission list of JNU’s MA programme
The year India leaves behind was a grim one in so many ways: a year in which travelling with Eid gifts or singing carols became fraught with dangers; when hate attacks on innocents became routine; a year that saw toxic political discourse, a stuttering economy and no jobs for young people.
The tenth day of the Karwan was a wrenching engagement with families in Nuh district in Mewat. In the course of an intensive day, we met eleven bereaved and grieving families in five villages.
Our second day in Shamli began with a meeting of another kind of violence that families are grappling with in western Uttar Pradesh, since the appointment of the Yogi Adityanath government.
This fifth day of the Karwan I arrived in Mangalore. Coastal Karnataka has been a laboratory for hate-mongering and hate attacks for many years now.
The Karwan began with an unexpected touching moment when the local gurdwara at Ramgarh in Jharkhand invited the Karwan-e-Mohabbat to endorse its call for solidarity and love.
On a bumpy bus journey from Giridih to Ramgarh in Jharkhand, my heart weighed down with many reminders of why this Karwan was important to attempt.
The Karwan-e-Mohabbat – a caravan of love – set out from Nagaon in Assam on September 4, 2017, and concluded its travels on October 2, 2017, in Porbandar, a small coastal town in Gujarat where 148 years ago Mohandas Gandhi was born.
Most targets of such attacks are Muslims. IndiaSpend, in a rapid survey of reported cow-related attacks since 2010, found that over half of those attacked and 86 per cent of those killed were Muslims.