Founder: Vishva Nath (1917-2002) VOLUME 13 • ISSUE 10

Editor-in-Chief, Publisher & Printer: Paresh Nath OCTOBER 2021

cover story / crime

26
Ritual Killings
How crimes of superstition
thrive in the new India
srishti jaswal

Superstition pervades families across India, irrespective of geography,

educational status or religious proclivities. It is often a way to cope
with uncertainty, and many godmen know how to exploit these
sentiments. Under Narendra Modi’s leadership, superstitious practices
have gained more legitimacy. The growing acceptability of rituals in
the public sphere paves the way for superstitious beliefs to proliferate
in the new India. Such beliefs can inspire not just rituals, but also
heinous crimes. Perpetrators are able to demonise or dehumanise their
victims as witches, sexual objects or sacrificial lambs in the name of
faith. Seema Katara, who survived a brutal night of torture in Madhya
Pradesh, was punished for displaying independence and bucking
patriarchal norms. Rajni Yadav was drowned in the Ganges for daring
26 to refuse sex to a godman. And a little Bakarwal girl in Kathua was
raped and murdered by grown men for reasons we are yet to fully
understand.

perspectives

14

government
14 A Disaster Foretold
How India lost the plot in Afghanistan
sushant singh

politics
17 New Beginnings
The BJP’s plans for a post-Yediyurappa future
46 in Karnataka
sugata srinivasaraju

politics politics
46 The Uncertain Path 20 State of Confusion
Can the Tibetan struggle outlive the Dalai Lama? Why the Modi government lies
lewis page suchitra vijayan

OCTOBER 2021 3
 the lede

arts
8 Conqueror in White 64
Chintamani Shivdikar’s reign as the pop star
of Mumbai’s first people
neha mehrotra and
saranya subramanian

communities
10 Fee Enterprise photo essay / conflict
Bhutan’s debate over controlling tourism 64 Red is the Colour
yeshi dema and roderick wijunamai of Spring
The afterlife of Nepal’s civil war
communities prasiit sthapit
12 Fighting the Tide
Venice rethinks its dependence on tourism
amid the COVID-19 pandemic
dario antonelli and giacomo sini

books
98

history
86 Against History
Sanjeev Sanyal’s attempts to
rewrite India’s past
meera visvanathan

the bookshelf 96
86
editor’s pick 98

4 THE CARAVAN
 editor Anant Nath
executive editor Vinod K Jose
political editor Hartosh Singh Bal
senior editor Roman Gautam
books editor Maya Palit
creative director Tanvi Mishra
associate editors Martand Kaushik and
Puja Sen
contributors web editor Surabhi Kanga
senior assistant editor Ajachi Chakrabarti
assistant editors Arshu John, Akash
THE LEDE 8 Neha Mehrotra is a freelance reporter based in Delhi and a graduate from the Columbia
Poyam, Tusha Mittal, Amrita Singh and
School of Journalism. Abhay Regi
Saranya Subramanian is a Mumbai-based writer and MFA candidate at the University of San assistant editor (hindi) Vishnu Sharma
Francisco. staff writers Nikita Saxena, Sagar, Nileena
MS and Aathira Konikkara
10 Yeshi Dama is a former student of political science and sociology at Royal Thimphu College.
contributing writers Dhirendra K Jha,
Roderick Wijunamai teaches at the department of social sciences at Royal Thimphu College. Prabhjit Singh and Jatinder Kaur Tur
12 Dario Antonelli is an activist and freelance journalist based in Livorno. His work has been editorial fellow (health) Nayantara
published in The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Il Manifesto, Domani, FQ Millennium and El País. Narayanan
reporting fellow (health) Chahat Rana
Giacomo Sini is a photojournalist based in Livorno. He is primarily interested in the stories
editorial fellow (tech) Mehak Mahajan
of refugees from conflict regions. His work has been published in several international reporting fellow (tech) Rachna Khaira
publications, including Vice, National Geographic, the New Internationalist andAl Jazeera. reporting fellows Sunil Kashyap
and Lalnunkimi Colney
multimedia producer CK Vijayakumar
PERSPECTIVES 14 Sushant Singh is the Henry Hart Rice Lecturer at Yale University and a senior fellow at the
multimedia reporter Shahid Tantray
Centre for Policy Research. multimedia editor Nabeela Paniyath
17 Sugata Srinivasaraju is a bilingual journalist, author and columnist. His book Furrows in a fact-checker Ahan Penkar
Field: The Unexplored Life of HD Deve Gowda will be published by Penguin shortly. senior software engineer
Anjaneya Sivan
20 Suchitra Vijayan is a barrister-at-law, writer and researcher. She is the founder and
photo researcher Utkarsh
executive director of the Polis Project, and the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History graphic designers Paramjeet Singh
of Modern India, recently published by Context, Westland. and Sukruti Anah Staneley
hindi translator Parijat P
trainee journalist (hindi) Ankita Chauhan
REPORTAGE 26 Srishti Jaswal is an independent journalist. She is member of the Reporters’ Collective, a
editorial manager Haripriya KM
AND ESSAYS group of investigative journalists based in India. She was a 2020 mobile-journalism fellow deputy editorial manager Vidhya CK
with Internews and Qisa Labs. She is also a recipient of the National Foundation for India contributing editors Deborah Baker,
grant. Fatima Bhutto, Chandrahas Choudhury,
46 Lewis Page is a former Luce Scholar at The Caravan. Siddhartha Deb, Sadanand Dhume,
Siddharth Dube, Christophe Jaffrelot, Mira
Kamdar, Miranda Kennedy, Amitava Kumar,
PHOTO ESSAY 64 Prasiit Sthapit is a visual storyteller based in Kathmandu. In 2016, he received the Magnum Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramanian and
Emergency Fund Grant and was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. Salil Tripathi
He is currently associated with the multimedia collective Fuzz Factory Productions, the editorial interns Sushovan Patnaik,
Amitoj Singh and Shubh Badhwar
photography platform photo.circle, and the photography festival Photo Kathmandu. He is also social-media intern Shafin Shamsudheen
the director of Fuzzscape, a multi-media music documentary project.
Roshan Maharjan is a Kathmandu-based trekking guide and the co-founder of Yoga Trekking
International. He is also a researcher on issues of cultural preservation and music.

BOOKS 86 Meera Visvanathan is a historian of early India based in the National Capital Region.

COVER Illustration by Saumya Shukla; Typography Design by Sukruti Anah Staneley

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THE LEDE
Conqueror in White
Chintamani Shivdikar’s reign as the pop
star of Mumbai’s first people / Arts
/ neha mehrotra and saranya subramanian
“Machhli humare rag-rag mein hain, isiliye mere
gaane mein samundar hamesha rehta hai”—Fish
run in our veins, so the sea is always present in my
songs—Chintamani Shivdikar told us as we sipped
sweet chai from porcelain cups in his home in
Worli Koliwada, a fishing village in Mumbai. Even
at home, he was dressed in white clothes and gold
accessories; chains with fish pendants hung from
his neck, and bright rings branded each of his fin-
gers. A folk singer and YouTube star, Shivdikar is
a local legend. He seems like a quintessential pop
star, but his story reveals the journey of the Kolis
and their unique connection with the sea, in a city
obsessed with land reclamation.
Worli Koliwada is shaped like a camel’s back.
Shivdikar lives near the local Golfa Devi Mandir,
on one of the camel’s many humps. The area hous-
es close to eight thousand people, most of whom
belong to the Koli community—sub-groups of
which are categorised as Schedule Tribes or Other
Backward Classes in Maharashtra. The Kolis are
said to be the first inhabitants of Bombay, hav-
ing arrived in the city nearlyfive hundred years
ago. The fishing community settled in Koliwadas
across the city—in Worli, Colaba, Vasai, Juhu and
Sion—in order to remain close to the sea, their
principal source of livelihood. Shivdikar is a proud
Koli. “When Deve Gowda was prime minister, he
wore a lungi and came here,” he told us. “If he can
flaunt Koli culture, why should I be ashamed of
it?” Shivdikar’s house is filled with photos of him-
self with former prime ministers and important
people from the Marathi and Hindi entertainment
worlds, music CDs recorded over the years, as well
as trophies and certificates he has won.
Shivdikar forayed into the arts when he was
six years old and won a prize in a drama com-
petition organised by the Kumar Kala Kendra,
a local drama society. Soon, he started singing,
dancing and writing as a hobby. His father, who
was a performer as well, encouraged Shivdikar’s
artistic inclinations. After college, like everyone
8 THE CARAVAN
else around him, he got married and settled into
a routine job, albeit one that kept him close to the
sea. “I worked at the naval docks for forty-five-
years, retiring as an HSK-1 officer,” he told us,
referring to his rank as a highly skilled officer.
Shivdikar continued to dabble in music. In 2018,
he wrote and sang “Papletwaali,” the song that
catapulted him to YouTube stardom. “Everytime
I go out now, people stop me in the street and sing
that song,” he said.
The song, produced by Zubaan Music, has 1.8
million views on YouTube. The concept is simple:
the singer is wooing a local papletwaali—a woman
who sells paplet, or pomfret. Paplet is both costly
and tasty, Shivdikar said, which is why the song’s
lyrics offer up a list of things to win over the pa-
pletwaali: paithani sarees, delicate sayali flowers,
Bata shoes, pearl earrings and more. The song,
adapted from a Koli folk tune, is written in the
Koli tongue, a hybrid of Konkani and Marathi.
Shivdikar loves to talk, particularly about his
music. He can spend hours explaining, and jus-
tifying, his choice of one word over another, his
characterisation of a person in a particular way
or the general mood he was aiming to convey. “I
sing to recharge the emotions,” he told us. He is
kannagi khanna for the caravan
indubitably proud of his community and showcas-
es thisin his songs, which are suffused with Koli
iconography: the traditional dress of a fisherman
topi and langodi, a triangular dhoti; the promi-
nent nathni, a nose ring; and what has come to
be known as “Koli dance,” performed in school
functions across the state. He is, however, very
clear that he does not sing for the Koli community
alone, but for all audiences. Whether they feature
him rolling up in a white Mercedes or dancing
with local bands, his music videos draw people in. above: The folk singer
“I want to share the fun that we have in our com- turned YouTube star
munity with everyone and I want them to enjoy Chintamani Shivdikar
like we do,” he said. poses behind
Mumbai’s skylines
Another Shivdikar hit, “Daru Tari Keli Sarkarni
and sea. In 2018, his
Band”—The government has banned your alco- song “Papletwaali”
hol—has garnered almost two hundred thousand catapulted him to
views on YouTube. Its reggae-like tune and YouTube stardom.

relatable lyrics have made it a popular
hit across languages and age groups.
One of his lesser-known songs, “Havlay
Havlay Dulat Jay”—Slowly we will
wash away—describes the process of
catching and killing fish. Its refrain
reminds us that we all arise from, and
ultimately return to, the sea.
But increasingly, the sea is mov-
ing further away. As work on the
government’s Mumbai Coastal Road
Project continues, land reclamation
has swallowed whole swathes of the
sea. The project envisions a sea-kiss-
ing highway along the entire western
coast of Mumbai, from Kandivali to
Nariman Point. The 35.6-kilometre-
freeway would require 111 hectares
of land to be reclaimed, of which the
government has already secured envi-
OCTOBER 2021
the lede
ronmental clearance for 90 hectares.
Such projects have an outsize effect on
communities like the Kolis, who live on
the coast and depend on fishing. “See,
this shouldn’t happen, but what can we
do?” Shivdikar told us. “The govern-
ment does what it wants to. Who can
stop them?”
Shivdikar maintained that he is
staunchly apolitical.“Main neta nahin,
abhineta hoon”—I am an artist, not a
politician—he told us. He added that
he has a different “artist personality,”
separate from his personal life. “People
sometimes call me ‘blackie,’” he said,
referring to his dark complexion. “But,
when the stage lights fall on my face, I
am white.” That is why he believes he
is a different person on stage. “When
I’m at home, I am myself,” he said. “But
when I go on stage, I am different. I
belong to the audience.”
In Worli Koliwada, a cool, briny
breeze serves as an insistent reminder
that the sea is near. The smell of fish,
the community’s muse and mainstay,
pervades much of it. On the pavement,
fisherwomen fry bombil—a variety
of fish, popularly known as Bombay
duck. Loud voices and colourful houses
throng both sides of the alleys that fold
out like a maze. At the heart of this
maze is the Worli Fort, built by the
British in the seventeenth century and
flanked on three sides by the sea. In a
city teeming with tourists, the Worli
Fort has remained surprisingly unfre-
quented. Instead, it has become a space
of exercise and recreation for locals.
It is no surprise, then, that most of
Shivdikar’s music videos are shot at the
fort. Poised on its ramparts, he towers
over the sea and the city, a conqueror
in white. s
9
 the lede
Fee Enterprise
Bhutan’s debate over controlling tourism
/ Communities
/ yeshi dema and roderick wijunamai
Couched below a picture of the Himalayan blue
poppy, the national flower, the inscription on
a pamphlet by the Tourism Council of Bhutan
reads, “Happiness is a place.” Often dubbed “the
last Shangri-La”—after the fictional place de-
scribed in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Hori-
zon—Bhutan markets itself as a “high-end” and
“exclusive” tourism destination. The country’s
tourism policy is guided by Gross National Happi-
ness, a multidimensional strategy of development
pioneered by Bhutan’s fourth king, Jigme Singye
Wangchuck, that propagates the idea that human
development goes beyond economic growth and
involves social, environmental, cultural, and gov-
ernance dimensions.
In just under half a century since Bhutan
opened its doors to international tourists, in
1974, the industry has emerged as one of the most
important sectors for GNH-driven growth. The
lillian suwanrumpha / afp / getty images
10
country’s unique “high value, low volume” tour-
ism policy emphasises maximising the economic below: In early
benefits of tourism—through generating increased 2020, the Bhutan
government
employment and foreign-currency reserves—while
imposed a daily
minimising its negative impacts on the indigenous Sustainable
culture and environment by controlling tourist Development
arrivals through a daily-tariff system. Fee on regional
In 2008, however, Bhutan’s tourism policy took tourists of 1,200
a major turn when the newly elected democratic ngultrums—
about sixteen
government announced a “high value, low impact”
dollars. While
policy instead. Following the policy shift, Bhutan the government
witnessed a significant increase in regional tourist expected that the
arrivals from countries such as India, Bangladesh SDF would bring the
and Maldives—the number of regional tourists volume of tourists
grew from 16,418 in 2011 to 202,290 in 2018, while down to within the
country’s “carrying
tourists from other countries grew from 47,610
capacity,” it has met
in 2011 to only 71,807 in 2018. The aftermath was with criticism from
an increase in local concerns, ranging from the the tourism sector.
violation of cultural norms and increasing waste
to noise pollution, traffic congestion and so on.
An editorial in the Druk Journal’s special issue on
THE CARAVAN

tourism noted that the policy shift had
been announced “to promote Indian
tourists in an Accelerated Bhutan
Socio-economic Development Plan,”
on the advice of the consultancy firm
McKinsey India.
On 17 October 2019, even as the
debates on tourism policy unfolded, all
Bhutanese media outlets ran head-
lines about an Indian tourist being
seen atop one of the 108 stupas at the
Dochula Pass. The stupas at Dochula
hold profound spiritual and national
significance for the Bhutanese peo-
ple. The incident served as a tipping
point. In early 2020, the government
imposed a daily Sustainable Develop-
ment Fee on regional tourists of 1,200
ngultrums—about sixteen dollars. For
the first time since the inception of
tourism in Bhutan, regional tourists
The country’s tourism
policy is guided by Gross
National Happiness, a
multidimensional strategy
of development pioneered
by Bhutan’s fourth king,
Jigme Singye Wangchuck.
ww
were to follow regulations similar to
tariff-paying international tourists,
who currently pay $250 per day at
peak season, and $200 at other times.
This tariff serves multiple social,
economic and environmental purpos-
es, and contributes significantly to the
national economy. Further, regional
tourists were now required to visit
Bhutan through prepaid package tours
arranged by Bhutanese tour operators
or hoteliers.
While the government expected
that the SDF would bring the vol-
ume of tourists down to within the
country’s “carrying capacity,” it has
met with criticism from the tourism
sector. Hoteliers, as well as owners
of homestays, cafés and handicraft
shops, told us of shared apprehensions
about the SDF policy. Many thought
the new tariff could discourage re-
gional tourists altogether, disrupting
sources of income. Not having to pay
the SDF, hoteliers explained, had en-
abled regional tourists to spend more
on their accommodation and on such
things as shopping.
“At first, the government encouraged
people to build hotels,” the owner of a
four-star resort with one of the highest
room inventories in the country told us.
“They were giving loans with lower in-
terest rates, there were lots of subsidies
and tax holidays. The whole idea was
to increase and improve the number of
hotels in Bhutan. But now the govern-
ment is changing the policy to limit the
number of tourists coming to Bhutan.”
The two approaches, the resort owner
pointed out, were contradictory.
Hoteliers told us that regional tour-
ists came in large numbers and kept
their businesses afloat. “There will be
problem of low room-occupancy rates,
given the booming hotel industry—
there are so many hotels in Paro and
Thimphu now,” Wangchuk, who runs
a hotel in Paro, said. “Also, regional
tourists usually travel in groups, so
with SDF it will now be too expensive
for families of more than four or five
members to spend even a few days in
Bhutan.”
For homestay owners, catering to
regional tourists helps provide an al-
ternate source of income. They agreed
with the hoteliers that the income
from regional tourism would now be
reduced, but were more receptive of
the government’s decision to imple-
ment the SDF. “It is nice to receive
excess income from regional tourists,”
Zangmo, who owns one of the oldest
homestays in Paro, told us. “We can
use it for shopping and do a lot of other
things,” such as renovations. “But we
will be fine even without that income,”
she added. “The government must have
OCTOBER 2021
the lede
LETTER FROM
BHUTAN
made the decision because it is good for
the country.”
Owners of cafés and handicraft shops
expressed similar concerns over how
the SDF could negatively impact their
businesses. “Our menus are designed to
cater to regional tourists,” the proprietor
of one of Paro’s most popular cafés, who
did not wish to be named, told us. “For
instance, we have Indian thalis, roti,
chai, chhole bhature. Many of them ask
for vegetarian items, so more than nine-
ty percent of our menu is vegetarian.”
Most people we interviewed deemed
regional tourism imperative for sus-
taining their businesses, contradicting
certain media reports that presented
regional tourism in a wholly negative
light. Hoteliers mentioned their pref-
erence for regional tourists owing to
the “quick and straight” cash payments
they made under the pre-SDF model, as
opposed to the long chain of payments
and paperwork that came with non-re-
gional tourists visiting through tour
operators. With COVID-19 restrictions
having meant almost no customers,
café owners told us that they did not
realise the value of regional tourists
until the pandemic put a complete halt
to arrivals.
Tourism entrepreneurs’ experiences
with regional tourists are not entirely
positive, however. Sometimes, during
peak season, crowding by regional
tourists impedes customer service.
Choki, a handicraft vendor in Thim-
pu, told us that “because of regional
tourists’ overcrowding, other interna-
tional tourists who usually spend more
on handicraft items tend to walk away
from the shop.” Regional tourists, she
said, “should be accompanied by guides
who can explain to them what they can
and cannot do.” s
11
the lede

Fighting the Tide

Venice rethinks its dependence on tourism
amid the COVID-19 pandemic / Communities

/ dario antonelli and

giacomo sini

A handful of people were waiting at

the dock on Burano, an island in the
Venetian Lagoon, and the approaching
vaporetto—a canal boat used for public
transport—was almost empty. The
narrow streets were silent, while the
traditional lace shops and restaurants
on the facades of the brightly coloured
houses were closed. “At this time of the
day it’s usually full of tourists, but look
at this!” Bruno, an 83-year-old resident,
told us, pointing towards the church in
the deserted square.
Bruno’s story is like that of many in
Burano. Born on the island into a large
fishing family, he left the hard life at sea
at a young age to work in tourism. He
giacomo sini

has worked at the Trattoria da Romano,

a local restaurant, since the 1950s. “I’ve
always been a waiter; I prefer to fly
low,” he said. “Now I clean the fish in
the kitchen. I do all the jobs an old man
can do.” Located in an eighteenth-cen-
tury building that once housed a lace
factory, the family-run restaurant has
been visited by a number of celebrities
over the years. “I have photos with
Robert De Niro, with Jimmy Carter’s
wife, with the most famous footbal-
lers,” Bruno said. In recent months,
however, it has only sporadically
opened, thanks to restrictions imposed
due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We
hope to reopen soon,” he added. “We
need you.”
At Fondamente Nove, the last stop
on the vaporetto route, the remaining
passengers scattered on the quay. A
man in his fifties gave us directions to
St Mark’s Basilica. “The workers are
protesting against the reduction of
their salaries, and the timetables are all
out of whack, so I don’t know how long
it will take you,” he said. “Welcome to
our world!”
In the shadow of the basilica’s bell
tower, the chairs of the cafés lining the
arcade were piled up, wrapped in plas-
At St Mark’s Basilica, the chairs of the cafés lining the arcade were piled up.
tic. It was a bright spring day in April,
but the passers-by could be counted on
the fingers of one hand. The museum
was locked up and the bell tower was
closed, with only one chapel in the
basilica open for prayer. Looking at the
basilica from the opposite side of the
empty square, we were struck by the
geometry of the buildings—an unprec-
edented beauty, but also a paralysing
desolation.
The streets most frequented by tour-
ists in normal times, from St Mark’s to
the Rialto, were similarly empty. In the
few open shops, the owners despaired
about how much longer the tourists
would stay away. At the Rialto, the
vaporetto dock, usually crowded, was
deserted. All the gondolas were moored
at the jetty. Under the midday sun,
some of the gondoliers had unfastened
their jackets. Some chatted among
themselves, while others ate sandwich-
es for lunch. Only one enterprising soul
attempted to attract passing university
students.
In the breakfast hall of the Pensione
Accademia, a hotel in Villa Maravege,
furniture and food racks were covered
by white cloths. The Grand Canal was
visible through the window. “Selfishly,
I could say that Venice is now fabulous
but, economically, it’s a disaster, and it
will take almost two years to recover,”
Giovanna Salmaso, whose family has
run the hotel since the 1950s, told us.
Salmaso has been managing the ho-
tel for the past thirty years. She said
that the hotel had received the relief
amount promised by the government,
but “the employees are suffering a
lot in this situation. The redundancy
fund is paid late and only covers half
the normal salary.” She added that
some of her competitors were close
to exhausting their savings and that
many hotels had invested in upgrades
to reopen safely. “As hotel managers,
we experience the situation as an
injustice.” She argued that this period
should serve to bring about a new
awareness, because evidently in mass

12 THE CARAVAN

tourism, “something is not working,
we must realise this.”
Francesca Dal Bo has been wel-
coming guests into her home—which
she turned into a bed-and-breakfast
called Al Canal—for the last fifteen
years. “I was one of the first to open
a bed-and-breakfast in Venice,” she
told us. “By opening my house, I try to
offer a different point of view on the
city, transmit something to the guests.”
When the online aggregator Airbnb
started operations in Italy a decade ago,
it contacted her because of Al Canal’s
popularity. “Initially, the philosophy of
home-sharing was central to Airbnb,
then everything changed,” she said.
The aggregator has been blamed in
several tourist cities for rising housing
costs.
Dal Bo blamed the local administra-
tion for a lack of housing policy, adding
that “there is no support for fishing
and traditional craft activities, nor for
innovation projects. Instead, money is
being spent on MOSE”—a controver-
sial flood-barrier project, designed in
the 1980s, that was tested in July last
year amid protests by environmental
groups—“which is already rotten.” In
the past year and a half, she said, she
had only received two guests. Now,
there were no more bookings, and she
was not eligible for government relief.
She said that she hopes that this situ-
ation will make people realise that an
entire city cannot be made dependent
on mass tourism. “Venice is unique, and
we risk destroying it.”
At the Campo Santa Maria Formosa,
a public square, at least two hundred
people listened to speeches at an as-
sembly organised by the Comitato No
Grandi Navi—No Big Ships Committee.
For years, the group has opposed the
traffic of large cruise ships in the Ven-
ice Lagoon, which it says is dangerous
for the ecosystem and the city’s fragile
Stefano Micheletti said
that the model based on a
“monoculture of tourism”
has aggravated the current
crisis and is leading to the
slow death of the city.
ww
foundations, as well as being part of
a tourism model that makes Venice
unliveable.
On 1 April, the Italian government
issued a decree banning large ships
from docking near the city centre, after
a court had struck down a previous ban
imposed after the 2012 Costa Concordia
disaster. Two weeks later, the cruise
line MSC announced that two of its
ships would include the usual jour-
ney past St Mark’s Square and up the
Giudecca Canal as part of a weeklong
Mediterranean voyage in June. Local
and regional authorities welcomed the
news and announced that ships would
be allowed to dock in Venice until fur-
ther notice. “They’re mocking us!” the
protesters at the Campo Santa Maria
Formosa said.
Stefano Micheletti, one of the most
active members of No Grandi Navi, told
us that the model based on a “mono-
culture of tourism” has aggravated
the current crisis, “which hits dockers
as well as hotel workers and other
sectors.” Micheletti said it is leading to
the slow death of the city, “which this
year has dropped below fifty thousand
inhabitants.” He added that the issue
“must be tackled together with work-
ers, or we will be trapped again in the
fake opposition between environment
and work.”
Marta Canino has been active in the
movement since the very beginning.
She grew up in the centre of Venice,
but has been living on the island of
Giudecca for the past few years. She
swore to never move back to the tourist
hub, which, for a resident, is “a desert
even in normal times.” The crisis in
the tourism sector has affected almost
everyone, she said, because “the only
job opportunities here are in the public
sector or in tourism-related activities.”-
Canino said that many Venetians hope
that the tourists and cruise ships return
soon, but the city’s deep social prob-
lems would remain with or without
tourism. “In the last year alone, Venice
has lost a thousand inhabitants.”
No Grandi Navi’s protests continued
into the summer, with around two
thousand protesters in small boats pick-
eting the MSC Orchestra when it made
its way through the city in June. The
committee also held demonstrations at
OCTOBER 2021
the lede
a summit of G-20 foreign ministers in
the city. The cruise industry organised
counter-protests, but to no avail. On 13
July, the Italian government reiterated
that the ban would come into effect on
1 August.
The shops in the Rialto close every
afternoon, Sara Bonfili told us, because
“very few Venetians come here to shop,
and many have never bought fish at the
Pescaria”—the Rialto’s fourteenth-cen-
tury fish market. Bonfili is 40 years old,
and started working as a guide, mostly
for foreign tourists, in early 2019. Last
year, her project, “Tell me a story
Venice,” was stopped by the pandemic.
“I moved my work online,” she said.
“I found new contacts and a network
began to emerge.” She began working
with Venetians, which completely
changed her perspective. “There are
people who live in the city but never
go shopping at the market,” she said.
LETTER FROM
ITALY
“They don’t know how gondolas are
made, or they don’t know the islands in
the lagoon.”
Bonfili now takes residents of the city
to learn about traditional fishing, the
production of barena honey in the salt
marshes of the lagoon or the cultivation
of artichokes on the island of Sant’Eras-
mo—places to which Venetians can
return on their own. At Sant’Erasmo,
for instance, she takes her clients to Da
Gino e Inda, a six-hectare farm which
produces not just castraùre, a local vari-
ety of artichoke, but also flour and olive
oil. These products, along with others
from the lagoon, are sold at a little food
truck, called Experientia, at the farm.
Projects like this offer new avenues
in Venice, which has increasingly been
reserved for tourist activities and
where a wall seems to separate the city
from its own inhabitants. These proj-
ects are drops in the ocean, but they
can break down that wall and create
new social connections in a city that
otherwise seems destined to disappear
in its lagoon. s
13
 PERSPECTIVES
marcus yam / los angeles times / getty images
A Disaster Foretold
How India lost the plot in Afghanistan
/ Government
/ sushant singh
Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a virtual
summit of the BRICS grouping on 9 September,
with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his
Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in atten-
dance. India, like much of the world, was still
reeling from the Taliban’s meteoric takeover of Af-
ghanistan, and the question of the country’s future
was dominant on the global diplomatic agenda. Yet
the summit’s outcome, the Delhi Declaration, dealt
14 THE CARAVAN
with Afghanistan in only one of its 74 paragraphs,
and even that did not mention the Taliban—a tacit
let-off for the group amid loud concerns in other
quarters over its intentions and beliefs.
There was no surprise in this. Outside of Paki-
stan and Qatar, China and Russia are now the most
powerful foreign actors in Afghanistan, among a
handful of countries with diplomatic ties to the
Taliban and full-fledged embassies still opera-
tional in Kabul. Xi and Putin had no intention of
risking this position by putting Afghanistan’s new

rulers on the spot. For India, however,
this was a kind of capitulation, and it
captured the country’s Afghanistan
predicament.
Broadly speaking, India’s interests
in Afghanistan overlap those of China
and Russia. All three are nervous that
terrorist groups could find safe haven
in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and
about regional instability flowing out
of an Afghanistan in crisis. But unlike
New Delhi, Moscow and Beijing have
found ways to engage deeply with the
Taliban. India, perennially uncom-
fortable with the Taliban, is now both
completely cut out of Afghanistan and
at odds with other governments that
hold influence over the country. For
now, it can only watch events unfold
from a diplomatic cul-de-sac.
This was not an inevitable outcome.
The Modi government was aware
for the last five years that the United
States was going to withdraw from
Afghanistan but did not prepare for a
scenario where the Taliban would be in
power. It merely hoped for an outcome
that would not put the Taliban in a
dominant position. As with its policies
on China, Pakistan and the rest of its
neighbourhood, there has been no long-
term strategic thinking and planning in
India’s foreign policy on Afghanistan.
The event-based, personality-centric
diplomacy of the Modi government,
coupled with a weakened economy, has
steadily shrunk India’s options. Worse,
the government has seemed devoid
of imagination or ideas, completely
ill-prepared to deal with the situation.
In the past two decades, India ben-
efitted heavily from the US military
commitment in Afghanistan, which
provided a measure of security in the
region. This regional stability left New
Delhi free to focus on other pressing
challenges, such as overseeing domestic
economic growth and “de-hyphenat-
ing” India from Pakistan in the eyes of
the world. This, however, should not
have resulted in India putting all its
eggs in the US basket in Afghanistan.
In its desire to consolidate its increas-
ing proximity with Washington, the
Modi government doubled down on its
mistaken policy.
The current government’s other
diplomatic moves have also not proven
to be the smartest ones in this context.
In West Asia, it devoted a lot of its
diplomatic energies to forging stronger
ties with the United Arab Emirates
and Saudi Arabia. Along with Pakistan,
these were the only countries to recog-
nise the previous Taliban regime. Since
then, however, they have been com-
pletely marginalised in Afghanistan,
their relationship with the Taliban in
tatters. Qatar, an antagonist to the two
Arab states, took the lead in hosting the
Taliban for talks in recent years and in
helping the United States with evacu-
ations from Kabul. The Modi govern-
ment has treated the Quad—a strategic
grouping with the United States, Japan
and Australia—as a panacea to all of
India’s geostrategic ills. But the Quad is
primarily targeted at containing China
and will be of little help in Afghanistan.
This scenario works greatly to the
benefit of Pakistan, which continues
to hold sway over the Taliban. The
group was born in Pakistani madrassas
and got sustenance from the coun-
try’s security establishment during its
toughest years. The current rulers of
Afghanistan have families and substan-
tial investments in Pakistan, and these
close ties make it well-nigh impossible
for the Taliban to defy Islamabad,
which has always seen Afghanistan as
a battleground between itself and New
Delhi. Having “won” the game in Af-
ghanistan, Pakistan is unwilling to let
the Taliban accommodate India even
slightly. This may change in the future,
but for now New Delhi has to live with
being on the “losing” side.
OCTOBER 2021
perspectives
opposite page: A street vendor sells Taliban
flags in Kabul. The Modi government was
aware for five years that the United States
was going to withdraw from Afghanistan
but did not prepare for a scenario where the
Taliban would be in power.
Some Indian commentators have
argued that the Pakistani security
establishment will eventually get into
trouble with the Taliban. The reason-
ing goes that Pakistan’s control over
the group will weaken, especially amid
factional fights, and it will then face
blowback through the Tehrik-i-Taliban
Pakistan—a kindred group responsible
for multiple terror attacks on Pakistani
soil. Even if all this comes true, all it
will offer New Delhi is schadenfreude.
Problems for Pakistan with the Taliban
will not automatically result in an
Indian success. On the contrary, the
regional instability created in that case
would engulf India as well.
Nowhere is this more evident than
in Kashmir, where India fears that the
Taliban resurgence could feed a revival
of the armed militancy that ravaged
the valley in the 1990s. Conditions on
the ground are not what they were: the
Indian security presence in Kashmir is
much larger now than it was then, and
the border fence on the Line of Control,
constructed in 2003, makes infiltration
from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir much
tougher. The number of active militants
in Kashmir, including foreigners, is
also much lower now, even if a growing
number of local youth have taken up
the gun in recent years. However, the
Islamist victory in Afghanistan can
give a psychological boost to Kashmiri
militants, and sophisticated weapons
and other military gear left behind by
the Americans or captured from the
defeated Afghan National Army could
still be funnelled into Kashmir. There is
also the matter of the Haqqani net-
work, a hardline Taliban faction linked
15
a disaster foretold · perspectives
to numerous jihadi groups beyond
Afghanistan. The new Taliban-con-
trolled government, where the Haqqa-
nis have important roles, could provide
safe bases to Kashmir-centric militant
groups currently based out of Pakistan,
such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lash-
kar-e-Taiba.
With no direct border between Af-
ghanistan and India, any Afghan push
to militancy in Kashmir will have to be
enabled by Pakistan. After the resto-
ration of the ceasefire on the Line of
Control in February, via UAE-brokered
backchannel meetings between India
and Pakistan, there has been no prog-
ress in bilateral talks. The resultant
peace is fragile, and there have been re-
newed attempts at infiltration from the
Pakistani side. Meanwhile, Pakistan
alleges that India has failed promises
made under the deal: the restoration
of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir,
and of demographic protections for
the local population, both lost in the
abrogation of Article 370 of the Indian
Constitution. The Kashmiri population
is restive, bitter at the unprecedented
repression that accompanied these
moves, and pro-India politicians in the
erstwhile state find themselves com-
pletely discredited. The situation is ripe
to be exploited, and Pakistan, embold-
ened by events in Afghanistan, would
wish to teach India a lesson in Kashmir.
The Modi government has mostly
looked at its foreign policy through
the prism of domestic politics, and
things have been no different with
Afghanistan. The government was too
late in reaching out to the Taliban to
secure its interests, but even when it
did it played a strange game. When S
Jaishankar, the foreign minister, made
trips to Doha in June and July to try
and open channels with the Taliban’s
political office there, New Delhi re-
fused to officially acknowledge these
attempts. There were no pictures of a
meeting between Taliban leaders and
the Indian ambassador to Qatar, hosted
by the Indian embassy in late August.
The optics of the event would have
contrasted dangerously with the Is-
lamophobic, tough-on-terror narrative
of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, es-
pecially in forthcoming state elections
where it will no doubt continue the
16
practice of beating up on the Taliban as
a dog-whistle tactic.
It is also for domestic political rea-
sons, to demonstrate the behaviour of a
de facto Hindu Rashtra, that the Modi
government highlighted its evacuation
of Afghan Hindus and Sikhs even as it
deported an Afghan woman member of
parliament back to Afghanistan from
Delhi airport. The government even
cancelled all existing visas issued to
Afghans, fuelling concern that it meant
to filter people fleeing Afghanistan for
India on the basis of their religion. It is
perhaps for the same reasons that Modi
made no mention of Danish Siddiqui, a
Pulitzer-winning Indian photographer
with Reuters, after he was killed by the
Taliban in July.
India is left with no good options in
Afghanistan, only bad and worse ones.
It was never as big a player in Afghan-
istan as Pakistan, Russia or the United
The Modi government
has mostly looked at its
foreign policy through the
prism of domestic politics,
and things have been no
different with Afghanistan.
ww
States, but after 2001, with a US-backed
government in Kabul, it was always
involved in promoting security and cul-
tural ties. Even that space has shrunk
dramatically. Ensconced in power, the
Taliban is gaining global acceptance by
the day. The defence minister, Rajnath
Singh, acknowledged in a lecture on 5
September that the “changing equa-
tions in Afghanistan present a chal-
lenge for India.” The biggest challenge
now is whether or not to recognise the
Taliban government. No member state
of the United Nations has recognised
the Taliban government so far, but
New Delhi may be pushed to take a call
soon, especially if Moscow and Beijing
decide to accept it in some form. India’s
best option at the moment seems to be
to keep a channel of communication
open with the Taliban and find ways to
engage with them without considering
full diplomatic recognition. It is also in
the Taliban’s interests to keep channels
THE CARAVAN
open with India, as New Delhi could
afford them a counterbalance to Islam-
abad’s influence.
It will be an uneasy and awkward re-
lationship, considering the history be-
tween the Taliban and New Delhi. The
Taliban were complicit in the hijacking
of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, in 1999,
and provided safe passage to the terror-
ists released by India in Kandahar in
exchange for the hostages. Ajit Doval,
now the national security advisor, was
present as a senior Intelligence Bureau
official, and is unlikely to have forgot-
ten the incident or the embarrassment
it caused the BJP government of the
time. With the Taliban back in Kabul,
the Modi government would be mis-
taken to assume that harsher internal
security measures alone can prevent a
similar crisis.
Surely, to plan for the foreseen should
have been a top priority for those
tasked with India’s security. If they
wondered what could have been done,
they could have looked at Russia. In the
1990s, when the Taliban were last in
power, Moscow backed the Northern
Alliance in its armed resistance to the
group’s rule. Now, the Northern Alli-
ance is gone, and armed internal oppo-
sition to the Taliban is coming from the
Islamic State Khorasan, a particularly
dreaded Islamist group. Fears of the
rise of IS-K, which is active across
Central Asia, led Moscow to change
its decades-old policy and engage with
the Taliban a few years ago. This is a
small but crucial example of the kind
of forward thinking the present Indian
government failed to do even as the
United States signalled its plans to
withdraw and publicly began talks with
the Taliban three years ago.
The United States could afford to
vacate Afghanistan and return to its
shores thousands of miles away. India,
located in the region, does not have this
luxury. Like the Central Asian republics,
it must prepare to face the collateral
damage of the US withdrawal. Those
who have framed India’s Afghanistan
policy in the seven-and-a-half years
since Modi took office are answerable
for the dramatic shrinking in India’s rel-
evance in the emerging world order, that
too so close to its borders. They must be
held responsible for this failure. s

New Beginnings
The BJP’s plans for a post-Yediyurappa
future in Karnataka / Politics
/ sugata srinivasaraju
On 26 July, BS Yediyurappa—often re-
ferred to as BSY—stepped down as Kar-
nataka’s chief minister, but continued to
occupy “Cauvery,” the chief minister’s
official residence. There are no signs of
him giving it up. Basavaraj Bommai, the
new chief minister, has already got him-
self allocated another bungalow in the
vicinity, which was earlier in the pos-
session of a deputy chief minister. This
makes Bommai look like BSY’s deputy,
which is perhaps the message that BSY
intends to send out.
Before Bommai made alternate hous-
ing arrangements for himself, on 7 Au-
gust, he passed an order bestowing the
status and perks of a cabinet minister to
BSY. This exceptional order was seem-
ingly passed to allow BSY to retain the
bungalow. However, when the order
made headlines, BSY was forced to de-
cline the new status. Nonetheless, the
bungalow was allotted to another sen-
ior cabinet minister, so that BSY could
continue to stay there as his privileged
guest—essentially a non-paying tenant.
There is good reason for the perks
BSY continues to enjoy. For the last
couple of decades, he has been instru-
mental to the rise of the Bharatiya
Janata Party in Karnataka. But, given
the lack of a neat overlap between the
Hindutva ideology and BSY’s politics,
his relationship with the national lead-
ership of the BJP was always uneasy.
While BSY’s departure can create a
vacuum, it is also an opportunity for
the BJP to create a new leadership in
Karnataka that is more consistent with
its national goals.
In his farewell speech, BSY repeat-
edly referred to the physical energy he
had expended going round the state
like a “peripatetic madman” to build
the party. He reminded his audience
that there was a time in the past when
the BJP found it difficult to assemble
even fifty people for its meetings in
Karnataka. He pointed out that even
when stalwarts such as Atal Biha-
ri Vajpayee, LK Advani and Murali
Manohar Joshi arrived, they found it
difficult to assemble people. He had
slogged to get the crowds to swell over
the decades. From then to now, he
claimed, the party had been shaped by
his own hand.
What BSY forgot to mention in his
speech was the intellectual spade-
work he had done to bring the party
to power. His social engineering, so
to speak, was very different from the
BJP’s pan-India formula. He preferred
to push the limits of Karnataka’s
caste-identity politics rather than car-
ry the Hindutva flag. As a result, he
was never dependent on the rhetorical
flourish or shrill bombast of his party’s
national icons. He never got along with
Advani and maintained a courteous
distance from Vajpayee and Modi. No
national president of the BJP—be it
Venkaiah Naidu, Rajnath Singh or Nitin
Gadkari—had a grip over him. “A cer-
tain reticence governed his relationship
with them, and the talking was mostly
done by his intermediaries,” a long-
time party colleague recalled.
National leaders came and went,
but it was BSY’s assiduous work on
building caste coalitions that reaped
electoral dividends in the state. In-
terestingly, each time BSY was sworn
in as chief minister—four times in to-
tal—he wore a green shawl and never
sported the saffron scarf. It could be
read as a symbol of his defiance, inde-
pendence or cultivation of a larger and
a more tolerant world view. The colour
green was more neutral, considering
the rainbow of caste identities he was
cultivating. An exclusionary Hindutva
identity would have only narrowed his
personal appeal. It appeared he want-
ed to brand himself as a farmers’ lead-
er than a Hindutva soldier. In his first
term as chief minister, he presented a
separate agriculture budget and made
an anthem of a poem that eulogised
farmers.
OCTOBER 2021
perspectives
Electoral politics in Karnataka for
decades had organised itself around
two dominant communities: Vokkali-
gas and Lingayats. The smaller castes
revolved around them, until Devaraj
Urs, the Congress leader who served
two terms as the chief minister in the
1970s, inverted this and pushed the two
communities out of the power nucleus.
After the Urs decade, neither the Con-
gress nor the Janata Party, which later
morphed into Janata Dal, could sus-
tain this social experiment. The state
returned to the old normal, where the
two dominant communities controlled
political trajectories.
In the early 2000s, when BSY was
coming into prominence, there was a
clear vacuum in Lingayat leadership.
Ramakrishna Hegde, a Brahmin politi-
cian who had earned the loyalty of the
Lingayat community in the 1980s and
aligned with the BJP after his expulsion
from the Janata Dal, was on the decline.
The Congress had attracted the anger of
this socially well-organised community
as early as 1990, when Rajiv Gandhi
announced the ouster of Veerendra
Patil as chief minister in a rather cold
and casual fashion, from a lounge in the
Bangalore airport. As BSY stepped in
to reassure the Lingayat community, he
left the Hindutva rhetoric to his junior
colleague HN Ananth Kumar, a Brah-
min without a mass base. The Sangh
Parivar had earlier experimented with
communal polarisation in the coastal
districts of Karnataka and the Western
Ghats, but it had not translated into
electoral success. BSY put Lingayats
in the middle and started building a
coalition of smaller backward-class
communities and the neglected majori-
ty among the Scheduled Castes—specif-
ically Madigas, referred to as “left-hand
Dalits.” The numerically smaller “right-
hand Dalits,” who were relatively more
prosperous, mostly remained with the
Congress, which had leaders such as
Mallikarjun Kharge and G Paramesh-
wara from the community. BSY also
17
new beginnings · perspectives
opposite page: wooed the Scheduled Tribes, especially Valmikis,
BS Yediyurappa into the BJP fold.
meets Lingayat To BSY’s good fortune, Deve Gowda, the Janata
pontiffs at his
Dal (Secular) leader, was mostly focussed on the
residence in July this
year. Yediyurappa Vokkaliga vote base in southern Karnataka, al-
consolidated his lowing the BJP to consolidate support in the Lin-
power in the state gayat-dominant regions. An indifferent Congress
through courting made the job easier for BSY. The backward-class
and empowering leader Siddaramaiah joined the Congress, in 2006,
caste pontiffs and
but was unable to expand his influence beyond his
their seminaries.
own Kuruba community. The Congress won in
2013 only because BSY had briefly left the BJP.
Between 2008 and 2018, BSY not only emerged
as an undisputed leader of the Lingayats but also
commanded the support of a majority of the back-
ward communities, including Dalits. If the BJP
fell short of a simple majority in both the 2008 and
2018 assembly elections, it was because the Vok-
kaligas in southern Karnataka had not warmed up
to the saffron party, and Deve Gowda’s JD(S) re-
tained an average vote share of twenty percent.
The new national leadership of the BJP, under
Modi and Shah, wanted to loosen BSY’s hold over
the party in the state but were unsure of how to go
about it. They reluctantly allowed him to become
chief minister, first in 2018—when he lost a vote
of confidence—and again in 2019, when the Con-
gress–JD(S) coalition government fell. Although
the party had set 75 as the age limit for its leaders,
the rule seemingly did not apply to BSY.
At the same time, the BJP began investing in
creating an alternate power centre in BL Santhosh,
an RSS pracharak who had served as the Karnata-
ka BJP’s organising secretary between 2006 and
2014. In 2019, Santhosh was elevated to the post of
the BJP’s general secretary for organisation.
Santhosh was a Brahmin who did not hide his
ambition. When he was loaned to the BJP in Kar-
nataka in 2006, his primary task was to expand
the base of the party and to groom an alternative
leader to BSY, who was already in his sixties. In-
stead of strategising in larger interest, he created
more and more factions within the state BJP
with the hope that he would be the consensus
for the chief minister’s post when the time came.
Two precedents bode well for him. Ramakrishna
Hegde, a Brahmin, became the chief minister in
1983 from a Janata Party that had competing caste
interests. Then, in 2001, Modi, who had also been
the BJP’s national general secretary for organisa-
tion, was parachuted in as chief minister to Guja-
rat after exploiting factional strife.
What Santhosh did not realise was that Hegde
already had formidable national exposure and
administrative experience when he was picked as
chief minister, and that Modi’s elevation was more
an exception than a rule. “The post of the national
organising secretary in the BJP is powerful be-
18 THE CARAVAN
cause the role is visualised as being independent
and neutral,” a senior functionary of the Karnata-
ka BJP told me. “People appointed to the role are
expected to represent the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh’s moral authority and ideological interests
in a Sangh outfit that chases power. The best tra-
ditions for that independent role were created by
people like Nanaji Deshmukh, Kushabhau Thakre,
Sunder Singh Bhandari and KN Govindacharya.
Even a person like Ram Lal, who preceded San-
thosh, kept a low profile.” But Santhosh was in the
news every day.
Given his deep involvement in the power game,
it appears that Santhosh came in handy for Modi,
Shah and the senior RSS leadership to develop
dissidence against BSY. While there were alle-
gations of corruption and nepotism against BSY,
they did not hurt his mass appeal. From 2019, sev-
eral prominent Lingayat voices seem to have been
enlisted to attack BSY: Basangouda Patil Yatnal,
Murugesh Nirani, Arvind Bellad and Laxman Sa-
vadi. Other Lingayats, such as Basavaraj Bommai,
secretly nurtured an ambition but never rebelled
openly. There were other unhappy ones who
maintained a dignified silence. This ring of overt
and covert dissidence started jeopardising BSY’s
authority. His son BY Vijendra’s high-handedness,
and BSY’s other vulnerabilities, only helped the
cause. Santhosh became the face of a growing cho-
rus of dissenting voices.
Interestingly, each time BSY was
sworn in as chief minister—four
times in total—he wore a green
shawl and never sported the saffron
scarf. It could be read as a symbol
of his defiance, independence or
cultivation of a larger and a more
tolerant world view.
ww
The BJP encouraged the Panchamasali subsect
among the Lingayats to demand a greater share
in reservation and more political representation.
The Panchamasalis comprise roughly seventy
percent of the Lingayat population but are mar-
ginalised even within the Lingayat community.
Most Lingayat chief ministers come from the
small Banajiga subsect, a trading community. The
Panchamasalis’ agitation for a greater share of
reservation earlier this year was a rare instance in
which Lingayats were agitating against a Lingayat
chief minister.
During the monsoon session of parliament, the
BJP government passed the hundred and twen-
ty-seventh amendment to the Constitution, which

handed back to the states the power
to prepare their own lists of castes
that could be included in the Other
Backward Classes list. A strategy that
has worked in Karnataka has been
supporting demands of sub-quotas for
highly disempowered groups within
categories such as Scheduled Castes,
Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward
Classes. Besides the Panchamasalis,
the Valmikis on the Scheduled Tribes
list began making demands for internal
reservation. A similar demand from
Madigas within the Scheduled Castes
already existed and began to gain
traction. While the idea of internal res-
ervation was meant to ensure a fairer
distribution of social justice, it could be
used in states like Karnataka to break
solidarity between different marginal-
ised groups. Infighting among margin-
alised castes blunts their resistance to
the BJP and the RSS’s upper-caste-led
Hindutva project.
BSY was a hurdle to the consolida-
tion of the Hindu vote bank in Karna-
taka. He had risen to power riding a
pti
wave of caste-based assertion rather
than one based on religious identity. In
the 1990s and the early 2000s, the state
saw a unique sociological phenome-
non when some OBCs and Dalits set
up their own seminaries and pontiffs.
Most of them were inducted into the
saffron path in the Lingayat tradition,
by Lingayat pontiffs, and not the Vedic
tradition of the Hindu mathas. Initial-
ly, it was presented as a challenge to
the upper-caste establishments. Each
backward caste was told about the ben-
efits that may accrue if they became
as organised a community as the Lin-
gayats, who had nearly five thousand
small and big mathas across the state.
The Lingayats had not only grown rich
with state patronage but controlled
power politics. Each backward-caste
seminary was designed to play a simi-
lar role. This empowered the pontiffs
who controlled the voting behaviour of
their communities.
BSY quickly appropriated this new
system by courting the caste pontiffs
and their seminaries. When he was
asked to step down as chief minister,
in July this year,a sea of people from
OCTOBER 2021
new beginnings · perspectives
various communities wearing their
castes’ saffron robes assembled in
Bengaluru. The BJP would want the
Lingayat and other traditions to blend
with the upper-caste Vedic tradition.
The work seems to have already be-
gun. The most powerful Adichunchan-
agiri Matha of the Vokkaligas is per-
ceived to be closer to the RSS than it
ever was.
BSY has been somewhat dismantled,
despite the bungalow and the perks.
The Congress is clueless as ever, with
no definite plan and an unimaginative
leadership that only hopes to be an
alternative by default. The JD(S) is
looking weaker in its former stronghold
of southern Karnataka. The overbear-
ing presence of the Gowda family is
not enthusing new talent to join them,
although they know how to fight the
battle better. They may be forced to
change their game too. This makes the
BJP the only party with a draft plan
to disrupt Karnataka politics. As they
continue to fine-tune it, to use cricket
terminology, Basavaraj Bommai will be
their night watchman. s
19
perspectives
State of Confusion
Why the Modi government lies
/ Politics
/ suchitra vijayan
From 10 to 12 September, academics from various
US universities organised an online conference
titled “Dismantling Global Hindutva.” It was
co-sponsored by various departments and centres
in more than fifty universities, including Prince-
ton, Harvard, Stanford and New York University.
The conference brought together scholars of
South Asia “specializing in gender, economics,
political science, caste, religion, healthcare, and
media in order to try to understand the complex
and multi-faceted phenomenon of Hindutva.” In
the lead-up to the event, pro-Hindutva groups
began an unprecedented disinformation campaign
and targeted attacks against the organisers and
participants. Academic conferences rarely receive
mainstream global attention, but in this case the
vicious response made the world take note.
The campaign was swift and coordinated. The
Hindu Janajagruti Samiti, a violent Hindu-na-
tionalist group—whose cadre are charged with
assassinating the journalist Gauri Lankesh in
2017—wrote to India’s home minister, seeking
action against the India-based speakers of the
conference. In the United States, groups such as
the Hindu American Foundation, the Coalition
of Hindus in North America and the Vishwa
Hindu Parishad of America—which have links to
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—started an
aggressive campaign to malign the organisers and
cancel the conference. They reportedly sent out
nearly a million emails to the organisers. An aca-
demic conference curated to understand Hindutva
was quickly rebranded by right-wing groups as
“Hinduphobic.” Over the years, Hinduphobia has
been used as a smokescreen in the West to deflect
any critical questions asked of the Narendra Modi
government and its ideological parent, the RSS—
including over escalating violence against India’s
minorities under Modi’s rule, India’s caste system,
the RSS’s Hindu-supremacist moorings and its rise
in the United States.
During the conference, videos of panellists were
maliciously edited and circulated, and troll armies
attacked speakers on social media, threatening
opposite page: them with dire consequences. Anonymous online
Distorting reality
accounts spread fake news calling the conference
is fundamental to
the Modi regime’s “a hit job against India” that was part of a “larger
capacity to hold on conspiracy.” The Polis Project, a New York-based
to power. research-and-journalism organisation I am part
20 THE CARAVAN
of, and which was among the co-sponsors of the
conference, was targeted as well. There were false-
hoods floated around that Polis was funded and
supported by groups such as Pakistan’s Inter-Ser-
vices Intelligence, and that the organisation was
part of a global conspiracy aimed at “targeting
Hindutva & Hinduism.” Ultimately, these tactics
of intimidation did not prevail and the conference
continued as planned, but the disinformation
campaign managed to do what the right-wings
group intended: muddy the discourse. The news
website Firstpost, for instance, has chosen to see the
conference as a “partisan and politically-motivated
event designed to malign an ancient religion and
its adherents.” It described the premeditated and
well-orchestrated bullying the speakers endured as
one of “the biggest examples of public mobilisation
among Hindus around the world.”
Over the years, Hinduphobia
has been used as a smokescreen
in the West to deflect any
critical questions asked of the
Narendra Modi government and
its ideological parent, the RSS—
including over escalating violence
against India’s minorities under
Modi’s rule, India’s caste system,
the RSS’s Hindu-supremacist
moorings and its rise in the United
States.
ww
Disinformation and censorship are two sides
of the same coin, both detrimental to democracy.
Both are also fundamental to how authoritarian
regimes function. They do not just disregard facts,
they deliberately try to alter our sense of reality,
manipulate language and set skewed terms of
debate. This is accomplished by creating false
equivalences and multiple narratives, while dis-
crediting intellectual opponents, scholarship and
empirical research. The goal is to leave the public
disoriented and unable to distinguish between fact
and fiction.
Lies in politics are pervasive. From monarchs
to dictators to democratically elected politicians,
leaders of all types and ideologies have lied to
 perspectives

illustration by mir suhail

OCTOBER 2021 21
state of confusion · perspectives
their people. Throughout history, var-
ious communities have struggled with
ideas of truth, both in public spaces and
private lives. However, as the historian
Federico Finchelstein argues in A Brief
History of Fascist Lies, authoritarian
lies are not “typical at all.”
This difference is not a matter of de-
gree, even if the degree is significant.
Lying is a feature of fascism in a way
that is not true of those other political
traditions. Lying is incidental to, say,
liberalism, in a way that it is not to
fascism. And, in fact, when it comes
to fascist deceptions, they share few
things with others forms of politics
in history. They are situated beyond
the more traditional forms of political
duplicity. Fascists consider their lies
to be at the service of simple absolute
truths, which are in fact bigger lies.
For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
and the RSS, their simple truths are
tied to a mythical past of supposed Hin-
du glory. They repeatedly reiterate that
India is and was always a Hindu nation
(Aryabhoomi), with territorial integrity
(Akhand Bharat) tracing back millen-
nia. While denying the violence that is
integral to Hinduism, most evident in
the enforcement of caste, they argue
that caste itself was a colonial inven-
tion, and consider other communities,
especially Muslims, to be “foreigners”
and “invaders” on Indian soil. All these
lies are eventually aimed at the justifi-
cation of the biggest lie of all: that their
hate will return India to its mythical
greatness and correct all the historical
wrongs suffered by Hindus.
Authoritarian regimes have to
eradicate truth to both achieve and
maintain their control. George Orwell
wrote that “the frightening thing about
totalitarianism is not that it commits
‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept
of objective truth: it claims to control
the past as well as the future.” This
is true of India today, particularly as
right-wing groups push for a xenophobic
Hindu-nationalist state. The philoso-
pher Lee McIntyre has argued that “we
live in an era ... where we’re in danger of
losing sight of what truth means.” In the
hands of strongmen and authoritarian
leaders, lies are intended “to corrupt our
22
belief in ... something that’s true,” which
“undermines the idea that we can know
truth outside of political context.”
Distorting reality is fundamental
to the Modi regime’s capacity to hold
on to power and evade accountability.
Its rule involves not just a failure of
governance—authoritarian regimes
seldom govern—but also, by a process of
attrition, draining meaning out of how
people perceive truth, time and history.
Authoritarian regimes make use of
lies in multiple ways. First, they start
by revising and rewriting history,
confounding our relationship with the
past. Second, they use propaganda so
pervasively that it becomes impossible
to identify the truth. This makes the
situation ripe for fear-mongering and
rallying the public around paranoiac
claims. Third, lies are used to constant-
ly manufacture enemies of the state:
Living with a state-
sponsored pandemic
of lies has profound
ramifications for our moral
and political universe. It
erodes public trust, deflects
accountability and hollows
out democratic institutions.
More importantly, it puts
the public in a constant
state of fear and confusion.
ww
traitors, foreigners and anti-nationals.
Dissent is not only unacceptable, it is
criminalised. In The Captive Mind,
the Polish poet and dissident Czesław
Miłosz writes that an authoritarian re-
gime divides people “into loyalists and
criminals,” with “a premium placed on
every type of conformist, coward, and
hireling.” (In India, those considered
disloyal to the Modi government are
quickly branded “anti-nationals” and
“urban Naxals.”) Fourth, proof and
evidence become impotent; they can no
longer procure justice.
Ultimately, lies are about power—not
just over the people at large, but also
over the men and women willing to lie
on behalf of the leader. The political
theorist Jacob Levy argues that a “lead-
THE CARAVAN
er with authoritarian tendencies will
lie to make others repeat his lie both as
a way to demonstrate and strengthen
his power over them. Saying something
obviously untrue, and making your
subordinates repeat it with a straight
face in their own voice, is a particularly
startling display of power over them.
It’s something that was endemic to
totalitarianism.”
Modi came to power on the back of
mass-scale disinformation campaigns.
In 2014, in the aftermath of his first
general-election victory, the Financial
Times called Modi “India’s first social
media prime minister.” Smartphones
and social media platforms became
platforms for multi-million-dollar
campaigns to craft an image of Modi as
a strong leader with a “56-inch-chest.”
Such propaganda became a perpetual
feature of his reign—with everything
from lies about crowd sizes at his
election rallies à la Trump to targeted
campaigns aimed at stoking tensions
between various communities. By the
2019 elections, when Modi’s govern-
ment was re-elected, the scale, speed
and sources of disinformation had only
multiplied. Among other things, big and
small, the Modi government has lied
about its ill-advised demonetisation,
the deadly pogrom in north-east Delhi,
suspect defence deals and the number
of pandemic deaths.
It has dispensed with inconvenient
statistics, hidden essential data alto-
gether or contorted statistics to fit its
narrative. Amid rising hate crimes, the
government declared in parliament
that there was no data available on
lynchings. The country’s GDP esti-
mates were revised to show higher
economic growth. Meanwhile, in 2019,
the government stopped the release
of unemployment data. The BJP has
repeatedly claimed that India will
soon be the “world’s fastest-growing
economy”— contrary to an Internation-
al Monetary Fund report that project-
ed that the Indian economy would
contract by 4.5 percent in 2020. The
government has lied about the massive
number of deaths caused by its disas-
trous management of the COVID-19
crisis. Bhramar Mukherjee, an epide-
miologist at the University of Michigan,
referred to the Modi government’s

failure to collect and publish credible numbers on
the pandemic as “a complete massacre of data.”
News reports, photographs, desperate please for
help on social media and even dead bodies were
dismissed as being valid proof of the nightmare the
people of India collectively suffered as COVID-19
swept through.
The list of Modi’s lies and obfuscations is long,
but that is no longer surprising. What is surprising,
perhaps, is that the public allows this govern-
ment to get away with so many lies. Living with
a state-sponsored pandemic of lies has profound
ramifications for our moral and political universe.
It erodes public trust, deflects accountability and
hollows out democratic institutions.More impor-
tantly, it puts the public in a constant state of fear
and confusion. Even when lies are caught and fact-
checked, chances are nothing will happen. It is as
if the truth can no longer hold power accountable.
Authoritarianism kills ideas, autonomy and our
right to dissent—all in the name of ideology. And,
as a result, we allow the regime to legislate on what
we eat, whom we love or desire, how we live.
In Goebbels: A Biography, the German historian
Peter Longerich writes about Hitler’s propagan-
da minister, using over thirty thousand pages of
Joseph Goebbels’s own diary entries. Many of these
entries are chilling. For example, Longerich repro-
duces an entry in which Goebbels describes fab-
ricating an assassination attempt against himself.
This attempt was covered widely on the front pages
of Der Angriff, the Nazi party’s newspaper, yet even
after evidence emerged that Goebbels had faked
the event, the news was never retracted. Goebbels,
even in the privacy of his diary, wrote that the “as-
sassination attempt” was “a genuine threat.” Lon-
gerich observes, “Having acted out a charade for
public consumption, he then recorded it as a fact
in his diary.” Goebbels’s invention of an alternative
reality and conviction that it was indeed the truth
are illustrative of the fascist midset—he did not see
the contradiction between truth and propaganda.
Reading Goebbels’s diary entries in the context of
India today, they feel not like fragments of history,
but rather like a primer on what is happening now.
In the Bhima Koregaon case, unfolding since
2018, 16 human-rights lawyers, scholars and activ-
ists have been charged, on evidence that stretches
credibility to great extremes, with inciting violence
and conspiring to bring down the Modi regime.
These individuals have been incarcerated under
the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act, and one of them, the 84-year-old Jesuit priest
Stan Swamy—incarcerated without evidence,
denied medical care and refused bail despite his
deteriorating health—has died of COVID-19 while
awaiting trial. SS Shinde of the Bombay High
Court—one of the judges who consistently denied
state of confusion · perspectives
Swamy bail—made statements praising Swamy af-
ter he died, but was forced to retract them after the
National Investigation Agency raised objections.
In an act of profound irony, the agency claimed
that “there is a negative perception being created
against the NIA.” The agency had declined to allow
Swamy even a straw to drink water from as he
struggled with Parkinson’s disease. What is crucial
here is the NIA’s demand to erase from the official
legal record even the modicum of empathy and
truth that judges could conjure in this instance.
The Bhima Koregaon model of prosecution has
also been applied in other contexts. India now has a
growing number of political prisoners, all incarcer-
ated on the basis of what appears to be false or fabri-
cated evidence. In March 2020, the BJP politician
Amit Malviya tweeted an edited video supposedly
showing the student leader and activist Umar
Khalid asking Muslims to “come out on streets in
huge numbers when Trump arrives in India.” He
falsely claimed that Khalid’s speech led to the Delhi
pogrom, which killed more than fifty people, the
majority of them Muslim. The manipulated video
was repeatedly broadcast on the news channels Re-
public TV, News18, Zee News and Times Now. Oth-
er media platforms, such as the Times of India, the
Hindustan Times and India Today, also circulated
Malviya’s duplicitous claim. Taking their cue from
the BJP leadership, police in Delhi claimed that
Khalid instigated the violence and arrested him.
During a bail hearing this August, Khalid’s law-
yer, Trideep Pais, presented evidence in court that
Republic TV and News18 had used Malviya’s doc-
tored footage. Pais played the entirety of the speech
in question and pointed out that nothing in it was
“seditious or instigated violence.” Despite the
overwhelming evidence of procedural impropriety,
the lack of evidence and a charge-sheet comprised
entirely of fiction, Khalid has been incarcerated for
over a year.
The key feature of political power today is not
just control over territory. It is something far
sinister: the absolute control over people’s minds,
keeping populations in a constant state of suspend-
ed disbelief, distorting everyday reality at the level
of love, trust and loyalty. All of this affects human
dignity, political agency and individual autonomy.
The loss of truth has irreparably damaged us.
The dire consequences of authoritarian regimes
on various societies have been chronicled exten-
sively since the Second World War. They remake
our communities, our ethical character and our ca-
pacity for empathy. But, above all, they profoundly
degrade us as individuals. When they are done with
us, we will have nothing else to hold on to except
the lies, because we will have lost our capacity to
understand our reality and will fail to believe the
immense tragedy we witnessed. s
OCTOBER 2021 23
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 COVER STORY / CRIME
SRISHTI JASWAL

How crimes of superstition

thrive in the new India

francois le diascorn / gamma-rapho / getty images

ritual killings · reportage

previous spread: “we don’t know what has happened!” corpse was coloured in kumkum—a red turmeric
A Sadhu-healer Abhay Ohri, a tribal doctor and activist, re- powder used during rituals. The body also had
performs a ritual in ceived a call from a volunteer of Jay Adivasi Yuva lacchas, or ritual yellow threads, tied at numerous
Benares circa 1900.
Shakti, a tribal youth organisation that he heads places. “I am a doctor, I have examined thousands
below: Seema in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. The panic-stricken of corpses,” Ohri told me. “I was scared to look at
and Rajaram with volunteer asked Ohri to rush to the Ratlam Civil Rajaram.” Rajaram’s arms and legs had impres-
Adarsh, their Hospital as soon as he could. “Rajaram Khadari’s sions suggesting he had been chained. There were
two year old son. body is here,” he said. “He is dead. Some ‘tan- also many marks of injury from sharp objects. His
Rajaram and Adarsh tra-mantra’ was done on him.” body was bleeding even after his death.
were murdered by
Ohri struggled to understand what he was being Before Ohri reached the hospital, the staff had
their family in a
superstitious ritual. told. It was early in the morning on 20 February found an identification card in Rajaram’s pocket.
2021, and he had just woken up. As he drove to It belonged to his 28-year-old wife, Seema Katara.
opposite page: the hospital in a hurry, thoughts of 27-year-old The staff members realised it was the same Seema
A sword mark on Rajaram Khadari crossed his mind. After him, it who worked as a nurse in their hospital. They tried
Rajaram’s mother, was only Rajaram who could become a doctor in to call her, but her phone was switched off. No one
Thwari Bai. When
their tribal village. Just a few days earlier, Raja- from their family was responding to calls. “I real-
the police stormed
in and interrupted
ram had informed Ohri that he had finally been ised something is very wrong,” Ohri said. “I imme-
the ritual, they appointed as a government ayurvedic doctor after diately asked the police to check their house.”
found her daughter years of private practice. The colleagues had last After getting initial information, a few police
Tulsi, sitting on her met on the birthday of Rajaram’s two-year-old son, officers from the nearest police station, Shivgarh,
stomach, choking Adarsh. “It was just two months before his death,” reached Rajaram’s village, Thikariya, at around
her and pulling her Ohri told me when I met him in his clinic, in the 8 am. Right outside his ancestral home—two
hair in the belief
summer of 2021. well-built blue buildings on both sides of the
that a spirit had
possessed her. Upon reaching the old white colonial building of road—around nine women were swinging and
the hospital, Ohri saw Rajaram’s body. His entire chanting “Jai Ho.” All these women were relatives
of Rajaram.
His parents, Thwari Bai and Kanhaiya Lal Kha-
dari, had eight daughters and two sons—Rajaram
and Vikram, who is 26 years old. While Santosh
is the eldest daughter, it is their middle daugh-
ter, Tulsi Palasia, aged 40, who wields the most
influence in the family. Tulsi is married to Radhey
Shyam, and both live in Dharad village, about
thirty-five kilometres from Thikariya. For the past
three or four years, according to the police, she
worked as a bhopa—a witch doctor. Tulsi believed
that her 17-year-old son had supernatural powers
and was an incarnation of Sheshnag, considered to
be the king of all snakes. The Hindu deity Vish-
nu is often depicted resting on Sheshnag. Tulsi’s
entire family, including her children Maya and
another minor son, as well as Rahul, the son of her
brother-in-law, were involved in the practice.
Bhopas are traditionally priest-singers in the
Bhil tribal community. They perform in front of a
phad—a long piece of cloth that serves as a porta-
ble temple, bearing various mantras and folk tales
of local deities. Bhopas carry this phad along with
them when invited by villagers to perform during
times of sickness and misfortune.
When the police asked the chanting women to
step aside, they threatened to curse the officers,
claiming that they were manifestations of the Hin-
rakesh porwal ratlam

du goddess Durga. Sheena Khan, one of the police

constables present that day, told me that no one
could comprehend what was going on. The police
decided to wait while reinforcements came in.
Meanwhile, a crowd began assembling at the spot.

28 THE CARAVAN

After ten minutes, someone inside
opened a window for a few minutes. As
Sheena approached the window, she
saw two children sobbing. The police
could also hear crying and shouting
from inside.
“As we saw children inside, we were
afraid of what might happen to them,”
Sheena said. “God knows what was
going on in that room.” Without further
delay, the police decided to break the
door and force their way in.
“I cannot forget what I saw there,”
Sheena recalled. The room was filled
with incense smoke, so much so that
hardly anything was visible. There
was blood, cracked coconuts, lemon,
kumkum and kilos of burnt incense and
wood. In one corner of the room, Tulsi’s
daughter Maya was sitting on the stom-
ach of Adarsh—the two-year-old son of
Seema and Rajesh. Maya had the fin-
gers of one hand inside Adarsh’s mouth,
and held a sword in the other. Adarsh
was already dead. In another corner,
Tulsi was sitting on Thwari’s stomach,
choking her at the neck while pulling
her hair. Thwari was bleeding profusely
from sword injuries. In a third corner,
Vikram’s injured kids were screaming
in horror while other family members
held them. As the scene was broken
up, Maya and Tulsi clung to the bodies
of Adarsh and Thwari so tightly that
rakesh porwal ratlam
it took three to five police officers to
remove them.
“All of them were on their own trip,”
Sheena told me. “Initially, they did not
acknowledge police presence. Later,
they started cursing us.” She recalled
how the women were shouting that
Seema was a daayan and a chudail—
Hindi words for a witch. The women
claimed that Seema had possessed Ra-
jaram. If they killed the witch, Rajaram
would come back to life.
That is when the police started
searching for Seema. She was found
on the other side of the road, in a room
next to a cattle shed. She was injured,
bleeding, unconscious but alive. Her
parents had reached the place by then,
and immediately took her to the hospi-
tal. A two-rupee coin was found stuck
inside her throat, because of which she
could not speak.
Among those arrested and charged
with murder were Tulsi and her chil-
dren including Maya and the son she
believed to be the incarnation of Shesh-
nag. Rahul was also arrested, as were
Rajaram’s youngest siblings, Vikram
and Sagar.
“They were talking insensibly,”
Hemant Parmar, the head constable at
Shivgarh police station, said. “I do not
know if they were possessed by some
deity or they were just pretending, but
OCTOBER 2021
ritual killings · reportage
this behaviour went on for two days, 21
and 22 February, while they were kept
in police custody.”
During that time, Tulsi and Maya
claimed that Seema was possessed
by Chainpura. Chainpura, a village
around fifteen kilometres away from
Thikariya, is home to the temples of
various tribal deities. Ohri told me that
Chainpura is considered a spirit in the
area. Tulsi and Maya told the police
that, on Sheshnag’s instructions, they
were trying to save their family from
the spirit’s influence.
The police investigation found that,
in the ritual, Tulsi and her family were
trying to kill the spirit, which they be-
lieved had possessed Seema. After See-
ma fell unconscious, they assumed the
spirit had left her body and possessed
her husband, Rajaram. After his death,
they thought it had possessed Adarsh.
After Adarsh died, they thought it had
gone into Thwari’s body.
Seema was told eight days after the
crime that her husband and child had
died. She had to go through multiple
procedures to remove the coin from her
throat. She could not speak for a month,
but she lived to tell the tale. I met her
in July at the civil hospital. By then, she
had returned to her duties as a nurse.
She now lives with her mother and
father, in a house she had bought with
Rajaram.
“The ritual was tantric in nature,”
Seema told me, “but they failed to suc-
cessfully complete it.” She said that the
ritual had been intended to harm her
family because of her financial inde-
pendence.
Seema broke with tradition in many
ways. She was the first in her in-laws’
family to be educated and employed.
“My father was a headmaster so he
wanted his daughters to be educat-
ed,” she said. “Otherwise, none of the
women in my family are educated.” She
did not even change her surname after
marriage—a big departure from the
patriarchal norm.
Seema married Rajaram four years
ago. They had shifted to their new
house, in Ratlam, last year. The loan
for the house was taken out in Seema’s
name. Life was blissful. The couple had
celebrated Adarsh’s second birthday in
2020.
29
ritual killings · reportage

below: In 2018, On 22 February, Rajaram’s youngest sister, what was happening,” she said. “While chanting
Rajnath Singh, Sagar, and his eldest sister’s daughter, also named and cursing, they started removing whatever I
who was the home Seema, were both getting married in Thikariya. was wearing, including my jewellery.”
minister at the time,
Most villagers in Thikariya belong to the Bhil She was made to sit in the middle of the room,
flags off the “Jal
Mitti Rath Yatra” tribal community. “They are very strict about their barely clothed. Then, Tulsi, her children and
at India Gate. The Bhil rituals,” Ohri told me. “They rarely let anyone Vikram started beating her. “While torturing
rath yatra brought who is not part of the Bhil community settle in the me, they told me that I was a witch,” Seema said.
soil and water from village land. Even if someone manages to buy land “They asked me where I had kept all my money.
four major Hindu and starts living, the entire village isolates them.” They took the almirah keys from me.”
pilgrimage sites for
Seema told me that, although the family was from Seema had around R2.5 lakh in the almirah.
the Rashtra Raksha
Mahayagna, which the Bhil community, they had shared affinities for Even after taking that money, Seema told me,
was held at Red Hindu gods and celebrated many Hindu festivals. they kept beating her with rods and sharp objects.
Fort. Rajaram left for Thikariya on 10 February, They took all her belongings, including clothes
around twelve days before the wedding, to prepare and make-up, and threw them into a stream a few
opposite page: for the celebrations, while Seema stayed back in kilometres behind their home.
Chandraswami, a
Ratlam because of her professional duties. She She told me that her husband was present in
self-styled godman,
pays tribute to
went for a day, on 16 February, before returning to the room, but neither beat her nor tried to rescue
former prime Ratlam for work. her. “He was mute, standing at a distance, while
minister Narasimha That same day, Sagar, the bride, fell sick. in the background very loud holy music was
Rao on his 91st Tulsi convinced her family that Seema had done playing,” she said. “They did not stop for the
birth anniversary in black magic on the bride, according to the police, whole night. Around midnight, they forced me to
New Delhi in 2011. and that the only way to counter her was to invite eat raw rice and pulses. They put kumkum on me
Chandraswami
her 17-year-old son to perform a ritual. The family and then forced me to swallow a two-rupee coin.”
once contested
allegations that procured the materials required, including a She started vomiting after swallowing the coin,
he performed sword, kumkum, coconuts and incense. “but they made me drink a lot of water, because
sacrificial rites to On the evening of 18 February, Seema arrived of which the coin was stuck in my throat. I could
help Rao become from Ratlam to participate in the wedding fes- not speak.”
prime minister. tivities. Around an hour after midnight, Vikram After a night of torture, they tied Seema to an
and the 17-year-old woke her up. Before she could old banyan tree behind the house. She was uncon-
react, they dragged her to a room in front of the scious through the day, so could not recall much
house. Rajaram and his family were present in of what was happening. She remembered trying to
that room, she recalled. “I could not understand escape twice. In the evening, she was once again

pti

30 THE CARAVAN

indian express archives
dragged to the room where she had
been tortured the night before.
This time, her husband and child
were targeted too. Tied up and chained,
Rajaram was also fed raw rice and puls-
es, and Kumkum was put on his body.
As the family started beating him,
Seema was locked in another room. She
could not recall what happened after
that.
“We recently bought a house in
Ratlam,” Seema said. “They knew we
had cash in the almirah for the wed-
ding expenses. Maybe they thought
they would manipulate us through
this tantric act and eventually take all
our money in the name of rituals.” She
spoke of the discomfort she felt with
her in-laws even before the horrific
incident had taken place. “I noticed
jealousy several times,” she said. “I
would never leave my child with my sis-
ter-in-law because I knew they would
not attend to him. There was always
some sort of tension where they were
not happy for our progress.”
Kanhaiya Lal, Tulsi’s father, consid-
ered a respected and wealthy man in
Thikariya, was once the sarpanch of
the village. He said Tulsi had mixed
some intoxicating powder into the food,
after which everyone agreed to do to
what she said. He later told me he was
not present during the ritual because
of a recent injury. The police corrobo-
rated this but said that they could not
confirm if the family had been fed any
intoxicant.
The 17-year-old, who is out on bail,
told me a bit incoherently that he “was”
an avatar of Sheshnag. He said his
family had told him that Sheshnag was
living in him, but that the deity is not
living in him now. When I asked him
what happened that night, he said it
was “a tantric ritual” and that he did
not remember the details.
Remorse was visible on the face of
Kanhaiya Lal. Days after the ritual,
Tulsi’s husband, Radhey Shyam, killed
himself. A few days later, his father also
died. While pointing towards a deep
“The ritual was tantric
in nature,” Seema
told me, “but they
failed to successfully
complete it.” She said
that the ritual had been
intended to harm her
family because of her
financial independence.
OCTOBER 2021
ritual killings · reportage
sword wound sustained by Thwari,
Kanhaiya Lal said, “One of my sons is
dead. Another one is in jail. Two wed-
dings in my house were postponed.”
“Superstition ruined my family.”
the story of the death of Rajaram and
his son is not a mere tale of tort. The
murders are coloured with a deeply
rooted belief in superstitions that is
often ignored in the court of law.
In India, belief in black magic and
paranormal healing is fairly common.
During the course of my reporting,
covering multiple states for over six
months this year, I repeatedly encoun-
tered an unquestioned belief in devils,
demons, ghosts, djinns and evil spirits.
A recent Pew Research Centre survey
on Indian religious practices revealed
that nearly half of the Indian popu-
lation believe in angels and spirits, 71
percent believe in purification by the
Ganges, 38 percent in reincarnation,
76 percent in karma and 70 percent in
fate. These beliefs are shared across
religious groups, including Hindus,
Muslims, Christians and Sikhs.
Superstition pervades families across
India, irrespective of geography, edu-
cational status or religious proclivities.
This often manifest itself in quotidian
ways. When someone buys a house or
31
ritual killings · reportage
a new car, they might invite priests to perform
rituals. Some might not eat nonvegetarian food
on particular days of the week. Most households
depend on astrological predictions to decide upon
major life events, including marriage and career
choices. These practices are believed to ward off
evil or invite good luck. Godmen—a loose term
that includes sadhus, gurus and tantriks—flourish
in this environment.
For many, superstitions are a way to cope with
uncertainty, to feel like they can control uncertain
events. Vinod Shirsath, the editor of Sadhana, a
socialist Marathi weekly, told me that since super-
stition is based on a false belief, it invokes either
confidence or fear. For instance, the belief that “I
can ace this exam if I take blessings of a certain
godman” inspires confidence. The same thought
can also instil fear: “If I do not take the blessing of
a certain godman, I will fail.” Many godmen know
how to exploit these sentiments.
Identifying something as a superstition general-
ly gives it a pejorative hue. Yet many superstitious
beliefs, because long and deeply held, are also
considered integral parts of religious faith and
granted the protections attached to it. This is true
not just within Hinduism, but also in Christian,
Islamic and tribal belief systems. Superstitions be-
gin to seem less banal particularly when they fuel
prejudices prevalent within communities. Super-
stitious beliefs often provide legitimacy to oppres-
sion and injustice, acting as a way to maintain the
status quo in a society, villainise minorities and
women, or to keep people in their places. On the
darker end of this spectrum are superstition-based
crimes, which can involve human sacrifice and
allegations of witchcraft.
Ohri told me he has seen many such supersti-
tious acts in the tribal belt. “When I was posted
as a doctor in the tribal Malwa region, I saw many
people prefer such bhopas, ojhas and tantriks over
doctors,” he said. “What happened with Rajaram
is not rare.”
There is no way to know if what happened with
Rajaram is rare or not. India does not consistently
compile data on superstition-related crimes. There
are no nationwide laws against it. The National
Crime Records Bureau started collecting data on
human sacrifice and witch-hunting as motives
for murder in 2013, but stopped within two years.
Even in that period, thousands of such crimes
were recorded. The full spread and growth of such
superstition-based crimes is unclear, but anecdot-
al evidence and the frequency with which such
cases are reported in local newspapers suggest
that they are flourishing. Godmen, many of whom
believe in black magic and practice superstitious
rituals, are getting more organised and growing in
public stature.
32 THE CARAVAN
Where there is superstition, there is also a
battle against it. But, while India has a lineage
of rationalists and sceptics, the murders of its
leading icons demonstrate how imperilled these
figures are. Narendra Dabholkar, a rationalist who
was among those demanding a stringent anti-su-
perstition law, was assassinated in the run-up to
the 2014 general elections, in which the Hindu
nationalist Narendra Modi was elected prime
minister. Within a year of Modi taking office, the
rationalist Govind Pansare was also assassinated
in Maharashtra, and another rationalist, MM
Kalburgi, was assassinated in Karnataka. A police
investigation found that Kalburgi’s statements
made during a discussion on an anti-superstition
bill were perceived as “anti-Hindu,” and had been
the trigger for the attack on him.
Soon after Dabholkar’s death, the government of
Maharashtra—then a coalition of the Congress and
the Nationalist Congress Party—passed the Preven-
tion and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other
Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black
Magic Act, 2013. This was the first state-level an-
ti-superstition law, but many believe it was adopted
as a kneejerk reaction and remains a much-diluted
version of what Dabholkar wanted. Its stated aim
is “to bring social awakening and awareness in the
society,” “to create a healthy and safe social envi-
ronment with a view to protect the common people
in the society against the evil and sinister practices
thriving on ignorance,” and to eradicate “practices
propagated in the name of so called supernatural or
magical powers or evil spirits commonly known as
black magic.” But the law fails even to define what
superstition is.
“We got an anti-superstition law in Maharashtra,
full of loopholes, after eighteen years of struggle,”
Ranjana Gavande told me. “How can we even ex-
pect a central law?” Gavande is a grassroots worker
with the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan
Samiti, an organisation founded by Dhalbolkar, and
has been an anti-superstition activist for twenty
years. “Getting a central law is a distant dream,”
she said. Karnataka passed an anti-superstition law
of its own in 2017, but this too was a diluted version.
According to Christophe Jaffrelot, a professor of
Indian politics and sociology at King’s India Insti-
tute, the rise of Hindutva exacerbated an atmo-
sphere of superstition. “Since a superstitious mind-
set is promoted by the Sangh Parivar and its fellow
travellers, including Baba Ramdev, people are more
prepared to acknowledge the non-scientific temper-
ament,” he told me. “Hindutva propagandists try
to make people believe that Modi is some godman,
that he is endowed with supernatural power. There
are stories of how, during his tenure as chief min-
ister of Gujarat, he survived poisoning, and that he
swam with crocodiles in his childhood.”

Under Modi’s leadership, supersti-
tious practices have gained more legit-
imacy. Especially during the pandemic,
superstitions and false remedies have
found a free playground. These have
ranged from the laughable to the dan-
gerous: from a minister getting people
to chant “go corona go” as a defence
against the coronavirus to public fig-
ures advocating cow urine as a prophy-
lactic or cure. Modi himself insisted
that Indians bang utensils or light a
diya for nine minutes at 9 pm, as a ges-
ture of solidarity in the country’s coro-
navirus fight. These events spawned
many bogus theories about the
supposed scientific principles behind
such strategies, which were spread far
and wide on social media. Faced with
enormous government mismanagement
of the COVID-19 crisis, and driven by
prevailing sociocultural beliefs and a
lack of awareness, many have preferred
faith healers over doctors.
Superstitious practices are not
limited to the BJP. Previous leaders,
including the Congress prime ministers
Indira Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao,
are known to have conducted private
rituals. Gandhi “privately” performed
the Lakshachandi Path, in which a
hundred thousand verses are recited to
invoke the goddess Chandi, at the Kali
temple in Jhansi, to protect her son
Sanjay after the Emergency. The rituals
continued in secret from 1979 to 1983.
Rao was an ardent follower of Chan-
draswami, a self-styled godman. Ac-
cording to Jacob Copeman and Aya Ike-
game’s book The Guru in South Asia,
Chandraswami had become “more or
less a ‘secret’ counsellor of politicians”
and had a role to play in Rajiv Gandhi’s
assassination. Chandraswami contest-
ed allegations of performing sacrificial
rites to help Rao become prime minis-
ter. Jaffrelot told me that the fact such
practices take place in secret, without
public knowledge, is an indication that
Indian politicians truly believe in them.
“They know that people may look at
them differently if they were practising
tantra publicly, yet such practices have
gained momentum now,” he said.
Jaffrelot told me that politicians
often feel that they need the moral sup-
port of spiritual power. They believe su-
pernatural powers can help them over-
come their political opponents. “It is a
really interesting give-and-take kind
of attitude which prospers between
tantriks and politicians,” Jaffrelot said.
“It is a classic way of mutual support.
Tantriks need political protection, poli-
ticians need tantric power to neutralise
their opponents and the evil eye. Both
tend to return the favour whenever
they can.” Many of these relations are
hidden from public view. “The magic
is sanitised to make it compatible with
the dominant Hindu identity, the Great
Tradition, that is so different from this
facet of popular religion,” Jaffrelot
said. “Politicians understand that both
should not clash.”
“It is a really
interesting give-and-
take kind of attitude
which prospers
between tantriks and
politicians,” Jaffrelot
said. “It is a classic way
of mutual support.
Tantriks need political
protection, politicians
need tantric power
to neutralise their
opponents and the
evil eye. Both tend
to return the favour
whenever they can.”
Before the 2015 state elections in Bi-
har, a video went viral showing Nitish
Kumar, the state’s chief minister and
the head of the Janata Dal (United), in
the company of a tantrik . The tantrik
could be seen speaking against Kumar’s
political rival Lalu Prasad Yadav.
In an opinion piece for the Indian
Express soon after the video appeared,
Jaffrelot argued that Kumar was
not apologetic for the event despite
political backlash. “This is revealing
of the growing acceptability of prac-
tices that, till recently, had to remain
secret,” he wrote. “Just before the 2009
OCTOBER 2021
ritual killings · reportage
general elections, then Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh had accused L.K.
Advani of resorting to black magic and
approaching tantrics to get to the seat
of power. The BJP leader had then
opted for the denial mode, but times are
changing and the rational mindset is
not the alpha and omega of the political
discourse anymore.”
A few years after the assassinations
of Pansare and Kalburgi, it was evident
that godmen and their rituals no longer
seemed as closeted in New India. In
2018, the BJP promoted a weeklong
Rashtriya Raksha Mahayagya, or
grand ceremonial fire, on the sprawling
lawns outside Delhi’s Red Fort, where
the prime minister hoists the flag and
delivers a speech every Independence
Day. The Mahayagya was held in prepa-
ration for the general election of 2019
to “blunt conspiracies hatched by the
country’s inimical forces,” according
to the former BJP MP Maheish Girri—
the event’s chief organiser. “There are
external and internal forces who are
attempting to harm the country’s inter-
ests,” Girri said at a press conference.
“We are organising the Yagya following
our ancient traditions to thwart such
attempts and to take a pledge to create
a ‘New India.’”
The extravagant affair, whose dates
corresponded with the Hindu New
Year, involved 1,111 priests and 108 cer-
emonial fires. Girri claimed that such a
yagya was being organised after eleven
hundred years. For the ceremonial fire,
soil and water were brought in from
Doklam, where Indian and Chinese
troops were locked in a standoff, and
from Poonch, located near the Line
of Control. These were transported
in a Rath Yatra flagged off by Rajnath
Singh, who was then the home minis-
ter. Soil was also brought in from four
major Hindu pilgrimage sites: Badri-
nath, Dwarka, Puri and Rameswaram.
A report in Jansatta said that the deity
Baglamukhi—one of the ten Tantric
Mahavidyas—was invoked during the
Mahayagya. “It is believed that Bagl-
amukhi is worshipped to oppress and
destruct enemies,” the report said.
The use of ritual and religious cere-
mony are more common in the coun-
try’s politics than ever before. Rajnath
Singh, now the defence minister, per-
33
ritual killings · reportage

below: Jharkhandi, formed a “shastra puja” on a new Rafale fighter jet Ganga, a personification of the River Ganges, de-
a young godman delivered from France in 2019. He placed a coco- scended from heaven on the tenth day of the month
in his thirties, nut on top of the aircraft and lemons underneath of Jyeshtha—the month of the Hindu calendar that
is an accused in
it. “For New India, tradition and power come hand overlaps May and June. In 2019, Ganga Dusseh-
the murder of
Rajni Yadav. He in hand,” Pradip Parmar, a BJP politician and ra was celebrated on 12 June. Hindu astrologers
was accused of minister in the Gujarat government, tweeted. claimed that this was a divine date that had come
soliciting a sexual The growing acceptability of such rituals in the after 75 years. Regional newspapers preached that
relationship with public sphere leaves the door open for supersti- those who took a dip in the Ganges on that day
Rajni through her tious beliefs to proliferate in the new India. As I while chanting a mantra could erase ten sins.
husband Maanpal
saw in the course of my reporting, such beliefs can Sankara, a village near Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh,
Yadav.
inspire not just rituals, but also heinous crimes. stands on the banks of the Ganges. It is dominated
by Yadavs, categorised as Other Backward Classes
ganga dussehra is celebrated in the plains of north in the state. On the evening of 12 June 2019,
India every June. It is believed that the goddess hundreds of people arrived at the village’s ghat to
bathe in the river. That same day, police officials
told me, a 32-year-old woman named Rajni Yadav
was drowned by her husband, Maanpal Yadav, a
man in his fifties.
Rajni’s brother Rajesh was a witness to her mur-
der. He was visiting Sankara with his cousins from
nearby Ratroi to celebrate Ganga Dusshera. As
soon as he reached Rajni’s house that evening, she
took him to her room. “She was worried,” Rajesh
told me.
Rajni started the conversation awkwardly,
Rajesh recalled. She told him that certain things
are not meant to be discussed, but she felt there
was no other option left. She said her husband was
forcing her to develop a sexual relationship with
a sadhu called Sant Das Jharkhandi. In return,
Jharkhandi had promised to make Maanpal rich.
Rajni told Rajesh that Maanpal had threatened to
kill her if she disobeyed.
Rajesh immediately confronted Maanpal. He
asked Maanpal what kind of man asks his wife
to sleep with someone else. But Maanpal was not
ready to listen and told Rajesh that he would do
whatever his guru told him. He repeated to Rajesh
that if Rajni disobeyed, he would kill her. Maanpal
slammed the door and left, while Rajesh tried to
comfort a sobbing Rajni.
Rajesh told her to immediately pack her things
and come back to Ratroi with him. Meanwhile, he
went to take a bath in the Ganges with his cousins.
“Who would have thought that Maanpal would
kill her right after I stepped out of the house?”
Rajesh said. “It happened in minutes.”
Rajesh was bathing in the river when he saw
Maanpal dragging Rajni by her hair. “She was
shouting, calling for help,” he told me. Her red
sari contrasted against the green fields next to the
ck vijayakumar for the caravan

river, he recalled. “We were around three hundred

meters away from her. By the time I reached that
end of the river, she was already gone with the
water currents. I saw Maanpal swimming across
the river.”
The next day, Rajesh registered a complaint at
Aligarh’s Dadon police station. He stated in the

34 THE CARAVAN
 ritual killings · reportage

first-information report that his sister had been Both Maanpal and Jharkhandi were granted below: Maanpal
killed by Maanpal because she refused to have sex bail by the Allahabad High Court within months. Yadav, a member
with Jharkhandi. Maanpal and Jharkhandi were The trial has moved at a snail’s pace in the three of the Bajrang
Dal, threatened
arrested soon after, and charged with murder years since. Both men have the same lawyer, his wife’s brother,
and voluntarily causing hurt, as well as criminal Subhash Chandra Sharma, who is also an ardent Rajesh Yadav, that if
conspiracy and destruction of evidence. follower of Jharkhandi. she did not do what
When I met them in Ratroi, Rajni’s parents told Maanpal told me that Rajni drowned because his guruji wanted,
me they had always been concerned about Maan- of the high flow of the Ganges, and Jharkhandi he would kill her.
pal’s propensity for violence. Maanpal had first claimed that he had never even seen her face. Both
spotted Rajni at their eldest daughter’s house, they alleged that the charges against them are part of
said. Maanpal told me that he is a member of the a larger conspiracy by people who want to defame
Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the Vishwa Hindu Hindus and their holy work.
Parishad, one of the many organisations attached to Jharkhandi is a young godman, in his thirties.
the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was visit- He refers to himself as Mahatma. His matted
ing neighbouring villages as part of a Bajrang Dal
campaign when he saw her. Maanpal found Rajni
attractive and decided there and then that he would
marry her. Within a few days, they were wed.
Rajni’s parents said that they now regret this
hasty decision. “We got to know after Rajni was
married that Maanpal already had two children
from his last marriage,” Ram Sakhi, Rajni’s moth-
er, said. She alleged that Maanpal had also killed
his first wife. “People told us that she was preg-
nant but, despite that, Maanpal used to beat her,”
Bhup Singh, Rajni’s father, said. “Once, he kicked
her womb with such force that she died.” Maanpal
denied this when I met him. He claimed that his
first wife died in an accident.
Rajni’s parents said that they had known about
Jharkhandi’s involvement in her domestic life
for months before her death, and that Maanpal
and Jharkhandi used to spend their days and
nights together. Bhup Singh said that they smoked
cannabis. “Rajni was so sick of his addiction, but
whenever she complained, he would beat her up,”
Ramsakhi said. “He was so brutal that he would
not even spare her in front of her kids.” Maanpal
told me that he collected donations over two years
to make a two-room home for his guru near his
fields. Before that, the godman lived at a crema-
tion spot on the river bank.
Shailendra Yadav, a police sub-inspector, also
noticed the “close” relationship between Maan-
pal and Jharkhandi. He recalled the scene in the
police station after their arrest. “Maanpal was the
first one to be arrested, but shortly after his tantr-
ik was also produced. In front of the media and se-
nior officials, Maanpal started crying. He asked us
why we had arrested his guruji. He told us to spare
his guru and arrest him instead.” Both of them
shahid tantray for the caravan

are closely linked with the BJP. Maanpal said

that the party shelters tantriks, seers and sadhus.
Jharkhandi is a disciple of the Terah Bhai Tyagis,
a Vaishnavite monastic order. Jharkhandi’s guru
boasted to me of their links with Adityanath, the
chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, and Vasundhara
Raje, a former chief minister of Rajasthan.

OCTOBER 2021 35
ritual killings · reportage
below: Mahant beard is not that long, while his dreadlocks hang
Ram Swaroop down to a little below his shoulders. He appeared
Das, known to young but, just to give me an idea of how young he
his devotees as
was, he told me he was initiated as a Tera Bhai Ty-
Brahmachariji
Maharaj, is agi sadhu just six years ago, at the Nashik Kumbh
considered one of Mela in 2015.
the most prominent Amit Sharma, a Mathura-based journalist, told
sadhus in the region me that Jharkhandi’s guru is considered one of the
with significant most prominent sadhus in the region. He also has
clout in regional
significant clout in regional politics, so much so
politics in Uttar
Pradesh. that Adityanath listens to him. In Uttar Pradesh,
Sharma said, sadhus are part of the ruling dis-
pensation. “In fact, the chief minister himself is
a priest,” he explained. “Each sadhu has between
two thousand and twenty thousand followers. If
that sadhu asks to vote for a particular candidate,
it makes a huge difference in regional politics. The
government understands it.” According to news
reports, the Terah Bhai Tyagis contributed R1.11
crore for the construction of the Ram Mandir at
Ayodhya.
I met Jharkhandi’s guru at his Mathura ashram
during Guru Purnima, a Hindu festival that cele-
brates teacher-student relationships. Mahant Ram
Swaroop Das, a man in his sixties clad in a saffron
robe, was expecting me. He is more commonly
known as Brahmachariji Maharaj and holds the
title of mahamandaleshwar—the head of a monas-
tic order.
Maanpal, out on bail, was present. Their lawyer
had also visited Mathura from Aligarh to pay his
respects to Jharkhandi and Swaroop Das. As I
started talking to Swaroop Das in his air-condi-
36 THE CARAVAN
tioned room, many of his followers sat down and
listened to our conversation. Some of them offered
him gifts of sweets, fruits and money.
Swaroop Das listed his credentials. He said
that he was the top sadhu of the Terah Bhai Tyagi
order, which had hundreds of sadhus and tantriks
as members—including Narendra Modi’s guru,
Abhiram Das Tyagi. After Modi left home in his
youth, Swaroop Das said, he spent several days at
Abhiram Das’s ashram and left only after meeting
him. Some vernacular news reports also mention
this. “Even today, Modi, his mother, Hiraben, and
his younger brother, Pankaj, follow the guruji,”
Swaroop Das said. “They even have Abhiram
Dasji’s photo in their house.” Some local papers
reported that Pankaj visited the guru before the
2019 general election, and that the two had had
“long conversations in solitude.”
Aaditya Mishra, a local BJP leader who was vis-
iting the ashram for Guru Purnima, spoke of how
well connected Swaroop Das was. “When Vasund-
hara Raje was chief minister of Rajasthan, she
organised a big havan where Maharajji was the
priest,” he said. “She shares a deep guru-bhav”—
teacher-student—“relation with Maharajji and has
remained his disciple for long.” Mishra said that
this year, in the lead-up to the Ardha-Kumbha
in Vrindavan, Swaroop Das was one of only two
ascetics allowed to question Adityanath.
When I asked Swaroop Das about his close ties
with BJP and RSS leaders, he told me that he only
knows them because of his ceremonial duties.
He said that his relationship with Raje went back
ck vijayakumar for the caravan

years, and that her mother had also
held him in high regard. During Raje’s
tenure as chief minister, he added, she
gave him a grant to build a temple at
his ashram in Bundi, near Kota, and
ensured that it was completed. “Both
mother and daughter have deep dedica-
tion for saints and mahatmas,” he said.
I sent questions to Adityanath and Raje
asking about their connection with
Swaroop Das, but received no response.
Jharkhandi claimed that he never
took Swaroop Das’s help for his case
despite his reach. “He was hurt when I
was implicated in Rajni’s murder—after
all, the relationship between a guru
and shishya is no less than a son and
father,” he told me. “He got to know
months after I was arrested. After I
got bail, he just asked me to stay with
him in his ashram, and I followed his
instructions.”
Maanpal told me that Jharkhandi
had taken care of all legal expenses,
but later said that his elder brother
had done so. Their lawyer told me he
did not charge them a fee at all. “They
are saintly people, what fees can I take
from them.” Jharkhandi told me his
sister paid for the legal expenses.
Swaroop Das was not keen to dis-
cuss the murder allegations against
Jharkhandi. “We Terah Bhai Tyagis be-
lieve in tyag”—sacrifice—he said. He de-
scribed the difficult processes of medi-
tation they go through—one practice, he
claimed, entailed being amid burning
balls of cow dung. He said that someone
with mala fide intentions of defaming
holy Hindu priests had framed his
disciple. “It is all a big conspiracy,” he
said. “How can someone who keeps on
chanting the name of god be capable of
doing something like this?”
in july 2021, I visited the shrine of
Hussain Tekri, in the city of Jaora, near
Ratlam. There, I saw men and women
chained to pillars, shouting, laughing
and crying. Some were trying to break
the chains, while others were chanting
the names of various spirits. The rela-
tives and acquaintances surrounding
them believed that their bodies were
possessed by spirits. As a treatment,
some people were tortured. Many were
given electric shocks. Women had their
hair pulled. Men were beaten.
Swaroop Das was not
keen to discuss the
murder allegations
against Jharkhandi.
“How can someone who
keeps on chanting the
name of god be capable
of doing something like
this?”
Mohammad Iftikhar Ali Khan Ba-
hadur, the nineteenth-century nawab
of Jaora, is buried in the same grave-
yard where the two-hundred-year-old
shrine of Hussain Tekri stands. Thou-
sands of people from across India visit
the six shrines of Hussain Tekri, known
for Hazri rituals intended to cure “hu-
man” ailments. A belief that evil spirits
leave the body when they come into
contact with the religious powers of the
shrine abides even today.
To know if the spirit has left the body
of the victim, a ritual called faisla—de-
cision—is performed. A lemon is nailed
onto the trunk of a dead tree at the
shrine. The lemon is bound with thread
and a piece of cloth—either red or black,
depending upon the nature of the spirit
supposed to have possessed them. The
victim reveals during the faisla if the
spirit has left their body or not.
The people I met at Tekri had com-
mon bodily ailments, such as stomach
aches, headaches and backaches. Some
were suffering from cognitive diseases.
Instead of seeking medical treatment,
people from far-off states had come
to his shrine in Madhya Pradesh in
search of healing. Surprisingly, most of
the visitors at the shrine were Hin-
dus and Jains. Various researchers
have shown that the “brotherhood of
sickness” tends to be inclusive in India.
A 2011 study found that “Hindus tend
to appeal to Muslim ritual within the
Dargah” despite their own traditions to
seek remedy for illness.
Believers assert that faith-healing
can initiate the cure of disease and
disability. The healing process can in-
clude a demonstration of faith, a prayer
or a ritual, or even torture and human
sacrifice.
OCTOBER 2021
ritual killings · reportage
Despite the pandemic, thousands of
people still flock to such shrines, tem-
ples, dargahs, godmen and tantriks. In-
dia spends a tiny fraction of its budget
on public healthcare. Even in spending
that minuscule fraction, expenditure
on mental health comes last. In fact,
the government encourages people to
reach out to faith healers for “spiritual”
treatments. The ministry of health and
family welfare mentions on its website
that “recent research has shown that
religious practices can be helpful in
curing and preventing physical and
mental illnesses.” It adds, “When med-
ical care becomes unaffordable, futile,
and of no use, spiritual care is absolute-
ly feasible, and a logical solution.”
Around forty-five kilometres from
Husain Tekri, in Nayapura, is the
baithak—hall—of Anwar Shah, a faith
healer. Nayapura is a predominantly
Muslim neighbourhood. Shah was
famous as “chumma baba,” or the
kissing godman, in the Malwa region
of Madhya Pradesh. People visited him
to seek jhad-phoonk—spiritual healing
through magic. His followers believed
that he could cure disability, diseases
and bad luck. He would recite Quranic
verses in front of those seeking his
blessings, then write those verses on
two separate pieces of papers with ink
made using saffron. One paper would
be dissolved in water that was to be
drunk by the seeker, while the other
would be tied into an amulet for the
seeker. In the end, the baba would take
the hands of the seeker, kiss them and
put his hands on the seeker’s head to
bless them.
Many people whom I met claimed
that they were healed by Shah. Mo-
hamad Aslam, a 50-year-old resident
of Mominpura, had come to seek
treatment for piles. “I had already
undergone multiple operations for the
treatment of piles but it returned once
again,” he told me. “The doctor had told
me that four or five more operations
are still needed. I was in a very bad
condition when I went to seek dua from
Chumma Baba.” Shah did his thing and
gave him an amulet. Aslam described
a placebo effect. “I felt something
peaceful from inside. My body had
goosebumps. I felt sifat”—good health.
“When I visited the doctor, he told me
37
ritual killings · reportage
I no longer need the operation. Some
ailments cannot be cured by doctors.”
“Seeking help from traditional and
faith-healing places is very common in
India,” Kishore Kumar, a psychiatrist
and director of The Banyan—an NGO
offering mental-health services—told
me. “Persons experiencing distress
seek faith healers immediately thinking
that suffering is due to wrath or curse
or possession or evil eye. The super-
natural explanation such as evil spirits,
black magic, past sins, failed wows,
astrology, ancestors, fault in the stars
or anger of spirits is consistent with
their belief. If the care providers give
this kind of explanation, it validates the
patients’ beliefs. They readily agree to
solutions like a visit to temples, dargahs
et cetera, even if it involves torture in
the name of treatment.”
On 4 June 2020, Shah died from
COVID-19. He had tested positive
for the coronavirus the previous day,
after complaining of a cough and fever.
Within a few days, local officials re-
sponsible for contact-tracing and quar-
antining estimated that 23 out of 50
people who had come in contact with
38
Shah had tested positive. The medical
team claimed that most of the posi-
tive contacts had visited him to seek
faith-based healing. The entire area of
Nayapura was declared a containment
zone. Shah was officially the third per-
son to die of COVID-19 in Ratlam.
Shah’s death and subsequent stories
of his black magic made national
headlines. This was around the time
when BJP leaders and the right-wing
media were demonising all Muslims,
holding them responsible for a spike in
COVID-19 cases, because of a Tablighi
Jamat congregation that had been
identified as a spreader event. Various
media reports misidentified Anwar as
“Aslam” and ran clickbait-y, Islamopho-
bic news clips.
I visited Nayapura just days before
Bakr Eid in 2021, within weeks of the
second COVID-19 wave. Although
Ratlam was one of the worst-affected
districts during the second wave, large
crowds of people were standing around,
chatting and laughing, as if nothing
had happened. I visited the house
where Shah had lived and practised his
faith-healing.
THE CARAVAN
françois-olivier dommergues / alamy photo
Shah had created a musalla—a space
dedicated for prayer—in the house.
The room was decorated with various
spiritual and paranormal artefacts he
had collected over the years. At the
centre of it were a kasa, sanad and kub-
di—a bowl to seek blessings, a beaded
necklace and a stick to support the
old—which had been in his family for
generations. The room also had some
Hindu religious artefacts.
The family told me that Shah had
received hardly any income from his
supernatural business, but their house
seemed to be better built and kept than
many in the neighbourhood. “Most of
his followers were Jains and Hindus
who controlled the major businesses in
Ratlam,” Javed, his son, said.
Jiten Parihar, a 36-year-old computer
technician from Ramgarh, in Ratlam,
who identifies as Hindu, worshipped
Shah as his “god” for more than five
years. “I used to visit Baba at least
twice or thrice a month,” he told me.
“He too came to our house to bless us.
It is because of him that my business
as a computer technician grew. I am
what I am because of him.” When I

asked him why he followed a Muslim faith healer,
he said, “It is my belief. There are no questions in
belief. How does it matter that I am a Hindu?”
When Parihar came to know about Shah’s death,
he was not present in Ratlam. He could not travel
back for the funeral, because transport services
had not resumed. “I locked myself in a room and
cried for hours,” he told me. “I could not believe
that he was no more. How could that happen?”
Over a year has passed since, but Parihar still reg-
ularly visits Shah’s grave and baithak. “Because of
the coronavirus, no one could bid him goodbye,”
he said. “Who knows if he is still alive? I can feel
his presence.”
when science collides with superstition, the
result is often resistance and anger. This is what
happened when the police and doctors tried to
test and quarantine faith healers and seekers in
Ratlam after Shah’s death. “Most of them lied to
our face,” Vicky Sangla, a member of the con-
tact-tracing team, told me. “No one would agree
that they had contact with Anwar Shah. So many
of them fled Nayapura for fear of being tested. Ev-
ery day I returned with my team and found more
people in the house hidden. A family had dunked
their teenage kids in a water tank on the roof for
two days. This was the extent of reluctance.”
The disbelief about COVID-19 and its potential
to kill extended to Shah’s family too. “I refuse to
believe my husband died because of coronavirus,”
Mahrool, his widow, said with tears in her eyes.
“Coronavirus is a myth.”
rakesh porwal ratlam
ritual killings · reportage
“It has been two years since COVID-19 has opposite page:
wrecked the world, despite that many people still The shrine of
believe that it is a myth,” Ranjana Gavande said. Hussain Tekri
was built in the
“It is not surprising. This is one deadly disease
nineteenth century
with no established treatment, medicines or re- by Mohammad
search. It is a hotbed for breeding superstition.” Iftikhar Ali Khan
On 24 January this year, V Padmaja and her Bahadur, the nawab
husband, V Purushotham Naidu—both teachers of Jaora. Thousands
in Madanapalle, a town in Andhra Pradesh’s Chit- of people across
India visit the six
toor district—murdered their daughters thinking
shrines of Hussain
that they would return from the dead. When Tekri, known
police reached the spot, they found the head of the for Hazri rituals
elder daughter, Alekhya, battered by a dumbbell in intended to cure
the family’s prayer room. Her hair was burnt, and “human” ailments.
she had metal stuffed into her mouth. Sai Divya,
below: A woman
the younger daughter, had been killed with a tri-
lies with her legs
dent. Her head, too, was battered with a dumbbell. tied at Hussain
The naked corpses of the girls were lying in Tekri. Believers
pools of blood. When the police went in to collect assert that faith-
them, Padmaja objected. She urged them to leave healing can initiate
the bodies “just for a day.” When the police in- the cure of disease
sisted, she started shouting at them. She said that and disability by
demonstration of
“god” was all over the house, and harangued them
faith, through a
for walking around in their shoes and trying to prayer or a ritual,
take her daughters when they were not wearing or even torture and
any clothes. “Don’t do it,” she told them. human sacrifice.
When the police asked the parents what had
happened, they insisted that their daughters
would come alive after sunrise—Kali Yuga would
end, they said, and Satya Yuga would begin. The
Kali Yuga, believed in Hindu cosmology to be the
present epoch of human history, is characterised
as full of conflict and sin. It is said to be followed
OCTOBER 2021 39
ritual killings · reportage
by the Satya Yuga, an age of truth in
which humanity is governed by the
gods.
The couple, who were arrested and
charged with murder, were incoherent.
While being tested for COVID-19, Pad-
maja told hospital staff that the coro-
navirus had not originated in China.
She said it had come from the Hindu
deity Shiva, and added, “I am Shiva and
corona will be gone by March.”
Having pled insanity, the couple is
currently out on bail. Some reports
said that the family suffered from a
rare psychotic condition called “shared
delusional disorder,” which grew
more severe through the pandemic
due to months of lockdown-imposed
isolation. This disorder is also called
shared psychosis, or “madness shared
by many,” where delusional beliefs and
hallucinations are transmitted from
one individual to another, often within
families.
In their confessions, the parents
told police that Divya had been ill for a
week, after which she developed a pho-
bia that she would die. The district’s
police superintendent told me that the
parents had approached a priest just a
day before the murders. The priest did a
small ritual and tied a string around the
girl’s hand. Alekhya, hugely influenced
by Shiva, had refused medical care.
the widely reported abduction, gang
rape and murder of an eight-year-old
girl in Kathua, in Jammu and Kashmir,
shocked the country in 2018. As per the
charge sheet, the girl was abducted on
10 January and kept in a devisthan—an
ancestral sacred hall—under a table
covered with mats. She was made to
eat manar—a form of bhang, which is
considered a prasad of Shiva. The girl
was left in the devisthan for five days
while the accused regularly came to
worship deities and perform rituals.
On 13 January, the day of Lohri, she
was raped multiple times and eventu-
ally killed. Her body was dumped in a
jungle because a fanda—an exorcism
ritual—was to be held in the devisthan
the next day.
What was even more shocking was
the support the accused received after
they were arrested. A theory was float-
ed that the case was a conspiracy to
40
defame Hindus, and local BJP leaders
jumped to defend the accused. They
stated that the arrests were motivated
by “vested political interests to divide
the country.” Two months after the
body was found, Chaudhary Lal Singh
and Chander Prakash Ganga, both min-
isters in the state government from the
BJP, held a rally to support the accused.
In July 2020, I visited Rasana, the
small village in Kathua with less than
twenty-five households where the inci-
dent took place. All families that reside
in Rasana take immense pride in their
Brahmin identity. Most villagers iden-
tify themselves as Jangotra Bhramins,
also known as Khajurias and Sharmas.
The girl belonged to a Sunni Muslim
nomadic tribe, the Gujjar Bakarwal.
Without getting into
the merits and details
of the investigations
and court proceedings,
their accounts
pointed towards a
new dimension to
the case that had
gone unexplored: the
ritualistic nature of the
rape and murder.
I conducted nearly two dozen inter-
views, including with the families of
the victim and the accused, as well as
neighbours, priests and police officers.
Without getting into the merits and
details of the investigations and court
proceedings, their accounts pointed
towards a new dimension to the case
that had gone unexplored: the ritualis-
tic nature of the rape and murder.
On 12 January 2018, the girl’s father
had complained to the Hiranagar
police station that his daughter had
been missing for two days. She had
last been seen with other Bakarwal
children, taking horses to graze. The
horses came back by the evening, but
she did not return home. Her family
got worried. They searched the woods,
thinking some wild animal might have
attacked her. They also looked around
THE CARAVAN
in other Bakarwal tents, but no one
could locate her.
The girl was one year old when her
parents had adopted her, having earlier
lost their two biological daughters in a
tragic accident. She grew up in their no-
madic household along with their only
surviving son. The family and their live-
stock—sheep, goats, horses and cows—
reside in the plains of Kathua during
the winters. In summers, they migrate
to the remote Himalayan ranges in
Shapatnala, in Ladakh. Each Bakarwal
clan follows a certain traditional route
to a particular pasture suitable for their
livestock. The girl’s family has been
following this route for years.
The father told me that he did not
want this harsh life for his children.
He wanted to educate them, which is
why he thought of temporarily settling
in Kathua. He bought land in Rasana
in 2004 and, by 2008, he constructed
a house there. “I thought the children
could stay there to study while we
could graze the cattle,” he told me.
Most Bakarwals have done some-
thing similar in recent years, but only
he had built a house in the Brahmin
settlement. Other Bakarwals in the
area either lived in seasonal tents or in
villages up on higher terrain.
A woman from Rasana had last seen
the girl around the pond where Ba-
karwals usually brought their animals
to drink. This pond was a few metres
away from the devisthan, which was
dedicated to the villagers’ ancestral
deity, Baba Kaliveer. People throughout
Jammu worship Kaliveer as an incarna-
tion of Sheshnag.
A day after the girl’s disappearance,
her mother visited the devisthan. She
was desperate and had heard that
Sanjhi Ram could foretell the future.
“As I saw the door of the devisthan
open, I unknowingly went inside with
my shoes on,” she told me. Sanjhi was
shocked, she said, and began shout-
ing at her about this. “Without even
listening to me, he claimed that he does
not have my horses and asked me to
leave. I told him that I am not looking
for horses but for my daughter. At that
time, two women were sitting in the
devisthan seeking some spiritual guid-
ance on their issues from Sanjhi. I also
sat on the side.”

She recalled, “He asked me why I had come
to the devisthan. I told him that I am aware that
he looks into people’s ‘hisab’ and can predict the
future.” By hisab, the mother meant the kundali,
or horoscope. She asked Sanjhi to tell her where
her girl was.
“As I asked him, he got silent and, after a few
minutes, asked the two other ladies to leave,” she
told me. “As the women left, he looked into my
eyes and told me that my daughter is in someone’s
home. She is well-fed and resting. He asked me to
not worry and return to my home.” Sanjhi Ram
started chanting mantras and lighting diyas, and
she left.
According to the police charge sheet, the girl’s
body was found on 17 January and taken into po-
lice custody for an autopsy. Further police investi-
gations found that Sanjhi Ram had masterminded
the whole thing, that he had directed another
accused “to execute the plan of kidnapping and
to give some intoxicant to the girl and thereafter
confine her at Devisthan in the first instance.”
The charge sheet states that, on the morning of
Lohri, Sanjhi Ram first performed some rituals
with the other accused. He then left “the De-
visthan from the back gate to perform some rituals
and met Deepak Khajuria.” Meanwhile, the girl
was raped inside the devisthan multiple times.
That evening, one of the accused informed Sanjhi
Ram that he, along with other men, had raped the
girl inside the devisthan. “Accused Sanjhi Ram
directed JCL that the time was ripe to kill the girl
so as to achieve the ultimate goal of criminal con-
spiracy hatched among the accused,” the charge
sheet states.
That night, the chargesheet adds, the girl was
taken to a culvert in front of the devisthan. The
men raped the girl once more before killing her.
Khajuria then “kept the girl’s neck on his left thigh
and started applying force with his hands on her
neck in order to kill her.” Then, one of the accused
strangled her with her dupatta. To ensure that she
was dead, the girl was twice hit on her head with a
stone. The charge sheet also says that, on 15 Janu-
ary, Sanjhi Ram “directed to throw the dead body
in the jungle as it was not safe to keep it inside
Devisthan anymore. People were likely to visit De-
visthan on the following day for Fanda which was
to be performed by accused Sanji Ram himself.”
I asked Shwetambari Sharma, a deputy super-
intendent and the only woman in the six-member
special-investigation team set up by the Jammu
and Kashmir Police, what fanda means. She said
it is “jhad-phoonk that people usually do.” I asked
her about the procedure involved in this jhad-
phoonk. She said that, since the verdict in the
case was being challenged in court, she could not
comment about it.
ritual killings · reportage
At the time of the incident, the BJP was part of a
coalition government in the state with the Peoples
Democratic Party. The PDP leader and chief min-
ister, Mehbooba Mufti, indicated that she might be
forced to end the alliance if the BJP stopped her
from providing justice to the girl’s family. Chaud-
hary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga,
the ministers who had rallied in support of the
accused, were forced to resign. Alleging that the
BJP itself had asked both ministers to attend the
rally, Ganga termed his resignation a “sacrifice” to
save the BJP’s image.
Chaudhary told me it was an insult to Hindu-
ism that the devisthan had been dragged into this
whole controversy. He argued that the girl had not
been raped, only murdered. “However, an investi-
gation by Central Bureau of Investigation was the
only way to know who her murderers were,” he
said.
Mufti was firm that the state police, and not the
CBI—which reports to the BJP-led government
at the centre—should continue the investigation.
In June that year, the BJP broke the coalition,
stating that the Mufti government had “failed in
its responsibility,” that “violence increased in the
Valley” and that “fundamental rights are under
threat.” There was no evidence that the Kathua
rape was the reason behind the rift, but the inci-
dent became a major political sore point.
It seemed to many that the extent to which
BJP leaders defended the accused indicated they
had many things to hide regarding the Kathua
case. Chaudhary told me that Jitendra Singh, a
minister of state for the prime minister’s office
who is known to be close to Modi, was involved
in discussions around transferring the case to the
CBI. Locals I spoke to who also wanted to see the
investigation handed over to the CBI also men-
tioned Singh’s involvement in political negotia-
tions. Many expressed their disappointment that
he had failed to ensure the transfer of the case. I
reached out to Singh with questions, but he did not
respond.
The case was shifted from Kathua to Pathankot,
a district in Punjab that borders Jammu, in May
2018, after the Supreme Court acknowledged a
threat to the lawyer and parents of the girl amid
growing resistance by Hindu-nationalist groups.
The previous month, lawyers in the Kathua court
complex had ganged up to prevent police from
filing the chargesheet.
In June 2019, after examining over a hundred
witnesses, a district court in Pathankot convicted
Sanjhi Ram and five other men of kidnapping,
torture, rape and murder. The court sentenced
Sanjhi Ram, a fomer police officer named Deepak
Khajuria and a native of Rasana named Parvesh
Kumar to life terms for murder and to 25 years
OCTOBER 2021 41
ritual killings · reportage
in prison for rape. Sanjhi’s son Vishal
Jangotra was acquitted due to lack of
evidence. His minor nephew is being
tried in a juvenile court. Another three
former police officers, Anand Dutta,
Surinder Kumar and Tilak Raj, were
sentenced to five years’ imprisonment
for the destruction of crucial evidence.
Though the investigation stated that
Sanjhi did not rape the girl, he was
convicted for being the “mastermind”
of the entire incident. The investigation
concluded that the abduction of the girl
was planned to dislodge the Muslim
Bakarwals from the largely Hindu-pop-
ulated area of Kathua.
The locals told me that a devisthan
is not a temple but an ancestral sacred
space only for the Jangotra Brahmins
of Rasana. Many villages across the
region have similar devisthans, apart
from conventional Hindu temples.
These devisthans are not just var-
na-specific but also jati-specific. For
instance, the Mahajan caste from the
42
The gruesome murder
shocked the country’s
conscience but, once
again, did not spark a
national conversation
on the role rituals and
superstitions play in
fuelling bigotry and
heinous acts.
Kayastha varna has its own devisthan,
as does the Dogra caste from the Rajput
varna. Each caste also has its own kul-
devta, as well as specific rituals, holy
days and beliefs. A priest from Jammu
informed me that Kaliveer is the kul-
devta of 12 such castes.
The Jangotras in Rasana prefer
identifying Kaliveer as “Kale Ghode
Wala Baba”—the deity who rides a black
horse. They told me the deity is known
THE CARAVAN
for his rage and demands complete
respect. As his servants, they cannot
take his name.
There are no priests in these devis-
thans. The locals instead believe that
these deities appoint a man of their
wish as their “chela” or “sevak,” who
then serves as the servant and mouth-
piece of the deity. Apart from perform-
ing duties similar to those of priests,
chelas are also involved in faith-heal-
ing. Many villagers believe chelas
can perform miracles and predict the
future, and they are often consulted
before marriages, births and deaths. It
is through a chela that animal sacrifices
are offered to deities after any wishes
are fulfilled. Kaliveer’s chela is referred
to as his kala ghoda, or black horse.
Sanjhi Ram was the chela of Ka-
liveer Devta. His 33-year-old daughter,
Madhu Bala, told me that he had been
performing this role for over twen-
ty-five years. Kaliveer had been their
kuldevta for generations, she said, but
srishti jaswal

it was only her father and a distant relative who
possessed these special powers. She told me he
was the “chosen one.”
After Sanjhi Ram’s retirement as a village
accountant, in 2017, he was fully dedicated to the
devisthan. Madhu told me that he spent his days
visiting the place in the mornings and evenings.
He conducted all the rituals, from bathing the
deity to changing its clothes, from lighting diyas
to talking to devotees. Sanjhi would spend every
Sunday—considered an auspicious day for wor-
shipping Kaliveer—in the devisthan. He had the
keys to the sacred hall. Of the four walls, three
had metal doors and windows. During the trial,
it was argued that other villagers also had keys to
the doors. However, the prosecution team told me
that no one could produce even a single duplicate
key as evidence.
When I visited the devisthan one morning, it
was locked and no one was around. It was located
at one end of a plot of barren land, surrounded by
a thick forest. A small pathway from the de-
visthan led directly through the forest to Sanjhi
Ram’s house. The girl’s body had been found
in the middle of that pathway. The walls of the
devisthan had been freshly whitewashed. “Jai
Baba Kaliveer” was written prominently on them
in black ink.
I returned to the devisthan that evening. This
time, it was open. There were two women in the
hall, but both denied knowing anything about
the rape case. The hall was mostly empty. On one
end, there was a raised platform with metal idols
of five deities. Madhu told me that, apart from
Kaliveer, the Devisthan hosted four more deities:
Mal Mata, Raja Mandali, Naag Devta and Peer
Baba. She said that, as Kaliveer’s chela, Sanjhi
Ram was bound to serve the other deities too.
According to multiple folk tales, Kaliveer is
considered one of the cleverest ministers of Man-
dali, a king believed to be the ruler of Jammu in
the Kali Yuga. Both are often worshipped togeth-
er. The folk tales narrate how Kaliveer convinced
Mandali to wage war on Muslims, as they had
abducted the Kapila cow from Jammu.
A certain section of Jammu society invokes
Kaliveer with every political development, often
calling out his name while calling for revenge
against Mufti and the PDP. When, in August 2019,
the Modi government abrogated Article 370 of the
Constitution and so stripped Jammu and Kashmir
of statehood, thus dissolving the country’s only
Muslim-majority state, many tweets credited
Kaliveer. Ankur Sharma, the president of IkkJutt
Jammu, a newly formed Hindu-nationalist group,
was the lead counsel representing Sanjhi Ram and
others. He regularly visits the devisthan to pay
his respects to Kaliveer. For the past two years,
ritual killings · reportage
he has been organising the Lohri Bhandara in opposite page:
Rasana. The walls of the
Bakarwals and Brahmins have always had devisthan in
Kathua in which
an acrimonious relationship. Trishla Devi, the an eight year old
mother of Pravesh Jangotra, one of the convicts, was drugged, raped
told me Bakarwals used to steal coins that had and kept in secret
been offered to the deities in the devisthan and have now been
often washed their clothes in the water of a hand- whitewashed.
pump there. Many locals believed that Bakarwals Locals believe
this devisthan, in
insulted the deities by their presence near the
which Kaliveer is
devisthan, which they considered a place only for worshipped, an
purebred Brahmins. If any Dalit came to worship ancestral sacred
there, Brahmins left the compound. Muslims space meant only
were considered of even lower status. The brother for the Jangotra
of the girl told me that Bakarwals eventually Brahmins of Rasana.
stopped going near the devisthan fearing fights,
especially because Sanjhi Ram was very touchy
about it.
Madhu told me that the spirit of Kaliveer used
to possess Sanjhi Ram’s body. Through Sanjhi,
Kaliveer used to talk to his followers to convey his
decisions. The spirit entered Sanjhi’s body when-
ever any man from the “Jogi Biradari” played kar-
ka—the holy folk songs of the deity—on the dhol,
she said. Jogis are Dogra Rajputs considered to be
descendants of Shiva. Rajkumar Jogi, a tradition-
al Nath Jogi based in Jammu, told me that Jogis
have the power to summon gods into the body of
the chela. The process is called chonki.
First, the chela readies the deity. Then, he takes
his position in the devisthan. He calls each deity
one by one and signals for the Jogi to start the
karka. As the Jogi starts beating the dhol, the
body of the chela starts shaking. The louder the
noise, the more reactive the body gets. After some
time, the chela signals to the Jogi to stop. At that
time, through the body of the chela, Kaliveer
starts speaking. First, he gives his regards to the
330 million Hindu deities. The he asks the reason
for summoning him. That is when people talk to
him. Most often, Kaliveer demands a sacrifice
from his followers. Usually, people offer Kaliveer
a goat. Rajkumar told me that, in the past, Ka-
liveer had demanded the sacrifice of the devotee’s
eldest child.
Another chela of Kaliveer, from a village in
Jammu, told me that, during the process of sac-
rifice, the goat is kept in front of Kaliveer in the
devisthan until it starts to shiver. “If it does not
shiver, that means Kaliveer will not accept the
sacrifice,” he said. “That is why some people keep
the goat in the devisthan for hours,” he said. This
process is called “bijna” in Jammu.
Madhu told me that Jangotra Brahmins cele-
brate Lohri and Makar Sankranti as the prime
festivals of Kaliveer. Makar Sankranti is celebrat-
ed a day after Lohri. Both festivals are important
to the villagers. Sanjhi Ram would perform a
OCTOBER 2021 43
ritual killings · reportage
below: Policemen chonki, while a bhandara—feast—would be organ-
escort Sanjhi Ram, ised on the Sunday closest to Lohri.
who was custodian It is not certain whether the 2018 bhandara was
of the devisthan,
held. Sanjhi Ram’s family claims that he hosted
and was convicted
for the gang rape it, and his lawyers raised it as a point of defence
and killing of an during the trial. If a large bhandara was hosted,
8-year-old girl in they asked, how could the girl have been hidden in
Kathua. the devisthan? However, according to the prose-
cutors, their witness could not produce any bills or
photographs as evidence.
When I talked to the officials of the crime branch
who investigated the case, they neither accepted
nor denied claims that the accused might have
brutalised the girl as part of rituals. None of them
agreed to speak on the record, fearing conse-
quences from the office of the lieutenant governor
of what is now the union territory of Jammu and
Kashmir, which answers to the BJP-led central
government. However, they told me that they did
not investigate the possible connection to ritual-
istic practices because they felt it was not relevant
to the investigation. A member of the investigation
team, who did not want to be named, told me that
most of the team’s officials were Muslims who nei-
ther understood these practices nor got involved
when matters of faith came up.
During the investigators’ examination of the
devisthan, none of the Muslim police officers en-
tered the ancestral hall, the police official told me.
44 THE CARAVAN
Instead, he said, a Brahmin woman police officer
was appointed to investigate the hall. She recov-
ered multiple strands of hair from one corner of
the devisthan, and forensic analysis revealed that
one of these belonged to the victim. Police officers
also told me that there was a lot of pressure on
them. Even before they summoned any witness for
cross-examination, there was a call from a senior
politician.
The gruesome murder shocked the coun-
try’s conscience but, once again, did not spark
a national conversation on the role rituals and
superstitions play in fuelling bigotry and heinous
acts. Perpetrators who are able to either demonise
or dehumanise their victims as witches, sexual
objects or sacrificial lambs in the name of faith
makes everybody complicit in society’s degrada-
tion. At the heart of this is a desire to keep people
and communities in their places. Seema Katara,
who survived a brutal night of torture in Madhya
Pradesh, was punished for displaying indepen-
dence and bucking patriarchal norms. Rajni Yadav
was drowned in the Ganges for daring to refuse
sex to a godman. And the little Bakarwal girl in
Kathua was raped and murdered by grown men
for reasons we are yet to fully understand. s
This story was produced in partnership with the
Pulitzer Centre.
afp / getty images
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reportage
The
Uncertain Path
Can the Tibetan struggle outlive
the Dalai Lama?
REPORTAGE / POLITICS
LEWIS PAGE
tenzin gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, was
flown from his home in Dharamshala to a private
hospital in Delhi on 10 April 2019. He was 83 years
old and suffering from what appeared to be a chest
infection. He was discharged from hospital two
days later. The following month, over seven thou-
sand people gathered outside his residence to offer
prayers for his long life. Addressing the gathering,
Gyatso tried to assuage their fears.
“Once I had a dream that I was swimming,
even though I can’t swim, and Palden Lhamo”—a
female deity worshipped by Tibetan Bud-
dhists—“was riding on my back,” he said. “She
remarked, ‘There’s no doubt you’ll live until you’re
110 years old.’ Other people too have dreamt that I
may live till I’m 113.”
Imagine that these dreams come true. The year
is 2048; it has been almost ninety years since
Gyatso escaped to India following the Chinese
invasion of Tibet. He has presumably worked
with the religious leadership in the Tibetan
community to plan for the future. Perhaps he
has appointed his successor already—through a
procedure called ma-dhey tulku, or emanation
before death, he has directly transferred his re-
ligious authority into the body of the next Dalai
46 THE CARAVAN
Lama, foregoing the lengthy process of identify-
ing the next incarnation. Perhaps his successor is
a young boy from India, or perhaps it is a young
girl from Nepal. Perhaps he has decided that
there will be no successor, or perhaps he has not
yet designated a successor, leaving the task to
other senior lamas, who will almost certainly
have to contend with a rival candidate propped
up by the Chinese.
Or tragedy could strike tomorrow. Tibetan
Buddhism places a strong emphasis on death—
thinking about it, talking about it, contemplating
its certainty. No matter how much mental prepa-
ration is done, Gyatso’s death will have grave
implications, not just for the Tibetan diaspora.
The fourteenth Dalai Lama is not only a spiritual
leader; in exile from the roof of the world, he sits
at the centre of a maelstrom of geopolitics, with
some of the most powerful states in the world—
China, India and the United States—looking to
stake their claim on the future. His presence has
papered over fissures within the Tibetan commu-
nity-in-exile over the past six decades and, despite
his efforts to put in place structures of governance
that can outlive him, whoever succeeds him will
face a unique challenge.
manan vatsyayana / afp / getty images
the uncertain path · reportage
previous spread: although gyatso has said that he spends eighty
Tibetan activists percent of his time on spiritual pursuits and only
participate in a twenty percent on temporal matters, the religious
candlelight vigil
and political leadership of Tibet have been united
outside the Dalai
Lama’s palace in the person of the Dalai Lama for almost five
in Dharamshala, hundred years. The Gelug sect, founded by the
in March 2008, fourteenth-century monk Tsongkhapa, was one
following a Chinese of several monastic orders competing for adher-
crackdown on ents and patronage in the medieval kingdoms of
protests in Lhasa.
the Tibetan Plateau and among the Mongol tribes
opposite page: of Central Asia. Altan Khan, a Mongol ruler who
In the 1950s, the converted to the sect in 1578, conferred the title of
Central Intelligence dalai—oceanic, suggesting depth of knowledge—on
Agency fomented the Gelug lama Sonam Gyatso. The title was ret-
an insurgency rospectively applied to the first two leaders of the
against the Chinese
sect, and Altan’s great-grandson succeeded Sonam
in the regions of
Kham and Amdo. Gyatso as Dalai Lama. In 1642, following his defeat
of the Tsang dynasty, which favoured the rival
Karma Kagyu sect, the Mongol chieftain Güüshi
Khan installed the fifth Dalai Lama as the ruler of
a unified Tibet. Lhasa, where the Gelug sect was
headquartered, became the Tibetan capital.
The Dalai Lama lineage continued to be shaped
by outside influence. In the eighteenth centu-
ry, the Qing Empire replaced the Mongols as
the hegemonic power in Tibet. As part of a 1792
ordinance to assert his authority over the unruly
Tibetan periphery after it had twice been invad-
ed by the Gurkha rulers of Nepal, the emperor
reformed the selection process for lamas. Instead
of the arcane rituals that sometimes allowed rival
reincarnations to emerge due to factional strife,
the names of prospective candidates would be
placed in a golden urn, with future reincarnations
being chosen by the drawing of lots, to be admin-
istered by the Qing representative in Lhasa. “The
new system added to the moral authority of the
Emperor in Tibet and deprived the offices of the
Dalai Lama and the Panch’en Lama of their char-
acter of self-regulating autonomies,” the Chinese
diplomat Li Tieh-tseng writes in The Historical
Status of Tibet.
The golden urn was used during the selection
of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth Dalai Lamas, as
well as of the eighth and ninth Panchen Lamas—
the second-highest spiritual authority in the Gelug
sect. The system started to break down in the early
twentieth century, as the Qing Empire came to an
end following the Revolution of 1911 and the British
Empire began to increase its presence in the region.
Tibet attained de facto independence—the British
argued that China held suzerainty, but not sover-
eignty, over Tibet—and the Kuomintang govern-
ment in China, too preoccupied with civil war and
a Japanese invasion to directly intervene, began
approving exemptions from the use of the urn.
It was not used in 1939, when a young boy
named Lhamo Dhondup—who would later take
48 THE CARAVAN
the regnal name Jetsun Jamphel Ngawang Lob-
sang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso—was approached by a
group of monks in Takster, a village in the region
of Amdo, which was then ruled by the Kuomint-
ang general Ma Bufang. A series of signs had led
them there: the direction that the embalmed
head of the thirteenth Dalai Lama was facing, the
incumbent regent’s vision of a monastery by a lake
and investigations by the reigning Panchen Lama,
who had shortlisted three potential candidates in
the region.
The monks arrived in disguise to test the child.
He is said to have recognised one of them and
correctly identified a series of objects owned by
the previous Dalai Lama. Although some Lhasa
aristocrats preferred not to choose a child born
in Chinese territory—and the Panchen Lama had
aligned himself with the Kuomintang after fleeing
Tibet, in 1923, following a dispute over taxation—
the monks eventually received instructions that
Dhondup was the one. After arranging a suitable
bribe for Ma, they brought the child to the capital.
Tenzin Gyatso has proven to be an unusual Da-
lai Lama. As a child, he displayed an unorthodox
interest in the world outside of monastic institu-
tions. This was in part due to exposure. One of his
tutors was a rare foreigner in Lhasa: an Austrian
adventurer, and former member of the Nazi Party,
named Heinrich Harrer. Having escaped from a
British internment camp in India, Harrer had fled
to Lhasa, where he spent a little over six months
in 1949 meeting with Gyatso on a weekly basis,
talking about arithmetic, geometry, technology
and current affairs. Gyatso also spent time in an
observatory, where he realised that, contrary to
Tibetan orthodoxy, the moon was not a light-emit-
ting celestial body. He has often spoken fondly
about his childhood love for taking apart and reas-
sembling mechanical objects, and called himself a
“half-scientist.”
Gyatso has also been burdened with an unusual
political responsibility. He was still a minor when
the Communist Party of China came to power, in
1949, and announced plans to “liberate” Tibet. On
7 October 1950, after months of failed negotiations
mediated by the Indian and British governments,
forty thousand Chinese troops invaded eastern Ti-
bet and, within two weeks, conquered most of the
region of Kham. Although Gyatso was still only 16
years old, the cabinet asked him to take over the
Tibetan government. “I protested at first that I
was too young, for eighteen was the accepted age
for a Dalai Lama to take over active control from
his regent,” he writes in My Land and My People.
Yet I understood very well why the oracles and
lamas had caused the request to be made. The
long years of Regency after the death of each

Dalai Lama were an inevitable weak-
ness in our system of government.
During my own minority, there had
been dissensions between separate
factions in our government, and the
administration of the country had de-
teriorated. We had reached a state in
which people were anxious to avoid
responsibility, rather than accept it.
The Tibetan government had unsuc-
cessfully appealed to India, Britain and
the United States for military aid. On
7 November, shortly before Gyatso’s
coronation, it wrote to the secretary
general of the United Nations, express-
ing its “hope that the conscience of the
world would not allow the disruption
of our state by methods reminiscent of
the jungle.”
The British and Indian governments
refused to sponsor the appeal so that it
could be debated in the General Assem-
bly. When the government of El Salva-
dor did so, their representatives had the
debate adjourned on the grounds that
the Chinese army was not marching on
Lhasa and that a peaceful settlement
was imminent. The Jawaharlal Nehru
government did not want to alienate
China, which insisted that Tibet was an
internal matter, and the British, who no
longer had a significant military pres-
alamy photo
ence in the region, had agreed to follow
India’s lead.
Having been thwarted at the United
Nations, Gyatso sent a delegation—led
by Ngabö Ngawang Jigme, who had
overseen the military defeat in Kham—
to directly negotiate with the Chinese,
in April and May 1951. As a precondi-
tion to talks, the Chinese government
insisted that the Tibetans accept its fa-
voured candidate for the tenth Panchen
Lama. Although the succession had
been disputed for over a decade, with
the Tibetan government insisting that
it would not recognise the reincarna-
tion until the boy was sent to Lhasa
for the requisite tests alongside other
prospective candidates, Gyatso agreed
to hold a “lottery divination” that,
the anthropologist Melvyn Goldstein
writes in A History of Modern Tibet,
“conveniently reported that the candi-
date in Peking was the true incarnation
of the late Panchen Lama.”
Gyatso did not, however, consent to
the Seventeen-Point Agreement Ngabö
signed, which formally acknowledged
Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. While
maintaining local government and re-
gional autonomy, the status and powers
of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, as well
as freedom of religion and the incomes
of monasteries, the agreement gave
OCTOBER 2021
the uncertain path · reportage
China control over Tibet’s national de-
fence, external affairs, administrative
appointments, agriculture, industry and
commerce. Ngabö had ignored explicit
instructions to clear the terms with the
Tibetan government—he would go on
to assume several key positions under
Chinese rule—and Gyatso only found
out about the agreement once it was
announced on Radio Peking. “It was
a terrible shock when we heard the
terms,” he writes. “We were appalled
at the mixture of Communist clichés,
vainglorious assertions which were
completely false, and bold statements
which were only partly true. And the
terms were far worse and more oppres-
sive than anything we had imagined.”
The Seventeen-Point Agreement
spurred the United States to action.
Communist China’s advance into
Tibet posed a threat to Washington’s
Cold War interests, and US diplomats
in India were in contact with Harrer
and Gyatso’s eldest brother, Thubten
Jigme Norbu. The US government
urged Gyatso to publicly repudiate
the agreement, leave Tibet and set up
a government-in-exile, becoming an
international symbol of the anti-com-
munist struggle.
The Indian and British govern-
ments, however, refused to cooperate.
49
the uncertain path · reportage
GS Bajpai, the secretary general in the ministry
of external affairs, reiterated India’s opposition
to any military or diplomatic actions that would
jeopardise relations with China, while RH Scott,
who headed the British foreign office’s South-
east Asia department, told US officials that “the
result of encouraging the Tibetans to denounce
the Sino-Tibetan agreement would be to provide
American publicists with some propaganda points,
but not aid the Tibetans effectively.”
Despite US promises of corralling international
support if Gyatso denounced the agreement and
once again appealed to the United Nations, of of-
fering asylum if he could not find it elsewhere, and
of providing loans and light arms if he organised
resistance against the Chinese and could not get
help from other sources, the Tibetan national as-
sembly accepted the Seventeen-Point Agreement
in July 1951. Gyatso agreed to remain in Tibet. “As
the Tibetans saw it, the United States had sent
thousands of troops to Korea, yet it was unwilling
to make a similar commitment to Tibetan ‘free-
dom’ and instead repeatedly insisted that all mil-
itary aid (meaning guns, not troops) had to come
through India,” Goldstein writes. “The Tibetans
… considered this a meaningless gesture since the
Indian answer was a foregone conclusion.”
Over the next few years, the US Central Intel-
ligence Agency began fomenting insurgency in
the regions of Kham and Amdo, in eastern Tibet,
which were considered de jure Chinese territory
and were not governed by the Seventeen-Point
Agreement. Tibetan recruits were flown to a CIA
base in Colorado, where they were trained in sabo-
tage, demolition, small-arms use and underground
tactics. Then, armed with the German weapons
favoured by Chinese warlords at the time—so
that they could not be traced back to the United
States—they carried out guerrilla warfare against
the Chinese, who responded with increasingly re-
pressive measures. The CIA also organised several
airdrops to supply the rebels.
Gyatso writes that, by 1956, when the rebel-
lion began in earnest, he “was very despondent.”
Unwilling to endorse violent resistance and feeling
unable to prevent the violence from spreading
throughout the country, he “began to think it
might be in the best interests of Tibet if I with-
drew from all political activities, in order to keep
my religious authority intact.”
The Jawaharlal Nehru
government did not want
to alienate China, which
insisted that Tibet was an
internal matter, and the
British, who no longer had a
significant military presence
in the region, agreed to follow
India’s lead.
homai vyarawalla / wikimedia commons

That year, Gyatso travelled to India for the com-
memoration of Buddha’s twenty-five-hundredth
birth anniversary. His brothers and ministers
urged him to remain in India until the situation
at home improved, but Nehru told him to return,
arguing that there was still potential for him to
leverage the Seventeen-Point Agreement into a
deal with China. The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai,
with whom Nehru had signed the 1954 Panchsheel
Agreement—which included a resolution to not
interfere in each other’s internal affairs—and who
was also in India at the time, made assurances
to Nehru, as well as to Gyatso and his brothers,
that their complaints would be addressed by the
Chinese government and that communist reforms
would not be forced on the Tibetan people against
their will. Based on Nehru’s advice and Zhou’s
promises, Gyatso agreed to go back to Tibet.
Matters came to a head three years later. In
March 1959, as he finished his monastic exams,
Gyatso was invited to a theatrical performance at
the Chinese army’s headquarters on the outskirts
of Lhasa. The invitation came with a stipula-
tion: he should be escorted by only two unarmed
guards, instead of his usual retinue. As rumours
spread that the Dalai Lama was about to be ab-
ducted, over thirty thousand Tibetans gathered
outside the Norbulingka palace on 10 March. They
elected a seventy-member committee that repu-
diated the Seventeen-Point Agreement, gathered
weapons and set up barricades throughout the
city. Over the next week, the crowd prepared for a
military assault. After the Chinese fired a mortar
round at the palace, on 17 March, Gyatso was con-
vinced by his cabinet to escape, while an armed
uprising spread throughout Tibet.
It took him 18 days to reach India. He was grant-
ed asylum by the Indian government, as were the
over eighty thousand Tibetans who followed him.
They were given little else. India is not a signatory
of the UN Refugee Convention, which has meant
that Tibetans fleeing to India do not have official
rights, and have to rely on arbitrary decisions
to retain their place in the country. The Indian
government refused to register births among the
Tibetan community between 1950 and 1986, which
meant that very few Tibetans have been able to
obtain Indian citizenship.
To this day, most Tibetans in India are not able
to own property; they cannot apply for govern-
ment jobs; and, although they have been granted
land and funding to set up educational institu-
tions, university admissions can be difficult or ex-
pensive, with students without Indian citizenship
forced to apply as foreigners and pay the accompa-
nying higher fees. Moreover, while it was willing
to provide some assistance for their sustenance
and education, the Indian government would not
the uncertain path · reportage
lobby for the Tibetan cause on the international opposite page:
stage. That, as a UN resolution sponsored by India While visiting India
noted, would be the role of the Tibetan govern- in 1956, Tenzin
Gyatso (left) met
ment-in-exile. with the Indian
prime minister,
when gyatso first came to India, he spent a year in Jawaharlal Nehru
Mussoorie before settling in Dharamshala, in the (centre), and the
Himalayan foothills of Himachal Pradesh. This Chinese premier,
is where he still lives, in a palace built to resem- Zhou Enlai (right),
who urged him
ble his old regal perch in Lhasa. Dharamshala is
to return to
also home to the Central Tibetan Administration, Tibet despite his
the government-in-exile, which is spread across misgivings.
a campus on the side of the hill that stretches to
McLeodganj, where the city’s fifteen thousand
Tibetans mingle with tourists and ageing hippies.
Alongside monastic retreats transmitting the tra-
dition of Tibetan Buddhism sit the offices of NGOs
providing services to Tibetans or advocating for
the Tibetan cause internationally. It is the closest
thing the exiled community has to a capital.
The CTA is a peculiar institution. It is a dem-
ocratic government run within another country,
serving as both a rehearsal for a future return to
independent Tibetan rule and an administrative
organisation presiding over the global Tibet-
an community. It has legislative, executive and
judicial branches but is incorporated as an Indian
NGO. Gyatso established the CTA’s parliament in
1960. Three years later, he introduced its constitu-
tion. It was part of his modernisation efforts as a
reformer, critical of elements in traditional Tibet-
an life and intrigued by the democratic systems of
the outside world.
For most of its existence, however, the CTA’s
political decisions and international presence were
overshadowed by those of Gyatso himself. This
began to change in 2001, when, in an attempt to
transition away from the Dalai Lama’s theocratic
rule, it held elections for the post of kalön tripa—
prime minister. Lobsang Tenzin, who had been the
speaker of the CTA parliament for the past decade
and holds the religious title of Samdhong Rinpoche,
won the election with 84 percent of the vote. “I usu-
ally describe him as my boss in the sort of temporal
field,” Gyatso told the New York Times in a 2009
interview. “And in the spiritual field, I’m his boss.”
When Gyatso announced his intention to relin-
quish his political role altogether, in 2011, many
objected. The CTA parliament, usually reluctant
to contradict the Dalai Lama’s decisions, passed a
motion urging him to reconsider. Gyatso refused,
resigning as head of the CTA’s executive branch.
“As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed
that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the
Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power,” he
said at an event marking the fifty-second anniver-
sary of the Lhasa uprising. “Now, we have clearly
reached the time to put this into effect.”
OCTOBER 2021 51
the uncertain path · reportage

Three candidates stood in the

elections that year to replace Tenzin
as kalön tripa, before the post was
transformed to that of sikyong—pres-
ident—in 2012. Tenzin Tethong and
Tashi Wangdi were both veteran
Tibetan politicians whose careers
stretched back to the 1960s. Against
them stood Lobsang Sangay, who was
born to refugee parents in 1968. After
spending his childhood in Darjeeling,
where he attended a Tibetan school
and helped his parents run a shop, and
completing an undergraduate degree at
Delhi University, Sangay was awarded
a Fulbright Scholarship, in 1995, to
ashwini bhatia / ap photo

study at Harvard. He spent the next

fifteen years there, earning a doctorate,
US citizenship and the smooth affect of
a Western politician. Though Tethong
and Wangdi were more experienced,
Sangay held an appeal to many as
a slick orator who could serve as a
spokesperson for the Tibetan cause The CTA is a peculiar tripa, and that controversies and mud-
on the international stage. He won a slinging have persisted on Facebook, in
majority of the vote. institution. It has WhatsApp and WeChat groups, and in
The campaign was divisive. The stan- legislative, executive the comment sections of websites such
dards of conduct in Tibetan Buddhism as Phayul and Tibet Sun.
are not well-suited to antagonistic and judicial branches As the 2021 sikyong election ap-
electioneering, and the race left a bad but is incorporated as proached, there was an uptick in mud-
taste in many Tibetans’ mouths. “It slinging. Term limits prevented Sangay
caused a huge seismic quake within the
an Indian NGO. from running again, and a broad field
Tibetan unity, and its aftermath is still of candidates jockeyed to replace
very much rampant [and] has fractured apology within a court-mandated dead- him. As it did for every other polity in
our unity to pieces,” Ugyen Gyalpo, line, leading to further outrage. the world, the COVID-19 pandemic
an India-born Tibetan living in New For the Tibetan community, this made this an unusual election season
York, told me. Sangay’s re-election, conflict fed into longstanding regional for the Tibetan community-in-exile.
in 2016, was even more controversial. factionalism. Although both San- Candidates could not make the usual
He faced character attacks over his gay and Tsering were born in India, trips to Tibetan enclaves around the
ego and Western attitude—a recur- Sangay’s family is from Kham, while world, and there were no debates. The
ring jibe was the fact that he had his Tsering’s is from Amdo. The two re- white scarves usually draped around
portrait displayed at the CTA’s office gions, where the CIA-backed insurgen- guests of honour at gatherings made
in Washington—while his opponent, cy broke out in the 1950s, have always few appearances. However, the CTA’s
Penpa Tsering, faced scrutiny over a had a tenuous relationship with the parliament building was covered with
rumoured drinking habit. Dalai Lama, whose writ has histori- the candidates’ posters, and Tibetan
Following the election, Sangay ap- cally been restricted to the region of social media was strewn with cam-
pointed Tsering as the CTA’s ambas- Ü-Tsang, in central Tibet. Despite the paign material. The talking points were
sador to Brussels, then transferred current state of the community, with familiar: candidates emphasised their
him to the embassy in Washington. In members spread around the world— commitment to uniting and serving
November 2017, however, he fired Tser- between 2011 and 2019, the Tibetan the diaspora, to preserving Tibetan
ing without providing any explanation, population in India fell by 44 percent, culture, to restarting diplomatic talks
which led to public outrage and a minor as thousands moved elsewhere—these with China, to building international
protest movement. Sangay responded regional divisions have persisted. Kal- support for the Tibetan cause.
by publishing a spate of allegations sang Rinchen, who runs the Dharam- In November 2020, Tashi Wang-
against Tsering, accusing him of insub- shala-based news portal Phayul, told du, an entrepreneur and former CTA
ordination and incompetence. Tsering me that these divisions flared up on Ti- diplomat who had also run for sikyong
sued him for defamation and won the bet-focussed blogs in the early 2000s, in 2016, dropped out of the race, citing
case, but Sangay neglected to issue an soon after the first election for kalön the lack of a platform for debate and

52 THE CARAVAN

the vitriolic divisions within the community. The
preliminary election, on 3 January, eliminated
four other candidates: Gyari Dolma, a former
radical activist in the Tibetan Youth Congress
and a former home minister in the CTA; Ngodup
Dongchung, a veteran CTA official and Gyatso’s
representative in Delhi; Yeshi Phuntsok, the
deputy speaker in the CTA parliament; and Tashi
Topgyal, a businessman who ran as a populist
outsider.
The run-off, in April, pitted against each other
the two leaders of the factional strife at the heart
of Tibetan politics. Kelsang Dorjee Aukatsang, a
senior CTA advisor—Lobsang Wangyal, the editor
of Tibet Sun, called him the Dmitry Medvedev to
Sangay’s Vladimir Putin because of his proximity
to the previous sikyong—had managed to skirt
travel restrictions caused by the pandemic. He
began his campaign in Switzerland, in September
2020, before visiting North America and India. He
was forced to halt his travels after testing positive
for COVID-19 in December, but advanced to run
against Tsering, who had gained a great deal of
sympathy among the electorate over his treatment
by Sangay.
The race served as a referendum of sorts on
Sangay’s tenure, which had seen the CTA adopt
a more confrontational position towards Chi-
na. Aukatsang promised to elevate the Tibetan
struggle and pivot the CTA from administration
to activism, while Tsering represented a return
to normalcy, promising to adopt a lower profile as
sikyong and pursue more realistic, result-oriented
and non-confrontational policies. On 14 May, the
CTA’s election commission announced that Tser-
ing had won with 53.6 percent of the vote—the
closest margin of victory, after the highest voter
turnout, since elections began in 2001.
Tsering occupies a crucial position in Tibetan
politics. By the time his tenure ends, Gyatso will
be 91 years old. The new sikyong will have to
fill the horror vacui caused by the Dalai Lama’s
reduced mobility and international engagement,
while working to heal the divisions in the Tibetan
community.
Gyatso has seen a slight dip in his interna-
tional popularity in recent years; his blunt
and sometimes out-of-vogue mannerisms and
opinions sometimes get him into trouble. West-
ern media outlets looked on in horror when he
joked, in a 2019 interview with BBC Asia, that
if his successor were a woman, “she should be
more attractive.” Once, while visiting Norway,
he pointed at a teenage girl, giggled and said she
was “too fat.” His affection for the former US
president George W Bush has drawn ire from
some, while his personal relationship with the
Democratic speaker of the House of Represen-
the uncertain path · reportage
tatives, Nancy Pelosi, is distasteful to others. He opposite page:
has been criticised for supporting India’s pur- Lobsang Sangay
suit of nuclear weapons. In 2018, the Daily Mail (left) and Penpa
Tsering (right)
reported that he had spoken at a 2009 event or- fought a bitter
ganised by NXIVM, a cult that had been found campaign during
to be engaging in sex trafficking, forced labour the sikyong election
and racketeering. Despite all this, Gyatso’s of 2016.
influence is still unmatched; his face is plastered
across the world, still serving as an inspirational
symbol of non-violence.
A section of the Tibetan community, however,
has long chafed against Gyatso’s political deci-
sions. Since the late 1980s, he has promoted a
stance towards China that he calls umaylam—the
middle way, a diplomatic pun on the Buddhist
principle of moderation—which promotes nego-
tiating for Tibetan autonomy under Chinese rule.
The policy grew out of a 1979 meeting between
his brother Gyalo Thondup and Deng Xiaoping,
who had recently succeeded Mao Zedong as
China’s paramount leader. Deng reportedly told
Thondup that, “except for the independence of
Tibet, all other questions can be negotiated.” The
negotiations led to a slight thaw in Sino-Tibetan
relations; more talks took place, and the Chinese
government loosened restrictions on travel in and
out of Tibet. Both sides sent several fact-finding
teams to Tibet, and China issued thousands of
travel permits for the 1985 Kalachakra ceremony
at Bodh Gaya.
On 21 September 1987, while addressing the
US Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Gyatso
announced a five-point peace plan for securing
Tibetan autonomy. It was his counter-propos-
al to a Chinese offer to facilitate his return to
Tibet, which, he argued, “attempted to reduce
the question of Tibet to a discussion of my own
personal status.” Gyatso’s plan called for trans-
forming Tibet into a “zone of peace,” abandoning
the Chinese population-transfer policy, respect-
ing the human rights and democratic freedoms
of Tibetans, protecting Tibet’s environment and
commencing negotiations over its future status.
“It is my sincere belief that if the concerned par-
ties were to meet and discuss their future with an
open mind and a sincere desire to find a satisfac-
tory and just solution, a breakthrough could be
achieved,” he said.
Six days later, a demonstration in Lhasa was
brutally suppressed by Chinese authorities, lead-
ing to a spate of unrest and violence. But Gyatso
did not change tack. The following year, while
addressing the European parliament, he expanded
on his proposals for a negotiated settlement to-
wards Tibetan autonomy. “I am aware that many
Tibetans will be disappointed by the moderate
stand they represent,” he said. “This, however, is
an essential and invaluable part of any process of
OCTOBER 2021 53
the uncertain path · reportage
change. I believe these thoughts repre-
sent the most realistic means by which
to re-establish Tibet’s separate identity
and restore the fundamental rights of
Tibetan people while accommodating
China’s own interest.”
In the late 1990s, a stark divide began
to emerge within the Tibetan diaspora
between adherents of umaylam and
those who wanted to push for rang-
zen—complete independence. Lobsang
Tenzin contested the 2001 election for
kalön tripa as a vocal proponent of the
middle way. In 2002, shortly before the
Chinese president Jiang Zemin visited
the United States and a first round of
Sino-Tibetan talks began in Beijing,
Tenzin asked Tibetans to refrain from
anti-China protests in order to create a
conducive atmosphere for negotiations.
His cabinet, and Gyatso himself, made
a similar appeal in 2006, before a US
visit by Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao.
The CTA leadership has continued to
support umaylam, as did all the sikyong
candidates in this year’s election.
Lobsang Wangyal told me that Penpa
Tsering is nicknamed “the prince of the
middle way.”
The poet and activist Tenzin Tsun-
due, one of the most ardent advocates
for rangzen, was part of a younger
generation that defied the CTA’s ban
on protests. “We were saying that this
is only a dialogue process, China is
allowing this for their own benefit,” he
told me. “They were outwardly creating
an image that they were talking with
the Dalai Lama’s representative, and
they will do this only until the 2008
Olympics.”
Tsundue, who wears dark-rimmed
glasses and a red band around his
cropped, curly hair, gained notoriety
for his one-man anti-China demon-
strations in those years. In 2002, he
climbed scaffolding outside a Mum-
bai hotel where the Chinese premier
Zhu Rongji was staying and hoisted a
banner that read “Free Tibet: China,
Get Out.” Three years later, he targeted
another Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao,
and unfurled a “Free Tibet” banner
from the top of a two-hundred-foot
tower at the Indian Institute of Science
in Bangalore.
In March 2008, months before the
Beijing Olympics, the annual obser-
54
In 2007, having
approved around
a thousand
reincarnations
since 1991, Chinese
authorities issued
regulations to
formalise the process
of governing the
“reincarnation of living
Buddhas.”
vance of the 1959 uprising in Lhasa
turned violent. The Chinese govern-
ment claimed that 23 people were
killed in the riots; the CTA claimed
that 203 people were killed in the
crackdown that followed. Clashes
broke out throughout Tibet, while
solidarity protests were held in major
cities around the world and many
called for a boycott of the upcoming
Olympics in Beijing. The subsequent
crackdown by the Chinese gov-
ernment marked a new chapter in
Sino-Tibet relations—a sudden chill
after a long thaw.
When negotiations between the CTA
and the Chinese government broke
down, in 2010, Tsundue felt vindicated.
In retrospect, the talks appeared to
have been exactly what he and other
rangzen advocates had been claiming
for years: a feeble attempt at dampen-
ing unrest and assuaging international
concerns, a red herring. But those who
espoused such views at the time were,
and still are, seen as anti-CTA and,
“in crude terms,” Tsundue told me, as
“anti-Dalai Lama.”
Tsundue said that he finds the def-
erence most Tibetans show Gyatso in
political affairs to be unproductive and
contrary to democratic principles. “You
love and respect your leadership, the
Dalai Lama, but you cannot place your
responsibility on the Dalai Lama, and
we must all understand this,” he told
me. “I think there is a problem in plac-
ing that 100-percent faith—it stops you
from thinking, rationalising. There is
100-percent faith, but there is 80-per-
cent lethargy.”
THE CARAVAN
the chinese government has tried for
decades to break this “100-percent
faith” by fashioning Gyatso as a villain.
It has called him, among other things,
the leader of a “separatist clique” and
“a wolf in monk’s robes.” A 2009 white
paper on “Fifty Years of Democrat-
ic Reforms in Tibet,” issued by the
information office of the state cabinet,
compared the Chinese occupation to
the US Civil War. After noting that
the US president Abraham Lincoln
was “crowned with eternal glory” for
fighting to end slavery despite the dev-
astating cost of the war, it said, “When
the Dalai clique staged the large-scale
armed rebellion to retain the theocratic
feudal serfdom and to split the country,
the Chinese government took actions
to quell the rebellion for the sake of
defending national unity and emanci-
pating the serfs and slaves of Tibet.”
Besides launching an aggressive
cyberwarfare and espionage cam-
paign against Gyatso, the Chinese
government banned the display of his
image inside Tibet and jailed many
Tibetans who praised him publicly for
“disseminating counter-revolutionary
propaganda.” Although Gyatso does not
condone the practice, over a hundred
and fifty monks, nuns and lay Tibetans
have immolated themselves in the past
decade to protest the Chinese occupa-
tion and curbs to religious freedom.
China has also continued its efforts
to prop up rival lamas whose spiritual
authority it can use to build support
for the occupation. In 1989, Chökyi
Gyaltsen, the tenth Panchen Lama—
whose selection had been a precondi-
tion of the 1951 Sino-Tibetan talks—
died of a heart attack at the age of 50.
Gyaltsen had not turned out to be the
puppet the Chinese government had
hoped he would. He publicly supported
the Chinese invasion and, following
Gyatso’s escape in 1959, chaired the
Preparatory Committee for the Tibet
Autonomous Region. However, three
years later, he drafted a petition to
Zhou Enlai detailing the abuses of
Chinese rule.
The petition, which Mao called “a
poisoned arrow shot at the party by
reactionary feudal overlords,” was kept
secret by the Chinese leadership until
a copy was leaked in 1996, but, in 1964,

Gyaltsen was denounced, dismissed from all posts
and imprisoned for almost two decades. Five days
before his death, having returned to Tibet to con-
secrate the remains of previous Panchen Lamas,
he delivered a speech to local officials in the city
of Shigatse in which he denounced the excesses
of the Cultural Revolution. “Since liberation,” he
said,“there has certainly been development, but
the price paid for this development has been great-
er than the gains.”
A succession struggle ensued after Gyaltsen’s
death. The Chinese refused to allow Gyatso to par-
ticipate in the search, even though the Dalai and
Panchen Lamas have historically been responsible
for identifying each other’s successors. Neverthe-
less, several groups inside and outside Tibet ap-
proached Gyatso with candidates. On 14 May 1995,
Gyatso announced that he had recognised Gedhun
Chökyi Nyima, a six-year-old child from a nomad
family in central Tibet, as the eleventh Panchen
Lama. Three days later, Nyima and his parents
disappeared. He has not been seen since, but a
photograph of him taken before his abduction, an
enduring symbol of Chinese repression, can be
found in Tibetan enclaves around the world.
The Chinese government denied having
abducted Nyima. State media, however, began
a propaganda campaign against his family—
claiming, among other things, that the boy had
once drowned a dog—and condemned Gyatso for
interfering with the selection process. Members
of the official search team were imprisoned for
students for a free tibet / ap photo
the uncertain path · reportage
allegedly sharing information with him. On 29 below: Although
November that year, a final selection was made. Gyatso does not
Although it was not apparent from the television condone the
practice, over
broadcast, the ceremony, at Lhasa’s Jokhang tem-
a hundred and
ple, was held at 2 am behind locked doors, with fifty Tibetans
armed police stationed outside. Tourists had been have immolated
forbidden from entering Tibet for the past month. themselves in the
Bome Qamba Lozhoi, a monk who headed the past decade to
Tibetan branch of the Chinese Buddhist Asso- protest the Chinese
occupation.
ciation and was part of the selection committee,
brought out the golden urn and drew the name of
Gyaincain Norbu, a five-year-old from the same
district as Nyima.
The selection of Norbu, who took the regnal
name Chökyi Gyalpo, was immediately denounced
by Gyatso and has not been accepted by the Tibet-
an diaspora. Max Oidtmann, a historian who has
written a book on the politics of reincarnation,
told me that Gyalpo “is tolerated by Tibetans,
loved by the Han, hated by the community in
exile.” The saga does not bode well for the future
reception of a Dalai Lama selected by the Chinese
government.
Even though the Chinese government refused
to allow Gyatso to play a part in the selection of
the eleventh Panchen Lama, it endorsed his 1992
decision to recognise Ogyen Trinley Dorje as
the seventeenth Karmapa Lama—the head of the
Karma Kagyu sect. The Karmapa succession was
disputed at the time, with rival factions in the
sect’s leadership backing Tibet-born Ogyen and
India-born Trinley Thaye Dorje.
OCTOBER 2021 55
the uncertain path · reportage

this spread: In Gyatso backed Ogyen based on a dream, but, in

May 1995, Gyatso an interview a few months after the Karmapa’s en-
announced that thronement, he expressed his suspicions about the
he had recognised
Chinese motives behind endorsing the selection.
Gedhun Chökyi
Nyima as the “My real worry is that now the Chinese will try
eleventh Panchen to manipulate him,” he said. “They will use every
Lama. Three days means to brainwash him and then occasionally
later, Nyima let him go to the outside world to tell people that
and his parents inside Tibet religion is completely free, that the
disappeared—he
situation there is very good, that the Dalai Lama
has not been seen
since. In November is a splittist, and some such things. I think this
that year, Chinese would not be of much benefit to the Chinese, but it
authorities held would be very harmful to the Karmapa.”
a golden-urn In January 2000, at the age of 14, Ogyen fled

afp / getty images

ceremony in Lhasa Tibet to India. “I heard it said that in a sense the
and selected
government of China would make use of me,”
Gyaincain Norbu
instead. he said at a press conference. “I was certainly
treated very well on a tour I made of China. But
I suspected there might be a plan to separate the
Tibetan people from the Dalai Lama through me.”
Sections of the Indian security establishment,
however, suspected that he was a Chinese spy.
The government confined him to a monastery in
Dharamshala.
These suspicions resurfaced in 2011, when the
Himachal Pradesh police raided the office of a
trust backed by Ogyen and confiscated foreign
currency—including Chinese renminbi—worth
over R6 crore. Ogyen claimed that the money
was raised from donations but was charged with
money-laundering. He denied being a Chinese spy;
Gyatso, the CTA and most Tibetan leaders have
backed this up. In May 2017, soon after the Naren-
dra Modi government eased the travel restrictions
on him, he travelled to Europe and the United
States. He has not returned to India since, having
obtained a Dominican passport. Government
sources began speculating in the media that India
might no longer recognise him as the Karmapa
Lama.
As the only high lama recognised by both the
Chinese government and the Dalai Lama, Ogyen
occupies a unique position. He has also captured
the imagination of a large section of Tibetan
youth, and of many in the West, for his progressive
stance on gender issues, for his public acceptance
of homosexuality and for openly discussing his
struggle with depression. For a while, he appeared
to be the most likely successor to Gyatso as an
international representative of Tibetan Buddhism.
He is not, however, universally beloved. A small
but influential section of the Karma Kagyu sect
supports Trinley as the rightful Karmapa. In
October 2018, the two claimants to the post met in
rural France in an attempt to make public amends.
“The purpose of our meeting was primarily to
spend time together so that we could establish a
personal relationship,” they said in a joint state-
ment. “While we were together we also talked
about the ways that we could work to heal the
divisions that have developed within our precious
Karma Kagyu lineage.”
They issued another joint statement, in Febru-
ary 2020, vowing to cooperate in the search for
the next Shamarpa—a reincarnate lineage within
the Karma Kagyu sect, whose living embodi-
ment, in turn, leads the efforts to identify the next
Karmapa. “It is extremely important that Shamar
Rinpoche’s reincarnation be recognised without
any mistake or confusion, without any ‘our side’
or ‘their side,’” Ogyen said. “Having a unanimous
recognition is absolutely crucial for Buddhism in
general, and our lineage in particular.” There has
been speculation that the two might recognise
each other as emanations of themselves in order
to heal the schism and allow for the selection of an
undisputed successor.
Gyatso, on the other hand, has said that he may
not appoint a successor to his own lineage, calling
the institution of the Dalai Lama feudal—the very
charge that China has often levelled against the
position. In a 2019 interview with Time, he said
that he does not believe that his political author-
ity should be transferred to anyone following his
death. “On one occasion the Dalai Lama institu-
tion started,” he argued. “That means there must
be one occasion when the institution is no longer
relevant. Stop. No problem. This is not my con-
cern. China’s communists, I think, are showing
more concern.”
Although China’s communists are avowedly
atheistic, they resolved in a 1982 policy document to
tolerate the personal practice of religion and set up
eight “national patriotic religious organisations”—
including the Chinese Buddhist Association, which
would lead the search for the eleventh Panchen
Lama a decade later—“to assist the party and the

56 THE CARAVAN

government to implement the policy of
freedom of religious belief, to help the
broad mass of religious believers and
persons in religious circles to contin-
ually raise their patriotic and socialist
consciousness, to represent the lawful
rights and interest of religious circles, to
organise normal religious activities and
to manage religious affairs well.”
In 2007, having approved around a
thousand reincarnations since 1991,
Chinese authorities issued regulations
to formalise the process of governing
the “reincarnation of living Buddhas”
in order to “better integrate the tra-
ditional modes of management into
new Communist Party methodolo-
gies.” These included an insistence on
the use of the golden urn to identify
high lamas, application and approval
processes to clear reincarnations with
appropriate state authorities, and a
requirement that approved reincarna-
tions “respect and protect the princi-
ples of the unification of the state.”
Besides making reincarnations an
instrument of state policy, the Chi-
nese government, in 2016, announced
plans to “sinicise” Tibetan Buddhism.
Under its current president, Xi Jinping,
China has spent widely on efforts to
make political inroads into Buddhist
institutions and boost its international
reputation as a centre of Buddhism.
In 2017, it established the Nanhai
the uncertain path · reportage
Buddhist Academy, modelled on the this contingency. In December 2018,
ancient university at Nalanda. It has the US president, Donald Trump,
hosted three editions of the triennial signed the Reciprocal Access to Tibet
World Buddhist Forum, each of which Act, paving the way to establish a US
have included the Chinese-approved consulate in Lhasa and impose a visa
Panchen Lama. The government has ban on Chinese officials who deny US
also funded the excavation of Natesh- citizens access to Tibet. Five months
war, a thousand-year-old Buddhist later, while making a rare visit to the
heritage site in Bangladesh; the con- Tibetan Autonomous Region—the
struction of the Lotus Sutra tower in first by a US representative since
Colombo, the capital of Buddhist-ma- 2015—Trump’s ambassador in Beijing,
jority Sri Lanka; and a $3 billion Terry Branstad, released a statement
project to expand Lumbini, the town encouraging the Chinese government
in Nepal where Gautama Buddha was “to engage in substantive dialogue with
born. Among China’s elites, Tibetan the Dalai Lama or his representatives”
Buddhism has become a fashionable and expressing concerns about “the
philanthropic cause. Chinese government’s interference in
Tibetan Buddhists’ freedom to orga-
nize and practice their religion.”
The Tibet Policy and Support Act, in-
troduced in 2019 to modify and reautho-
rise a similar bill passed in 2002, was
an even more overt indication of intent.
Citing China’s worsening human-rights
record, the TPSA established as US
policy that “decisions regarding the
succession or reincarnation of Tibetan
Buddhist religious leaders, including a
future 15th Dalai Lama, are exclusively
spiritual matters that should be made
by the appropriate religious authorities
douglas e curran / afp / getty images
within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition
and in the context of the will of reli-
gious practitioners and the instructions
of the 14th Dalai Lama.”
In November that year, Samuel
Brownback, the newly appointed US
ambassador-at-large for religious free-
dom, made a diplomatic trip to Dharam-
shala. “The purpose was to talk about
In August 2019, state media reported, the succession of the Dalai Lama,” he
the Communist Party of China held a told me over the phone, “and to make
“training session on reincarnation for a clear the US government’s decision that
living Buddha” for over a hundred Bud- we support the Tibetan Buddhists se-
dhist monks. Bianba Lamu, the head of lecting the next Dalai Lama, and not the
the South Asia Institute of the Tibetan Chinese communist government.” Days
Academy of Social Sciences, was quoted after Brownback’s visit, representatives
as saying that the training was meant to of all four major sects of Tibetan Bud-
ensure that the reincarnation process dhism resolved that only Gyatso could
was carried out “properly,” without decide the manner of his succession.
interference from the “Dalai Lama’s “No government or otherwise will have
separatist clique.” With all this in place, such authority,” the resolution, passed
it is all but certain that China plans to at the fourteenth Tibetan Religious
appoint its own successor to Gyatso Conference, said. “If the Government of
regardless of his wishes. the People’s Republic of China for po-
litical ends chooses a candidate for the
the united states, with its tough-on- Dalai Lama, the Tibetan people will not
China policy, has been preparing for recognize and respect that candidate.”
OCTOBER 2021 57
the uncertain path · reportage
Following his visit, Brownback
advocated for other countries to make
similar statements. “I’d love to see a
resolution passed in the UN,” he told
me. Such a resolution would have
little chance of passing—China holds
a veto in the Security Council—but
Brownback argued that it would send a
strong message. “This is a major issue,”
he said. “The Dalai Lama is 84, he’s
healthy but, you just—you never know.
He thought he would live another fif-
teen or twenty years, but you just don’t
know.”
In July 2020, the US secretary
of state, Mike Pompeo, announced
that the United States would restrict
visas for Chinese officials involved in
blocking diplomatic access to Tibet and
said that the Trump administration
supported “meaningful autonomy”
for Tibet. Three months later, Trump
appointed Robert Destro as special co-
ordinator for Tibetan issues, a post that
had been created in the Tibet Policy
Act of 2002 but had been left vacant
since 2017.
The TPSA, which threatens to im-
pose sanctions on anyone who inter-
feres with the Dalai Lama succession,
was expected to easily pass the US leg-
islature. It is a rare cause that appeals
to Trump’s anti-China ideology, old
“I don’t think he
will feel comfortable
poking China in the
eye,” Yun Sun said
about Joe Biden. “It
will be a human-rights
angle, rather than
one of sovereignty or
territory.”
Cold Warriors as well as liberals and
leftists who have historically champi-
oned the Free Tibet movement. Having
passed the House of Representatives
with an overwhelming majority in
January 2020, the TPSA was added as
an amendment to the consolidated ap-
propriations bill during the legislature’s
lame-duck session. Despite threatening
a veto over COVID-19 relief, Trump
signed it into law as one of the final
acts of his presidency, on 27 December
2020.
During the US presidential election
that year, the Tibetan community
had been divided over the choice of
supporting Trump or his victorious
rival, Joe Biden. Some saw Trump as
uniquely good for Tibet, given his an-
ti-China rhetoric; others saw him as a
destructive demagogue and argued that
US support for Tibet had always been,
and would remain, bipartisan. On 16
November, eight days after the election,
Lobsang Wangyal argued in a Tibet Sun
editorial that “Tibetan Trumpers” had
failed to see Trump’s tough-on-China
stance as a mere gimmick. “Trump
didn’t confront China on human rights,
freedom, democracy, rule of law, or
global warming, let alone speak on
Tibet,” he wrote. Biden, he added,
would make it easier for undocumented
Tibetans to become US citizens, would
continue to financially support the Ti-
betan community and would “hit China
at the right spots by speaking about
human rights abuses, Tibet, East Turk-
istan and Inner Mongolia included,
undue territorial claims, and for more
freedom and rule of law in China.”
Not long after, in the waning days of
both their presidential tenures, Sangay
visited Trump in the White House.
Some hailed it as a historic visit—San-
gay declared himself “the first political
head of the Central Tibetan Admin-
istration to formally enter the White
House”—but others noted all the meet-
ings Gyatso had had with previous US
presidents. Allen Carson, a professor of
government at Cornell University, saw
us mission to china / ap photo

the meeting as a last-ditch effort that could poten-
tially prove dangerous. “Lobsang Sangay may have
made himself a pawn in a larger, and currently
highly unstable, game of great power politics, one
being driven by a volatile American leader,” he
wrote in an article for the US news site The Hill.
He implored Sangay to focus his efforts on gaining
Biden’s favour.
The broad contours of diplomatic relations be-
tween the United States and Tibet, however, look
likely to stay the same. “I don’t think he will feel
comfortable poking China in the eye,” Yun Sun, a
senior fellow at The Stimson Center, a nonpartisan
think tank, told me of Biden. “It will be a hu-
man-rights angle, rather than one of sovereignty
or territory.”
In March, a state-department spokesperson
reiterated that China should play no part in the
Dalai Lama succession, adding that the imposition
of a Chinese-approved Panchen Lama in 1995 “re-
mains an outrageous abuse of religious freedom.”
Reports issued by Biden’s state department have
omitted language found in previous editions
that called the Tibetan Autonomous Region part
of China. When the secretary of state, Antony
Blinken, visited India in July, he had a brief meet-
ing with Gyatso’s representative in Delhi, Ngod-
up Dongchung. A spokesperson of the Chinese
foreign ministry called the meeting “a violation of
the US commitment to acknowledge Tibet being a
part of China.”
As long as the two behemoths remain at odds,
the United States is likely to use Tibet as a point
of leverage against China. But the extent to which
the Biden administration will go to support Tibet,
beyond disapproving statements and threats of
sanctions, is unclear. Support from other govern-
ments is unlikely—who would risk provoking the
second-largest economy in the world? As China’s
power has grown over the past decade, world lead-
ers have been increasingly reticent to meet Gyatso.
This pattern may play out in exaggerated form
with the next incarnation. It is unclear how much
support a Dalai Lama born outside Tibet would be
able to sustain. Both Gyatso and Ogyen, the two
most significant and charismatic religious author-
ities in exile, were born and trained in Tibet; a
significant amount of their religious authority and
charisma is derived from their upbringing in the
traditional monastic institutions of the plateau.
Gyatso could return to Tibet before his death, a
wish he often expresses in public but which seems
as unlikely to come true today as it ever has. Many
Tibetans thought that Xi, whose wife is rumoured
to be a practising Buddhist and whose father was
once stationed near Tibet, might improve Sino-Ti-
betan relations, but the opposite has been the case.
One possibility is that the Chinese government
the uncertain path · reportage
could permit Gyatso to return for strategic rea- opposite page: Terry
sons, to consolidate its hold over Tibet. Branstad, Trump’s
The current Panchen Lama has proven popular ambassador to
China, visits the
among China’s Han citizenry—whose share of the Jokhang temple in
population in the Tibetan Autonomous Region Lhasa in May 2019.
has increased over the years—and it is likely that a
Chinese-approved Dalai Lama would be similarly
received. Geography, demographics and realpo-
litik favour China’s interests. Its hold on Tibet is
strong, and the Tibetan diaspora only accounts for
about four percent of the total Tibetan population.
In Gyatso’s absence, the tenuous connection be-
tween Tibet and its community-in-exile would be
further frayed. Without the tempering hand of the
Dalai Lama, violent unrest in Tibet could increase.
Or, if China plays its cards right and grooms a suc-
cessor, there could be a peaceful period, through
either a decline in Tibetan political will or its
sustained suppression.
Gray Tuttle, a professor of modern Tibetan
studies at Columbia University, told me that, no
matter what the Chinese decide to do, he is certain
the Tibetan community will find a way to endure,
both inside and outside Tibet. “There’s a term in
Buddhism in general called ‘expedient means,’ an
ability to adapt to the culture you’re in, use what’s
effective and to not be embarrassed about it,”
Tuttle told me. Since before the Mongol domi-
nation of China, Tibetan lamas had maintained
priest-patron relationships with outside rulers,
serving as religious tutors while maintaining their
autonomy. The Dalai Lama lineage, after all, owes
its origins to such a relationship. This is why many
Tibetans refute Beijing’s claims that Tibet has
never been independent. It also explains the ease
with which Tibetans move from one benefactor
to the next—from the CIA to the beat poets in the
United States, from Sichuanese elites in China to
liberals and Hindu nationalists in India, a parade
of strange bedfellows has always been present to
provide funding and support for Tibet.
i met rinzin choedon, the national director of
Students for a Free Tibet, at the organisation’s
Dharamshala office in November 2019. A global
network of students and activists, the group has
a long history in India too, and the walls were
plastered with faded posters from the heyday of
Tibetan activism in the 1990s. She told me about
the reluctant hope that she had felt about Trump’s
attitude towards China and the pro-Tibet policies
that came out of it. She hoped that her work as
an organiser could somehow harness the rising
enthusiasm for Tibetan culture among Indian
youth into more overt support for it from the
Indian government. Perhaps concerns about cli-
mate change or water security could provide the
impetus—China’s overdevelopment of the Tibetan
OCTOBER 2021 59
the uncertain path · reportage
opposite page: Plateau has already impacted India’s water supply
As Sino-Indian via Himalayan rivers.
relations When I spoke with Tenzin Tselha, Choedon’s
deteriorated
predecessor as the organisation’s head, at a café
over the status
of Arunachal down the street, she expressed this sentiment
Pradesh, the Indian more bluntly. “We are an empty card,” she told
government me, and shrugged. It was both an admission of
allowed Gyatso to helplessness and a hint at a strategy, a willingness
visit a monastery to adopt expedient means.
in Tawang, in 2009,
The Tibetan cause has long found support across
despite Chinese
opposition. the political spectrum in India. Nehru’s Tibet policy
during the 1950s was criticised by politicians such
as JB Kripalani, Vallabhbhai Patel, JP Narayan
and Ram Manohar Lohia, as well as by members
of the liberal Swatantra Party. Even conservative
Hindus tend to view the community favourably,
claiming Buddhism as an ancient Indian religion.
Gyatso does his part to play up this appeal. In recent
speeches and interviews, he has emphasised a need
for a return to “ancient Indian knowledge” and for
teaching Vedic philosophy in schools. Since the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organi-
sation of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, has
historically been a champion of Tibet, most Tibetan
politicians and activists have been reticent to speak
out against Hindu nationalism.
Outside of this cultural bonhomie, however,
India’s support for the Tibetan community has re-
mained damp, erratic and transparently strategic.
Nehru refused to intervene during the invasion of
Tibet in the interest of preserving relations with
China, but by the time Gyatso fled to India those
relations had begun to deteriorate. The Chinese
government had begun to claim territory along the
Indo-Tibetan border and constructing highways
in the region, including one through Aksai Chin,
which India claimed as part of the erstwhile state
of Jammu and Kashmir. The Sino-Indian War of
1962 froze relations between the two countries,
and India began providing covert support to the
Tibetan government-in-exile as well as to the
CIA-backed insurgency in Kham and Amdo.
Since then, India’s position on Tibet has been
contingent on its relations with China. In 2003,
when the Indian prime minister at the time, Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, visited Beijing, he affirmed that
the “Tibetan Autonomous Region is part of the
territory of the People’s Republic of China.” This
concession, in exchange for an implicit accep-
tance of India’s territorial claims over Sikkim,
was strategically worded. By using the name of
the state that came into being in 1949, he was not
acknowledging prior Chinese claims to Tibet.
And, by saying Tibetan Autonomous Region, he
was excluding other Tibetan-populated parts of
China as well as Arunachal Pradesh, which China
claims to be on its side of the Indo-Tibetan border
negotiated in 1914.
60 THE CARAVAN
As relations deteriorated, in 2006, over the
status of Arunachal Pradesh, India again played
the Tibet card. In 2008, it released a statement
mentioning that “innocent people” had been
killed during the protests in Lhasa. The following
year, Gyatso was allowed to visit a monastery in
Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh, despite Chinese
opposition. In communiqués issued after visits
by the Chinese premiers Wen Jiabao in 2010 and
Li Keqiang in 2013, as well as the Indian prime
minister Manmohan Singh’s 2013 trip to Beijing,
India refused to explicitly affirm Beijing’s “one
China” policy or Tibet’s status as an integral
part of China—though both tenets remain part of
Indian foreign policy. “It is in our interest to keep
the Tibetan heart beating in the region,” B Raman,
a former intelligence officer, wrote a few months
before Singh’s visit to China.
When Modi came to power, in 2014, he invited
Sangay to his swearing-in ceremony and treat-
ed the sikyong on par with the assembled South
Asian heads of state, raising Tibetan hopes of
greater Indian support. Three years later, Gyatso
was again allowed to visit the Tawang monastery,
while Sangay was allowed to hoist the Tibetan flag
at Pangong-Tso, a lake located on the Indo-Tibet-
an border. However, after a military standoff at
Doklam in 2017, followed by a conciliatory summit
between Modi and Xi at Wuhan, there was anoth-
er turn away from Tibet. Rahul Bedi, a senior jour-
nalist, told me that Modi made “a Faustian bargain
with Xi in Wuhan, and they decided to throw the
Dalai Lama under the bus.”
On 22 February 2018, India’s foreign secretary,
VK Gokhale—who was the ambassador to China
until the previous year and was scheduled to visit
Beijing the following day—requested the cabinet
secretary to direct all government officials to
stay away from any events being organised by the
Tibetan diaspora over the next few months to
commemorate the sixtieth year of Gyatso’s exile.
“The proposed period will be a very sensitive time
in the context of India’s relations with China,”
Gokhale wrote. “Participation by senior leaders or
government functionaries, either from the Central
Government or State Governments, is not desir-
able, and should be discouraged.”
Soon after the request, and a subsequent circu-
lar issued by the cabinet secretary, were report-
ed by the Indian Express, the CTA cancelled its
planned events in Delhi. “The Dalai Lama can do
any event in India provided it’s not political and
not aimed against China,” the BJP leader Subra-
manian Swamy told the news agency ANI. The
government’s moves to dissociate itself from the
events, he said, were “a hint to him that he should
stick to religious activities.” Nevertheless, several
BJP leaders—including Ram Madhav, Mahesh

Sharma and Shanta Kumar—attended
a rescheduled “Thank You India” event
in McLeodganj on 31 March. Although
Madhav, the BJP’s national general
secretary at the time, hailed the frater-
nal ties between Indians and Tibetans,
who, he said, were “bound by spirit, re-
ligion, culture and knowledge,” he took
care to clarify that “we followed the
one-China policy at the political level.”
The following year, Modi did not
acknowledge the sixtieth anniversary
of Gyatso’s arrival in India. When he
was re-elected prime minister, he did
not invite Sangay to his swearing-in
ceremony. When I asked Indresh Ku-
mar, the founder of the RSS-affiliated
Bharat-Tibbat Sahyog Manch, about the
inconsistencies in the Modi govern-
ment’s support for Tibet, he responded
curtly. “The symbol was already clear,”
he said, referring to Sangay’s invitation
to Modi’s first inauguration. “Why do
we have to say it again?”
As Sino-Indian relations again
soured following a brawl between Chi-
nese and Indian troops at Galwan, in
Ladakh, in June 2020—the first border
clash since 1975 to result in the loss of
life—the Modi government once again
appeared to be ready to deploy the
Tibet card. A few months later, Madhav
attended the funeral of Nyima Tenzin,
a soldier in the Special Frontier Force,
who had been killed in a landmine blast
near the Line of Actual Control, which
epa
Outside of cultural
bonhomie, India’s
support for the Tibetan
community has
remained damp, erratic
and transparently
strategic.
divides the areas of Chinese and Indian
control. The SFF is a secretive high-al-
titude special-operations unit made
up of Tibetan refugees, created in 1962
with CIA support. It is not considered
part of the Indian Army, despite having
participated in wars against Pakistan
in 1971 and 1999. Tenzin’s body was
draped in the Indian and Tibetan flags.
It was the first time that an SFF mem-
ber had been afforded such a public
funeral. Madhav subsequently deleted a
tweet about his participation.
Sangay latched on to the opening
the Galwan brawl seemed to provide
for raising the Tibetan issue. At a
ceremony in Dharamshala on India’s
independence day last year, he urged
the Indian government to recognise
Tibet as a “buffer zone of peace” to
prevent further border clashes, and
to take Tibetan history as a guideline
while dealing with the Chinese army.
In an opinion piece two weeks later,
published in light of the border dispute,
the uncertain path · reportage
Bedi bemoaned the fact that India
had not publicly supported the Dalai
Lama—whom he called a “compelling
force multiplier.”
“India has absolutely no leverage
over China,” Bedi told me. “But the
Dalai Lama and Tibet are two areas
that are of irritation to the Chinese. I’m
not sure if India actually has the balls
to raise these issues and stand up to the
Chinese. It looks difficult, because In-
dia has, for the last forty or fifty years,
said Tibet belongs to China.”
In July 2021, an international jour-
nalism consortium revealed that the
phones of scores of politicians, activists
and activists in India had been put
under surveillance using the Pegasus
spyware, sold exclusively to state actors
by its Israeli creators. The list of po-
tential targets included several senior
CTA officials, including Sangay and his
predecessor as kalön tripa, Lobsang
Tenzin. Ogyen was also listed as one of
the targets, as were Tempa Tsering, a
former CTA envoy in Delhi, and Gyat-
so’s aides Tenzin Taklha and Chimmey
Regzin. Gyatso himself reportedly does
not carry a cell phone.
The Indian government has neither
confirmed nor denied its use of Peg-
asus. The CTA spokesperson Tenzin
Lekshay told me that, since it had only
found out about the alleged surveil-
lance through media reports, the CTA
was unable to comment on the issue.
the uncertain path · reportage
Lobsang Wangyal and Tenzin Tsun-
due both told me that they were not
surprised by the revelations, since they
had always assumed that the Indian
government would conduct surveil-
lance on CTA leaders. Tsundue said
that the Indian government’s “mis-
placed priorities” had been exposed.
It was “spying on its own people,” he
said, but where it should have focussed,
“which is the Chinese, it was not there.”
Robert Barnett, the founder and for-
mer director of Columbia University’s
Modern Tibetan Studies Program, told
me that the Pegasus episode was “not a
reminder that there is tension between
New Delhi and the Dalai Lama. But
this is a reminder that New Delhi has
remained remarkably ambiguous, am-
bivalent and strategically variable in its
public pronouncements, activities and
thinking about the Tibetan issue.” It
was also a sign, he added, “that India is
yet to produce a long-term strategic vi-
sion, let alone one that would maximise
its strategic advantages but, at the same
time, would not provoke major conflict
with China.”
It is unclear how the Modi gov-
ernment will proceed on the Tibetan
question. “Mr Modi is a very ruthless,
self-possessed man, so it really depends
on how the situation evolves,” Bedi
told me. “It’s not something that you or
I can decide is going to be resolved in
the next one month or eight months.”
But no matter how India proceeds, he
added, “I don’t think anyone in the
world thinks they can wrench Tibet
from the Chinese. I don’t think even
the Dalai Lama thinks that. Or even the
Tibetans.”
for the tibetan community in India,
the situation has settled into a fragile
détente. The CTA never conceived of
the Tibetan population as long-term
residents and so has spent little energy
lobbying for their rights within India.
Some Tibetans oppose efforts to gain
Indian citizenship, arguing that it
symbolises losing the fight. Meanwhile,
many continue to leave India for the
West.
As it stands, the community’s polit-
ical situation is beyond the influence
of good intentions or cultural senti-
ments. It is in the hands of great pow-
62
Kyap said he was tired
of the theatrics of the
Tibetan movement in
India. Activists receive
a permit; they protest;
they are arrested,
then released—but the
enemies they face are
not their real enemies.
ers and subject to lumbering political
machinations. “As an activist, my role
is to interpret and see how I can relate
the issue of Tibet in the interest of
another country,” Tsundue told me.
“If we are able to do this, we can find
an ally.”
When I met Rinzin Choedon, she
had recently been released from jail.
On 11 October 2019, she was detained,
along with several other activists, while
trying to organise a protest in Chennai
against a diplomatic visit by Xi Jinping.
She had been rattled by the experience.
Choedon had been detained before,
during protests in Delhi, but only
ceremonially—the guards in Delhi jails
often served them chai and sometimes
called them freedom fighters.
In Chennai, things had been differ-
ent. They had been arrested four days
before the protest was scheduled. The
guards had threatened them with de-
portation to Tibet. She was held for 11
days, she told me, adding that the police
told her they “had orders from the top.”
Citing the cancellation of the “Thank
You India” event, Choedon hypoth-
esised that their rougher treatment
could indicate an Indian turn away
from the Tibetan cause. Or perhaps it
was accidental, she speculated—the
police in Chennai might have not been
as informed about the Tibetan cause
as their counterparts in Delhi. With
the number of changes in the Indian
government’s stance on Tibet, based
on whether it wanted to provoke or
appease China at any given time, it was
hard to tell.
As Choedon recounted her deten-
tion, she stood up and started to pace.
She used to be shy, she told me, but
when she began advocating for Tibetan
THE CARAVAN
independence while studying at Delhi
University, she found a new voice. She
would conduct teach-ins during free
periods, explaining Tibetan history
and politics to her Indian peers. The
same fire still burned, despite—or,
perhaps, because of—her recent arrest.
She handed me campaign materials
and told me about her organisation’s
upcoming film screenings and political
actions. “We agree to disagree with
His Holiness,” she told me. When I
asked her about the succession, she
nodded knowingly. “Now is the time
we have to face it, it is our generation
that has to face it,” she said. “It’s the
bitter truth.” Their struggle for rang-
zen, she added, would continue after
Gyatso’s death.
Wangden Kyap, who runs Tibet
Watch, an NGO that investigates and
publicises human-rights violations
inside Tibet, was pessimistic about the
current situation. While growing up in
Tibet, he participated in small acts of
rebellion, such as drawing Tibetan flags
and distributing them at school. At the
age of 15, a desire to contribute more
meaningfully to the freedom struggle
led him to make the dangerous one-way
trip to India.
But in Dharamshala, on the balcony
of Tibet Watch’s small office, Kyap told
me that he felt ineffectual. He was tired
of the theatrics of the Tibetan move-
ment in India, which focus on sending
a message to the international commu-
nity. Activists receive a permit from
the Indian government; they protest;
they are ceremoniously arrested, then
released—but the enemies they face
are not their real enemies. “There’s no
point, no visible result,” he told me.
Kyap wished he were back in Tibet,
where he could confront the forces that
had occupied his country and killed
generations of his family. There is too
much focus on the diaspora, he said;
the only focus should be on the “people,
plants and animals inside Tibet.”
Kyap said he was not surprised that
other Tibetans also felt restless in
India. He understood that life in India
can be hard—even after all these years,
he still rents his home—but he had not
come to India for comfort. Watching
the exodus to the West, he said, he
wished others were as committed as he

was. He did not want to pursue Indian citizenship
himself, but saw value in struggling for that goal
as a community: with the diaspora concentrat-
ed in India, more permanent status could help
to preserve the culture, language and political
energy of Tibet in enclaves such as Dharamshala.
As it stands, he added, the CTA tends to wag more
fingers at those who pursue Indian citizenship
than at those who move abroad.
Despite the community being increasingly
spread out, he saw hope in the next generation.
Many who had grown up abroad, he told me, have
showed a renewed interest in learning about their
heritage. They come back to Dharamshala for
short-term courses in Tibetan culture or Buddhist
philosophy, and participate in political activism
in India and abroad. Some have even inherited a
more proper, Lhasa-accented Tibetan than their
peers in India, who speak with a Dharamsha-
la-bred twang. Even Tibetans growing up in India,
he said, are no longer following the earlier fashion
of inserting English or Hindi words in Tibetan
sentences.
He also admires the younger generation’s irrev-
erence—younger Tibetans make art about Bud-
dhist texts that older generations would consider
sacrilegious, they speak their mind more readily
when they disagree with their elders and even
espouse views that contradict those of the Dalai
Lama, which his generation found unthinkable.
manpreet romana / afp / getty images
the uncertain path · reportage
Kyap thought such disagreement could produc- below: Tibetan
tively bubble up into democratic deliberation. activists in Delhi
For now, though, he was cynical about the poli- perform a street
play, in April 2008,
tics of the CTA, which he called a glorified divorce
to denounce the
court. “We don’t have democratic society, we don’t Chinese crackdown
have this much land,” he told me, squeezing his on protesters in
thumb and index finger together. The CTA, he Lhasa.
said, “is a welfare NGO in India. And one welfare
NGO cannot have this kind of legal authority.” Be-
yond its legal limitations, he added, its democratic
aspirations are curtailed by a tendency to defer
to the Dalai Lama. Though the CTA had voted to
support umaylam, Kyap said, the official resolu-
tion only backed Gyatso’s stand. “If His Holiness
says—like, from today, from this moment—‘Oh, I’m
going for complete independence,’ then the Tibet-
an government-in-exile need not vote again.”
I asked him whether the CTA would take on a
different role after Gyatso’s death. “I cannot say,”
he replied, “but the struggle will remain. That’s
the point. We are here just for the struggle, noth-
ing else.” Gyatso did not come to India on his own,
he said, but rather with the aid of CIA funding,
with the sacrifice of thousands of Tibetans and
with the permission of the Indian government.
“He was just 24. Today he has a big role in the
world but, when it comes down to the bottom line,
it’s not just because of one individual. The great
people, they come, and the great people, they go—
but the people, they remain.” s
 “You fought valiantly, comrade,
Sacrificing yourself for the country.
Your blood, now,
Paints the spring red.”
Junmaya Nepali, “Hot-Blooded Vengeance”

red is the
for most of my childhood, an old photograph
hung on the walls of my grandparents’ living room
in Kathmandu. The photograph was of our great
grandfather—at least that is what we kids were

colour of
told. It was only after it was taken down that I
found out that the man in it was actually Joseph
Stalin, whom my grandfather, a staunch commu-
nist in those days, had idolised.

spring
The afterlife of
Nepal’s civil war
PHOTO ESSAY / CONFLICT
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY PRASIIT STHAPIT
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY ROSHAN MAHARJAN
opposite page: Junmaya Nepali, Thawang, Rolpa. 20 October
2019. Junmaya, a poet who served on the Maoists’ Dalit Area
Committee, recalled wandering through the forest with her
children for almost a month, eluding the government army.
Junmaya is mostly relieved that the war is over, but still
believes revolution is necessary, even inevitable. “It’s for the
future of our children,” she said. “We have to fight.”
The discovery that it had been Stalin staring
down at us all those years coincided with my
political awakening. For most of the early days
of Nepal’s civil war, in the late 1990s, I had been
shielded from what was unfolding in the country.
Living in Kathmandu, far from the areas where
the fighting was concentrated, there had been only
whispers back then: two police officers killed in an
ambush, seven villagers shot dead on suspicion of
being Maoists. In 2001, after the Maoists attacked
a Royal Nepalese Army barracks and killed nu-
merous high-level government officials, the king
declared a state of emergency. Now the conflict
exploded into everyone’s consciousness—includ-
ing mine—with more frequent and unavoidable
news of attacks, climbing death tolls and curtailed
civil rights.
The war had begun on 13 February 1996, when
Maoists launched coordinated attacks on police
posts in three locations. One of these was in Hol-
leri, a small town in the Rolpa district of western
Nepal, and another in the neighbouring district of
Rukum. Rolpa and Rukum soon became strong-
holds of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist)
and the epicentre of the civil war. Before the fight-
ing ended, with a peace deal signed a decade later,
these districts witnessed some of the most brutal
crackdowns by state forces. Across the country,
the war took a huge toll: around seventeen thou-
sand deaths, 2,506 disappearances, thousands
disabled and millions displaced.
The harder the state pushed, the more the
Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army and its affili-
ates succeeded in recruiting people. Many were
recruited by force, but many others wholehearted-
ly supported the cause of abolishing the monarchy
and establishing a democratic people’s republic.
In the words of Mausam Roka, a journalist and
former PLA fighter, the Maoist cadre believed “a
system that hinges on the barrel of a gun can only
be smashed by the gun itself.” After he lost an arm
66
above: Comrade Pratirodh, Kathmandu. 26 February
2020. Bhim Bahadur Roka, also known as Comrade
Pratirodh, was a soldier in the People’s Liberation
Army. He was involved in many battles and became
a commander of various ranks, and lost a younger
brother, a brother in-law and four vice-commanders
during the war. “Had I not been a communist, many
people around my village wouldn’t have followed,”
he said. Looking at the state of the country and the
party, he felt “sad and responsible for the deaths
of many soldiers like me.” Having lived through
the war and seen so many others die, he opened a
home in Kathmandu for the children of PLA fighters
who had been killed. He is still proud that he was
part of a historic movement.
left: Maoist leaflet. On 13 February 1996,
Maoists attacked a police post in Holleri,
Rolpa. This was one of three coordinated
attacks that signalled the beginning of
Nepal’s decade-long civil war. Having
captured a few weapons, they left
shouting slogans and distributing copies
of this leaflet. It reads, “March along
the path of People’s War to smash the
reactionary state and establish a new
democratic state.”

below: Unfinished monument, Holleri,

Rolpa. 15 October 2019. This memorial, still
under construction, stands at the site of the
police station attacked by Maoist fighters on
13 February 1996. It was attacked again on 12
July 2001, when one police officer was killed
and 70 were captured, to be released three
months later.
above: Mural, Mahat, Rukum. 20 October 2019. This
mural depicts the Maoists’ capture of Thule Rai,
then the area’s deputy superintendent of police,
on 22 September 1999. He was later released in
exchange for a top Maoist leader, Dev Gurung, who
was in police custody.
opposite page: Tara and Ramkali Khadka, Pokhari,
Rukum. 22 October 2019. Ramkali’s husband, Laxmi
Khadka, a farmer, was shot dead by police near his
house on 22 February 2000. The police shot 14 others
and set fire to around seventy houses in the area that
day. Tara was born to Ramkali three months later.
in an accidental bomb explosion, Roka ran a radio
station for the party, Radio Jan Ganatantra, some-
times broadcasting live during attacks. “Soldiers of-
ten shook hands before heading into battle and they
would tell each other that they would meet in the
next life if they were martyred,” he remembered. “I
still wonder what kind of ideology made people face
death with such open arms.”
After the peace deal, in 2006, the Maoists entered
mainstream politics. Two years later, the Shah
dynasty, which had ruled the country for almost
two hundred and fifty years, was formally ousted,
and Nepal became a federal republic. The Mao-
ists have led or been part of multiple governments
since then, and the country has seen some historic
changes, many of them part of the CPN(M)’s origi-
nal demands: the creation of a new constitution, for
instance, and the transition to a secular state. Yet
much of what the party promised its supporters and
fighters remains unfulfilled.
Travelling through Rolpa and Rukum, I met
people who fought on both sides and heard stories
of atrocities committed by both sides too. The treaty
that ended the fighting promised justice for wartime
crimes and a process of reconciliation, but those
who bore the brunt of the fighting have seen these
hopes reduced to empty dreams. Many who fought
on the front lines, who believed in an egalitarian
new society, have given up.
Junmaya Nepali, a poet from Rolpa who served
on the CPN(M)’s Dalit Area Committee, recalled
wandering through the forest with her children
for almost a month, eluding the government army.
She described times when all they had to eat was
a kernel of corn, which she would split in two
and give to her children. “After the war ended,
we hoped there would be development and we
could live in peace,” she said. “We haven’t seen
any development, but at least we have peace. We
don’t have to go underground, there’s no fear of
anybody.”
Mina Nepali, from Liwang in Rolpa, was seven
months pregnant with her second child when
the Maoists abducted her husband, Tilak Ram
Nepali, who worked as a school teacher. His body
was found 18 days later under a tree not far from
Liwang, with a letter in his shirt pocket addressed
to his family. It read, “Jayendra’s mother, my life

above: Video still of Pushpa

Kamal Dahal, also known as
Prachanda, and Babu Ram
Bhattarai. This image from
the CPN(M)’s Chunbang
convention shows Dahal
and Bhattarai, the party’s
two top leaders, attending
a performance of the
opera “Yuddha Morchabata
Farkada”—“Returning from
the Battlefield.” Many in
the audience that day were
moved to tears.

left: Plank left to dry,

Chunbang, Rukum. 22
February 2020. This was
the site where the opera
“Returning from the
Battlefield” was performed
for the Maoist cadre and
leadership at the Chunbang
convention. The CPN(M)
central committee agreed at
the convention to combine
forces with an alliance of
mainstream political parties
that had turned against the
monarchy. This led to the
People’s Movement of 2006,
which restored parliament
and paved the way to peace.
partner, my wife Mina, in case I don’t ever return home
you have in your lap a piece of myself, a part of my body,
our son Jayendra. Take solace from looking at him. In
your womb is another baby who will be born in two
months. It does not matter whether it is a boy or a girl,
take care of it, protect the baby. Even if things get diffi-
cult, don’t lose hope.”
Mina recalled that her youngest child used to say she
wanted to join the police or army and kill Maoists to pay
them back for killing her father. “I tell her that isn’t what
you should do, one shouldn’t take revenge,” Mina said. above: Hammer and
“She has changed her mind now. She wants to further sickle, Thawang, Rolpa.
her education, but it’s difficult for us financially.” 20 October 2019.
“ I am falling, comrade, sacrificing this physical life to the revolution
I am going, leaving my friends forever
I fell as I fought, please take this news to my home
Please tell my parents not to weep too much with worry for their fallen son”

this page: Video stills

from a film rendition
of “Returning from
the Battlefield.”

opposite page:
Jhankar Buda
Magar, Chunbang,
Rukum. 22 February
2020. A musician
and a member
of the CPN(M)’s
cultural wing,
he performed at
the Chunbang
convention. He
said party leaders
used musicians for
their gain during
the war and cast
them aside once
they were in
power.
above: Guna Bahadur BK, Jaljala, Rolpa. 18 February opposite page bottom:
2020. Guna Bahadur BK, from Thabang, belongs to a Martyr’s Road, Rolpa. 16
caste traditionally considered untouchable. He was October 2019. The Martyr’s
not involved with the Maoists but was forcibly taken Road, connecting the
to various party events, sometimes walking for days villages of Nuwagaun and
to get there. On one such trip, he recalled, “I was Thawang, was one of the
assigned a Brahmin house to spend the night. They Maoists’ most ambitious
asked us what caste I was and I said Dalit. They said I projects. It was built with
couldn’t enter because I was an untouchable and their mandatory contributions
house would be impure if I entered. I forced my way in. of labour and cash from
I told them we were fighting against exactly the same families in Rolpa and
thing, caste discrimination.” neighbouring districts.
right: Smoke above
Kankri, Rukum. 23
October 2019. The
PLA had a technical
wing responsible for
the manufacture
and maintenance
of weapons and
explosives. They
often operated from
mobile workshops in
the forests. Comrade
Suman recalled,
“These trees were our
protection, and we
protected them in
turn. Guerrilla warfare
happens in the forests,
so they were very
precious to us. They
must be giving us the
lal salaam as we walk
past them.”
above: Chaitor Bahadur and Gaumala Pun Magar,
Harjang, Rolpa. 16 February 2020. Gaumala’s
husband, Aibhan Pun, attended a meeting of one
of the CPN(M)’s rival parties in Harjang, Rolpa, on
11 March 1999. Maoists locked the house where
the meeting took place and set fire to it. Seven
people were burnt alive, and Aibhan was shot
dead while trying to escape. For Gaumala, the
saddest part is that Chaitor, her son, does not
even remember his father. Chaitor was only two
years old at the time. His brother Nim Bahadur
joined the police to avenge their father’s murder.
opposite page: Mural of five
communist icons, Thabang,
Rolpa. 19 October 2019. This
mural adorns the main entrance
to Thabang, a hotbed of the
communist movement in Nepal
even before the war began. The
area’s rebellious nature prompted
numerous state crackdowns,
including offensives such as
Operation Romeo in 1995 and
Operation Kilo Sierra 2 in 1998.
 For many, the decision to join either side in the
war was triggered by a desire for revenge. Nim
Bahadur Pun, a resident of Rolpa, joined the police
because the Maoists murdered his father. Ganesh
Khadka, from Rukum, became a soldier in the
PLA to avenge his father’s death at the hands of
the police. Such examples were common during
the war.
Music was one of the party’s most important pro-
paganda tools, used to induct recruits and indoctri-
nate members as well as to influence the wider pub-
lic. “We used the tunes of the places we played in,”
Jhankar Buda Magar, a musician and a member of
the party’s cultural wing, said. Magar recalled that
the Maoists’ music was powerful enough to even
convert members of rival parties to the CPN(M).
“Speeches cannot influence people as much as music
can,” he explained. “That is why they used music
during the war.”
Before battle, the Maoists sang songs evoking
bravery and heroism to encourage soldiers to fight.
Afterwards, they sang songs full of sadness and grief
to mourn the departed. “Yuddha Morchabata Fark-
ada”—“Returning from the Battlefield”—an opera by
Khushi Ram Pakhrin, captured a mix of both kinds
of emotions. It tells the story of a PLA soldier going
right: Comrade Suman, Rajya Pokhari, Rolpa. 15
February 2020. Devendra Gharti Magar, also known
as Comrade Suman, was a soldier in the PLA. He
recounted that he was wounded so badly during the
battle of Gam, on 7 May 2002, that his fellow soldiers
thought he had died. He survived and was taken for
surgery to Lucknow, he said, where he was nearly
caught by Indian police. Once back in Nepal, he went
on fighting and was wounded multiple times again—
he claimed he had taken some twenty bullets in all.
His left side is immobile.

below: Comrade Suman’s phone, Lisne Lek, Rolpa. 15

February 2020. Comrade Suman shows an old photo
of himself in the PLA.

into battle with a dream and getting killed, and calls on

those surviving to build a new Nepal:

You must fight and win this last battle

Wailing hearts, sweat-drenched bodies
Are waiting for a new dawn

Maoist cultural troupes performed this opera during

the Chunbang convention, in October 2005, where the
CPN(M)’s central committee agreed to join an alliance with
mainstream political parties that had turned against the
monarchy. This led to the People’s Movement of 2006, which
restored the democratic parliament that had been dissolved
under the state of emergency and paved the way for peace.
In the audience that day were almost all the top leaders of
the CPN(M), and the opera left many of them in tears.
right: Nandakali’s hands, Kural, Rukum. 22 October
2019. Nandakali Oli was the only person to witness
the murder of five people at the hands of the police
on 22 February 2000. The police also shot ten others
and set fire to around 70 houses in the area that day.
They were on a rampage after one of their officers
was killed nearby by the Maoists that morning.
The five people murdered were members of the
Nepali Congress, the ruling party at the time. Oli
remembered the police saying as they left, “It’ll be a
lot of fun today in this village.”

below: Weaving hemp, Rachibang, Rolpa. 19 October

2019. Cannabis is one of the most common crops in
Rolpa and Rukum. Nothing of the plant is wasted: the
leaves, flowers and fruit are harvested to produce
hashish and marijuana, oil is pressed from the seeds
for use in cooking and as medicine, and the stems are
processed to extract fibre for thread. Experts argue
that if cannabis was fully legalised in Nepal, it would
greatly profit impoverished and remote districts such
as Rolpa and Rukum.
below: Teja Bista Chhetri, Sulichaur, Rolpa. 17 February
2020. During the war, Chhetri was affiliated to the Nepali
Congress, which held power through part of the conflict.
She had been against the war from the day it started.
“They call it the people’s war, but in reality it was an
armed conflict,” she said.

centre: Execution site, Topi Falna Danda, Rolpa. 15

February 2020. Cham Bahadur Thapa, his son Ujar Man
and Chane Mahara were shot dead and burnt by the police
at this place on 11 December 1998. All residents of Tebang,
Rolpa, they were suspected of having information on the
Maoists, although they were not affiliated to the party. It
was Ujar’s wedding day.
above: Comrade Lal, Thawang, Rolpa. 19 February
2020. Man Prasad Buda, also known as Comrade Lal,
was affiliated to the communist movement since 1977.
From his start in student unions, he eventually rose to
the position of a political commissar. When he joined
the Maoists, he was responsible for forming affiliated
organisations around Rolpa and was involved in the
“schooling department,” which taught ideology to PLA
soldiers and the general masses. Now he repents: “If the
war that was so close to being won can be demolished like
this, what use is a revolution?”
right: Ramkirne Roka, Gobang,
Rolpa. 19 October 2019.
Ramkirne Roka is now the vice-
chairperson of Thawang Rural
Municipality. She was involved
with various Maoist-affiliated
organisations and actively
promoted the party during the
war. Her sister Jovansari Roka,
a PLA fighter, was killed after
her gun misfired.

below: Remnants of a ritual

sacrifice, Liwang, Rolpa. 17
October 2019.

After the party won power, the

musicians that were such a vital part
of the Maoists’ revolution were cast
aside. “You know how they say, use and
throw?” Jhankar, one of those who per-
formed at the Chunbang convention,
said. “That is how I think the party has
treated us musicians.”
Like in the rest of Nepal, migration
is a big issue in Rolpa, with many thou-
sands leaving the district every year.
During the war, villages and towns
were mostly left with only old people,
as the young joined the party and had
to go underground. These communities
still look the same now, but instead of
going underground young people are
mostly abroad for work. Since the Mao-
ists’ promised economic transformation
never came, life in Rolpa, a historically
poor place, remains difficult. Foreign
employment is an inescapable temp-
tation, if not an obligation, for those
seeking something better in life.
“Looking back, I feel like it was all
just a fictional tale,” Comrade Suman,
a former PLA fighter from Rolpa, said.
“But we were there, we are part of the
living history.” Suman, who is still an
active party member, claimed he had
survived multiple battles and sustained
some twenty bullet wounds. Now he
was disheartened. “Whatever we did,”
he mused, “maybe we did it just for
them”—the party leaders. Yet he still
had faith in the party, even if he had
little hope of another revolution. One
would only be possible under two con-
ditions, Suman said. First, all the tele-
communication towers in the country

above: Rajya Pokhari, Rolpa.

15 February 2020. Gyan
Bahadur Roka Magar’s body
was discovered in this place
on 31 October 1998. He was
abducted by the police the
previous evening while
working his field.

left: Comrade Syaula,

Thawang, Rolpa. 19 October
2019. Lap Bahadur Roka, also
known as Comrade Syaula,
was working in the kitchen
in Chalabang, Rolpa, on 20
August 2002, as PLA leaders
planned an attack for a
few days later. The army
surrounded them, and a battle
ensued. He was wounded
and had to have his arm
amputated. Disappointed
by the direction the party is
now heading, he said, “They
aren’t real communists, we
know now. I think they are
communists controlled by
imperialist forces.”
“Mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters,
Let us turn our grief into weapons of revenge.
If we die, spare us a tear or two.
If we live, let us meet like we always do.”
Junmaya Nepali, “Hot-Blooded Vengeance”

above: Gyan Bahadur Roka Magar’s grandson carrying the above: Rest stop, Jhyalanga,
communist flag, Rajya Pokhari, Rolpa. 14 February 2020. Rukum. 22 October 2019. The PLA
More than two decades after Gyan Bahadur was abducted attacked the army camp at Khara
by the police and found dead, his family still awaits justice. twice and was badly defeated both
The deal that ended the war promised accountability for times. This was the way they used
wartime crimes, but that hope has been reduced to an to approach the camp, located atop
empty dream. the opposite hill.
would have to be blown up, since
everyone now had phones and the
authorities could use those to track
them. Second, the foreign employ-
ment syphoning young people away
would have to be stopped. “It isn’t
possible in the present context,” he
lamented.
The memory of the war is
etched deep in everyone who lived
through it, be it in Kathmandu,
merely hearing news of the atroc-
ities and fighting, or in the places
that actually faced the brunt of the
violence. The memory lies not just
in people but also in the landscape
itself. “Guerrilla warfare happens
in the forests, so they were very
precious to us,” Comrade Suman
said. “They must be giving us the
lal salaam”—the red salute—“as
we walk past them.” But for the
generation born after the war, it
often appears as merely an event in
history, not as the most important
event in Nepal’s recent past. In the
school curriculum, it is only men-
tioned in a sentence or two. When
I asked my younger cousins about
it, none of them knew who were
the people involved, why the war
happened or what consequences
it had.
Comrade Lal, once a loyal party above: Rhododendron,
member, repented: “If the war that Putalichaur, Rolpa. 22
was so close to being won can be February 2020. “Hot-Blooded
demolished like this, what use is a Vengeance,” a poem by
revolution?” Junmaya Nepali, reads, “Like
the rhododendron adorning
spring/ You adorned the
This work was produced with the battlefield/ Martyring yourself
support of the Musée du quai Branly for the freedom of your
– Jacques Chirac. country and your people.”
 anshuman poyrekar / hindustan times

86
BOOKS

THE CARAVAN
 Sanjeev Sanyal’s attempts to
rewrite India’s past

/ HISTORY
MEERA VISVANATHAN

in the early twentieth century, Rabindranath Tagore began

his essay “Bharatbarsher Itihas” with a vision of Indian history
as a series of recurring nightmares. “The history of India that
we read and memorise to sit for examinations,” he wrote, is a
story “of who came from where, ceaselessly fought each other,
of which sons and brothers wrestled for the throne, of the
disappearance of one group and its replacements by another.”
Tagore continued:

Where the Indians are, these historians do not answer. As if,

only those who have engaged in battles and assassinations
alone exist, Indians do not. … In one’s youth, it is history
which makes one familiar with his own country. It is exactly
the opposite in our case. It is our history which has hidden
our country in obscurity.

How do we begin to tell the story properly? This is a question

that Tagore asked and tried to answer. More than a century later,
the question is being posed afresh, as if it were entirely new. In a
speech given in Kolkata in January 2020, Prime Minister Naren-
dra Modi invoked Tagore’s essay to call out the supposed errors
in the writing of Indian history. This June, the Parliamentary
Committee on education, women, children, youth and sports
invited suggestions from students, teachers and experts for
“removing references to unhistorical facts and distortions about
our national heroes from the text books,” and “ensuring equal or
proportionate references to all periods of Indian history.”
The idea that Indian history has been taught incorrectly—
that the history we currently study does not do justice to In-
dia’s past, that it is framed by colonial and Marxist biases and
needs to be rewritten on the basis of the latest evidence—has
become a popular chorus. To understand why, it may help to
look closely at the work of a key proponent of the need for new
histories: Sanjeev Sanyal.

OCTOBER 2021 87
against history · books

right: An Ashokan
rock edict in
Peshawar. If
historians privilege
the evidence of
Ashoka’s rock and
pillar edicts, this is
because they are in
his own voice and
from his own time.
This does not mean
that they read them
uncritically.

opposite page:
A rock edict in the
Prakrit language
and Brahmi script.
Sanyal’s Ashoka
narrative takes
great liberties
in interpreting
sources. We must
recognise the
impossibility of
reconstructing
a fully accurate
biography for
someone who
lived very long ago.
The evidence is
fragmentary, and
there are huge gaps
in the record.
alamy photo

I first encountered Sanyal’s work as a teacher in
a new private university, in a sprawling campus
set amid agrarian fields. Earnest engineers came
to my classes, sometimes with his books in hand,
hoping I would reveal for them India’s past in all
its grandeur. As an academic historian, I was un-
prepared for this. I had just submitted my doctoral
thesis. This was my first job. I was not comfortable
with thinking of the past in terms of “pride.” Nor
was I used to the idea that there could be audienc-
es interested in history but with no maps to help
them find their way.
Soon, I began to see his books everywhere—es-
pecially in airport bookstores, propped up beside
trinkets and chocolates. Then, his videos began to
appear in WhatsApp forwards: “Sanjeev Sanyal, ex
banker and now an economist, he is also an Eisen-
hower fellow. Listen to his short talk—very informa-
tive without being tinged with saffron & quite an
eye opener. Now people wouldn’t question the need
to re write Indian history books.” In the videos,
Sanyal appears jocular and charming, at ease with
ideas and the world. His English is as immaculate as
his white kurta, his choice of words as precise as his
side-parting. He conveys the ease of a professional,
the enjoyment of a storyteller, the swagger of a good
debater as he walks up to the podium.
Writing and oratory are only part of the spec-
trum of Sanyal’s talents. Visit his Wikipedia page
or his personal website and you will know that he
is currently the principal economic advisor to the
Indian government. Before this, he was a global
strategist and managing director at Deutsche
Bank. There is an impressive list of fellowships,
starting with the Rhodes. Sanyal wears his many
titles lightly. “Young Global Leader.” “Internation-
ally acclaimed economist.” “Environmentalist.”
“Urban Theorist.” “Author of best-selling books
on India’s history and geography.” If that were not
all, he also writes poetry.
The sheen of success is compelling, as is his
ability to flit across disciplines and concerns. Run-
ning through it all is a quicksilver impatience, a
desire to dismantle the old and bring in the new.
In his first book, The Indian Renaissance, Sanyal
speaks of the economic liberalisation of 1991 as a

88 THE CARAVAN

turning point, “when India was forced
to open itself out to the world.” Its
long-term impact on Indian history, he
writes, is nothing short of “what was
witnessed in Western Europe following
the Renaissance.” Liberalisation was
not only an economic revolution, but
also a sociocultural one. It made pos-
sible the transformation of India and
a reinvention of its place in the world.
Spurred on by demographic change,
a primary-education revolution and a
new assertive middle class, India could
look forward to a new age of progress.
Indians could begin to “believe in
themselves again.”
In this vision of political economy,
liberalisation freed India from the
shackles of Nehruvian socialism.
Sanyal has only contempt for the for-
mer regime, which he associates with
Jawaharlal Nehru and his economic ad-
visor, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
With a tremendous rhetorical flourish,
he speaks of the “Nehruvian Vision”
as “only the latest manifestation of an
inward-looking cultural attitude that
has held down the Indian civilization
for almost a millennium—far longer
than foreign conquerors.”
Sanyal tells us that Mahalanobis
treated the economy as a “mechanical
toy,” a static mathematical model based
on a system of inputs and outputs.
Such a scheme left no space for private
enterprise. It also throttled creativ-
ity. To occupy the space earlier filled
by this creaking, antiquated machine,
Sanyal calls for a new framework based
on speed and agility, which sees the
economy as a “Complex Adap-
tive System,” whose man-
agement requires quick
information-gathering and
resolute political vision.
The age of narrow exper-
tise is over. At least, that is
what Sanyal would have us
believe. The power of his
interventions lies in their
appeal to interdisciplinar-
ity. As he tells us, “Neat silos
may be useful for pedagogi-
wikimedia commons
cal purposes, but the real
world does not function in
separate compartments.” But
perhaps there is also a case
to be made for the rigours
of disciplinary training and scholarly
expertise?
Today, the historian’s craft is seen as
easily acquired, requiring no more than
an ability to construct narratives based
on philosophical or ideological vantage
points. But expertise in history, as in
any other discipline, is hard-won, ac-
quired through years of training. Sanyal
may be a competent economist, but his
ignorance of the protocols of historical
research means that many of his narra-
tives are highly flawed. If I emphasise
his historical ventures, it is because an
understanding of the past is written
into his work, undergirding even his
economic analysis. It is an essential part
of his vision of Indian society.
to understand the problems with
Sanyal’s vision of history requires
that we take his many articulations
together: the books, the columns and
the videos are all cut from the same
cloth. Take, for example, his “reread-
ing” of the figure of Ashoka in his 2016
book The Ocean of Churn. Sanyal is
rather proud of this deconstruction, for
it appears in several iterations. It is also
a prime example of the fault lines that
characterise his work.
This is how it begins: in 274 BCE,
the Mauryan ruler Bindusara suddenly
fell ill and died. The crown prince,
Sushima, was fending off incursions on
the empire’s north-western frontier. By
the time the news of the death reached
him and he rushed back to Pataliputra,
he found that his half-brother, Ashoka,
had already usurped the throne. Hav-
ing crowned himself king, Ashoka
OCTOBER 2021
against history · books
murdered all his male rivals, sparing
only his full-brother Tissa. The blood-
bath also eliminated hundreds of royal
officials who had opposed his rise.
The story sounds compelling. But
if you have not heard it or read it in
your textbooks, there is a reason for
this: historians have shown that such
accounts are simply untenable, since
they are the stuff of legends written
several centuries after Ashoka’s death.
In explaining why he privileges these
legendary accounts, Sanyal says:
Supporters of Ashoka will claim that
these acts of genocide are untrue and
they were inserted into the story by
fundamentalist Buddhist writers in
later times. This is indeed a possibil-
ity, but let me remind readers that my
alternative narrative is based on ex-
actly the same texts and inscriptions
that are used to praise the emperor.
Perhaps the same scepticism should
be evenly applied to all the evidence
and not just to portions of the text that
do not suit the mainstream narrative.
Sanyal would have us believe that
historians knew of these materials
but chose not to take them seriously
because they had been tasked with
building up the ruler’s greatness. In
fact, historians have had a long and
uneasy relationship with the legendary
accounts. For instance, in his 1928 book
Asoka, Radhakumud Mookerji made
use of the materials contained in the
Sri Lankan chronicles (the Dipavamsha
and the Mahavamsha), the accounts
of the Chinese pilgrims I-Tsing and
Yuan Chwang, as well as the Buddhist
hagiography Ashokavadana
to reconstruct Ashoka’s
early life. Remarking on
the unreliability of these
texts, Mookerji wrote, “the
legends are themselves at
conflict with one another in
many places, and thus betray
themselves all the more.” He
also made it clear that there
were discrepancies and differ-
ences in many of the key details
contained in these accounts, and
even more discrepancies appeared
upon comparing the texts with informa-
tion contained in the Ashokan edicts.
89
against history · books
What Mookerji was doing is called
source criticism, and it is a method that
every historian is trained in. It is also
something that is completely absent in
Sanyal’s work. In the case of a literary
text, source criticism requires that we
understand the context, authorship,
audience and agenda of a text before
using it to reconstruct history. Conse-
quently, if historians use the legendary
accounts sparingly and with caution, it
is because they understand that these
texts have their own agendas. In partic-
ular, since these accounts set up Ashoka
as the Buddhist ruler par excellence,
they often exaggerate the grandeur of
his conversion to Buddhism, presenting
him as a once fierce and terrible ruler
who gets transformed into a righteous
king. Texts such as the Mahavamsha or
Ashokavadana are extremely interest-
ing sources if we want to understand
the afterlife of Ashoka, how he was
imagined and reimagined within the
Buddhist tradition. But they are of very
little use if we want to reconstruct the
life and times of the historical ruler.
We must also recognise the impos-
sibility of reconstructing a fully accurate
biography for someone who lived so
long ago. The evidence is fragmentary,
and there are huge gaps in the record.
If historians privilege the evidence of
Ashoka’s rock and pillar edicts, this
is because they are in his own voice
and from his own time. This does not
mean that they read them uncritically.
Almost every historian who has studied
Ashoka’s Rock Edict XIII, which details
his remorse after the Battle of Kalinga,
recognises that it is an act of propa-
ganda. They also know that this edict
has not been found in Odisha, the region
where the battle took place, and that it
contains a warning to the atavikas, or
forest-dwellers, that the king still has
the power required to crush them if
necessary. In emphasising these aspects,
Sanyal is not telling us anything new.
Sanyal’s Ashoka narrative takes great
liberties in interpreting sources. Using
a story told in the Sri Lankan chroni-
cles, he compares Ashoka to “modern-
day fundamentalists who kill cartoon-
ists whom they accuse of insulting
their religion.” But, as I have already
pointed out, the legendary accounts
are not credible sources on which to
90
base such claims. Further, why is a
story told in a Sri Lankan chronicle
composed several centuries after
Ashoka’s death deemed more reliable
than Ashoka’s own inscriptions, such as
Rock Edict XII, where he speaks of the
importance of samavaya—concord—in
interactions between different religious
sects? Similarly, Sanyal marshals other
legends to tell us that the “Ashokan
project” was “the first large-scale act of
religious genocide ever carried out in
Indian history” and that his dhamma-
mahamattas were a “religious police.”
Not only are these statements based on
evidence that cannot be corroborated,
they are also inaccurate because they
are anachronistic—they impose modern
categorisations upon a past where such
categories did not exist.
Such anachronisms are common
in Sanyal’s work. Thus, in place of
Ashoka, he glorifies Chanakya and
the Arthashastra, arguing that such a
“post-socialist reading” of history is
needed to dismantle the ideological
biases of the Nehruvian project which,
he argues, set up Ashoka as a great king
in the first place. Fusing the characters
of Kautilya, the apocryphal author of
the Arthashastra, with Chanakya, the
counsellor of Chandragupta Maurya,
he goes so far as to ask, “So what would
Kautilya do if he were alive today?”
The answers that he provides—fix
the judicial system; invest heavily in
internal security to put down terrorists,
Maoists, criminals and mobs of various
kinds; and dramatically simplify the
taxation system and administrative
structure—tell us more about Sanyal’s
blueprint for policy change than any-
thing Kautilya may ever have imagined.
This is a supreme act of ventriloquism,
for Sanyal is imposing on the text
whatever he wants to read from it. At
one point, he even refers to the Artha-
shastra as a precursor to the economist
Adam Smith.
The fascination with Chanakya runs
deep. We are told that he was originally
“a professor of Political Economy at
Takshila university” who allied with
Chandragupta Maurya to create the
Mauryan Empire, which covered “vir-
tually all of the Indian subcontinent.”
According to Sanyal, not only was the
Arthashastra composed by Chanakya,
THE CARAVAN
but the text’s description of a prosper-
ous economy and efficiently run admin-
istration correspond to the reality of
the Mauryan state.
This explanatory paradigm is out-
dated by about five decades. In 1971, the
scholar Thomas Trautmann’s statisti-
cal and philological analysis demon-
strated that the Arthashastra displays
an unevenness in composition and style
that indicates it is a composite work.
Sanyal’s works are not
written for the academe,
but this does not mean
that they can dance
free, unencumbered by
the standards of the
discipline.
Subsequent research has confirmed
this finding. The Arthashastra was not
composed by a single author. Rather,
it bears the imprint of many tradi-
tions and minds. It is not a manual
that describes how the Mauryan state
operated, but a shastra—a text that con-
solidates the nature of political thought
as it evolved over the Early Historic
period. The link between Chanakya
and Kautilya is no longer accepted, for,
as the Sanskrit scholars Mark McClish
and Patrick Olivelle tell us, “not only do
we fail to find any evidence of CƗ৆akya
or the ArthaĞƗstra from the Mau-
ryan period, but the ArthaĞƗstra itself
originally made no connection between
its author, Kau৬ilya, and the legendary
CƗ৆akya.” And finally, a range of schol-
ars, from Gerard Fussman to Namita
Sugandhi, have shown that Mauryan
political control would have been vari-
able and limited, being especially fuzzy
at the borders—a stark contrast to the
vast, centrally controlled empire that
Sanyal imagines.
The point of this is not to prove or
disprove the greatness of Ashoka or
Chanakya, since historians no longer
trade in the currency of golden ages or
great men. Instead, it is meant to show
how Sanyal’s histories are riddled
with holes. Precisely the same exercise
could be done with any number of his
other case studies. The issue, then, is
 against history · books

no longer about the accuracy of his narratives. I love using is an African saying which basically left: Prasanta
Instead, we have to ask: Why is he building them? goes as follows, “Until the lions have their own Chandra
Where do the sum and substance of his argu- storytellers, the history of the hunt will always Mahalanobis
and Jawaharlal
ments come from? glorify the hunter.” So, until we learn to tell our
Nehru in 1953 at
own story and continue to think of ourselves in Amrapali. Sanyal
sanyal states that he seeks to decode the past so the ways others define us, we will continue to be has only contempt
as to understand “what it means to be Indian.” their slaves. So it is very important that we tell for the former
That this is a project with a deeply personal in- our own story. But there is a real problem: that, regime, which he
flection is evident from Land of the Seven Rivers, seventy years after independence, we still do not associates with
these two figures.
published in 2012, which he dedicates to his sons tell our own story and, when we do, there are
Sanyal tells us
so “that they may know where they came from.” enormous biases. that Mahalanobis
treated the
economy as a
“mechanical toy,” a
static mathematical
model based on a
system of inputs
and outputs.
courtesy prasanta chandra mahalanobis memorial museum and archives / indian statistical institute

But his public statements often go beyond this, to
speak of the importance of history for a people as
a whole. For several years now, Sanyal has been
articulating the need to rewrite Indian history
textbooks. This is what he says about the project in
one of his many videos:
This issue about Indian history has now become
quite a hot topic—in fact, has been for a few
years now. And I’m going to give you a flavour of
why I think there is a very good case for begin-
ning to rethink Indian history. And the line that
The source of the proverb is the writer Chi-
nua Achebe, although Sanyal does not cite him.
Achebe’s citation has a slightly different cadence:
“Until the lions produce their own historians, the
story of the hunt will only glorify the hunter.” This
proverb, like all proverbs, is attributed to tradi-
tion. Someone came up with it, but we cannot
narrow down the exact source. It is also true that
within the flow of a tradition, such questions of
authorship and attribution do not matter. But, as
Achebe was to reflect later, something about the
proverb does not ring true. He was speaking of a

OCTOBER 2021 91
against history · books
moral truth rather than a literal one:
“In the end, I realized what the problem
was: the lion himself. The lion projects
too strong an aura of strength to be
entirely satisfactory … as a messenger
of truth.”
Achebe’s alienation from white liter-
ary narratives of Africa is also not an
apt metaphor for Indians’ relationship
with their history. This is because the
discipline of history was absolutely
central to the struggle for Indian inde-
pendence. In polemical tracts, scholarly
works, newspaper columns and journal
articles, intellectuals and activists alike
sought to recover the past so as to lay
claim to the future. In this intellectual
and cultural ferment, history became a
site for anticolonial nationalism, the as-
sertion of regional identities, the articu-
lation of social protest and the creation
of communal ideologies. And, as these
narratives seeped into the popular
domain—through speeches, plays and
novels—they often became exercises in
invoking past glory.
Debates over history fed into the
wider intellectual culture of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. This
was a public sphere that was eclectic
and idiosyncratic, marked by learning,
confidence, humility and generosity.
Without it, the Indian nation could not
have been imagined into being. True,
these debates tapered off following
Independence, as creative energies
were mobilised for the task of building a
nation and its institutions. But to argue
that “our intellectual world has been
inadequately decolonized,” as Sanyal
does, is inaccurate.
Sanyal sets out, from the very begin-
ning, to look for the great continuities
of Indian history. In doing so, he keeps
returning to the ancient past. The
“golden age” of Indian history, we are
told, was the period prior to the elev-
enth century. It was a time when “In-
dian society celebrated its risk takers,”
when it “encouraged innovation and
change.” This was the India of “yoga,
algebra, the concept of zero, chess,
plastic surgery, metallurgy, Hinduism,
Buddhism.” Sanyal compares India’s
“extraordinary economic, intellectual
and cultural influence throughout
the ancient world” to the sway of the
United States in the late twentieth
92
century. Unlike the United States,
however, India was apparently a com-
pletely peaceful superpower. Ranging
across time and space, Sanyal creates
extraordinary interconnections. He
swings from century to century, king-
dom to kingdom and coast to coast to
create a seamless narrative, collapsing
a whole host of cultures and dynasties
to create a picture of a great, golden
past.
This vision of Indian history as a
single, continuing thread is central to
Sanyal’s idea of “civilizational nation-
hood.” His entry point into it is the
Mahabharata. He tells us:
Since the Kurukshetra battle is said
to have involved all the tribes and
kingdoms of India, the Mahabharata
gives us long lists of kingdoms, clans
and cities. Many of them were prob-
ably added to the text in later times.
Nonetheless, it gives an idea of the
Indian world view during the Iron
Age. The name Mahabharata is itself
interesting as it can be read to mean
‘Greater India’. This would make
sense for an epic that claims to tell
the story involving all the clans of the
subcontinent. The text itself explains
the name in terms of a primordial
Emperor Bharata who is said to have
conquered the whole country (but
plays no important role in the central
plot). The epic is therefore told as a
history of the Bharata people. Since
there is no independent evidence of
an all-conquering Emperor Bharata,
one wonders if this is an echo of the
powerful Bharata tribe mentioned
in the Rig Veda. Did Sudas’s victory
against the ten tribes create a dream
of civilizational nationhood that gets
echoed over the millennia?
This is classic Sanyal: the entire
paragraph is an exercise in speculation
masquerading as fact. Sanyal starts
with a token recognition of different
possibilities. Then, he crosses out all
the possibilities that he does not agree
with, without telling us why. Logically
speaking, if the lists of kingdoms, clans
and cities were added to at a later time,
they cannot reflect the Indian world
view during the Iron Age. The title
of the text, Mahabharata, cannot be
THE CARAVAN
translated as “Greater India.” Instead,
it means the “Great War [of the Bharata
clan].” The importance of the figure
of Bharata has nothing to do with his
presence or absence in the central
plot. Instead, it has to do with the fact
that all the central figures in the story,
the Kauravas and Pandavas alike, are
his descendants. This is why they are
referred to as “Bharatas.” Yes, it is true
there is a link between the Battle of the
Ten Kings in the Rigveda and the com-
position of the Mahabharata story, but
this does not allow us to extrapolate
“a dream of civilizational nationhood
that gets echoed over the millennia.”
Finally, even if the Mahabharata is
classed in the Sanskrit literary tradi-
tion as an itihasa—a story about the
past—this does not mean that we can
read it literally as history.
Sanyal concludes his discussion on
the Mahabharata with a sudden shift in
gears. The Partition of India in 1947, we
are told, “was partly due to a fundamen-
tal divergence in views about the nature
of India’s civilizational nationhood.”
What does the Partition of India have
to do with the Mahabharata, you might
ask. Sanyal does not answer explicitly.
But the overall logic of his argument is
clear: Indian civilisation is Hindu civili-
sation, as is, by extension, our “civiliza-
tional nationhood.”
although embedded deep in the logic
of his paragraphs, Sanyal’s argument for
a Hindu India and the centrality of its
civilisational history finds its clearest
articulation in his lectures and videos.
A case in point is the introduction of
his 2016 lecture “How Much of Indian
History is Really True?”, which puts to-
gether many of his enduring concerns:
a statement I often hear, particularly
from educated people, that Indians
are somehow an ahistorical people,
i.e., that we are sort of unique in the
world in not caring about our past.
Now this is a really astonishing
accusation to make about what is,
arguably, the world’s oldest continu-
ous civilisation. Here are people who
in normal conversation will throw
up idioms and ideas and names that
appear in epics that are from the Iron
Age. Every day, tens of millions of

Hindus will chant the Gayatri Man-
tra, which was composed in a very
ancient form of Vedic Sanskrit in the
Bronze Age, depending on whom
you ask, between three thousand
five hundred and five thousand years
back. So, clearly we are, if anything,
a people obsessed with the past, ob-
sessed with the continuity of our ci-
vilisation. And it is a continuity that,
as we will discuss, we have bought
with blood. So, surely it is strange
that we should be accused then, of
not having any interest in our history
… I would argue the real problem
is that intuitively we know that the
history that we are taught, the his-
tory that is there in our textbooks, is
actually false.
Viewed historically, this quote is
marked by two convictions: first, that
the Vedic texts are the fountainhead
of Indian civilisation, and second, that
Indians have repeatedly had to fight off
a series of foreign invaders. In Sanyal’s
view of Indian history, Muslims and
Christians in India are always outsid-
ers—whether entering peacefully as
traders, or violently as invaders. The
struggle of Rana Pratap and his army
of Bhil tribesmen, the last stand of
the kingdom of Vijayanagara and the
assertions of the Ahoms against the
Mughals are all held up as a genealogy
of resistance. Against the aggressions of
“outsiders,” they together constitute the
continuing, defiant selfhood of Hindu
India.
The subtitle of Sanyal’s first book, The
Indian Renaissance: India’s Rise after a
Thousand Years of Decline, shows that
this ideological choice has marked his
narratives from the very beginning. It
echoes the Hindu Right’s presentation
of the Muslim medieval and British co-
lonial periods as “twelve hundred years
of servitude.” In the early pages of the
book, we are told that Partition divided
the subcontinent into “Muslim-majority
Pakistan and Hindu-majority India.”
For Sanyal, the core values of Indian
civilisation are Hindu values. They are
what we have to build upon if we wish
to assert our place in the world. In an
article titled “Building a Framework for
Policy and Governance based on Civili-
sational Values,” originally published in
the Economic Times in 2016 and cred-
ited to Sanyal and the Bharatiya Janata
Party MP Jayant Sinha, we are told that
successful “political economy systems”
are those that “are deeply rooted in
their civilizational values.” What are
these civilisational values that can be
mobilised to “define an internally con-
sistent belief system for a truly Indian
state”? The four elements they mention
are karma (interpreted to mean that
“every individual is responsible for his
actions”), dharma (every individual is
tied “to a web of duties, which are to
be carried out irrespective of personal
interest”), manthan (a situation where
“success is measured by the ability to
absorb the negative and adapt to take
advantage of the positive”) and the rule
of law (interpreted with reference to
Sanyal sets out, from the
very beginning, to look
for the great continuities
of Indian history. In doing
so, he keeps returning
to the ancient past. The
“golden age” of Indian
history, we are told, was
the period prior to the
eleventh century.
matsyanyaya—a need to prevent a situ-
ation where the big fish devour smaller
fish).
There are immense problems with
this framework, for it amounts to in-
flecting the apparatus of the state with
a religiously informed vocabulary. It is
also a primordialist venture that strips
these terms of their history, reducing
them to singular, hegemonic defini-
tions. The discussions that went into
framing the Indian Constitution, the
give-and-take of ideas, are seen as not
being “Indian” enough. What is offered
instead is a “civilizational matrix”
in which a citizen has no rights, only
duties. One only has to contrast this
mission statement with the preamble of
the Constitution to see what is miss-
ing: there is no mention here of justice,
liberty, equality or fraternity.
OCTOBER 2021
against history · books
Because Sanyal’s historical narratives
are a romance of origins, they have little
understanding of historical complexity.
This is the case despite his persistent
espousal of complexity as a conceptual
paradigm. If we take as an example his
discussion of Hinduism, Sanyal argues
that Hinduism can be understood as a
Complex Adaptive System, “an organic,
evolving ecosystem of interrelated
and interdependent elements that are
constantly interacting with each other.”
I agree with this at the level of an idea.
The problem is that, instead of attempt-
ing to understand a tradition in motion,
his explanatory paradigm returns to
the ancient rishis who, he tells us, “may
have deliberately set up … Hinduism’s
flexible, adaptive architecture.” This
is a contradiction in terms, since the
understanding of dynamics is central
to a CAS analysis. This means that
Hinduism has to be understood through
history—not in terms of some origi-
nary moment or eternal, unchanging
tradition, but as something that evolved
in relation to the specificities of time,
place, sect and society. Such granu-
lar detail is completely missing from
Sanyal’s analysis. And finally, while
hierarchical organisation is also part of
a CAS, Sanyal’s account of Hinduism is
completely silent about caste.
There is no denying that continuities
are a part of history. The past lives on
in myriad ways—in the foods we eat, in
the scripts we use, in forms of ritual, in
ways of thinking and being in the world.
But history is a pattern of transforma-
tion as much as repetition. The Rama-
yana and Mahabharata, for instance, are
not just Bronze Age epics, but also sto-
ries that were told and retold over time.
In each retelling, they were changed
and transformed, and these changes
are as much a part of their story as their
continuing appeal. Similarly, while
Sanyal emphasises that Indians forgot
Ashoka, and that he was rediscovered
only in the nineteenth century, he fails
to mention that the same process holds
true for the Arthashastra, similarly
forgotten and then rediscovered in the
twentieth century.
If change, as much as continuity, is
part of history, how can Sanyal argue
for the continuity of Indian civilisa-
tion? In a conversation with Hindol
93
against history · books
Sengupta at the 2017 Jaipur Literary
Fest, he said that,
in a lot of literature, we hear, you
know, “India as a nation is a modern
construct. It really took off in 1947.”
And, oddly enough, this is an echo of
a colonial idea … for obvious reasons,
the colonisers wanted to make the
case that India did not have a sense
of being a civilisation or a nation in
any way, because obviously it served
the purpose of them perpetuat-
ing their rule. But, in fact, Indians
have had a sense of being a nation of
some sort for a very, very long time.
The Puranas clearly mention that,
“south of the snowy mountains, the
Himalayas, and north of the deep
sea, lived the sons of Bharatam.” So,
you know, you have that. You also
have, for example, the criss-crossing
of the pilgrimages. You also have a
character like Adi-Shankaracharya
who criss-crosses the country and
then he sets up mutts—if you look at
the location of the mutts, they are not
random; they are at four corners of
the country. So, there is very strongly
a sense of a nationhood, and the fact
that it is somehow linked to a sacred
geography as well. So, this is a very
old idea. And it is an idea that, not
only Indians considered themselves,
but the rest of the world also ac-
cepted as being the case.
On the face of it, Sanyal’s referents
are the Chinese. Their myth of civilisa-
tional nationhood is the basis of his ori-
gin myth for India. But the discourse on
civilisation that he projects is not a new
one. As the historian Sabyasachi Bhat-
tacharya demonstrates in his brilliant
book Talking Back, the idea of Indian ci-
vilisation emerged in the twentieth cen-
tury as part of the currents of Indian
nationalism. In fact, the elements that
Sanyal cites as evidence above replicate,
almost point-for-point, arguments made
by Radhakumud Mookerji in his The
Fundamental Unity of India, published
in 1914. These are the old nationalist
arguments, rewritten for a new time.
But, strangely enough, scholars such
as Mookerji never appear in Sanyal’s
citations. Even if they did, it is worth
pointing out that Sanyal’s conflation of
94
civilisation and nation is historically
untenable, for nations—unlike civilisa-
tions—are modern constructs. Finally,
the idea of Bharatavarsha, as the histo-
rian BD Chattopadhyaya shows us, was
not a constant, fixed in space and time,
but involved an evolving cosmography
that never corresponded to the territory
ruled by a single dynasty.
Clearly, then, Sanyal’s is more than
a nationalist history. It is an avowedly
right-wing one. The problem is that his
slickness has often prevented people
from understanding the nature of his
work. Reviews of Sanyal’s books laud
his “fascinating” narratives and “deft”
storytelling; his writing, we are told, “is
infused with both wit and intelligence”;
he is a “secret reformer” who “works to
alter the contours of a discipline”; his
books should reach “the hands of every
inquisitive young mind in India” and
be “translated into every Indian lan-
guage.” Meanwhile, Penguin Random
House offers its readers a boxed set
In essay after essay,
Sanyal presents himself
as a critic of the old
establishment, a tamer of
India’s entrenched elite.
To cement his narratives,
it is necessary to argue
that Indian historians
have so far got it all
wrong.
entitled “The Great Indian Collection,”
which sets Sanyal’s Land of the Seven
Rivers alongside Shashi Tharoor’s
India: From the Midnight to the Millen-
nium and Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi
Before India. They make for incongru-
ous bedfellows.
In essay after essay, Sanyal presents
himself as a critic of the old establish-
ment, a tamer of India’s entrenched
elite. In doing so, he aligns himself with
Narendra Modi and what Sanyal sees
as his “promise to build a new India,
one founded on a radical break with the
past.” Consequently, he can no longer
frame himself as a lone warrior or rebel.
THE CARAVAN
He is, instead, very much part of the rul-
ing establishment. If a report published
in the Indian Express is to be believed,
Amit Shah has his number on speed dial.
Moving beyond self-identification
with a right-wing regime, Sanyal is
now its ideologue. He is part of a new
intellectual constellation which seeks
to normalise the political culture of
our time. Their rise has come alongside
new online platforms such as Swarajya
that make possible the dissemination
of an intellectually palatable Hindutva.
Recovering the past is part of their
search for origins, an attempt to locate
the narrative of progress in an ancient,
ever-continuing stream.
to cement these narratives, it is neces-
sary to argue that Indian historians
have so far got it all wrong. Sanyal,
for instance, consistently presents the
historical establishment as resistant
to change. He argues that they “tend
to mix up the evidence with their
opinions,” apart from “perpetuating
outdated scholarship” and colonial and
Marxist biases. He tells us:
History is still largely written as if it
is pre-determined by some unidimen-
sional factor: historical materialism,
geography, demography, or great men
(take your pick). In the case of India,
history writing is further complicated
by the accumulation of colonial, Ne-
hruvian and Marxist biases that have
distorted the narrative to the point of
absurdity. Indian history needs to be
rewritten but only after the primary
evidence has been properly revisited.
As and when new evidence arrives,
we need to update our views.
But who are these “mainstream Indi-
an historians” in charge of the “official
narrative” that he calls out? Strangely
enough, there is never any mention of
who these scholars are—unlike in his
economic columns, where he criticises
a Mahalanobis or a Raj Krishna by
name. It is almost as if he needs to set
up straw men to emphasise the potency
of his arguments. This is not to argue
that the scholarship of Romila Thapar,
Irfan Habib or Bipan Chandra is infal-
lible. But any intellectual critique will
have to be based on engagement with

their work. It cannot rest on caricature
and conspiracy theory.
Looking at Sanyal’s citations, two
things are noticeable. First, despite
his call to rewrite history after revisit-
ing the evidence, his accounts make
almost no use of primary sources. Scan
through his footnotes and you will see
that, while he occasionally cites a text
in translation, there are no archaeologi-
cal reports, no archives, no inscriptions
that he has individually consulted. On
what basis, then, does he claim to have
undertaken historical research? Second,
and even more interesting, is that his
reconstruction of the past is based on
secondary materials often culled from
the very historians he inveighs against.
His rereading of Ashoka is based on
books by Upinder Singh and Nayanjot
Lahiri, his history of the East India
Company comes from Tirthankar Roy
and Ashin Das Gupta, and his survey
of the twentieth century comes from
Ramachandra Guha. His footnotes are a
melange of textbooks, popular narra-
tives and newspaper articles. This is not
surprising, for that is what writers of
popular books commonly depend upon.
Unlike Sanyal, however, they do not
then turn around and offer historians a
lecture on how to write history.
The quarrel with Sanyal does not
arise from the fact that he espouses a
right-wing politics. One can disagree
with a DR Bhandarkar or an RC Majum-
dar, but continue teaching or engaging
with their scholarship. Nor does it stem
from the fact that he is an outsider to
the discipline. DD Kosambi, one of
the most respected historians of early
India, was a mathematician by training
and a polymath by personality. He had
what Sanyal sorely lacks: the ability to
master old debates and intervene with
new readings of the sources. Instead,
the issue with Sanyal’s work is that it is
marked by gaps in his data, flaws in his
reasoning and an evident inability to
weigh and measure the sources.
The success of Sanyal’s books stems
from a pervasive inability to under-
stand historical expertise. The chain
begins with the dubious fact-checking
of his narratives, and it ends with an
audience inundated with information
in our post-truth world. Admittedly,
Sanyal’s works are not written for the
academe, but this does not mean that
they can dance free, unencumbered by
the standards of the discipline.
The public view of history seeks
villains and heroes, great powers and
great men. It is shorn of the discus-
OCTOBER 2021
against history · books
below: Sanyal aligns himself with
Narendra Modi and what the writer sees
as his “promise to build a new India, one
founded on a radical break with the past.”
Consequently, he can no longer frame
himself as a lone warrior or rebel. He
is, instead, very much part of the ruling
establishment.
sions on ideas, structures and processes
that characterise scholarly debates or
university curricula. In the popular
imagination, history is often a dreary
discipline that involves rote learning.
Enter Sanyal, whose prose is filled with
flamboyant characters and interesting
vignettes. His books are peopled by
princes, pirates, priests and soldiers.
He has an eye for interconnections
and anecdotal detail. His arguments
present a logically appealing simplicity
that is actually marked by rhetorical
grand-standing and a selective use of
the evidence.
Sometimes, the naivete of the audi-
ence may be informed by an ideologi-
cally charged ignorance. But, at other
times, it arises from the fact that there
are simply not enough resources to
challenge a rapidly growing right-wing
common sense. One of the reasons
someone like Sanyal is able to peddle
his narratives is because professional
historians have never taken him seri-
ously. He has grown in confidence and
stature not because he is a good his-
torian, but because he has never been
contested or critiqued.
No doubt, history is at its most
appealing when it is presented as
narrative. But audiences interested in
history must recognise that not every
narrative about the past qualifies as
history. True, the “if-but-then-else”
style of the professional historian may
not appeal to the common reader, but
it is also important to guard against
simplicity. Simple narratives are rec-
ognisable because they say things that
people have already heard. They are
seductive because they tell people what
they want to hear. Complex narra-
tives, on the other hand, can be hard to
reckon with. They can be occasionally
uncomfortable, inconclusive or jarring.
They require that we interrogate what
we already know, that we unlearn what
we have often accepted unquestion-
ingly as true. s
95
THE BOOKSHELF

A TIME OUTSIDE WHEN

THIS TIME GOVERNMENTS
FAIL
Amitava Kumar A PANDEMIC AND
ITS AFTERMATH

Edited by
Vikas Rawal,
Jayati Ghosh and
CP Chandrasekhar

Kumar’s novel follows an Indian author and journalist trying
to write a book in Italy, while grappling with many recent re-
al-world events, from rumours surrounding the coronavirus
to misinformation spread by world leaders. The book mixes
his own experiences, family life and childhood memories
with thoughts about fake news and politics.
The articles in this book examine the economic impact of
the coronavirus pandemic in various countries, including
India, Thailand and Mexico. Scrutinising measures such as
lockdowns and their economic outcomes, these essays ask
questions about the different trajectories of the disease around
the world and suggest alternative macroeconomic policy
responses.

aleph, S699, 240 pages tulika books, S900, 312 pages

INDIAN MACHINEHOOD
BOTANICAL ART
AN ILLUSTRATED SB Divya
HISTORY

Martyn Rix

This book compiles a wide variety of botanical artwork from
India created over three hundred years. There is a particular
emphasis on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings,
many of which are part of the collections of the Royal Botani-
cal Gardens in the United Kingdom.
This science-fiction thriller is set in 2095, when humans are
dependent on pills that keep them alive and safe from dis-
ease. But a group named Machinehood, whose members are
part-human and part-machine, attack the funders of the pills,
causing global panic and the fear that artificial intelligence
will take over the world completely.

roli books, S1,495, 224 pages hachette, S499, 416 pages

96 THE CARAVAN
 THE BOOKSHELF

MODI’S INDIA THE HOUSE NEXT

HINDU NATIONALISM TO THE FACTORY
AND THE RISE OF
ETHNIC DEMOCRACY Sonal Kohli

Christophe Jaffrelot

In this book, Jaffrelot examines the history of Hindutva and
the rise of populist politics in India. He argues that the Modi
government has weakened institutions, distorted the elector-
al process and targeted minorities, all of which is part of the
transition of India into an authoritarian Hindu nation state.
This debut collection, with many of the stories set in Delhi
between the 1980s and late 2000s, is a tender exploration of
family life, loss and displacement, travel and the aftermath of
the anti-Sikh violence in Delhi.

princeton university press, $35, 656 pages harper collins, S499, 196 pages

ATTENTION BEYOND THE

FACTORY STARS & OTHER
THE STORY OF STORIES
TIKTOK & CHINA’S
BYTEDANCE Qurratulain Hyder
Translated by
Matthew Brennan Fatima Rizvi

The author traces the story of Tiktok, the reasons for its
enormous popularity and how it became one of the fast-
est-growing companies in the world. The book also examines
how Tiktok’s algorithms work and speaks to the people be-
hind its parent company, ByteDance.
Qurratulain Hyder’s earliest collection of published stories,
newly translated into English, follows young characters liv-
ing in Lucknow, Mussoorie and Dehradun before Indepen-
dence. The stories showcase Hyder’s experiments with form
and literary devices, including stream-of-consciousness and
interior monologue.

westland business, S399, 262 pages women unlimited, S425, 207 pages

OCTOBER 2021 97
 Editor’s Pick
ap photo
on 31 october 1956, protesters in Bu-
dapest’s City Park carve out pieces of
metal from the head of a statue of the
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that they
toppled during the Hungarian Revolu-
tion. The eight-metre-tall bronze stat-
ue was created by the sculptor Sándor
Mikus, who won a design competition
announced on Stalin’s seventieth birth-
day, in 1949, months after the Hungar-
ian People’s Republic was created. It
was unveiled in December 1951 before
a crowd of eighty thousand people.
The statue was controversial, partly
because many believed it had been cre-
ated out of bronze obtained by melting
down statues of Hungarian national
98
heroes that had been damaged during
the Second World War or dismantled
for political reasons. In February 1956,
three years after Stalin’s death, his suc-
cessor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced
the cult of personality that had grown
around him. In Poland, the dissemina-
tion of Khrushchev’s speech, as well as
an insurrection in PoznaÑ that June,
contributed to a de-Stalinisation pro-
cess in October 1956. While organising
a protest in solidarity with the Polish
people, Hungarian students included
the removal of the Stalin statue in their
list of demands.
The protest, on 23 October, was
attended by over a hundred thousand
THE CARAVAN
people in Budapest. As the chairman
of the council of ministers, Imre Nagy,
tried to pacify a large group that had
gathered at the parliament building, a
large crowd marched to the City Park.
As some people used blowtorches to
cut the legs, others attached winch
cables to the neck and, using several
trucks, eventually toppled the statue.
It was cut into several pieces, which
protesters took home as souvenirs.
Someone placed a Hungarian flag in
the empty boots on the pedestal. The
head remained in the street for days,
with insults scribbled onto it and a “no
through road” sign rammed through
its nose.