Reported By:
| Edited By: Pooja Salvi |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 30, 2018, 06:35 AM IST
Book: RECONCILIATION
Author: Multiple Writers
Publisher: Westland
Pages: 192
Price: Rs 399
Starting September 4 last year from Nagaon in Assam, and ending on October 2 in Porbandar, Gujarat, Karwan-e-Mohabbat, or Caravan of Love, is a journey of solidarity across 12 states conceptualised and organised by former IAS officer and human rights activist Harsh Mander. A crowd-sourced project, it was a journey “of atonement, solidarity, healing, conscience and justice with people who had been targets of hate attacks across our wounded land. It was a small, audacious effort to offer a garland of empathy across many parts of India,” Mander writes in Reconciliation – Karwan-e-Mohabbat’s Journey of Solidarity Through A Wounded India.
Reconciliation chronicles the expedition as the Karwan, consisting of writers, journalists, photographers, social workers, students and lawyers, travelled through Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Delhi, Western Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana.
“Our primary objective was to show solidarity to those families who had lost their loved ones to hate crimes,” Mander tells this writer, adding, “We wanted to let them know that there is someone who cares.” The Karwan also made inquiries into the lives of the (few) surviving victims, met with families who had lost their sons to see how they were coping and what they needed for a livelihood, their psycho-social care and even initiated inquiries into their pursuit of justice.
The Karwan found the victims (either Dalits or Muslims) living in abject fear and poverty. To meet one victim, Usman Ansari in Giridih in Jharkhand, the Karwan had to drive through several villages before finally finding his hideout. “These hate crimes are largely against Dalits and Muslims by [upper-caste] Hindus. In a survey of cow-related violence after 2010, India Spend (a news data portal) found that 86 per cent of persons killed in cow-related lynching were Muslims, and 8 per cent Dalits. It also found that 97 per cent of these hate crimes occurred after Narendra Modi came to power,” states Mander.
The activist believes that atrocities against minorities should be a collective responsibility of not just the government but also citizens, who foster the feeling of ‘other’ness. “It is through Karwan that I realised that this othering is much more widespread than I suspected. Lynchings, murders – they aren’t law and order miscarriages – they are command hate crimes,” he says.
Mander finds similarities between these lynchings and those of African Americans in the US. “There was a time when African American lynchings were events of public spectacle. It is pretty much the same with India now – onlookers gather around the victim, the incident is filmed by attackers and uploaded on social media in real time. One can see the victim humiliated, cringing and begging for his life.”
One thing the Karwan noted early on was the consistent irresponsibility of the police.
Mander writes in Reconciliation: “In the case of almost all the fifty-odd families we met during our travels, the police had registered criminal charges against the victims, treating the accused with kid gloves, leaving their bail application unopposed, or erasing their crimes altogether.”
The police also tried to record the incident as cow smuggling, animal cruelty, rash driving and road rage. “In its investigations, the police never cordons off the site of the lynch attacks: even hours after the crime, people walk all over the ground still splattered with blood and burned flesh,” Mander says.
This is not all. In his essay, When the Grave Gives Up its Dead, Reluctantly, human rights and political activist John Dayal writes about cross-cases, which are cases against the victims. “The police make sure the family knows that cross-cases can be filed against them for cattle-rustling, or worse, for cow-slaughter....This is enough to enforce silence, ensure that resistance crumbles, and destroy the will to pursue justice.”
It was Mohammad Akhlaq’s lynching in Dadri (2015), close to journalist and independent filmmaker Natasha Badhwar’s home, that shook her to the core. “We are used to all kinds of social disasters, but crimes along these lines were new,” she recalls. She didn’t think twice about joining the Karwan. “I have covered massacres and violence against people for years, but that was with television news. There, I could only report. Here, I was hoping to push for change,” she says.
A year now since the Karwan went on its first journey, Mander sees hope. “Today, hatred is like heroin injected in our veins,” he laments. But there is always the first step to progress. “The true measure of a democracy is the way it treats its minorities. We need to acknowledge that India is facing a hate crisis at the moment. We need to acknowledge that India has never been as divided since Partition.”
