Karwan Against Hate Crime
Why I travel with the Karwan e Mohabbat | Natasha Badhwar
Why do you go to such godforsaken places?” asked my uncle, referring to the journeys I make with the Karwan-e-Mohabbat to the homes of victims of targeted hate crimes. I had just arrived at the home of close family friends in Patna after attending a literature festival in Bengaluru.The next morning, I was going to join the team of the Karwan-e-Mohabbat, a people’s campaign for solidarity and conscience that reaches out to survivors of hate crimes. Led by Harsh Mander, this group of volunteers was arriving from Delhi and would travel by road from Patna to villages in the districts of Sitamarhi, Muzaffarpur, Araria.
Who killed Rakhi? In UP’s Muzaffarnagar, justice eludes a Dalit girl who died after being raped | Navsharan Singh
On the brick wall of a nearly bare room, hung a picture of a young girl, the picture is grainy, enlarged perhaps from the school identity card. A bead garland adorns the picture frame, signalling that the young girl in the picture is dead. The young girl in the picture is Rakhi. Rakhi lived in Bhurahedi village, near Purkazi town in Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh. She was all of 15, a Class 8 student and a Dalit. She was the second of five children – three girls and two boys – of Virpal, a daily wage worker, and Deepa, a casual labourer.
One morning, returning from visiting his sister, an 80-year-old Muslim man was lynched in Sitamarhi | Harsh Mander
There is no other part of the world that Zainul Ansari had known and loved in the eight decades of his life. This noisy, crowded, impoverished, vibrant piece of Bihar had been his only home, Sitamarhi. I guess that there would be no other place he would have wanted to breathe his last breath. But not this way: his body burned beyond recognition by a lynch mob of strangers, including children and a woman. He would not have wanted his remains to be buried furtively with only his sons and a few policemen as witness, alongside the bodies of strangers in another city, Muzaffarpur.
How the dreams of a family man from Muzaffarnagar were lynched 2,500 km away in Tripura | Harsh Mander
Zahid Khan was just 18 when he was married to Shama Parveen, who was even younger than him. The eldest of five brothers, he had many dreams. But there was no future for him in his village – Sambhalhera in Muzaffarnagar district of Western Uttar Pradesh. “We were very poor,” his wife Shama Parveen recalled. What could he earn with the two bighas of unirrigated land that fell into his share?