The Caravan Magazine

16/01/2025

From the river to the sea, of settler sewage contaminating the valleys of the occupied West Bank, Palestine is not yet free. Millions of cubic metres of untreated wastewater from the illegal hilltop settlements pour into the land. Another delusional question: “Are you friends with any Israelis—is there any way to coexist?” This question implies it is a matter of reconciliation, a resolution over difference—erasure of the decades of systemic violence, erasure of the unlevel playing field of settler colonialism. The only interactions with Zionists are ammunition from the muzzles of their weapons, the surveillance towers blocking horizons and the poisonous stench of faeces suffocating Palestinian fields. Does it get any more intimate than that?

Read Maen Hammad's photo essay from Palestine, published in our January 2024 issue:
https://caravanmagazine.in/conflict/gaza-genocide-jenin-palestine-israel

16/01/2025

Janet Gyamfi, a 52-year-old cocoa farmer, meets with other farmers affected by illegal gold mining, locally known as galamsey, in the Samreboi community of western Ghana on 26 February 2024.

The land suffers, and the groundwater is contaminated. As the crisis deepens, consumers across the world sense its faintest tremors whenever they pick up a bar of chocolate and find the price has increased.

Read the photo essay here: https://caravanmagazine.in/agriculture/cocoa-chocolate-climate-change-mining-gold-ghana-colonialism-francis-kokoroko

Photographs by Francis Kokoroko / Reuters
Text By Aranya

16/01/2025

During the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Jharkhand Chaupal made dozens of posts extolling the Modi government’s achievements and explaining the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto. The page really came into its own, however, during the campaign for the Jharkhand assembly election at the end of the year. By August, five regional pages with similar names and content had sprung up: Ranchi Chaupal, Hazaribagh Chaupal, Palamu Chaupal, Santhal Pargana Chaupal and Chaibasa Chaupal. They were part of a vast network of “shadow accounts” that make propaganda for the BJP without disclosing any affiliation to the party. Often masquerading as news platforms, these accounts spend large amounts of money to boost their reach, saturating social-media feeds with divisive, hate-filled content.

Such disinformation violated both the model code of conduct as well as Meta’s policies against hate speech. However, even as the Election Commission failed to act against BJP leaders, including Modi, who employed similar rhetoric on the campaign trail, the shadow accounts fell outside its purview altogether, since they were not explicitly connected to the party. Meta has also failed to crack down on such violations—during the Lok Sabha election, one report found, it approved over a dozen ads that incited violence against Muslims. The report noted that these ads “were created based upon real hate speech and disinformation prevalent in India, underscoring the capacity of social media platforms to amplify existing harmful narratives.”

The BJP’s “land jihad” campaign evidently failed to gain traction among Jharkhand’s Adivasis, with the party winning just one seat reserved for the Scheduled Tribes and the ruling coalition securing a two-thirds majority in the assembly. However, the sheer scale of the activity by these shadow accounts points to a gap between regulatory frameworks and enforcement, as well as an apparent indifference among social-media platforms to the impact of their policies. In an electoral field that is heavily tilted in favour of the BJP, such accounts have the potential to undermine the democratic process.

Read Ryan Thomas's report on how shadow accounts on Meta spread BJP propaganda in Jharkhand:
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/shadow-accounts-meta-bjp-propaganda-jharkhand

16/01/2025

Zia-ur-Rahman Barq, the Lok Sabha MP from Sambhal, whose Muslim residents presently face a Hindu right-wing campaign backed by police brutality and a hostile administration, said that the BJP-led state government had framed a case against him for speaking for his people. The violence in Sambhal first flared up on 19 November, when Muslims protested against a court-ordered survey of the Shahi Jama Masjid, a local sixteenth-century mosque, following a petition claiming the mosque was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple. Barq also raised the issue of the arrest of the mosque’s cleric, who had simply been delivering the azan through a loudspeaker. Another Muslim legislator from the state, Imran Masood, said that “Muslims’ condition has become such that, if they stayed indoors, rioters would kill them, and if they stepped out, the police would kill them.” The Kairana MP Iqra Choudhary accused the state government of targeting Muslim traders through a discriminatory diktat that temporarily forced Muslim traders to put up a signboard revealing their religious identity.

Read Sagar's notes on how the minority legislators rued the erosion of the Constitution under the Modi government:
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/minority-dalit-adivasi-sikh-anglo-indian-parliament-constitution-anniversary-modi-reservation

16/01/2025

Vrinda Agarwal, a doctoral student of art history who worked with BN Goswamy, thinks of his art historical practice as having “an object-based approach” that he thought students were moving away from, that they were not really seeing. “He was not as much a theoretical person, which a lot of American academia does not appreciate,” Agarwal said. Theoretical propositions and jargon were anathema to Goswamy’s thinking and, therefore, his writing. The art historian Preeti Bahadur Ramaswamy, who studied under Goswamy, recalled how he would always come into the classroom and ask, about a painting, “‘What does this work mean to you? Speak about it.’ It was always about responding to the work and taking it from there,” she told me. “Data, material, period, style, et cetera, is always there. But you need to engage with the work of art first. Find a point of entry into the work of art. The rest will follow. It is a kind of levitating.” Looking is its own form of rigour.

But uneasy questions linger. When we interpret and theorise an object—say, a painting, or a film, or a book—how far do we go before we can no longer see it? Before we realise our interpretation has dislodged itself from the object? On the flip side, how much does immersion into the work of art, which many call “romantic” and Ahuja calls “valorizing the experience of art,” render the reading oversaturated, overwrought?

Read Prathyush Parasuraman's essay on BN Goswamy’s strategies of seeing:
https://caravanmagazine.in/books/bn-goswamy-strategies-seeing

16/01/2025

| There were further allegations of voter suppression in the by-election. An investigation by Newslaundry found that over a third of the voting booths in the constituency had seen their turnout drop by at least fifteen percentage points as compared to the 2019 general election and Barq’s 2022 victory, with a dip of over forty points in 44 booths, two of which did not record any votes at all. There were videos of police barricading one polling booth and demanding to see the credentials of Muslim voters, in contravention of regulations—similar reports had been widespread during the general election. The SP president, Akhilesh Yadav, called it the “most distorted form of electoral politics,” while his counterpart in the Bahujan Samaj Party, Mayawati, announced that her party would no longer contest by-elections unless the Election Commission took measures to prevent fake voting.

After the violence of 24 November, Akhilesh alleged that it had been orchestrated to divert attention from the “loot of votes” in Kundarki. Ramesh Singh Raghav, the advocate commissioner appointed by the civil court to lead the survey, however, said that they had had to work around the election. On 19 November, he said, the team had wanted to resume its survey the following day, but the administration refused because it was polling day. “The administration followed due diligence,” he added, “and informed the respondents and issued summons a day before the survey.”

Read Shahid Tantray and Sunil Kashyap's report on how an atmosphere of fear persists in the wake of the Sambhal violence:
https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/surveyors-of-destruction

Or watch the video report on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/gQOtI3njJY8

16/01/2025

| “While India possesses a very large government machinery whose responsibilities range from research to the management and preservation of India’s monuments, the juggernaut among departments and directorates of archaeology and museums is the ASI that is attached to the Union Ministry of Culture,” the historian Nayanjot Lahiri writes in her book Monuments Matter. Today, the ASI is responsible for looking over the maintenance of close to four thousand monuments or structures. Roughly a third of the ministry’s funds, Lahiri notes, go to the ASI.

The ASI was always imagined as a neutral body with technical expertise, where archaeologists conducted excavations, analysed their findings, published research papers and added to the academic understanding of ancient India. Its mandate is neutrality—it is expected to stand above religion and politics, and rely only on verifiable, archaeological evidence, in order to provide a true picture of the subcontinent’s history.

This, however, has not always been the case. The ASI’s history includes archaeologists who have been accused of partisanship, serving the BJP’s political projects or acting in their own interests. BR Mani was one. His report on Ayodhya had invited criticism from historians such as Irfan Habib, who noted that the ASI had been less than careful with animal remains at the Ayodhya site, which could have ruled out the existence of a temple.

Read Eram Agha's report on how the Archaeological Survey of India fortifies Hindutva History:
https://caravanmagazine.in/history/asi-archaeological-survey-india-hindutva-history

15/01/2025

Over the past decade, the ECI has been criticised for allowing the BJP to escape scrutiny, even as the party hollowed out practically every democratic institution in the country. Two elections will have been conducted while the Modi government has been in power, and, in both, the ECI has been a little more than a bystander to its excesses. It has permitted the government to target the opposition and use financial resources to its advantage, while restricting the spending capabilities of other parties, and in many instances looked away as various BJP leaders openly violated the model code of conduct. On the other hand, it has acted hastily when it comes to other political parties, such as when it pushed for the disqualification of 20 AAP legislators. It has set campaigning dates, and departed from convention, in instances that have suited the BJP. It has consistently dismissed reports and complaints about electronic voting machines and demands for measures to ensure fairness and transparency. This has contributed to a precipitous decline in public trust in the electoral system. And, more worryingly, it has severely compromised democracy by failing to be the watchdog it needed to be.

Read Eram Agha's report from April 2024, on the taming of the Election Commission of India:
https://caravanmagazine.in/government/taming-election-commission

15/01/2025

A certain awkwardness is evident in Mohan Bhagwat’s relationship with Narendra Modi.

According to some senior RSS leaders, the two have not had a personal meeting since 2014—except on a few public occasions such as on 5 August 2020, when Modi and Bhagwat sat side by side to lay the foundation of the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Meanwhile, Dattatreya Hosabale, considered Modi’s man in the RSS, was elevated to the post of general secretary in 2021. The prospect of Hosabale’s elevation had earlier been resisted by a section of the RSS. Once Modi came to power again in 2019 with a much larger mandate, the opposition to Hosabale’s election died down. Hosabale is now positioned to enable Modi’s diktat with greater ease within the RSS.

“There is no question about who is in charge,” Ramesh Shiledar, a former pracharak and a contemporary of Bhagwat, said. The RSS leadership used to have a major say in how its cadre would be used during elections, as well as on key organisational decisions of the BJP. This is no longer the case. “Sangh office-bearers rarely decide for themselves when it comes to political matters,” Shiledar said. “This change has happened because of the weak and short-sighted leadership of the Sangh under the present sarsanghchalak.” According to the senior RSS leader, “It’s not Narendra Modi or Amit Shah who is to be blamed. It is just that the regulating force that the Sangh had been has become non-operative. Mohanji should have resisted it. But he is so clueless that he has gleefully facilitated the shift.”

Since its founding, RSS hagiographies have accorded sarsanghchalaks, such as KB Hedgewar and MS Golwalkar, a larger-than-life place in the Hindutva pantheon for their ideological influence over the Parivar. Bhagwat’s legacy, in comparison, is likely to be more underwhelming.

Read Dhirendra K Jha's report from November 2022, on how, in Modi's shadow, the Sangh leader is no longer supreme:
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/bhagwat-modi-supreme

15/01/2025

| In many ways, the military has become a willing accomplice in Modi’s political project. By all appearances, the armed forces benefit from the more aggressive and in-your-face nationalism we have witnessed since 2014. A professional military with colonial origins, which had no role to play in the freedom struggle, has shifted towards showcasing nationalism as a major attribute of its functioning. This is entirely different from the anticolonial nationalism that a newly independent India espoused. The deep selection of the military’s top leaders and their future re-employment by the Modi government have further created incentives for the armed forces’ loyalty to the cause. The standard norm of civilian and executive control of the military, painstakingly established by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is now misused for political gain.

Modi himself has made good use of the armed forces to burnish his own image. He has rarely wasted an opportunity to dress up in military fatigues, has regularly invoked fallen soldiers to deflect from disastrous political decisions and has fashioned himself as a tough nemesis to India’s enemies. Meanwhile, India stands in a precarious position with China, while Pakistan continues to foment trouble in Kashmir. In Manipur, an ethnic cleansing has been underway for nearly nine months. Modi has not visited even once, and the army has been hamstrung in its efforts to restore order. But Modi’s public image as a strongman on top of all security issues remains undiminished.

None of this would be possible without the exalted status occupied by the armed forces in Indian society. The clientelist relationship between the military and civilian leadership, if seen in isolation, serves only one explanation for how longstanding democratic norms have been violated to align the military to the ruling party’s ideology and political objectives. But this view ignores Indian civil society, which completes the trifecta in the relationship involving the military and the political leadership. The media—including journalism, films and sports—has played a critical intermediary role in bringing the soldier and nationalistic values closer to the public. Since 2014, the Modi government’s investment in the shaping of public sentiment through propagandist films and television shows—which make heroes of the Hindu Right as well as the armed forces—has allowed the creation of narratives that hide serious blunders by both.

Read Sushant Singh's report from our February 2024 issue, on how the military fell in line with Modi’s political project:
https://caravanmagazine.in/security/military-modi-political-project

15/01/2025

On 12 January 2017, three days before , Lance Naik Yagya Pratap Singh, then posted with the Forty-Second Infantry Brigade of the Indian Army, in Dehradun, uploaded a video on Facebook. It soon went viral, and was picked up by news channels. The mobile-phone footage showed the soldier in camouflage fatigues, facing the camera with squared shoulders, his image blurry but his voice sharp and clear.

In June the previous year, Singh said in the video, he had addressed a letter to the prime minister, the president, the defence minister, the home minister and the Supreme Court. The letter called for an end to the practice of assigning soldiers to officers as sahayaks—attendants. He described the practice as exploitative. Soldiers trained to fight the enemy, he said, should not be made to polish their officers’ shoes or walk their dogs.

"The Manual of Indian Military Law," a compilation of all legislation governing the army, does not contain the word “sahayak.” After his retirement, Singh filed a right-to-information request with army headquarters, asking how a sahayak was defined, and whether tasks such as polishing officers’ shoes, walking their dogs or washing their cars were considered part of a sahayak’s duties.

In response, the army gave Singh a copy of a 2007 circular issued to all its commands. “Sahayak is a soldier who in addition to his duties provides the essential support to authorized Officers and JCOs”—junior commissioned officers—“in both peace and war to enable them to fully attend to their assigned duty,” the circular said. It defended the practice by saying that a sahayak is a “comrade-in-arms” to the officer to whom he is assigned, “symbolizing trust, respect, warmth, confidence and interdependence, which are the fundamentals of relations between the leaders and the led.”

The circular provided a list of activities for which sahayaks could not be used under any circumstances: serving separated families and retired officers, as caddies at golf courses or for retrieving balls at tennis courts, as unauthorised sentries and guards, and for menial household jobs. “There is an urgent and continuous need to impress upon all concerned that sahayaks being combatant soldiers under no circumstances are employed on a job, which is not in conformity with the dignity and self-respect of a soldier,” it added.

The circular had little effect. In 2009, two years after it was issued, the parliamentary standing committee on defence reported that, during interactions with jawans, it had found “that some of the soldiers are deployed to work as Sahayaks with the families of the officers.” When the committee put this observation to an army representative deposing before it, the witness responded that they “would have been attending the work at home due to reverence. He is not supposed to do it technically.” Noting that the air force and navy have done away with the sahayak system, the report said that the “shameful practice” lowered jawans’ self-esteem and “should have no place in independent India.” It asked the government to end the use of sahayaks in the army, as well as in the paramilitary and police forces.

Read Sagar's report from March 2020, on why the army's colonial and exploitative sahayak system must go:
https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/sahayak-system-must-go

14/01/2025

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14/01/2025

At a cocoa farm in the town of Samreboi, in western Ghana, a car sits abandoned, weeds growing in its dusty interiors. The farm itself has been destroyed by illegal gold-mining—a fate it shares with many cocoa plantations across Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, two West African countries that accounted for over sixty percent of the global supply of cacao beans till 2022. In Samreboi, Janet Gyamfi, a 52-year-old cocoa farmer and single parent, had hoped to pass on her plot, with nearly six thousand cacao trees, to her children. Today, fewer than a dozen trees are left standing. “This farm was my only means of survival,” Gyamfi told Reuters, breaking down at the sight of pools of cyanide-tainted, mud-coloured waste water that the miners left in the wake of their small-scale operations, locally referred to as galamsey.

Read the entire photo essay here: https://caravanmagazine.in/agriculture/cocoa-chocolate-climate-change-mining-gold-ghana-colonialism-francis-kokoroko

Photographs by Francis Kokoroko / Reuters
Text By Aranya

The land suffers, the groundwater is contaminated. As the crisis deepens, consumers across the world sense its faintest tremors whenever they pick up a bar of chocolate and find the price has increased.

14/01/2025

As the Election Commission failed to act against BJP leaders, including Modi, who employed similar rhetoric on the campaign trail, the shadow accounts fell outside its purview altogether, since they were not explicitly connected to the party. Meta has also failed to crack down on such violations—during the Lok Sabha election, one report found, it approved over a dozen ads that incited violence against Muslims. The report noted that these ads “were created based upon real hate speech and disinformation prevalent in India, underscoring the capacity of social media platforms to amplify existing harmful narratives.”

The BJP’s “land jihad” campaign evidently failed to gain traction among Jharkhand’s Adivasis, with the party winning just one seat reserved for the Scheduled Tribes and the ruling coalition securing a two-thirds majority in the assembly. However, the sheer scale of the activity by these shadow accounts points to a gap between regulatory frameworks and enforcement, as well as an apparent indifference among social-media platforms to the impact of their policies. In an electoral field that is heavily tilted in favour of the BJP, such accounts have the potential to undermine the democratic process.

Read Ryan Thomas's report on how shadow accounts on Meta spread BJP propaganda in Jharkhand:

Often masquerading as news platforms, these accounts spend large amounts of money to boost their reach, saturating social-media feeds with divisive, hate-filled content.

14/01/2025

INDIA Alliance MPs and BJP MPs protest at the Makar Dwar of the Parliament in New Delhi on 19 December 2024. The Alliance demanded an apology and resignation of home minister Amit Shah over his remarks on BR Ambedkar in the Rajya Sabha.

Read Sagar's notes on how the minority legislators rued the erosion of the Constitution under the Modi government:

At the discussion on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Constitution, at least a dozen MPs representing religious and linguistic minorities, Dalits, Adivasis and Backward Classes made appeals for constitutional protection against the Modi government’s illegal actions over the last decade.

14/01/2025

BN Goswamy calling the rasa theory “elusive” and “inscrutable” feels like his defence of something that does not quite fit. On the one hand, rasa refers to a thing in the text itself, its essence (“a work of art possessing rasa”). On the other, it also refers to the experience of the text (“the experience of rasa”). Bharata and later commentators fixate on how not everyone can attain the rasa experience, that the mind must be prepared to receive the experience, must bring to the work of art an utsaha—enthusiasm. So now, you cannot definitively say whether or not a work has rasa. The theory is rendered fragile, indifferent to the grip of fact.

According to the rasa theory, is there a way to speak of the artwork without speaking of the spectator? The philosopher Bence Nanay notes that the rasa theory, unlike the Western fixation of aesthetic judgment, is immersed in ideas of aesthetic experience, adding that “judgements would in fact work against [the rasa].” Rasa theory, then, creates the illusion of judgement when, in fact, none is possible. The Western audience, more attuned to judgment as a form of criticism, was joyously perplexed by Goswamy’s organisation of the works by rasas. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times noted that it would drive “purists and rationalists” mad. Imagine, the reviewer writes, “a French 19th-Century painting next to a Spanish 16th-Century sculpture next to an American 20th-Century assemblage, just because they all had to do with, say, heroism.”

Prathyush Parasuraman got the sense from the review that the exhibition slipped by because of its rendering of India as “exotic”—that Indian art cannot be spoken of with the rigor and expectations held for Western art. Did Goswamy unknowingly participate in this culture?

Read the essay on BN Goswamy’s strategies of seeing:
https://caravanmagazine.in/books/bn-goswamy-strategies-seeing

14/01/2025

| The petitioners in the Shahi Jama Masjid case claim that the mosque was built by the Mughal emperor Babar, in 1529, after he ordered the demolition of a Harihar temple. They cite an 1879 report by the colonial archaeologist ACL Carlleyle, who was an assistant to the first director general of the ASI. Ramesh Singh Raghav, the advocate commissioner appointed by the civil court to lead the survey, said that, according to the petitioners, crucial evidence could have been lost if the survey was not immediately carried out.

Several colonial accounts have disputed the theory that the mosque was built by Babar, or even during his reign. In its entry on Sambhal, the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer of India Volume 22 noted that the town “contains a mound marking the ruins of an old fort. No building stands on this except a mosque, claimed by the Hindus as a Vaishnava temple, but in reality a specimen of early Pathan architecture in which Hindu materials were probably used. The mosque contains an inscription recording that it was raised by Babar, but doubts have been cast on the authenticity of this.”

A gazetteer of the Moradabad district, published three years later, mentioned litigation over ownership of the mosque. Carlleyle, it added, appeared to have been “influenced by the arguments” of the Hindu petitioners in the case. “The claim of the Hindus was of course rejected in the civil courts, and it is clear that Mr. Carleylle [sic] could not have seen the very interesting documents, going back to the days of Jahangir, now in possession of the guardians of the mosque.” The gazetteer argued that it was “certainly curious” that a temple would have survived at the site until Babar’s reign, since Sambhal had previously been a capital of Sikandar Lodi, “a noted iconoclast.” It agreed with the Imperial Gazetteer that the structure resembled Pathan architecture and “might well be older than Babar.”

Mohammad Usman, a historian based in Sambhal, said that the mosque’s origins lie in a platform raised during the Tughlaq period. Mahmud Shah II, the last sultan of Delhi from the dynasty, “stayed in Sambhal for five years after Timur’s attack on Delhi,” in 1398, he said. “He built this platform during that period.” Sikandar Lodi, who became sultan in 1489, “built a small mosque” at the site, Usman added. “Babar gave it the status of Jama Masjid, and Humayun completed it.” There is an existing Harihar temple in Sambhal, he said, which had been funded by Aurangzeb when he was governor of the province.

Read Shahid Tantray and Sunil Kashyap's report on how an atmosphere of fear persists in the wake of the Sambhal violence:
https://caravanmagazine.in/crime/surveyors-of-destruction

14/01/2025

The Archaeological Survey of India was established by the colonial government in 1861. Over the next few decades, its first director general, Alexander Cunningham, conducted extensive surveys of much of northern and central India, especially Buddhist monuments and sites. Cunningham is said to have spent personal funds on these projects, as the ASI suffered a financial crunch. In the early 1900s, it was codified as a statutory body under the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act. Some of its most groundbreaking discoveries were made under the director general John Marshall, a young, Cambridge-educated archaeologist who had experience in excavations. Marshall led the ASI for over two decades, and it was under him that the Indus Valley civilisation was discovered, at sites such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

The organisation was dealt a blow with Partition, since the most iconic sites of the Indus Valley civilisation are now in Pakistan. Many mosques and shrines were damaged during communal violence, while other monuments, such as Delhi’s Purana Qila, became massive refugee camps. Ancient artefacts were quite literally split down the middle, between the two countries. The ASI’s post-Independence leadership, which decided to seek out more Harappan sites, also became the largest conservationist body responsible for protecting and maintaining Indian heritage—a role it continues to fulfil today.

Read Eram Agha's report on how the Archaeological Survey of India fortifies Hindutva History:
https://caravanmagazine.in/history/asi-archaeological-survey-india-hindutva-history