After the #NotInMyName tamasha there is another chutiapa going on.
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The Initiative
There is a rising darkness in India. Mobs violently are acting out visceral hatred in many parts of India targeting people because of their faith and caste. India has witnessed hate attacks in the past. What is new is the frequency and the normalisation of this lynching, in a growing aggressively majoritarian political and social environment.
These assaults are characterised by bystanders who actively support the killing, or do nothing to stop it.
Pehlu Khan is killed on a busy national highway; in Una, attackers circulate videos of whippings, convinced of their valour and impunity. Akhlaq is lynched by his neighbours. Junaid is stabbed 30 times on a crowded train.
As this lynching threatens to grow into a national epidemic,
Indian Muslims are learning to endure an intense sense of foreboding – a lurking, unnamed, unspoken fear. This is not simply the apprehension of discrimination, of being treated the ‘other’: in classrooms, in public spaces, in residential colonies.
This they have long become accustomed to. What is new is the persisting danger of imminent violence, of being vulnerable to attack anywhere - on a public road, in a bus or train, in a marketplace, even in their homes - only for looking and being Muslim.
In tribal regions,
Christian people are also feeling a mounting dread. There is another community as well that has long lived with everyday violence and humiliation, the Dalits. But they too are now fearful of attacks for pursuing their socially demeaning caste vocation of skinning cows.
How culpable are we when our brothers and sisters are burned and lynched and we stand by? We need to interrogate the reasons for our silences, for our failures to speak out, and to intervene, when murderous hate is unleashed on innocent lives. We need our conscience to ache. We need it to be burdened intolerably.
Darkness can never be fought with darkness, only light can dispel the enveloping shadows. To speak to our collective silences, me and my comrades propose to embark, with as many comrades who wish to join, on a journey of shared suffering, of solidarity, of atonement and of love. A Karwan-e-Mohabbat.
The Journey
We have joined hands to undertake this journey across parts of India which are worst affected by lynching. The purpose is twofold: to respond to the everyday fear of Muslims, Dalits and Christians, and the worrying silences of the majority. We aim to declare that we stand with our Muslim, Dalit and Christian sisters and brothers in this hour of gathering darkness. But the journey is also a call of conscience to India’s majority.
We propose this as a large collaborative civil society initiative, a month-long journey which will include visiting families of those who lost loved ones to hate lynching. It will be called Karwan e Mohabbat. It will be a journey for sharing pain, for atonement, for solidarity and for love.
The journey will begin from Nellie in Assam on September 4 and end at Porbandar in Gujarat on October 2. The first phase of the Karwan will cover Assam, Jharkhand and possibly Karnataka.
We will gather again at Tilak Vihar in Delhi on 11 September. In this second phase of the Karwan all participants will travel together by buses. From Delhi, the Karwan will move to Western UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, and on to Gujarat. This phase of the Karwan we will culminate at Mhow, the birthplace of Dr Ambedkar.
In a third phase of the Karwan, we will visit Kandhmal and Tsundur. The Karwan will conclude in a large program in Porbandar, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi, on his birth anniversary October 2.
The major aim of the Karwan will be to visit families which have suffered from lynch attacks in each of the states: Assam, Jharkhand, (possibly) Karnataka, Western UP, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. We will offer our atonement and solidarity to each of the lynch victim families. In each state, we will try to assess how the family is coping and what they need for livelihoods and the pursuit of justice. In advance of our visit, an advance team will visit them in the earlier month and spend at least a week there. They will try to constitute an Aman Committee, with members of Muslim, Dalit and Hindu groups (and Adivasi and Christian where applicable). These Aman Committees will commit to support the family for justice and livelihoods, and promote amity, goodwill, and peace in the larger community.
After we meet with the family, we will with the help of the
Aman Committee organise a public meeting – Aman Sabha - on the themes of love and solidarity, preferably hosted in the settlements of the majority community. There will also be singing on these themes by singers who we hope will accompany the Karwan.
In the course of the Karwan, we wish to also acknowledge symbolically the long history of mass targeted violence against various vulnerable communities in India after Independence, with their unmet justice and unhealed wounds.
