REVIEWING THE BOOKS read during the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to make sense of the tumultuous world we live in. When events unfold with such rapid succession, there is scarcely a space to reflect on the meaning of what has gone by. Literature could be a way through which we sift the ephemeral from the more meaningful and find a way to engage with the world anew. Reviewing literature, both fiction and nonfiction, that engages with the complexities of law, justice and socio-political transformations in India and globally also allows an opportunity to thread together our pasts - of injustices and buried histories - and our many futures more intelligibly.
This year, I was reminded again as to why Gauri Lankesh matters so much, as to how we must pay attention to what is happening in Kashmir post abrogation of Article 370 and what the imaginative frontiers of the new stage of viro-capitalism may be. I was also drawn into a deeper understanding of how colonialism, racism and human rights came together in the Tokyo Trial, the battle for justice in Chile post Pinochet and the plural roots of Kannada culture.
I also found myself engaging with an alternative imagination of Indian Constitutionalism, the irreligious futures imagined by Periyar and how art, love and dispossession collided in Palestine.
I am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, Rollo Romig (Penguin Books, 2024)
American journalist Rollo Romig has penned an evocative and tender tribute to Gauri Lankesh, bringing to a larger public the reasons why she was so loved and so hated at the same time. It is also a portrayal of a country going through a very difficult time as seen through the lens of the murders of writers, activists, scholars and intellectuals.
The assassination of journalist and activist Gauri Lankesh followed the assassinations of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, communist leader Govind Pansare, and M.M. Kalburgi, a scholar of Kannada literature.
As per the chargesheet filed by the Karnataka SIT in Gauri’s assassination, the killing was undertaken by people associated with the Hindu Jagran Vedike, an offshoot of the Sanatan Sanstha. The chargesheet also notes that the killings were inspired by the ideology of the Sanathan Sanstha which is manifested in a book titled ‘Kshatradharma Sadhana’. The SIT investigation through ballistic testing is able to show that the same gun was used to kill Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri. A second gun which was used against Pansare was the one which was used against Dabholkar.
The killings were not meant to stop with Gauri. The other figures on the hit list who followed were K.S Bhagwan and Girish Karnad. Thankfully the arrests were made and the spate of killings stopped. Of course the question remains as to why the Maharashtra police were singularly unsuccessful in their investigation. It was the criminal incompetence of the Maharashtra police’s investigation into Dabholkar’s killing which resulted in Pansare’s killing and the consequent murders of Kalburgi and Gauri. On this point, the Karnataka Police SIT needs to be congratulated on a job well done. The task of justice is now left to the criminal courts.
However, what is troubling is that the organisation behind the killings, the Sanathan Sanstha, does not seem to have suffered for being tainted with the killing of four intellectuals. Rather, Romig shows, their star only seems to have risen with them continuing to police thought in the Indian public sphere.
Romig’s book, apart from tracking the investigation into the killing, also paints a beautiful picture of Gauri herself. Gauri shifted from writing in English to writing in Kannada only after her father, P. Lankesh’s death, when she took over the editorship of his iconoclastic paper the Lankesh Patrike. Gauri’s writing according to Romig, was “strident and jeering”, when “writing against politicians or religious nationalists”, “anxious and tender” when ‘writing in defence of the oppressed”, and “self-deprecating”, when “writing about herself”. “Regardless of subject, she was direct and frank and unpretentious,” Romig notes, “and never lyrical and abstract.”
Gauri was however not just a journalist. As Romig notes, she had a“talent for friendship, a talent for outrage, a talent for mentorship, a talent for cultivating local thoughts…in the face of the growing movement to homogenise Indian culture.” Umar Khalid, one of Gauri’s mentees, analogized her relationship with her young mentees to that between Brecht’s ‘Mother Courage and her children’.
To Romig, Gauri has to be remembered as someone who was an integral part of the cultural fabric of Bangalore. One gets a sense of the literary culture of Bangalore through an exploration of the paper she inherited and edited, namely the Lankesh Patrike. The Lankesh Patrike established by her father was a crusading paper, as well as a tabloid, taking on the political establishment which was also a tabloid. Lankesh Patrike also brought the world to its Kannada readers. Romig notes that the paper “translated Rimbaud; then he talked about Barthes. You are sitting in a corner of Karnataka and you are being introduced to the world.”
Romig’s book is a moving portrayal of Gauri, a penetrating account of the organisation behind her killing and a continuing tribute to the people who are keeping alive the quest for justice for Gauri.
Dengue Girl, Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery (Astra House, 2025)
Set in Argentina of 2272, Nieva's work of imagination sees the dry desert like Argentinian pampas transmute into the pampas Caribbean. The story revolves around ‘dengue boy’, who is born when his mother is raped by a mosquito. It was not easy for ‘dengue boy’ in school with his ‘long beak’ and the “unbearable buzzing sound of his wings as they rubbed together’, distracting his ‘entire class”. Dengue boy’s childhood is difficult with his self perception being that, “he was a genetic mistake’ and a ‘grotesque hybrid of human and insect.” Sadly, “where his mother would have liked to see cute little ears Dengue boy had thick, hairy antennae.”
‘Dengue Boy’s is ceaselessly bullied by his fellow students with the main bully being ‘El Dulce’, whose obsession is with the video game, ‘Indians and Christians’, in which one experiences the joy of ‘smashing open the skull’, of the ‘unfortunate Christians’. El Dulce’s obsession with the trance-like energy of ‘Indians and Christians’, blurs the line between the real and the virtual. El Dulce’s brother believes that El Dulce is “playing at being a builder”, and thinks that, “in a devastated age like ours there is no space for a young boy’s dreams.”
The video game moves from earth to the conquest of outer space and El Dulce, in the new version of the game, becomes Noah Nuclopio, the Director of the Ebola holding company who is engaged in a corporate battle against its rival, AIS – Influenza’ Financial Services.
Nieva introduces a new frontier of capitalism, namely viro-finance, which involves speculation on which of the zoonotic viruses is likely to develop into a full fledged pandemic. Companies speculate on the pandemic which is likely to occur by racing to develop a vaccine and hence make a killing on the stock exchange. The entire economy comes to depend on the ‘golden age’ of viro-finance which becomes the new frontier of capitalism.
The novel brilliantly charts the conflict between ‘Dengue boy’, who will be the cause of a new pandemic and ‘El Dulce’ in the background of a hyper capitalist society which is based on extreme inequality, digital obsession, profound cruelty and a complete lack of empathy for one’s fellow beings.
Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, Gary J. Bass (Picador, 2023)
While the judgment at Nuremberg is well known, the judgment at Tokyo for war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity committed by the Japanese across Asia , from China and Vietnam to Indonesia and Malaysia right up to Burma, is relatively lesser known. The book in three symmetrical sections titled ‘Genesis’, ‘Catharsis’ and ‘Nemesis’, outlines the reasons for the Second World war in Asia, the process of trial itself and the judgment.
The origins of the conflict in Asia lie in Japanese expansionism as it moved from its colonial empire in Korea to the establishment of trading outposts in China, the declaration of war on China and the occupation of Manchuria. The Japanese war on China began in 1933 way before the war began in Europe. The Japanese invasion of the former European colonies began with the declaration of the Second World War in Europe and is initially welcomed as a “long awaited liberation from cruel European empires”, However, it soon “curdled into a grim reality of repression, torture and economic exploitation so severe that hundreds of thousands of Asian laborers died by the end of the war.”
It is this complicated scenario of European racism and colonialism which forms the backdrop to the Japanese invasion (with its attendant war crimes) which the Tokyo Tribunal had to adjudicate upon.
There were eleven judges at Tokyo, with judges from China, India and the Philippines representing the global south. The other global south countries were represented by the colonial powers namely Britain, Netherlands and France. As Bass puts it, “the Indonesians would be spoken for by the Dutchmen and the Vietnamese by the Frenchmen and the Koreans not at all.”
Unlike Nuremberg, Tokyo did not provide one clear verdict. The work of the Chinese judge, Mei Ruao, who spoke eloquently as part of the majority, ensured that the “tribunals verdicts and final judgment would weigh the suffering of Asians rather than merely condemning aggression against the United States as MacArthur would have preferred.” Judge Mei was instrumental in “rallying his fellow judges to convict and hang the Japanese officials responsible for the ‘slaughter in Nanjing and elsewhere’.”
However not all judges were on board the need for the Japanese to be punished for the suffering inflicted on the people of Asia. The most famous dissent was that by Justice Radha Binod Pal, who acquitted all 28 of the accused. Justice Pal’s opinion is sharply critical of racism and colonialism which, though not acknowledged by the majority, per Justice Pal lies at the heart of international law. This ideological perspective on international law makes Justice Pal critical of the double standards in not trying the US decision makers for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Bass argues that Justice Pal rightly foregrounds European colonialism, especially as the end of the war sees France and the Netherlands recolonizing Vietnam and Indonesia respectively. However, Justice Pal is unable to entertain the thought that there is Japanese racism and colonialism due to which violence and suffering was inflicted on the people of China, Korea, Vietnam and Philippines. Justice Pal’s dissent, Bass notes, failed to acknowledge the fact that the Japanese were “more cruel, more brutal, more unjust and more vicious than the British.” Strikingly Justice Pal claimed that “there were propagandistic exaggerations and distortions in the eyewitness evidence of massacre and rape in Nanjing.” Nehru, too, was horrified by Justice Pal’s dissent and notes that‘in this judgment wild and sweeping statements have been made with many of which we do not agree at all.”
The contrast between the majority and minority judgments provides a crucial lens to reflect upon the difference between Nuremberg and Tokyo and how the Tokyo trial sought to make sense of Japanese guilt against a background of European colonialism.
Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony, Sandipto Das Gupta (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
In ‘Assembling India’s Constitution’, legal historians Rohit De and Ornit Shani argue that the Constitution was co-authored by a people's engagement with the Constituent Assembly and therefore the Constitution embodies the radical energies of the freedom movement. For Sandipto Dasgupta, the constitution was more a ‘Motor Vehicles Taxation Act’ rather than a document “animated by the living faith of revolutionary founders”. He notes that there is a “deliberate and acknowledged distance between the political spheres of the popular and the constitutional, which proved to be foundational for the postcolonial political world.” He continues to state that the “constitution was written with the pen of administrators.”
Dasgupta is a critic of the now “globally hegemonic grammar of constitutionalism”, which has liberated itself from the “vexing concerns of the social question”.
It is the failures of the Indian Constitution which the author is interested in exploring. Among the key failures of the Constitution is allowing for the continuation of what Ambedkar would call a “life of contradictions”, even post the coming into force of the Constitution. The Constitution set in place “political freedom”, but failed to ensure equality in social and economic life. This is traced to the fact that social and economic freedom, in most cases owe their origin to revolutions. “Revolutions,” he notes, “tend to ‘unmoor imaginations’ from habituations of tradition and deference, and therefore pose a distinct challenge to authority and stability. India did not have a revolution.”
The consequences of the failure to guarantee economic freedom is brought to the fore through a comparative example from the USA at the end of the civil war. W.E.B. Dubois’s proposed at the end of the American civil war that every black person be given forty acres of land and a mule. Dubois’s argument was that “universal franchise could not survive, without personal freedom, land, and education”. The failure to provide the same, would lead to the “dictatorship of property” and under the dictatorship of property, “the hope of democracy in America for all men”, died.
Dasgupta finds the echoes of Dubois’s proposal in ‘States and Minorities’, which is a draft constitution authored by Ambedkar. The argument of the Ambedkarite Constitution is “constructed around one simple idea: the socio-economic sphere presents a greater threat to freedom than the state.” For Ambedkar, “the unemployed are compelled to relinquish their
fundamental rights for the sake of securing the privilege to work and to subsist” and therefore, “the time has come, to take a bold step and define both the economic structure as well as the political structure of society by the Law of the Constitution”.
There were other Dubois inflected imaginations in the Constituent Assembly. S. Nagappa proposed,“If you can give us, every Harijan [Dalit] family that is not possessing land, all the landless Harijans, at the rate of ten acres of wet land and twenty acres of dry land … I am prepared to forgo the reservation [of seats in the legislature].”
The vision of economic and social democracy, even though unattained, remains a “radical articulation of the relationship between constitutionalism and social unfreedom.” This “articulation contained the seeds of a far more expansive interpretation’ and remains an example of a ‘transformational constitutionalism’ in an ‘unrealized yet incandescent form.”
However, the consequences of the fact that the promises of the Constitution with respect to both social and economic freedom were unrealised are dire. As Dasgupta puts it, the “concrete utopias” of a mobilized anticolonial demos, unrealized, prepared the grounds for a demobilized postcolonial ethnos.”
However the Constitution deserves our “critical labour because something, something else, was possible. In the fissures of that once imagined future, there remains something for our fractured present.”
A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370, Anuradha Bhasin (HarperCollins India, 2022)
Bhasin’s book, incidentally also features in the list of twenty five books which are banned in Kashmir. The police are authorised to seize all copies of ‘A dismantled state’ and the notification issued by the Lieutenant Governor, is marked to all public libraries. In effect in a state in which disappearances are an everyday reality, the State is now attempting to disappear a way of thinking about Kashmir.
Bhasin’s book analyses how the abrogation of Article 370 has resulted in “altering the internal landscape in unprecedented ways and shaping the geography, society, identity, economy and politics”, thereby impacting the people of J & K. What Bhasin archives is the “myriad of unheard and unnoticed sounds” which lie beneath the official narrative on Kashmir post 2019.
One of the silences which Bhasin brings attention to is the scale of detentions including under the Public Safety Act (PSA’), about which no statistics have regularly been made public. On one occasion the Government’s Chief Spokesman, Rohit Kansal, admitted to over 4500 persons being detained under PSA. The number of illegal arrests is, however, completely unknown. The invisibility around the arrests in the public domain is a way to “impose collective punishment on an entire population, triggering massive fear in the name of fighting terror.”
In Bhasin’s analysis, the lockdown was a means to “drill into the minds of ordinary citizens the new reality of their impotence.” This took the form of arbitrary arrests , torture and complete prevention of people from travelling outside their homes.
The lockdown also became an opportunity to “strengthen the architecture of impunity with the practise of secret burials of those killed during gunfight.” Bodies are not released to their families, with the bodies being taken to “discreet burial grounds.” For example the Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani who died in 2021 was “allegedly forcibly buried before the crack of dawn in a graveyard near his house, instead of the Martyrs Grave in downtown Srinagar.” In Kashmir today, the “state control over dead bodies” is “another measure of disempowerment and humiliation.”
The other troubling shift Bhasin documents is how in June 2020, fifteen families of Srinagar’s congested downtown locality of Nawakadal lost their homes in a gunfight between militants and the state. In Nawakadal, the security forces “rained grenades on several adjacent buildings, blowing up a large part of the neighbourhood, not only leaving many people homeless but also causing severe burn injuries to some.” The question is if there is any change in the Standard Operating Procedure (‘SOP’) by the Army?
The post-Article 370 scenario has also witnessed an accelerated change in the use of land with the amendments to the Jammu and Kashmir Development Act, “virtually empowering both the Industrial Development Corporation and the Armed Forces to devour land with no legal mechanisms of redress.” The law has enabled an accelerated transfer of land which is bound to have deep ecological impacts as both forest and agricultural land is being converted to industrial and military use. Most painfully the sprawling 813 kanals of the Raika reserve forest is going to give way to a new High Court complex which goes against the requirements of both lawyers and clients.
The encouragement to outsiders to settle in Kashmir is seen as a way to “alter the demographic balance” or the power equation in Kashmir. This policy combined with the other massive changes which J & K is seeing in the post-Article 370 scenario, presage a situation like the Occupied West Bank where Palestinians have been dispossessed and the land has been taken by settlers.
This strategy may be untenable as the resentment and anger against the policies of the state cannot be controlled forever through military force and a tight grip on dissent. As Bhasin argues, “by unilaterally integrating Kashmir - the most fragile region - India has ended up pitching its tent on a potential minefield that is waiting to explode.”
