Today, in this sombre moment of collective grief and revulsion across India, the child from a pastoral community in Kathua with two sets of parents has also become your daughter and mine.
Coastal Karnataka has been a laboratory for hate-mongering and communal violence for over a decade. Once celebrated for its communal amity, the region now constantly verges on the edge of hate violence.
The epic, heroic legal battle fought by the barely lettered wife of a small Gujarati cattle trader has caught the imagination of many in the country. The judgement of the Bombay High Court on Thursday – which upheld the life sentence awarded to 11 men convicted by a lower court of raping her and killing 14 members of her family…
From Assam, the Karwan e Mohabbat proceeded to Jharkhand, an impoverished forested region with a large tribal population bitterly divided along communal lines. The state has witnessed a rash of lynching attacks in recent years.
Karwan e Mohabbat began its journey of solidarity, atonement and conscience from Assam on September 4. There, we met four families, each still weighed down by the heaviest of burdens any parent can be called upon to carry – that of the bodies of their children.
For millions of Indians, freedom still remains just a word. Link: https://scroll.in/article/847268/as-india-turns-70-a-somber-reminder-of-stolen-freedoms This article was first published by Scroll on 15th August, 2017 Even as millions of Indians rally to celebrate – with pride and gratitude – 70 years of India’s freedom, worrying reminders surfaced for the country’s religious minorities and oppressed castes and classes…
The journey of the Karwan e Mohabbat into Rajasthan on September 15 was overcast by the violent opposition to our resolve to place flowers on the dusty kerb of the highway in Behror where dairy farmer Pehlu Khan was lynched by a vigilante mob in April. I have already recounted this story earlier, and will not repeat it.
An impoverished dairy farmer, white-bearded, visibly Muslim, only a few years younger than me, was lynched on a national highway by a mob of young men with stones and sticks who claimed that he was a cattle smuggler.
In these troubled times, the world’s two largest democracies – India and the US – are increasingly becoming hostile, threatening places for people with Muslim names.
A politics of hate, however powerful, can never triumph if people defy attempts to divide them with bigotry and fear.