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What goes into the making of a life? Sometimes, when we look at someone at a particular point
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in time, it might appear that they are who they were meant to be. This could be hindsight
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bias in play. In hindsight, we see events following a linear path and everything seems
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bound to happen. That's never the case. But having said that, it also may not be the case
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that everything is random and anyone could be anything. We do have an essential nature,
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even if that essential nature is itself accidental, and the paths we go down on conform to that.
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Now, many of the episodes I've recorded in the last couple of years have been like oral
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histories and have an element of the memoir to them. And one common pattern I have seen
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is that my guests never planned to be where they landed up. When they were young, they
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did not have some grand bird's eye view with which they planned their lives. Instead, they
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were often locked into a moment, they did something that made sense at the time and
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one thing led to another. In fact, I invite you to think about your life. Are you where
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you planned to be? How much of it was intentional? If you had to do things all over again, what
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would you change? These thoughts came to my mind because this episode features a remarkable
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guest with a remarkable life. And speaking to her, it's clear that she did not set out
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to be remarkable, to be a brave dissenter, to go to prison for her beliefs. Instead,
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she always followed paths that interested her, that were authentic to herself and to
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the moment. And then life happened. And here we are.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest today is Trista Sattelvard, who most of you
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will know as a human rights activist who has relentlessly fought to get justice for the
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victims of the 2002 riots in Gujarat. She succeeded to some extent, but the fight continues
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and she even spent some time in jail recently, persecuted by a regime that she continues
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to fight. But Trista is a lot more than just a bleeding heart activist and her activism
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involves a lot more than the 2002 riots. She was born to an illustrious family of lawyers
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and could have followed in those footsteps and lived a plush life. She loved to write
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and she was interested in politics. Her first published letter to the editor in 1978 protested
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the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi. She joined journalism after college and was a
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reporter between 1983 and 1993. In that time, she covered various kinds of communal violence
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and realized that there was a deeper current in our society that mainstream media could
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not cover. She formed Communalism Combat in 1993 with her partner Javed Anand with the
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aim of fighting communalism from all communities. They wrote about the horror of what the Taliban
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was doing in Afghanistan, about the plight of Bangladeshi Hindus. They criticized the
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Jamaat-e-Islami in India. And Trista herself wrote five important stories on what was unfolding
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in Gujarat before 2002. She saw our society getting increasingly fractured and warned
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about Gujarat exploding into criminal violence well before it happened. And when the 2002
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riots took place, she played a part in helping the victims and in fighting for justice for
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them. That's a fight we know her for but she's also fighting for other causes such
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as the unseen chaos that's unfolding in Assam over the impending Citizenship Act. She's
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also a fine scholar who's been teaching young students about history and politics for over
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two decades. In fact, the thing that struck me most about Trista was that she is both
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a thinker and a doer and the thinking and the doing inform each other. She's had a rich
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life and has tons of insight to share on our country and our times. I loved her memoir,
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Foot Soldier of the Constitution, which I recommend all of you buy. And I love this
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conversation. Note, by the way, that we didn't discuss a few things that are subjudice, but
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there is still so much here to marvel at and to learn from. Before we start though, let's
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take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love
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to help you. Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of
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Clear Writing. An online community has now sprung up of all my past students. We have
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workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction.
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing. There are many exercises, much interaction,
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a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST
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or about $150 and is a monthly thing. So if you're interested, head on over to register
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at indiancut.com slash clear writing. That's indiancut.com slash clear writing. Being a
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good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard and a clear
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idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you.
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Tista, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen. Great to be here, Amit.
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You know, normally when I'm sitting with a guest, we go a long way back and talk about
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their childhood and all of that. But with you, I want to go even further back because
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just now at lunch, we were talking about Maharashtra and Gujarat. And you were telling me about
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how Maharashtra has so many different syncretic traditions. So it's not just the RSS strain
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of a particular kind of Hindutva, which is relatively recent, like you pointed out, but
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it goes back centuries. And equally, you mentioned how Gujarat interestingly doesn't, despite
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producing outliers, I guess, like Gandhi and Patel. Can you elaborate a little bit more
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Yeah, actually, it's a fascinating discussion in itself, because for many of us who look
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at history and Indian constitution and law, not just in books, but in practice, have found
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that this subcontinent, you know, the soil, this India, South Asia, has had a very strong
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strain of resistance, if you like, of questioning of rationality, which goes back like centuries,
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centuries, it could even go back to the early Indian period, or even the certainly the early
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medieval period, early Indian as well, because if you look at the entire question of Buddhist
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Jainism, Buddhism, then of course, the resurgence of Shankaracharya, trying to bind it all back
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together for the Sanatana Dharma, then you look at the early medieval and you have the
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Bhakti Sufi traditions, and you have, you know, across the country, and particularly
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Western, Central, North India, Bengal, East India, Northeast, this entire business of
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looking at faith, spirituality, the individual, her or his space in it and questioning, and
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always looking at equality and non-discrimination through it, has been there, has been very
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I mean, you can name them, you can look at Basavanna in modern-day Karnataka, Narayan
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Guru, more modern period, you can look at Kabir in Banaras, you know, and we know where
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Banaras is today, and you look at Guru Nanak, and you look at coming back to your, you know,
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the Western Indian, what I'm talking about, that the RSS is a very new thing, I mean,
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it's a new modern proto-fascist concept, it's before that we had Eknath, we had Namdev,
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we had Tukaram, and then we've had Phule Ambedkar.
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So the argument for some of us is that the inherent values of the Indian Constitution,
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you know, which formally came to us with the discussions around the Karachi resolution
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which was the Indian National Congress in the 1930s, where Subhash Chandra Bose as president
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and Gandhi as the mentor, but it was Subhash Chandra Bose, the agricultural struggle, the
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workers' struggle, the left traditions that influenced and pushed the Congress into making
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the plea for fundamental rights for all, which included workers' rights and women's rights
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and rights of all genders, etc., those are not entirely foreign.
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And anyway, I'm not trying to say that there's anything wrong with international, internationalism,
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because we know the modern discourse that came with the French Revolution was also metamorphosis
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But there's a strong strain of our people, particularly people who are lesser privileged
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in terms of class and caste, questioning the rigidity of caste and of privilege.
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And Basavana talked about gender in a very, very strong way.
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So you had the Rashtra Seva Dal has worked on Maharashtrian women, saints of the bhakti
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tradition, single women, and later on we saw Nargis and Jogin in the middle part of the
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20th century, you know, and she was representing that, that it's the Miras and the Janabais
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and all of that, who took to the streets singing to their God and said, we are not going to
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be living in within the family or within patriarchy and within the bonds of marriage or whatever.
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And you had the Gargi and Jayabala and the Vedic period also, saying that we have a right
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to the Vedic scriptures.
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So there has been a strong strain of this.
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And all of this is also metamorphosed into the constitution, as much as modern ideas
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of equality, fraternity, justice and non-discrimination.
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Now between Maharashtra and Gujarat, I found it fascinating because I speak better Marathi
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than the Gujarati is my mother tongue, but I speak better, speak and read better Marathi
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because this is my Karma Bhoomi if you like, because it's like three, four generations
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But thanks to my paternal grandfather, I can read and speak Gujarati as well.
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But I've seen that in Maharashtra, with all the rigidity of a kind of Brahmanism and conservatism,
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which is evident in certain traditions, you've always had this subaltern questioning.
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And that has manifested itself, manifested itself in reform.
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It's manifested itself in something fascinating because I teach history in schools and I tried
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to go by what Fred said, that the classroom should be the location for questioning and
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not for the one way traffic between what you're told to be taught and what you're told to
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He said in 1848, Savitri Bai Phule and her partner opens the first all girls school possibly
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in the world, possibly in the world.
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And what is the concept that in one class, you like girls of different castes and communities
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Now, this is before you have the civil rights movement in the US and the anti-segregation
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civil rights movement, but black girls could also come into the classroom.
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So what does this mean?
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It means that there's a huge churning and assertion and that I think still survives in
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Maharashtra with all its other regressive tendencies.
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Gujarat has been different and because of my work as first as a journalist, then as
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an activist in Gujarat, I've always asked that what is this difference?
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Is it because there was no strong anti-caste movement like you see in many other parts
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of the country, particularly Maharashtra?
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Of course you had Narmada and his poetry apart from Gandhi and Patel.
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Of course you had Wali Dakhni, one of our early Urdu poets coming and settling in Ahmedabad
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and calling Gujarat his own land.
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It was his tomb that was dug open on 28th of February 2002.
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But there's a mercantilism which runs across communities.
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There's a sort of prosaic non-questioning that is prevalent.
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So that has affected things there.
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And therefore I think for the project for the Hindu Rashtra and the project for the
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masochist authoritarian state to revile and to discredit Gandhi in the land of his birth,
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Porbandar, Gujarat was very, very important, has been very important.
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So a couple of strands I want to sort of follow up on.
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And the first is this, that if we look back through the centuries, if we look at that
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tradition of questioning existing structures and so on and so forth, I would imagine that
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for most of our history those would not be against the state because the state would
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be a very distant kind of thing.
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It would more be against power structures in society around you where you see caste
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play itself out or you see gender play itself out and so on and so forth.
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And this sense of this strong authoritarian state which is like a distant beast, somewhere
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far away, how do you even rebel, blah, blah, blah, seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon
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if we talk in terms of centuries.
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Has that dimmed the fire somewhat?
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Because just kind of looking back through the decades of our independence, one strand
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that kind of stands out is just one of apathy, one of inertia, that you let things happen.
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People almost become fatalistic.
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Now it's possible that people were always fatalistic and it's a bit of selection bias
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that we remember all the rebels and all the countercultures and everything and that those
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But is it that it just seems harder to fight the distant state which you can't beat anyway
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so you just get on with things?
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I think it also depends on what history we read and which struggles we pick and which
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I've been fortunate through the work I have chosen to do which has not become a ninth
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generation high-profile lawyer that I could have been because given the Settlva tradition,
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I could have been the ninth and apart from maybe being good at my job, I could have earned
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But that's not the issue, the point is one chose a path of, it's not about activism,
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it's about interrogating power structures at various levels.
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So apart from the work I'm more known for which is human rights and fighting for justice
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in the courts, one of my passions is education and pedagogy of history teaching and social
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science teaching in the class.
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And for that we had this coach project which we kind of undertake and we are doing it in
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municipal schools and private schools in different parts of the country.
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Now fortunately one has been able to look at therefore history and turn it on its head.
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And if I answering your question, if I ask you that then what made the Adivasis and the
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agriculturalists be the first challengers to colonial rule before anybody from the cities
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got up and found out even before Dadabari Naoroji's historic pamphlet on poverty.
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I think because they experienced firsthand what colonialism and to what extent colonial
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power economically and culturally debauched them, which is not to say earlier oligarchies
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coming to your question earlier oligarchies or monarchs had an equitable relationship
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It was a feudal relationship, they would take their share, but they left the lands alone.
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They left the lands largely alone, there was a transactional relationship which was of
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course iniquitous, but what colonialism did was completely ravaged our land, our population
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If you look at the Indigo rebellion, the Santal rebellion, I mean I have been fortunate enough
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to work with Adivasi All India Union of Forest Working People for the last nine years and
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I have seen firsthand those struggles and how they've kept their oral histories alive
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and that has opened my eyes to the fact that we've really not looked at urban India and
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upper class India, liberal India, has not looked at these subaltern histories which
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have been manifest in challenging colonialism.
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I mean that is why the land law was passed in 1848, that is why the Forest Act was passed
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in 1927, because the British had to clamp down on these struggles and if you look at
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the way the lawyers and the doctors and the names you and I know or we knew in childhood
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started fighting for freedom and all of them are very admirable, that happened like 150
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years later, but these struggles had already been born and were being challenged and they
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lost lives at huge cost, you know, there's Birsa Munda, there's named from Assam to
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Maharashtra to Karnataka and these are modern-day constructs, but to Bengal, to Tibaga, Tibaga
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struggle to modern-day Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, you had the agriculturalists and the Adivasi
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challenging colonial powers like nobody else did, you know.
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So I think that is a very important thing to remember in terms of answering your question.
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I think a point will come when I think even with this fractured values that neoliberalism
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has caused us, where all of us are in little aspirational bubbles and it's not easy to
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collectively organize or unionize or protest anymore, traditionally protest anymore, I
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think a time will come and I just hope that human cost is not too high by then, when people
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will just find what's happening is too much, just too much, even though the state is not
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distant ever, the state is never distant, in fact today the state appears very oppressive
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and very intrusive, just like the colonial state was and I think what we are experiencing
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today is a kind of neo-colonialism really, because if you look at the corporatization
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on the one hand and the snatching away of civil rights on the other and of course minority
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rights being right out there first, that's what we are seeing.
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So and constitutionalism and what the freedom struggle fought for is being turned on its
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So Ambedkar becomes an icon for the regime and yet the collected works of Ambedkar, 18
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volumes are sold without the six critical volumes at the Delhi Book Fair which is the
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most, and which are those?
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State and minorities, annihilation of caste, religion and Hinduism, the most critical books
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of Ambedkar when it comes to the Hindu religious and social structure, are not part of the
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official volume sold by the government of India anymore.
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So you are picking and choosing, you can't ignore Ambedkar, you can't ignore Bhagat
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Singh, you can't ignore Subhash Chandra Bose, so you pick and choose and you appropriate
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them and you try and hollow them out.
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The essence of these people was what they stood for, I mean Bhagat Singh's writing
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on the dangers of communalism of all kinds, you know Ambedkar's writing on not just the
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caste question but also on communalism and the state majoritarian project.
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And why, even I feel like re-looking at Gandhi's stand on the communal award and the communal
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electorate because I think Ambedkar was right in saying that reserved constituencies should
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allow that section to vote for that section because otherwise you won't have representation
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of Dalits and minorities in parliament and we are seeing that.
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So many issues get thrown up, you know, and I think a time will come when I think the
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apathy will be overcome by the sheer intrusion of the horror that the state is undertaking
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So a number of strands to go down on but it's interesting you should mention about how people
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are trying to appropriate Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh and so on because we are recording this
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on October 27th and just yesterday there was this announcement of, you know, Arvind Kejriwal
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saying that we must have Mala, Laxmi and Madhurga on the currency notes because our
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economy will do well and on the background there were these photographs of Ambedkar
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and Bhagat Singh and, you know, I mean what would those men have made of something like
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And when I meant a distant state I didn't mean a distant as in it doesn't affect our
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lives, of course it does.
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It's distant in terms of accountability, seeming accountability but its tentacles are
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I refer to our state as a predatory state.
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I am fascinated by what you said earlier because you are right that, you know, what we make
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of history sometimes depends on how we have studied it and what prism we are looking at
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it from and what you mentioned about the first sort of pushback against colonialism coming
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from Adivazis and agriculturalists is not something I have really read much about.
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So why don't you, you know, give me a little potted history.
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I will send you a booklet which we co-drafted that is one of my mentors who has taught me
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so much, Ashok Chaudhary, who's the part of this union and myself, he was kind enough
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to say that I should get a joint byline for it though I think he did a lot of the work
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So I'll put it in the show notes and my listeners can download it.
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So we've done a chapter for this book that is a part of a foreign university publication
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and we also brought out a booklet for the union and CJP.
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And I think it's very important to look at this because it tells us four or five things.
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It tells us first of all that coming back to your question that this history is very
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important, the history of struggle, because the history of struggle is the history of
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actually obtaining your rights.
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And that's always a fundamental for any civil liberties activists, which I primarily am,
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that no rights have come for easy, no rights have come for free, okay, they don't come
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unless there's a struggle for them.
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Worldwide we've seen that from Africa to the United States to any part of the world.
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I mean, even now, I mean, if you look at the United States, there's still barely a recognition
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of what they've done to their own American Indian people.
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And that conversation is beginning to happen in Australia to some extent, with the indigenous
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and the Maori populations and all.
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And it's a painful conversation because it's not easy.
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But I think all of us, particularly from the privilege sections need to have that because
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we don't realize to what extent that appropriation of resources has happened by those of us who
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have come from privilege sections.
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So coming back to this, you know, during the COVID period, in fact, which was otherwise
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a very difficult period because none of us could travel as much as we normally do, and
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particularly going to some areas, we undertook this exercise of ensuring that all of us
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in the, I'm not, that's Citizen for Justice and Peace, the organization which I represent,
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and also the other one of which I'm vice president, which is the Akhil Bharatiya Wanjan Shamjeevi
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Union, that all the units of the unions, we should stay connected.
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And CJP helped hugely in this because we said that, you know, technology is such a far away
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thing, and technology in a village and a Gram Sabha, how do you do it?
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So we sort of did these Zoom trainings and these Zoom workshops, I mean, connectivity
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in India is very, we think we are greatly, very, very poor if you look at the non-urban
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So all of those were huge challenges, we tried to overcome them.
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And we started having weekly meetings, what eventually became Gram Sabha meetings on Zoom.
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I mean, I cannot even tell you what that experience was, because I could be sitting in Bombay
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or Pune or Delhi, wherever I was.
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In that one camera that was in Sonbhadra in UP, where Sukaila Di was, who was the president
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of our union, she's the most amazing woman, she's been jailed twice in her lifetime.
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And unlike me, when she was in jail for a month, she didn't eat food, she just survived
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on fruit and milk, I don't know how she did that.
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So she would be sitting on her camera, on a phone, phone camera, with at least 150 women
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And each one would have their turn to speak on the Zoom and all of us would be able to
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So it was an amazingly humbling and democratizing process and through that we decided collectively
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that knowledge about the constitution and Adivasi rights and the making of the Forest
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Rights Act of 2006, which is our mantra for the Adivasi and Indigenous movement, because
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it's the law that came about because of these collective struggles in the land and forest,
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because it turns the whole notion of elite conservation on its head, that you can't really
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conserve environment without protecting the rights of the people who've lived in those
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environs, you know, and because they're the best conservators of that.
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It's not a hostile positioning, it has to be a collaborative thing.
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So when this started to happen, you realize that they were also during the COVID period,
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commemorating their histories all the time.
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So they were saying we will start our own kind of schools, which will be shifting schools,
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which will be telling our own histories, and the histories of these struggles are alive
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We think that, you know, we have to dig them up from the odd historian who actually has
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had the grace to look at Adivasi struggles in English or Bengali and the Bengali translation
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And there have been some amazing bureaucrats also from the IS and earlier from the British
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colonial period who documented some of these, despite being part of a colonial hierarchy.
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And you collect this information and then you, you know, these struggles are being actually
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today celebrated commemorated as well.
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They haven't forgotten them.
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But then you give it a discussion gives it a deeper form and a context, you connect it
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up with today's struggles.
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And through those exercises that one and a half, two year period, and through that we
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saw the farmers struggle, okay, and I want to mention this because it was an amazing
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thing what happened to India during that pandemic, particularly the second half, and when you
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saw that from June of 2020, and then you saw November 2020, and you saw how that I mean,
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where was the pandemic for those for the farmers who went and sat at outside outside Delhi,
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you know, and I mean, they compelled and impelled all of us to, to look at their struggle and
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they brought history and context to their struggle because everything they were saying,
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particularly the BKU, Ugran and all they were talking about Bhagat Singh's grandfather
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and Punjab and you know, what, what the, what the impoverishment of colonial rule meant
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and how our policies are taking us back in that direction, by not by passing laws that
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are going to corporatize agriculture completely and leave the bargaining power of the farmer
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So all these things are very, very crucial.
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So I think, for me, it has been a learning through actually working with people's struggles
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and having the humility to always understand that you don't know it all.
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In fact, you're in a constant process of, yes, you bring something of your experience
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and learning to the process.
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And that's why it's collaborative and important, but there's so much you need to learn actually
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from people's struggle.
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And you know, like we were talking earlier that we are a strongly oral history tradition,
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you know, and if you remember the Patalgadi movement, you know, with Father Stan and others
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when Father Stan died in judicial, tragically died in, I mean, to the judicial murder, horrendous.
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But that Patalgadi struggle was doing just this in, in Tarkhand, you know.
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They were saying that we will on stones and on pillars, put up our constitutional rights,
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which are being granted to us.
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So whether it is schedule nine or schedule five or the constitution, or whether it is
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article, the directive principles, which give Adivasi rights, or whether it is an Iyamgiri
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judgment or any of the judgments that the court has given us, we will put that down.
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So tomorrow when the forest official comes and pretends not to know of these laws, which
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have been passed by the Indian parliament, we'll tell you, we'll do a legal education
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for you, you know, and there is this, there is this very strong belief that the constitution
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is ours, among people of this country, that the laws, the progressive laws passed, the
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recognition of land rights, recognition of forest rights, the land acquisition law, which
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was amended by the UPA2 government before the present regime overturned it again.
#
All of these were not because the UPA2 government wanted to give it, it was because there was,
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being a coalition government, being not an authoritarian strong government, they were
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compelled to listen to voices from the ground, and that's what a democracy is.
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So I think coming back to your question of history and Adivasi history, it all boils
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down to working with communities on an equitable basis, equal basis, and realizing that any
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struggle that you're involved in today has to hark back to your past, because eventually
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you are based on your symbolisms, I mean, the strong women's presence in Adivasi struggles
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has been there from the beginning.
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The very strong women's presence, the number of women lost to the battle against colonialism
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They know the names, they know the names, they sing songs to them, they know that they
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advocated education for the kids, they advocated the rights over forest produce, and that should
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not go to the colonial powers and the forest bureaucracy.
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But unfortunately, there's always been this distance between urban and rural and Adivasi
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and non-Adivasi, and hence it's taken a while for the rest of us to open our eyes to it.
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So there are about five different directions I want to digress in, but I'll just pick
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one and digress in that.
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And it's a slightly long-winded question, which I've explored in past episodes with
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There are two kinds of forces that we have seen in modern times, and the first force
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which comes with urbanization and capitalism and all of those, with all their, you know,
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other positive effects, is of a certain kind of homogenization, which leads to a loss in
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I mean, one metaphor for this is a Cavendish banana, which is of course a banana that we
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exported to the world, and then, you know, it made sense in the U.S. economies of scale,
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Then it was brought back to India, and now it is kind of killing all indigenous sorts
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And that's an example with bananas, where your diversity is driven out and everything
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is becoming homogenous and rice is the same.
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And I had assumed that there's a similar thing happening with languages and dialects.
#
Like one of my previous guests, Vinay Singhal, not the Hindutva Vinay Singhal, this is a
#
young entrepreneur who runs a company called Stage.
#
What he once told me, you know, the languages of the city, the dialects are outside.
#
And I had assumed and lamented that the logical direction is going to be that dialects are
#
gradually going to die out, because when a young person who is from a village goes to
#
a city, the incentives will be to fit in and to speak in their dominant language, so you
#
might forget your dialect of Hindi and speak Hindi, and gradually that's what happens.
#
What Vinay is doing with Stage is demonstrating the opposite effect, where Stage is an OTT
#
for Bharat, but it's not an OTT for Indian languages like Hindi and Punjabi.
#
It's an OTT for dialects like Haryanvi and Rajasthani, and is doing incredibly well.
#
And again, capitalism playing a part, technology playing a part, that individuals are being
#
empowered with the means of production, and in some cases, perhaps a means of communication,
#
where they can keep their culture alive, where things don't have to scale.
#
It's almost an opposite of these forces of homogenization.
#
And I want to ask you about this, because when you speak of all these different oral
#
history traditions, stories that have come down, the danger always is that these stories
#
will be lost, because you move to a city or, you know, gradually over time, things erode
#
and things wither away, and God knows how much we've lost.
#
But then there is also the hope that people will, instead of being embarrassed by their
#
origins, can take pride in it, can find community in it, and can, you know, take it into a different
#
So it's not a very well articulated question, slightly long-winded, but just looking at
#
these two forces, since you work so much at the grassroots and on the ground with such
#
a wide variety of people, what is your sense of this, that is it something that we should
#
be hopeful, that people who earlier did not have a voice or a way to preserve their memories
#
and their traditions, do they now have more of it?
#
I'll come back to this whole business of history, and I've learned so much from many of our
#
most renowned historians, whether it is Romila, Adhapur, or K. N. Panikkar, and I'm talking
#
about the 80s, 80s, and 90s, when we used to hold workshops with them, first to learn
#
and then I organized workshops with them for teachers.
#
And you've got a great interview of Romila ji also, I'll link that from the show notes.
#
For me the most, and for them, I organized three workshops where they came and actually
#
interacted with the school teachers from about maybe 40 schools in Bombay, two schools each,
#
and three, four days they interacted, and so, and my thought behind that, because Khoj,
#
the pedagogy of Khoj was evolving at that stage, now we've got about 54 modules going
#
and resources permitting we can do that or we can't do that kind of workshop all the
#
time, but we are editing it and we're trying to make it available so we can use that input.
#
Idea being that those original thinkers and historians who are actually looking at history
#
in a particular way, should interact directly with the carriers of that history into the
#
classroom, so that pedagogy of a non-diadactic teaching, no final full stop, always a question
#
mark, have the humility and courage to say you don't know something and you look it up
#
and come back and the child will respect you more, the young mind will respect you more
#
not less, all of that went into the success, so I remember those kind of early days when
#
I was also sort of learning all this and I'm still learning, is that they would say that
#
you know and that's when Narcissus of course is going to be 100 years old in 1925, in 2025,
#
so it's worked very hard for what it's done apart from actually having obnoxious amounts
#
of money which it shouldn't have, but that's not the point, that one of the bulwarks against
#
authoritarian supremacism is local histories and diversity and pluralism.
#
This was always what we said and came up with at the end of these discussions and workshops
#
and we need to do this at various levels, we need to do it at the finer academic historical
#
level where there's a certain rigor of the discipline, where local histories emerge and
#
maybe even contradict the national narrative, doesn't matter, let the dialectic emerge,
#
but we also need to do it at the level of people and communities which is the question
#
you are asking, so I think it's very important and this continues to be a passion for some
#
of us, we are also doing so many things that doesn't always happen the way we want it to
#
happen, but wherever I go, wherever I speak, do workshops, speak about civil rights, liberties,
#
I keep trying to say that put together a group of citizens, whether it's Belgaum, whether
#
it is Mangalore, whether it is Chiplon, a tiny seaside town in Maharashtra, put together,
#
you'll always have those 10-15 people, 5 people, 4 people who are obsessed with your
#
past and your history and your tradition, put them together, meet regularly, start documenting
#
and put it out, because I think that is our only bulwark against this top-down homogenization
#
which has a sinister political motive without question. I think this is what we've tried
#
to bring into the coach classroom and if you give me a few minutes, I want to share this
#
because it was fascinating for us when we evolved these modules and one of the modules
#
is which we do, I mean, unfortunately because they're dealing with India's school structure
#
and the classroom and we don't want to make it a honeymoon experiment with those special
#
schools, we've decided to look at the school as it is for everybody, which is a problem
#
but we have to tackle it, so we've tried to do it in middle school, like 5th, 6th, 7th,
#
a 3-year program, not necessarily go, 8th and 9th are only special classes because the
#
whole exam pressure gets too much etc. So, towards the end between the 6th and 7th, we
#
do this migratory history model, which is my history, the child's history. The idea
#
is to introduce to the young mind, which is about 10, 11, 12 by then, 11, 12 by then,
#
let's explore your family history, each one of you need to explore your history and how
#
do you do it? We don't finish it in one class ever, it goes through 3 or 4 sessions once
#
a week, maybe you come back to it even a month later, 2 months later. The idea is ask questions
#
in your family and in your community, where are we from, which village, which district,
#
which state, which language do we speak, do we have connections with that place still,
#
do we go back, if not where, did we directly come from there to Mumbai or Pune, wherever
#
the class is being held or did we go somewhere in between and start tracing this, start tracing
#
it, make notes, jot it down. If you ask enough questions, you'll find a couple of people
#
who are willing to kind of wax eloquent about this. Once you get them to wax eloquent, crosscheck
#
the sources a little bit, crosscheck with 2-3 people, the facts and all that and start
#
penning this history, migratory history of say, Dhruv, Prajapati or whatever the name
#
is and start writing it down. And then at the end of 9 months, one and a half years
#
when I was ready, when these are sort of shared in a live classroom atmosphere, I cannot begin
#
to even describe to you what happens in the classroom because the entire temperature changes,
#
the classroom sort of almost becomes from a kind of a uniform, straight in a line benches,
#
it suddenly becomes multicoloured, colourful, somebody brings in a Kannad word, somebody
#
brings in a Telugu word, Tulu word, Urdu, Kaplet, a funny story, a tragic story and
#
the diversity is really lived and felt because that's how all our realities are. Mumbai might
#
be more than that, some cities might be less but show me one classroom, any part of India
#
or the world where this diversity does not exist. We are all migrated from somewhere
#
to somewhere, we are all creatures of movement and travel, that's what human beings are
#
and maybe some are not but even that is very interesting. So I think that whole concept
#
that you understand each other through the story, through the language, through the past,
#
through the present is very important for the young mind to develop and if you do that,
#
I feel and that's been one of our reasons why we are doing Koj even now after 20, 32
#
years is that it's a very small thing, it will take a long time but the young minds
#
who go through it never give up that questioning and I don't believe in this business of teaching
#
secularism or teaching the constitution, you can't do that. What you can do is if you want
#
to share an understanding of article 14 and 15 which is equality and non-discrimination
#
then you have to teach them about discrimination, share stories about discrimination and struggles
#
against discrimination. So that's the only way a sense of what that article is will actually
#
take root in that young mind and then you at the end of 13 years might get a citizen
#
that is a questioning citizen and not just somebody who is looking for job and pay hikes.
#
So I think that has been the basis of this whole thing. When we look at homogenization,
#
when we look at authoritarianism, it's all connected. Why is there this obsession whether
#
you look at the fundamentalism of political Islam or whether you look at Hindutva or if
#
you look at extremely rigid Buddhism that Sri Lanka also threw up when it massacred
#
so many Tamils and not Sri Lanka. Why is this obsession with homogenizing and uniformity?
#
It's as if diversity itself is a threat and therefore the patriarchy comes in, the rigidity
#
comes in, the attacks on women come in, all of this. So I think the ability to connect
#
some of all of these things is very, very important and can we do that? Can we do that
#
in our struggles? Can we form alliances in our struggles? This has been an abiding concern
#
and question and I don't think we've always succeeded but I think the effort itself is
#
very important. Effort itself is very important because you're able to see that not just this
#
struggle which you've taken up just now is important. Of course it is but there are also
#
many other, myriad struggles that need to be looked at to be able to question this absolutely
#
crude homogenization that we are seeing.
#
I find this story you've told of the magic you created in the classroom very resonant
#
because it feeds in with a theme that I think about a fair bit which is the importance of
#
the concrete in our lives. What often happens is that if we just think in terms of abstractions
#
like nationalism or purity or race or the other or Hindu or Muslim, those abstractions
#
can be dangerous and can lead us down problematic paths but the moment you make it concrete
#
and I see that's what's happening in this classroom, that's what it seems like to me,
#
that it's almost like a show don't tell brought to life that each child is making herself
#
concrete by talking about her past and where she's come from and showing her authentic
#
self also in a sense and showing the joy in that and everyone can then relate to each
#
other in a different way. It's a lesson about discrimination in the most beautiful way because
#
it's a lesson about the joy of diversity which is automatically an anti-discriminatory lesson.
#
So that's a lovely story. Here's my next digressive question and obviously that cliche
#
is of course true. Whatever you say about India, the opposite is also true. So we are
#
deeply illiberal in so many ways, gender, caste, whatever, but there is a lived liberalism
#
which you can see in our languages, in our cuisine, in our clothes, assimilations from
#
everywhere and you've also spoke at the start of this conversation about how Maharashtra
#
has had much older traditions in the RSS which go back which are syncretic, tolerant, which
#
celebrate differences. But here's the thing, my sense, and we were chatting about this
#
at lunch and it's a theme I keep going back to, is that if there is one way in which I
#
have realized I was wrong about the world, it is that growing up in my little elite English
#
speaking bubble, I always thought that India is broadly tolerant, we are liberal, there
#
are fringes, but that's okay, we are what we are. And my sense, and I can perhaps get
#
too pessimistic about this, is that no, that we are the bubble and society has always been
#
extremely illiberal and these strands that we see in political Hindutva today, they're
#
not recent, they've been, like I did an episode with Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press, fantastic
#
book and all of these issues from love jihad and cow protection and conversions, all of
#
these were live issues exactly a hundred years ago as well, right? And if you see sort of
#
the sales of the books on the Geeta Press including the manuals telling women how to
#
behave and in sanskari ways and so on and so forth, you realize that this is a very
#
big strand in our society and therefore one begins to wonder about whether the experiment
#
that we tried with the kind of constitution that we had, was it bound to fail? Because
#
what we seem to have done is we took a liberal constitution, not as liberal as I would like,
#
but still much more liberal than society and imposed it on an illiberal society and assumed
#
that the job was over, that we are doing it top down, things will take care of themselves,
#
you know, Madhav Khosla in a brilliant book, an episode with me describes a constitution
#
as a pedagogic exercise and it seems that politics has caught up with society and therefore
#
where again I'd look pessimistically at what you said about at some point something's
#
going to give, at some, you know, I don't know if at some point something's going to
#
give because the majority is having its way now, who's going to do the rebelling? It's
#
not that society is being forced into a direction against its will or whatever, you know, this
#
horrible direction that we are going in seems to be, if the majority aren't actively clamoring
#
for it, they're perfectly content with it, which is, you know, obviously it's a very
#
pessimistic view and I know you're not so pessimistic, so, I mean, what's your sense
#
of this? Am I being too negative?
#
No, I just, it's a kind of expected question and it's a question that needs to be asked
#
if you like, but I just would like to take a little bit of issue with, say, the proposition
#
that Madhav would make or whatever because I think it shows very little regard for what
#
went into the making of the constitution. I mean, to think that the constitution or
#
the constituent assembly debates that resulted in the constitution and to forget that the
#
constituent assembly debates had the partition bang in the middle of it and the fact that
#
the constitution actually emerged after the 150, 175 years of the struggle against the
#
British, I think it really disregards the entire sacrifices or the pains of the national
#
movement against British colonialism. So I'd just like to contest that very strongly
#
because I think to say that it was a pedagogic constitution is actually to disregard that
#
the, what I said right in the beginning, that the values that were thrown up from the freedom
#
struggles from the national movement also harked back to much earlier struggles, but
#
they coalesced in a certain way and they represented a large and vast section of our people. In
#
fact, I think the problem is with liberals who think that we are the cocooned minority,
#
but I think the vast, vast, vast section of these people, of the people of this country
#
have actually battled inequality and oppression of various kinds under British rule and they
#
actually were part of the movement against the British. So I want to repeat that and
#
I think therefore the values that were then sort of nichorod and put into the constitution
#
came as much from there, as much as from the higher intellect as we like to think of it,
#
of people. I mean, why was Babasaheb Ambedkar chosen? I mean, that question, I think Madhav
#
Gosla who should also answer because why was Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, a man, a young man
#
who when he was a young boy of maybe 12 or 13 in the Elphinstone School, Mumbai, sitting
#
in a classroom and a brilliant mind, and Matt's problem is put to him and nobody in the class
#
is able to answer and he puts his hand up confidently and then the teacher is compelled
#
to allow him to come up to the blackboard to write down the five steps solution to the
#
Matt's problem, which he does. He solves it correctly and the attention of the class
#
by the time he's reached the last, the answer is not on the fact that he's got it correct,
#
but the fact that a quote unquote untouchable has reached the blackboard because all their
#
tiffin boxes are behind and therefore they will not eat their food anymore because now
#
it has been polluted. Now, this is the man chosen, quote unquote, not chosen, he's the
#
man who obviously the person to write the constitution and how can we therefore ever
#
see that the majority of this country are sworn to a kind of a majoritarian authoritarian
#
deal? No, I think there is certainly the subaltern, there's a whole section of the underbelly
#
and that has grown from the meager 0.5 or 10% that the Jansang once had to maybe even
#
a 30% or 35% or 40% of the population. But I do not think that I will accept that it
#
is 100%. What has happened for sure is that the rest, whether it is 20% or 60%, we can
#
argue numbers, but I think they have been silenced at various levels, particularly the
#
ones who are in a position to speak. One is a sense of self-preservation and fear that
#
we would not like to be the next persons who are a target, whether it be through state
#
agencies or through any sort of vilification. And there's a larger section, our problem
#
is the Indian middle class, which is just too obnoxiously large by world standards,
#
which actually does not care one way or the other. It does not care either whether we
#
are going to be a democratic constitutional state or an authoritarian state because it's
#
navigating its life. But they're not the majority of the population. They're obnoxiously large,
#
but they're not the majority of the population. So I think it's the fragmentation and the
#
silencing, which is not letting the rest sort of come together in a way that would give
#
hope to everybody that something is happening. If you are looking and working at the grassroots,
#
if you are looking at the kind of the struggles in various parts of the country, and there
#
are myriads of them, I think one will realize that it's not an entirely hope. It is fairly
#
hopeless, but not entirely. I'm not a stupid optimist, but I'd also like to say that the
#
hugest and biggest abdication of the last decade and a half has been by the media. And
#
I think all of us in some way or the other are products and have been associated with
#
the media. So I think we need to understand what this means. I remember when I did these
#
long interviews with Sainath, who's really interrogated this thing very, very deeply.
#
And of course, there are many others. He said it's a kind of a triangle hold on Indian democracy
#
now through the corporatization of the media and the party politicization. Media has to
#
be political. But you have if one party dominates the ownership of the media and corporates
#
and those same people are then now the dominant in parliament. So then when he calculates
#
like Sainath does that, how many percentage of our parliamentarians are billionaires?
#
And which industries do they represent? Then it's mining, telecom and television companies.
#
So then you know that the digital communications industry, your commercial television and your
#
political representation is all the same. And therefore you're unlikely to see a debate
#
happening there on what you were talking about, which is a homogenized banana or the rice
#
varieties which are being completely finished off because of the kind of priorities we are
#
giving to agriculture. Forget a Lynne Chang or a Mohammed A. Clark. You won't even have
#
a debate on homogenization of agriculture because it's not in the interest of the section
#
that would benefit from this homogenization who are sitting in parliament to do that.
#
So actually, therefore we are talking about as in when and if the resistance happens in
#
our lifetime and I hope it does, even if it doesn't seem very imminent, is that you really
#
need to be looking at electoral reform, judicial reform, media ownership changes. We need to
#
look at judicial reform, courts. You need to look at so many things being turned on
#
their head, which is like individual and collective struggles that encompass all of this. And
#
is that feasible? Is that happening? Can it happen? It of course seems so overwhelming
#
that we most of the time feel it cannot happen. I mean, just look at what the election commission
#
is doing. Look at the electoral bonds issue. I mean, it's so brazenly non-transparent.
#
It is brazenly non-transparent. And then therefore there's inordinate hope that is required from
#
the judiciary and will the Supreme Court go? Therefore these debates on who the next chief
#
justice is going to be. So all of this is we are looking at these one, two, three places
#
for us to get manners from heaven and to get solutions from them. All of this can only
#
happen if there are these myriad struggles that are constantly pushing these institutions
#
to answer and many more people who are willing from the political opposition to not say Lakshmi
#
and Ganesh on the vote, but to actually say, we are prepared to go to jail and let's flood
#
our jails with the opposition. Doesn't matter if you want to do it, but we are going to
#
raise some inconvenient questions. We are going to raise questions of the lynching of minorities,
#
the lynching of Dalits, the attacks on girls in Uttar Pradesh. We are going to raise these
#
issues, even if it's inconvenient. So there is a sense of despair because of the quiet
#
we see, but I think we need to start looking for constructive noise and constructive struggles.
#
So we'll talk about each of these one by one as we go along in the conversation. But first
#
there's a book by Rohit Dey called The People's Constitution, which makes exactly that point
#
that these are not just imported values, these are lived values and they reflect in people's
#
struggles in different ways. Let me ask you sort of my final digressive question before
#
we get back to our chronological narrative of your growing up and your family and all
#
of that. And this one nicely segues into that because you said a little earlier that you
#
were almost sort of the ninth lawyer in the family, down the family line and all of that.
#
And it would seem to me that in one way you are doing exactly the same thing or working
#
in exactly the same spirit as your grandfather and as his father before him in the sense
#
that they were using their skills to work for a better society in the role that most
#
made sense to them at the time. Right? So flush after independence, for example, your granddad
#
MC Sattelbaugh, first attorney general, it would have seemed that, yeah, I know the law,
#
this is independent India needs people like me. And that is what an idealist would do.
#
And we find over time that that idealism and that hope in the in the virtues of the state
#
have kind of vanished, that we are faced with a much starker reality. And it might and and
#
you would obviously you don't know whether it's true or not. But I imagine if your grandfather
#
was born when you were, he might have gone down on the kind of line that you did, because
#
you can't anymore make a better society in that way from within the system because it
#
will just corrode you and it will eat you up. And in a sense, if you, you know, want to
#
go down those paths, you end up like your route in that sense feels natural, like on
#
one hand, and and and that's, you know, a separate side question that how do we become
#
what we become, how much of it is contingent and how much of it is has something to do
#
with our essential nature. And on the one hand, it might seem contingent, different
#
things happen, you know, your first journalism job, you're covering those riots, you're
#
covering communal violence. So on one hand, it might seem contingent. But on the other
#
hand, in these times, what else could you have been is another question that comes to
#
Yeah, actually, that's interesting. This I was just reading my grandfather's autobiography,
#
my life law and other things. And there's a very interesting chapter in it on the Mundra
#
scandal, which was the independent India's first huge financial scam and scandal. And
#
he was attorney general at the time. And the fact that and the whole question of autonomy
#
of autonomy of oppose if I look at today with the attorney, I mean, today we are very decent
#
attorney general after many years, but look at how the Solicitor General is functioning
#
today. It's so crude, you know, apart from anything else. So it tells you a little bit
#
about how these institutions need to function. Because he narrates it was the Jagla MC Jagla
#
that was appointed as Commissioner into the scandal. And he was representing the government
#
government as in state not in government in power. So he had made that very clear. And
#
the entire proceedings were in our city, which is the old town hall, where now the Director
#
General of Police sits. And it was hugely attended by the public Jagla had taken the
#
decision that it will be open. And of course, Settelbaard was arguing that all these evidences
#
coming etc. And the very interesting passages from there, because obviously the dispensation
#
and that was our first Prime Minister, highly regarded and it was about the LIC scam LIC
#
investing out of turn more than a crore of its capital on in private enterprise, when
#
it should can't could not have done that without under the Act under which it was formed and
#
without consulting its shareholders, which is the public. So anyway, so of course, the
#
stand that my grandfather took, and then the praise he got got from the newspapers and
#
all of that. And obviously, dispensation was not happy and including the Prime Minister
#
was not very happy with the kind of independence Danny took yet after the whole thing got over
#
and the T. Krishnamachari was compelled to resign after the finance minister. So it was
#
like a huge thing internationally as well. He described the first visit to the Nehru's
#
residence after dinner because a lot of rumors that now Settelbaard will resign because the
#
because he was attorney general for about 12 years, because the government is unhappy
#
with him. And I think Nehru went out of his way apart from anything else to say that that
#
is not what he intended at all, though he was upset at the time. So it's both things
#
you see you see the fact that yes, there was this tension. And the tension was unfortunate
#
and should not have happened that you saw the finance secretary and the home and the
#
finance minister and the state bank chairperson and the RBI chairperson behaving in ways they
#
shouldn't have. But you equally saw the Attorney General and MC Chagla and others functioning
#
above, I mean, beyond par, you know, and then he writes there that then, you know, after
#
that, he talks about his father, Sir Chimanlal Settelbaard, who my great grandfather went
#
because he cross examined Dyer in the Hunter Commission and because of that. But for me,
#
it was so important also to see about Chimanlal and this I'm hoping that his autobiography
#
we are reprinting now as well because people demand it but it's out of print is that he
#
was a close colleague of Babasaheb Ambedkar. And in 1924, Chimanlal was president of what
#
is called the Bahishke Thitkarni Sabha, which was formed with the aim of ensuring the construction
#
of 124 hostels for Dalit girls and boys. Because the whole understanding being that, you know,
#
they're left out, they can't stay there because only residential colleges are possible. So
#
we must have this. And it's not just Chimanlal, the entire trust that the board of that was
#
one Parsi, one Jew, so different cast and communities recognizing the vision of Ambedkar.
#
Of course, this is the tradition one has grown up very proudly with, one knew about this.
#
But I was very personally, I sort of assumed that I would be the one, we are just two sisters,
#
I would be the one who does law because my sister was not particularly interested. I
#
was always very interested in the law and current affairs and everything. But I mean,
#
12th standard changed all that, 7th standard changed all that when I was about 12 years
#
old when I just, a book that my father bought me actually, all the precedents men and I
#
said, no, I just have to do journalism. And I told him that one day in one of our myriad
#
discussions and arguments that I want to now do, journalism. I remember he didn't say
#
a word, he didn't even say that there was no pressure, no pressure at all. He just sort
#
of kept quiet for a few minutes. And then he said, you have to do what you are most happy
#
doing. And I think that feeling of being brought up in that sort of environment where you had
#
a father who asked him to call him by his first name. He never asked us to call him
#
father or papa or daddy or whatever. We always called him Atul, both of us. And he was very
#
comfortable with two girl children. I think my mother probably wanted a son but because
#
there were two miscarriages after my younger sister. But I don't think he was at all at
#
all concerned that he didn't have a son. I think this also allows a lot of self confidence
#
to grow. So then you not only decide to take on a profession, which is not this thing,
#
but you also ask questions of your father who has told you once that don't study your
#
Kundra and your history textbook. Read the history from your library that you're lucky
#
enough to have because he had a huge personal library of history and stuff. Then I would
#
ask him, but why do you have more Nehru and Gandhi and Patel and why don't you have Vinay
#
and Ambedkar and Phule? The moment I was in junior college. So all that questioning and
#
turning would begin. My own politicization in Elphinstone College, which again I chose
#
because my father and grandfather had gone to that college. So there was this thing of
#
always being proud of that tradition, but also being quite self-assured about questioning
#
it and taking a different path. And I think that also probably comes from that upbringing.
#
Of course, you're also your own person. So even as a reporter, I covered the courts immediately
#
after doing my university beat and political beat. I was very keen on legal reportage and
#
coverage, legal analysis of judgments. So I think the traction of the law and understanding
#
it or try to deconstruct it didn't ever go away. Of course, one was looking at it from
#
a different prism than a practicing lawyer. But I still will say, and maybe then you want
#
to ask me something more, is that I still have had the good fortune of, through my work,
#
coming across a wide spectrum of lawyers who are existing in today's much more difficult
#
system than it would have been for my grandfather or my father and great-grandfather also. And
#
you are doing such a fine, dignified job of it. And it must be so much harder because
#
we are facing a very viciously reprisal-oriented government. And yet they just carry on at
#
great personal risk and displaying huge moral courage. So yeah, maybe that's the trajectory
#
I took, but I'm so glad that there are lawyers within, in our courts, whether it is Gujarat
#
High Court, whether it is Bombay High Court, whether it is Delhi Supreme Court, who are
#
still there to be able to take up the causes that we, all of us collectively espouse.
#
What did your father feel of the work that you did? Like you've mentioned that in your
#
book you've spoken about how he'd give you strength before he passed in 2010, that he
#
was supportive and all of that. But in general, as your career took the paths that it did,
#
you know, your 10 years as a full-time journalist, 83 to 93, and then after the activism kind
#
of happened, did all of it feel like this is a natural flow of things, that this is
#
what she, you know, this is who she is? He was hugely supportive of both me and Javed
#
because both of us worked so much together, my partner Javed Anand and me, very supportive
#
of the work when we decided to quit journalism, start formal mainstream journalism and start
#
communalism combat, which was also an iconic magazine for the longest time. August 93 was
#
our first issue and November 2012 was our last issue. Now we are online. He was very
#
supportive. But I think there was also a sense that maybe, you know, worry and concern that
#
maybe she's going too far and maybe she's challenging a system which cannot stomach
#
so much challenge. There was also that sense of concern and fear as he grew older. He was
#
also sick at the end of it. So I think he was also very, very worried. So I remember
#
particularly from June this year to September when I was so wrongfully confined and in jail,
#
one of the thoughts that used to come in, I said that, you know, I never wanted him
#
to go so early, but I'm glad he's not there because I don't think he would have been
#
able to handle that. The way in which I was picked up and the way the vilification has
#
been happening would have been really too much for him because he really believed in
#
a different India where the system cannot be. He really believed that the system and
#
the state cannot be so vile. And that's how it's become. It's vile now. So I think that
#
is something which would have been at a war within himself because he was from that generation
#
that believed that the state and the courts and the system will not reach that degenerate
#
level, you know. So there's always that thing I keep thinking when I think of him. Though
#
he was a huge, huge support. I think it was also a huge sense of worry he had and that,
#
you know, where is this going to take off?
#
You mentioned your grandfather's encounter with Mr. Nehru and how, you know, your grandfather
#
did the right thing and Nehru did the right thing. And they were both in that sense, upstanding.
#
But my sense always has been that, you know, you might be lucky at a particular point in
#
time that you have people of great character, but you cannot rely on that. A well-designed
#
system is a system that will function even if you have the worst possible people in charge.
#
And it is clear that our system is not a well-designed system. It's, you know, it's too top heavy,
#
too much power to the state. And sort of, in a sense, the scales have fallen from our
#
eyes over the decades. You know, my dad was an IAS officer as well. And when he speaks
#
about the idealism with he and his batchmates all joined. And, you know, I think back on
#
that and I'm like, you know, how could you be so idealistic? Right? And today it's easy
#
to say that in hindsight when you've seen what the state has become. But the point is
#
that that was never really going to last. And even in your book, all your actions represent
#
a great faith in the rule of law, a great faith that no justice will be done and we
#
have to keep fighting for it and so on and so forth. There are parts, including in your
#
book, where you seem to show a sort of despair about where the system is. Like I'll quote
#
this bit which I found very resonant where you write, quote, there is a lesson to be
#
learned in the struggle for justice. The system that loves the status quo tolerates interventions
#
up to a point, but appears to fall short of delivering radical, real or substantive justice.
#
The system engages with the survivors and defenders in the early years, but a shakeup
#
of the status quo demands an exceptional judicial mind. If survivors and defenders labor on
#
for decades, 15 years as we have done, if we try it and take it beyond the small fry
#
offenders, somehow the system to keep us in check makes us pay. Stop quote and then you
#
went on to elaborate on this. And it just seems to me and I of course tend to be too
#
cynical, but it just seems to me that that that ultimately all these institutions will
#
be co-opted, you know, because just look at the incentives in play. Of course the judiciary
#
will be co-opted. Of course the attorney general will be like a lawyer for the party in power.
#
You know, of course all of this will happen. Everything will kind of crumble. And yet you
#
keep fighting and placing your faith in the system and you know, you continue that journey.
#
So tell me a bit about how do you reconcile these two? Like for your father, for example,
#
you mentioned that it was sad for him to see that the state could become this. So did you
#
see that disillusionment creep in him? Did you feel that it hurt him that in some senses,
#
you know, it's like Santa Claus doesn't exist. And for you, did you also have moments of
#
doubt where you said, what is the point? Kuch nahi hone wala. It's pointless, you know.
#
You know, how was that for you? See, when you're in a struggle and the struggle keeps
#
changing forms and needs to also adapt strategies and take new strategies, it's not always,
#
you can't always predict the path that the struggle will take. I feel that when you're
#
in the midst of the struggle and it's by no means over when it comes to me or us, none
#
of it is over. I think the question is also one of what is the option? What is the option
#
once you're in the midst of it? Even if I were to allow myself to think what is the
#
point, like you said, or should I give up? Is that an option at all? Because you're not
#
representing only yourself, you're not representing only an individual maverick attempt, it is
#
part of a collective process that has metamorphosed into something, okay? So, can you just give
#
it up? Even if you feel you're a more real person now, you're more grounded than when
#
you began in terms of the experience of the system, you're more cynical even, can you
#
afford to give up? That's one question I'm placing on the table. Secondly, I think you
#
also realize that there are different ways you can take the same struggle forward, okay?
#
Which is that, yes, even if you look at certain aspects of say targeted killings and communal
#
violence and the accountability we demanded from the state through a battle in the courts,
#
which was very rigorously fought and unfortunately was not echoed by a political battle by the
#
opposition of the same kind, because that's also what I say in my book that when the battle
#
against proto-fascism gets limited to a battle in the courts, there is no way you're going
#
to win it, okay? So, that is also a story which needs to be, that's also a strand that
#
needs to be explored in our conversation, that why is the political opposition so wary
#
about looking at some of these tumultuous issues as part of election campaign hearing?
#
Can that ever happen till we metamorphize into that? South Africa did happen. Many,
#
many countries, we've seen the language of electoral politics take the language of an
#
emancipatory struggle. Whether it is a question of rights of Adivasis or the rights of minorities
#
or targeted killings, that's not happened in our country yet. Even right to education
#
does not figure as an election manifest to battle. So, the issue is not just about the
#
visa settle word in the courts or whatever, it is about the issue. The issue is, okay,
#
you're trying to demand accountability and transparency in heinous targeted killings
#
based on hate speech and hate violence through the courts. Courts have a certain conservative
#
structure, they're not diverse, they're not accountable, they're appointed, we all know
#
that. They're top heavy, they take too long, all of that. Can the battle ever be won only
#
there? Yet, if you look at what happened in Gujarat 2002, even now, with all the setbacks,
#
the kind of convictions we got has never unprecedented compared to 84, 92, 93, Meerut Maliana. What
#
I'm trying to say is that, and the question you earlier raised, which we didn't fully,
#
I didn't fully answer is that, you know, the post independence, what was expected of the
#
state and what was expected of society. I think the state did some of it, but not enough.
#
You mentioned what Nehru did the decent thing, he did the decent thing that one time about
#
Mundra, but if you read Nehru and the anonymous column he used to write in the statesman,
#
he said that I'm becoming more and more dictatorial because there's nobody to question me in my
#
cabinet. And then the way he proceeded, and you see a certain degeneration, and you see
#
whether it is inducting family or whatever it is, and the disrespect for federalism.
#
And I think that is the important thing about the constitution, which again has not been
#
understood that it's a unity, but federal structure. And we are seeing this noise is
#
coming from the south. We are seeing the MK make that noise in a very considered way.
#
We are seeing the Kerala make that noise. Now, whether it will be effective or not,
#
but it's a battle. And eventually we are 75, 76 years down. Look at other democracies
#
and how they've evolved. Is democracy the best way? Even history will tell us that,
#
but it has taken 200, 150 years for capitalist entrenched democracies to even get their quote
#
unquote institutions to a level at which when Trump is trying to capture that election,
#
which one and a half years back, you have election officers, many of them women saying,
#
no, the last vote will be counted, which given America's foreign policy is no great deal
#
because they massacre people all over the world. But at least as far as that institution
#
is concerned, it gave me a lot of hope. So I'm just saying that it's a very complex
#
battle that we are fighting. It's a battle to deepen the institutions of governance of
#
democracy in this country. Yet our structure of our society and state is very, very casteist,
#
fascist and feudal. Or we did not allow the structures of state to get, you know, to have
#
representation as they ought to have had from the sections that need it the most and deserve
#
it the most in terms of if lived democracy had to come in. Anytime any Dalit intellectual
#
talks about the issue of Dalit representation in the higher judiciary, they are shot down.
#
But it's a very valid question. Dalit representation, gender representation, minority representation,
#
why can't we raise it? Because it's a fact that it's only when those representations
#
come that you will have a sense of your responding. And I don't think it's about just identity
#
politics. It should be about workers, about farmers. Do we have farmers as judges, workers
#
as judges, teachers as judges? You know, it's all of these kind of cross intersectionalities
#
that we need to think. So I know I've gone all over the place, but what I'm trying to
#
say is that the battle for accountability and transparency, the battle for from the
#
state certainly can be more successful in the courts if the courts are more accountable.
#
And I'm not running away from that question. But it cannot only be fought there. It just
#
cannot only be fought there. And when we're looking at communal violence or targeted violence
#
against sections of ethnic populations, caste or community, it is a kind of, I mean, it's
#
a historical reprisal as a section sees it for what happened in partition. And that also
#
shows a lack of understanding of history because in partition itself, if you look at the map
#
of India, and I'm sure if you taught history, you'd do the same thing. I'll teach history
#
that way, that you look at it from the east to the west. And if you look at the trajectory
#
that maybe in Bengal, you had Noakali and Hindus were massacred most. But in Bihar,
#
it was large sections of Muslims. And in Punjab, it was the Sikhs. So it is three communities
#
doing it to each other pretty much, playing it out. And that demon of communal politics
#
that actually sits within all communities, which at one stage you're a majority and
#
other stage you're a minority, is what we need to tackle. That's the hate politics
#
that we need to tackle. And there's a danger of it becoming majoritarianism when it's
#
Hindus were here, but equally Islamization in Pakistan or the Buddhist state in Sri
#
Lanka. So that understanding we need to get among our people, which means a strain of
#
rationality and a strain of questioning. And the right wing, the supremacist right wing
#
is better organized. It has had its gold. In fact, it made it clear when it assassinated
#
Gandhiji. And that was in fact the first book I edited. I don't know if you've seen it.
#
It's called Beyond Out. Because I mean, for me, it was an eye-opener when Jagan Farnes's
#
book I read in Marathi in 1998, where I first, as a student of history, first his book was
#
called Mahatmanchi Akhir. And he first wrote, and it was his original work, that there were
#
five attempts on Gandhi before the last one that successfully killed him. And this is
#
not part of the dominant narrative. Even now I have to keep telling people that did you
#
know that there were six attempts totally, six were successful. And in three previous
#
attempts Godse was part of it. So it was not a spontaneous act. It was pretty organized,
#
pretty well thought out and all of it. So I just feel it's all of this coming together.
#
Let's look at the world. The world is also going very right, has gone very right. So
#
it's not just an Indian phenomenon. There's a grappling all along. And so much has to
#
do with economic structures and the kind of path of neoliberalization, neo-globalization
#
that the world took, which is now being questioned at some level, if you look at South America
#
and some of the states there. But have we reached a stage where we are questioning it?
#
I don't think so. Because if you look at what we are doing with the forest conservation
#
rules, what we're looking at, the kind of model of development. So for civil rights
#
activists also like me, we have to develop our understanding of economics and what kind
#
of priorities. Because I'm keen on reaching and discussing with the people who feel today
#
that they are jobless and hopeless and therefore they can sit and watch propaganda videos.
#
We need to reach those people because they are the same people who supported Trump. It's
#
the white American workforce that supported Trump. And I think if that white American
#
workforce is feeling completely isolated and without job, I cannot say that we can't speak
#
to them. I cannot say this is them. It's not a them. It's a them which is being pulled
#
there because of a certain economic reality. So it's a huge challenge for all of us who
#
are trying to work at the people's level, at the struggle level, at mass organization,
#
at building up a political opposition. We all realize also that we have to work with
#
the opposition we've got. It's not going to radically change the way we want it to.
#
So how do we make that happen? How do we work with it? These are all very complicated questions.
#
And then it boils down to, okay, what is your struggle and what is your choice? And do you
#
stop what you're doing? And then I think the option is not there to stop. Maybe you take
#
a break, take a different path for a little while. But I mean, for instance, I just wanted
#
to share that apart from the school program, the work we're doing in Assam at the moment,
#
I don't know if you're aware of it, it is looking at the law and citizenship and the
#
way it's rendering millions of Indians, genuine Indian citizens, a civil death. Because that's
#
what it is. You suddenly wake up and say that, you know, Amit is not an Indian, Tista is
#
not an Indian, and then I have to just scramble around putting together documents to prove
#
my citizenship, which is not even required under the Indian constitution. And we have
#
a team there. CJ, my organization has been working there since for the last seven years,
#
local team, diverse, gender diverse, ethnic diverse, working in villages, and we're ensuring
#
paralegal and legal aid. Now, according to me, that's a follow up trajectory to what
#
the kind of work we've done before with targeted violence, that you're using the law bottom
#
up from the Foreigner Tribunal level up to the Supreme Court. Not just going straight
#
when there's an incident of mass violence, but this is an everyday annihilation of the
#
people, you know, just rendering them completely non-citizens. And I think, therefore, it's
#
like using your previous expertise in a way where a huge humanitarian crisis is brewing.
#
And when I was in jail, and I found, and this is what I like to just share with your viewers,
#
that for a person who's never looked at herself as an individual, but part of a collective
#
battle, to feel that the kind of organization building that CJP has done, and that we have
#
now teams working in Assam, we have a team working in Purvanchal, and we keep telling
#
our supporters that, you know, these are the teams we need to support. It's not A-Tista
#
or A-Individual, but human rights workers and peace workers on the ground, who are able
#
to take up these little and bigger challenges. And that's when the change will happen.
#
So I share your lament about the one point of failure in all this, which is politics,
#
which is the opposition, right? And my question is about that. Now, this seems to be an assumption
#
on the part of all the opposition parties that you cannot mess with the Hindu vote.
#
So in some way or the other, they will try to, you know, cater to it, maybe in the very
#
crude ways that Kejriwal is doing, that you put pictures of goddesses on banknotes, or
#
even earlier when the Babri Malchit judgment came, you know, Priyanka Gandhi boasted that,
#
hey, my father opened the gates of the Babri Malchit. There is this sense that you have
#
to in some way show religiosity and so on. And they seem to be making the assumption
#
that ties in with my sort of pessimistic speculation earlier that this is what society is like.
#
Politics has caught up with it, and they seem to be treating it as a non-negotiable. Now,
#
is it the case that they are onto something, or is it the case that there is a lack of
#
imagination there, that there are other margins on which you can appeal to people? You know,
#
we all contain multitudes. Even if it is the case that religiosity matters, even if it
#
is the case that there is a certain shared bigotry there, there are surely other margins
#
that you can also appeal on. And, you know, but this is a battle everyone's just turned
#
their back on. So, you know, so it's that why which I'm trying to understand that are
#
our parties, are these opposition parties on to something about our society, which,
#
you know, may give you and I this quiet, and we may not want to accept it? Or are they
#
just showing a lack of imagination that there is a space to fight?
#
Extraordinarily important question, you know, I can't tell you how important it is, and
#
I'll try and just do some justice to it. See, I, you know, it boils down again to this,
#
and I like the way you put it, that is there a lack of imagination? I think there is a
#
lack of imagination. If I believe as a as a Rahul Gandhi or a Kriya Jeewal or a Mamta
#
or whatever, if I believe that this is where society is, that this is actually everybody
#
has now always been or has become so divided and so polarized that that's the only language
#
I can speak, then I will keep perpetuating this lack of imagine. But if I actually, and
#
I think that's the other problem that if you look at the election figures of number of
#
people who don't vote, I think that's a figure that's really important to look at. It tells
#
a very despairing tale. It means a lot of people are just so disillusioned with what's
#
being offered. It's not that they're going to this or that. They just seem we don't want
#
to vote. Okay? Then if you put it together with those who are not voting for this regime,
#
I think the figure is pretty large. Okay? Pretty large. So I think it's lack of imagination
#
to first say that lack of that lack of imagination is not simply from what the way you put it
#
that go to other issues. I think the other issues must be gone to whether it's unemployment
#
or prices and all. But I think it's also about tackling diversity and secularism head on.
#
And then I want to hack on something, which is something that people don't want to talk
#
about, which is that, how did Javed and I start the work we did from about 1986 onwards?
#
In 1993, we began combat formally, but actually this whole turning began in around 1986. I
#
don't even know you were born then, but it was an incredibly critical period for India.
#
I was a teenager then. Just joking. Thank you for that. Very critical period for India,
#
very critical period for India, because you saw so many things happening at the same time.
#
And if I just want to encapsulate those two, three, one was, of course, you referred to
#
it, opening what Priyanka said, opening of the talas of the Babri Masjid, but not as
#
important was the reaction of the Muslim male clergy to the Shahbano judgment. Now this
#
was within weeks of each other, both happening within weeks of each other. And we saw as
#
young journalists, we saw that what awful effect it was having on the ground, because
#
the VHP, VHP had made this, the construction of the Ram Mandir, their program from 86 onwards.
#
BJP adopted it a year or two later. But the Shahbano judgment was like a manna from heaven
#
for the right, for the Hindutva right, because the manner in which not just the Muslim male
#
clergy reacted, but the manner in which India's centrist party reacted, which is the Congress,
#
was horrendous. Instead of negotiating and navigating with the vast majority of India's
#
Muslims, which includes its women, they were negotiating with just the top heavy clergy
#
and the response they were getting in terms of the shouting and the hoards and the slogan
#
hearing were confirmed to that middle road, a Hindu who had not gone over to that side,
#
that yes, this is a section that wants special treatment under the law and wants, is not
#
even prepared to give a 125 rupees for an old woman who has been divorced. What does
#
this mean? You saw minority communism feeding into majority communism, exactly what led
#
me to do so much reading of my history pre-partition. And I teach it now in the class to the 8th,
#
9th, 10th standards junior colleges. We have to understand the trajectory of this country
#
between 1857, 1847 to 1933 and then 1947. Why till 1925 did you not see the emergence
#
of these sectarian forces from both sides? And then what happens between 1925 and 1937
#
when you first had the Muslim League pass the Lahore resolution? To believe for anybody
#
to any critical thinker in India to believe that secularism can only be two things, that
#
secularism can only be a battle for Hindus to become liberal and to Hindus to battle
#
caste and that minority should not be touched. I think it's not to understand what secularization
#
of society means, number one. And I think number two is not to understand that historically
#
this has always played up, that minority communism has played into majority communism and whereas
#
of course I agree with Nehru when he said that majority communism endangers the state
#
because the structure of the state changes. What happens to society when minority communism
#
is given a free hand and is not tackled is that it's three or four things. First of
#
all, you don't give agency to the moderate liberal dissenting voices among Muslims. You
#
don't allow that leadership to emerge and you ignore the Muslim women completely. And
#
can you imagine something more horrific than the fact that it's under this regime that
#
an issue like talaq is raised when organizations like the Indian Muslim for Secular Democracy
#
which my husband partner represents has been talking against triple talaq, polygamy and
#
halal for like two decades and yet it's just completely ignored by mainstream politicians.
#
So this lack of imagination encompasses even this, that what is secularism? Secularism
#
is not about giving Friday holidays to Muslims or to give the prophets birthday as a holiday
#
to Muslims. That's not what a vast majority of Indian Muslims have ever wanted. It's like
#
an insult to them. The vast majority of Muslims in this country are working class, artisans,
#
craftsmen, self-made people and they're from the subaltern caste. They're not from the
#
Ashraf Syed caste who have been the leadership of the opposition parties. They have been
#
asking for their share in the economic social cake even within the community. They haven't
#
got it. So I think if political parties started articulating what India stands for in terms
#
of all of this, secularism means this, secularism, equality, non-discrimination between various
#
faiths and within communities as well. I think if you have the moral courage to do that and
#
I can't see which leaders or very few, there are a few who do it in their own way, I think
#
it's possible that your disgruntled, hustled voter who doesn't vote will get inspired to
#
say yes, we believe we are like Muslims who are secular, we are Hindus who are secular
#
but we don't want this nonsense kind of secularism that you are electorally peddling out to us
#
which is meaningless. We want real secularism. And I think the real secularism exists. It's
#
morally, people are living it all the time. Muslims have, I mean if you look at today's
#
Muslim, you look at the number of Muslim girls who are kind of educating themselves. They've
#
not done it on a free lunch. They've done it out of battling patriarchy within the families
#
but they just need articulation. Why is opposition politics not keen on doing that? And I think
#
it's possible to do that it needs to, and these things need to be said. I mean when
#
someone like Tikayat, the farmer's leader in Muzaffarnagar has that slogan, haraar maavadev
#
Allah Akbar, it's a transformational moment because all of us were wondering that Rakesh
#
Nikad used to be a fairly reactionary big farmer but even that whole struggle and his
#
interacting with the small farmer, the middle farmer, the woman farmer, the Dalit farmer
#
and his realisation that where is this politics taking us has made him kind of utter those
#
slogans you know. Even Mamata Banerjee when she was faced with a couple of times during
#
the Bengal elections, she was trying to articulate, Ishwar Allah Teronam, this is my secularism,
#
don't try and tell me when the, I think the congress on the left tried and put up an ultra
#
right wing Muslim against one of her candidates. So we've seen glimmerings of that, we've
#
seen glimmerings of that but this needs to be a principled accepted position that we
#
are going to battle for secularism which is intrinsic to this country staying one and
#
united and that means no nonsense politics that talks about equality and discrimination.
#
So yes much more imagination is required and moral courage.
#
So I used to find it a little bit of a semantic paradox where a couple of decades ago the
#
BJP would go on and on against the congresses pseudo secularism while at the same time they
#
had no regard for secularism either. So it's like you know you accuse someone of being
#
pseudo secular if you are saying that hey they are pretending to be secular but then
#
one would imagine you want to be secular but that's not the case either. I want to ask
#
you a question about this then because you know you mentioned a real kind of secularism
#
where you know you build that equality into society. Now one of the complaints lasting
#
complaints of the Hindu right has been against the Hindu court bill saying that why are you
#
only reforming our personal laws why not the minorities. Perfectly rational complaint to
#
have and that is why also you know the UCC's the uniform civil code is going to be an issue
#
at some point in time though you know there are other incentives obviously driving them
#
towards that. So would you say that part of the reason for the vehemence and the radicalness
#
of Hindutva coming up the way it has are also the mistakes that the congress made in terms
#
of not being truly secular or being pseudo secular you know building that vote bank pandering
#
to it so on and so forth. You know what is what's your take on that whole debate.
#
I won't use the word pseudo secular because I think it's a it's a it's a abuse term but
#
I think it's a it was a hollowed out secularism that was trying to be tom tom and it's ironic
#
that the same party that did that because it was a party for let's not forget for forty
#
five years also you know today began even before Kejriwal started playing its own version
#
of soft Hindutva now Kejriwal has taken it to another obnoxious level. So I think obviously
#
I think that a lot of what happened and a lot of the ceding of power to the Hindutva
#
right has been possible because of the mistakes of earlier parties without question but on
#
this point I really really feel very very strongly that so much ground was lost and
#
it's not as if and you know it was both things and I want to join that as well because this
#
is something that the Hindu privileged cast and classes not all of them who support the
#
Hindu right need to understand and were rightly angry about what the congress did on this
#
score is that they also did not do enough to protect the life and economic livelihood
#
of minorities when it came to riots and all of that so both things were happening so you
#
alienate even the minority by not doing enough whether it is in 84 with the Sikh community
#
or made at Malianas, Nellie was the first post independence massacre of Muslims in Bengali
#
speaking Muslims in Assam so you see you did both things that you hollowed out the word
#
secularism so much so that you neither like protected the life and livelihood of the religious
#
minority as stringently as you should have done and equally well you hollowed it out
#
by quote unquote these silly pampering acts which were meaningless through which you kind
#
of created a coterie of this of male clergy privileged sections who became the spokesperson
#
of the community with whereas the community had moved way ahead disgusted with that same
#
leadership you know so you don't want to navigate or negotiate with a modern looking man or
#
woman from who may be a believing Muslim may be an agnostic but who definitely represents
#
his or her community because she or she is going to question the way you look at her
#
community that don't stereotype me I have been working I am working I am a busty level
#
worker I am a self-made person please don't patronize me it was a relationship of patronage
#
not a relationship of rights and I keep saying I used to say this because I have a certain
#
equation with the Muslim community because my work I used to say this in-house all the
#
time that why do you have this relationship of patronage with the opposition party that
#
time it was a ruling party demand it as your right as a citizen of this country as a citizen
#
of this country you need to be protected you need to have economic livelihoods you shouldn't
#
and you should demand that every time wise you are taken four generations back every
#
time there is a riot so much of your property is destroyed and you know this is under which
#
regimes before 2002 you know so it was both things happening I just wanted to table that
#
equally well this is a very good question you raised miniscule sections of the Muslim
#
community were raising this question of codification of the Sharia law from the beginning and I
#
don't think the Hindu community should feel resentful about it they should be happy that
#
at least that happened to them but they should certainly ask the question like all Indians
#
should as to why there was not a similar codification of the Sharia bill I don't think uniform civil
#
code is the way to go but the codification which will then ensure certain gender just
#
provisions emerging and then if you want a certain gender just code or the special marriages
#
act to become a more gender just and representative diverse thing certainly do that I think that's
#
another very valid proposition when you've had voices within the Muslim community raise
#
this question again and again and again that please codify these three practices like again
#
I'll repeat polygamy triple talaq halala and others they don't exist in other Muslim countries
#
so why do they exist in India and yet this so that's the other thing that happened with
#
the Shah Banu thing which is I think important to table here is that the creature called
#
the Muslim personal war that had been dead for about 80 90 years didn't exist in terms
#
of the political consciousness of this country or community or the Muslim community was resurrected
#
by none other than Rajiv Gandhi because of that stupid exercise of getting that special
#
law passed now never mind the fact that you know that law itself that Muslim women divorce
#
protection act has also been used by Muslim women to get their rights because that's what
#
people will do but but the impulse to pass that law to take out a question section of
#
the community away from the purview of normal criminal law is it was what alienated large
#
sections of the majority population so I think that is something we need to recognize that
#
how do we view different communities when we govern what do we mean by secularization
#
of society you know what do we mean by secularization of state so congress also precurs the majoritarianism
#
in the state if you look at 1984 I mean if you look at Mrs Gandhi's statement that she
#
made from Jammu I remember I think 1980 I was horrified horrified when I read that
#
when she said and that's why Balaseb Devaraj of the RSS had said that she's the tiger and
#
we need to support her is that she was she said that I'm faced with Khalistan on one
#
side and I'm faced with separatism in Kashmir so I'm appealing to Hindu India to vote for
#
you know so it's not as if the majoritarianism had not started creeping into the state as
#
well earlier the the state in the latter years of the rule of the earlier opposition largely
#
the congress but even even the coalitions did ignore the whole question of the communalization
#
of the police force which was like a hugely problematic issue which had thrown itself
#
up I did a lot of investigative work on this when I started covering communal violence
#
and found that and so so all of this built up into what we are seeing today you know
#
so state agencies police governance and in this governance agencies it's one thing to
#
be secular neutral you know that you don't really bring alive secularism but another
#
thing to allow the induction of those kind of people who actually have an ideology which
#
is hardcore and there's a big difference it happened started happening.
#
So you know Vir Sanghvi in his recent memoir and in an episode he did with me speaks about
#
exactly what you said how the 1984 Congress vote was really a expression of the Hindu
#
vote and at that point the BJP realizes that hey we are losing the battle that used to
#
belong to us you know let this you know they formed the BJP saying we'll do Gandhi on socialism
#
but they said forget that you know let's chase the vote and then you have that sort of that
#
competitive race to the bottom as it were and this is sort of one trend that is playing
#
itself out that makes it seem inevitable.
#
I also did an episode with Vinay Sitapati on sort of the history of the BJP before Modi
#
and Shah and one of the interesting points he made there was that liberalization in 1991
#
while it led to all the prosperity and all the great things that happened one of the
#
sort of side effects was that it brought into being a new middle class which just happened
#
to be conservative or bigoted or whatever term you want to use for it and that played
#
into the political arena and thinking of it that way it almost seems as if what we have
#
seen in our politics in terms of the general direction was sort of inevitable events might
#
be circumstantial and you know different things happen at different points like you said the
#
Godhra incident was just a pretext for what was already planned and we'll talk about that
#
in detail as well but the general direction was always this the general drift was always
#
Is that a take that you'd agree with or do you feel that it's too much based on hindsight
#
that there are different directions we could have taken that it need not have gone this
#
Even that question is would be hindsight you know even that answering that question itself
#
would be hindsight so I just want to mention that it's very easy to you know take it either
#
way that it's very easy to adopt this position which you already mentioned that it was going
#
to go this way anyway then the question I asked myself that is that a kind of a defeatist
#
position that you're trying to say that because you maybe we didn't do enough or maybe you
#
didn't anticipate deeply enough and is that why we are now today coming up with that analysis
#
or then I will ask myself this question but then if not that then what could have been
#
done differently would be the next question and I think one immediate thing which definitely
#
occurs to me is federalism and I'm coming back to something which is I think decentralized
#
politics and federalism so federalism is not just in terms of what the how you disempower
#
the states financially and economically and culturally but I think also how political
#
parties that is a dominant political party again you come back to congress but I think
#
all of them dealt with regional leaders dealt with diversity diversity and leadership and
#
all of that and I think that that decentralization diversification in politics enabling leaderships
#
to come up from subaltern communities and castes and federalism I think is something
#
we should have definitely done differently because I think this as the belief kind of
#
took hold with the same middle class you're talking about that you know only a top heavy
#
centralized one man messiah kind of a thing which has never been the solution anywhere
#
in the world in any case it's just been one of those things that catch people's fancy
#
but just end up in pure disaster so actually the best governments have always been coalition
#
and low key and non-confrontationist but somehow the that's not what the hindi film is about
#
and that's not what the that's not what the narrative is about so I think this is
#
definitely one thing we need to be looking at very seriously today when we talk about
#
other things we need to be talking about you know the federal aspects of the constitution
#
even if it is not federal enough what changes need to be made and how India can possibly
#
be governed peacefully and successfully or non-confrontation impossible by respecting
#
maximum amount of layered diversity meaning diversity not just at one level or whatever
#
but right from the bottom up to the top because I think it is this diversity itself and only
#
that will eventually be a proper bulwark against this.
#
I agree with your solutions about federalism and decentralization but that also begs the
#
question because if you just go back to the circumstances like you mentioned the constitution
#
was framed where when the country was basically falling apart you know Gyanprakash had a book
#
where he sort of made the point that the emergency that Indira Gandhi called in 75 was actually
#
constitutional and the reason it was constitutional was that so much power was centralized in
#
the constitution by the framers and it was rational for them to do so because they looked
#
around and hey the country is falling apart so would federalism even have been possible
#
and then if you just look at how power you know plays in to character you know I had
#
an episode with Rahul Verma and I discussed this with others as well where we speak about
#
the decline of the congress party and the real moment where the decline gathers space
#
is Indira Gandhi where she starts changing chief ministers at will and she is just completely
#
centralizing all power within the congress so it is kind of run from Delhi and that is
#
when the party kind of decays and that is why you see what is happening today and you
#
know the roots are back there so in a vacuum yeah sure you know you need more federalism
#
need more decentralization and I am sure we can add things to the list but realistically
#
you know but I mean I do not want to seem sort of defeatist and you know it was always
#
meant to be this way but you know it is hard for me to pick out a point where it could
#
have gone in a different direction but it is not a question and I am not even arguing
#
with you I am just kind of I mean let me just come to the last three years or four years
#
in Maharashtra and we had this experiment like crazy experiment Maharashtra Vikasakadhi
#
and I do not think I could have believed anybody could have believed that such an experiment
#
could have been even possible or whether it would succeed and I think it reasonably succeeded
#
and I think the biggest test for it was covid the biggest test for it was a pandemic lockdown
#
period if you look at the manner in which the lockdown was handled from Delhi and from
#
the thali punching and the lockdown and then that led to the millions of people I mean
#
after partition it was the most miserable migration we saw of our migrant workers on
#
the roads and how many of them lost their lives and all of that that was central government
#
were inflicted and then we saw what happened in Maharashtra I am not saying other states
#
didn't do it but I am saying the manner in which it was handled in Maharashtra far from
#
perfect but far from bad the manner in which a man who became chief minister completely
#
untested we know the background we know everything but the manner in which he sort of commanded
#
those one and a half years I think got respect from many of my friends in sitting in Delhi
#
who were even appalled by the way Kajkejwal handled the delta the second round where there
#
was death and devastation in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat and others so my point
#
is I think over intellectualizing and dismissing issues like federalism and diversity like
#
you've done it won't help you need to concretize what I am trying to say with moments when
#
this could have happened or can happen in future and can it happen realistically is
#
the question we need to deal with okay that can this kind of diversification and decentralization
#
actually happen or is it too far gone a story now and I think that's the challenge we will
#
have to face and it's going to happen I believe because of the manner in which economics is
#
going the manner in which the workforce pressures are going the manner in which agricultural
#
pressures are going and the cultural and religious issues we are facing it I think that that
#
is going to be the only solution people will finally find or we'll split up you know into
#
god knows how many fragments because this kind of thing is not feasible to continue
#
for a long time so either you're going to be able to figure out and this is exactly
#
what Kamil Nadh is talking about every single day it's just that we sitting in Bombay and
#
Delhi don't read about what's happening in the south because the south is not mattered
#
to our consciousness we are so north oriented you know we are so Delhi Sarkar oriented I
#
mean this is a conversation that is happening every day when they're saying that we call
#
you not union government but central government it's very very fundamental issues that are
#
being raised and those are successful strong governments that have raised them where there's
#
a strong such social justice component where there's also atrocities on Dalits and all
#
that we know that so my point is it's happening at a real level also it's Maharashtra was
#
an experiment Tamil Nadu is something else Kerala is something else so let's just see
#
I mean today what's happening in Telangana and what TRS is trying to do what just came
#
out in the papers this morning in terms of how I mean we know that they're trying to
#
buy off these MLAs and MPs all the time how far is that buying out going to go because
#
the politics that we are seeing which this regime has perpetrated Modi and Shah as you
#
put it is not a genuine centralization of politics it is also huge amount of money throwing
#
around after demonetization everybody knows how this money got into their hands yet there's
#
no institution that is prepared to question it yet so all of this is up in the air and
#
out in the open it's known and yet it's unknown it's known and yet it's untackled you know
#
so I think it's therefore not a fair level playing field at all by any means whether
#
it's the election commission you're talking about the courts that are willing to question
#
etc so my point is we have to see how all this plays out is it going to be getting much
#
much worse before it never gets better or is it going to get slightly better so there's
#
going to be spaces created where there'll be more resistance that is the question.
#
I take back my words you're right these are signs of hope especially you know Uddhav Thackeray's
#
leadership and I'll have a question about that which just kind of struck me and as much
#
as that is a sign of hope you know earlier we were talking about how oppositional politics
#
is letting us down but I think if there's one thing that gave me joy and hope about
#
this country it was the mass protests at the time of CAA no and also when Bilkis's remission
#
happened yeah I was in jail but I was unbelievable like saw the level of protests that happened
#
and the kind of people who were horrified at the act brazen act of not just the Gujarat
#
government but also now we know the center yeah despite the fact that the presiding judge
#
Mr Salvi and the CBI also opposed the remission I think both things you know sorry to interrupt
#
the CAA and this for me was a sign of hope that and even a man like Uddhav Thackeray
#
mentions the Bilkis Banu remission you know I mean and one particular example I would
#
like to give about Uddhavji because I think it's very important an interesting experiment
#
happened the first round in 2020 I'm talking about when the lockdown was declared and all
#
that there's a large education campus in Pune happened to be owned by a Muslim I won't
#
get into names and all there's a mosque there the person who was this thing he offered it
#
to the local administration for quarantine and that became was like a spiral effect lot
#
of mosques in western Maharashtra and Maharashtra gave up because large areas they said we can
#
allow the mosque to be used for quarantine spaces for covid Uddhavji actually did a video
#
or this thing somewhere thanking the Muslim community saying that this is very valuable
#
space because they were running out of space they were appealing for schools and colleges
#
now you know these are very small things but in a very battered hateful public atmosphere
#
it's just a recognition of different people's contribution and different communities contributions
#
and it means a lot and I don't think it means that you're compromising on your being a believer
#
in Hindu or whatever it is it is genuine Indian lived secularism that's what he did so there
#
are examples like that you can come up with which which are happening around us few and
#
far between maybe not enough but I think if those kind of things can be strengthened because
#
and that they can be strengthened only by a kind of self-confident politician who believes
#
that his or her supporter is not going to go away because he or she says that small
#
things can be big things and this reminds me of an incident I'll share with you for those
#
of my listeners also who haven't heard my episode with Mukulika Banerjee but I was very
#
moved by this story Mukulika has written this great book on the Khudai Khidmatgarh called
#
the Pathan Unarmed and to do research for the book she spent she took 10 years to write
#
it but she spent a few months in the northwest frontier province in Pakistan going from village
#
to village looking for for past members of the Khudai Khidmatgarh who would all be in
#
their 70s 80s or whatever and she noticed that actually as she goes through these villages
#
you know in those areas beef is very cheap and chicken is expensive so every house keeps
#
just one chicken in case a special guest comes and wherever she was going she was being given
#
that one chicken which is so expensive for them and she felt so bad that she started
#
eating beef and then she came back to India and she told her mother who was a devout Hindu
#
about what she'd done and her mother thought for some time and said tumne sahi kiya ye
#
toh insaniyat hai and that's such a beautiful story which speaks to exactly you will find
#
most people most Indians even today under Modi Shah's India reacting like that they
#
are horrified by the lynchings they horrified by the thing I don't believe our people are
#
I mean it's a wretched country to be in just now because of what the silence I see around
#
that there's not enough protest but then I tell myself there are reasons for it and
#
the people are not willing to take risks etc but I think ordinary people do react to these
#
things but the fact that the media doesn't let those stories come through the fact that
#
and therefore I feel the hugest and biggest abdication is by the media today and they
#
are going to be historically culpable for the personal human cost that is being paid
#
by young lives who are incarcerated by this regime and the lives who have been brutally
#
taken away by this regime it's the media who is responsible collectively because if
#
they let the stories of hope and the stories of struggle get across like they used to at
#
one stage then I think others get emboldened no you come out of your kind of isolated cocoon
#
you feel nahi ye ho raha hai log lad rahe hain kuch kar rahe hain toh hum bhi kar satte
#
ek chota bhot kuch you don't need to necessarily do big things
#
it plays to what the sociologist Timur Kurran calls preference falsification one way in which
#
I kind of explained what has happened over the last few years is that there were so many
#
closeted bigots among us who kept their bigotry to themselves but social media emboldened
#
them to speak out because they saw so many others like them and you had what Kurran would
#
call a preference cascade and the Modi wave and so on but what you are saying is that
#
it can also go the other way that a lot of us in these heated environments are sort of
#
not speaking against it but you know if enough people start doing it and just when covid
#
struck it seemed as if people were doing that young people were out on the streets waving
#
the preamble and it seemed that there was 300 or 400 meetings I attended on CNRC because
#
of our Assam experience across India I was just doing trainings because people knew we
#
were working in Assam so they kept calling us how do we cope tomorrow if it comes and
#
it's going to come I'm telling your viewers now it will come next year they'll bring
#
in NPR NRC because they have nothing else they have nothing else but negativity and
#
confusion to offer our people they want to put they want us to chase our documents around
#
so that we are not in a position to struggle and challenge them so I think we need to prepare
#
ourselves for this kind of vicious onslaught because one of the other things I said and
#
this is I was privileged enough to deliver the Kannabiran Memorial Lecture for POCL within
#
a year of this regime coming in that was 2016-17 and things are so much worse now when I said
#
they've opened up so many fronts why this government or regime is worse than any other
#
is because they've opened up multiple fronts economic, adivasi, Dalit, minority, human
#
rights, unemployment I mean on every and they've opened up so many fronts and if I sit and
#
calculate there may be 20-25,000 of us all over the country who are fighting this it's
#
not enough they have to be many many more but there are those doing fantastic things
#
but you need to somehow create an atmosphere with which this will spiral and that fear
#
of reprisal will go because that is what is making people quiet.
#
So before we go in for a break one sort of final question sparked by what you said about
#
Uddhav and this is just me thinking aloud in my grand tradition of randomly thinking
#
aloud which is one thing that I really loved about Uddhav was his style of speaking to
#
the people where it's like he's speaking to a friend that you know Angela Merkel has
#
the same thing for example where you're not declaiming in front of an audience grandly
#
but it's personal, it's intimate, it's almost like a friend is speaking to you or you know
#
your elder brother is speaking to you it's that kind of a connection and that leads me
#
to thinking about a you mentioned earlier that across the world people seem to like
#
strongman leaders so every once in a while that's the narrative we are told, no there's
#
actually an evolutionary explanation for it that all our instincts evolved in prehistoric
#
times we lived in small tribes you know it's a doggy dog world you want the leader of your
#
tribe to be the strongest bigger biggest mofo there is so it's perhaps you are instinctively
#
drawn to leaders who appear to be strong anti-deluvian yes but I don't think that's today's too
#
yeah but and I'll now come to what appears to be a completely unrelated subject that
#
one movement I've seen in the creator economy is that whereas the superstars of yesterday
#
and perhaps all the way till recently were people who were larger than life right so
#
you have your Amitabh Bachchan and you have your Shah Rukh Khan even and you build temples
#
to them and they're just larger than life and today in the creator economy the people
#
who do really well are people who are authentic to themselves who build an intimate connection
#
you feel like they are your friend and I wonder if a similar sort of connect can be made in
#
politics as well where it's not just the larger than life you know Modiji declaiming in you
#
know his Shudhindi or whatever but just someone like Uddhav sitting talking one-on-one almost
#
as if he's a guest on a podcast kind of chatting with you and I wonder if a leader like that
#
can also then get a mass following and and kind of get through I mean what what do you
#
think because you've you've written a lot about the Shiv Sena in your book as well neither
#
of us is too fond of Uddhav's dad for example and I'd done an episode on Maharashtra politics
#
with Sujata Anand where she did kind of see it coming she saw Uddhav as someone who is
#
you know not cut in the same mold what is your sense that is this that when we talk
#
about a new politics do we need to look at a new politics not just in terms of issues
#
but also in terms of manner of communicating and reaching out because as an activist you
#
are communicating and reaching out all the time what do the people want what do you know
#
see we need to understand that this narrative that we are constantly being fed and I'm sure
#
some of it is true because it's like the eternal stereotype a stereotype is powerful because
#
at least 15% of it is true otherwise it can't work okay therefore this narrative of you
#
know the messiah or the big man or the big woman or the strong strong is good for you
#
is the a narrative but I would put it just as a narrative I'd say it's a descriptive
#
narrative not a normative that's what I'm trying to say and I was just gonna the next
#
point I want to make is just six yesterday I read somewhere I've pinned it I've not
#
yet read the whole thing that 66% of people Indians don't know I have not heard a monkey
#
but I mean just I've fitted through that I've not read the study yet now if this is even
#
a good sample and a study it tells you it's an answer to your question that if 66% of
#
Indian don't know what a megalomaniac is saying and for which he thinks it's you know it's
#
the biggest and the most important moment of his prime ministerial life every month
#
and then it tells you something okay now coming back to Uddhav Uddhav Jain you know very interesting
#
thing is if you look at the history and trajectory like you're interested in doing go to his
#
grandfather Prabodhan Thackeray a social reform interrogating caste took the RSS head on you
#
know and in fact I think recently the the repubblication of his collected works has
#
happened in Marathi at least I'm hoping they'll come in English sometime so I think you know
#
there is there's a multifaceted tradition behind behind what we're talking about families
#
contain multitudes yeah and what I think was a strength of Uddhav was what you're saying
#
that not just as a friend he was calm in in in today I think people would like to listen
#
to words of calm wisdom rather than shrill shrieking which see I remember once being
#
on a show by somebody like even Rajdeep has become like that now Barkha because towards
#
the 2000 towards 2014 as the as the trajectory of Modi build up even the anchor sort of
#
fell in line you know and everyone was shrieking on television I realized I could see I remember
#
one what was that thing she used to do that one of the talk shows she used to do we the
#
people we the people it was Chandan Mitra and other and one day I told her I said Barkha
#
asked me the same question on a lower tone and I whispered she said what do you mean
#
I said the moment you start I'll also shout louder that's what you want because see that's
#
the idea that if I suppose we were not having this conversation at this and suppose you
#
were kind of very excitably saying something my instinct would be to also respond with
#
the same hyperbole okay whereas in a nice calm conversation it's possible to talk laugh
#
in a very low tone and say the same things and better things maybe you know so I think
#
this is what Uddhav has that has that ability Stalin has that also in Tamil Nadu they're
#
not shrieking and shouting they're making solid points I mean Stalin may be more political
#
or whatever but and during Covid what was very interesting about Uddhav ji was that
#
he was constantly consultative and I think that consultative thing appeals to Maharashtrians
#
because there's a rational streak we were faced with a beast an unknown beast this virus
#
it was freaking us all out we didn't know what to do with it it was scary it was worrying
#
all over so he was saying okay I'm talking to doctors I'm talking to my bureaucrats
#
I'm talking to my team we are trying our best and I think that is the best thing you should
#
be able to do in a crisis this is what the Prime Minister should have been doing talking
#
to various Chief Ministers and their bureaucrats rather than trying to be play God you know
#
because even God did not know what Covid was you know so I think this is the difference
#
and yes I really believe that the way forward for India and the world is going to be collective
#
leadership collective solutions collective faces yes attractive young diverse gender
#
diverse ethnic diverse all all those boxes have to be ticked but you don't need to have
#
that one strong him or her it can be a collective voice and it can be collective solutions also
#
because I think the kind of problems you're facing I mean we're not even looking at climate
#
change but when I just think about the kind of what children will have to face in 2050
#
which is a hot world which is like an oven I mean we're not even looking at all of that
#
because we are so caught up in today's we're not looking at the fact that we might have
#
water wars tomorrow in Bombay because we just won't have enough water so you know what are
#
the things we are going to be thinking of short term middle term and long term what
#
are the issues we need to focus so we preserve ourselves in some dignity as a human race
#
and not completely exterminate ourselves with the way we are going at the moment yeah I
#
mean your thought of Modiji is not God is interesting because if he was God he wouldn't
#
exist because God doesn't exist but I you've made it that's a really profound point in
#
how a leader can set the tone the same way a television anchor can or a podcast I've
#
experienced it because I used to be called for TV all the time fortunately now I'm ostracized
#
so I'm very lucky because now after 2014 they don't want to call me which is just as well
#
but I realized that it was very possible for me to remain calm when they shriek but I would
#
just tell them please lower your tone I'll answer the question and that would actually
#
unsettle them a little bit I said because you know you're doing it so that you want
#
me to scream and this is not a cup panchayat it is a television debate or discussion their
#
views need to be exchanged so we don't have to be shouting at each other on this note
#
I will gently suggest without shouting or shrieking let's take a quick commercial break
#
and we'll continue this on the other side long before I was a podcaster I was a writer
#
in fact chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India uncut
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time I love
#
the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways I exercise my
#
writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things because
#
I wrote about many different things well that phase in my life ended for various reasons
#
and now it is time to revive it only now I'm doing it through a newsletter I have started
#
the India uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write regularly about whatever
#
catches my fancy I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about
#
much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe it is free once you sign up
#
each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox you don't need to
#
go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm chatting with Ishtar Sattelvaad and you know
#
we spoke for two hours and we didn't really even get much into your life or your childhood
#
or whatever so I want to kind of get into the chronology of that a little bit and I'm
#
fascinated and very jealous that you've kind of lived in the same house more or less all
#
your life yeah so lucky except for maybe four years when Javed and I moved out and started
#
living together in government quarters in Antofil you were finishing your question or
#
no no yeah I mean tell me a little bit about that because you know I've had guests on the
#
show and sometimes we will discuss what is our sense of home and how rooted are we and
#
various of my guests like me will sometimes lament that that sense of home is not really
#
so strong one of my guests Max Rodenbeck spoke about he grew up in Cairo and he spoke about
#
how to him home means Cairo but it is not the Cairo of today that no longer exists you
#
know it's a Cairo of memory and it strikes me that even though you've kind of lived in
#
the same place all your life it's not been the same place all your life you know it just
#
kept changing and since you know you live in Juhu I live in Andheri you know buildings
#
like the one I'm in must seem like monstrosities and unimaginable so tell me a little bit about
#
how growing up was like in the 60s and you know what was life like actually it was just
#
it was just so much fun because it was like a it was like a different Bombay different
#
Mumbai different Bombay I mean I've always loved Bombay and I think I continue to love
#
it though it has changed so much and so and it has always been Juhu as home for me except
#
except four years like I said when Javed and I moved out and started living together much
#
the chagrin of my parents but anyway so that place where we live now is off the beach on
#
the beach and very lucky place to be because particularly now with all the like you said
#
buildings coming up I won't call it a monstrosity but you know large buildings everywhere construction
#
everywhere actually more than the buildings I feel the fact that they don't they don't
#
allow trees around them as is mandatory required you know you have 14 inch spaces you should
#
have trees that's another story but growing up was like so next to the bungalow where
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we live in now which was built in 1964 there's an older structure which is next door which
#
is an old old bungalow and that is where my grandfather Moti Lal moved in 1933 when he
#
broke away from the family home at Nepean sea road which is off Settelwar lane over
#
there it was named after Jiman Lal and he was a great man for the outdoors he liked
#
he liked open spaces green spaces and all of that so he moved out with his two children
#
Atul Usha was my aunt and Atul and his wife and I remember that we growing up with these
#
stories of his moving out and the older house and the new house as all families have and
#
we still have a lovely black and white photograph of the Nepean sea road home which is known
#
as Jiman Lal Settelwar's residence and when he moved here and my mother had this I saw
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it after my father passed the older land agreement on where my grandfather bought this property
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there's his signature and there's GRD Tata's so that was all Tata land you know so and
#
he didn't buy just this plot where we built the home in 64 the old bungalow he bought
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right he bought about like 20 bungalows worth of the whole stretch right from that where
#
Nawal Waqeel's bungalow now is where now Jairu auntie lives right up to Asha Parikh's
#
bungalow because his vision was that you know I'll move there and then we'll sell these
#
plots to friends and family and this be one large community of all of us living together
#
and it worked like that for about 25-30 years for him because I mean 40 years 50 years for
#
him because 1933 we're talking about so for instance my father and I were born in that
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1933 that older bungalow and then this place was vacant land and then there was my one
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aunt another aunt then there was India Bombay's very famous dentist BG Kher's brother he had
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one bungalow then there was Dr. Gajjar who was Bombay's primer pathologist who was a
#
friend of my grandfather so it was like that it was that sort of a world where my grandfather
#
did all that and then of course things started changing in the 70s when people sold off and
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building started coming up and everything but what I remembered is that there never
#
was a there was never a compound wall so it was like a huge stretch of bungalows bungalows
#
bungalows bungalows and gorgeous gardens and we used to just run through all of them as
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kids because it was like no question of security no question of walls or you know traversing
#
gates or whatever so it was a very very lucky existence and the beach I mean for me the
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sea and the beach was everything and I remember right up to when I was 22-23 swimming off
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Juhu beach and swimming at midnight by moonlight as well which much to the horror of my sister
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they should be really worried because my parents wouldn't know I had sneakers so it was a safe
#
beach it was a safe place it was a clean beach so it was quite quite quite nice and the sound
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of the sea has always meant huge amounts to me the sound of water and the sea but the
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sea and I think waves sort of always the gentle or the more ferocious waves always sort of
#
reflected the mood I was in whether it was upset angry or very calm and I don't know
#
why that has always always been a huge thing for me and my mother was a very avid gardener
#
and planted huge number of trees and she was into biodiversity and indigenous trees and
#
all of that and she was quite a birdwatcher as well so a lot of that sort of came through
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I never had enough time for this till now I mean last 10-12 years with all my hectic
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stuff I love to cram in four five hours a week in the garden doing planting ensuring
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that I pot repot do nursery stuff give plants to a lot of friends and because I think the
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more greenery you can spread the better so there was all of that books were a big thing
#
and my father my father actually my grandfather I will not sue my grandfather my father was
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a crazy reader I mean he was one of the fastest readers I know I think my son after that and
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I am also quite a fast reader but my son reads very well so he would just devour and a lot
#
of it was non-fiction so he had a fantastic library so we had the benefit of that and
#
also benefit of father and mother who said that don't bother about your textbooks this
#
is what you need to know you need to get into books marks are not important but the book
#
knowledge from books is so I think that is also so precious and so important it was also
#
lucky because one didn't have to get into the rat race of high marks and jobs but so
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it was obviously privilege but I think privilege used nicely you know rather than in a money
#
also I remember something very intrinsic past of me is being very very my mother teaching
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us to be very frugal I mean she used to be very strict about money very strict so we
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never had pocket money in school ever everything you needed you asked for and then it was within
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limits you got it but only after 11th and 12th standard college we started getting pocket
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money and always public transport function within your even your films and your books
#
have to be savings from your pocket money so I think these things are very important
#
markers about what you become how you live how you relate to people I mean yeah money
#
was there is there but it's also somebody something you respect you don't you're not
#
crass about it you don't there's a humility that come I have this story which I always
#
tell people and sometimes Javed throws it back at me when I'm careless Dada used to
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come he used to be in Delhi most of the time so the months he spent in Juhu or the months
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we he had another lovely home in Ooty Uttakaman the months we would spend with him there in
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in whether it's here or we went to Delhi to one of the lovely government bungalows or
#
into St. Patrick's in Ooty you know he'd take these morning and evening walks so I'd
#
feel very important walking next to him so as a toddler I'd be walking aping him putting
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my hand at the back and walking and stuff and on the in the Juhu bungalow it would be
#
in the front lawn he'd go walking up and down so I remember once I think maybe I was in
#
standard four or something and it was a sunset time walk and I moment I saw him go out from
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his bedroom I charged from mine to join him and he of course smiled and we started walking
#
together and then I suddenly saw him turn back towards the house and go into my bedroom
#
because I left the light on and he didn't yell he didn't shout but he just went and
#
put off the light and came out and he said you know that so that that's those are kind
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of lessons you that stay with you that no wastage of electricity no wasted of money
#
no wasted of resources you know you you you live you you have money you live in a fancy
#
place but you you must remain grounded and respectful of people and what they are and
#
and domestic help was always family their families were family I think all these things
#
really are very very crucial to your and for me they were very precious so there was that
#
and of course there was a constant engagement with current affairs news law politics a constant
#
so newspapers reading the newspapers listening to like you were saying you know earlier that
#
we were so starved of entertainment so listening to all India radio listening to whatever forms
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of news you go at was extremely important and then discussing that with my father at
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the dining and for me that that dining table for was an arena for discussion debate and
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argument and I think that it's it was such a precious site because my father would encourage
#
both our sisters to argue and to contest what he said and I think that was the biggest lesson
#
I learned in terms of parenting or in terms of teaching even which I started doing later
#
is that you are not threatened by discussion or debate or argument that you need to encourage
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it at every step because that shows growth that shows evolution and and regardless of
#
where that argument took us even if it was most bizarre things we said but he would encourage
#
us to argue so the days when they would go out for dinner with friends or whatever it
#
is I remember listening to the news BBC all India radio writing down all the important
#
news points that I had to discuss with him the next day and I would leave the note for
#
him I said this is what needs to be discussed tomorrow so I think that sort of discursive
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upbringing you know which is very adult even though you are growing minds you're treated
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as an adult you're given that respect your mind is given I think is is so important and
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then there are so many things you remember because the Asian games took place when I
#
was in college Elphinstone college and that was a big thing because it was in the first
#
time India was hosting something internationally like that and very exciting for young people
#
so we booked our tickets to Delhi we said we'll go to the stadiums and watch and everything
#
and all of that and we were there for a good week or 10 days watching all of this and then
#
one weekend we took off that's a good friend of mine my sister and I we took off to Jaipur
#
just touristy kind of a thing to go and see the pink city when we were coming back and
#
this was the early 80s 81 I think coming back to Delhi and we went by ST bus the bus was
#
stopped and all the Sardar boys were asked to get off and they were frisked and I remember
#
getting so agitated and upset by it so upset by it and I used to have this habit of constantly
#
discussing everything with my father everything including things that really angered me upset
#
me and that time there was only STD phones not easy to call but I remember making sure
#
that day I went to an STD booth and taking extra coins and I said what are they doing
#
okay we might be faced with this problem of Khalistan or whatever but is this the way
#
a state should deal with it if they want if there was a fear for a stadium in Delhi some
#
terror attack they should have searched all of us why are you singling out one community
#
the moment you do that you're going to alienate and anger that community you know and I experienced
#
the same thing in 1995 in Charar Sharif when Charar Sharif was burned in 95 when I was going
#
from Srinagar to Yosembourg so this attitude of the state of you know singling out had
#
begun and I think this is what we were not able to see how to handle it and I was remember
#
feeling very disturbed by it anyway so these are things you think back on you know that
#
when you realize that an understanding was growing about some of these issues which you
#
then engaged in later family was very important to my father and mother both so family holidays
#
were like a huge thing he never ever did not take family holidays so a lot of it was with
#
my grandfather in Delhi either as attorney general or then a member of parliament law
#
commission and all but also Ooty so and in between we would go other places like we go
#
to Himachal or we go to Kashmir was very very important to us because my there's a family
#
connection actually because Sheikh Abdullah and my Motilal were very close friends because
#
my he was my grandfather had was the Indian council and representative of the United Nations
#
for the Indian position on Kashmir and the fact that the Sheikh had wanted to stay with
#
India was a huge thing so they were very good personal friends so I remember when we went
#
to Kashmir and one of the one of our family holidays he hosted us and it was such an awe
#
awe-inspiring occasion that my father mother and the two of us they hosted us for tea and
#
there was a keva and there was a macaroons from Kashmir that we ate then the other time
#
when we went to Dalhousie and the Dalai Lama hosted us in a similar way because just these
#
were like private meetings but I mean they meant so much because you realize these were
#
really incredible people that you had a chance to meet simply because you happen to belong
#
to this family or whatever it is so these were some of the things that stayed and there
#
was one one little ditty that my sister and I would keep singing to ourselves which we
#
were taught I think by somebody in the family which is that Atul, Motilal, Chimanlal, Harilal,
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Brijrai, Harirai, Settelwal which would take all the of course it was very patriarchal
#
because the women were not counted but it just showed the long lineage of lawyers in
#
the family so there was all of that there was all of that and there was also the fact
#
that my grandparents both sides vegetarian Gujaratis but my father beef eating alcohol
#
consuming atheist a sense of rationality that you make your choice so I used to ask him
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that how did you begin so it was because he went for his LLM in post-war Britain so he
#
stopped drinking sugar in his tea but he started consuming beef so there were things like that
#
which were very interesting and my mum was never really a committed non-vegetarian but
#
she would indulge my father and she would eat a few things here and there she preferred
#
non-vegetarian she preferred curries rather than meat as such but there was all of that
#
there was all of that and we were of course both my sisters are non-vegetarian and there
#
was no problem in the family on that my grandparents had no problem there was also a huge respect
#
for girls and women's status in the family and education so the other thing I remember
#
is my mother very strongly always saying that because she was also part of the Settelwal
#
family from another side so they were second cousins so that dowry is something that was
#
frowned upon during marriages so as a principle when there were marriages in the family the
#
girls would never be given a dowry and that was one of the thing precursors discussions
#
that you know and I think and that on the one hand and education and higher education
#
for girls on the other so I think all of these things stay with you and you realize the value
#
of that has come to you through a trajectory so there's it's a humbling experience also
#
it's not something that you have done but it has been brought to you a bunch of questions
#
I want to ask taking off from this and I'll quote this para from your from the book about
#
your dad but but first I'll just you know that's a lovely anecdote about how you were
#
with your grandfather on the beach and suddenly he turns back because he's seen the light
#
on in your room and the you know the lesson there is not so much as in wasting electricity
#
though that's of course a lesson I think the lesson is to be mindful of the things around
#
us and the things that we do with them and there is some of that that also comes across
#
when you write about your dad in your book quote atul went to pupil zone a school started
#
during the independence movement in a small abode in ville parle which then moved to khar
#
his friends from school included dilip purohid dilip dalal and hameer doshi they made up
#
a jolly foursome who stayed close to the end my father had this unique and rare capacity
#
to keep and stay in touch with all his friends even if their paths had diverged friday morning
#
before go to the new coffee houses where they would often gather stop quote and and I found
#
this worth remarking on because one you of course remembered those names and you know
#
an indication of how special those people must have been to him and therefore by association
#
to all of you and also just that sense of just as you know your grandfather is mindful
#
that the light is on your father is mindful that I have to stay in touch with friends
#
and I don't think that that's a quality that we can take for granted in modern times because
#
more and more what we see is that we live more and more in the abstract worlds inside
#
our smartphones you know you mentioned how in the dining table you would be encouraged
#
to discuss stuff you're looking into each other's eyes and you're discussing things
#
but the modern dining table is not that the modern dining table is yeah you might get
#
four people together but they are looking into their phones or they are lost in their
#
worlds and all of that and I mean we are only 12 years apart but I'd say that we are kind
#
of more or less a last generation that has seen this transition from having to actually
#
look into people's eyes and talk to them and having nothing to do if you're all alone there's
#
no phone to look into to this new connected world where you are always engaged and you
#
always you have this barrage of sensation and information just kind of coming at you
#
and one thing that I keep reminding myself to do is to fight this that don't look into
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your phone when you know when you're with someone that make an effort to you know to
#
be with your friends and all of that so do you have any observations about this because
#
one of the things that you've done through your activism is stayed in touch with people
#
actual people you actually meet them actual conversations phone calls instead of whatsapp
#
messages you know one very powerful part of your book and we'll come to that when we speak
#
about 2002 is when as events unfolded you got call after call after call after call
#
after call tell me a little bit about this you know this changing texture of life as
#
it were and is it something that you've noticed that you feel you need to be on the watch
#
out for or that you've seen affecting people around you because I would imagine that your
#
kids would have had really different childhoods or growing up years and what someone like
#
you would have just in terms of experiences.
#
Yes and no I think both you're right that you know the sheer barrage of electronic information
#
or electronic disinformation that is kind of thrown at us is just so it's from all
#
over the place so it's like very difficult to escape it but I think and you have to fight
#
it you have to fight it for sure but I think some of us our lives inevitably become the
#
fight itself because in for instance there's no way I can do my work without actually engaging
#
with actual people which means lots and lots of very very good conversations also means
#
fighting for that time to have those conversations because sometimes the other work also takes
#
over which is writing and communicating and all of that and everything but I think the
#
sheer activism the sheer expanse of this activism means that you have to actually be engaging
#
so you've already said that but I think on a lighter note you know you just have to go
#
to jail to realize what happens when your phone is not there or you don't have a device
#
because then it's very and then it's back to your books I mean if you can manage to
#
get the books it's only the books and only the books but it's one great thing that happened
#
because like you yourself mentioned that except for four years I've been here is our kids
#
also grew up here so I was very very clear about this that there was no question of unregulated
#
television or computer even so they were just on the in the garden and on the beach most
#
of the time so apart from school which was bad enough for or good enough or whatever
#
so it was both being in the modern world and yet being quite different because you had
#
the lucky enough to have the outdoors so I think that was a good balancing act that happened
#
and then there was very kind of that you choose maybe one or two programs for two hours a
#
week and that's it nothing more but that also meant that we did not have the television
#
on and that was a very clear choice that we made though we were journalists though we
#
were activist stroke news persons we said whatever we do is after they sleep because
#
you can't have it running and then make that choice for them it has to be for all of us
#
so these are things that you need to be able to be clear clear about you know when you're
#
parenting as well but yes it is true that but fortunately I'm quite a I'm crazy person
#
in the sense I love cooking I love working with my hands I love craft I love gardening
#
so if I don't do that I'll go crazy so because of all of that then that is non-digital work
#
that's non-phone work so I can't do without all of that so and I am been lucky enough
#
to have really really good friends both from childhood and college and even through my
#
activism when new friends have come and they ask solid as old ones and for me the greatest
#
joy when I was in jail was receiving 2,700 postcards and letters which I was just I mean
#
that just I think if there's one thing that kept me going apart from visits from my family
#
it was that and I think it was started as a political act by sir the union the adivasi
#
union I'm working with and the Janwadi Mahila Indolan which is the women's wing of the CPIM
#
but then it took different form because I got so many personal letters childhood friends
#
from California who are now in California or a journalist from Indian Express who wrote
#
to me we worked together in 86 she walks to a card shop in Birmingham buys the card and
#
posts it to the Sabarmati women's jail you know I mean these are I mean I even now it's
#
like one and a half months around that I'm out but I read and reread them all the time
#
because I think when and I realized also the importance of the pen and the written word
#
it's not simply so I've told myself that before the year is out I'm going to be replying
#
to each one of them so that's the task I've set myself because I think it's very important
#
to write letters back and not just email or WhatsApp letters back and I think so these
#
are I think because I think it's the handwriting the pen the paper the postcard the picture
#
postcard some of them that they sent and the words that they wrote I mean a close friend
#
of mine Jerry Pinto author he wrote one the first postcard which is a picture postcard
#
which had a stamp of Jayaprakash Narayan and Gandhi where he said they also spent a lot
#
of time in jail and they're thinking of you all the time and then there were 16 more which
#
were poems which were unsigned and I'm telling myself this is the same person and it was
#
I didn't connect that this is Jerry he wrote poems from different people from Palestinian
#
poets to Japanese poets all resistance poetry and he wrote poem number one poem number two
#
and poem number 16 and each one was a beautiful poetry so I mean such lovely stuff people
#
did you know when you were inside and I think these were the these were the things that
#
really kept on going yeah I think the only thing of value we collect are people and then
#
this is such a beautiful story in your memoir you also speak about how you wrote letters
#
and cards to your grandparents and you were encouraged to do so and you just mentioned
#
writing again and something that I often think about is that the experience of writing letters
#
and notes and messages has changed completely in the sense that today everything is a WhatsApp
#
message or a quick email or whatever it's very functional it's very brief whereas back
#
in the day if he sat down to write to someone the act of writing itself was one it was communicating
#
to the other person that I care about you I'm spending time on this and two it was an
#
act of actually sitting down with yourself and examining the contents of your own mind
#
it's a it's like a deliberate act of consideration it's not just that you hit compose on Gmail
#
and you say you know are you free at eight or whatever you know so and you mentioned
#
that you'd like to do that and you mentioned what it meant for you to receive all of that
#
and it's hard to sort of look back and kind of try to reconstruct this or whatever but
#
how important do you feel things like that were in sort of shaping the way you related
#
to people understanding yourself because every time you sit down to write something you get
#
to know yourself a little bit better in that act so how important was that kind of writing
#
to you and do you feel that you lost like when now when you say that I like to do more
#
of it is it because you stopped and didn't do enough of it at some point and you feel
#
You know I like to kind of make two comparisons one to your earlier earlier question and this
#
one that there's something very very similar between the art of conversation and the art
#
of letter writing and I was very lucky to grow up with fine conversationalist so I mean
#
whether it's my father or my grandfather or another person who was very close to us HM
#
Sirvai who was my father's senior and his son Navro Sirvai who continues to be a very
#
dear friend there was joy in conversation so and that conversation was personal political
#
books poetry all of it intertwined so you realize that the time you spent together with such
#
people and my father spent a lot of time with his chambermates what lawyers call their chambermates
#
so the parties for juniors were like big occasions for us because not only would a lot of good
#
food be planned but there would be lots of very lively conversation so all the family
#
friends we had all the chamber friends we had conversations were very important and
#
these were not conversations about Shadi and Bia and Dauri but they were conversations
#
about life about what was happening around the emergency I mean the emergency was a huge
#
thing in our childhood you know I've written about it also but I mean for me it was a formative
#
moment when I'm in standard 10 in 77 when the elections are called and you have your
#
parents both telling you that listen your studies are not as important as your campaigning
#
to get this government out and you know in the pre-emergency in sorry in the pre-election
#
period during the emergency it was the homes of the settler and the chaglas and the Bhatkals
#
in Bombay that all these meetings would take place as to how the Chanda party can come
#
back and we need to get this government out and etc so you know that that's a heavy dose
#
of life and politicization that happens and then you're out by public transport going
#
to the Bhatkals place in Prabhadevi picking up posters and plastering posters all over
#
town and the matter of great pride that Bombay returns six seats to the Chanda party you
#
know that so that sort of thing now these things don't happen just like that they happen
#
as a lot of conversation my first letter to the editor in the India Today was about Indira
#
Gandhi's growing authoritarianism in 1978 and stuff like that so you know all of this
#
is so much part of the same thing that you're thinking you're conversing you're learning
#
through those conversations you have the benefit of some fine minds whom you're conversing
#
with all the time I mean I became a life member of the PUCL at 15 years because my father
#
paid the check for it and because I knew I was passionate about civil liberties so you
#
know all of this is getting imbibed at various levels and you're writing you're writing
#
by hand so I have my notes my essays my diary notes my letters to people and of course always
#
encouraged by my mother to write letters to grandparents and others so writing and communicating
#
was always important you know I mean the gift was not important but the letter was important
#
and I was writing even before the GLT I was writing a lot at least once or twice a year
#
I'd write long handwritten letters to close friends and family whom I felt like saying
#
something to but after this experience I want to do it much more because now I feel it has
#
to be something that has to become part of your life again it cannot be just something
#
that you do to just say thank you for those letters but to try and continue because it
#
is an important exercise to get some nice handmade paper from Chimanlaz to think of
#
that letter pad write it out or recycle paper from an organization that does recycling work
#
and write it because I think it's that communication is that receipt the receiving of that letter
#
is so important and there's an old family friend of ours who lives in San Francisco
#
and half her time is spent in and that family is also a very important part of my upbringing
#
was my mother's best school friend was Preeti Desai and her three sisters Jyoti, Sita and
#
Bindu and one brother were like family to her and my father so we lots of holidays together
#
and Bindu was Preeti and Bindu were like my political mentors cuttings about Palestine
#
and cuttings about resistance in South Latin America, South America all of that would come
#
from the Guardian and the time that they would get and they would send it to me to read these
#
we've lost the others but Sita's are there but Bindu is so much part of my life still
#
she I got maybe five ten postcards from her in jail and she wrote to many of her academic
#
and doctor friends all over the world who then wrote to me when I was inside so you
#
know there's so much of this which is so important and continues to be important and why is it
#
important only because you feel important at that moment or you feel loved no I think
#
through every postcard that you get or letter that you get there is an idea there's a thought
#
you're making a connection so Dilip D'Souza when he writes to you will be writing about
#
his visit to Portugal where he saw that particular monument where he's which he's writing about
#
in the postcard that makes you reflect on that then you think of Mario Miranda and his
#
postcard you know there's so many things that happen to you when you are reading and writing
#
letters and the first letter I got in jail was on 27th of July and that was in an envelope
#
and it was from Son Badra it was from the Adivasi Union leaders women leaders Rajkumari
#
and eight nine others had angutha chapped it and they had written out this letter and
#
my fellow inmates in the barracks six were saying what are all these letters why are
#
you getting so many so then I would tell them about the women who have written them who's
#
Rajkumari and who's Sukalo so about for now that conversation would take place till interest
#
would wane I said no these are amazingly fantastic women you would never meet meet such women
#
in your life they live in this thing they're fighting for their land and this thing rights
#
they've been in jail twice I've been jail only the first time so you know all these
#
comparisons analogies become extremely important I don't know what it meant to my fellow inmates
#
in barracks six but those conversations were very important to me to have them wow that's
#
so fascinating another sort of strand I want to kind of pick up on where you mentioned
#
how it meant a lot to you to be living by the sea that you know you would have that
#
sense of calm and all of that and you've also spoken about times where you know you'd just
#
like to be yourself cooking or be with yourself doing something with your hands and one thing
#
I wonder then is that how in one's life especially if someone is as engaged with the world as
#
you are where you're always busy doing something organizing something speaking to people you
#
know how do you manage to make space for that in your life like sometimes you know you just
#
want to sit back and sink into yourself and just find a moment of calm where your monkey
#
mind is quiet so to say and at the same time you have so many things to do which are not
#
unpleasant things to do you're passionate about it you wake up looking forward to doing
#
them how have you kind of managed that because you know what someone like me will know of
#
you from the outside is someone who's always involved and you know in your activism in
#
your writing all of that but there is also a private self sometimes you just want to
#
chill sometimes you just want to blank mind look how do you how do you manage these is
#
it frustrating sometimes where there's just too much I never have enough time in the day
#
it's like horrible it's horrible I'm always fighting and I think I'm driving everybody
#
berserk with it because I'm trying to cram in maybe 40 things to do in a day when I can
#
only do 10 and it's like very very tough and ask my family they go berserk with me because
#
I make they've seen this they've grown up with this so it must have been very tough
#
for them but yeah but I do zealously cry try to grab my private moments and then my family
#
tries to make me grab them too so that I try and get them but the holidays unfortunately
#
have become less than they ought to be the earlier wish to be very very this thing about
#
having family holidays three weeks a year three weeks in a year whatever but they have
#
lessened a lot so those are kind of big big sacrifices that one has had to make in the
#
last seven eight nine years hopefully that will change one keeps telling oneself that
#
one needs to get that to change because I don't think those three weeks are going to
#
make a difference but but it's tough so one just it's a tussle with oneself and as you
#
kind of tell oneself about health also look after yourself all those things are a battle
#
and I think my family has paid a price for this frenetic level of activity but I also
#
feel that one is lucky to at least have the space and the place that one can sit up and
#
sit one never had the pressures of not having a home or having to pay a loan for the home
#
and I think I always recognize that that you know one is lucky activist in that sense and
#
at least this fallback cushion was there and maybe that's why one can do more or should
#
do more so you mentioned how you know you decided you wanted to be a journalist when
#
you read all the precedents man and then you know you got into college and you threw yourself
#
into student politics you protested fee rise you were active in debating you were part
#
of the film society all of that tell me a little bit about what was your developing
#
conception of yourself like when I think of myself in college I mean I would have no way
#
of answering that question because everything was a confused hazy mess and you're just kind
#
of going with the flow and whatever but in your case you know there seems to be more
#
purpose to kind of what you're doing so what was that period like like were you so clear
#
that you're going to be a journalist and this is just like a waiting period graduation
#
karna hai get the degree and then I think college for me was a flowering of my personality
#
so I think that journalism would have come later I was not looking at that stay I was
#
just enjoying every moment of that thing of a kind of an educational space and institution
#
where you were challenged by the curriculum but not enough not to do lots of extra curricular
#
stuff political engagement because those are the times when campuses were political and
#
I think that's one of the linking up to your earlier question I think one of the reasons
#
why you have this hopeless depoliticization of the middle class is the this whole lindo
#
committee business not having elections in colleges and a completely depoliticization
#
of the campus because I think the only politics that happens in campuses is ultra right politics
#
and that's that's really sad it's really really sad because there's a whole crop of us generations
#
who got politicized on campus because that's the age right you're out of school you're
#
on your own your mind is growing you're you're experimenting breaking away from what your
#
family has stood for all of that is natural and I think that was so important to me elfie
#
years elfenston years were like really important for my formation in terms of what I became
#
afterwards and what the these the the work I did afterwards and my engagement with student
#
politics issues I mean I mean we saw so many lovely I mean I wish I could see the films
#
that I saw there number of films I seen I can't see them I don't have the time but we
#
saw the most glorious films I mean apart from really good solid classics and art films we
#
saw I mean we saw three films a week in theaters you know and we bunk classes but we were very
#
active on the campus and we had very good professors so they knew that tutorials would
#
be submitted but not always we attended in class it was a fantastic atmosphere and I
#
think we really need to fight to get our campuses back to a space in a stage by which really
#
good politics can happen where the politics of equality and non-discrimination can be
#
arenas in the campus because where else can you learn this you know imagine I mean I'm
#
coming out of Manikji Cooper school and I'm going to Elfenston and I'm engaging with the
#
this whole question of feed eyes and of course but I'm also telling the political organization
#
that is talking about feed eyes that please also raise the question of English language
#
privilege because I am already got a 20-point handicap over somebody who studied in the
#
non-English languages because I can sail through my 11th and 12th without even opening my textbook
#
if I'm not interested in getting 90% I can get at least 50, 60, 70% because of the retched
#
English language privilege so let's also battle for some sort of handicap marks for those
#
persons who are not coming from you know so all those issues get crystallized if you are
#
able to articulate them in that kind of space how many kids are given that in a commerce
#
college today or in a science college today is there that kind of articulation possible
#
we saw it during CA and in RC and we know the potential is there I mean the gathering
#
we saw at August Kranti Maidan and then at Gateway for a deep politicized city like Bombay
#
was tremendous so the potential among young people is always there but I think we need
#
to also revive politics on the campus to make this consistent I guess you're saying this
#
from you know an Elphinstone upbringing point of view but the counterpoint to this would
#
be so many campuses in north and central India where you know politics just leads to violence
#
and I guess the kind of politics you have also depends on the kind of society you're
#
in and the kind of people that there are you know those are not see this is like a teacher
#
telling me when we are doing teacher training on coach and we say that coaches principle
#
is pedagogy multidimensional and we must bring conflictual issues into the classroom because
#
to believe as an adult that the young mind has no capacity to deal with conflict is as
#
an ageist prejudice you know so this is one of the discussions and trainings we have so
#
many teachers say but you know you're talking about a very noisy classroom so I said yeah
#
but it's the right kind of noise it's the noise that means questioning so to answer
#
your question it's the kind of what kind of politics if you're talking about politics
#
of the mob then obviously what you're seeing is true that's why I said that the only politics
#
left on the campus is right-wing politics but if you're talking about the politics
#
of organization the politics of the constitutionalism the question of make deepening the constitution
#
deepening democracy then this is the age to do it I mean you have to question your structures
#
now and here and learn how to do it and experiment with how to do it you might make mistakes
#
but that's how you kind of get because I think to ensure that all our citizens forever remain
#
politically active the campus is very important and we have to have politically active I'm
#
not talking about party politics but politically active citizenry is what strengthens democracy
#
so as we sort of segue from your college years to actually joining journalism let me also
#
ask you a larger question about journalism which ties into your point about the importance
#
of politics and political thinking.
#
I did a recent episode with the journalist Samarth Bansal you know and one of the questions
#
that we sort of debated was just the meta question of what should a journalist report
#
on because you know a journalist or publication can really write about anything but you choose
#
to write about some things and not about others and that choice is aesthetic ethical political
#
all of these things everything kind of comes into it and this is something that I think
#
increasingly we need to think more about and you of course bemoaned and I share your lament
#
of what is happening to the media today and the spaces that they've vacated but on this
#
larger question what has been your evolving sense of it that if as a journalist you have
#
to think about what do I write about you know or if as an editor you're saying what are
#
the stories we will publish today what will we put on page one and why you know what would
#
your answer be today and how would it have evolved over time and I understand that obviously
#
there are nuances here like what is your market or who are you speaking to and are you a tabloid
#
or a broadsheet and obviously all of those nuances are there but in general I think that
#
you know there are many of us who are searching for an answer to the question that goes beyond
#
the functional one of what does the market want what will sell most copies you know what
#
is trending on Twitter you know so is there so how do you sort of look at this and how
#
has your thinking on this evolved like where are you and how did you get here see I think
#
as a practicing journalist I need to explain to all of you because you know you have probably
#
not seen it from the inside I've been a practicing journalist as well but never mind no but I
#
just want to say that I think what is often forgotten is that you know how has the whole
#
concept of the fourth estate evolved I mean the fourth estate both internationally and
#
nationally within India and South Asia it's evolved as an entity or a thing which is outside
#
the state which is for which is by its very inherent nature anti-establishment and needs
#
to question structures of state and society so you need the independence you need autonomy
#
is it then as you evolve further and you get into a democratic setup you know you have
#
this notion of ensuring that the journalist or media and we begin with print then we move
#
to electronic and digital should be equipped to question every governance structure that
#
exists within that democracy right now having said that step back for a minute and look
#
at the way our national movement and the freedom movement given what I was saying earlier where
#
you have our best leaders and even the using media for political mobilization so Gandhi
#
as an editor Gandhi as a writer but there's Young India, Harijan all the publications
#
he edited Babasaheb Ambedkar edited like 15 Mukhnayak so many of them so many of them
#
and each one of them had a different stage and evolution so on the one hand I'm talking
#
about the post post independence what what it ought to be or should be what it has become
#
will come to later and what it has meant in terms of political emancipation I also flagged
#
so it's very important to understand that the focus needs to always that of course the
#
editorial in terms of comment and comment writing or feature writing is important but
#
I think the journalists and publications and television channels and portals should never
#
forget that the primary duty is to report now reportage means what reportage means understanding
#
the structure of society and state and having meticulous independent autonomous coverage
#
of it okay so in traditional terms what this meant for us when we began was beat reporting
#
okay beat reporting and what I would like to flag today is and I say this all the time
#
because I take journalism classes also is I really bemoan the complete obfuscation and
#
eradication of beat reporting today and I think this is very important so what am I
#
saying here that you traditionally and there were lacunae there also it was not perfect
#
so we'll come to that in a minute but what do I mean by I mean that how did we begin
#
when we began as cub reporters or trainee reporter you begin with the crime beat then you go
#
to the corporation beat then you I'm talking about cities then you go to the university
#
beat then there's also health beat and then there's also science beat for the experts
#
and there's also legal beat, law beat, court beat and there's of course the pinnacle which
#
is everybody aspires to the political mantra ale beat or the Vidhan Sudha beat or the parliament
#
beat so these were the traditional I'm saying even then some of us were questioning like
#
for instance we formed the women and media committee which I write about then there were
#
the labor writers and all even then we will be mourning the fact that there was not enough
#
attention paid to the labor beat workers issues agricultural beat no attention at all even
#
that time or very little maybe sporadically when there was a drought but not as a beat
#
so farmers issues were not regularly covered agricultural issues there was no environment
#
and climate change was never really an issue you know so even then all this was being deepened
#
and questioned but my point is that the beat journalism is gone never mind that those that
#
didn't exist or were eroded didn't exist even then you know so I think one of the things
#
we really need to flag again today when we are looking at alternatives and your own experience
#
Amit with this entire podcast is actually a reflection of this that to say that the
#
market doesn't want it is bullshit you know I really whether it's with Bollywood and the
#
kind of films being trashed out or whether it is media I don't buy that because who is
#
deciding and who is giving we know the game of advertising what it was I mean it was it
#
was all a bubble you told yourself that this is what worked and you told yourself this
#
was what the market wanted we know the world of TRPs we know whether TRPs are represented
#
or not there are enough critical studies on that so I think let's come back to the fact
#
that who is honest enough to actually return to being a decent newspaper or a decent television
#
channel or whatever and who is willing to back that financially because the issue really
#
is ownership money and all of that which is what Vaya is trying to do that you know that
#
funding by the viewer and all of that all experiments in the making we don't know if
#
they're going to succeed in the long term scroll we just hope they do because if they
#
don't then I think we are sunk because what little options we have will go so I think
#
I'll return that I think this looking at this entire business about number one reportage
#
being as important as comment and when I mean by reportage I'm not about just individual
#
fragmented stories but through those individual stories you're actually picking up trends
#
you're picking up this thing and then you're doing an analysis so from the reportage comes
#
the knowledge of analysis not just sitting in a editor's chair and doing the analysis
#
with no knowledge of what's happening on the ground so today for instance and this is what
#
I found so tragic and many of us were still involved with the Bombay Union of Journalists
#
and the Delhi Union of Journalists he said you know 475 to 500 journalists lost their
#
lives during Covid and it's not a national story just as you had nurses and Anganmadi
#
workers and health workers who risked their lives so did journalists but it's not a story
#
even for the media why would it be for politicians so you know I think this is where the huge
#
disconnect lies that there are still journalists who want to do their job there are still journalists
#
who are trying to do their job there are still journalists who are actually sacrificing lives
#
for the job but they just don't get the visibility or the respect that they deserve maybe that
#
was always the case but it is far more acute today so I'm just saying that you know so
#
crisis reporting, conflict reporting, beat reporting and reporting before and no over
#
emphasis on comment will itself sort of bring down the hysteria levels and the hate levels
#
because I think facts speak stronger than words and many of the things that I'm talking
#
about will actually the syncretism the lived secularism of people will also get reflected
#
in those stories you know which is why there's a group of people in Tamil Nadu started this
#
thing of my India whatever they just report on all the good news stories because that's
#
the other thing many of us used to feel as reporters that bad news is news but good news
#
is no news you know so much of this needs to be brought back to the debate obviously
#
forms will change because media has changed so I'm not saying we go back in this go back
#
four decades or three decades or two decades but we re-examine the proposition that are
#
we doing justice to reportage and if reportage has to be engaged in fairly today of the various
#
structures of governance how do we do it and if this is an age of shared news and syndication
#
and shared platforms can this be done collectively?
#
I think these are some of the challenges that we need to do because the digital portals
#
are trying it you know so you have a mukhnayak, you have a wire, you have very very interesting
#
experiments you have that Khabar Lahariya, you have Gow Ke Log many small and big interesting
#
experiments taking place in the non-english arena as well but this is no match for the
#
kind of bombardment and this thing that we get from our electronic commercial channels
#
I refuse to call them mainstream anymore they are commercial they are pure commerce so how
#
does one counter this that is a huge challenge and of course some of our best journalistic
#
minds are engaged in it but are they enough?
#
So you know couple of profound points which I want to underscore and the first of them
#
which might you know to the casual listener it might seem that hey what difference does
#
it make if there aren't beat if there isn't beat journalism but it's incredibly important
#
and I want to read out this passage from your book where you wrote about it where you wrote
#
quote I believe I was among the large generation of reporters to benefit from training on the
#
beat the loss of this structured framework has seminary reduced the quality and standards
#
of the profession we honed our skills as observers and critics of the system by talking to people
#
in the university in the municipal corporation the BMC beat in the mantra layer the seat
#
of the state government or in the courts we listened to court proceedings and debates
#
in the assembly to cover the courts to understand and report on the issues being contested meant
#
ploughing through court records petitions and affidavit annexures it was not only about
#
flippant oral comments made in the courtroom each encounter allowed us to understand better
#
the way these structures worked in our democracy mundane beat reporting allowed us to port
#
through the agenda of the standing committee meetings of the municipal council or to sense
#
a pulse behind the assembly sessions our exclusives our front pages had to be built on long hours
#
of hectic consultations learning and questioning stop code and the importance of this is that
#
there is a deep engagement like what I see happen like one of the things that has gone
#
wrong with media today in addition to many others but one of the things is that too many
#
journalists today are generalists right the new publications don't have budgets so you
#
no longer have beats with dedicated reporters one day you are reporting on BMC next day
#
you're reporting from the hospital you're taking quotes from people without getting
#
quotes from five other people you are not questioning anything it's it's become that
#
kind of shallow reportage and the reason this matters is that I agree with you that one
#
of the functions of the media is to speak truth to power and to me the key word there
#
is truth right and how do you arrive at the truth you arrive at the truth by going as
#
deep as possible by gathering as many dots as you can so your you can build a sufficiently
#
high definition picture and again I say in truth to power the truth bit is important
#
because it's also dangerous to go in the other direction and you know become sort of become
#
oppositional for the sake of it and and and we've seen that happening as well and the
#
other profound point you made is about new ways of perhaps collective reporting arising
#
and I've been thinking a lot about in the creator economy how new ways of expression
#
are coming like I don't think there is any more any sense and any of us hoping that the
#
big publications are mainstream publications will deliver they're not going to do that
#
they have their pressures they have their incentives fine it is what it is but we have
#
the tools of production in our hand you know you mentioned my podcast listen you know as
#
an editor if I was I were to go to any mainstream house and say ki main paanch gante ke conversation
#
karunga I would be laughed out of the room right but there are so many people like me
#
who don't have to conform to a particular conventional way of thinking who don't have
#
to go through gatekeepers and I think just as in the creator economy and really there's
#
a thin line between creating and reporting and all of this that I do see hope coming
#
there you know the likes of Kabbalahariya for example and so on absolutely and I really
#
feel that we should be talking on lines of this collaboration and syndication of this
#
work because and complementing and complementarity because I think the time for these big mega
#
be everywhere stories are not going to work so how can we share and it's happening people
#
are doing it as people are doing it in a very collaborative way it's just that it's begun
#
so I'm hoping that it'll get there at some point and I feel very very positive vibes
#
from a very small section of creators plus digital alternate portals who are really trying
#
to do this and doing it respecting each other's spaces respecting each other's values and
#
not counting yourself in terms of who's big and who's got the maximum money or whatever
#
but in terms of who's a genuine journalist and what is a journalist at the end of the
#
day you know so I think it's very very important to that and I think this reflection is very
#
important and this articulation is very important that if we keep asking ourselves that are
#
we doing enough reportage are we going out there to talk to people and do it because
#
that is that is what used to get us the anchor stories and the testing stories and the analysis
#
I mean 1987 when Express sent me to South Rajasthan to cover the drought where there
#
were these horrendous starvation deaths as well starvation killings actually where a
#
father actually you know sent his wife home and I mean I'll never forget you know and
#
but but that learning of that entire 10 days stays with you for the for your life I mean
#
even now how to report how to understand and how to understand what you don't know so
#
had that humility that you do not know this issue completely you're a journalist so you're
#
reporting it there's always more to know about it and you have to have the humility to know
#
that more you know so read read up as much as you can and have respect for that expert
#
on the ground or the expertise on the ground which is fighting it.
#
So you joined Russi Karanjaza daily in 1983 and 1984 you speak about how covering the
#
communal violence in Mumbai was a huge turning point like you've got a para and I won't
#
even read it out about the violence you saw at cheetah camp in Gowandi and it's just
#
just horrendous I'd encourage any everyone to read your book anyway.
#
What was that period like was it was covering that communal violence did it kind of change
#
you how did you process all the things that you saw around you how did you kind of make
#
sense of it tell me a little bit about that that period.
#
I mentioned earlier if you remember that 86 was so important that whole 83 to 86 period
#
is also where the whole buildup was happening and I was covering Bombay and Javed was covering
#
Bhiwandi because Bombay Bhiwandi happened at the same time and you know you how to report
#
it how to how to put it down where the horror is not concealed from your reader but you
#
don't become voyeuristic also kind of created a whole churning and trauma even that you
#
know you you don't want this to remain to the level of just reportage that can you engage
#
with it more and I think that is what led up to eventually what one started doing many
#
many years later you know particularly in 92 93 when activism also campaigning and activism
#
also came into the play when our city burned and all of that but I think the understanding
#
and the engagement with this kind of targeted violence and the horror of it you know unexpectedness
#
of it it can just hit anybody anywhere and not anybody anyway it's of course some people
#
somewhere but you just read up much more about it and I also I have to say this that I learned
#
so much from my mentors in journalism so I remember that for me I was and that was another
#
tradition we grew up with as journalists that you always had a mentor so the best minds
#
in Marathi journalism were my mentors I mentioned Jagan already there was DK Riker who was my
#
chief reporter in Express there was there was so many many senior journalists that one
#
learned from and I particularly remember Madhu Shetty and S. B. Kolpe because they were writing
#
for tinier publications but when 92 93 happened you haven't come to that yet but I just wanted
#
to mention that I started exploring this whole thing about you know this whole metaphor of
#
who cast the first stone you know and then this kind of tendency to blame it on the angry
#
Muslim who did this year or did that year and then you start looking at that what happened
#
just before that and you realize there's hate speech and there's hate writing and that
#
the whole the temperature of that demography whether it's a city or a region or a state
#
is built up through that hate speech and hate writing for weeks and months before the first
#
stone is cast so and now you have what all pervasive Facebook social media and all that
#
so your geographic areas Leicester, Shodas is like just everywhere so how are you going
#
to deal with it? So the I think I started that engagement and then covering various
#
bouts of violence after that November 84 when close friends were involved in the anti-Sikh
#
violence and reporting and relief work in Delhi then Meerut, Malayana, Bhagalpur all
#
happened in 87, 89 all of that became a kind of way to learn to read and learn more about
#
this beast what is this beast why is it happening again and again why is it making othering
#
people amongst our own you know what I mean generation I mean we've already been through
#
partition and partition related is it because that catharsis was not allowed to happen is
#
it because we didn't discuss partition enough so all of those thoughts were forming and
#
then you have 92 which is like a big blast I mean it was like crazy so your analytical
#
capacities as a journalist are growing side-by-side you're not thinking about just that reporting
#
that incident but reporting on the phenomenon of communal violence which is why I started
#
conducting classes on the historiography of communal violence at Xavier's Institute of
#
Communications, Sophia and other things and I think I'm thinking of now putting those
#
online because I think they're very important because institutes might feel too scared to
#
touch the issue today but if they're online people will listen and there will be journalists
#
who'll want to learn and I think it's important to put it out there the kind of experience
#
one has got so I remember this one conversation which is so important to me it was sitting
#
at the press club with Madhu and SB Kolpi and they saw that I was I was frenetic after
#
the 92-93 violence I was really both a journalist active doing whatever I could really upset
#
I'd also done the police wireless messages expose that which showed the communal violence
#
and you know Kolpi said just sit down and listen to me this is not entirely new and
#
that's what I remember that conversation I've gone back to free press I've still not located
#
that clipping but he went back to when he was a reporter in Free Press Journal and he
#
covered the first round of post-independence 1961 Jabalpur and what did he tell me I've
#
written about this also he told me that he was sent to cover it ten days after the violence
#
had been raging and there'd been a sect narrative nationally okay what was the narrative that
#
this Muslim BD worker had abducted this Hindu girl and therefore the communal virus broken
#
out he goes there he's sent by his editor that you go there something is wrong you go
#
there cover it properly he goes and meets the superintendent of police he meets all
#
the like we all are supposed to do in the beat and I remember him telling me he said
#
you know those days he was a Kashmiri pundit he was Hindu and he told me he said listen
#
all the damages damages being being generated by this one rag which is published here which
#
is RSS affiliate which has started this narrative and all the publications are syndicating and
#
picking up from there there's no independent coverage yes there were issues between the
#
families but it was a love marriage but the class was different this guy was a working
#
class he was a Hindu she was a middle class girl he was a working class boy so obviously
#
there was angst on both sides that you know it's the love jihad of that time if you like
#
but it was not conflictual in the sense that is being made out and then it was it was a
#
periphery that got into the act and the violence broke out so he wrote those pieces two or
#
three pieces for free press journal and he got a letter from Nehru pundit Nehru saying
#
that you know thank you for doing a national service to the country by putting right the
#
narrative so you know that's strengthened my conviction on that but journalists need
#
to be trained on how to cover communal violence just because you're a decent journalist doesn't
#
mean you will get it right because it's a particular kind of beast there are forces
#
and organizations that work what trying to generate a viciousness within us what trying
#
to generate hate within us who are using hate speech as the currency as their currency so
#
unless we no one are able to catch that and the police often don't tell you about it
#
or project it right or even prosecuted because there's a there's a infiltration there so
#
you have to be alive to all of this and there will also minority communalism which is feeding
#
into all of this so you know all these dimensions unless we are aware of when we are entering
#
the field you can't just cover it i mean i was lucky because i was sensitized like this
#
i was at that time and then i went my trajectory way i read more i talked a lot of senior journalists
#
read up all the commission reports all the judicial commission reports on communal violence
#
so that developed my analytical thinking but how many journalists will do that
#
just like Nehru wrote to your friend i hope one day modiji writes to you and says tista
#
thank you for your service to the nation but i won't hold my breath waiting for that my
#
next question is this that as things happen the more they happen the more they they get
#
normalized the more there is a sense of numbing and i would imagine that uh you know if i
#
had to cover incident of communal violence after violence after violence eventually you
#
know it could bleed into one but what you have done in your writing and in fact you
#
know just your description of one of the deaths at cheetah camp is an example of that is that
#
you took that deeper look and humanize the person like you could easily say that uh you
#
know a muslim boy was in a room and the police burst in and they took him out and they killed
#
him but instead we know that he's a zari worker his name is Abdullah he's writing a letter
#
to a friend in Kuwait about the birth of his child and then the police burst in and take
#
him out and this just humanizes the whole thing immediately there is empathy and it's
#
in fact really cinematic like if you had a web series on communal violence your opening
#
scene could just be the letter being read out and whatever and then that sudden burst
#
and the shock of the police and the violence and all of that this gaze did you work at
#
developing it was it partly um sort of a strategic thing that for my stories to be powerful this
#
is what i have to do is it something that was taught to you or that you learned over
#
time by yourself or was it always just natural to you tell me a little bit about the craft
#
of doing this kind of reporting to make it effect i don't think anything is just entirely
#
natural or is entirely taught right it's both correct so but if you're serious about what
#
you're doing and i think i was extremely serious and honest about reporting on communal violence
#
very honest i was always interrogating myself how do i put it down how do i communicate
#
this because you know you are writing on something which is potentially you're going to reach
#
people you enjoy a certain credibility then you it's all the more reason why you should
#
be doing it extremely carefully before i try and answer it further i want to give you one
#
more example of something like this in 1991 i was covering the rathiyatra that rathiyatra
#
and that takes place in jamalpur every year ahemdabad i was in business india and i was
#
lucky in business india allowed that space to explore the issue a little bit so it was
#
not just like newspaper coverage where you were covering on a day to day so it was a
#
particularly brutalizing period that was happening all along because you had seen that whole
#
development post 1986 and then of course it culminated in 2002 like i've written about
#
but 1991 i actually traveled by train from bombay to baroda surat then surat to baroda
#
surat then finally ended up in himat nagar emdabad and i kept talking to people including
#
businessmen who happened to be hindu and one just was really appalled by the level of crass
#
hate that was being openly spoken about by the muslim minority but that apart that also
#
reflected in my business india story but this particular incident i remember being really
#
very very horrified by which is at narangpura very posh area of emdabad one of the narratives
#
of the vishwa hindu parishad at that time was to distribute to journalists this map
#
of emdabad which was painted orange and green and i'm looking everywhere and my people
#
come in order when i'm in real archivist but i can't find it to show that you know
#
anytime a muslim couple or mixed marriage couple tried to move to a quote unquote more
#
elite area which by their definition was a hindu area they would ensure through violence
#
to push them back and there were many such incidents one such was really brutal because
#
this particular gentleman khan was his surname living in this building second floor of a
#
building in narangpura obviously had moved out from the old city and in the height of
#
the rathiyata violence this couple of baksim gujati saree clad women had pushed him to
#
his death from the second floor back it was something that chilled me because it was like
#
so many things in that incident because it it was and how do you and how do you ensure
#
that our community remains ghettoized the brutality of the violence the fact that women
#
are now engaging in communal violence as much as men which was not something i saw till
#
86 87 in the country at all so you saw the handy work of the vishwa hindu parishad and
#
the sadhiri ritambaras as as icons you know it's working it's working in society so it
#
was horrific at so many levels so anyway i was in the process of writing this book so
#
i was speaking in nakpur and this is i think just a few months before the book came out
#
in 2016 and there's a public meeting in nakpur where i narrated this incident and i write
#
about this also in the book and after the meeting is over on the stage and all if you
#
remember i see this young man sitting there and he's shaken really shaken and he said
#
ma'am can i have a word with you and all i said sure and he's a reporter for the times
#
of india won't mention his name and he said i just want to finish your story you mentioned
#
that incident and i was just 12 or 13 or 14 when it took place and it had chilled me and
#
my family and i don't think you know this because you've reported gujarat so closely
#
i'm telling you so you can round off the story that that navratri three months later those
#
women were felicitated so you know you realize when you're writing coming back to your earlier
#
question that how do you write these stories that you have to write about every nuance
#
and every tone if you're honest about the story you have to also write the fact that
#
when you reach godhra the first time i reached godhra was on 21st 22nd of uh uh no no that
#
was on 9th of march 21st 22nd was justice with justice varma uh that visit was preceded
#
by so many rumors as to why godhra had taken place and you have to actually unravel those
#
rumors so the rumor was one rumor for the majority community one rumor for the minority
#
community all of that because you know by then you had tv internet emails had begun
#
and all of that and one particular story i remember was about this muslim girl at the
#
godhra platform who was evtis by the karsevaks okay so that incident happened it was bakrid
#
she was bakrid there was few days back so she was returning to baroda with her mother
#
and her younger sister and she was an attractive teenager she was actually evtis but what did
#
the rumor among the muslim community say that she was pulled inside one of the compartments
#
and something so you know the story becomes another story you know so one of the things
#
i keep saying in my lectures to journalists and suggestions is never report incidents
#
of communal violence unless you have verified every incident even of the survivor or the
#
victim because because there is a tendency to of the of the untruth to also spiral into
#
truth you know because that's how the rumor functions and rumor is something you have
#
to really guard against as a journalist so long winded answer but to say that be honest
#
be truthful cover every nuance but never forget that the human victim needs to be central
#
to the story victim or survivor because you're not writing about numbers you're not writing
#
about numbers of death but you're writing about a human being a set of human beings
#
who've lost their dignity and life it is something you learn i don't think anything is just pure
#
instinct or natural but it's something i learned because i was serious about continuing to
#
cover it though it was a deep personal cost because it takes something out of you every
#
time tell me about how that sort of journey happened from where you realized that activism
#
was a part of your journalism just because of the nature of the stories you were doing
#
and so on and so forth see where does the pen stop the full stop
#
or does it stop with some some little bit of justice being done to the survivor should
#
one facilitate that at all or should one just stop with the full stop and the typewriter
#
and walk off from there so there's another story if you'll allow me which is that this
#
is again 92 93 which is 7th i think 7th 8th of december demolition was sunday 6th and
#
i reached this khan abdul khan ghaffar khan nagar and kurla and i reached around nine
#
ten in the morning and there's this one particular lane where there is this sole or lone muslim
#
building otherwise it's a maharashtrian locality and it's the survivors of muslim survivors
#
of the building who tell me the story so i don't think you can get it truer than that
#
they tell me two three things they also praise the acp of the locality for dispelling a rumor
#
real rumor not a rumor fact when there was a pig was you know typical that you know what
#
i can't also get to is that i remember watching tamas i don't know if you watch tamas at
#
all but reading tamas watching tamas and then reading partition related shara chandra stories
#
and the cow carcass and the pig carcass and the sindoor outside the mosque and the music
#
outside the the stuff doesn't change and yet we are falling prey and victim to this every
#
time so i don't know how we are going to ever deal with this and stop it does it mean people's
#
education people's awareness or whatever that's an aside so i reach there and this family
#
starts telling me the story that we would not have been alive today but for this one
#
woman i said who's this one woman so she said she's about 70 75 years old at the time she's
#
the mother of the shivsena shakha brahmukh now you know it's it's it's like unbelievable
#
story material because she is this now nowari sari wearing maharashtrian woman i go and
#
meet her i take her photograph on my black and white camera and what has she done her
#
son bharat khavanekar drunk has taken this mob the night before 12 one o'clock and is
#
exhorting the mob to burn down the building attack and burn down the building she gets
#
to know she goes there this is all being told to me by the muslims who survived all this
#
she stands in front of them and she hears her son who is like drunk and hears his mother
#
and she's saying that you will go there over my dead body you got your talwar in your hand
#
first you attack me and then you go and then this face-off continues for a few minutes
#
and then obviously slinks away ashamed now i've got the story i did the story i talked
#
to her because of these survivors i get the story from them then i go and talk to her
#
i take a photograph and i'm in business india which is a fortnightly and i said this is
#
not on i mean i can't i mean this story has to be told now when the city is burning so
#
it's so happened that my husband is isn't sandu observer so he's i said can i go meet
#
your editor i talked to his editor and they put the story there with with a little caption
#
and nice small little text story but the photo is the most important and then she gets the
#
mayor's medal for bravery now should i have stopped at not doing that because i mean for
#
me that is important both as a journalist and as a citizen that this act of hers gets
#
recognized and important she becomes a symbol in those in those hate-ridden times so that's
#
these kind of things that started happening then 92 93 sayanath nikhil vagle sajid rishi
#
javed me our homes were like mini control rooms naresh vanandas daryl demonte because
#
we were not just covering that there was no way we could be every part of bombay so we
#
were also sharing credible information so that we could report on other areas where
#
we couldn't be but we were also responding to despairing calls of victims now could we
#
should we just put down the calls and not call the cops after that those are the dilemmas
#
we faced real life dilemmas that all of us faced and all of us were doing this reporting
#
also writing was on also making those calls and that's when you found out that police
#
is not responsive police is giving bizarre answers to the victims so you know it was
#
an evolution it was i think a need of the times that one needed to do more than just
#
put pen to paper or type out your story and give it in and part of the journalism is reporting
#
in the moment that okay this happened this this lady in a sari went and stood in front
#
of her son and you know that's a story but one of the things that you pointed out that
#
made you feel that you need to do more that you can't work within traditional media anymore
#
is that traditional media was too focused on events but what built up to it what led
#
to it what is going on in the background in a sense is seen in the unseen right that there
#
is so much that is happening unseen and those layers are not being peeled off by journalists
#
because those layers aren't sensational and you wanted to sort of then dig a little deeper
#
into those layers so tell me about how you started coming to this sense that journalism
#
is not it anymore and you need to go beyond and a supplementary question to that is that
#
did the teaching that you were doing did it help you understand the subject better because
#
if you're teaching it then you're thinking about it deeper you're going more into you
#
know fundamental causes and so on and so forth so did that help actually started teaching
#
it later around around about maybe the early 2000s or late not immediately after so sure
#
that happened after much more experience came in dealing with it but certainly before 2002
#
so the but I think you know the how do you put it that I think we were also lucky enough
#
to be part of a generation of journalists and writers or that were by training in nature
#
compelled to reflect on your own work okay you didn't just do it and forget about it
#
you looked at it you looked at your peers you looked at your mentors and you know you
#
talked about it that is it something you could have done better is it some more elements
#
you could have added so that was always a part of us then as it you know then as 1984
#
moved to 92 93 and then like you yourself mentioned apart from who cast the first stone
#
this whole business of hate speech and hate writing then this business about fallout build
#
up and fallout that how long do you stay with the story that ho gya log mar gaye itne log
#
camp se nikal gaye but you realize that under the law for seven years a missing person cannot
#
get a check so if your body of the body of the dead person has not been found and that
#
that was is true of targeted violence always that they're charged to nothingness you can't
#
recognize them or the body is not one then you can't claim the compensation or reparation
#
for seven years so this is the law so I mean then then you want to battle that for them
#
you want to at least write about it for them but then your publication starts telling you
#
that you know now it's an old story so you know many of these things started happening
#
after 92 93 I mean it's not ironic 84 then 92 and then 2002 you know I mean and I've
#
said that you know if this culture of impunity in 83 Nellie if this culture of all pervasive
#
impunity which cuts across parties where the binding factors of bureaucracy and the police
#
that is there to protect each other so that nobody gets booked did not exist then you
#
would not have one massacre leading to a worse massacre later you know it is that culture
#
of impunity that was trying to understand and grapple with so it's it's I think it
#
was it was a challenge and that is what it was a challenge to try and figure this out
#
but how do you write it and report it in a in a fair honest emotive proper way and also
#
to be able to not stop at just reporting it tell me a little bit about you know that phrase
#
you mentioned who cast the first stone because what we are currently sort of seeing all around
#
us is basically narrative battles you know and and a of course that raises the question
#
of you know where does journalism fit into this you're just one more narrative in a sea
#
of narratives and you know but that can just lead us to unproductive laments but you've
#
pointed out the skill with which all of this is done both in 92 93 where somehow these
#
guys spread the bizarre narrative that the riots were a response to the blasts you know
#
it was the other way around you know the blasts happened in March 93 and then there was more
#
that they were before that they said before they came to that bizarre proposition I remember
#
Prakash Javadekar was the lead one in that was that Radhabai Chol was set it all off
#
which was a Radhabai Chol incident was 4th and 5th January whereas you had all of December
#
the city burning and you had several things spiraling into everything including one Muslim
#
family burnt alive in a red maruti car and top hill two days before Radhabai Chol if
#
at all you need to count this because I think beyond a point it doesn't matter which was
#
first it was just a phenomenon but you just want to turn every narrative on and it was
#
the Marthis that were begun on 22nd December which were the single defining factor responsible
#
for the targeted violence of January you know so many levels and of course these leaders
#
criss-crossing the country there was Advani there was Sadhviri Tambara spewing venom of
#
course you didn't have social media but you had their video cassettes being distributed
#
and it was so so so damaging would it have been worse if there was social media needless
#
to say yeah like before we talk about communalism combat tell me a little bit about Javed so
#
you know like you you guys were colleagues and you were covering sort of communal riots
#
both of you he was in Bhivandi and you were in Jogeshwari and Govandi in 84 so tell me
#
a little bit about the partnership actually he is a graduate of IIT Mumbai kind of metallurgy
#
engineer who never did a day's engineering in his life he went straight after coming
#
out of IIT he was a gold medalist and all he went straight to working in rural Maharashtra
#
joined an organization called Freya and then Israe so engaged with kind of alternate development
#
working in Marathwada the 71 drought and you know then a library movement in the state
#
and all of that he entered journalism through a very unusual trajectory which was not planned
#
like like I wanted to become a journalist is through the textile strike so he had started
#
as an labor activist looking very closely at the whole reason of labor unions and all
#
that and started reporting on the textile strike for the blitz and the daily and those
#
reports had done very well and they were very very highly read and all that which is when
#
Rusri Karanji offered him a job of special correspondent in the daily so that's when
#
his he sort of transitioned that was a couple of years before me so I joined in 83 and that's
#
where we met and we got to know each other almost immediately in 84 we covered the communal
#
violence together so I think it was a obviously it was a camaraderie and all that also respect
#
for the profession but also I think apart from a kind of perspective on labor and human
#
rights and generally I think this whole huge concern for the targeted and communal violence
#
was a was also was a shared kind of shared concern and I remember long conversations
#
with Javed when he would come back from Bivandi I would come back from covering Bombay and
#
you just needed to talk it out because it was so brutal you couldn't sort of rest that
#
night before you had long conversations and sorted it out or nothing gets sorted but at
#
least you shared it and that was a huge binding time very difficult painful time but a binding
#
time and then I decided to quit the daily within a year and few months because he got
#
promoted to chief reporter and I just did not want to ever have the anybody because
#
he got personally involved also didn't want anybody to ever kind of and people will you
#
know that's saying that I would get any and I was very clear and that I was a decent journalist
#
I didn't want to get that thing about my having any favors because he was chief reporter so
#
I had also begun doing a lot of legal reporting and I was covering the Antule trial so by
#
then I got an offer from Express so I shifted the moment I got it.
#
So it was I think a shared concern about where the country was going in terms of targeted
#
violence and what I found was a huge complementarity was that of course I was hugely concerned
#
about majoritarianism and you know impending doom which of Hindutva which I saw but I realized
#
that he had this capacity I think because of his own biography because he grew up as
#
a believing Muslim came to IIT and IIT sort of radicalized him completely so he became
#
left and all of that but I remember him telling me that when he was younger he was not only
#
would recite the Quran but didn't want his mom to abandon the burqa and I can't imagine
#
that to be the Javed I know so there was a huge change so he would always be talking
#
about the absence of rationalism within the Muslim community and now it's always needed
#
needs to be talked about as much as majoritarianism and I thought that was a very interesting
#
dialectic because I was of course very concerned with the majoritarians of the community I
#
was born into but he was always very interrogative of the regresses in which he saw and the
#
obduracy he saw among the leadership even over Babri Masjid though of course everybody
#
was extremely upset by the demolition but he wrote this piece I remember which I thought
#
was a pretty brave piece he wrote I think in Sunday Observer which even Siyasat carried
#
translating it in Urdu where he was writing to the likes of Shah Abbouddin that don't
#
make this into Hindu-Muslim battle make it a battle of the battle between the constitution
#
and non-constitution and leave it to the majority to fight that battle because if you make it
#
into Hindu-Muslim battle you are not winning given the trajectory of Pakistan and I remember
#
not getting up slightly while writing that but realizing the sense of it because you
#
saw extremely hysterical outpourings coming from the minority side which was matched then
#
by the aggression from the majority side and the sufferer is always going to be the minority
#
in this situation and he was able to see that dialectic you know which was a huge learning
#
experience and continues to be because even he wrote this recent piece in The Express
#
on the hijab thing and I don't agree with it entirely because I think the education
#
of a Muslim girl is for me paramount even if she is forced by a PFI kind of outfit to
#
wear the hijab but I realize the importance of Ajaved Anand and writing what he is saying
#
is that outfits like PFI cannot be given currency because they are just the flip side of the
#
RSS and he says for instance that a whole generation of extremely intelligent Muslims
#
were lost to Simi and now we are losing them to PFI you know and it is very sad that there
#
is not another kind of politics that young Muslims are going into so there is that engagement
#
as a partnership which I think is always a lot of complementarity to it we also had very
#
strong arguments but I think it adds a lot to your own perspective also so like he always
#
said it is very important that Tisa's work is just here she does the work she does but
#
it is very important that I continue to do this kind of interrogation so I think nature
#
wise is much calmer than I am maybe but it has been a great partnership.
#
You know I have been reading some pieces by him while looking your work up and I found
#
his writing really nuanced and even this piece that you mentioned on the Babri and I was
#
just thinking that in today's sort of social media polarized environment you know this
#
is just going to get you slapped from both sides that do you feel that there is a degeneration
#
of the discourse in the sense that there is sort of this incentive to preach to the choir
#
and to kind of go more and more extreme on either side and therefore there is no space
#
in the middle there is no space for nuance you really have to be careful otherwise you
#
are going to get mobbed from every end.
#
Not only that there is no respect for the need for dialogue are we going to stop talking
#
to each other I mean am I going to believe that every single Hindu or Muslim even if
#
he or she is different from what I stand for that we can't have a conversation and come
#
to some meeting around and I think that is very dangerous in this extreme polarized and
#
I think that is what the ultra right wants they want the reasonable voice to be completely
#
submerged and to some extent they are succeeding but that is the space we have to battle for
#
we really have to battle hard for and I keep telling people that listen I don't want to
#
fight an election so I am going to say this I am going to say both things and I don't
#
want to come to fight an election I am not coming for popular brownie points so you may
#
like what I am saying or you may not like what I am saying but even the tough things
#
So I will pose to you a question I asked both Hussain Haidari and Ghazala Baha when they
#
were on my show which is something I am truly befuddled by which is that clearly what would
#
work for the Hindu right is that you provoke, provoke, provoke, prod, prod, prod and some
#
poor Muslim guy somewhere can't take it anymore and lashes out and then you use the lashing
#
out you spread it all over WhatsApp and you use it as a pretext for whatever the same
#
way Godhra was a pretext for what happened and that scares the shit out of me because
#
it almost seems inevitable because there is no end to provocations especially this year
#
it seems like almost every week there are 3 or 4 things that we hear of in the news
#
which are just you know it is targeted anti-Muslim hatred and you just need one guy somewhere
#
to snap and do something and yet you know the Muslims of India and one shouldn't generalize
#
but by and large aren't snapping there is really I mean they have to live through the
#
violence and hatred let's remember that and they have already lived through it for decades
#
the worst of course being post 2014 to some extent but 2002 and then partition and all
#
of that so 92 93 Bombay so I mean it is the community that is at the receiving end that
#
realizes how it has to live and how it has to navigate and I don't think we can ever
#
have the gumption to speak for them I think it is really wrong to do that but I have always
#
said this that you know and this is what I have said even to law enforcement personnel,
#
police officers in better times when one would be called to meetings with the at Sardar Patel
#
police academy I would be called for lectures at one point which of course won't happen
#
now at least under this regime and I should say that you realize that 99.9% of Muslims
#
today are still not getting provoked at all and that is a huge, huge tick mark you know
#
and therefore it is so important I am not saying there is no radicalization happening
#
I am not saying there is no but that is a huge thing in favor of law enforcement forget
#
Tisa Selvar and civil rights activists it is a very important reality and therefore
#
what you need to do is trust building what you need to do is rights and a politics of
#
rights and not a politics of patronage and I think this is what the glimmer of hope that
#
the CA anti CA anti NRC movement gave us all particularly the initial phases when you saw
#
the emergence of and I think before lots of other people jumped in I don't want to get
#
into that but when you saw actually it became a articulation by amazingly articulate community
#
women and youngsters who was taking their voice as citizens you know that we are not
#
going to get dishoused from here we bloody opted to stay here and we are Indians and
#
of course unfortunately that whole narrative got turned around completely and brutalized
#
with the covid and incarceration and all of that I don't think that can entirely disappear
#
though that spirit can't go of course the cost has been hugely high paid by the community
#
but I think it will come back it will resurrect itself at some point and I think that the
#
farmers movement also got a lot of heart from Shaheen Bagh I don't think these things happen
#
in isolation you know so I think the farmers movement coming up and it was also very syncretic
#
and the fact that it did also articulate some of the political issues that had preceded
#
what had happened and all that but I think it's really not a good space to be in what
#
the Indian Muslim community is today being pushed into it's very very sad it's disgusting
#
as far as I'm concerned as a thinking Indian that any individual or community has to be
#
compelled to live like that and pretend that everything is alright I think that's the worst
#
thing ever you know because things are not okay I mean you just have to have a child
#
going to school or you know you have to have somebody traveling by public transport or
#
you need to sit and listen to conversations on how with what fear people travel by train
#
or cross country train or whatever it is fearing that you know if they just open their tiffin
#
box they might be lynched you know so I think it's a terrible terrible situation to live
#
through the I mean I think the more of us who are born into the privileged majority
#
should not just acknowledge it but do little and big things to put this in abeyance and
#
to stop it and to protest it wherever we can.
#
Tell me about communalism combat now because you know you started in 93 and what was your
#
sense of how this is going to evolve and was there a worry that how will we make money
#
how will we reach enough people will our work have an impact you know you must have started
#
with all these worries obviously and immediately you you know had a bunch of impactful stories
#
like the story you mentioned with the cover no riot can last for more than 24 hours unless
#
the state wants it to continue which is a quote from a serving police officer which
#
was picked up by you know 34 Indian publications and a series of successes after that but what
#
were the early days like because you know you've made a move which is a move purely
#
of conviction that this needs to be done but what were the uncertainties there and how
#
did you approach it how did you sort of set that brief for yourself what are we going
#
to do how are we going to do it.
#
Well it was not easy at all it was very tough and it was like I don't think commercially
#
it was quote unquote successful or viable but and it 20,000 copies was the best-selling
#
number and by post and dispatches and all of that but I think it's pretty good yeah
#
but it had an influence it was very disproportionate to the numbers you know because I mean and
#
from day one we got this input that please ensure that comes out in Hindi we never could
#
do that because I think that was a real need that it should that kind of material should
#
also be available in one of India's largest spoken languages but anyway those are all
#
that but unfortunately we had English speaking and writing journalists so yeah we had a
#
string of quote unquote journalistic successes it was recognized it was quoted in fact just
#
the other day Lolly and Ramu Admiral Ramdas and Lolly who were they wrote for six months
#
we had to suspend publication then we got some friends did a show for us and collected
#
some money and started it and all so that reopening issue I remember where we went back
#
to black and white and lots of stuff we had to do to cut corners so Admiral Ramdas and
#
Lolly wrote this autobiographical piece on when they saw Delhi burn and he was Chief
#
of Indian Navy as you know very powerful piece and just now she found a photograph of it
#
and she said Tista is there an archival copy I said you're talking to an archivist I'll
#
send you a copy but you know so you not only was it quote unquote we have successes but
#
we had the kind of writing and people writing on it who were actually sharing very very
#
priceless insights and perspectives on targeted violence which I think was most precious about
#
combat because whether it's this or the earlier piece you're talking about when Vijay Tendulkar
#
wrote that piece on Muslims and I or Suketu Mehta the writer shared a chapter of his book
#
on partition very particularly shared that excerpt on that one Punjab village the Sikh
#
elder had indulged in violence all of these actually cause a lot of introspection when
#
you read them because it's not about that one story or it's not about that one narrative
#
but it feeds into this the effort that combat was trying to make which is to understand
#
and unravel the whys and and the wherefores of this kind of violence that erupts within
#
us and the fallout of it you know and in fact I sort of think little flyer we used to put
#
out when we were trying to get subscribers and supporters that you know the riot in the
#
mind festers for days and months and years before it spills onto blood on the streets
#
and we are trying to unravel that riot in the mind how does it get there who makes it
#
happen what makes it happen is it our childhood is it something we hear is it the shakar is
#
it something else you know so I think that exploration is what made it so special.
#
That essay you mentioned Vijay Tendulkar Muslims and I I want to quote a little bit
#
from it as I get to my next question.
#
We had narrated it to Javed I remember yeah this entire thing yeah.
#
A Muslim meant someone with a beard the word also conjured up an unclean appearance uncouth
#
behavior lack of education and culture a Muslim was someone you stayed away from contact with
#
them in any form was supposed to be dangerous I still remember a common expression very
#
frequently heard in casual conversations among white-collared adults Manu Sahez ka Musliman
#
are you a human being or a Muslim stop quote and he also speaks about how this was once
#
asked in a classroom and you know the student didn't mind it and what struck me as you
#
know as a revelation the one thing I really didn't know about 2002 till I read your book
#
is how many years it was in the making right and you had before 2002 happened in communism
#
combat you had five stories which were just on what is happening in Gujarat and they have
#
the headlines are in August 1998 is the first of those welcome to Hindu Rashtra then there's
#
one on conversions then how textbooks teach prejudice face to face with fascism and split
#
wide open in February 2001 right and you've pointed out in such detail how the preparation
#
for the riots you know right down to instruction manuals and so on was done in incredible detail
#
for years and Godhra was just a pretext you know any other sort of spark might well have
#
worked and it wasn't really just Modi Modi had just kind of come that year this is our
#
society this is a movement this is what was going on tell me a little bit about this and
#
the reason I read that excerpt out also is it it's again the scene in the unseen right
#
the Muslim is unseen it's not concrete and it also speaks to the kind of ghettoization
#
which you've described in great detail also which was there in Gujarat especially and
#
there is this very cities at borders cities are borders and there was this very moving
#
quote by Ehsan Jafri where apparently he was in a riot in the late 60s and then somebody
#
said why are you still living here why don't you go and live where you'll be safe and he
#
said no that's not my idea of India my idea of India is where I can live anywhere and
#
feel safe and and so tragic given what happened Ranveer Bhai's son tried to tell him just a
#
year or two before the massacre that your area your trade union and people have changed
#
anyway and he was quarterized and killed but no so I mentioned earlier in our conversation
#
about 1991 and that Khan Sahib being pushed off the this thing so that is also the buildup
#
that is even before combat so so this is something I'd been following I'd been following about
#
Gujarat and it just bothered me because see at the end of the day my ancestors are from
#
there I'm a Gujarati I I spent at least one or two holidays a year in Ahmedabad because
#
my mother's maika my mother's mama was there we would go by Gujarat mail we'd stay there
#
Dargalwar old city the cloth market the Bera famous mutton samosas which my father would
#
bring they were all part of one's upbringing so one knew Ahmedabad and yet one was seeing
#
this happen later much later as a journalist and as an activist and nice combat particularly
#
and you saw the lawyers associations getting bifurcated you saw teachers associations othering
#
the Muslims I mentioned earlier to you that I mean I was appalled because I Chief Justice
#
of India later much later this is a remedy one of our best chief justices hails from
#
Ahmedabad and horrific story I heard from senior lawyers at that time was that when
#
he was first appointed as Chief Justice and this I heard retrospectively he said several
#
sessions lower courts went on strike how could a Muslim be achieved I mean this unheard of
#
in any other part of India at that time so what was it about Gujarat that this was possible
#
why was it happening who was making it happen and I remember one of the in face-to-face
#
as fascism I tried to deal with some of this in earlier stories I tried to deal with it
#
is asked this question that what was it about the Gujarat's socio-political territory the
#
political economy that allowed this kind of othering to happen so one of course I said
#
before that I think there was a particular VHPRSS project that discredited Gandhi because
#
Gandhi was their biggest hurdle in terms of Hindu Rashtra you know so they got him dead
#
but they couldn't kill him so easily so discredited him in the liners but that was a broad sweep
#
statement what next I think the fact that like I said earlier that anti caste movement
#
social reform movements only went up to so much and didn't go further in Gurus not that
#
there were no movements but they didn't go as radically deep as say they went in Maharashtra
#
or Karnataka or whatever I think that was important another factor was that so for instance
#
Dalits they will call themselves Harijan they won't call themselves Dalit you know and I
#
think the trade unions only are mostly Gandhian and socialist they are not really left except
#
in certain pockets so these are some of the patchy sort of insights one started getting
#
or started listening and then Girish Bhai Patel was a senior lawyer and activist amazing
#
personality I would have conversations with him and others and try and understand what
#
is it about Gujar and talk about the land reform movement never having gone below the
#
Patel community Patel is like the forward obesity like the Maratha years so you didn't
#
really have land getting into the hand of Dalit farmers but then how many states has
#
it gone even Punjab you've not had it gone to Dalit farmers but still you don't have
#
this level of deep-rooted communalization so it's a complex story not yet figured it
#
all out but one certainly was doing reportage and investigations to warn people that something
#
awful seemed to be in the offing because there was this galvanization of the mob our private
#
armies weaponization all of that threshold distribution so anytime there was this group
#
of people fed on hatred and narratives that was available for a project and you know unfortunately
#
we saw that happen so I think that is why I did those stories and it was no great satisfaction
#
for me long before 2002 to at every meeting one would address to keep telling people that
#
please pay attention to Gujarat something terrible seems to be building up there and
#
not paying enough attention and I think and we're very very sad to say that it happened
#
and you know the one thing I want to just mention because so many things I when I go
#
back to those cover stories I did the first one that you mentioned welcome to Hindu Rashtra
#
1998 just the one after that we did one on the Taliban in Afghanistan which is what combat
#
was about I'm mentioning that was hell or not and I did this telephonic STD call interview
#
with the Revolutionary Association of Afghan women and nobody in South Asia at that time
#
certainly not India Today, Apremia magazine, Sunday magazine none of them were bothering
#
to look at you know majoritarianism there or whatever it was only after Bamiyan Buddhas
#
in 2001 that everybody started waking up to what the Taliban was but we were trying to
#
look at this everywhere trying to look at I mean I visited Sri Lanka in 1997 and wrote
#
about the majoritarian Buddhist tendencies there so one was trying to understand this
#
as a phenomenon not just to do with the Hindu religion but whenever the majority Hindu religion
#
gets majority religion gets close to state power what are the potential disasters that
#
can happen so coming back to that welcome to Hindu Rashtra story you know it's not
#
a coincidence that the two villages that are mentioned there which is based on a PUCL report
#
at the time Randhikpur and Sandili where for a three month period after a brutal attack
#
on the Muslims living there they were living outside their village for three months till
#
somehow they crept that is exactly the area around which Bilkis was then in 2002 gang
#
rape just outside Randhikpur so I mean what do these connections mean what does this trajectory
#
mean what do we ignore as society and state for the build up I mean I still remember doing
#
this interview which is there in that issue of combat I think it is the same issue welcome
#
to Hindu Rashtra where I interviewed then director general police CP Singh and I asked
#
him I said listen you know there's this constant rumors of love jihad the love jihad was not
#
a phrase till after the Bamiyan Buddhas but inter community marriages and all rumors around
#
them that they are forced and they are this thing in fact Babu Badrangi went into a whole
#
racket with Patel girls at that time and I said that how true is it that these forced
#
marriages are happening you know the Gujarat government under Keshubhai Patel had set up
#
a cell in the police to investigate inter community marriage is a completely unconstitutional
#
act because once you are above 18 you can marry whom you want in this country but yet
#
the Gujarat government had done this so it was a government that was functioning out
#
of the purview of the Indian constitution for a long time I asked director general this
#
question he said all those stories are based on rumors and they are untrue we have investigated
#
each one of these cases and they are all voluntary marriages I have quoted him in combat on that
#
so the rational debate is one thing the facts are something else but yet something completely
#
different is happening on the ground.
#
And just to underscore the variety of stories you were covering you also did a cover story
#
in September 2004 on Bangladeshi Hindus living with terror minorities in Bangladesh you know
#
you've mentioned Javed's critique of the Jamaat-e-Islami where he wrote a piece called Reluctant Democrats
#
so you know you've been sort of.
#
We wrote on the Islamization of Kashmir I mean which was such a personal tragedy for
#
me because we saw Kashmiris as resistant in a secular fashion and then you see because
#
of infiltration from Pakistan you see the Islamization of that movement all that is
#
being reported in combat true to our word that you know minority communalism feeds into
#
majority communalism and we were constantly having our antennas up for it.
#
Some of the things that you mentioned in the build up to Godhra what was happening in Gujarat
#
really struck me like you speak you've written about this session in Ahmedabad in September
#
2001 where you wrote about how during this three-day training of Dalit and Muslim women
#
quote, Dalit women spoke of the RSS slash Bajrang Dal luring their sons at 3000-4000
#
per month to attend camps where they were taught how to wield lathis and arms.
#
Muslim women spoke of how their children were not allowed to carry eggs in their tiffin
#
Abuses among the community had become sharper and shriller stop quote.
#
And elsewhere you write about how as part of a cover story you were doing you accessed
#
an anonymous pamphlet which was being widely circulated that had Hindutva that had a Hindutva
#
in home symbol and quote, it was a detailed instruction manual for the carders on how
#
to file false complaints and mislead the police after leading violent attacks.
#
A senior Gujarat serving police officer had used this circular widely in trainings to
#
warn carders of the Gujarat police on the dangers posed by such supremacist organization
#
And obviously you know Ashish Khaitan later in 2007 the Tehel ka operation kalang that
#
he did spoke about how bombs, guns and other weaponry had been brought to Gujarat from
#
Punjab, Rajasthan and other states months before the mass killings stop quote.
#
So you know all of this is happening and I think you mentioned in your book that just
#
a week before Godhra you warned someone in Bangalore and they just laughed at you.
#
In fact some of them laughed but one of my friends from Gujarat were angry saying why
#
do you keep on saying this at every meeting.
#
I said because I am really sensing a terrible fear that there is a build up and that build
#
up is something we are ignoring.
#
So tell me about February 27, 2002 when your phone started ringing.
#
Oh it was one of those awful days because I think it started ringing from early morning
#
about soon after 9, 9.15, 9.30 and I must have got I think over 170, 200 calls that
#
And you know mobiles I mean I keep telling people that mobile phones were very expensive
#
at that time 22 rupees a minute so it was not like today when you have all these different
#
So it must have cost people a lot of money to call and there were desperate calls from
#
all over districts, people whom I had met through all my coverage and network and activism
#
who were just reporting on the fear and helplessness after the Godhra incident because already
#
the mobilizations had started and they were worried that they would be targeted.
#
So one just spent the next two and a half, three days just making calls to police officers,
#
district officers, SPs, calling Delhi, calling people like Nirmala Deshpande, whoever one
#
could think of to motivate them to do whatever they could.
#
It was a very desperate time.
#
And then the next day the violence started first in Ahmedabad and then all the villages
#
and I was struck by this sentence where you write quote, my phone records carry in them
#
the geography of the attacks, the route of the violence from one end of Gujarat to another.
#
And you know I remember after the tsunami that had struck I had traveled down the coast
#
of Tamil Nadu with a friend and one of the things that really struck me and I remember
#
writing about it is that everywhere where we went where the tsunami had hit the clocks
#
had stopped and you could make out from the time on the stop clocks all across the beach.
#
So it's like a mapping of that as well and in your case it's a phone records.
#
So what was going on because one of the things that was different this time that you pointed
#
out is that earlier when you would call the police they would send someone, they would
#
do something, something would happen.
#
This time that wasn't the case.
#
I mean in some cases it happened.
#
It was obviously not universally like that.
#
But it was not just about me.
#
I mean you look at the reports of Times of India, Indian Express, everybody at that time
#
because the media was still doing a very decent job largely and they were reporting
#
this that there were distress calls which were not being responded to.
#
In fact I still remember one conversation with the Lieutenant General of the Army, Zameeruddin
#
Shah who was there and I recalled this with him later because he got very annoyed with
#
Somebody had passed on his number to me because of his availability because the Army had been
#
calling by 28th or 1st, by 1st of March if they were in place and he kept on saying that
#
every time you're calling me and giving me details of where the attacks are taking place
#
but actually when I'm telling the police they are saying that no they're not happening,
#
they're happening somewhere else.
#
He was very annoyed, not annoyed as irate, he was probably hassled by all the calls.
#
So I just kept silent for a few minutes and I said sir I can only say that please decide
#
which of the two bits of information are correct, I won't say anything more.
#
And then there was completely stunned silence and he said thank you and put on the phone
#
because there was nothing else I could say.
#
But then I kept calling him and he kept taking the messages.
#
So it was not nice at all, it was very very distasteful.
#
It was clear that the official explanation is that they were overwhelmed but it was very
#
clear according to me that there was a lack of response.
#
So when did you go there?
#
I went there on the 3rd of March.
#
In your book you've got this striking para where you write quote, on 4th March I was
#
at a relief camp, the Shah Alam camp in Ahmedabad.
#
I remember meeting women from Narodapatiya there.
#
They described how they had reached the dargah, they came with no clothes on when they were
#
A humiliation, easy to recount but difficult to comprehend.
#
This meant they had been stripped of clothes and dignity apart from being physically abused
#
for the better part of 12-13 hours.
#
They sat in that state at the police station, they had been brought back bloodied, bruised
#
And later you write quote, it is chilling that for 7-8 hours a whole locality was actually
#
When you have women and men celebrating the persistent hounding and killing including
#
the daylight rapes of young girls and women, it is reflective of the public space before
#
and after the macabre violence.
#
Such violence also qualitatively affects the space in that area.
#
Stop quote and you go on.
#
This of course reminds me of Hannah Arendt's phrase, the banality of evil but what tells
#
and this is a story we hear time and time again.
#
Even Wilkes-Bannos rapist and the killers of her child and all the family members were
#
our neighbours, they were people around her, they were people otherwise you would consider
#
just normal people and at a time like this you have an entire locality just chilling
#
out enjoying a massacre as it happens and apparently not feeling a thing.
#
And when we speak of the rule of law, you know, you can convict a few people, you can
#
convict ringleaders as indeed you have, right.
#
You have some of them, yeah.
#
But the point is everybody participated and that's just such a horrifying thought that
#
everybody participates, like you've spoken of many victims who cannot go back to where
#
they lived, where all this happened to them.
#
But even those who go back, I can't imagine the kind of denial they must have to live
#
in when they know that the people around them are the people who did all of this, you know,
#
and it's not just a handful of people and a handful of ruffians and a handful of, you
#
How does one come to terms with that?
#
Well, actually, that is why I think it's very important to grapple with this question further
#
and move out of just Narodapatiya also and look at the whole phenomenon, come back to
#
partition, look at Rwanda, because I met this amazing activist who worked in Rwanda and
#
she was telling me once that what happens when every person from the Hutus has been
#
involved in the massacre of Tutsis, there's not a single family that's not been involved.
#
So you're talking about an entire section of people, you know, including Catholic nuns
#
sometimes, you know, horrific stories that came out of Rwanda at that time, 800,000 people
#
So what is it that drives populations to this level of an expanse of bestiality?
#
More important, as you said, how do you recover from it?
#
How does a society then re-engage with each other and reconstruct?
#
I mean, it's like, for me, it's extremely difficult to find them.
#
I can't give any recipe or this thing because it has to be through the voices of the survivors
#
who tell us the solutions.
#
We cannot in any means give a solution to them.
#
It has to be a solution that maybe we can help facilitate as sensitive human beings,
#
but how can we be the ones who give it to them?
#
I have no answer to that.
#
But I just feel and this is what I keep urging people that as a society, we cannot turn our
#
blind eye to what we are unleashing on our own people.
#
And we can't do this by shutting out conversations as if it didn't happen, or by blurring the
#
narrative or turning the narrative on its head or saying that, you know, this is all
#
I mean, at least let's engage with the kind of horrors that we've been able to, at least
#
those that we witnessed in our lifetimes, you know, even if partition is too far back
#
and it is difficult to reconstruct every single incident or every area and region and which
#
community was affected.
#
At least what we know is that it's reasonably true that it has happened, it's been reported.
#
And before anybody kind of accuses me of, you know, saying what I said about Naroda
#
Bhatt, you just have to read the judgment of Judge Jyotshnya Yagnik, which came out
#
on 29th of August 2012, and what she speaks and how and the credibility she gives and
#
the way she talks about the integrity of the witnesses who have spoken up.
#
And for me, that experience of supporting those women survivors that that CJP did was
#
that for the first time in the history of this country, the narrative of gender violence
#
was brought back during a trial.
#
Normally, the court process blurs it out.
#
It sanitizes it or refuses to admit it.
#
For the first time, it was possible and that was that brief glimmer that the Supreme Court
#
monitoring gave this process before it sort of sunk into something else, was that these
#
were Supreme Court monitored trials, they were specially appointed judges, some of them.
#
So certain integrity to some of those processes existed.
#
But I think that's the learning experience that as a society, it's not about Isha Zalwar,
#
it's not about Good Drive 2002, it could be about Nelly, it could be about 84.
#
How many Sikh families have got justice for 84 compared?
#
I think it's equally shameful, I think it's important.
#
As a society, are we going to accept and deliberate with some sensitivity on what makes us fall
#
prey to this level of bestiality and violence?
#
For me, that's the abiding question.
#
It's not about one individual or one state, but it's how an entire neighborhood can do
#
What are your candidate answers to that rhetorical question about what makes us do this?
#
Is this really the human condition?
#
Is all this civil society a sort of a facade and everything is contingent and yes, there,
#
but for the grace of God, go ahead.
#
If I were to accept that, then I would not get stories, which I got out of Gujarat also,
#
which we did Good News Gujarat, one whole cover story we did a year later in July 2003,
#
June 2003, which is that whether it was Sardarapura where 33 people were massacred in one house,
#
Sheikh Muala, or whether it was Godhra or whether it was even Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, Naroda,
#
you had the most outstanding stories of bravery in the midst of that bestiality.
#
Yes, they were a minority, they were kind of completely outnumbered, but if that was,
#
if the human condition was that brutal voyeurism, then why did those acts take place is my question.
#
Why did those policemen, which were a hopeless minority, stick their out necks out for the
#
Constitution and ask even today paying for it?
#
You know, there is always going to be this battle between the predominant majority narrative
#
and the resistance and maybe at many, many points of time, the hate wins.
#
But I don't think hate wins all the time and I think anyway, the endeavor for us should
#
be at least the endeavor for people like us should be that one tries to interrogate, which
#
is what communism combat was, what Khoj is, what our work in Assam is at the moment.
#
And that's why I would urge your listeners to visit the CJP website, cjp.org.in, look
#
at the kind of work we are doing.
#
It's not just about targeted violence against minorities.
#
It's also about Adivasi's land and livelihood rights.
#
It's also about citizenship rights.
#
It's about constitutional values in the classroom.
#
Hate Watch is very much part.
#
Is that what are the manner in which we can equip citizenry, societies, villages to ensure
#
that the lone voices become the majority?
#
The lone voices, which I still believe are manyfold, become a kind of cohesive majority.
#
And I feel that's the effort and that should be the effort.
#
I think we do not have the luxury of saying that the human condition is the hateful condition.
#
We just cannot do that.
#
So when you went there, you know, you mentioned in your book about how a friend asked you
#
about how it was and you said, remember how bad 92, 93 was, this is 1000 times worse.
#
And another thing that comes across really well in your book is the extent of it.
#
It was not just Ahmedabad.
#
It was, you know, the majority of the districts in the state.
#
It was hundreds of villages.
#
It was like targeted, planned elsewhere.
#
You also written about how in the months preceding this, there were these census documents drawn
#
up of where Muslims stay, where Christians stay, everything.
#
So you know, that data was kind of made for a reason.
#
I think you showed it to Justice Verma, if I remember, and he said he has similar data.
#
What was that period like because you were attacked a number of times while you were
#
there, I was attacked five times, including the car and the driver leaving me in a village
#
Justice Verma himself witnessed when he was in the car in front, when my car at the back
#
was attacked before turned into Godhra.
#
The ad hoc attacks towards anybody who was trying to record or witness any of the violence
#
I still remember this elderly gentleman in Jamalpur telling me that beta, if you're going
#
to go out of Ahmadabad, then remember you just wear a, wear a saffron dupatta and a
#
otherwise without that you'll be targeted. So you know there was all of that, hotelieries,
#
1100 hotels belonging to the Muslim Chilliya community had been brutalized. I mean you know
#
the economic loss and devastation was as bad as the loss of human lives which we calculated
#
post-Kodra to be 1928 or whatever according to the chart sheets, close to 2000, 1928. And you know
#
as Indians we tend to not count the numbers about loss. We think that we try to valorize only the
#
lives lost but I think you know even the CII put the loss at several thousand crores.
#
So this was all a matter of record and the National Human Rights Commission's report,
#
interim report, final report, follow-up reports, the Chief Election Commissioner Lindo's report
#
of 2002. They document some of this apart from the work that some of us have done so but there
#
is still a desire today to change the narrative, to turn the narrative around. I mean history will
#
tell as to how far that will go. Tell me now about how Citizens for Justice and Peace CJP came about
#
like at what point did you feel the need for something like this that what you guys were
#
doing, there needed to be another superstructure on top of that. It just it wasn't enough. Tell
#
me about that whole process. Actually the organization was born out of the realization that
#
you know we need to have a group of citizens involved in the civil and legal rights issue
#
which will look at supporting survivors of targeted violence. Then we'll look at the whole issue of
#
constitutional values in the classroom and now we're looking at citizenship rights. So basically
#
legal rights and legal aid is the concept behind CJP and you know if we wanted to engage in
#
battling those cases of course Gujarat 2002 but not only that because we've also done
#
engagements with bomb blast survivors 26-11 before that in Gujarat etc. It's important to
#
see what that whole process of engagement will mean. It means understanding the law,
#
it means legal aid, it means staying with the survivor for periods of time that are long
#
because our court process takes so long you know and advocacy and all of that. So that is why
#
it was set up and many of the persons then and now were involved in CJP had seen Bombay Burn
#
in 92-93. So I thought that was a very important understanding and link that came out of that.
#
Now of course we have some new people also and it was very important to have that
#
that thing in place and I just want to say that you know the experience we got out of 92-93 Bombay
#
where we didn't actually engage in the courts but we were engaged in the campaigning for the
#
Shri Krishna Commission report to make sure the report was published. Getting it published,
#
we actually published the report two editions of it. It was also very important to understand that
#
you know that do we stop there or do we now get into the courts and also battle the cases.
#
So that was one part of the story and now we've actually reached a stage which is very fascinating
#
because I think the experience has also meant that you know for human rights and civil liberties and
#
legal aid to be sustaining and enduring we need to create local teams on the ground. So therefore
#
to have this team that's going in Assam which is a really vibrant team of 25 plus people,
#
paralegal and lawyers who are working on the question of citizenship. I don't know how many
#
people in the rest of India know but this whole NRC process, National Register of Citizens process
#
which it's important to tell your listeners this because you know Assam has a 3.3 crore
#
roughly population and at least a third of them are kind of completely being
#
there's a humanitarian crisis of huge proportions. So there's a background and trajectory to it but
#
the conflict and the violence in Assam pre and post the Assam Accord has led to a kind of demand
#
quote unquote that outsiders should be identified and citizens should be, citizenship should be
#
scrutinized in a particular way and the matter was taken to the Supreme Court and all of that.
#
It's a complicated thing and on the CJP website you get a lot of information about it.
#
In 2016-17 when the draft list was brought out, draft final list, as many as 44 lakh people
#
were left out of citizenship which is like a huge number. Then when the final final list came in
#
in 2019 which is August 31st, the number came down to 19 lakhs. Now even that is being contested by
#
the political class, they seem to want to reopen it further. But what has this entire process meant
#
first of all it's a huge cost to the state exchequer, figures like 1700-1800 crores are being
#
thrown around. This is the kind of money that has been worsted on this whole exercise but it is made
#
that virtually in every village in the state of Assam, you have families and extended families
#
who are completely devastated by this and their meager allowances are being spent on
#
trying to navigate a very hostile legal system, the Foreigner Tribunal. Now you have a creature
#
called the Foreigner Tribunal in Assam which is a kind of a legal entity pre-independence
#
under the Foreigners Act, very complicated, which doesn't happen anywhere else in India.
#
And the adjudication there, the level of evidence gathering there is completely
#
contrary to what the Indian Evidence Act says. So you know all of this has meant first of all
#
me and our team understanding this issue, then us trying to do legal education with a batch of
#
lawyers who have been doing this for a long time but trying to discuss and how we can do it better
#
understanding the Superior Court judgments, High Court and Supreme Court and trying to bring in
#
national and international law. So all this has been a very intense exercise for the last
#
seven years and we've been very very lucky to build up a very very vibrant team and the work
#
carries on day to day, week to week and village to village in about 12 districts and for me the
#
greatest satisfaction when I was incarcerated the last three four months is that the work of this
#
kind whether it was Hate Watch or Assam or Constitutional class in the classroom in Purvanchal
#
continued and I think there was a first shell shock of the first week when it all happened and
#
I was arrested but after that teams galvanized and motivated each other and the work carried on.
#
And for me that is the biggest answer to this kind of tragedy and this kind of targeting.
#
Is that the work should not stop. The work simply should not stop.
#
That's inspiring. You know why don't we see more of this particular Assam problem in the mainstream
#
media? Is it because that there is some kind of a North bias so much of media is happening from
#
Delhi? What's the deal?
#
It's a very good question. I mean you will find almost zero coverage even in the alternate
#
portals actually because I mean little bit comes in to scroll and wire of course occasionally but
#
I mean consistent coverage you'll only see on the CJP website or on the Sabrang website because we
#
are engaged there. Simply because we are engaged there we are getting that report and information.
#
But you know there's always been a bias in the quote unquote Indian media even when I'm talking
#
about the better days of journalism I'm talking about the 80s and 70s against the northeast the
#
east and the northeast Orissa, Bengal and the seven sisters I mean the northeastern states
#
are never covered. So if there's violence there, if there's a conflict there, if there are floods
#
there maybe for a few days but not looking at some of these endemic problems which are being
#
unleashed. So according to me the quote unquote commercial media nationally is doing very very
#
big service disservice to the people of Assam by not having regular coverage. This changed a little
#
bit around 2019 when the citizenship amendment bill was passed and all these protests erupted
#
because inevitably some of us who had been working even before that on Assam were asked to speak
#
about how this entire trajectory of proof of documented citizenship has unfolded in Assam
#
and when we started sharing the horrific experience there and warning that this could happen anywhere
#
in India if this was not protested enough that is when there was a little bit of coverage in other
#
places but very momentary because soon you had covid and the lockdown and you know media just
#
forgets these stories very quickly. Yeah it's event to event and not really staying on for longer
#
with the story. Let's go back to the aftermath of 2002 and not just the aftermath 2002 itself
#
and at one point you speak about how you know there was this mob of vhp slash bajrang dal people
#
who were chanting with impunity. Yeh andar ki baat hai police humare saath hai. Right and this is
#
by commission or omission you know this was true as you've documented in your book and elsewhere
#
and as we kind of know you already you mentioned that anecdote about the general who told you that
#
the police are giving him locations of villages where nothing has happened and you know. No it
#
was like in Ahmedabad a certain direction would be pointed out where there was not but actually
#
something's happened somewhere else. Actually it's happened somewhere else so the you know
#
willful misdirection so on the one hand there is. In fact he has written a book Zamey Rudin Shah on
#
the entire experience of Gujarat which is very interesting. I'll link that from the show notes
#
as well as so many other links and so on the one hand there is a police which the moment that the
#
state government is of a particular dispensation the police is going along on the other hand you've
#
spoken about the judiciary and you have of course spoken about the outliers in the judiciary like
#
Jyotsana Yagnik who you know gave that great sort of judgment Himanshu Trivedi who left a Facebook
#
message praising you you know ex-judge of the. Abhay Tipse in the retrial in best bakery. Yeah
#
yeah so those seem like outliers more and more the worry is that if the dispensation in power
#
you know bends a particular way sooner or later they'll capture all the institutions and this is
#
something I discussed at length with Josie Joseph you know he's written a book on the deep state so
#
to say and that's again an eye-opening book and an eye-opening episode so what is your experience
#
with this because on the one hand you come from literally a family of people who've
#
believed in this rule of law it's a court in it right and then you encounter this system
#
where it feels like a frustrating uphill battle but you stick to your principles and you
#
kind of continue down that path and you've had some success but you also had a lot of frustration
#
so how do you how do you look back on these struggles and do you you know do you still hold
#
out hope because to me it seems like you know just hoping that some outstanding individual will make
#
a good judgment that goes for you is you know systemically it just seems that. You know while
#
that is true I would put it the other way that the only way a system can be held accountable is
#
through engagement with it. If you decide to disengage completely with the system whether it is
#
the police or the courts or the judiciary or the election process electoral presidency I'm just
#
not going to vote I don't know whether you're going to ever get it any hope of it any revival
#
or reform or improvement so that's the broad way. Finally I'd like to also point out apart from what
#
Josie's written look at two very outstanding recent interviews that Karan has done
#
one was with Justice AP Shah and that piece he wrote in the Hindu is actually what that interview
#
is based on and it's just like Justice AP Shah, Ajit Prakash Shah, former law commission, Delhi
#
High Court, Chief Justice you know writing that sorry writing that in Hindu and then elaborating
#
at length in that interview and what is he saying you know he's saying that the challenges
#
to the judiciary post 2014 and then you have of course Senior Counselor Mr. Dushyant Dewey
#
talking about our incoming Chief Justice so see these are issues that are being looked at with
#
concern and debate and we've had judgments of which are which have offered hope and their
#
judgments which have raised huge alarm and concern I don't want to get into those individuals because
#
individual cases because it would not be appropriate but I will say that an institution eventually
#
if I talk about the judiciary will be judged by the sum total of what it does and of course it
#
will also be judged by its major what is seen to be major hurdles or obstacles when it has not met
#
met the exacting standards of substantive justice however I'll also say that you know the
#
ironic thing about this whole process it's some of the irony that you yourself mentioned is that
#
it's much easier not to battle in the courts I want to also mention this and flag this that it's
#
much easy to do any sort of activism but does not involve the courts because and that is something
#
that feminists have learned something that civil rights activists have learned that this is a far
#
more quote unquote demanding process it's when you're in the courts that the reprisal is greater
#
because they're sworn affidavits and then the agents of the state representative of the states
#
are going to be held accountable ostensibly for what they've done or not done so it is it is a far
#
more problematic and risky but I see that not doing it at all or assuming I don't think anybody
#
who engages in the courts whether it's a PUCL or whether it's us or the association for democratic
#
reforms or anybody does it with the hope that they're looking for that one messiah messiah
#
individual no but what you're looking for is some level of exacting this thing on constitutional
#
values from an institution that's supposed to be a constitutional court whether it's a high court
#
or a supreme court so I think it's with that hope that you go there or otherwise you might as well
#
say if it extends your argument further that you know leave aside this battle to the courts wait
#
or don't wait for that day when it happens and fight your battles elsewhere you know in the
#
discursive arena in the communication arena and the media arena and I don't know whether that
#
by itself is enough you know so neither is only this enough for sure like I've said earlier as well
#
that if this battle takes place in isolation and there is no support from the public or from
#
political class or from the opposition then too it gets rendered isolationist and you get you can
#
get targeted but I think the important thing is to continue to engage rework strategies sometimes
#
you need to rework strategies and rework issues but but to keep at it anyway and one of the
#
historic kind of quotations that students of the law are always told is that the the law is really
#
presently made by dissenting judgments not the majority judgment no that's interesting yeah so
#
that is one of the things you're compelled to see study and read as students of the law the
#
the dissenting judgment yeah in asking my question I wasn't really making an argument at all that one
#
should not engage I think one has to do what one has to do regardless of you know how optimistic
#
we might be about it working out I mean you know you have to do what you have to do
#
now I have sort of a question about whether something has changed fundamentally in the last
#
changed fundamentally in the last 20 years in terms of technology empowering citizens like us
#
like you pointed out at one point in your book that you know when Zahira Sheikh turned hostile
#
in the best bakery case the reason that you guys were able to push through is that you had footage
#
shot I think by Pankash Sharma you had footage of her you know talking about what had happened and
#
therefore you know that helped that was evidenced by itself and helped you make the case and today
#
we are sort of living in an era where smartphones have become ubiquitous broadband has become
#
cheap a little bit of credit to your favorite neighborhood industrialist Mr Ambani but be right
#
as it may today you're not going to have a mass burial go undocumented someone or the other you
#
know the chances are just much greater that it will be documented that a lot else will be documented
#
and therefore it is much harder to get away with anything it is it is much harder for the unseen to
#
remain unseen as it were is this something that a you've seen playing out and b that it sort of
#
gives you hope that you know now you can't you know there is no such thing as under the cover of
#
night anymore see I am two or three levels of my answer again one is that you know during the
#
Zahira Sheikh time it was not simply that Pankash Sharma that was important I think important thing
#
was that she herself had given previous statements to the National Human Rights Commission signed
#
affidavits to the Nanavati Commission where they were you know where the whole version had been
#
laid out so her suddenly saying that all of this was not correct or was coerced out of me was could
#
not hold out in a court of law and I went to the Supreme Court you know saying that her allegations
#
are serious and please investigate which very few people know I said that when she made those
#
allegations I said please investigate and that's when the Supreme Court set up a registrar
#
general's inquiry we all appeared she had to appear and then that is that the inquiry that
#
found her guilty of burglary and all of that so but it's a arduous process to kind of counter
#
all of that so coming back to what I said earlier that once you engage in it there's a risk of this
#
happening then it's an arduous process to then have correction and lot of energy goes into that
#
as much as fighting the actual battle besides that what I want to say that see technology is
#
it's it's not an apolitical beast okay so let's not completely glamorize it because I want to
#
just flag five six very very problematic things that have happened with the same technology and
#
not with the kind of result that you are yes certainly it's coming to the public yes but it
#
has not generated the kind of outrage that at least I would want and I'm sure you would want
#
and one is this recent public flogging of Muslim young men in Keda other one was a similar kind of
#
incident in Jharkhand which which where you had this horrendous killing and lynching and all of
#
these are being captured on through technology by the perpetrators you know so they're not attempting
#
to hide them they're actually wanting to play to the uh the support base that you were talking
#
about to be able to galvanize more hysteria and hate uh in their corner so I think let's also flag
#
that issue when you when you raise this question and having said that yes if if technology is truly
#
democratized and has it been I don't think so I think it's not been democratized if you really
#
look at how deep penetration internet is uh uh it's I think it's Apache story I wouldn't say
#
it's a negative story but Apache story I mean even now there are a place in Uttar Pradesh including
#
Banaras and others where it's very bad internet penetration is very bad so you can't have zoom
#
calls and conversations so it's I'm just saying that let's also be very clear that the penetration
#
is very patchy I'm not uh and if somebody would like you were to map where India has really good
#
broadband I think it might tell a different kind of story uh so yes it is possible and feasible
#
today that there's going to be a huge god forbid a huge targeted violence tragedy or something
#
happens that's either for the wrong reasons like I mentioned or for the right reasons it will get
#
documented my question is again coming back to what I was thinking as a journalist what happens
#
then does it generate the kind of response it ought to or should have from either the the
#
institutions that I require to correct it or from the political opposition that should take it up
#
that also is not happening enough is what I feel because I mean just to give this take up this
#
first example I gave of the for flogging you just see that the two major parties in political
#
opposition in Gujarat who are now claiming that they might make some headway I don't know about
#
winning that is congress and up have just not commented on that incident and I don't know what
#
kind of message that sends to either the citizenry which is part of the community that uh of the
#
policeman that perpetrated it or the survivor victims that have undergone such a humiliation
#
what does it mean what is that what does that signaling mean I have not seen one of my one of
#
my uh constructive criticisms before the higher judiciary which is the high courts and supreme
#
court is that they have a very interesting power called the suo moto which is that you can actually
#
see some violations of fundamental rights taking place through the media through the social media
#
and actually generate a legal action without it being brought to your notice and there have
#
been occasions when the court has done that but those occasions are very rare I have not seen any
#
constitutional courts be it in jaharkhand or anywhere up or gujarat or anywhere actually
#
initiate suo moto action on these kind of uh public violence humiliations and targeted violence
#
against minorities for a long long time it didn't happen earlier didn't happen it's not even happened
#
earlier even before so I don't I will not put the 2014 marker for that you know even it did not
#
happen in nelly it did not happen in 84 in fact I've had very very intense discussions with
#
advocate hs fulka who's a one of the advocates who's really stuck by the sick survivors of the
#
84 program where the congress party was involved and he says that you know the kind of silence
#
he encountered from the institutions was was was awful and in fact at least in gujarat we got a
#
few glimmerings of hope with a couple of very good judgments from the supreme court transferring
#
best bakery bilkis bano out of the state sending certain signals whereas they got nothing so you
#
know I think some of these introspections are important and necessary as to when was it the
#
national security narrative around mrs gandhi's killing that it was a sick body what was it that
#
prevented uh the higher constitutional courts from intervening because it was delhi it was
#
happening in delhi so you could not claim that you did not know every wretched resident of the
#
capital would know judge or not a judge so why was that no there was no sumo to action everything
#
these are issues that need wider discussion and debate and I think some of this is also linked
#
to the fact that we need to have sane sensible debates and conversations about institutions
#
without hysterical responses or be or be threatened contempt of court or anything because I think
#
you're not talking about crass motives sometimes what you're talking about is a general level of
#
a lack of accountability and I think that is something that citizens should start engaging
#
in you know so whether it's a question of how higher courts deal with uh sexual assault or
#
rape or in posco cases when you have a string of judgments suddenly not string but I've seen at
#
least three or four saying that you know everything will be fine as long as the perpetrator marries
#
the victim I mean I just just the thought makes me cringe you know that is this our notion of
#
substantive justice in the criminal law amendment but by the way I have to point out I did an
#
episode with uh rukmini s who's written a great book on uh data journalism as well and what she
#
found out through her work was that a lot of these cases are actually cases where a couple elope
#
and then the girl's parents file a case and then it goes through the court and the judge's way out
#
is saying you guys have to get married so but but is that the way out I mean even first of all in
#
those cases it's fine but in one madhya padesh case that was certainly not the case where they
#
said tie a rakhi and it'll be okay but my point is that even if that is the case is that the way
#
the judiciary should have you should either deal with it head on and say that listen there's a
#
marriage by choice yeah so therefore it's not no no say it's not rape it's consensual and therefore
#
but you can't leave it halfway because you don't want to confront the parental authorities
#
but anyway I'm I'm just mentioning that uh in any case you had this other very problematic
#
judgment from the bombay high court saying that you know uh touch of a certain kind does not
#
constitute offense and a posco so there could be any number of such or the feeble no judgment
#
yeah so my point is any of these issues is not just about targeted violence against minorities
#
any of these issues requires forums that sanely debate this in the in the public arena so that
#
the echo chambers that judges live in also is not just of hysteria and the social media but where
#
the sensible debates also get to them because I think they need to understand that the the
#
citizenry is thinking about it talking about it how how how the judiciary is being evaluated
#
because this is in any mature democracy this is important a lot of power is wielded by different
#
institutions of governance whether it's the police whether it's law enforcement
#
whether it's the ib whether it's the judiciary so I think all these institutions should realize that
#
debates and criticisms as long as they're healthy and not shrill and silly are needed to improve
#
the the caliber and the quality of governance I buy a cautionary note about technology and you
#
know is there perhaps a shifting of the problem from nobody knows about this to nobody cares about
#
this because almost and that's that comes back to your earlier question and a question that every
#
sensible person asks that are we just getting numbed by this kind of looking at these images
#
and circulating them on whatsapp and not not reflecting on where they come from and what they
#
mean but just quickly forwarding or not forwarding them or whatever it is you know what does this
#
kind of relentless violence images mean imagery mean so I think it's it's really a question we
#
need to grapple with because I will not as a journalist ever argue for any kind of censorship
#
ever because I think that that could be much more harmful than anything else but but I think we need
#
to ask where that is coming from how is it being how is it traveling who is who is allowing it to
#
become viral you know all these terminologies that we are using and then we all know about the
#
IT cells working we know about all of the money behind this powering of the social media we know
#
how elections are being now powered by data collection and social so there's so many layers
#
to this where I think you know just just sanitizing and seeing technologies empowering is not enough
#
because just now the there's a huge power imbalance huge power imbalance yeah I mean I mean the the
#
striking another striking image that I saw earlier this week was and you must have seen it too was
#
of this 14 year old girl who'd been raped and she was lying bleeding on the ground and you have this
#
picture of a bunch of men in front of her not helping her but taking videos of her or pictures
#
of her on their cell phones horrific image reducing her from a real person to an image on a phone
#
which is like you know it's horrific just losing your humanity here's a proposition I think I first
#
you know presented it to Akar and I want to see what you think in my view you know in India
#
we have three huge problems and the first problem is a proximate problem and you and I will agree
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on it and that's a political problem of the particular dispensation in charge right but I
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think there are two deeper and longer lasting problems which will remain with us and I can't
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think of a way to solve them one we have already spoken about which is the society that we are in
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that it's an illiberal regressive society and more assertive now than it was earlier so what do we do
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about that that's one and the other deeper problem is just a Indian state which has always been an
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over-powerful centralized predatory state where you know all the organs of the state become tools
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of the political party in charge right so yeah there's a proximate problem and one hopes that
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something emerges in our politics and we can get past this but those two deeper problems I don't
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know how we get past because you can't just say that you know let us you know let's introduce
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ideas into the discourse about how to make the state better and make it better and no that ain't
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gonna happen because people you know the state will not let us change the state you know it is
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what it is those in power are not going to give up power so what is sort of your sense in that
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do you also you know do you agree with my broad formulation or is there something you'd like to
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add to these no I just like to nuance your second proposition while not discounting the first and
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third at all which is yes the society today that is the kind of huge support echo chamber for this
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kind of political dispensation that is our problem I'll reiterate what I said right in the beginning
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I think is that you know what are the numbers are we talking about I mean where do we balance the
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numbers yes there is no question in my mind that a large section of our society has become the
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support chamber the support base for this kind of politics but I'm not still willing to believe
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that it has crossed 50 51 percent I mean that too on the very outside okay so that is the first
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thing the question is what about the rest are the rest uncaring they couldn't care one way or the
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other are they scared are they scattered what is it that is what we need to figure out I don't have
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a bad answer for that I think it's some of all these three that they are uncaring some of them
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but I think a lot of them are also scared and many of them are scattered so the question is
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the scattered and the scared what do you do with that how do you work with that etc so that's that's
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the first thing I just like to first drop in the in my response secondly I think I don't think one
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can hope and this thing hope any that hope for the state to improve and all of that no but I think if
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one accepts the fact that at the moment this structure exists and the fact is that for whatever
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reason we are a notional or real not so real democracy then do we or do we not speak and I'm
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asking you this question back do we or do we not speak about things like eventually you have the
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preamble which makes the people sovereign not the state and therefore every decision of parliament
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every decision of the supreme court every decision of the election commission that is
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constitutional bodies is eventually answerable to the people at some level obviously in an
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organized fashion so how do this mass of people become articulate enough to be able to challenge
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anything that they find so different wings of the state if you desegregate because it's too
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overwhelming otherwise how do you desegregate and actually start challenging this and can you do it
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at all that's the question so can you really realistically talk about judicial reform is it
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ever going to happen or no is the appointment of judges the diversity of judges never really
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going to change okay those are the questions I think we need to keep raising okay and I think
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in the raising of the questions you will maybe get some answers there cannot be one person or
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three people giving you the bad answer one of the major reasons and this was stated by I think by
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Mr. Sibyl the other day when he was being a couple Sibyl when he was being felicitated for 50 years
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at the bar is that you know what you need today is a lawyer's movement for social justice to counter
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the kind of silence that is there from the bar today when there's according to him wrongs done
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by sections of the judiciary so you know this could be one answer I don't know but the point
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is I know from a fact from my father and grandfather and great-grandfather and everything
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that they've experienced from their writings that the bar and the bench are intrinsically linked
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when you say bar is the not the that bar but the bar which is the advocacy advocates so if the bar
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becomes supine like it did during the emergency except a few outstanding voices then the judiciary
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also will just have one dissenting HR Khanna okay but I remember that that year in 1973
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when when the supersession took place KC college June I mean an amazing meeting takes place I still
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have the booklet from that meeting where who did you have you had Daftari you had Hidayat Tulla you
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had Settlvar you had KT Shah all of them speaking about on the outrageous act of the government and
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superseding and making Ray the chief justice so you know there will be those moments now was that
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unimportant was that dissent not important I think we the fact that we are referring it to it today
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in a conversation means that those dissents become very very important to the growth of
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our democracy do I see that dissent today from the bar no which is why leads someone like Mr.
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Kapil Sibal to make that statement it's coming it's coming from other sections of the lawyers
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and advocates who are not the big big names but it's coming from dogged practitioners who are
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working you know on the most difficult of cases so the issue is how do we then tackle this
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all this Indian state as you put it do we just give up on tackling on it or do we try and maybe
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think of ways to segregate the different wings of it and think of talking chipping away and
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challenging I mean the way the election commission has started behaving is outrageous it's been
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written about it's being talked about one or two previous election commissioners are somewhat
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writing about it but that's not enough I mean they have to be able to understand that the voters at
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some point is eventually whom they are responsible to not the government of the day but when will
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those voters get mobilized outside an ADR association of democratic reforms to challenge
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the election commission that becomes the question of people's mobilization resistance etc it's a
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very tough call because it means organizing it means organizing non-violently in a cohesive way
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in an informed way communicating this challenge you know all of this means working on electoral
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reform judicial reform structural reform criminal justice reform I mean what was my lessons what
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are the lessons that we learned after the best bakery case was that four things are necessary
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in our criminal justice system first is independence of investigation which is police reform which nine
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police commissions have told us we should do but nobody wants to do but it's not a citizen's issue
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it's not an election issue how do we make it that okay then the question of independence of prosecutors
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because only I think two or three states in the country have the judiciary appointing the
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prosecutors otherwise it's the government appointing the prosecutor so again you have a collusion when
#
the cases are argued then witness protection which again came to the fore with the zahira sheikh case
#
and finally time-bound trials you can't have criminal trials going on for 10 11 no survivor
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will have the will have the stamina to even want to live through that tragedy for 12 why should he
#
or she you want to wrap up and move on right so two or three years time-bound trials now these
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are very simple things it's not rocket science that I'm sharing with you but who is going to
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push it which band of citizens is going to push which political party to make this into an issue
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I mean it's it's really not an easy call but the question is whether it needs to be taken or not
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you know I feel that even if I believe that the cause was hopeless we'd still have to do what we
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have to do because we don't do what we do for instrumental reasons if it's the right thing to
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do you do it and that's clearly what motivates you as well there's a lot of stuff we can't talk
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about now because it's subjudice but what was what was your feeling like when you were
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you know incarcerated recently I won't talk about like I said the case and everything I
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just simply say that the manner in which it happened was outrageous and completely unlawful
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the way I was done but in jail it was it's I mean nothing can be worse than being jailed because
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your personal freedom is taken away you feel helpless you feel despairing you feel angry
#
feel let down there's also physical discomfort which you're not used to all of that is there
#
I think eventually human beings have this ability to dig deep into their reserves and
#
deal with it and we we all did I did you you build relationships with people women other women
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inmates in the barrack you you have conversations some of those relationships become very very
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long-standing the most difficult thing is to cut time is to kind of is how do you cut time
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and I used to find the greatest solace in writing and reading I wrote a lot two three thousand words
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a day and written in my diaries what would you write about it's a book hopefully that'll come
#
out it was basically about everything that I thought I felt my observations how the political
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economy of the jail worked on the hard labor of 2025 convicted women who would be working from
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7 a.m to 7 p.m just at 3000 rupees a day you know it's tough you try and find out because
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the journalist in you is always there stories for individual women under trials and convicts
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I've written noted a lot of those stories how to cut the time then you read and write books and
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after six o'clock nobody wants the lights on six thirty so the bank gets very dark there's a very
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banal hindi film channel going on with the worst kind of films so all of that is very tough it's
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very tough sleep is difficult sometimes but you manage you manage somehow somehow you find
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hope in small silly little things gardening the flowers there's a peacock perch somewhere
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their bird I mean this is the kind of thing human beings start looking for
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and I like I said to you sometime in between that the greatest sucker to me was of course I
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was lucky enough that my family visited me for the letters I mean the letters were just unimaginably
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a huge hope and that's what I keep telling friends after coming out and organizations and groups that
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we should ensure that all political prisoners get letters we should just ensure that we sit down and
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write to them because that's that that that does help you know my my huge battle with the jail
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authorities would be to keep the library open because they have a very nice reading room in
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sabarmati mahila jail but they don't keep it open enough they keep it open for two hours sometimes
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one hour sometimes sometimes keep it shut they just believe it's not a priority for women you
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know and though there will always be two or three women who want to sit there and read and write but
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it's a battle so those are the kind of battles one had to fight initially I was very scared too
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because I was worried about my physical security and all of that but then I just sort of told
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myself that it's best to be living in a barrack with other women and my greatest security line
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being with other women and that was okay and was there the fear that this could last a long time
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like you've seen siddiq kapan in jail for so long umar khalid was there a fear that oh my like I'm
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going in going in I don't know when I will come out that's what the state wants okay that the
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state wants that and unfortunately there's not enough accountability in the bail courts and the
#
judicial system to ensure that doesn't happen to others so there's always that fear that it could
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have lasted much longer than it did were you you know you've seen the stick but were you ever shown
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a carrot were you ever kind of was there ever a hint that why don't you chill and stop and
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things will get better or whatever I got a lot of indirect hints over the last 20 years I mean it was
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through persons that not name and mention but there would be indirect hints that you've gone
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far enough now you've got one case transferred and now you've got one person arrest now enough
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now you leave the cases now that it's not necessary but you realize you're accountable to a wider
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survivor population it's not just about you and and that kind of keeps you going
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so two final questions I've taken a lot of your time and my penultimate question is sort of a
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traditional question for all my guests who come on the show that recommend for me and my listeners
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books films music whatever gives you joy whatever you like so much that you'd just like to share it
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with everyone oh I must mention that I just love thrillers thrillers of all kinds so I read lots
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of them when I was in jail also so read lots of thrillers I think they can keep you going
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they're lighter reading for me that's just for a lighter moment many authors but I remember that
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I think in Norman Burke's the scalpel the sword it was a very lovely book about this I think it
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was the surgeon who went from the Spanish civil war a very important book that I read when I was
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growing up then of course there is a Eduardo Galeano the Yerguen writer's outstanding Orhan
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Pamuk is very very good and I mean I keep going back to the framing of the Indian constitution
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which sounds very trite but it's Shiva Rao B Shiva Rao and it basically encompasses the
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the constituent assembly debates thematically of course I've also got the 18-volume constitution
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assembly debates where I go through the sections on preamble and article 14 article 19 and I
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realize now they're all online and I think it's very important that some of us were interested
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and particularly young people who are concerned about how fragile Indian society's commitment to
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equality and secularism is that we go through these debates because you realize that there's
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because you realize the white consensus there was around the fact that in spite and despite of
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partition we should remain a republican constitutional democracy and I think that was
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an amazingly brave and seditious decision of our founding mothers and fathers and I don't think
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it just came out of an elite club it came out from a grounded movement and realization of
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Adivasis, agriculturists, workers all sections of the Indian people who said that no this is the only
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way India can survive we are so diverse we are so different we are so our language our culture our
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religion our I mean we're so inegalitarian some are rich a few are very rich the rest
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but the only way you can do it by at least giving a vision of equality so I think go back to our
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constitution debates I think it's important it's not boring at all and to add a book to that if I
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may I would recommend this book I don't know if you've heard of it called foot soldiers of the
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constitution yeah a lovely book I would have loved to discuss you know just 2002 and the
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aftermath for a few more hours but people can read the book it's it's it's uh are you opening
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any films or music oh lots of films and music but uh I mean I simply love Indian classical music I
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love jazz Miles Davis I like Janis Joplin and of course Beatles are my all-time favorite Bob Dylan
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and if you come to Indian classical I mean there's very little I don't like but Malik Arjun Mansoor
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and Bhim Sen Joshi and I also like many times to just listen to music late evening I also like
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western classical very much though I don't know it very well but I love listening to western classical
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music too and films all of them I mean Satyajit Ray of course and uh Ingma Bergman all of them and
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of course I like I mean Charlie Chaplin is a go-to for me all the time even again and again and again
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many many times and my final question if people listening to this want to help in some way
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whether by volunteering whether by contributing or just whatever way how can they reach you what
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can they do see actually that that's such an important question for us because you know
#
thanks to all the various kinds of targeting we've gone through we are an organization that
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proudly today functions on entirely Indian funds so our website cjp.org.in tells everybody
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how to contribute the smallest amount is important the larger amount is also welcome
#
so of course the donations are very very welcome and there's a very easy way to do it online and
#
even otherwise the other way is which is what I also tell young people is you know you can
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intern with us you can volunteer legal research and writing narratives we've had interns from
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universities worldwide who've interned with us writing about comparative kinds of targeted
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violence black violence in Chicago how police have behaved there compared to Gujarat very
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outstanding work so that if that's what you prefer you can write to us for internships
#
we want to write we have some of the top universities sending legal interns to us even now
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and we get them we get about 15 to 25 interns number I can handle because sometimes our team
#
is small and that we we are looking for video volunteer people who can make videos for us
#
because we have a small team but we always need more than we have so and if you if any of our
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any any of the volunteers want to visit our work on the ground look at it cover it we are also
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looking for independent eyes on the ground to give us feedback wonderful all these relevant links will
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be in the show notes Tista thank you so much for your time I really learned a lot talking to you
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thanks so much Amit for doing what you do not just today but for all the episodes that you're
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doing through this because I think you're reviving the kind of interest in you know deep
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deep thinking and deep diving which is so important today thanks thank you so much
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if you enjoy listening to this episode do share it with whoever you think might be interested
#
check out the show notes enter rabbit holes that will do by t-stars books you can follow
#
t-star on twitter at t-star settle word you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m
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a you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for
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