In faraway climes and foreign kitchens, there was nothing like cooking a familiar dish to blow away those wistful longings for home – a mutton stew, an onion sambar, or good old rajma, they all did equally well.
Soak 2 cups of rajma (soaked overnight), add four to five cups of water; cook for 15 to 20 minutes. Chop 2 large onions, four large tomatoes, crush ginger-garlic…The monsoon rain I knew would be now pouring down on parts of a country called home and it was time for corn roast-ripening on live coals, ready for its lick of salt, chilli power and lime…
Food as a secular metaphor is comforting, the rising aroma from a cooking pot bring people – even those separated by fathomless seas and unending skies – together.
Through those drifts of home sickness I could discern something…a presentiment, which like a long shadow on the grass tells you that darkness is about to pass (with apologies to Emily Dickinson). It was a period the prime minister sanctified with a double-barrelled moniker, “Amrit Kaal/ Kartavya Kaal”.
India had put the moon in its pocket and held an international talk fest in a gleaming new mandapam amidst the floral décor wreathing New Delhi’s newly re-furbished public spaces (created by hiding from view and flattening out anything that smelt of the sweat and struggle of ordinary people).
The incessant flow of breaking news from home did not make for exhilaration. Through the two months I was away, intimations came of a gathering sickness, of a looming murk slipping over the horizon in real time.
A lot of this news fell into three broad categories.
First, the enormous wreckages that had manifested themselves earlier in the year continued to remain unaddressed. Every day brought information that the gaping wound Manipur was, it continued to be. In these two months the prime minister has neither visited the state, nor spoken in any substantial way about it; the chief minister who had presided over killings and rapes when they first broke out, still sits on his chair even as wave upon wave of fresh violence rages around him. He bestirred himself only to try and grind down journalists critiquing his handling of the situation; or to tweet about his achievements: “Pleased to share that the construction of the Manipur State Guest House (3rd Bhavan) in Dwarka, New Delhi, is making excellent progress. This guest facility, equipped with 104 rooms, a gym, a cafeteria, three conference rooms, two-floor underground parking areas, and a nursing room, will be a valuable resource for the people of Manipur when visiting Delhi for different reasons.”
It is amazing that nobody in the Indian media thought it fit to ask: What, sir, about the people of Manipur in Manipur who need shelter, food, medical care, safety? But the quandary before every journalist grappling with this story was how to tell it without immediately getting trapped in the Kuki-Meitei divide. How do we report when the double-engine sarkar ruling the state and country has no investment in facts emerging and will not hesitate to use their police to suppress them?
The second category was the familiar flesh-eating virus of communal hatred which continued to rage.
Lynchings carried on like yesterday’s news; then suddenly whole regions that had never experienced communal violence went up in flames. Amidst the ensuing embers came bulletins about a police man attached to the Railway Protection Force (protection?), shooting three Muslim passengers. He may have had a bone to pick with his superior who he also gunned down, but what quarrel did he have with three bearded men whose only fault was that they happened to share a moving train with him? What was amazing about this story is that apart from a few desultory attempts to follow up on it (we were informed that the man was dismissed from service…slow clap), this murderous individual who went by the name of Chetan Singh was allowed to slip out of sight without the Indian public getting a chance to understand his source code. We heard his toxic speech that ended with an exhortation to vote for Modi-Bisht, but what unique ugliness of disposition, what vile indoctrination, what blindness of belief, drove him to commit these acts? We will perhaps never know.
Meanwhile, evidence kept surfacing of communal bestiality manifesting itself elsewhere. A Muslim couple in UP’s Sitapur got beaten to death because, evidently, their son had eloped with a Hindu woman a few years earlier. The reasons may vary, it could be a cleric killed in an attack on a mosque or a disabled man wandering into a puja pandal and eating prasad, but the feral ferocity of the attackers surpasses understanding. It speaks of a generation of teenagers and young adults (the demographic dividend that India is so proud about) who has experienced a seismic shift within their psyche. But why blame only the young? What can be said about a elderly MP spewing anti-Muslim filth in Parliament?
Finally, it is about politics. As a commentator put it in The Wire, has there “ever been a serious attempt whatsoever in the history of Indian politics to ensure the inclusion, protection, and representation of Muslims which may have stalled the pace of the present onslaught?” (‘What It Means to Be an Indian Muslim Today’, September 26). The fact is that the prime minister and his cohorts appears to be in perpetual search of deeper and fresher divides, dreaming all the while of a grand temple at the Gyanvapi Mosque to twin with the grand temple now being built at Ayodhya – and of course of a victorious verdict in 2024.
The third pattern that could be discerned was the steady collapse of academic institutions.
When major universities falter on the brink, it tells you that the future of learning and knowledge creation itself is at the point of disintegration. What was distinctive about the bits and pieces of breaking news that reached me was the fact that any professional who did a half way decent job of explaining the times we live in, found themselves pushed over into the abyss. In a period when the census has been disappeared, alternative sources like the National Family Health Surveys (now in its fifth round) becomes extremely vital, all the more so because of their credibility.
The Modi government, however, was having none of that. It wanted all data to be dressed up to flatter its own performance, much like the capital city was for the G20 event. This meant that the person who headed NFHS operations and who allowed the truth in the data to speak, had to be given the marching orders. Then there was an academic paper, ‘Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy’, written by an assistant professor of economics at Ashoka University. It looked a little more closely at the results of the 2019 general election than the government would have liked, unearthing an unsettling pattern that indicated the adroitness with which the BJP had clinched victories in certain constituencies (‘What the Ashoka University Professor’s Paper on BJP ‘Manipulation’ in 2019 Election Actually Says’, August 3; Was the 2019 Lok Sabha Election Really Manipulated?, August 13). The paper got ‘reviewed’ by Sanghi trolls and unfortunately the university in question had misplaced its spine and could not stand up for its faculty member. He had no recourse but to leave.
Before long the Trivedi Centre for Political Data, housed within Ashoka University, also had no choice but to dissolve itself. These are indeed dangerous times for data collection or even something as straightforward as knowledge collection. At JNU, the highly regarded Centre for Historical Studies had its library relocated.
It is now exactly 90 years since the Deutsche Studentenschaft set over 25,000 books alight in university towns across Germany. We haven’t reached the book burning stage as yet, but other bonfires are raging. MGNREGA, a lifeline of the rural poor, is at chokepoint. Some laws like the Forest Conservation Amendment Bill were passed to take away established rights; others like the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam were passed to reinterpret rights; while still others like the Data Protection Bill were being designed to enhance the rights of the government to take away people’s rights.
In many senses, the news was all about this almost daily assault on our constitutional rights and freedoms against a backdrop of public helplessness.
Ask The Wire anything…
The Wire is a small media house with modest resources and this makes it incumbent upon it to think on its feet – constantly, creatively and with sociality. In his opening remarks at ‘The Wire Dialogues: The F-Word That India Really Needs Today’ (August 15), a founding editor revealed that The Wire was launched in 2015 because it was clear “that media freedoms in India were going to get more and more imperilled and that the future of independent journalism in India lay in building a new social contract between journalists and editors, on the one hand, and readers, viewers and the wider citizenry on the other…”
I see its latest addition on YouTube, the ‘Ask Me Anything’ series as a part of that contract (‘Ask Me Anything : Siddharth Varadarajan Answering Your Questions | Justin Trudeau | Modi Govt’, September 22). As the introductory text put it, “We’re starting AMA or Ask Me Anything, where The Wire’s team will be available to talk to you. You can pose questions to our editors and journalists on all the burning issues that are there. So welcome to The Wire’s public square.”
The Wire has a present base of 4.78 million subscribers and the first discussion on Canada attracted 8,688 views at the time of airing. If anything, this demonstrates that in an age in which a whirlpool of misinformation is in constant circulation and where the prime minister has steadfastly avoided being asked about anything, forget issues of substantial national interest like the Hardeep Singh Nijjar killing in Canada and its repercussions for India-Canadian ties, there are many who are in search of trustworthy information and analyses. It also indicates that not only is The Wire attracting digital citizens, it appears to have also built for itself a fair degree of public trust.
The tone adopted is not adversarial, because that does not make for a useful conversation. In fact, the ask-me-anything format is made for open communication where facts can be discounted and opinions challenged.
The only advice I would have for those anchoring this feature is to ensure the smooth flow of queries and the responses to them, so that the programme also makes for a good televisual experience. Here the challenge is to achieve a balance between too much information and two little – loading the format with too much data could make it more of a classroom and less of a media channel.
Also, since “burning topics” of the day tend to be the most controversial, the anchor needs to be alert to the direction in which the conversation is heading without showing anxiety.
The Canada topic had its share of booby traps. At one point, the anchor even made it clear that the Wire is not taking sides on the issue, that it is agnostic about who killed Nijjar. This disclaimer, incidentally, did not stop trolls waiting to take potshots at The Wire from hissing lovely words like “anti-national” at it. But trolls will be trolls. One cannot do a programme like AMA with half an ear cocked for those ugly noises in the dark.
In any case, to unpack the whole story there is always the space afforded by good old print journalism – in this case I thought The Wire piece, ‘India-Canada Standoff: Khalistan Not an Issue in Today’s Punjab’ (September 21) was an excellent backgrounder for the woman who wanted to know, during the AMA discussion, whether the Khalistan movement continues to carry traction.
Ultimately, this is an effort – the ambition is to make it a weekly effort – to go beyond the comfort zone of familiar followers. The architecture of the bridges that need to be built between editors and readers would necessarily vary, but getting out of the box is the first essential step.
Finally, it may be a good thing to keep the humour quotient going. The person who anonymised himself/herself as @neutronstarbrightest3972 had the right idea: Ask me anything? “Okay, let me ask you something: how do you make sambar for dosai?”
This may not call for a recipe, but it should certainly earn a smile.
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Readers write in…
As I resume my column after some weeks, my apologies to the writers of these posts for the delay in bringing them to readers…
Anti-national, really?
Soumitra Kandpal writes in:
“I know that The Wire is a far left website which claims to be ‘anti-establishment’. You have spread so many fake news stories that I thought that nothing would surprise me. But you still managed to do that. In the story, ‘India Is MY Country Too’: Canadian Punjabi Singer Shubh After BookMyShow Cancels His India Tour’ (September 22), the claim is made that Book My Show cancelled a Khalistani supporter’s India tour because of strains in India Canada relations. A simple search on X would have told you that the backlash was because he had shared a distorted map of India and had nothing to do with Indo-Canadian relations. If you actually cared for ‘truth’ and not agenda peddling you will issue a correction. But I have no hope from anti-nationals.”
My response:
It may be more useful if you can make your argument while avoiding jargon popularised by trolls, like “anti-national”. In any case there is little evidence you present to refute the fact that Shubh’s tour was cancelled because of the current India-Canada standoff. The fact is that the tour was very much on, despite the distorted map story, until the point when social media posts demanding the boycott of the booking app, #UninstallBookMyShow, began to trend on X.
Reaching out to Nuh
Dr Farrukh Faraz:
“I appreciate the excellent reporting in the story ‘Watch | ‘We are Surviving on Water’: After Nuh Demolitions, Poor Muslims Struggle’ (August 8), on the plight of poor families whose homes have been demolished in Nuh. I wanted to know if one was to distribute food rations to the needy families, especially the one seen in this report, how would one go about it? What is the location of the affected area?”
My response: Apologies for the late response given that I was on vacation. Do hope you managed to contact the affected family.
Please spare us stories like this
Deepu SDR:
“This is with regard to The Wire report, ‘Special | Sifting Fact From Fiction in the High-Profile CBI Investigation That Charges an Andhra Pradesh MP With Murder’ (July 22) on Vivekananda Reddy’s murder. The article is so ridiculous, I barely have words. So I’ll just point to a detail in the article which indicates how wrong it is. On the day Reddy died there was an official statement from the Andhra government saying that he suffered a heart attack even though everybody could see marks on his body. They changed their version after a few hours and immediately started blaming the opposition. Doesn’t this say enough? Seeing how the present government is destroying Andhra, how can anyone support it so blatantly? Crimes are rising, the roads are bad, drugs are being sold like candy, MLAs and MPs speak such foul language. Please don’t put out reports like this and hurt the people of Andhra more, they are suffering enough.
Manipur is alarming the world
Dr. P.Saravanamuttu and Sushil Pyakurel, bureau members, South Asians for Human Rights:
South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR), a regional network of human rights defenders, is extremely alarmed at the extent of the almost three month long, ethno-communal violence that is taking place in Manipur, India and is appalled at the lack of political will of the Central Government to effectively curb it…
While individual perpetrators will no doubt be identified and booked for violence, SAHR is simply appalled at how in a functioning and strong democratic country this level of widespread violence and mayhem continued unchecked and at the lack of political will or inability of the State Government and the Central Government of India to bring it under control. SAHR lends its voice to others from around the world and strongly calls upon the relevant government authorities to immediately take action to thwart violence in Manipur; and provide immediate redress to those affected while ensuring fair and speedy justice. But SAHR also reiterates against the use of excessive force by law enforcement authorities. SAHR strongly believes that it is the duty and responsibility of the Government of India, as it is committed to uphold democratic principles, to consciously eliminate any effort to trigger communal polarisation through a multi-pronged strategy in order to protect the rights of all the people enshrined in the constitution.
A jurist and judges
N. Jayaram:
Apropos ‘We Have a Veiled Emergency, Judges Often Lack Spine…’(September 13), Fali Nariman provides a fascinating detail about CJI A.N. Ray who, being in a minority of one in a 13-member bench, had himself engineered an order to try and overturn Keshavananda Bharati. Nariman, the great jurist, had other revealing comments too and I thank him for mentioning Dr Umar Khalid and for consistently raising the issue of secularism.
Write to ombudsperson@thewire.in.
