Menacing clouds have gathered earlier as well over the picturesque lake city of Bhopal. Clouds of dangerous, even criminal, public malfeasance. In the winter of 1984, the people of the city endured the world’s worst industrial disaster in history.
Although catastrophic communal massacres recur from time to time, the Indian State has never appointed truth and reconciliation commissions.
This blistering summer of 2016, two years have passed since Prime Minister Narendra Modi triumphantly assumed office, heading the first Bharatiya Janata Party-led national government with a comfortable majority in Parliament.
In Mewat, Haryana, the traditional cheer of Eid ul Zuha was muted this year, overcast by clouds of fear. Four out of five residents here are Muslims. Mewat, recently renamed Nuh, is one of the poorest districts of Haryana.
Every communal massacre in India is marked by the stain of impunity. Imp unity means the assurance that those who plan and execute the slaughter and rape of innocents, and the loot and arson of their homes will ultimately escape all punishment.
Mahatma Gandhi taught us how to respond when confronted with an unjust law. You must publicly disobey the unjust law, and demand that the state either withdraws the unjust law or punishes you under this law.
In urban India some imagine that caste demarcations have become history. We need to only check the caste identity of those employed to clean the toilets in our offices and homes to recognise how wrong they are.
It is eight years since communal violence swept the second poorest, deeply-forested district of Odisha, Kandhamal. We must not allow the erasure of this hate violence from public memory, because the suffering and displacement of the tribal and Dalit Christians targeted by the communal violence are unabated even today, and justice is systematically denied.
Early on a winter morning at the Chuna Mandi labour adda near Paharganj in Delhi, the capital’s “dispensables” were gathering to scour for their day’s work, as they do every day. The fog was yet to set in, and the air had a sharp nip. The mood among the casual workers was visibly downbeat.
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older. The cruel traditions of the past 2,000 years have trapped them into stigmatised occupations, regarded ritually “unclean”.