The Caravan August 2022

THE LEDE 8 Kinshuk Gupta is an award-winning writer, poet and freelance journalist who writes on culture, gender and books. 10 Joseph Palmer is a former diplomat and bartender. His non-fiction work covers wildlife, travel, sport, politics, music and art PERSPECTIVES 12 Seema Chishti is a Delhi based journalist and writer. 14 Viruben Nandakumar is an editor at the Tamil Guardian, focussing on Sri Lanka and human rights. 18 Bindu Doddahatti is associated with the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru as well as Prisons Forum, Karnataka. Ameya Bokil is associated with the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru as well as Prisons Forum, Karnataka. REPORTAGE AND ESSAYS 22 Shiv Inder Singh is a freelance journalist and the editor-in-chief of the Punjabi portal Suhi Saver. 50 Eram Agha is a…

When I was in my second year at Delhi’s Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital, a lanky boy in a red shirt and fraying jeans came to the dermatology OPD for a consultation. He spoke openly about the globular swellings on his penis that had ruptured, leaving shallow craters. A busy resident asked him to strip and lie down on the examination table. She enquired about his history of contact: “Have you had sexual relations with a girl?” “Are you married?” “Have you visited any sex workers?” “No,” he responded to each question, quickly and confidently. Running out of time and patience, the resident referred him to me. It was only when I changed “girl” to “partner” that I understood the reason for his denial. He was in a sexual…

In the wake of a global health crisis, it is worth taking a moment to appreciate the humble horseshoe crab. According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, “if you have ever needed a vaccine … you most likely benefited from the use of horseshoe crab blood.” The SCDNR would know—it is facing a lawsuit on the subject. Horseshoe crabs are a common sight in South Carolina, a rural state on the south-eastern coast of the United States covering roughly the same area as Jharkhand but with a population smaller than Himachal Pradesh. The state’s coastline is a picturesque labyrinth of interweaving barrier islands, saltwater marshes and sandy beaches. Every spring, Atlantic horseshoe crabs converge here by the tens of thousands to spawn, just as they have since time immemorial. “Time…

In the month of July, 75 years ago, a soon to be independent India chose the tricolour as its national flag. A spirited debate followed in the Constituent Assembly before it was adopted. However, the national emblem, inspired by the Sarnath lions, was adopted on 26 January 1950 without debate. According to the historian Madhavan Palat, the four lions found in the excavations at the Buddhist site of Sarnath, in Uttar Pradesh, “standing together, facing the world in all four directions, represented a spirit of courage, calm and control.” Palat, the editor of Jawaharlal Nehru’s multi-volume Selected Works, understood Nehru and the imagery he wanted to invoke. Nehru, he said, believed firmly in projecting a view of India that was suitable to the deep turmoil and violence the region was emerging…

When Gotabaya Rajapaksa had nowhere else to go—protestors raging against him on the streets of Colombo, his opulent presidential residence overrun, blocked by airport immigration staff from boarding civil flights out of the country—he found sanctuary at a military base for his last night in Sri Lanka. The next day, 13 July, he and his wife finally escaped aboard a special air-force flight to the Maldives, leaving behind the country he and his brothers had led to complete economic ruin. In his darkest hour, Gotabaya knew that the military was the last institution still with the power to stand up to the people who had sent him running. Gotabaya gave up the presidency, and the immunity from arrest that came with it, only after he had made his way to Singapore.…

By March 2021, the National Crime Records Bureau—the apex body maintaining crime- and criminal-related databases—had a record of eight million fingerprints in its National Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Much of it was collected, it is assumed, under the purview of either the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, or various state regulations. A lot of what has been collected, though, goes beyond the sanction of the law. For instance, there are the recent reports of police in Telangana and Madhya Pradesh collecting fingerprints and photographs during stop-and-search operations. It would seem that, so far, state desire for greater surveillance and the eagerness to adopt new technologies for this purpose has been checked only by the absence of physical infrastructure to store the quantities of data and not by any legal framework…