Among those who fell to police bullets in Sipajhar yesterday was 12-y-o Shaikh Farid. The Aadhaar card was found in his pocket. He'd gone to the post office to collect it.
In July, the Assam govt released a list of people who had died in detention. The list of 25 people included a 45-days-old child and an 85-year-old partially immobile man. I met the families of six of them. Almost all of them claim to have documents to prove that they are Indians.
Gujarat has always fascinated me. How does a state so obsessed with dhandho reconcile its emotive support for Hindutva with substantial economic setbacks? In the last three months, I travelled across the state to try and try and understand that.
A thread
I have been a journalist for around 7 years now. People tell me terrible bigoted stuff all the time. I rarely get shaken by the act of reporting, but these interviews not only shook me, they left me cold and fearful.
Assam state govt employes behind the barricades meant to protect the Secretariat joining protesters on the other side with "go back BJP" slogans
#CitizenshipAmmendmentBill2019
Three dead, according the local accounts, as Assam govt's eviction drive in Darrang district's Sipajhar turns violent. Some horrific visuals coming in.
Ajmat had stepped out today morning with his e-rickshaw when he was accosted and asked his name. As soon as they heard a Muslim name, the mob pounced on him. He ended up with 52 stitches in his head and 6 in his leg.
He was supposed to get married on March 21.
“Why does the media show only one side?” complained Mehdul, a butcher. “All day they are showing videos of Muslims pelting stones, what about the fact that Bajrang Dal people came with arms?”
Akhil Gogoi has been discharged by the NIA court in the last pending case against him relating to the anti-CAA protests. If the state doesn't file a new case today, he is a free man.
ICMR develops test kit. Transfers technology for mass production to a Gujarat-based company. No bids invited, no competitors approached.
Neither the health ministry nor the company would answer specific questions on nature/scale of arrangement
In Gujarat’s Khambhat, the bulldozer continues to be in action -- quietly, out of national media spotlight. On April 28, the administration bulldozed 17 godowns -- which have stood for 10-15 yrs -- all of them owned by Muslims.
Cong calls for strict action against hate speech in BJP-run Haridwar. In Chhattisgarh, its leaders organise similar conclave with Hindu Rashtra as agenda where a speaker exhorts crowd to kill. Senior Cong leader from same stage thanks him for his "sermon".
Now that Twitter activism has led to dog meat being banned, I wonder how many of those upset by the "brutality" against dogs would also write to the Centre demanding the repeal of AFSPA that has brutalised generations of humans in the state.
This is urgent. You can help make history by sending an email tonight to csngl
@nic
.in saying Nagaland must stop dog markets, dog restaurants and smuggling of dogs into the state. Eating dog meat is inhuman, not just illegal. The issue comes before the cabinet tomorrow.
Called district hospitals in all 38 districts in Bihar.
33 confirmed they'd received ventilators last year.
In 25, ventilators are still not up and running.
Because the state govt has failed to hire docs and support staff in more than a year.
The first in a three-part series on those: deaths: a new-born child and an 85-year-old man. The child's mother and the old man's son were subsequently declared Indian citizens.
The final story was about a Bengali Hindu tea-seller and an Adivasi tea worker. Both languished in jail for more than 5 years in the detention centre before dying, one of cancer.
The soldiers continued to fire at him and his companions despite his vehicle’s bonnet bearing the BJP flag. “They should have at least seen that...how will the world run if the Hindustani Army kills civilians like this?”
No amount of spin can change this: India's oxygen requirement has outpaced production; we are dipping into the last of our reserves. The only way out is to import but tragically we're running out of even cylinders & storage tanks.
I look at the numbers.
Everything is “complex” till you are interned in a detention centre. Also, for the sake of complexity, please don’t tell that story of a 45-day old child dying in a detention centre because the court didn’t bother to check his mother’s documents.
I have managed to access Assam's official all cause-mortality data from 2018-2020. August to November saw 27,765 "excess deaths" compared to the average for the same period in the previous two years -- 30 times the official Covid toll from the period.
I began in south Saurashtra with the groundnut and cotton farmers of Rajkot, Amreli and Junagadh. Once profitable cash crops, but returns are increasingly diminishing.
My last piece for Scroll is a long dispatch from the war torn border town of Moreh in Manipur.
I end where I started seven years ago: in the North East, a place I also call home.
Next, I headed to the central districts of Kheda and Anand – Gujarat’s tobacco country. GST on the previously untaxed raw tobacco had broken the back of local farmers.
In adjoining tribal-dominated Narmada district, the PM’s pet project, the grand Statue of Unity, was supposed to change the lives of the area’s residents. But the tourism industry has largely left out the local Adivasis.
I spent Diwali in Surat, India’s textile hub, and Gujarat’s commercial nerve-centre. Soaring inflation and unemployment has led to a massive decline in demand and profits plummeting.
I spent close to a week in Punjab recently and found a state raging with resentment against the Centre in general and PM Modi in particular. Most Punjabis not only support the ongoing protests, but are deeply invested in them.
Then I travelled to the state’s coast and stumbled upon a fascinating story of climate change and communism. Yet another tale of how climate change impacts the marginalised the most.
Yunus arrived from Hapur in the morning today looking for his 24-y-o brother Suleman, a daily-wage labourer. Sulemam was last seen by a relative yesterday, getting beaten up by 40-odd men at Karwal Nagar. Yunus found Suleman's dead body in the morgue.
No way to sugarcoat this anymore: NRC is an unmitigated disaster targeting the most vulnerable sections of society.
My dispatch from Barpeta and Baksa. via
@scroll_in
If learnt a lot while reporting and writing these stories. I hope you’ll find them insightful. If you do, pls consider contributing to our reporting fund to read more bipartisan ground reporting, really the backbone of journalism.
Assam's latest Covid-19 order issuing curbs allows gatherings upto 400 in open spaces and 100 in closed spaces, but insists that shop-owners should sanitise notes/coins before handing over to customers.
Telling of how much science informs policy even after more than a year.
Well known: Testing kits are in short supply.
Not so much: Even the ones available are being under-utilised because of restrictive testing norms.
I explain the science & politics of India's testing regime.
via
@scroll_in
Exclusive: The Mumbai trial court which had pronounced the original sentence had asked the Guj govt not to release the convicts -- an opinion that the Gujarat govt disregarded.
I made my way back to central Saurashtra. Here, in Surendranagar, I found that Dalit cow skinners’ incomes had taken a massive beating because India’s leather industry is struggling in the face of competition from China and Vietnam.
One more civilian shot dead in Mon, Nagaland in fresh violence today; another injured. Mid-afternoon, a crowd of 500-600 people allegedly barged inside the AR camp in the town, following which the paramilitary force's soldiers opened fire.
The district administration has repeatedly affirmed there's no communal angle -- only common sense -- but Indian TV anchors are hellbent on setting the country on fire.
@KDscribe
, Kaushik da, please advise your colleagues to exercise restraint.
#FloodJihad
?
1. Kabul Khan
2. Ripon Khan
3. Mithu Hussain Lashkar
4. Nazir Hussain Lashkar arrested by Cachar police on Assam Irrigation Department complaint of damaging dyke causing flooding of Silchar. Accused boasted on video.
Police investigations underway. More arrests soon.
Assam police make another arrest in the Sipajhar eviction case: a local farmer called Sarifuddin.
He was arrested from the Gauhati Medical College & Hospital last night where he was undergoing treatment for a bullet injury he'd received during the eviction drive on Sep 23.
No, the NRC doesn't have an inherent anti-Muslim bias and it's not a brainchild of the BJP.
Here I bust some myths about the process. The NRC is complex and requires careful understanding (to even criticise)
Remarkable and quite telling of how far we have slid that a governor ridicules a CM by calling him secular in an official communication.
via
@scroll_in
The virus has invaded hitherto largely insulated rural UP & despite the very apparent data dressing, the consequences are for all to see: people are dying by the dozen gasping for breath.
Most of these deaths are, of course, unaccounted.
From there, a long GSRTC bus ride took me to Mundra, the site of India’s biggest private port owned by the Adani group. The port and the SEZ had changed the lives of many locals, but also deprived others of their livelihoods.
The curfew continues and even broadband has been now snapped. Yet hundreds of people turned up for the funeral of Sam Stafford on Friday afternoon. 17-y-o Sam's face was blown up by a police bullet.
#CitizenshipAct
BJP's IT cell has insisted that India's decline was less dramatic than several other countries including the US.
But, of course, the facts are for all to see. The scale of economic contraction in India was bigger than almost any comparable country.
I am no regionalist, but it’s just incredible how all the resistance to amend India’s citizenship laws has come from the NE. Is abrogation of secularism in the frontier not reason enough to hit the streets in Delhi?
“The army comes at night, sometimes they don’t even have have police with them. First they cover the mosques so that an alarm cannot be raised there, then they raid. They come to beat up people, 12 am, 1 am at night.”
via
@scroll_in
Finally, a dispatch from the milk-producing districts of Banaskantha and Mehsana. Considered the economic engine of rural Gujarat, dairy farming, too, has fallen on hard times.
On Wednesday, the sniper bullet that killed Haokip came from somewhere around Phubala, minutes away from his old workplace: the Moirang police station.
On what it means to be a cop in Manipur now and the choices one makes in a all-consuming conflict.
Reporters and photojournalists across orgs have put their lives at risk to report the migrant crisis attributable in large parts to the culture of hero-worshipping.
Maybe a good time to learn a few lessons and stop perpetuating personality cults.
How a single journalist can make a difference!
@BDUTT
back to her basics and single handedly shown the nation the plight of the hapless poor when others thought they are dispensible!
Another long bus journey landed me in Palanpur, the original home of India’s diamond industry – but currently in a state of decay. Yet, few seemed to think the solution lay in the ballot box.
A lot of what I saw in Manipur didn't/couldn't make it to the reports I filed from there. This is a short personal essay to capture the madness that has descended upon the state -- and one can only hope it subsides soon.
Deterred by the farmers flying kites, the Haryana police seem to have ditched the drones and are now lobbing tear gas shells in the old school style.
The kites have all sorts of motifs: from Canada to Siddhu Moosewala
BJP mayor’s kin bought land for 20 lakh, sold to temple trust for 2.5 crore. Stellar story by
@sighyush
and
@Basantrajsonu
Can only hope big media follows up.
Assam has *banned* a TV show because a bunch of RW groups complained it promoted "love jihad" & was anti-Brahmin.
This after the groups issued rape threats to the show's lead actress.
via
@scroll_in
Manipuri nurses allege racial abuse in the streets of Guwahati.
“In Delhi, they don’t understand that people from North East and China are different, but in Guwahati at least they should understand. We feel so bad."
via
@scroll_in
I ran into Onkhomang one August afternoon. In the same village he was killed today. It was a brief encounter but it stayed with me for his cheerfulness and something he said. "We are all refugee police," he said laughing, as he and his team jumped into their Maruti Alto.
In district after district of Assam, a whole gamut of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti leaders have been kept behind the bars. Most face multiple cases with similar charges – if they are granted bail in one, they are arrested in another almost immediately.
He ranted against the PM and the CM. The police slapped a case of sedition. Court dismissed it, so the Manipur govt clamped down with an "alternative preventive measure”: detention under the National Security Act.
Have stayed quiet for long now, but it needs to be said: Assamese nationalism on Twitter is a toxic confluence of Hindu nationalism and regional parochialism intolerant of anything and anyone not toeing their line.
And fence sitters: remember they'll come after you too one day.
An FT member writes an official letter saying that his and his fellow colleagues' contribution should not go to TJ members, and "jehadi and jahil". This man will decide the fate of Assam's NRC rejects & can send people to detention. He now says he has withdrawn the letter.
It's incredible how much panic there is in the BJP camp considering it seemed headed for a clear majority all by itself barely a month ago. The polarisation did not work in the first phase and will likely backfire in the next two.
Breakung : Tamulpur’s BPF candidate Rongja Khungur Basumatary to withdraw candidature in a short while from now in presence of
@himantabiswa
. He will support the UPPL candidate. Basumatary was missing since this morning.
What's happening in Assam has got nothing to do with empowering marginalised indigenous landless folks.
If you identify yourself as Assamese & are cheering on the evictions, you don't give a fig about Assam. You just want to see one community on the mat.
BJP MLA Vungzagin Valte, who is from the Kuki community, was set upon by a mob and beaten up in Imphal while returning from a meeting with Chief Minister N Biren Singh’s office on Thursday.
On the last day of BJY, RG’s attire has finally changed: the T-shirt has made way to the pheran. But as the 150-day-long cross-country march ends, what has really changed on the ground? I retraced the yatra’s Hindi heartland leg to find out
A thread…
These people sold land and livestock to fight -- and *win* -- cases in foreigner' tribunals. Now, they have to do it all over again because the tribunal messed up its records. Even worse: they had no idea till I told them.
Academics, particularly those in the global South and without institutional affiliations, say it would be near-impossible to do what they do if not for the website.
via
@scroll_in
"Polling party hailed a passing vehicle, boarded it along with EVMs...without checking the ownership of the vehicle."
I like the whole no-phaltu-ka-baat tenor of this transaction. Gaadi mil gaya, baith jao bas.
Met some incredibly brave people over the last two weeks. They spent much of the lockdown getting grilled by the Delhi police for their belief that a secular India is worth fighting for.
This is their story, & in many ways, the story of today's India.
Seven years ago, I wrote scores of desperate emails to editors seeking a job. Few bothered replying to an engineering graduate with very little experience. Madhu got someone to call me the very next day and arrange an interview at NL.
Thank you Madhu for everything. 🙏
On Tuesday afternoon, as a visibly battered Gogoi waited for the judge to decide on the NIA's plea for custody, he spoke to me inside the courtroom about his politics and where he thinks the current agitation is heading.
It now appears that protesters did also carry out targetted attacks on houses and commercial establishments in non-Assamese localities in certain areas. In one such incident in Upper Assam’s Tinsukia town, a 70-year-old Adivasi man burned to death.
The rest of the country may have forgotten but Tripura's journos still light candles every evening demanding justice for slain journalists Sudip Datta Bhaumik and
Santanu Bhowmik.
If you are a dissenter, you risk being cast as a criminal. If you're a Muslim, you risk being criminalised by a slew of laws and policies that enshrine the govt’s Hindutva ideology.
3rd of a 5-part series on crime & punishment in Adityanath's UP
A blow-by-blow account of the events that led up to the blowout, the containment operation, and why it's taking so long to snuff out the leak. My report piecing all of that & more based on several interviews with OIL employees and independent experts.
is looking for a reporter (ideally based out of Guwahati) to cover the North East.
It's a super cool job where you can do great work and have lots of fun while doing it -- I can vouch for it 'coz I did it for 4.5 years.
APPLY!
If you're excited by news reports of India launching a Covid-19 vaccine by August 15, please hold your horses.
Doctors entrusted with conducting the trial say the timelines laid down by ICMR are unrealistic and make a mockery of science.
Home Minister Amit Shah to ANI: There is no need to debate this( pan-India NRC) as there is no discussion on it right now, PM Modi was right, there is no discussion on it yet either in the Cabinet or Parliament
Guy was a good reporter in 2022 because said the BJP under Yogi enjoyed the support of a wide range of social communities and people valued PM's welfare.
Guy is a bad reporter in 2023 because he showed BJP in Manipur failed to rein in ethnic militias.
@TweetinderKaul
The guy used to be a good reporter. I was pretty impressed with his coverage of UP 2022 polls. But i guess it is impossible to work at an agenda peddling outlet at Scroll and maintain one's neutrality.
Delighted to have received the recognition for a story I put in a lot of work for. As I said in my acceptance remarks last evening: gratitude to
@sharmasupriya
for always asking the right questions and
@tajmahalfoxtrot
for creating and nurturing a space for journalism like this.
We are excited to announce the winners of the
#ACJAwards
for Journalism 2022-23 across the three categories: investigative journalism, social impact journalism and photojournalism.
In Assam, people who do not pass this rather vague indigeneity test can be evicted as and when the government pleases. If you resist you can be killed.
12-y-o Sheikh Farid wasn't even doing that. He just got swept up in the melee.
Dispatch from Sipajhar.
The minister’s son not only led a convoy of SUVs that mowed down protesting farmers, he even shot dead a young man, farmers alleged: "How much more brazen can it get? This is the BJP’s open goondagiri.”
My dispatch from Lakhimpur Kheri.
Akhil Gogoi, currently housed in Guwahati central jail, after being arrested by the NIA under the UAPA in December 2019 for his role in the anti-CAA protests in Assam, has tested positive for Covid-19 today.
Stories that the government wants to distract you from
Village after village, town after town in Upper Assam is filled with accounts of death, disappearances and distress triggered by microfinance debts that never quite reach you in the din of
#NRC_CAA
.
The "aggressive" migrant vs the "lazy" Assamese: I trace the land conflict in Assam through the story of two villages in Nagaon separated by ethnicity -- and 500 acres of fertile alluvial farmland fed by the Brahmaputra. via
@scroll_in