These year-end paragraphs ought to contain seasonally appropriate sentences of hope, so let me offer a couple of them. I begin with what one of my correspondents, a gifted Asian intellectual who is half my age, has just written to me: “I still have Hope and Faith that if not our generations, our next generation will reverse the curve. Nothing is permanent.”
A day earlier, I had expressed a similar thought myself. Writing to the valiant team of U.S.-based Indians who two years back started this wonderful and expanding group called “Hindus for Human Rights,” I said that the forces of Hate in a land like India, “even if they seize all the trumpets of the world”, are fighting “a losing battle”, for they have made “Art, Music, Humour, Equality, Truth, and Love” their foes.
Nothing is permanent, but in some circumstances even a week seems brutally long, and there are countries that have been deprived of democratic rights for longer than seven decades. In the India of 2021-22, every day brings a bunch of troubling stories.
That online platform thewire.in, to which dozens of brave reporters contribute from far-apart corners of India, has a heart-rending story of Rohingya refugees in a “settlement” in Haryana that has seen more than a dozen successive fires to its “homes” made from cardboard and thin pieces of wood. The winter is biting where they are, there are no toilets, the food they receive is less than meagre.
Their camp is located in a Haryana corner populated by poor Muslims, for there appears to be an unspoken policy that Muslims, no matter their background, must be confined to “their” areas. If, despite strenuous efforts by the Indian government, some Rohingya refugees managed at first to enter India and later to remain in the country, they must be pushed into Muslim ghettos, which, like Dalit ghettos, are a feature of many an Indian city.
Another painful story, and this one has received attention even in India’s mainstream print media, is of the lynching, in two separate incidents in the state of Punjab, of two men for alleged acts of sacrilege. On December 18, one man was seized in Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, when he allegedly tried to desecrate the Guru Granth Sahib (the Sikh holy book, viewed as the living Guru) kept in the temple’s sanctum sanctorum. Enraged men reportedly snatched the alleged desecrator from the hands of temple officers and beat him to death.
The next day, in a much humbler gurdwara (Sikh temple) in village Nizampur in Punjab’s Kapurthala district, a man who allegedly tried to damage the gurdwara’s Sikh flag was beaten to death by an angry crowd in the presence of a handful of helpless policemen. Subsequent comment by politicians has focused almost exclusively on the need to prevent and punish sacrilege, leaving the killings unaddressed.
Jammu and Kashmir did not fail to add its bit of hurtful news. It appears that any future legislature in J & K -- once an autonomous state of the Indian Union but since August 2019 a union territory -- will now have six additional seats from J & K’s Hindu-majority Jammu “half” and one additional seat from Muslim-majority Kashmir. The last census (of 2011) showed Kashmir’s population to be 6.88 million and Jammu’s as 5.35 million. Under the new arrangement, Jammu residents will be more generously represented than their Kashmir counterparts. Some are more equal than others in “the world’s largest democracy”.
This new redistricting exercise (immediately denounced by former J & K chief ministers Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti) will make it a little less difficult for a BJP-led alliance to capture office in J and K when elections are next held in the union territory.
In a sobering analysis available on YouTube, the greatly respected political scientist and commentator, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, told Karan Thapar on December 17 that Modi has presided over a damaging change in India. Anti-Muslim politics has been the foundation of his strategy, Mehta says, and popular TV channels have streamed hatred of Muslims into the homes of Indians. The courts have not arrested the slide towards a “communal and authoritarian” India, and Mehta’s foreboding is that the polity might fracture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWYmM_7rw8
After citing all this, and knowing much more that I don’t cite, why do I return to some sort of hope? Because I want to believe that the arc of history bends towards justice, even if painfully slowly much of the time.
Is there evidence to bolster faith? At least some Indians are speaking out more freely, clearly, and powerfully. India’s chief justice, N. V. Ramana, has lamented that investigative journalism is disappearing. And P. Sainath, who has been documenting for decades the state of rural India, has written an open letter to the chief justice that’s worth reading. It can be found here: