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- The Danish government's efforts to revoke protections for Syrian refugees

Unwelcome Letters

The Danish government's efforts to revoke protections for Syrian refugees

María Elorza Saralegui

30 September 2022

A protest in Copenhagen against the deportation of Syrian refugees. Denmark’s ruling Social Democratic Party made a “zero asylum” electoral promise in 2019.

Thibault Savary / AFP / Getty Images

Nisrin Mohamad Amam’s life in Denmark has been marked by letters. One of the last ones arrived on 31 January this year. For months, rumours about a new immigration policy had been going round her neighbourhood, near the town of Ebeltoft in northern Denmark, but she had been sceptical—until the letter arrived. That day, she learnt that the Danish Immigration Service was challenging an extension of her residence permit. Amam had fled her home in Damascus with her two sons after the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011. According to the new immigration policy, the DIS’s letter stated, Damascus was now deemed safe for refugees to return to.

“We thought Denmark was a good country, that they respect human rights and allow family reunification,” Amam said. When she arrived in 2015, the DIS granted her family temporary protection and a residence permit but not the right to reunification with her daughter, who had been forced to stay behind in Syria. “We learnt that maybe people are good, but all governments are indifferent.”

In February 2019, the DIS and the Danish Refugee Council, which is partly funded by the Danish government, published a report that declared Greater Damascus to be “safe.” The report was heavily criticised both by humanitarian organisations such as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and EU lawmakers, but the following year Denmark became the first—and, so far, only—European Union member to begin revoking the residence permits of Syrian refugees who had fled the region. The DIS letter invited Amam to plead her case against revocation in an interview with immigration authorities.

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Perspectives

- Yashwant Shinde’s affidavit further proves the BJP’s hypocrisy on terrorism

- A landmark judgment finally acknowledges abortion is about women’s autonomy

Two Faces of Terror

Yashwant Shinde’s affidavit further proves the BJP’s hypocrisy on terrorism

Bharat Bhushan

30 September 2022

Narendra Modi, who was the chief minister of Gujarat at the time, speaks during an anti-terrorism rally at Delhi’s Karol Bagh, on 19 September 2008. The failures of his government at the centre to extradite terror-accused from Pakistan make abundantly clear that terrorism remains a purely rhetorical issue for the BJP, useful to mobilise voters even as he lacks any real ability to take action.

Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

An affidavit submitted in late August to the sessions court in Maharashtra’s Nanded district by Yashwant Shinde—a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the former head of the Bajrang Dal in the state—is a watershed moment in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s claimed record of combating terrorism. Shinde in his affidavit—as well as in subsequent interviews—claims that he, along with several others, was trained in making bombs and conducting blasts in the lead up to multiple national elections, including in 2004 and 2014. Shinde said that they were trained by members of the RSS and the Vishva Hindu Parishad. He also claims that these RSS and VHP members facilitated members of the Indian Army in training them in the use of modern weaponry. So far, the RSS has not conclusively denied Shinde’s affiliation with it and neither the VHP nor the Indian Army have denied the contents of the affidavit. Shinde has also not been arrested or sued.

The affidavit includes names that have been frequently mentioned in the bevy of chargesheets related to a string of nine bombings, from Parbhani in 2003 to Malegaon in 2008, that killed more than one hundred and twenty people and injured more than four hundred. Others he named still maintain senior positions within the RSS or VHP. Among those who trained with Shinde were Himanshu Panse and Naresh Rajkondawar. The training was allegedly organised by Rakesh Dhawade and Milind Parande—the current secretary general of the VHP—and conducted by a mysterious figure called Ravi Dev.

Dhawade was later arrested for the 2008 Malegaon bombings, while Panse and Rajkondawar died in the Nanded blast of 2006. In a recent court hearing regarding Shinde’s affidavit, the Central Bureau of Investigation, which had investigated and filed a closure report in the Nanded case, refused to add Parande as an accused despite fresh evidence pointing to him as the mastermind. If he were to be added, he would become one of the senior-most office bearers of the Sangh Parivar to be investigated in a terrorism case.

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Birth Right

A landmark judgment finally acknowledges abortion is about women’s autonomy

Puja Sen

30 September 2022

An operating table at an abortion clinic in Delhi. Medical abortions are out of reach for most women in rural areas, who often only have access to public-health facilities, and even many urban women struggle with high costs and a lack of qualified doctors at private clinics.

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

In June, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe vs Wade, a landmark decision that had made abortion a constitutional right in the country. Given this massive setback to reproductive rights in the world’s oldest democracy, many in India took the opportunity to congratulate themselves on having more progressive abortion laws. The next month, however, the Delhi high court refused a 25-year-old woman the right to terminate her pregnancy because she was unmarried. The high court bench was interpreting the main abortion law—the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971—which allowed certain categories of women the right to abortion under very specific conditions. The judges argued that, in her case, aborting the foetus would be equivalent to “killing the child.” On 29 September, the Supreme Court of India stepped in to expand the right to cover “unmarried women,” whom the MTP Act did not until then explicitly include. “Certain constitutional values, such as the right to reproductive autonomy, the right to live a dignified life, the right to equality, and the right to privacy have animated our interpretation of the MTP Act and the MTP Rule,” the judgment states.

While this is a step in the right direction and is remarkable for upholding a comprehensive view of women’s rights, it is in stark contrast to how India got its abortion law, which was not exactly created keeping women’s reproductive autonomy in mind. Unlike in several other parts of the world, our abortion law did not emerge as a result of feminist interventions that placed women’s political, social and sexual autonomy at their centre. Instead, in India, women’s reproductive fate has always been tied up with government anxieties about population control. After Independence, family planning became a central plank in India’s developmental ambitions and, to that end, the regulation of women’s fertility was treated as a national imperative.

But not all women were treated the same. The country’s efforts at controlling birth rates, historically, have been influenced by deep structural inequalities. In her recent book Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas lays this out clearly. She writes that the early years after Independence “were central in bringing middle-class women—as family planners—into the state’s development agenda, and in situating poor and working-class women as their targets. This targeting would intensify in the later 1960s, as Western funders and Indian government priorities aligned to make population control a focal point of Indian development, and women’s bodies became the ground to enact this developmental agenda.” Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim women have borne the brunt of these measures. The burden of family planning in India has almost always fallen on women, except during Indira Gandhi’s emergency, when it was working-class men who were subject to coercive measures of population control.

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Reporting & Essays

- How China outmanoeuvred the Modi government and seized control of territory along the LAC

- An RSS worker trained in firearms and bomb-making reveals the Sangh’s extremist underbelly

- Modi’s Sabarmati Ashram project is another Central Vista in the making

- The lives and rituals of the Lost Tribe Jews in Mizoram

Out of Control

How China outmanoeuvred the Modi government and seized control of territory along the LAC

Sushant Singh

30 September 2022

A map of the India- China border in Ladakh, depicting the 1956 and 1960 claim lines of China, as well as lines of actual control before and after the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Wikimedia Commons

FOR THE FIRST TIME in forty-five years, on 15 June 2020, India and China recorded the death of Indian soldiers on the Line of Actual Control—the contested border between the two countries, which stretches from the Karakoram Pass in the west to Myanmar in the east. The deaths occurred in the Galwan Valley, in Ladakh, and these were the first military casualties in the territory since the 1962 Sino-India War. The full details of the incident are shrouded in ambiguity, but it involved Chinese soldiers pitching tents around the Galwan Valley and their forceful eviction by the Indian Army—there is little clarity on whether China’s People’s Liberation Army had agreed to abandon these positions. This led to a clash which claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four PLA soldiers. More than seventy Indian soldiers were injured while nearly a hundred more, including some officers, were taken captive by the Chinese. No Chinese soldier was in Indian captivity. “We were taken by surprise by how well prepared they were for the clash,” a top officer at the army headquarters in Delhi, who was part of the decision-making in the Ladakh crisis, told me.

The LAC has neither been delineated on the map nor demarcated on the ground by either side. The last attempt to do so failed nearly two decades ago. The difference in the two sides’ understanding of it is so vast that New Delhi claims the border between the two countries is 3,488 kilometres long while China says it is only around two thousand. It is the world’s longest disputed border. As the two countries do not agree on where the “actual control” exercised by either side ends, both are engaged in an uncompromising contest of asserting control over small parcels of land in a desolate Himalayan wasteland. The demonstration of territorial claims can take several forms, including soldiers patrolling up to certain points, building infrastructure along the border and controlling the limits to which people in border villages are allowed to graze their animals. The unforgiving terrain and harsh weather have not dissuaded India and China from deploying around fifty thousand additional soldiers each on the 832-kilometre LAC in Ladakh since the summer of 2020.

The deadly Galwan clash occurred at patrolling point PP14—an area that was not until then disputed, and which the Indian Army patrolled regularly. Days after it, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared in Delhi that the Chinese had not “intruded into our border, nor has any post been taken over by them”—an attempt at saving face that China gleefully seized upon as proof that it had not encroached upon Indian territory. The clamour around the deaths and the release of captive Indian soldiers, however, had blown the lid off the government’s attempts to play down the crisis in Ladakh. The situation had already come to public notice in India a month earlier because of massive physical clashes on the north bank of Pangong Lake, also in Ladakh. There were severe injuries on both sides, but no deaths. These major episodes marked the border crisis of the summer of 2020, even though tension had been building for months before that.

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Main Yashwant Shinde Bol Raha Hoon

An RSS worker trained in firearms and bomb-making reveals the Sangh’s extremist underbelly

Sagar

30 September 2022

Yashwant Shinde, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the former head of the Bajrang Dal in Maharashtra. Shinde claims in an affidavit that senior RSS leaders facilitated training for him and others in the use of modern firearms as well as bomb-making in preparation for a widespread terror campaign.

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAGNIK CHAKRABORTY

In a series of four interviews over the course of September, Yashwant Shinde, a former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak—full-time worker—spoke to Sagar, a staff writer at The Caravan. Shinde explained how he was trained to carry out covert operations in Pakistan and conduct bombings across India that could be blamed on Muslims. In 2003 and 2004, he alleged, his fellow trainees bombed mosques in the Maharashtra towns of Jalna, Purna and Parbhani. Others who allegedly helped facilitate the conspiracy have been tied to a bombing campaign that killed more than one hundred and twenty people over five years. Most of Shinde’s claims line up with the details of these cases in media reports and court records. It is not possible to fully verify Shinde’s claims unless they are tested against evidence such as phone records, training-camp registers, forensics reports and crime scene videos and photographs, which can only be accessed by investigative agencies. Many of these allegations were mentioned in an affidavit that Shinde submitted to a district court at Nanded, in which he asked to be made a witness in the 2006 Nanded bombing case. The Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, which had investigated the case and filed a closure report, has opposed his application.

Shinde is still devoted to the Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva ideology. However, he has slowly grown disillusioned with the RSS leadership after seeing many friends lose their lives conducting extremist violence for the Sangh. He has grown to believe that the sacrifices of ideologically driven extremist workers have been squandered for the political gain of the Bharatiya Janata Party, instead of the glory of Hinduism itself. He came to believe that extremist violence would only harm the Sangh Parivar in the long run. Without fully understanding their level of involvement, Shinde claims to have alerted several senior leaders in the Sangh Parivar, either directly or through intermediaries, that members of their organisation were conspiring and conducting a terror campaign.

These leaders include Indresh Kumar, a member of the RSS national executive; Shrikant Joshi, a former RSS national executive member; Venkatesh Abdeo, a former central general secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad; Sunil Deodhar, a national secretary of the BJP; Tapan Ghosh, a former RSS leader and founder of Hindu Samhati; Pramod Muthalik, the founder of the Shri Ram Sena; and Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the RSS. If Shinde’s claims are true, much of the leadership of the RSS and VHP were either part of the conspiracies behind the bombings or knew that Sangh members were part of the conspiracy and failed to act on that information.

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The Blueprint

Modi’s Sabarmati Ashram project is another Central Vista in the making

Parni Ray

30 September 2022

Prime Minister Narendra Modi writes in the visitors’ book during his visit to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad in June 2017. The ashram’s redevelopment, announced in 2021, has been described as Modi’s dream project.

SAM PANTHAKY / AFP PHOTO / GETTY IMAGES

BORIS JOHNSON, the former prime minister of United Kingdom, landed in Ahmedabad early on 21 April this year. It was his maiden visit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. The day began with a visit to the Sabarmati Ashram, once the residence of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the starting point of Gandhi’s march, to protest the British monopoly on salt, at the coastal village of Dandi. Johnson garlanded Gandhi’s portrait, spun the charkha and scribbled in the guest book that the father of the nation was “an extraordinary man.” He then breezed off to Swaminarayan Akshardham—one of the largest temple complexes in the country and, with its own IMAX theatres, exhibition halls, audio-animatronics shows, research centres and air assembly ground, a landmark of corporate Hindutva. Johnson then swung by for a quick meeting with billionaire Gautam Adani. Finally, he ended up at the British company JCB’s newest plant in Halol, where he posed for photos atop a bulldozer. The itinerary provided a perfect snapshot of Modi’s ambitions of remaking India—and the various stages of the dream development projects that will get him there.

Since Modi took office, the Sabarmati Ashram has been a consistent stopover for world leaders, including the Chinese president Xi Jinping in 2014, the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2017, the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018 and the former US president Donald Trump in 2020. It is also where Modi flagged off the two and a half year long celebration of India completing 75 years as an independent nation. The site has, in fact, been almost as recurrent a motif in Modi’s public activities as Gandhi himself. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the ashram’s redevelopment, announced in 2021, has been described as Modi’s dream project.

The “Gandhi Ashram Memorial and Precinct Development” project is being jointly undertaken by the state and union governments, and has been assigned a budget of Rs 1,200 crore. Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation Limited, owned by the Amdavad Municipal Corporation, has been tasked with its execution.

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Finding Faith

The lives and rituals of the Lost Tribe Jews in Mizoram

Photographs and Text By

Daniel Tepper

30 September 2022

I first learnt about Jewish communities living in India while traveling through the country in 2017. A friend from Assam told me about “Lost Tribe” Jews in neighbouring Mizoram. Those who identify as members of Lost Tribes believe that they are the descendants of the ten Jewish tribes that were exiled from ancient Israel after the Assyrian empire conquered it around 722 BCE.

I had previously been aware of the existence of Lost Tribe Jewish communities around the world but had not actively given it much thought. I was raised in a Jewish family—my parents are observant Jews, but I had never fully embraced the religion. However, I was curious to learn more about these communities in India who identified so strongly with the Jewish faith—something that I had simply taken for granted for most of my life.

In March 2017, I travelled to Mizoram and parts of Myanmar to meet the Lost Tribe communities and document their rituals and daily lives. The first thing I photographed was a Jewish funeral in Aizawl. What surprised me most were the personal interactions after the funeral when I had put my camera away. I experienced what would become a pattern through the rest of my journey—the Lost Tribe members warmly and wholeheartedly welcomed me into their homes and services. I was no longer a mere photographer documenting their rituals, but rather a fellow Jew from the outside world, the kind they had only limited contact with and looked upon with great curiosity. They were eager to know about my upbringing and had many questions about what life was like in Israel, where I had briefly lived. Almost all expressed a desire to return to Israel.

Over the last two decades, Jewish-Zionist groups, with funding from private donors and evangelical Christian organisations, have facilitated the relocation of members of the Lost Tribe communities from northeast India to Israel. The communities are known as the Bnei Menashe, meaning Sons of Manasseh, one of the ten lost tribes. At present, there are about three thousand members of Lost Tribe communities from India living in Israel. Another seven thousand live and practice Judaism in India. As reported in the Israeli press, the Bnei Menashe require special government authorisation from Israel to move to the country. They are not automatically covered under the Jewish Law of Return which requires proof of at least one Jewish grandparent.

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Books

- Jotirao Phule and the history of Marathi print culture

To the Presses

Jotirao Phule and the history of Marathi print culture

Karthik Malli

30 September 2022

Courtesy - Siddhesh Gautam

THE FIRST FEW PAGES of Jotirao Phule’s Gulamgiri or Slavery, published in 1873 and widely considered to be his most important text, opens with a dedication to “the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery”—a reference to the abolition of slavery in the United States, in 1865, that sets the tone for the text’s arguments. Phule goes on to quote Homer on slavery and two Western writers on the detrimental role of Brahmins in Indian society.

This is followed by a preface written in English, which was intended for the colonial authorities and written in the formal prose style already customary in English but not yet in Marathi. He gestures to the mythical lineage of the Brahmin community and the spiritual basis of their authority over non-Brahmins but interprets these myths in the context of new developments in history and anthropology, as well as early findings on Indo-European migration into India. He also describes this retelling of the traditional Puranic narrative as “the history of Brahmin domination in India.” Then, quoting from the Manusmriti, he describes how Brahmins perpetuated caste by suppressing non-Brahmins and extracting their labour. The preface ends with a petition to the colonial authorities, who, Phule hopes, “will ere long see the error of their ways, trust less to writers or men who look through high class spectacles and take the glory into their own hands of emancipating my Sudra brethren from the trammels of bondage which the Brahmins have woven round them like the coils of a serpent.”

A Marathi introduction follows this English preface. As the text switches between languages, it retains its prose form but now addresses a non-Brahmin Marathi readership instead. Continuing in the same vein as before, Phule writes of how Brahmins tricked non-Brahmins into serving them while retaining control over their resources in a spiritual and secular sense. He then writes of developments in the West, where slavery was abolished.

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Editor's Corner

- Editor's Pick

Editor's Pick

The Caravan

30 September 2022

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

ON 14 OCTOBER 1956, BR Ambedkar, seen here posing for a photograph with members of the Bharatiya Bouddha Jana Samiti, converted to Buddhism along with almost half a million followers. He had declared his intention to convert at the Depressed Classes Conference in Yeola, on 13 October 1935. Although he had been unable to prevent being born a Hindu untouchable, he said, “I solemnly assure you that I will not die a Hindu.”

Over the next two decades, Ambedkar exhorted Dalits to leave Hinduism and studied several prominent religions. He eventually settled on Buddhism, because of its indigeneity, rationality and commitment to social equality. On 23 September 1956, he announced that he would convert on Dussehra that year. Nagpur was chosen as the venue, he later said, not because it was the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh but because it was named after the Nag people, who had resisted the Aryans and propagated the Buddha’s teachings throughout the subcontinent.

The mass conversion, organised by the Bharatiya Bouddha Jana Samiti’s Nagpur branch, was held at a ground near the Vaccine Institute, on South Ambazari Road. Anyone over the age of 18 could participate. The Indian Railways arranged a special train from Bombay, and all trains to Nagpur were full of attendees. The entry passes issued by the organisers were soon exhausted, and the event was declared open to all. After his own initiation by Mahasthavir Chandramani, the oldest Buddhist monk in the country, Ambedkar initiated his followers. Two days later, he converted a further three hundred thousand people at Chandrapur.

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Table of Contents

Caravan Magazine

The Lede

The Danish government's efforts to revoke protections for Syrian refugees

Perspectives

Yashwant Shinde’s affidavit further proves the BJP’s hypocrisy on terrorism

A landmark judgment finally acknowledges abortion is about women’s autonomy

Reporting & Essays

How China outmanoeuvred the Modi government and seized control of territory along the LAC

An RSS worker trained in firearms and bomb-making reveals the Sangh’s extremist underbelly

Modi’s Sabarmati Ashram project is another Central Vista in the making

The lives and rituals of the Lost Tribe Jews in Mizoram

Books

Jotirao Phule and the history of Marathi print culture

Editor's Corner

Editor's Pick