The Caravan July 2022

On a dusty morning in Palasani, a village near Jodhpur, 46-year-old Kaburi Mirasi recounted stories her mother told her about the Chhappaniya Akal—the Famine of ’56. The famine occurred in 1899–90, or 2056 in the Bikrami calendar. Kaburi narrated how members of her community of Mirasi Muslims, a historically marginalised caste in Rajasthan, would beg their landlords for spare grain or how water from boiling green pulses was preserved as a source of nourishment. The famine spread through north-western India and, in Rajasthan, brought illness and hunger like never before. “People left their homes forever,” Kaburi told me. “Millions moved away to villages far away in the hope of some work and a meal.” In Rajasthan, famines are classified into four types: a dearth of water, a dearth of grain, a…

In 2020, Lalita Boipai, a rural healthcare worker, was conducting tests with malaria kits in her village, Bera Kundrijor, as part of a government survey. She, however, was not prepared for its findings. “Surprised at the zero cases of malaria in my report, I got nervous thinking it would raise questions from the higher authorities,” she told me. “Out of panic, I reported two-three fake cases.” Bera Kundrijor is one of the 62 villages in the Noamundi block of West Singhbhum district in Jharkhand. The district is highly vulnerable to a malaria endemic. According to the National Vector Borne Disease Control Program, Jharkhand reported 37,133 malaria cases in 2019—in which West Singhbhum alone reported 9,077 cases, the highest in the state. In 2020, the cases in Jharkhand came down to 16,655. Astounded…

Simranjit Singh Mann’s astounding victory over the Aam Aadmi Party candidate in the Sangrur Parliamentary bypoll, coming on the heel of the AAP’s victory in the state election months ago, is representative of the turmoil underway in Punjab. The virtual disappearance of the mainstream Akali Dal has opened up a huge space in the politics of the Sikh majority in the state and Mann, a maverick radical Sikh politician who has always been on the extreme right of the spectrum of splinter Akali groups, marks only the beginning of a period in which various new alternatives will emerge to fill this vacuum. Based in Punjab as a reporter, over twenty years ago, I found that, while reporting on elections in rural areas, it paid to take the litany of complaints voters…

On 7 April 2022, the union home minister, Amit Shah, while speaking at a meeting of parliament’s official-language committee, described Hindi as “the language of India.” He said that Hindi, an official language, should become an “important part of the unity of the country.” When speakers of different languages in India converse with each other, he added, “it should be in the language of India” and, in keeping with this spirit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used Hindi for running the government. Shah suggested that Hindi, rather than indigenous languages, should take the place of English. He announced that all eight north-eastern states had agreed to make Hindi compulsory up to the tenth standard and had recruited over twenty thousand Hindi teachers. This was not the first time that the home minister…

Between April and June 2021, India experienced the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a second wave swept across the country, India recorded more than half of its total COVID-19 fatalities. The estimates vary widely, with the most conservative figure being more than a quarter million deaths. It was a period of extreme loss, angst, helplessness, mayhem and grief. Vineeta Sharma writes a personal account of that time from Delhi, one of the worst affected cities in India, where hospitals were overfull, as were crematoria and burial grounds. Sharma writes a lived account—a story behind the numbers and facts about failed institutions—as she still seeks closure a year later. In the second week of April 2021, my husband, our two children—one still a toddler—and I tested positive for COVID-19. We immediately…

THE SENIOR ADVOCATE A MARIARPUTHAM was all set for an important day in court. He was to appear in front of a division bench of the Supreme Court on 15 April 2015, representing the National Investigation Agency, India’s primary anti-terror task force, against five accused in one of the nation’s largest terror attacks. On 29 September 2008, during the Islamic holy month of Ramzan, two bombs concealed in a motorcycle had exploded in the Muslim-dominated town of Malegaon in north-western Maharashtra, killing six people and injuring more than a hundred. Another bomb had gone off on the same day, near a mosque in the Muslim-majority Sukka Bazaar area of Modasa, a town in Gujarat. {ONE} The accused were all members of a Hindu militant group called Abhinav Bharat, linked to several senior…