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.
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.
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…
Every communal massacre in India is marked by the stain of impunity. Impunity means the assurance that those who plan and execute the slaughter and rape of innocents, and the loot and arson of their homes and businesses will ultimately escape all punishment.
In Mewat, Haryana, the traditional cheer of Eid ul Zuha was muted this year, overcast by clouds of fear. Four out of five residents of the district are Muslims. Outside Jammu and Kashmir, Mewat has the highest ratio of Muslim residents except Dhubri in Assam.
Three men have been marched to the gallows in recent years in India. All three were convicted of terror crimes. By contrast, I cannot recall a single person awarded the death penalty for communal violence since Independence.
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.
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.
It would be hard to find a building more burdened with suffering and memory in all of Delhi. And yet, if you walked past it, you would hardly turn your head to look at it again. There was nothing that distinguished it from the tens of thousands of other urban cages anywhere in the country.