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Sonya was both feminist and communist, committed to working class and agrarian rights as much as gender consciousness within. She was secretary of the Maharashtra All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), known to all as Janwadi Mahila Sanghatana in Maharashtra and in the state party. Together with fellow women activists also committed to the laal bauta (red flag) she would learn about and organise women from the BDD Chawls Worli and Delisle Road, also in central Mumbai. As fellow AIDWA leader Mariam Dhawale recalled, when she took charge as AIDWA secretary in Maharashtra, she overcame the language barrier and took the organisation forward in the state.

Less than a week ago, Sonya and Sainath were in Hyderabad to celebrate his elder sister’s 75th birthday. That sister-in-law was bereft today as she travelled from afar to bid her farewell. She recalled to me what her mother, Sonya’s ma-in-law, would often say to Sainath, admiring the couple’s work, “You – you do all the writing, but Sonya does all the work!”

One moment she was there and the next moment she is gone, Sainath said to me, lips trembling as sobs took over, while the now familiar CPI(M) party tribute and farewells were paid this afternoon at the Janshakti office in central Mumbai. Fellow women activists from the Janwadi Mahila Sanghatana, AIDWA, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) Mumbai and national CPI(M) members, as also writers, civil liberties activists from fraternal organisations paid tribute. Comrade Sonya Gill ko Laal Salam, Comrade Sonya Gill Amar Rahe, were the slogans that burst forth accompanied by the raised arm and fist!

Never before have I witnessed this man of suave turn of phrase, depth of thought and perspective so bereft, at a loss, shaking his head in utter disbelief at the loss of a forty-year steely companionship. Forty years, Sainath said to me, forty years we were together, how do I even think of how I will cope?

Not a week passed that she did not visit either the Worli or Azad Maidan offices of the party, constantly at work, rebuilding a vision of left mass organisations and politics, he said.

This party, the people stand by you through thick and thin, he said, still in disbelief. Last evening, after her sudden demise, Sainath had, apart from his Sonya now gone, Sugandhi Francis, a 38-year old saathee from Janwadi, a fellow working class organiser, Shailendra Kamble, Mumbai president of the party, CITU’s Dr Vivek Monteiro, all by his side while the formalities were completed. Today, comrade S.K. Rege and Mariam Dhawale, national vice president of AIDWA were also present.

Sugandhi, wife and partner of Dr Monteiro is heartbroken. They were, for many of Mumbai activists, a duo seen everywhere, their close cameraderie of 38 years, one an academic trained at the famed Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the other a foot soldier of the party from the working class. Sugandhi recalls the ease with which Sonya related and reflected with all. Sugandhi was self-effacing about her own natural ease and charm with people and within the organisation.

The first post on social media that I read, bringing this loss to us all, was from the revered People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) network, of which Sainath was founder and Sonya the cofounder and trustee. Among the first of many to deepen notions of reportage and journalism, PARI has grown to be a formidable voice over the past decades.

People’s Democracy, the CPI(M)’s weekly organ, the Janwadi’s booklets and pamphlets, all had writings by Sonya Gill, be it on public health, right to an equitous public distribution system or communal harmony. They can still be read online.

But it is the training workshops conducted by the mass women’s organisation of the party, where activists were trained, where Sonya Gill with other women comrades regaled new recruits with historical accounts of valour by women comrades – the February 1946 shooting to death of veteran communist comrade Kamal Donde during the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) uprising at the Parel junction in Mumbai, while Ahilyatai Rangnekar and Kusum Ranadive also faced the bullets – that are remembered with awe.

Sonya Gill’s own quiet revolutionary journey will and must be treasured, by comrade husband Sainath, family, women saathees and party as it undoubtedly will. Adieu and Lal Salaam, Sonya.

Teesta Setalvad is co-editor of Sabrang India and secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP).

Courtesy: The Wire

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The reasons are not far to seek.

Over a decade ago, in 2015-2016, barely a year or two into the first term of this regime that has since been viewed nationally and internationally as autocratic and proto-fascist, it was the Ambedkar-Periyar circles in both Hyderabad Central University and Chennai that were the first targets of power and ideological assault. Ministers from the union government weighed in, first to withhold meritoriously earned scholarships/fellowships of Dalit (read Ambedkarite) and left oriented students like Rohith Vemula and others, thereafter to humiliate them by limiting access to libraries and even hostel accommodation. Muslim student scholars like Umar Khalid and Najeeb Ahmed were particular targets. Najeeb “disappeared” from his JNU room on October 15, 2016, after an alleged scuffle involving the RSS-linked Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) the day before. He had been injured in that encounter and doctors, according to a witness, had refused timely treatment. Shockingly, the case assiduously pursued by his mother was “closed” by the Rouse Avenue court in 2025.  Two films, Ammi (2019) and Where is Najeeb? (2022) have preserved a contemporary tragedy this regime would rather have us forget.

Rohith Vemula, talented and bright, part of a vibrant student community that was in the cross hairs of the administration for daring to screen Muzaffarnagar Baqi Hai at HCU was driven to suicide, an act the movement has called “institutional murder” on Sunday January 17, 2026. That very night JNU students protested Rohith’s death and the ripples of the movement surged across India. Mumbai that only sometimes steps out collectively against repression saw tens of thousands students and activists march in Mumbai from Byculla to CSMT (CST) to demand justice for Rohith.

Brute power and authority coupled with the supine behaviour of Vice-Chancellors like Appa Rao Podille (HCU) and M Jagadesh Kumar (JNU) actively enabled violent police entry and involvement in both campuses, behaviour that physically brutalised students and also criminalised dissent. [1] Cases were filed, Umar Khalid and Kanhaiya Kumar were jailed for a month and students (35 from the FTII) had to spend precious years battling the vindictiveness the powerful. Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) is a film that, in a multi-layered narrative depicts what young Indians have been put through.

2016 then is as significant as 2026 may yet prove to be.

Why then is our public memory so short and our response only episodic? Institutional culpability or even amnesia by our constitutional bodies including courts and a wilful subservience by legacy and traditional commercial media has enabled the irresponsible vilification of student leaders and protesters.

Clearly, the specific targets were young, autonomous students, free in thought and behaviour. Organisations and individuals from Left and Dalit lineages and communities were specific, targets the case(s) made against them more vindictive and pernicious.

Umar was labelled “anti-national” (“desh drohi”) by irresponsible (and unaccountable) “media houses”. Rohith’s unquestionable “merit” was questioned and his caste status “doubted”, his mother hounded as she struggled for justice for her son. Fatima Nafees, Najeeb’s mother proud that her son made it to a central university, regrets that he opted for staying in its hostel! This level of violence and institutional discrimination faced by Dalit and Muslim students has not stemmed before 2016 or since. The deaths of Arman Iqbal Khatri (April 2023) and Darshan Solanki (February 2023) in Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) and Payal Tadvi (May 2019) studying to become a doctor at BYL Nair Hospital were all victims of targeted violence. Corrective constitutional institutions like courts have been tardy in offering remedies

Today in 2026, while the “westernised youth” or “desh drohi” (anti-national) are labels still sought to be applied to Gen Z as well, for erudite and clear left-leaning scholars like Umar and Rohith it was relentlessly pinned.

The sustained protests in HCU and JNU —among two dozen other institutions of higher learning –a decade ago were the first effective challenges to a regime determined to control behaviour, thought and ideas. In the months and years that followed this protest spawned multiple campuses across India: Film & Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi Mumbai University, Kashmir, Assam, Puducherry, all saw spirited and sustained protests. Patna University-Bihar, Jadavpur University-West Bengal, National Law School-Bangalore and the Allahabad Central University-Uttar Pradesh saw similar struggles against repression. Nine months after Rohith Vemula’s “institutional murder” on Sunday, January 17, 2026, eight law students from the Babasaheb Ambedkar University Lucknow protested after two of them were target of vindictive administrative action: two of them toppers, who ranked first and second in the PHD entrance examination had been suspended and thereafter expelled without due process because they protested the caste-ist behaviour of both the government and their professors who they claimed were being protected by the administration and the Ministry for Human Resources Development (MHRD).In an article on SabrangIndia, Prathama Banerjee (in 2016) reported that in Gwalior, a meeting organized by the Ambedkar Manch involving an Ambedkarite professor Vivek Kumar from JNU was attacked by ABVP members, who went on to not only fire guns at the gathering but even burn the Indian Constitution, perhaps to avenge Ambedkar’s burning of the Manusmriti half a century ago!

From the ideological slant on syllabi, to the rights of women to dress as they please and eat non-vegetarian (!), to dubious appointments like Gajendra Chauhan as director (FTII), students and youth mobilised first and immediately against the threat to their very existence and autonomy. By end 2016, the Modi 1.0 regime’s assault on public education and taken the form of simply cancelling (read withdrawing) a staggering 20,000 scholarships to central universities; this was soon followed by withdrawal of all minority scholarships instituted by the previous UPA II government.

So while today’s 2026 Gen Z protests come as another breath of fresh air to a battle weary people, our students and youth, backed by some in the academia have been at the forefront of this democratic challenge for a decade.

What if?

What if the political opposition, despite its poor numerical strength had backed and amplified these voices and demands in Parliament? Since and repeatedly since 2016?

Would India have already witnessed a pushback from the seat of power?

In any truly democratic society, it is the university that is the storehouse of young and budding intellectual opinion and often the bedrock of voices of sharp, critical dissent. Since 2014, India has been going through a determined effort towards homogenisation and imposed majoritarianism—whether through the blind acceptance of commercialization or privatization of education, or the imposition of a culturally-homogenous worldview where the Indian state and nation is equated with “one language, one culture,” in effect denying a plurality of existence and citizenship. These trends are not just dangerous but pose a challenge to the very foundation of India as a constitutional republic. Centres of higher learning within India that have become the battleground for the preservation of Indian democracy and all it stands for.

Before 2014, over the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, through a slow and often painful process within these central universities that came into being through key enactments—the University of Hyderabad Act of 1974, the Jawaharlal Nehru Act of 1966 and the North-Eastern Hill University Act of 1973—baby steps toward affirmative action within teachers’ unions and associations first ensured real diversity among students: students from rural, marginalised and discriminated-against backgrounds made it into institutions of higher learning. That is how, our Umars, Najeebs, Rohiths are household names even in bold challenge or sacrifice. Before that it was the moneyed with access that enjoyed entry within.

Under this regime in its third term however, the dual assault of aggressive neoliberal policies that have ensured a cut in scholarships in institutions of learning, accompanied by an ideological assault of a proto-fascist authoritarian character, have rendered campuses in India the focal points of a resurgent democratic movement. Student leaders and associations that do not fall in line with the majoritarian vision face criminal cases, the worst being the law of Sedition (Section 124-A)..[2] Only a few days ago, a former student of previously prestigious Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) was denied bail for attending an event in support of academic, now deceased, G.N, Saibaba.

As the monsoon session of Parliament reaches its conclusion, and the union home minister, responsible in the chain of command for the use of pellet guns and nail-tacked lathis on students who protested at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 20, refuses to answer charges of accountability or incompetence, there is every chance that the regime may not back off either surveillance or vindictive action.

The Gen Z generation that is rightly euphoric of its success in shaking up the union government, may yet have to give tests of its resilience to persistent punishment by process. If solidarity shown by older Indians and large sections of independent media, not present a decade ago, holds, victory may still be ours. We need to be prepared though.

In this moment of reckoning, this is my humble tribute. To the inspiring decades plus relentless pushback by India’s young.

[1] Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 2016 was M. Jagadesh Kumar, who assumed office on January 28, 2016, a month before the assaults and arrests of tudents. He succeeded Sudhir Kumar Sopory and later served until February 2022; Appa Rao Podile former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad was awarded the Millennium Plaques of Honour for his achievements in Life Sciences by the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi in 2017!

[2] Teesta Setalvad’s KG Kannabiran Memorial Lecture delivered at Madurai. December 11, 2016

Related:

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Today, a day after reports of the death of Justice MS Liberhan at the age of 87, Sabrangindia is reproducing this article for the benefits of two or three generations of younger readers who did not have the benefit of these insights available herein. Besides Communalism Combat, where the article may be still read, it has also been re-published on Sabrangindia and may be read here.

We are also re-publishing this here again today, August 4, 2026.

Rath Yatra Retraced

First published in Communalism Combat in April 2001

Unless he, too, prefers to suffer from ‘memory failure’ before the Liberhan 
Commission as Uma Bharati did, Union home minister LK Advani would benefit from a quick survey of news reports that recorded his words and deed for posterity – during the bloody rath yatra in 1990, till the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992 and subsequently

After eight years of procrastination, the proceedings of the Justice MS Liberhan Commission investigating the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 have reached the conclusive stage. Evidence of the key accused in the entire episode, however, still requires to be led, before arguments from either side can begin. This includes the evidence of former BJP president, best remembered for his bloody rathyatra to Ayodhya in 1990, Lal Krishna Advani. Today he is India’s home minister. Others to depose are another former BJP president and presently Union HRD minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, and former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh.

Through rather dubious claims in a writ petition filed before the Delhi High Court, Singh has sought to avoid appearing before Justice Liberhan altogether. It is to be hoped that the Delhi HC judge in question will call Singh’s bluff and compel him to appear in this significant investigation.

Advani, too, has been avoiding appearance before the Commission, pleading “other pressing commitments” as an excuse for some time now. He is scheduled to appear before Justice Liberhan on April 10 and 11. Further cross-examination of former Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao and some other witnesses are also due.

Only after these depositions and cross-examination will the arguments begin and the key issues under investigation be raised. The issue being probed relates to the crucial question of rule of law under the Indian Constitution. A place of worship and a historical site was destroyed in broad daylight with no resistance from the police and the paramilitary deployed. Equally important is the instigation to violence that resulted in systematic and violent attacks on the lives and properties of Muslims, before and after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

For the first time in the half-a-century old history of the Indian republic, a mass movement was orchestrated and thereafter blatantly used to subvert the law and defy basic norms of equal and fair protection of all sections of the population by the law and order machinery. The purpose of the investigation, however delayed (as unfortunately all such public investigations have been in the past) and subverted, too, by key witnesses accused of criminal conspiracy yet holding positions of power today is to nail and punish those guilty.

As Advani’s date with the Liberhan Commission draws close, CC proposes to recall — through documents and press clippings — the events that led to the demolition. This will remind our readers of the issues raised by the movement that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the widespread violence it brought in it’s wake. A reminder of the past words and deeds of the key leaders of the sangh parivar, something they would like us all to forget today.

In this issue, CC looks back for answers to the questions:

Ø What was Advani’s role in leading the rath yatra in 1990 and again in 1992? Through public speeches and silent mobilisation, in the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992? In inciting crowds and thus triggering rounds of communal riots countrywide through his rath yatra?

Ø  What did large sections of the mass media report and record about the trail of blood that the rath yatra left behind in its wake?

Ø  How did Advani and the BJP react to the demolition soon after it took place?

Ø  What has Advani said on the issue, from the time the BJP adopted the Ramjanmabhoomi programme initiated by the VHP in 1986, until the demolition, and since, even as Union home minister?

Ø  Which is Advani’s realspeak and which his doublespeak?

1993

A month after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, on January 25, 1993, Advani expressed “no regrets over the demolition” adding, “it was the hand of providence that willed the fall of the Babri Masjid”.

The Indian Express dated January 26, 1993 reported on his public meeting in Ahmedabad under the headline: ‘No regrets over demolition, says Advani’. The text of the report read — “Ahmedabad: Bharatiya Janata Party leader LK Advani told a largely attended public meeting at Narangpura in Ahmedabad at the end of his three-day visit to the state on Sunday that what happened at Ayodhya on December 6 would change the course of Indian history. Mr. Advani said he did not regret the demolition of the mosque though he was sad that day because his fervent pleas to kar sevaks not to damage the monument had been ignored. Reciting a couplet from Tulsi Ramayan, ‘Hoi So Soyi Jo Ram Lekhi Rakha’, he said the disputed structure was destined to fall because Providence had ordained it so.”

Another report of the same event in The Economic Times dated January 26, 1993 had the headline ‘Providence willed fall of Masjid, Advani’.

Soon after the demolition, despite occasional outbursts of remorse at the event, LK Advani was unequivocal in his assessment that the political gain to the BJP from the demolition far outweighed outpourings of secular remorse. December 6, 1992 meant increased voter support for the BJP, or so Advani felt. At no place is this more clearly evident than in the foreword to the BJP’s white-paper on Ayodhya, authored by Advani and triumphantly released by him at the party office in New Delhi in April 1993.

The Frontline dated May 21, 1993 carries a report on the event titled, ‘Black, and White’. “The feeling in the rank and file that after December 6, 1992, the BJP has come into its own was corroborated by its leader, LK Advani at a press conference in New Delhi on April 18 to release the document, when he claimed: “It was because of Ayodhya and the people’s perception of it that the BJP increased its voter support.”

In the foreword to the paper, Advani amplifies his claim.  “…But the kar sevaks did more. They did not just erase a symbol of our subjugation. They did not just begin building a symbol of resurgence. They showed us as if in a flash, how far we have to travel. For the country reacted in two diametrically opposite ways, as virtually two different peoples. For a handful — those in government, in political parties, and in large sections of the English press, for instance — what happened were a ‘national shame’, it was ‘madness’, and it was ‘barbaric’. For the rest of the county it was a liberation — a sweeping away of cobwebs. The depth of anger at the recent policies, surprised me, as I said; the depth of the chasm between these two nations — the microscopic minority and the people — did not.”

The Blitz of May 1, 1993 in an article under the heading, ‘I Accuse…’, quotes Advani in the foreword: “Sri Rama is the unique symbol, the unequalled symbol of our oneness, of our integration, as well as of our aspiration to live the higher values. As Maryada Purushottam, Sri Rama has represented for thousands of years the ideal of conduct, just as Ram Rajya has always represented the ideal of governance. And one saint of our land after another, one saintly tradition after another has immersed itself in devotion to Him: the sacred Sri Guru Sahib celebrates and invokes Sri Rama about two thousand four hundred times, Gandhiji died with His name on his lips.

“It is natural, therefore, that the place of His birth has been an object of the deepest devotion for Hindus through the millennia — the inscription which has been found at the site and which speaks of a magnificent temple with a pinnacle of gold, dedicated to Lord Vishnu Hari who had humbled King Bali and defeated the wicked Dashanana, that is, Ravana; the record of the unremitting struggle of the Hindus to regain the site; the pathetic history of their worshipping the spot from a distance when they were denied access to it, of their circumbulating it — all these bear testimony to their deep and abiding, and indeed stirring, devotion to Sri Rama.

“On the other hand, the structure which Mir Baqi put up on the orders of Babur never had any special significance from a religious point of view. It was purely and simply a symbol not of devotion and of religion but of conquest. Correspondingly, quite apart from its being an obstacle, preventing Hindus from worshipping the birthplace of their idol, Sri Rama, it was for the country the symbol of its subjugation. This is how in 1989 the Bharatiya Janata Party formally decided to lend its shoulder to the cause — the party was responding to the deepest urges of our people.”

1990

To go back three years, when Advani led his rath yatra from Somnath through Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, and Purulia in West Bengal until it’s culmination, news reports portray the then BJP president in a defiant and angry mode, as he challenges the law and order machinery to dare act against him or his rath initiative. Incidentally, news reports of the period warn of the fast-deteriorating ground reality around the trail of the rath yatra that caused deep polarisation and brutal and violent communal outbursts.

The Telegraph dated October 16, 1990 records the defiant mood of Advani as he dares the government to arrest him. A report titled, ‘Advani defies govt to stop rathyatra, arrest him’, reads:

“New Delhi, Oct. 15: The BJP president, Mr LK Advani, today warned the government not to “stand in the way” of building the Ram Janmabhoomi temple and said any obstruction on its part would prove costly… Speaking from atop his rath, Mr Advani challenged the government to arrest him and his associates and impound the rath.
He warned: ‘If the government stops us, it should be ready to face the consequences.’”

The Sunday Times of October 14, 1990 similarly records Advani in a defiant mood. ‘No one will stop this rath yatra’, is the headline of the interview he gave to Swapan Dasgupta.

“Q. Now that the rath yatra has taken off, there is a demand that it be banned on the grounds that it is inflaming communal passions. You have said it will provide a healing touch. Is there some failure in communicating this view to those who demand a ban?

Advani: No, I do not attribute it to any such failure to understand the message of the rath yatra. I am sure that everyone knows that it has provided a healing touch; it has not caused any tensions or has not inflamed passions. These demands are being made by people who felt that they could ride roughshod over the sentiments of the Hindus. But now the sentiments of the Hindus have been manifested and articulated in such a powerful fashion without arousing any communal passion that their case has become indefensible. It is the indefensibility of their own case which makes them react with such vehemence.

“I am pained by the casual comments being made here and there about the rath yatra leaving behind trails of blood and communal passions. Actually, these have nothing to do with ground reality; I can admit that I was very apprehensive when it started. As everyone knows, Gujarat and particularly certain places such as Baroda, Ahmedabad, Surat and Bharuch have become very susceptible to riots over the slightest provocation.
Therefore, I was particularly keen to ensure that nothing happened. You may have noticed that as the first reaction of the rath yatra, there was the blood tilak, vessels of blood and the collection of shastras. All this is symbolic, they don’t mean anything. Even then they saw that I didn’t approve of the slogans that are being raised. Babri Masjid todo, jo hum say takrayega sidha upar jayega’ and I think this disapproval had a very salutary effect on them”.

A spate of news reports, analyses and editorials around this period warn of the grave consequences to harmony and unity caused by the divisive politics of Advani’s rath. This editorial in The Times of India, dated October 5, 1990 called ‘Playing With Fire’ really sums it up:

“If the BJP president is congratulating himself on the success of his Rath Yatra – and going by his recent utterances in Maharashtra he seems to be doing just that — the rest of the country has reason to be greatly worried. For, with the conclusion of the Gujarat chapter of the programme, it should be plain that Mr Advani’s campaign is leaving a trail of destruction in it’s wake. Communal riots have already broken out in Baroda and Banaskantha. It is difficult not to see the connection between the Rath Yatra and the Ram Jyoti campaigns on the one hand and the heightening of communal tensions in different parts of the country on the other… Indeed the collection of lethal weapons, particularly of trishuls, gory ceremonies and performance of other rituals designed to create a spirit of militancy… it would be something of a surprise if violence did not follow it.

“By taking the lead in the campaign whose divisive and destructive potential is just going to unfold …he has considerably lowered his political stature. His inflammatory speeches, his indulgent wielding of glittering Sudarshan Chakras in public and his endorsement of the most bigoted among the militants threaten to identify him with the likes of Acharya Giriraj Kishore of the VHP… If Mr Advani is concerned about the unity and integrity of the country and stands for the defence of law and order, he should reconsider his course.”

Advani paid no heed as a succession of news reports from different newspapers show. ‘Stop Rath Yatra, government told, read a headline in The Hindustan Times, October 7, 1990. An article in The Sunday Observer, dated October 14, 1990 titled, ‘The Communal Flare-up’ was authored by none less than Sudheendra Kulkarni, then assistant editor with the paper and today officer on special duty to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The article read:

“Tumkur, Mandya, Kodagu or Coorg, Chitradurga, Mysore, Mangalore, Shimoga, parts of Bangalore city itself and even Dharwar in North Karnataka, have all reported instances of mounting tensions and even minor clashes. What is new to this present round of communal violence in this state, is the extent to which it has succeeded in penetrating the villages. The burning down of an entire hamlet of Muslim farmers near Chennapatna is only the most shocking among the cases reported so far. In Kolar district, too, Muslim houses in several villages have been reported to have been attacked by unknown outsiders.

“Even as the state was reeling under the sudden spurt of religious strife, yet another piece of inhumanity was committed in Bah Malkheda, a village in the north-eastern district of Bidar (which borders Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh). Seven persons, including a woman and a child, were roasted alive, in a clash that was set off by nothing more than a minor altercation between two drunken youths… There is no doubt whatsoever, that the Muslim community (which constitutes about 35 per cent of the town’s population) bore the brunt of the rioting, both in terms of lives lost and property damaged — of the 17 dead, 13 were Muslims. Muslim hoodlums, in turn, attacked a colony of Tamil speaking Adi Dravidas (adivasis) and set ablaze 15 houses. ‘They asked us angrily why we received the Ram Jyoti at our colony on Dussera,’ recounted Venkatayya, who was one of few old men present when the attack occurred.

“But what Hindu lumpens wreaked on the Muslims was on a far larger scale. Yaarab Nagar, a colony of poor Muslims, engaged in beedi-rolling, toy-making and other low-paying forms of self-employment, was attacked by a mob 500 men wearing ‘khaki shorts’ (as Saab Jaan Saab, a local resident described them). A Muslim watchman of a nearby plastic factory was roasted alive when it was set ablaze. Sikandar Pasha, a lottery ticket seller, was burnt alive in front of his house. Amir Jaan, a beedi roller, was axed to death while Khairun Bi, an elderly deaf woman, was knifed and killed inside her little hut”.

Other news reports of the period published by the national press record with chilling similarity the trail of violence that Advani’s rath yatra inspired. ‘Fears of another round of communal frenzy dog Gonda’, read a headline in the Blitz dated October 14, 1990.

In a long report, The Telegraph (Insight) dated October 14, 1990, was scathing in its comment. The newspaper has likened Advani’s rath with ‘Chariots of Fire.’

“…The extent to which communal passions have been heightened is evident simply by taking a look at what is happening in UP today: even before Mr Advani’s rath has entered the state, the death toll in communal clashes has gone up to 44. And with the BJP chief about to enter UP, there is apprehension that this figure might shoot up…When the rath moved into Maharashtra from Surat, the armed Bajrang Dal activists were less prominent — but the speeches of the BJP leaders were as full of venom…

“It was not just coincidence that communal riots should break out in Karnataka, within days of Mr Advani and his Ram rath passing through Solapur, near Maharashtra’s border with Karnataka. On October 3, communal clashes claimed nearly 20 lives in Kolar, Chennapatna and Ramanagaram towns and another 12 a few days later in Davangere. At least in Davangere, the instigation once again was VHP volunteers, who insisted on taking the Ram Jyoti procession through the heavily Muslim populated areas of Davangere town.

“In neighbouring Mandya and Hasan districts miscreants desecrated places of worship, set fire to houses and vehicles and assaulted women. But what needs to be pointed is the failure of the Veerendra Patil government.

“In Madhya Pradesh, where Mr. LK Advani’s rath wound its way through 13 of the state’s 45 districts, the BJP message was clear: the Muslims in India had to choose between Maryada Purshottam Lord Ram and lootera Babar. This was repeatedly stressed by BJP leaders in the course of Mr Advani’s whistle stop tour from October 6 to 10. In fact, at Mandsaur, from where chief minister Sunderlal Patwa hails, Mr Pramod Mahajan, the BJP leader in the course of a fiery speech asked the Muslims to either have faith in Lord Ram or else leave the country. Mr Advani all the while nodded in acquiescence and the hundreds of youths who surrounded the podium brandished their swords and trishuls and hailed the speech. The result, of course, was inevitable: communal clashes broke out in Raipur.”

‘When the Pink City ran red with blood’, The Sunday Observer, by Nirupama Subramanian, dated October 28, 1990, reads: “Death arrived at Mohalla Koliyan and Rishi Ghalib Nagar in the congested Ramganj area this week with a savageness that has few parallels in this part of the country. The Pink City acquired several shades to turn a crimson red, the colour of blood and mindless violence.”

Similarly, The Telegraph report on October 28, 1990 in ‘Purulia violence after Yatra’ by  Barun Ghosh says: “The communal flare-up that rocked Jhalda in Purulia district on Thursday claiming 9 lives, is a direct fall-out of the rathyatra of Mr. LK Advani which passed through the town on October 20.”

The Independent, dated November 2, 1990 in a story titled, ‘Communal riots take a new turn in Indore’, depicts the grisly violence in that town. “Communal Frenzy and out-bursts are nothing new to Indore. These are like festering sores and this sprawling industrial town, over the years, has learnt to live with them. What is remarkably different in the on-going clashes is that rampaging mobs armed to the teeth have clashed with the police attacking them with firearms and, of all things, tear gas grenades. Curfew orders have been violated with impunity and families of policemen have been attacked and their houses damaged. That the riots were pre-planned is evident from the large haul of stored arms and weapons from several houses — petrol bombs, country made pistols, guns, Molotov cocktails, swords, spears, knives, tear gas grenades, glass shards and soda water bottles.

The events in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 and countrywide in the dark month that followed are testimony that the assessments of scribes were proved woefully correct.

1992

After the demolition, here are some of the newspaper headlines. ‘Over 200 killed in nationwide frenzy’, reads The Indian Express, December 8, 1992; ‘Anarchic situation in Ayodhya,’ is the headline of The Hindu, December 8, 1992; ‘SC hints at trial of BJP leaders,’ said The Pioneer of December 8, 1992; ‘Violence toll crosses 500,” was the headline in The Indian Express, December 9, 1992; “Violence Unabated, toll mounts to 700”, The Economic Times, December 10, 1992; and, “Shoot at sight in Calcutta: Toll mounts to 950, TheEconomic Times, December 11, 1992.

The Frontline on January 1, 1993 in it’s story headlined ‘Wounds all over — The violent aftermath’ said: “It may well go down in history as the worst round of widespread violence the country has seen since Partition: over a thousand people were killed in the week following the Black Sunday. The states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were burning and bleeding with more than 200 of their people consumed by the communal fury in less than a week. Anarchy reigned in Bombay and Surat where the tolls were as high as 191 and 155 respectively five days after the vandalism in Ayodhya. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Assam and Karnataka were also reeling under the impact of riots. Surprisingly, while West Bengal remained by and large peaceful initially, a belated bout of violence broke out in Calcutta and adjoining districts.”

1994

Two years later, this report in The Independent dated July 25, 1994 is a sombre reminder of just what the Ayodhya movement was really all about. “Fears of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Ayodhya; ‘Shuddhikaran’ programme includes fight against ‘Islamikaran’ of holy city by Janardan Thakur. “Behind the surface calm of this besieged town, a sinister plot is being executed. Its goal: to scare away the Muslim population, take over their land and property — and their holy places. Leaders of the community wake up to threatening calls by unidentified callers demanding that they ‘quit Ayodhya or die’. Muslim shops are ransacked and burgled at night and the police refuse to register their cases lest the shopkeepers claim compensation from insurance companies to keep their establishments going.”

Clearly, Advani, the man who played a pivotal role in the movement that led to the demolition of the Babri masjid, with callous disregard to its implications for the rule of law, or its human consequences, will have a lot to answer before the Liberhan Commission.

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The making of “Ram Ke Naam”: a Hinduism that is the mirror opposite of Hindutva

The post Rath Yatra retraced: Evidence presented to the Liberhan Commission appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Why the agitation at all? Because. Because. How can Muslim students –that too 42 of the 50 admissions!–study in a college bearing this name! On streets, within official corridors, the voices were shrill and focussed, cancel these admissions, No Muslims in this “Holy Medical College!” they said.

A strident and crude local unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) joined in as part of a neatly scripted plan, visible, vocal and crass pitching its demand to snatch away legitimately procured admission and ensure that ‘only Hindus’ study in that medical college since the Jammu-based medical institute funded by Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board! The BJP also sought the L-G’s intervention to reserve all the seats at the varsity for Hindus because “it has come up over donations of Hindu devotees”. Only seven Hindus had made it past the test in a batch of 50. The fact that this august institution, had also been funded by public money from the state exchequer, Rs 24 crores last year and Rs 28 crores this year was immaterial to the protestors drunk on prejudice and power.

The agitation that had been launched in late November 2025–as visible on the streets as on social media was backed by the Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha— who responded, we are reportedly told—and ensured that the “National Medical Commission” issued a saffron fatwa to the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence (SMVDIME). Following a hasty inspection carried out on site four days prior (around January 4), orders were given to “shut down” the MBBS Course for which, after due process, permission had been granted four months ago.On January 6, 2026, the NMC’s Medical Assessment and Rating Board withdrew the Letter of Permission granted to the varsity for running the MBBS course with 50 seats for the academic year 2025-26. No show-cause notice was given to the college, there is no room for appeal or due process.

Do we not believe in instant (in) justice in this version of a Hindu rashtra?

The turnaround intervention by the NMC, guided, is not only a tale of gross violation of fundamental rights of equality and non-discrimination enshrined in the Constitution. Worse or as bad is how openly credits were distributed by the victorious. The Hindu reported on January 7, how members of the Sangarsh Samiti in Jammu distributed sweets and played loud music to celebrate the “victory” of their agitation, which began on November 22, 2025 precisely.  These images were played out on the ever visible and intrusive social media too. “We have come to celebrate the victory of our agitation. We especially thank the Union Home Minister and Health Minister for respecting our sentiments. We believe the decision took longer because of the legal process. We also thank the prominent personalities who joined us in our protests,” convener of the Sangarsh Samiti Sukhvir Mankotia is reported to have said.

Moreover, what does this means for the region? Kashmir, Ladhakh and Jammu have seen and witnessed multiple levels and layers of betrayals by the Indian state and officialdom. This latest is, above all else, an abdication of this government’s own hollow promises and rhetoric that it has used since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. Any efforts at return to participative, representative rights-based citizenship by Kashmiris is thwarted by a prejudiced and exclusivist governance by the centre’s representatives and other institutions influenced by the Centre. This augurs ill on principle and also in terms of the social peace of the state and region given the overall fragility of the Valley and Jammu.

Alienation has been the tale that most Kashmiris grow up with, real, not imagined. When 42 students pass a gruelling NEET test for the MBBS Course and are told –after they are horrifyingly witness to crude slogans of protests and shoddy dances of victory in the streets–that they cannot exercise their Right to Education (now a fundamental right under article 21a of the Constitution) because of the colour of their faith, and because they are Kashmiris, it is not only alienation that they will once again have been forced to feel. There will be anger too.

Today the NMC justifies its unjustifiable step citing ‘shortage of teachers/tutors, lecture theatres and library resources’, unconvincing as an argument as all these facilities had been scrutinized and passed when permission was obtained four months ago. Key to the inevitable fallout out is whether out of any last grain of shame, the SMVDIME will appeal the NMC’s unjust scrapping of its MBBS permission in court and fight on constitutional principle. If this college succumbs, as have others to the might of a majoritarian agenda, we can again say with bitter conviction that India is now almost completely deep down into an abyss of its own making!

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The post Partitioned minds, a Saffron Fatwa & Denial of Fair Opportunity: Mata Vaishno Devi University, Jammu appeared first on SabrangIndia.

There has been outrage at official complicity and silence, that no FIR was filed for days after the attack. Social media Zindabad. CM Pushkar Dhani (BJP) called Anjel Chakma’s father and publicised the conversation on X. There has been outrage at the prevalent concealment of the crime itself till it resulted in death. Yet, Dehradun’s Senior Superintendent of Police, Ajai Singh has been quick to state on Monday, December 22 that “there is no evidence, prima facie, of racial attack.” The clear lapses and subsequent outrage include a three-day delay in registering the First Information Report (FIR), the refusal by the Selakui police station personnel to register the complaint on multiple occasions, the failure of the police to invoke appropriate sections of the law at the initial stage, and attempts by senior police officials to dilute the crime by portraying it as a fight while ignoring elements of racial abuse.

But should not we, as Indians, ask ourselves, if we are not inherently racist, casteist and communal? Students or professionals, Delhi, Kolkatta, Degradun, Bengaluru, Chennai or Mumbai, who hail from any of the seven states in the north-east face, have faced and have always faced attacks, ostracisation and slurs. I can give examples from the 1980s from the university of Mumbai, 32 years later from 2012, when 3,000 migrant and gig workers tried to flee Chennai, Benagluru and Pune over threats and attacks. Or in between before and after. When this inherent othering was seen in brute communal attacks, first against groups, then against individuals. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians. The civilizationally sanctioned othering of our Dalits, the everyday rape and killings of Dalit women is a reality that crept on to news pages only after the 1990s somehow. Though it has existed forever. Angel Chakma’s brute killing is no worse than Mohammad Aklaq’s (Dadri, 2015) or Surekha and Priyanka Bhotmage (Khairlanji, 2006). Listing or mapping these could run like a gruesome litany, Indian calendar of hate.

Such manifest attacks after humiliation, (1980s, 2006, 2012) however elicited a seminally different response from officialdom. Or mostly. Things were attempted to be brought back on track by an overall adherence to the “rule of law” and “principles of equality and non-discrimination underlined in the Indian Constitution.” Despite gross lapses (Nellie 1983, Delhi, Kanpur 1984, Bombay 1992-1993, Gujarat 2002) in official response the veneer that society accepted or adopted was one worn by the state. A clear and conscience driven adherence to the Indian Constitution. Even if substantive justice or reparation was never quite done. We were, until 2014, a constitutional republic in the shaping and making.

Something sharply changed then, however.

No regime or administration –until 2014 –was headed by outliers who brazenly signalled to cops and officials that “those who are violent” can be identified by “their clothes” or attire. Those holding constitutional posts did not legitimise terms that slur or stigmatise particular groups or communities. Today this is par for the course. We did not have heads of state(s) that proudly espoused sectarian divide and privilege. It is this, the prevalent and dominant a politics ideologically powered on stratification and othering that has brought out the worst in us.

There are enough of us Indians who are civilizationally brutalized into othering that welcome the prevailing, politically endorsed politics of hate and violence that results in Anjel’s tragic demise. Enough in the populace to cheer the hate-leaders on. Even as those very institutions of constitutional governance, naively constructed to act as check on the executive running awry, fail us, fail India seminally.

As 2026 beckons, the rest of us Indians face a stark challenge. To meet this mob cheering hate cheerleaders, head on. To demonstrate, creatively with numbers that there are enough –and more– on our side too. Scared, scattered, maybe. Those that have forever battled stratification and divide from centuries back. Reclaim our homes, streets, schools, neighbourhoods. Do this with stories, songs, protests, meetings, marches. On beaches, parks and highways. Never mind if the panchayats, assemblies, parliament take a while. To ensure not just that we have no Anjels, no  Priyanka, no Junaids whose lives are taken before they have begun to really live. And to most of all break the shackles of all imprisonments free.

Related:

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Not Merry, Not Free: What the attacks on Christmas say about India’s shrinking pluralism

Jharkhand: Another case of mob lynching of Muslim man

Rising Menace: Mob lynchings escalate as vulnerable Muslims and minors face grave danger

The post Racist, casteist and communal, when will we as Indians reclaim that lost charade of constitutional decency? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

It was during tea with Zakia appa – where she tussled with her daughter-in-law about how many biscuits she could have – or the little meals we shared, where she would just hold my hand and stroke it, reaching out with empathy and mutual support. These are the memories that coming rushing back. It is as if we both knew and felt the enormity of the task we had jointly undertaken.

When we look back and take stock of the steely support from Tanveer bhai, Duraiappa (Durreshwar), Nargis, Najid bhai, the family and, not to forget, the dedicated team at Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), we couldn’t have known where it would lead – to some cracks in the otherwise hostile and unbreachable walls of accountability and justice? Or a cold rejection of a simple, hitherto unique plea –acknowledgement of the role of state actors as a murderous mob roamed unchecked for days?

February 28, 2002

I had first walked in alone into the charred remains of the Gulbarg society on March 4, 2002, armed with a small tape recorder and a notebook. Shards of broken glass bottles, tiny vials and their lids dotted the ground as I trudged across the eerie expanse where embers still burned.

No fire-brigade had come to its aid either on February 28 or at any point since then. I made my way to house number 19, Ahsan Jafri’s iconic home, heavy with the knowledge of what we knew until then of the man, his family, neighbours and his brutal death.

The home was no home any more, reduced to a haunting shell. It was bleak. Walls blackened with soot of the intense burning caused by flung gas cylinders. Fans gutted, gnarled and twisted. Miraculously, I found a signed postcard stamped with Jafri Sahab’s name, a diya-swastika and ‘Happy Diwali’ message written on it, on the stairwell – my precious memento of that first of dozens of visits.

A purple-pink bougainvillea that still lends defiant colour to the sombre ruins hung that day with barely surviving leaves and some overhanging blossoms. It had survived hours of mass arson. How could the flowers live on after the hell of February 28, 2002, I remember asking myself in some bewilderment.

Ironically, Zakia appa had spent that night of February 28 in the premises of the Shahibaug police station barely two kms away from the Gulbarg society in Chamanpura. She was alone. Only the next day was she shifted to the home of some distant relatives where she met her son Tanveer Jafri two days later.

Chamanpura falls under the Meghaninagar police station. Traumatised and shaken by the events that she witnessed from the terrace of her home, she was unable to sleep, full of anguished questions to which she had to find answers. Zakia appa has recounted that night to me several times over the years.  She had spent the night haunted by cries and screams of a gory bloodshed – in the midst of the very same force who she saw had let her people down.

Eighty-six years, the day before yesterday, when she left us, Zakia appa was 63 in 2002, no age to hear the cries she did, no age to witness what her eyes could not turn away from. Over 69 persons were killed in cold blood that day as a 15,000-strong mob began attacking residents at 11 in the morning. No police help arrived till 6 pm.

Late that night, in the precincts of the Shahibaug police lines, she found several policemen present in their homes on the compound. Perplexed, her simple query to them was, “Why did you not come to my husband, my society, our neighbour’s rescue beta? We made so many calls” she asked. “We were given the day off,” one police officer casually replied.

This reply by one of them has gnawed at her, since. On June 18, 2009, six years later, she recounted this to the Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court. In her official statement, she said “…No police turned up and the police came only at six in the evening and I was taken to Shahibaug police line. I saw that the police staff were present at home. They told me that they were not called for duty today (that day).”

Who was Ahsan Jafri?

Zakia appa’s husband of several decades, father of their three children, Tanveer, Nargis and Zubair had been the sole target of the mob. He was 72 when he was killed. Formerly with the Communist Party of India (CPI), he was later the city chief of the Indian National Congress in Ahmedabad, and a formerly elected member of parliament. Ahsan Jafri was a lawyer, thinker and poet.

If the ‘Happy Diwali’ postcard I had found offered a glimpse of the man – whose name soars above and beyond the hatred that was unleashed on the streets of Gujarat in 2002 – then Zakia appa’s moistened eyes, quivering smile and warm hands, Tanveer’s stoic clarity amidst pain and Nargis’ powerful articulations over two decades have actualised Jafri’s inviolable moral core and persona. In the Jafris’ resolve to calmly demand accountability from the high and mighty, Zakia appa, Tanveer and Nargis have always echoed Ahsan sahab’s deeply ingrained beliefs, his credo.

I first met Tanveer through his uncle in early March 2002. It had been Tanveer’s task to hold and help his mother heal even as he went back to Gulbarg society, his childhood home, around March 4. He had rushed to Ahmedabad from Surat where he resided. It was Tanveer who lovingly collected the remains of Ahsan sahab from outside their home, more from the Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad and laid his father to some peace and rest.

Zakia appa now lies there with her husband, friend and guide, after she had come as a young bride to Ahmedabad from Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh. Though there had been nothing peaceful about Jafri’s passing. The utterly stoic and adamant refusal of the Jafris to let go of their belief in the India that Ahsan sahab lived and died for, is special and rare.

Zakia appa and the Jafris turned their back on any bitterness born out of the realisation that even their neighbours had joined the mob on February 28. This is what made Zakia appa stand out with her children, as the stellar human rights defender she was.

She inspired millions, including us, and if there is some consolation today, 22 years after the massacre, it lies in the fact that a complicit media has had no choice but to reflect this in the coverage of her demise. For me personally, as a fellow human rights worker who has stood by the Jafri’s through every legal battle since February 28, 2002 – notwithstanding what it cost me personally and our team at CJP – it has been a rare privilege to embark on this unique journey.

Quiet dignity

Zakia appa had been a young mother, and Tanveer just six years of age, in September 1969, when Gujarat experienced the worst communal violence that the country had seen since Partition. Ahmedabad was the most acutely affected epicentre of the statewide violence.

A vast majority of the nearly 500 persons killed then were also Muslims. Ahsan Jafri lived in Dr Gandhini chawl, a tenement near Gulbarg society with his parents and family. He had already registered the Gulbarg society earlier in 1961 and it was under construction.

As the violence spread, young Tanveer watched in horror as Aiyub bhai’s shop was burned down. Why was this happening, they asked? Soon, there was no time for more questions, they just had to flee. Returning home in panic, Jafri sahab guided his family as they ran two-and-a-half kms down a railway track – the Asarva Udaipur railway line – past the rail crossing. There, some SRP vans came to their rescue and they were taken inside the Relief Camp located inside the police stadium at the same Shahibaug location where Zakia appa was to spend that fateful night of February 28, 2002, 33 years later.

Tanveer remembers playing out in the open and queuing up for tea which they drank in brightly coloured plastic glasses, a novelty at the time. “We lived there for a month, then for another month inside Ubair Shaikh’s Dunlop agency-cycle shop and after that moved into the barely constructed House No. 19 of Gulbarg society. There were no doors and windows, we used sheets to cover sight and sound. Despite this displacement and tragedy, even the fact that all our belongings had been burned and destroyed, Abba just did not let this mean anything to us, did not allow this loss to eat at us,” Tanveer recalls.

“How we lived, how he lived (Ahsan sahab) after the 1969 displacement, is how we have tried to regroup ourselves and live after the unforgettable tragedy of 2002,” says Tanveer. “Dangai hamaaree soch nahin badal sakte hai. Agar aisa hoga to dangaeeon kee jeet hai. Hamaara nuksaan hamen badal nahin sakta. (Rioters cannot change our way of thinking. If that happens, they win. Our losses cannot change us.) They cannot change our choices, the way we are or how we we think. It is this conviction that has ensured that the tragedy of 2002 does not change us,” he adds.

This profound resolve and dignity in the face of unspeakable loss is what epitomises Zakia appa and her family. It is this dignity that she brought to her battle for justice and accountability.

22 years in grief

Zakia appa lived for 22 years after her husband’s brutal killing in deep personal grief, battling sleepless nights and guilt – the guilt of surviving. Her beloved Ahsan sahab had sent her to the top storey of her home to safety, where dozens with her were saved, while many others perished. Those who stood by Ahsan till he finally gave himself up to the mob, just after he said his last prayer, were witness to his calm fortitude, his determined and desperate efforts to make calls (including to the high and mighty) and even his willingness to offer himself to the mob if other lives could be saved.

For the blood-thirsty and determined mob, that was not to be. Apart from the particularly brute way of his killing, young women were subject to gendered violence. To repeat, 69 persons lost their lives at just one location in Gujarat that day. The total number of the post Godhra killings – if we peruse official charge sheets – is close to 2,000.

Zakia appa’s guilt of being alive is evident in an unrelated incident that Nargis recounted in a letter, ‘Bless Us Abba’, in 2016.

“Ammi is never tired of recounting the incident when in the bedroom of your old house while you were sleeping, the small kerosene lamp on the side of the bed fell off and the curtain caught fire. You were sleeping on the side of the fire and Ammi was next to you. As the heat woke you up and you saw the fire, instead of jumping out of the bed immediately, you first woke Ammi up and asked her to get to safety. But when she woke up and saw the fire, she thinks she quickly jumped out of bed and ran to the door without even knowing where you were or what you were trying to tell her. It is more than 40 years since, but she still remembers and regrets that incident and feels guilty of putting herself first that day and not grabbing your hand as she ran to the door.”

I met Nargis for the first time in 2002 in the United States, as I deposed before the International Commission on Religious Freedom. I had that copy of Communalism Combat with me, a testimony of all the eye-witness accounts and FIRs. With swollen eyes, this young woman had only one question to ask me, was the killing of her darling Abba as brutal as she had heard? Lowering my head in shame, I half shook, half nodded, trying to conceal both the documents and facts. It was not to be.

Bearing witness carries an unbearable load. I have often wondered, even as Nargis and I spoke, laughed and squabbled over the years, “Has she ever forgiven me?”

On Saturday (February 1), as I stood inside Saraspur Roza in Ahmedabad, Nargis said, as she held my hand, “She is free now, my Ma. Free of the pain.” Then together we cried.

Journey for justice

Mass media, especially one that has become fearful and complicit, is selective in its coverage and often responsible for erasure of history. But Zakia Appa and Ahsan sahab’s sheer moral worth and the grit of her battle just could not be ignored. This is evidenced from the vast coverage of her demise. But what of the fact that the same coverage is de-fanged and de-contextualised? Especially when it chooses to ignore the venality of the state and the attempted decimation of a principled legal battle. From the start, attempts were made to dilute and erase the scale of the violence, not just across Gujarat after Godhra in 2002, but especially the targeted violence at the Gulberg Society and against Ahsan Jafri on February 28, 2002.

The journey for justice and accountability for the survivors of 2002 has seen its up and downs and as I take stock two days after Zakia appa left us, I wonder if  the glass half empty or half full? Was it all worth it? In all, we, at CJP,  collectively managed 172 convictions, 124 to life imprisonment. Never mind that higher courts often reversed decisions. On principle, we stood against death penalty.

Evidence of state complicity, absence of fire brigades and police response, documentary evidence on intelligence and police control records, was ignored by investigating agencies, and unfortunately, even our courts. Yet, the exemplary efforts put in by our band of dedicated human rights workers and lawyers, we managed to put all this substantive investigations on public record, all this evidence for history to judge.

While the Zakia Jafri case has seen its end, the trial in the Gulbarg society massacre is pending appeal in the Gujarat high court. On June 17, 2016, the trial court judge had convicted 11 persons to life while 13 other accused received sentences up to ten years. All charges of conspiracy were rejected, as was the evidence of three police witnesses, fire brigade records and those from the police control room. As Tanveer, in his own special way says it, “Victory in the courts is only half the story. In the annals of people’s recall and history, that we fought, that Ahsan sahab and Zakia appa are an inspiration to millions, that our collective battle has given others the confidence to fight; that we could through CJP put all this wealth of evidentiary material on record, that is our victory.”

In sum, as I said in tribute to Zakia appa, the day before yesterday, “You graced the courts, our homes and hearts. You did so with unwavering fortitude. Theirs is the loss who could not recognise the scale and magnitude of the loss for just what it was.” For the Jaffris and us, at CJP, who handed over 68 cases concerning the Gujarat carnage, despite all efforts, the state has never fully succeeded in curtailing some substantive successes of the wider battle.

As a footnote, I would like to record here what Zakia Appa, Tanveer, and I often discussed over the years: how high the costs have been, especially for some. For us at CJP, the stellar legal aid provided by our teams epitomises a constitutional right under Article 39-A, and at significant cost, we undertook this battle. Our trustees stood in staunch support. Alongside a committed group of High Court and Supreme Court counsel, we owe a special debt to advocate Suhel Tirmizi of the Gujarat High Court. His sacrifice, commitment, and services were invaluable – not only in being the guiding force behind setting up multiple legal teams of senior and junior lawyers to handle various trials, but specifically in the Zakia Jafri case. From 2006 to 2011, when the case first reached the Supreme Court, his contribution has been immense, and the personal costs he paid, heavy. We pay our tributes to him. There are too many lawyers – at the trial court, High Court, and Supreme Court – to mention here, but their efforts have been equally vital.

I end with this powerful poem penned by Farahdeen Khan and sent to be my dear friend Rukmini, who recognised how personal this loss was for me.

The Betrayal of Fire

She stood, a woman forged in the furnace of grief,

a widow not of one, but of a thousand souls,

each name etched in ash, in silence, in the acrid smoke

that curled from the pyres of justice undone.

Zakia, they left you among ruins, among bones

that the earth itself shuddered to cradle.

They call this nation a mother, but what mother devours

her daughters and spits their bones to the wind?

The gavel did not fall—it was hurled,

a cudgel masquerading as law.

Each robed man who turned his back

added another brick to the mausoleum of truth.

And what of the one who stood beside her?

Teesta, shackled for daring to bear witness,

for daring to say what history chokes on,

for dragging the carcass of conscience into the light.

What price for remembrance, for defiance?

A cell, a charge, a silence enforced—

For in this land, to fight for the fallen

is to fall yourself, and fall alone.

Tell me, you who avert your gaze—

what use is your silk, your scented wealth,

when the very soil beneath your feet

stinks of the unburied dead?

You recoil now, do you not?

Once, you drank with me, laughed with me,

shared in the hollow spoils of comfort.

But truth is a bitter draught, and you spit it out.

Yet I will stand, though my voice be drowned

by the thunder of cowardice and complicity.

For to be silent is to wield the knife,

to be neutral is to be an accomplice.

And so, when the reckoning comes—

not in the courts of men, but in the halls of time—

she will rise, they will rise,

and those who failed them will find no name to call their own.

Teesta Setalvad is a rights activist and journalist.

This article was first published on The Wire

The post Zakia Jaffri, with her compassion and resilience inspired millions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Many epithets have been used to describe the regime in place at the centre in India since May 2014 and it is no gratification to hear India, always a proud and growing democracy being increasingly described by international institutes as only “partly free” (Freedom House) and a “partially free electoral autocracy.” (Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute). One of the most fundamental and unique aspects of the Indian freedom movement that included within its scope vastly diverse but committed groups and ideologies who saw the exploitation of colonial rule, was the clear articulation for a “one person one vote” system, universal adult franchise.

Dr BR Ambedkar’s articulations before the Southborough Committee (2019) followed by the Motilal Nehru Report (1928) and the resultant Karachi Resolution of the Indian National Congress (1031) buffeted this clearly by ensuring that this – universal adult franchise with  no ifs and buts – became a non-negotiable part of the citizenship project. Not only did this ensure the inclusion of the most marginalised castes, genders and other sections in the Indian decision making process, it also compelled political forces to formulate policies geared to the largest common good. Ambedkar’s articulations was clear when he was categorical that a democratic government was inseparable from the right to vote, and it was voting that would prove to be (one of) the harbinger(s) of political education. India moved from a restrictive 15 per cent of Indians having (limited) voting rights to universal adult franchise, driven by the transformative impetus of the national movement and the ideals of equality and non-discrimination that it threw up.

The world’s largest democracy, India, therefore beat the oldest, the United States of America (USA) when it came to inclusive enfranchisement beyond qualifications. The USA, reeling under the ignominious Jim Crow laws[1] that indirectly disenfranchised racial minorities only gave all citizens the right to vote in 1964 after a Supreme Court’s ruling in Reynolds v/s Sims. [2]

In what seems like clear regression if not an outright counter-revolution, the party and ideological forces in places since May 2014, have in their manipulation and infiltration of institutions ensured that only a skewed version of democracy exists.[3] Post 2014 India has seen a reign of ‘undeclared emergency’ marked by normalisation of terror: a rule by police (law enforcement) raids or executive fiat; where terror and fear of targeted reprisal by the executive affects normative citizens voices and actions, the concentration of brute political power with the state and economic resources with chosen corporates combined with the steady decline of the federal structure of our Constitution has led to an erasure or erosion of democratic values. Crucial institutions of governance have been seen to crumble under this pressure.

On the last day of 2024 it is time to speak only and specifically of the Election Commission of India (ECI) one such that has clearly abdicated any and every semblance of transparency and accountability. If Articles 324-326 enjoin the ECI, a constitutional body to ensure free and fair elections, these articles of the Constitution as its Preamble underline that the ECI is answerable to the Indian people alone not the government in power.  Yet, election after election, especially those held after 2017 –when for the first time a standalone EVM machine was replaced by a three part system (VVPAT attached to a laptop and Symbol Loading Unit) making the EVS open to manipulation—elections have drawn sharp questions from a scattered but active citizenry. The use of hate speech, slur and vitriol by men and women in constitutional posts –including the prime minister and home minister—have gone unchecked despite election law demanding action from the ECI.[4] [5]

2024 saw these questions at their peak. From the general elections that took place in seven phases from April 19 to June 1 2024, to the Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir elections, and finally to the Maharashtra state assembly polls, the questions and anger towards the ECI has not stemmed nor stopped. Towards all these, the ECI has maintained an autocratic and obdurate silence.

Be it TN Seshan or James Lyndhoh in the past, not to mention, Yakub Qureishi these were all chief election commissioners that held governments to account. Today, the men in that position represent a stultified and manipulated Election Commission of India (ECI) that is both structurally and otherwise holding elections in an un-free and un-fair manner violating not just the Preamble of India but Articles 324-326 of the Indian Constitution. Be it in the manipulation of electoral rolls—bogus injection of voters or mass deletion of sections opposed to the BJP, or in the actual manipulation of the Electronic Voting System (EVS) through the vulnerable Symbol Loading Unit and the Microprocessors in the VVPAts. An external laptop is now connected to the Ballot Unit. Both have labile memories and ever since 2017 when the EVM stopped being a standalone unit the vulnerability of external malware changing/shifting and altering votes cast (from one to another candidate and party) began.  Citizens have asked whether it is this possibility of manipulation that is behind the reluctance of the ECI/system to allow the easy checking of the actual microprocessor through independent experts.

Besides these technicalities that are being raised by concerned and active citizens along with experts every day in the public domain, the manner and absence of any transparency in the ECI’s phasing of elections, its obdurate and blind inaction against hate speech during polls (especially when delivered by the prime minister, home minister and other functionaries), its refusal to make 17 C forms public, its flouting of election law and rules by not collecting Index Cards from Returning officers, its changing of data parameters and figures made public (*from 2019 Lok Sabha, 2024 Lok Sabha, Haryana 2024 Vidhan Sabha and 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha*) makes the actions even more opaque and open to suspicion. In July 2024 the Vote for Democracy Report compiled data and analysis into a report that raised serious issues and questions that remain, to date, unanswered. [6]

On July 19, Citizens served a notice to the ECI that has, to date received no response.[7] The utter and abject refusal of the ECI to answer key questions on the conduct of free and fair elections requires us as citizens to launch grassroots campaigns for a free and fair election, demanding that “Votes Cast be those Counted”, and the removal of the present Election Commissioner. The data collected by the ECI belongs to the Indian people and ECI must function in the interests of the people and not the regime in power.

Among the key aspects of the defaulting conduct by the ECI is its continuing failure to release all data of votes polled and counted, it’s shifting and changing parameters of data release (releasing percentages of voting that too not constituency but district wise) and its over-centralisation of the process, weakening of the Returning Officers role, powers and accountability. The fact that it is the BJP party that has emerged victorious in many if not all the elections as the process because more obscure has not helped matters.

In the latter part of 2023, in his Paper titled “Democratic Backsliding in the World’s Largest Democracy,” (2023) scholar Sabyasachi Das, formerly of the Ashoka University who studied the 2019 General Election to Parliament, says that electoral manipulation can take place at the stage of voter registration (registration manipulation) or at the time of voting or counting (turnout manipulation).  Both the recently conducted Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections (November 2024) and the upcoming Delhi state elections (2025) have been marked by serious allegations of mass deletions of legitimate voters and significant additions of possibly “bogus voters.” Between April-June 2024 and November 2024, ECI’s own figures show a 41 lakh increase in voters in the states. The opposition Congress has alleged that the seats that benefitted from this unusual and unaccounted increase benefitted the ruling combine. No coherent answer to the detailed representation has come from the ECI.

Das’ 2023 analysis showed how, at the time of voter registration, manipulation is also done in the form of targeted deletion of names of voters who are unlikely to vote for the incumbent party. At the time of voting, polling officers can strategically discriminate against registered voters, who are likely to vote against the ruling dispensation. Manipulation can take place at the time of counting of votes due to confusion created by variations in voter turnout data and percentages as well as weak or prejudiced monitoring by counting observers appointed by the ECI who are from the State Civil Service (SCS), as opposed to the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) especially those coming from beneficiary states who are pliable. Both these manipulations allegedly happened in the 2024 election also and ECI neither took preventive steps, nor acted upon the many complaints sent to them.

Other questions that are blowing in the wind, answered and unaddressed are:

• Several candidates who lost by narrow margins have complained of a 99 per cent battery in the EVM machine when counting started in certain booths that is unlikely given the battery usage for polling on polling day
• There have been no answers for mismatch in Form 17C and final results displayed by CU (even if one machine shows this anomaly) –Lok Sabha polls
• The ECI has no answers as to why it did not disclose the ABSOLUTE NUMBERS in the first 2 phases of Lok Sabha 2024
• There was no explanation given for unexplained and sudden power cuts during counting
• There was no explanation given for –in certain cases—EVMs being taken out of strong rooms
• There has been no explanation for ruling party candidates accessing mobile phones used by DEOs feeding the data in the ENCORE APP
• There has been absolutely no explanation or answer given for the high, absurdly illogical and abnormal rise in Voter Turn Out (VTR) percentage over two to more days before counting. (In earlier elections pre-2019 this percentage did not vary beyond 1-2 per cent). With the general elections 2024 and state elections this year variations have been from 6-11 per cent!
• There have been no answers foe the ECI’s inaction for its inaction against prime minister, Narendra Modi’s communal slurs during the Lok Sabha 2024 polls and his open fluting of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and provisions of the Representation of People’s Act, 1951
• No answers for the sharp increase and addition of voters between GE 2024 and Maharashtra Elections 2024
• No answers for the time allowed to the Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar Government to pay the instalments of freebies to the voters August to October 2024
• No answers for the valid questions raised by technical experts regarding vulnerability of VVPAT, due to its connection with the internet and its potentially dubious role in transferring spurious or manipulated votes to the Counting Unit (CUY)
• No answers as to whether the ECI is in independent control of the Source code in the EVS Unit and why this cannot be made public
• No answers as to why BJP’s members are on the Board of Directors of Government Companies viz. ECIL and BEL, which manufacture the EVMs

Rules that empower citizens and candidates

• Under Rule 32(b) of the Registration of Electors Rules (RER), 1960, the authenticated printed copy of the electoral roll is available at the District Election Officer, on a permanent basis.
• As per Rule 31(e) of the RER, 1960, all the related papers which led to the revision of the electoral rolls viz. enumeration pads, copies of the roll used for house-to house verification, manuscripts prepared on the basis thereof, claims and objections and applications for correction of entries and transposition of entries (Forms 6, 6A, 7, 8 and 8A), and all papers connected with their disposal, shall be retained for at least three years after next revision of electoral rolls.
• As per the Rule 33, the Electoral Rolls and connected papers, as mentioned above, are open for inspection for any person, on payment of the stipulated fee. These rules are not amended and can be used to verify the issues in question.

For India and Indians to celebrate our democracy, we must insist that these questions are answered, that the Election Commission of India bows to the questions raised by the We the People of India. If a weak and confused Opposition flounders, citizens and independent media need to carry the flag. Of Resistance and Accountability.

Happy New Year. Welcome 2025.

[1] The Jim Crow laws were a body of discriminatory legislation, state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries that enforced racial segregation. ‘Jim Crow’ is a perjorative term used for African Americans. The last of the Jim Crow laws were overturned in 1965.

[2] Before this, The Warren Court’s decisions on two previous landmark cases—Baker v/s Carr (1962) and Wesberry v Sanders (1964)—also played a fundamental role in establishing the nationwide “one man, one vote” electoral system

[3] While India experienced a political emergency declared by a previous Congress government between 1975-1977 that also snatched basic human rights, caused disappearances and ran interference with the higher judiciary, the elections declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1977 were free and fair, sweeping her out of power.

[4] In its Report titled “Is the Indian EVM and VVPAT System Fit for Democratic Elections?” released in January, 2021 and submitted to ECI, Citizens Commission on Election (CCE) had said that EVM system does not provide provable guarantees against hacking, tampering and spurious vote injections and the VVPAT system as practiced does not allow the voter to verify the slip before the vote is cast and the absence of E2E verification would lead to voting and counting manipulation and had suggested remedial measures. ECI did not bother to respond.[https://constitutionalconduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/citizens-commission-on-elections-vol.-i.pdf].

[5] In August/September 2023, civil society submitted a Memorandum to ECI signed by about 10,000 voters making a specific demand: “The VVPAT system should be re-calibrated to be fully voter-verifiable. A voter should be able to get the VVPAT slip in her hand and cast it in a chip-free ballot box for the vote to be valid. These VVPAT slips should be fully counted first for all constituencies before the results are declared.” [https://www.change.org/p/ecisveep-eci-must-implement-its-constitutional-mandate-to-conduct-free-and-fair-election]. ECI did not even acknowledged this Memorandum leave alone acting upon it.

[6] The report was made public and can be viewed and accessed here:
https://votefordemocracy.org.in/

[7] The Notice served to the ECI may be read here https://votefordemocracy.org.in/

The post Is India’s unique experiment on people’s democracy with the right to universal franchise being lampooned by a compliant Election Commission? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Salutes and Apologies Vasanta ji and Professor GN Saibaba!

The last we met and briefly held hands was outside AKG Bhavan, Delhi where he, with his usual gentle resolve had been wheeled by dear wife, Vasanta to pay tribute to Sitaram Yechury, general secretary of the CPI-M. That was September 14, 2024, Sita had left us two days before, exactly a month before Saibaba did, on September 12, 2024. On Saturday, October 12, 2024, the 54 year old professor of English died of “complications following a gall bladder surgery at one of Hyderabad’s known hospitals.”

Immediately, I had to say something publicly, react. “Who answers for this life lost, unaccountability & callousness? #GNSaibaba We owe you….” is what I said on X.

Who answers for this life lost, unaccoutability & callousness? #GNSaibaba We owe you…. pic.twitter.com/6iI7j99yan

— Teesta Setalvad (@TeestaSetalvad) October 12, 2024

Professor GN Saubaba had stubbornly refused to die despite every effort by the brute Nagpur jail authorities, on instructions of the political executive, to ensure every indignity heeped on this physically frail and handicapped man. After being accused and convicted of all kinds of manipulated charges including under the draconian anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and convicted to life imprisonment on March 7, 2017 he was first acquitted on October 14, 2022 by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, only for a superior court to ensure further jail term. Saibaba’s poem penned at the time was and is a source of sorrowful inspiration. On August 5, 2023, the Bombay high court judge Justice Rohit B Deo (former Advocate General, Maharashtra from 2016 to 2017) — who had acquitted Professor GN Saibaba—resigned,  a full two years a four months before he was due to retire on December 4, 2025. Though citing personal reasons to be the cause, in his statement before the court while he made farewell remarks in open court, he did say, “I can’t work against my self-respect.” After the Supreme Court’s “interventions” at this stage, the Bombay high court again acquitted Saibaba and others on March 5, 2024, observing that holding a trial under UAPA without adhering to procedural requirements would amount to a “failure to justice”. Professor Saibaba’s wife Vasanta Kumari who valiantly stood by him through all these multiple violations of the Constitution and law had, with him, a beaming smile, when he finally was wheeled out free from the Nagpur Central Jail on March 7, 2024.

Saibaba’s death after a critical surgery at the age of 54 raises questions for which there will be, likely no answers. A former professor of the Department of English, University of Delhi and a prominent figure in the struggle for democratic rights and the defence of the marginalised, Prof. Saibaba, was 90 percent disabled and wheelchair-bound. What had he been accused of, charges that he was, after a bitter ten long years, acquitted? Of being “a member of the banned Maoist party on flimsy grounds of having some Maoist literature in his house.” There was no other evidence and yet, he had been incarcerated eight and a half years ago and had been kept in conditions which utterly disregarded his physical condition and resulted in continuing deterioration of his health. Little regard was paid to his need for proper medical attention. Finally, almost too late, the Maharashtra High Court acquitted him of all charges and he was discharged recently. However, his condition could not take the stress of gall bladder surgery and he passed away due to haemorrhage and cardiac arrest. Saibaba had said on release from Nagpur jail on March 6, “When I went to prison, I had no ailment other than my disability. Now, my heart is 55% functional…live, gallbladder and pancreas have also been affected. My right hand is partially functional. My doctor says I need multiple surgeries.”

Who will pay for this state-driven negligence?

In any civilised society –and electoral democracies mandated by the sovereign will of the people certainly claim that label—there should be an independent inquiry into such a death, at the very least. So that those guilty jailors and Superintendents of Nagpur prison face rebuke, real punishment. And we as citizens with the sovereign authority are informed of who exactly in the executive ordered such treatment. Prof. Saibaba’s death has therefore also been called nothing short of an institutional murder as was Father Stan Swamy’s on July 5, 2021.  On July 5, 2021 Stan Swamy had died of cardiac arrest, complications from COVID-19, Parkinson’s, also a victim of dismal and unaccountable Taloja jail prison conditions.

The Indian state, and judiciary, which failed not only to protect his fundamental right to a dignified life, actually also subjected him to the most cruel and inhuman conditions of incarceration, denying him even the basic medical attention.

His own words best express both his life, treatment in jail and death.

Saibaba’s poem from jail in 2017

When I refused to die
my chains were loosened
I came out
Into the vast meadows
Smiling at the leaves of grass
My smile caused intolerance in them
I was shackled again
Again, when I refused to die
tired of my life
my captors released me
I walked out
into the lush green valleys under the rising sun
smiling at the tossing blades of grass
Infuriated by my undying smile
They captured me again
I still stubbornly refuse to die
The sad thing is that
They don’t know how to make me die
Because I love so much
The sounds of growing grass

November 2017. (Remembering October 1917)

G N Saibaba, life convict, Anda Cell, Nagpur Jail

What does all of this, in any real sense mean? As we pen our thoughts and tributes to this extraordinary man, whom the Delhi University refused to re-instate as professor even after his acquittal, first we must recall that though Professor G N Saibaba died a free man, acquitted of all charges, he could not savour the sounds of freedom for even a year.

Here was a man 90 % physically challenged who survived solitary confinement –three stretches at a time—for a total of eight and a half years. He was deprived of his essential mode of mobility, the wheelchair in the Nagpur’s Central Jail, a wheelchair that he had been dependant on since childhood. Medicines essential to his treatment for 19 ailments were denied him as was a simple bland diet and other medical treatment. This despite the fact that when he was arrested for the second time, in December 2015, on orders of the Gadchiroli sessions court, Professor Saibaba was due for pancreatic surgery and a delay would lead to infection, which his doctors had warned.

Confined to solitary confinement, the Anda Cell (reserved for the most dangerous persons!), itself an acknowledged form of mental torture, he was in jail in Nagpur, a city in Maharashtra with hot summers and cold, cold winters. Even when sharp pains seared his body in winter, jail authorities refused to allow him warm clothes sent by his family. In a letter to his wife, A S Vasanta Kumari, from prison in November 2017, eight months after having been convicted for life under the anti-terrorist act UAPA, he had baldly said, “I am living like an animal.” The callous unaccountability by the jail authorities continued until the very end leading to an open letter, in December 2020 by his lawyer to the jail authorities saying that ‘Saibaba’s future was in his hands.’

Among all the questions that should bother our Courts is this one, “How long is too long a period of incarceration as an under trial for a court to conclude the right of speedy trial is defeated?”  It was the Delhi High Court in Mohamed Hakim v. State (NCT of Delhi) 2021 SCC OnLine Del 4623, who had thus queried,  though that was in the context of grant of bail for an undertrial prisoner. As India today ignominiously boasts of over 4, 00,000 under trials –several thousand of which have served terms way beyond the punitive terms they are charged with, Saibaba’s death reminds us of a state’s complete collapse. Apart from Saibaba, there are other political prisoners, Delhi Riots cases 2020 (Umar Khalid we know and speak of often, Gulfishan Faitima less so), Orissa, Chhattisgarh that point a finger at us and the higher judiciary. Is it not about time that High Court and Supreme Court Judges, step out of their courts and chambers and visit the Jails in their jurisdiction? Meet and speak to under trials and convicted, interrogate and examine why some of their Orders on Bail and Release are simply not implemented on the ground.

More of such ruminations, point by point, later. This one is about Professor GN Saibaba. So I will end this guilt-filled remembrance with the poem tweeted by fellow journalist, Saubaba, today, October 15.

When you remove Saibaba’s eyes,

Please add a touch of gentleness,

For in them lie traces of the world he dreamt of,

That might unfold within someone else.

Please extract his heart with utmost skill,

For in that tenacious heart that denied death

In the fascist Manuvadi regime’s prison,

You may find the roots of tender compassion

For the Adivasis and the oppressed masses.

In constant captivity, grappling with illness,

He stood firm for his beliefs.

Please check, perhaps, those polio-stricken legs

Could leave a mark on the faces

Of the chameleon activists who preach a new ideology every day.

One more, final request…

Please preserve that brain even more carefully for the future generations,

For though ninety percent disabled,

His “thinking mind” made this exploitative system tremble with fear.

Someday, it may help someone identify the system’s weak link.

Janjerla Ramesh Babu

President, Telangana Forum Against Displacement

(With a heart burdened by sorrow for the sudden martyrdom of Comrade G.N. Saibaba…)

Related:

GN Saibaba wheeled out of Nagpur Central Jail on March 7 two days after the Bombay HC resoundingly acquitted him & 5 others in…

Protesting for release of GN Saibaba, Delhi students ‘assaulted’ by ABVP, cops

Prof GN Saibaba Case: Supreme Court to hear Maharashtra Govt’s appeal against HC’s discharge order on Jan 17

Unprecedented, Abnormal, SC order of ‘suspension’ of sentence in GN Saibaba case

SC Staying acquittal of Prof. Saibaba and 5 others sets a dangerous precedent: PUCL

The post When the state turns rogue even protests dry up, Salutes & Apologies Professor Saibaba! appeared first on SabrangIndia.

When, as is our want, as chroniclers of the times, we are pressed to pen our words, our tribute to this special man, leader, father, partner, comrade, thoughts crowd in, yet words refuse to flow in cohesion. Exactly seven days on, after September 12 when we were numbed and chilled to the core as the 3.03 p.m. news crept in, I attempt this piece. Cringing in the knowledge that so much of meaning has already been written.

What more, then, will I have to say?

I will begin this homage, or tribute with this then, sharing (s) from last Friday and Saturday when we collectively bent our heads and grieved first at Seema-Sita’s Vasant Kunj home laced and lined with gracious scented white blooms dotted with the defiant communist red and then, the next day at the Gol Market party office, AKG Bhavan where we had spent so many hours with Sita and other comrades, over the years. I did not just meet Sita there though, over decades. It was most often at the Sahmat daftar, first the one at Vithalbhai Patel house (8 VP house), then at 29 Ferozeshah Road and the last several times at 36, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla lane, adjoining the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) office. His visits for lunch and pow-wows with close comrades were intimate and friendly and those of us who could get a few minutes –often more—of his time—chatting with him on issues of grave importance, one on one, were lucky. The depth of his understanding of the ever morphing forms of ugly communalism-translated into a bitter abdication by the state and violence and misery for hundreds of thousands of our own, Muslims, made common cause with the work that we– Javed and I –have dedicated large parts of our working lives to robustly counter. His unwavering support of this work, through thick and thin, through better times and bad, was and is special yet part of the support that the party he joined in 1975 (he had joined SFI a year earlier) always offered and has given us. Deep bows and Lal Salaam Comrade!

Sita’s was an unwavering commitment to socialism and communism, his sharp reading of history matched his dedication to the soil of this land, the many layered and many flavoured freedom struggle that ousted the British. More than anything else it was his  nuanced layered and complex understanding of India’s agrarian crisis, the issues of labour organised and unorganised and for me especially, social justice that must come with a critique of communalism and a stand against caste that were fascinating. His admission, somewhat reluctant, of the urgent need of the party and left theorists to really factor in caste and issues of social justice to a class analysis goes back to 2001 or more. I was privileged to be among those who, with support from Sahmat, drew in all parliamentarians to support the cause of Dalits at the Durban UN Conference. That year, on August 31– September 4, when the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Intolerance, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances (WCAR) met in Durban, the first time since the discriminatory and centuries old regime of apartheid was overturned (in South Africa, early 1990s, formation of the first democratic government in 1994) through much sacrifice and struggle in that country, another group of subordinated peoples, discriminated by descent and occupation, forcibly segregated by tradition and religion from access to common resources, Dalits from South Asia, made their voice heard before the international community. The demands, sharply contested by the right and also other “mainstream intellectuals who rebutted claims on the matrix of sociological definitions” was clearly that that caste-based discrimination, which amounts to descent and occupation based oppression, segregation and exclusion be recognised as a distinct form of racism. A distinct form of racism, because it amounts (and has for centuries amounted to) to the denial of basic human rights based on prejudice, discrimination or antagonism and is justified by well–entrenched beliefs about high and low, superior and inferior.

The contrasting stance of India and Nepal are illuminating. As I wrote in Communalism Combat (April 2001, Hidden Apartheid). At the preparatory meeting for the WCAR, on February 19 in Tehran, the Indian government (NDA-I under Atal Bihari Vajpayee) made its stand clear — introducing caste into the ambit of the WCAR at Durban would amount to diluting the concept of racism. The government delegation was represented, among others, by then attorney general, Soli Sorabjee. More significantly perhaps, government spokesmen stressed that the problem of caste was an ‘internal’ one and therefore out of the purview of the UN. In stark and sharp contrast to the Indian government’s position was the Nepal government’s candour on the same issue, confronted as it was, then, with assertions of Nepali Dalits who account for not less than 15 per cent of the total population. The government of the only Hindu kingdom in the world openly admitted that caste is the source of acute discrimination and segregation within Nepal. This, it held, was a serious issue that falls under the theme of the forthcoming conference and should, therefore, form part of the official deliberations at the WCAR at Durban.

The idea of this recollection is not to lay down the rich nuances of that debate, that –given the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh’s (RSS’) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stance on caste even turned nasty for some of us supporting the Dalit demand – but to emphasise the readiness of a man of Sitaram’s intellectual and political acumen to engage with the challenge. A challenge that the demand posed, even to the organised left, the CPI-M, that has been accused of, historically and to date, ignoring the issues of caste oppression and inclusion.

Sita participated in the pre-Durban conference deliberations and lent his voice and support to the Dalit movements’ demand that was essentially attempting to take the issue of caste–based discrimination to a global forum; to solicit international condemnation of caste–based discriminatory practices and support for the struggle against it. Let’s not forget that caste based discrimination, legitimised for centuries through scripture and followed in practice by notions of high and low, superior and inferior, pure an impure. Even 77 years after independence, the problem persists. The Dalit condition, which was the result of such a pernicious theory, is the outcome of a narrow and hierarchically powerful assertion of race by perpetrators of this condition and not the other way around. It is not the metaphor of race that was being invoked but the metaphor of racism, which was the outcome of the misplaced metaphor of race. This Sita understood and as late as five months back, in early 2024, publicly articulated. The need for the organised left to be really seen as a serious political party that regards class as much as caste (and communalism) as the root of Indian oppression. For us at Communalism Combat, too this (journalistic) journey has meant deepening our understanding of how communalism (and majoritarian proto-fascism too) cannot be theoretically understood nor soundly countered or overcome without factoring in, or also battling caste.

The core of our conversations and parleys –Sita and mine–of course always dealt with the work we had undertaken, at great risk and challenge since 1992-93. First in the publishing (in book form) of the Srikrishna Commission Report on the Bombay communal riots of 1992-1993 (copies of which we sold at Rs 60 and 90 to ensure wide readability and availability). This journalist-activist action was born of our realisation that, most judicial commission reports that dissected the causes, build up and fallout of targeted communal violence post-Independence, are documents of legal-political importance that need to influence institutional memory to build in preventive and other measures to ensure that such violence does not periodically – and with more vicious intensity-repeat. For the past 32 years since then, a major personal academic and journalistic endeavour of mine has been to continually engage with these documents, ensure wider reach and availability, a task I am still currently engaged in. As editor of the CPI-M’s People’s Democracy, he was the first one, instrumental in ensuring that independent voices like us contribute to the party organ. Sita needed to fight numerous internal battles to allow me and other contributors the space to write what we wanted in PD in the manner we wanted to. But, in his own inimitable way, persuasive yet dogged, he got his way. This relationship has paved the way for a unique equation between me, a journalist activist academic and the CPI-M that is rare, precious and unique. Sita and Rajen (Rajendra Prasad) first, and then of course comrade Brinda and so many others have ensured that this relationship has been enduring. Communalism Combat (published from August 1993 to November 2012) and most particularly in the work of Citizens for Justice and Peace, post Gujarat 2002 is something that was more than close to Sita’s heart. It was an engagement that he saw as vital for the reassertion of the Constitution, a visionary document that arose out of India’s struggle for freedom. Not a day or month passed in that rich yet fractious battle (that still continues!) with a rogue state and its unaccountable functionaries, that Sita did not have his ear out for us, watchful of our predicament, support unconditional, during vilification and even incarceration. With Rajen and Sahmat in the tiny vibrant office spaces, often, and then at his Gol market office too, long elaborate discussions on the intricacies of our legal battle for accountability and reparation took place. The fact that we at CJP, always centred Survivor Voices in this battle, ensuring that the names of those who had loved, lived and lost their closest ones in the brute perpetrated violence is something that Sita deeply understood and empathised with. He met and interacted with the Survivors who bravely shared their tales and his words, his presence, renewed their faith. In not just their battle for Justice (that has remained only part fulfilled) but in the idea of India itself and the Indian Constitution too. How else can a mother who has lost her only son, another who has seen her sister and daughter raped before her eyes, a wife who lives sleepless with guilt of her dear husband’s death, a former parliamentarian not just hacked to pieces but his reputation smeared too, dare to live on? It was the warm, firm support of a man like Sita – among so many others – who met them, had the patience to listen, who spoke of the issue boldly, even when it became politically non-expedient, that meant we were not completely alone. Post September 3, 2022 when I visited Delhi after my release from jail, one of the most memorable moments of my life – one that I cherish close to me – was the lunch Rajen and colleagues organised at Sahmat – when, within minutes of my reaching, the general secretary of the CPI-M, Sitaram Yechury came by to hug and salute, with partner and fellow journalist, Seema, and soon, another Polit Bureau member, Brinda Karat, followed. Unflinching has been the support and personal respect and affection that I have been fortunate enough to receive. Hundreds of letters that I received from women activists and comrades of the AIUWFP (All India Union of Forest Working Peoples) and AIDWA (All India Democratic Women’s Association) while interned at barrack 6 of the Sabarmati Mahila Jail, Ahmedabad were an immense source of succour and strength.

Yes, it was the minor details and sheer expanse, Sitaram’s grasp on constitutionalism and parliamentary procedure, the irreverence of authority and most of all Sita’s playful charm and chuckle, all of this, that made the time spent with him, something you (silently) tuck away. To savour for another day. For the way Sitaram matched words with ideas, wove in culture and history, shared this with the ease of complete camaraderie made the conversations special.

Words often desert us when a near one passes. There is shock, disillusion, need to collectively grieve and share and then the inevitable clichés. So let me share more of some and all of these with you from September 13-14 in New Delhi.

The elegance and beauty of the flower malas and garlands strewn on the staircase up to the first floor home matched the fragrance of goodwill, care and grief within. They had been handpicked by Kanishka and Vertika (of the Prasad-Chopra-Chaturvedi clan) from the flower market at Seema’s special request. Sita lay before the beautiful, large poster of the original blockbuster, 1949 film, Andaaz with the triangular cast of Dilip Kapoor, Nargis and Raj Kapoor, directed by Mahboob Khan and the songs by Majrooh Sultanpuri. This larger than life poster adorned a bright red wall painted for Sita as a special gift by partner Seema to and for her communist humsafar and love, Sitaram. Kahwa and then tea was served graciously to all (daughter Akhila, son Danish and daughter-in law Swati) as we sat and shared the moments of loss as Pinarayi Vijayan, chief minister of Kerala, much later Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh (remember Sita was the Andhra boy who entered Jawaharlal Nehru University-JNU and became the student union president in 1978) and so many other political figures (even from the ruling dispensation) paid homage. Comrade Brinda Karat was staunchly by the family’s side both last Friday and through the weeks of care at AIMS, Delhi where he had been admitted on August 19 with a pneumonia like infection. There was disbelief and loss and as always a shared camaraderie and many precious conversations.

The next day at the party office was different, yet similar. Here was a different homage, formal, rich with the presence of so many special names from the political and intellectual firmament but it was also one large family. A large, large gathering from the morning till 3 p.m. when the final march began from AKG Bhavan to 14 Ashoka Road, the CPI-M office and finally to AIMS where Sita said goodbye must have touched 25,000. Young people, party affiliated and not, were there in significant numbers. It was not the numbers however but the shared common emotion of loss and belonging that were tangible. District committee members of the party from states across the country recounted how this man, who represented this party and organisation to the world (Sita headed the International Department of the CPI-M) and within India, across regions who spoke Bengali as much as his mother tongue Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi-Urdu apart from fine English was one of them, a comrade who had no airs, who was not just accessible but understood the value of each woman and man in this giant structure. To feel this tangible quality of what Sita was that day in the hot and sweaty mandap outside Gol Market is something I do not think one will see too often, again. His close colleagues Muralidhar, SN, yaar NK Sharma stood some distance away bewildered, unable to face the loss. Danish his second adored son quietly went up and paid homage to his father in the office, the office of the general secretary of the party, where Sita had sat, after some tussle and pulls, since 2015.

Sita’s personal life with Seema in their home and beyond reflected the openness and flexibility of him as a person, the staunch communist ideologue with a generous and practical pragmatic bent that deeply believed that the rich nuances and diversity of India’s coalition politics was not just a pragmatic necessity but possibly, the best way for an inclusive and representative government. His mentor, the wily Sardar of the party, Harkishen Singh Surjeet, groomed Sita well in the dos and don’ts of building consensus. We are too vast, diverse, bonded yet different for any structural rigidity to successfully bind us. The bonds that bind must be – like at the time of India’s struggle for freedom – bows of common cause with arrows that focus on all kinds of oppression, gender, caste and communal driven. These too must evolve with the times and technologies of the day. Language of the young laced with the rich learnings of our positive past is something that Sita respected and we must too.

Not a day has passed since that day, September 12 that I have not thought of Seema, and Sita often. It is a bruising sort of pain. Especially when I think back to that day, April 22, 2021 when the family lost their elder son, Ashish (Bhiku) Yechury to Covid-19. The grace and stoic courage with which he, Swati, Indrani Mazumdar, Seema, Akhila and Danish bore that loss is rare to see. It was the same grace that was evident on September 13-14. Bonded again in quiet and dignified grief, one heart-breaking moment was when Indrani said to me, “how tragically similar the way both Sitaram and Bhiku left us; now they are both gone.”

His dear wife and life partner Seema, a professional colleague and friend will bear the loss with her customary courage and shrugging, biting humour even as she tears up in unbearable grief. The loss will remain a constant void. The dignified threads of love and sharing with all three children will mitigate the difficult passing. Apologies for this additional dose of sobriety and sadness but it is impossible to pen this piece without reflecting and sharing how unfair it has been, for the Chisti-Yechury-Mazumdars to live through this twice. The loss and pain of a loved one’s aching departure.

For Bhiku, at Delhi’s Sunder Nursery, loved ones have dedicated benches to their beloved and lost ones (benches trigger nostalgia, anticipation and also, an inscription becomes an epitaph of belonging). Here we have, this family who has dedicated two benches to “beloved Bhiku” (Ashish Yechury). One of the inscription reads: You left us bereft but with much to discover of the season and the times captured by your camera…And the quirky touch that remains forever you. The second one, also dedicated to Ashish Yechury, ends with a poem by Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo: “So, here you are too foreign for home, too foreign for here. Never enough for both.” Both are, as I said before, in the loving memory of Ashish Yechury.

And then I think, in how many Indian and world cities, Delhi first of course, will benches be dedicated and inscribed to Comrade Sitaram Yechury? His footprints left imprints near and far, and in each of these locales, to that bench that will inscribe, deep affection, loss and love at his too early parting.

Fare thee well comrade Sita, Au Revoir.

Teesta

[1] Sitaram Yechury’s writings and speeches figured regularly and often in both Communalism Combat and Sabrangindia.For example https://sabrangindia.in/ban-private-armies-of-gau-rakshaks-by-govt-order-central-state-sitaram-yechury/; https://sabrangindia.in/a-multi-religious-multi-cultural-nation-state-like-india-must-stay-aloof-from-religion-sitaram-yechury/

Related:

‘You left us a decade too soon, when India needed its body healed and soul rejuvenated’: a farewell to comrade Sitaram Yechury

A life dedicated to idealism of inclusive anti caste India

How Do I Say Goodbye to a Comrade I Have Known For 50 Years?

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