Активист Харш Мандер: ненависть в Индии стала инструментом власти и разрушает права меньшинств

All information sourced from publishers. It Started with Words: The Epidemic of Hate Speech in New India, Harsh Mander Since 2014, hate speech in India has moved from the political fringe to the centre of public life. It is heard from election platforms and religious stages, repeated in television studios, circulated through WhatsApp and YouTube, and rewarded with votes, influence and profit. It calls for minorities to be boycotted, evicted, stripped of their livelihoods, driven from neighbourhoods and, increasingly, met with violence. These words have consequences. They create the climate in which homes and shops are demolished, and ordinary citizens are lynched, intimidated, and made to prove, again and again, that they belong to their own country. Human rights activist Harsh Mander examines how this hatred is produced, spread and protected; who profits from it; and what happens when those who incite fear also command the machinery of the state. Drawing on several case studies, including his own attempt to seek legal action against politicians for incendiary speeches delivered in the lead-up to the communal riots in Delhi in 2020, Mander asks whether the law can still protect the vulnerable – or whether it has become another weapon in the hands of the powerful. The Undocumented: One Family’s Journey from Bangladesh, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia In May 2009, Cyclone Aila tore through the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, swallowing everything Safrat had built: her land, her livestock, her livelihood. What it left behind was not a choice but an ultimatum: stay and slowly disappear or cross the border into India. The Undocumented follows Safrat and her two children, Nur and Nabeel, as they journey from the delta’s edge to Kolkata, shedding names, faith and identities to survive. It is the story of a border crossed and an identity hidden, but also of a family struggling to remain together even as it fractures from within. Drawn from 13 years of fieldwork on the fringes of a Kolkata slum – years spent earning trust and reading silences – this book offers a rare and intimate account of why people leave their homes, how they cross over to a strange, unknown land and what it takes to build a life on the other side. The Carnatic Wars: Great Power Rivalries in Eighteenth-Century India, Venkatesh Parthasarathy In the mid-18th century, a contest between two factions of the Deccan aristocracy for the title of the Nawab of Arcot (in modern-day Tamil Nadu) sparked a multi-decade struggle for supremacy in India known as the Carnatic Wars, which enmeshed the motivations of the two factions with those of the French and English trading companies. The military lessons learned during the conflicts at Arcot, Cuddalore, Pondicherry and Trichy were then applied by the English in their campaigns across the Indian subcontinent: against Siraj-ud-daulah in Bengal, the French at Wandiwash, Hyder Ali in Mysore, the Marathas and finally the Sikhs. The setbacks suffered and the victories gained in these battles may well have laid the foundations of the British Empire and altered the political course of the nation. This epochal set of battles for political dominance is frequently reduced to a conflict between Joseph Dupleix and Robert Clive. It is this misleading binary that Venkatesh Parthasarathy seeks to correct. Drawing on rigorous research and first-hand accounts of diverse players on that crowded stage, he reintroduces a forgotten episode in Indian history that features a host of larger-than-life characters and the complex interplay between local politics and global power rivalries. A Life in Freedom: Memoir and Prison Diary of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit A Life in Freedom brings together two essential works by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit: her personal memoir, The Scope of Happiness, and her searing prison diary, Prison Days. Born into the Nehru household in 1900, Pandit came of age as India’s struggle for independence transformed private lives and public destinies. Daughter of Motilal Nehru, sister of Jawaharlal Nehru and wife of the scholar and freedom fighter Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, she was drawn early into the Gandhian movement, endured imprisonment, personal loss and political upheaval, and went on to become one of independent India’s most remarkable public figures. In her memoir, Pandit writes with grace, candour and moral clarity about Anand Bhawan, the national movement, Gandhi and Nehru, marriage and motherhood, bereavement, diplomacy, the United Nations, and the difficult years after Independence, including the Emergency. In Prison Days, written during her 1942 imprisonment after the Quit India movement, she records the daily realities of jail life with immediacy, restraint and quiet courage. Together, these two books offer the portrait of a woman who lived at the centre of modern Indian history, yet wrote always from a deeply personal place: as daughter, sister, wife, mother, prisoner, diplomat and citizen. A Life in Freedom is both an intimate self-portrait and a vital record of India’s passage from colonial rule to democracy. Operation Silkyara: The Untold Story of One of India’s Greatest Rescue Missions, Saurabh Sharma The first definitive account of a rescue that held an entire nation breathless. On November 12, 2023, a section of an under-construction tunnel in Uttarakhand collapsed. Deep inside the partially collapsed Himalayan tunnel, 41 men were trapped. For 17 days, these workers managed to survive with limited supplies in the darkness, anxiously waiting to be rescued, while above ground, an extraordinary story of determination began to unfold. Told with pace, tension and vivid detail, Operation Silkyara brings alive the relentless efforts of miners, engineers, rescue teams and volunteers who battled time, terrain and exhaustion to pull off the impossible. Bhagat Singh’s Pistol: The Hunt for a Martyr’s Legacy, Jupinderjit Singh When Bhagat Singh was arrested in 1929, the pistol he carried became a crucial piece of evidence leading to his conviction for the killing of a British police officer, JP Saunders. Soon after the trial, however, the silver-grey.32 Colt went missing. More than eight decades later, an investigative journalist chances upon a newspaper article that gets him thinking about what might have happened. Who could have spirited the pistol away? Had it been smuggled out of the country or merely misplaced? Driven by curiosity and a growing conviction that the weapon must be found and preserved, Jupinderjit Singh decides to follow the trail. We welcome your comments at [email protected].