In conversation with Kunal Kamra on Adivasi rights

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DeNNqzvl6M&t=185s

Post-mortem of a PIL

I am writing this blog for my own satisfaction, after the Supreme Court disposed of our public interest litigation without proper hearing, on May 15 2025. We had filed the cases in 2007. This post must be read in conjunction with my chapters on litigating against counterinsurgency in my book, The Burning Forest, which deal in more detail with the 2011 judgement. 

Umar Khalid, the Historian

Muslims in India, somewhat like Adivasis, are always being told to ‘integrate’ and to join the ‘mainstream’. The difference with Muslims and Adivasis is that the former are seen as unwilling to be ‘mainstreamed’ and the latter as incapable of it. The assumption is always that the ‘main-stream’ is an upper-caste Hindu river, singularly flowing without any input from minority streams.  At the same time, when Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis fill the jails disproportionately and are denied bail when others get it for the same offence, then there is no admission of how the mainstream has excluded them. 

When a Muslim like Umar Khalid crosses boundaries, there is a further panic attack. A young articulate Muslim man who does not wear a skull cap, who is an atheist, who did his Phd from JNU in history on Adivasis in Singbhum is seen as an anomaly in the segregated world the RSS wants to create. The attempt is then to reduce him to just one aspect of his identity – so that whatever else he does or says or writes, in the end he must be seen merely as a Muslim, and by extension, violent, anti-national and a threat to the “Indian mainstream.” So dangerous that he has been in jail for three years without bail. It is not surprising that so many of the young people who were arrested for the anti-CAA protests were Muslim students at India’s leading universities. 

Amit Shah's 'Bhima Koregaon Model' Used For Anti-CAA Protests

The recent arrest of Jamia student Asif Iqbal Tanha and two JNU students, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal, both activists with Pinjra Tod, shows that the Union home ministry is convinced the ‘Bhima Koregaon model’ works and must be replicated.

What is this model? You start with a few arrests, for instance, the first round of the Bhima Koregaon five or the Jamia students Safoora Zargar and Meeran Haider. Then you widen the net indiscriminately to build up a picture of an immense threat to the nation from a nexus of Dalits and Maoists, Islamists and Marxists or whatever. In actuality, the major threat this government fears is the Constitution, in whose name all these activists have worked, and which the ruling party wants to gut.

As with the Bhima Koregaon struggle which was a symbol of Dalit assertion against neo-Brahminism, the BJP government is trying to completely change the narrative around the anti-CAA protests. At least six clear motives appear to be at work in both cases.

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

“Go back to India and cover every statue of Gandhi so that he doesn't have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150^th anniversary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha

Nitya Ramakrishnan (Advocate) and Nandini Sundar (Sociologist)      

We visited the Kashmir Valley between 5^th and 9^th October 2019. We spoke to a cross section of people in three different regions.

No end in sight for India's bloody Maoist conflict

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/05/sight-india-bloody-maoist-conflict-170508120738882.html

On 24 April, 2017, 25 men from the paramilitary central reserve police force, India’s main counterinsurgency force in the central Indian war theatre, were killed in a Maoist ambush.  Predictably, the media outrage, the solutions offered by security pundits and the statement issued by the Maoists had a strong sense of déjà vu. 76 men from another battalion of the CRPF had been ambushed and killed in this very stretch of Sukma district near Tadmetla in Chhattisgarh on April 6, 2010.

In the seven years between then and now, there have been other CRPF deaths – for instance, 12 CRPF men were killed barely a month previously on 11 March 2017; there have been unmarked deaths of Maoist cadres, and above all, there has been a relentless assault on the human rights of adivasi or indigenous villagers across the region.

Toward an Anthropology of Culpability.

“Toward an Anthropology of Culpability.” In American Ethnologist, 31 (2), 2004, 145-163.

Anthropologists concerned with political violence and justice must engage in a comparative examination of culpability for past and ongoing crimes. When powerful states use reparations, truth commissions, or war crime tribunals to attribute culpability to others, including their past selves, they often, paradoxically, legitimize ongoing injustices. As against culturalist explanations for mass violence, which set up a hierarchy of cultures, we need to look at the institutional sites through which public morality is constructed. This approach is illustrated with reference to the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, India, in 2002 and to the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003. 

keywords: culpability, comparative anthropology, reparations, genocide, war, India, United States

The full text of the article is available at: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103046/Towards-an-Anthropology-of-Culpability