Danish Rajab, a former salesman in his early twenties, was shot by a pellet gun during anti-India protests near his home in Srinagar in 2016. He lost his job after his injuries made it impossible to work. After three surgeries, he can still only see blurry images from his left eye. Photo by Sharafat Ali
The dispute over Kashmir has raged for seven decades and ignited three wars. Now the conflict has entered a new phase: violent street protests in India-controlled Kashmir, followed by brutal crackdowns by Indian security forces that have maimed a new generation of militants, protesters, and bystanders.
Umer Beigh
Hiba Nisar was eighteen months old when she became the youngest casualty of the latest phase in the deadly, decades-long conflict in Kashmir. Last November, protesters clashed with Indian security forces outside her home in Kapran, a village in the south of the Muslim-majority state controlled by India but also claimed by Pakistan. As protesters pelted them with stones, Indian police fired tear gas, which began to seep into Hiba’s home. Hiba started to choke.
Her mother, Marsala Jan, grabbed her and opened the door, intent on getting her out of the smoke. “As I sneaked out, I heard a loud bang,” Jan recalls—the security forces had fired their shotguns. A spray of lead pellets ripped through the doorway. Jan had covered her daughter’s face with her hand, but a pellet went through her hand, she says, and into Hiba’s left eye.
Hiba was partially blinded. “Fate struck a terrible blow,” Jan says. “I held my child tight, but … I failed to protect her eye.”
Since 2010, Indian security forces have used pellet guns to deal with widespread protests in Kashmir, leading to the blinding, maiming, or killing of hundreds of people, according to human rights advocates and local medical personnel. While the term “pellet gun” brings to mind a children’s toy, the pellets—also known as birdshot—are metal and spray over a wide area. Most countries do not use them for crowd-control purposes because they cannot be aimed and thus cause indiscriminate injury.
Best of In The Fray 2014. Once thought cured by modern medicine, tuberculosis is making a global comeback. Rampant misuse of antibiotics and broken health-care systems have spawned deadly, drug-resistant strains that are now present in virtually every country.
By Octavio Raygoza
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen that causes TB. NIAID
She looks like a child: a baby face and large, round eyes, long and thin arms that make her seem gawky. When she sees me, her eyes brighten, and she struggles to sit up in her hospital bed. The blanket covering her drops, revealing a frail and gaunt body—a nineteen-year-old’s body. Five feet, four inches, she weighs only eighty pounds.
Sonam Yambhare is dying, and there is little modern medicine can do for her. Two years ago, she contracted a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis in her lungs. The bacteria that cause the disease have destroyed her macrophages, the body’s first defenders against foreign invasion. Constant nausea, loss of appetite, and vomiting—symptoms of the disease—have emaciated her. All medications have been infective. In her weakened state, another serious infection will likely kill her.
Ward Number Eight of the Sewri Tuberculosis Hospital is a silent room with gray concrete walls. It is a world away from the chaotic streets of Mumbai. And it is a world away from the rest of Indian society. With nowhere else to go, neglected and stigmatized TB patients like Yambhare come here—even from towns and villages hundreds of miles away—to wait out the last stages of the disease, sometimes alone.
“Everyone is depressed here,” says Chandge Mokshada, a young doctor on her rounds. In the crumbling ward, dozens of women lay quietly on their beds. There is little chance they will recover, Mokshada says. “We mostly lose our patients.”
One of the world’s most lethal infectious diseases is making a comeback. Two centuries ago, tuberculosis was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in parts of Europe and the US. Known as the “white plague” or “white death” due to the way it blanched the skin, the disease left a deep imprint on the culture. Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about it. Emily Brontë and Henry David Thoreau died from it.
After the development of effective antibiotics in the 1940s, deaths from tuberculosis plummeted. But TB remains a formidable killer in many parts of the world. And in recent years, it has evolved in frightening ways. Its virulent new strains now defy many or all known antibiotics. And while they have ravaged Asian countries in particular, these deadlier forms of the disease are spreading everywhere.
Last month, the World Health Organization released a report about the surge in infectious diseases that are fast becoming untreatable. “A post-antibiotic era—in which common infections and minor injuries can kill—is a very real possibility for the 21st century,“ the report read. The WHO singled out drug-resistant tuberculosis as one of the greatest dangers. In 2012, it accounted for 450,000 new cases and 170,000 deaths—that is, less than 4 percent of those newly infected with TB, but 13 percent of those the disease killed. The total number of confirmed cases has grown sevenfold over seven years, with India, China, and Russia accounting for more than half of new infections. (The official statistics also understate the size of the problem, since many of the hardest-hit countries report bogus numbers.)
New strains of TB arise when the old ones are not properly treated. Not taking a full course of antibiotics, for example, can merely weaken, rather than eradicate, the bacteria that cause the disease. The remaining bacteria evolve to adapt to the drug, turning a treatable strain of TB into a resistant one.
The problem has gotten progressively worse. At one point, health officials believed TB could be eliminated. But in the 1980s, tuberculosis strains emerged that resisted the most common and safe anti-TB drugs. In the past decade, even second-line treatments have become ineffective against certain tough strains that fall under the category of “extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis” (about 10 percent of drug-resistant TB cases). To deal with them, doctors will put patients on more than one of these toxic drugs. Their side effects, however, can be severe, ranging from acne, weight loss, and skin discoloration to hepatitis, depression, and hallucinations.
For the hardest-to-treat strains, doctors are now forced to use so-called third-line drugs, an even more toxic regimen whose effects have yet to be fully tested.
Today, resistant strains can be found virtually everywhere, including the United States and Europe. But perhaps nowhere is the crisis more real than in India. The world’s second most populous country has a quarter of its TB cases—and now, many of the hardest ones to treat. While the number of Indians suffering from the disease has actually gone down in recent years, thanks in part to widespread vaccination, the WHO estimates that in 2012 the country had 21,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB of the lungs—an exponential increase from the few dozen cases the government had been reporting just six years earlier.
India also has the dubious distinction of being one of three countries—Iran and Italy being the others—where certain strains of TB have resisted every drug used against them. Four years ago, Zarir Udwadia, a noted pulmonologist at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, identified twelve patients suffering from untreatable TB infections. (Three of the twelve have since died; the others have been taken into isolation by the government.) Udwadia and other researchers have described these kinds of cases as “totally drug-resistant.”
The Indian government disputes the categorization, arguing that these strains have not been tested against all of the experimental third-line drugs. Another term, “extremely drug-resistant TB,” gets around the worry of some experts that classifying such a common disease as untreatable may cause panic.
Regardless of what they are called, these hardy strains have the power to push societies back to a time before antibiotics, when the “white plague” was all but unstoppable. “If not contained,” says infectious disease specialist Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, “it poses a big problem to the world.”
In India, those infected with TB tend to be the most vulnerable people in society. Yambhare was born into a low caste. She lived in a cramped apartment, where she shared a room with her mother and two sisters. Every day she took overcrowded trains from her home in the countryside to Mumbai, where she helped her mother clean houses. In other words, her poverty made it far more likely that she would be exposed to TB, which often (though not always) settles in the lungs and can be transmitted through the air.
Two years ago, Yambhare developed a persistent cough. She visited one of the private medical clinics that line the teeming streets of the western suburb of Bandra. There, a doctor diagnosed her with tuberculosis, and Yambhare began taking antibiotics. When her family saw no improvement over two years, they switched doctors. The new doctor prescribed more drugs.
No one bothered to give her a drug-sensitivity test. The test would have revealed what strain of TB she had, and a competent doctor could have then prescribed the correct drug. Instead, the incomplete and inept treatment that Yambhare received gave the bacteria the chance to adapt and become stronger. It soon developed a resistance to all four of the first-line drugs used to treat TB.
In Yambhare’s case and thousands of others, a broken health-care system has made the problem of drug-resistant TB much worse. Hospitals are overcrowded, and the services provided are minimal. So Indians—rich and poor—flock to private doctors. But the slapdash treatment they tend to provide, with laxly administered drugs and inadequate follow-up care, has allowed drug-resistant TB to spread wildly.
Udwadia, the Mumbai pulmonologist, says that many of these doctors are unscrupulous, and most are uninformed. In 2010, he conducted a study in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, one of Asia’s largest and the origin of many of the city’s most severe TB cases. He asked more than a hundred doctors in the area to “write a prescription for a common TB patient.” Only six were able to do it correctly. Half of the doctors he surveyed were practitioners of alternative therapies with no grounding in modern science.
Udwadia argues that India needs a law that will let only designated specialists treat drug-resistant tuberculosis patients. But at the moment the government does not bother keeping detailed records on the many private doctors now operating, much less ensuring they provide adequate care.
“The government has no control over private practitioners,” says an official in the health ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity since he is not authorized to talk to the media. “They require only once-in-a-lifetime registration, and there is no chance for them to lose their license.”
Calls for regulation by experts like Udwadia, the official says, are silenced, ridiculed, or ignored. Meanwhile, the government has been accused of underreporting the number of new cases of drug-resistant TB every year. In 2011 the official count was 4,200 cases; the next year, the government began adjusting its figures to resemble the WHO’s estimates, and the number of reported cases quadrupled. (Indian health ministry officials did not respond to emails asking for comment.)
In terms of its anti-TB spending, however, the government has been devoting more resources. In 2013 it budgeted $182 million to fight the epidemic.
Some of this money will go toward upgrading the 103-year-old Sewri hospital, which could use it. In its ward for drug-resistant patients, there is no medical equipment in sight; records are kept in rusted metal cabinets. The most pernicious forms of TB are hitting a health-care infrastructure poorly equipped to deal with them.
Every year, more than eight million people fall ill with tuberculosis. More than a million die from it, placing TB just a notch below AIDS in its globe-spanning lethality. And a whopping one-third of the world’s population has what is called “latent TB”: they are infected by the bacteria, and a tenth of them will go on to develop the disease at some point in their lifetimes. Drug-resistant TB, in other words, is just one part of a global health emergency.
Meanwhile, the problem goes ignored in rich countries. Antibiotic treatments for TB have been so successful there that most people’s experience with the disease today is limited to works of literature: novels and poems with archaic references to “consumption” and TB sanatoriums. But that may change someday soon. In the United States, a hundred new cases of drug-resistant TB are diagnosed every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases of extensively drug-resistant TB have already been reported.
Paul Nunn, the WHO’s TB coordinator, says that these deadly strains have cropped up in certain European countries, too, though the reports have yet to be published. “If the health system of the world fails, the highly resistant strains will replace the old,” he adds. “We’ll see a worsening of the situation if nothing is done.” On the other hand, it may be only when the resistant strains become a major problem in rich countries that the profit-seeking pharmaceutical industry will take notice and pour real money into the development of potent new treatments.
Without effective drugs to combat the most resistant strains, doctors may have to revert to remedies from an earlier era. Udwadia recalls his first patient with untreatable TB. Twenty-six years old, she had spent the last five years trying a variety of anti-TB drugs, all of which had failed. As a last resort, she underwent a pneumonectomy, a high-risk medical procedure to remove a lung. The woman later died of complications from the surgery. The procedure had not been used on tuberculosis patients since the introduction of antibiotic treatments six decades ago.
Even though so many people are infected, TB still carries a terrible stigma in Indian culture. “People treat you with disgust,” Yambhare says. As she grew sicker, she became more isolated. Her sisters were told to stay away. Her friends stopped visiting. Finding a partner or even a job was impossible. She sunk into a depression.
Meanwhile, her family struggled to pay for her treatment. Their monthly household income was just $100—not uncommon in a country where one in three people lives on less than $1.25 a day. But the expensive second-line drugs cost $80 a month. And once she began taking them, the side effects kicked in. Her skin became discolored. Her muscles atrophied. Her weight dropped.
Eventually, Yambhare’s family could no longer care for her. They sent her to the Sewri hospital.
When I visit her in the ward, orderlies are carrying out the infected mattresses of previous patients. In a nearby courtyard, they set the mattresses afire.
Yambhare watches the smoke curl past the window near her bed. Below her, in the courtyard, stray dogs fight over bones.
Yambhare turns to me, an eerie shine in her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says through her mask. “I want to go home and help mother.”
Octavio Raygoza is a video journalist who covers sports, news, and culture. Twitter: @olraygoza
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Lately, as a result of planning my wedding, there’s been a lot of talk among my buddies about what drives the expensive social conservatism we see during our various social and religious ceremonies in India. There is, of course, the cash-flashing, wealth-waving syndrome that leads to obscene shows of buying power, and the media-spurred my-fairy-tale-wedding delusion, but what spurs people with sensible plans and ideological commitments to chuck it all and take a nosedive into these pro forma spectacles of self-destructive wastage?
In a country like India, where power comes in many forms and from many different sources — age, caste, gender, class, senior social roles, perceived religious devotion, nobleness of profession — I’d say that, apart from the usual suspects, embittered failures in roles of familial power play an enormous role in enforcing socioreligious conservatism. This is not to say that successful people with genuine affection for their families cannot be socially conservative, but in the specific case of bitter underachievers, reverting to traditions crafted for the patriarchal family head in a very different economic era allows them, temporarily, to become directors instead of dependents. The more rules and strictures they reinforce, the more power and control they have.
Rituals and ceremonies are their particular triumphs, since during them, they can reduce their more successful kin to temporary penury (or close) by insisting things be “properly” done at enormous expense, almost none of which they bear themselves. The worst aspect of this entire situation, perhaps, is that we have an automatic pity-flavored weakness for the weak and dependent among us — and for these brief periods, give them free(ish) rein over our lives out of affection or sympathy or adherence to social hierarchy, not realising the undercurrent of malice that such indulgence feeds. Indeed, I would say that most people practicing such malice don’t realize they are being malicious either. They take their socially assigned roles seriously, and quite successfully hide their subconscious jealousy and vengefulness (even from themselves) by dressing them in the righteous garbs of culture, tradition, and propriety.
This is aided in Hindu society by a complete ignorance of what Hinduism accommodates and entails. A very practical set of scriptural directives have been drowned under a collage of folk practices over the centuries, and since firsthand knowledge of Hinduism requires actual scholarship — and a broad, receptive mind — most self-identified Hindus go with the flow of simplistic, homogenized inventions and outright aberrations, firmly convinced they’re treading the path of their ancestors a million times removed.
If today I get married and decide to serve roast beef and fried pork at the wedding feast, it would be an absolute phenomenon. I would find no caterers, people would nervously offer sorry excuses for not attending, and those who attend may think they’re being revolutionaries by breaking stupid “Hindu” rigor. But even for a few centuries after Buddha’s death, roast calves and fried pork were centerpieces of Hindu daily and ceremonial eating, in combination with deer, rabbits, boar, various birds, ghee, rice, barley, and honey-thickened, milk-based sweets. But I digress.
The point is, in a social system where there are competing structures of power, every time you mark a social milestone in your life — unless you have genuinely loving and/or sympathetic kinsfolk in positions of familial power, or people secure enough in themselves to either aid you or allow you the freedom of choice — be prepared to either incur considerable financial damage in the name of maintaining the social fabric or causing breaches in the family, for which you shall bear all the blame after you have spent a smaller — but still considerable — amount in marking the milestone anyway.
It’s called social living. Or the tyranny of the weak.
Priyanka Nandy works on structural inequities in public education and public health in India. She blogs at priyankanandy.com and photo shares everywhere.
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ITF speaks with Andrew Blackwell about his new book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, a travel guide to the most polluted places on the planet. Even sites ravaged by radiation and industrial waste, he argues, can still be places of “nature, wildness, and beauty.”
A man paddles across the Yamuna River, India’s most polluted.
Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places By Andrew Blackwell
Rodale Books. 320 pages.
Journalist Andrew Blackwell traveled to seven of the most polluted places on the planet: from the nuclear disaster zone of Chernobyl, to the smog-ridden city of Linfen, China, to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In his new book, Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Blackwell details his often humorously grotesque experiences hanging out in these past and present eco-disasters. In The Fray culture editor Susan M. Lee talked with him about his travels, the unique charm of the globe’s dirtiest corners, and the myth of pristine nature in an age of climate change. (Disclosure: Andrew Blackwell is president of ITF’s board of directors.)
You were inspired to write this book by a trip to India that you took years ago.
I heard how polluted Kanpur was supposed to be. It had just been named the most polluted city in India by the government. And it certainly lived up to that expectation. But I learned, after the fact, that I really enjoyed my time there — strictly as an interesting place to visit. So I had this flash: I just realized that, almost because they were polluted, there were all these places around the world that you would never really bother to visit, that you were missing out on because they had this stigma of pollution attached to them.
Did you have any expectations of what you would find, before you started out on your trips?
I thought the destinations would be a lot grosser than they were. As I went along, I realized I was in danger of not getting enough grossness in, and doing my due diligence for a book about pollution. Fortunately, I ended up being fazed by the Yamuna River in northern India in the last chapter. There was no way to say that it didn’t smell really, really gross. But otherwise, the visceral sensory experience of the locations was not nearly as intense or offensive as I expected. But that might have something to do with my message, which was not to find the grossest place but to find places that were the ultimate examples of a particular kind of environmental problem. And that didn’t always line up with the place being unpleasant.
Andrew Blackwell aboard the brigantine Kaisei, en route to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
What did you enjoy the most on these trips? What were the highlights?
In almost every case, it was experiences I had with people I met. I think that’s often true either about reporting or about travel. It’s less about whether you saw this or that building and more about the kinds of people you met.
In Chernobyl, my guides Dennis and Nikolai and I are drinking and totally wasted. And I see they are thinking, “Oh, he’s not joking — he really wants to see what’s fun and interesting about this town, not just what the horror story is.” People do respond to your curiosity and sincerity. Like the time with the sadhus [ascetic, nomadic Indian monks]. I’m with these guys and they’re wearing robes and paint and we’re camping in the countryside and they’re completely taking care of me and feeding me. They were so friendly and solicitous, almost to a degree that they drove me insane. That was a special experience.
What were some of the challenges you encountered in writing about the world’s most polluted places?
Some of the regular problems of traveling, such as: I don’t speak Chinese and I don’t speak Portuguese. On a topical level, while these places are real and their [environmental]issues are all real — and I certainly don’t want to be thought of debunking these issues — they’re often hyped. Maybe not by serious journalists, but at a popular level. A lot of the time, I did go into each location expecting it to be more spectacular. What I realized was that the story was more subtle and much harder.
But I think it ended up making the book stronger in the end — that struggle became a theme in the book. For example, that popular image of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a solid mass is not true. But it’s still a powerful image that persists, even in the minds of people fighting the problem.
A smokestack disappears in the haze surrounding Linfen, China. The city is notorious for having some of the worst smog in the world.
In the book, there seems to be a recurring theme of problematic ways of viewing nature, even by modern environmentalists. Could you talk a little about these alternateviews of nature?
Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.
Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.
Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.
The destroyed Chernobyl nuclear power plant, with a view of the steel and concrete “sarcophagus” built to contain Reactor No. 4, which is still dangerously radioactive.
So you’re sort of trying to demystify these polluted places as well as the idea of pristine nature?
Yeah, exactly. There are people out there doing some interesting work on showing ways in which places that are thought of as pristine aren’t. And I’m working from the other end, by finding places that are considered to be horror stories and “anti-nature” and saying it’s also still a place that has nature, wildness, and beauty.
Do you think that your background had anything to do with your desire to write about environmental and industrial issues?
I don’t know what comes from my family or what just comes from me. But my brother was trained as a scientist. Now he works doing visualizations at the California Academy of Sciences. My dad is an engineer. His dad was an engineer. And I have a cousin who’s a geologist. So science has always been special to me.
I grew up mostly in Seattle, but before that our family lived in Japan for three years. I lived in Japan for first, second, and third grade. And we also did a lot of traveling in the summer since we were in Asia. We went to Indonesia, Singapore, and a number of other places. That was a really formative, great experience. Just that a place can be bizarre and strange and can be welcoming and fun. I think Japanese culture especially, at least thirty years ago, was extremely safe — and people were friendly, probably because I was American and different and had blond hair.
If you could have included other places, which ones would they be?
I wanted to go to the oil fields in the Niger Delta. Two things kept me from doing that. The two or three people I talked to sort of were cautious. You want to make sure you’re in safe spots. And also I didn’t want half the book to be about oil-related locations. I wanted a better spread.
I really wanted to see ship breaking in India or Bangladesh — these incredible beaches where they tear ships apart. The world is just a candy store for this stuff.
Interview has been condensed and edited.
An oil tanker carrying twenty million gallons of crude oil approaches Port Arthur, Texas.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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The stories now featured on the site touch on many issues, but one theme they have in common is the role that religion plays in driving people to get passionately involved politics and activism — and how difficult it is to find secular ways to kindle the same fire. In Saving Souls, Benjamin Gottlieb profiles an enterprising humanitarian group that is busily educating poor children in Delhi’s slums. But the work of COI and other evangelical Christian groups continues to draw controversy in India, a once-colonized nation now booming economically and working mightily to assert its own cultural identity. In Losing Zion, Rob York reviews the book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dying, ruined by extremism in Israel and the apathy of the liberal American Jews who could help bring about a broad-based peace movement.
Religious groups have been almost unmatched in their ability to train activists and build social movements. In America, the most obvious recent example is the pro-life movement and the cultural warriors it has drawn from the pews of evangelical, Catholic, and other congregations. But the civil rights movement, too, acquired its power and breadth by filling the streets with churchgoing protesters, and filling its rhetoric with the biblical language of freedom, struggle, and redemption.
Wherever people congregate, they organize. Social scientists talk about how churches (and other houses of worship) serve as reservoirs of social capital — the web of relationships that connect people and bring about various benefits, including the ability to rally around political causes. Generally speaking, this is great for democracy. And many religious groups have managed to find a balance between doing God’s work and respecting views that diverge from their own. But in America, Israel, and elsewhere, it seems the people getting inspired and engaged come from the extreme, intolerant ends of the political divide, trapped in their own dogma and their own sets of facts.
I used religion as a jumping-off point for my comments, but really the problem is not religion, but fundamentalism of whatever kind — religious or economic or nationalist or otherwise. The Tea Party, for example, is crusading on behalf of an uncompromising economic fundamentalism that verges on religious fanaticism, with its own patron saints in F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ayn Rand — ironically, a mirror image of the earlier cult of communism. But religion appears to motivate many of these true believers, too, and may help explain the movement’s success in organizing. On the question of Israel and Palestine, too, the same dynamic seems at work: the more devout and dogmatic speak louder.
Perhaps the recent wave of global protests against corruption and austerity — for example, the indignados demonstrations in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street and its related movements in America — will help balance the scales. Churches and synagogues have been heavily involved in the organizing of the Occupy actions across this country, reminding us that the religious right is not the only voice of faith in the streets and on the megaphone.
That said, younger Americans seem to be turning awayfrom religion, while the secular ways that ordinary people have traditionally gotten involved in politics are in decline. Labor unions have been dwindling away in America for decades — the one bright spot in recent years was public-sector unions, and the recent failed Wisconsin recall election may have been their Waterloo. Political parties rely increasingly on big donors and independently wealthy candidates, while the old political machines that groomed leaders out of local wards are disappearing. Young people continue to rally to various causes on college campuses, but it will be hard to fill in the hole left by these institutions, which could organize in a sustained, concerted fashion and appeal to broad segments of the population.
This is yet another reason that we can expect politics to become more partisan and extreme in the coming years. The hard-liners are hungry for power, while more reasonable men and women stand by and watch. It brings to mind words by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote. And things didn’t end too well in that poem.
Home to one-third of the world’s poor, India attracts hundreds of Christian humanitarian groups seeking to do God’s work in its slums and hinterlands. But while these groups make up in vital ways for the failings of government and markets, their work comes with a consequence: conversion.
On a sun-kissed Saturday morning in March, Rahul Kumar whips through a squalid Delhi neighborhood, his ashen buttoned-down shirt tucked into his dress pants and thick black hair gelled back from his forehead. He is headed to the Sanskar Centre, a bare, one-room school run by a Christian nonprofit in the city’s Shahbad Dairy slum. Every day, Rahul walks to the schoolhouse for his lessons, the best education to be had for many of the district’s poor migrant families.
Just twelve years old, Rahul is already a leader among the neighborhood children, who flock to his side as he walks, eager to embrace him. Though short for his age, he has an outsized ambition: one day, he says confidently, he will dance in Bollywood’s biggest productions. But first, Rahul says through a translator, “I need to get a job to help my family. I need to study hard.”
Rahul’s family moved to Delhi from northern India several years ago, lured by the prospect of a better life. But the situation for Shahbad Dairy’s 100,000 residents is overwhelmingly grim, their opportunities circumscribed by severe, endemic poverty. While some parts of the district enjoy government support—a public school, a maintained latrine, a health care center—most of the slum’s inhabitants live in jhuggis, or slum dwellings, without running water or proper sanitation. A thick expanse of garbage and sewage surrounds the slum and is patrolled by scavenging children and feral pigs alike.
“[Shahbad Dairy] has the dynamics seen in every ghetto or slum,” says Alfred Gnanaolivu, special projects director for Cooperative Outreach of India (COI), the Christian group that runs Rahul’s school. “You have turf warfare. You have the influence of drugs and alcohol … Unfortunately, the main victims are the children.”
A nongovernmental organization, COI works extensively in Shahbad Dairy’s slum blocks, offering clean water, food, and education to local families. Children account for 50 percent of the district’s population, Gnanaolivu notes. That’s where COI—along with the hundreds of other faith-based NGOs operating in India—can have an impact: educating the children of impoverished families that are neglected by the Indian government.
But like many NGOs working in India, COI has a slant. It provides the 500 children enrolled in its schoolhouse an education—but with evangelical undertones. Young boys and girls recite Christian hymns during class, not conscious that they are being indoctrinated. Their faith-driven education is reinforced by COI’s pastoral care workers, or religious counselors, who help the slum’s families with their economic and personal problems using a Christian form of therapy. COI says this “results in transformation of the communities.”
Rahul Kumar, twelve, outside his home in the Shahbad Dairy slum in Delhi, India.
While Shahbad Dairy’s families—most of which are Hindu and from India’s lower or scheduled castes—are aware of the Christian sculpting, they believe that COI is giving their children a better chance at life. And as their relationship with their Christian benefactors deepens, some families are even converting.
“Very often, children are lured in the name of providing [a] good education,” says Chandan Mitra, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) representative in India’s upper house of Parliament. “They don’t understand very often why they have become Christians until they are older.” Religious conversion is banned in many Indian states, but the laws are “violated frequently,” Mitra adds. (In Delhi, conversion is legal.)
Of course, proselytizing Indians is not a new phenomenon. Christianity has existed in India for centuries, and Protestant missionaries have been working in Delhi since the early eighteenth century. Today, Christianity is India’s third-largest religion, with approximately twenty-four million followers.
What is different today is the growth of a politically independent, economically powerful India, a rising nation of a billion-plus people that has become more comfortable asserting its culture. In India (and Indian America) today, there is a willingness now to question the outside influences that for many years were tolerated as the price of doing business. Meanwhile, India has become home to roughly a third of the world’s poor, according to World Bank data. As a result, the country is a magnet for humanitarian aid organizations, many of them Christian.
The conversion of destitute Indian families to Christianity enrages many Indians, and on blogs wild accusations fly that Christian NGOs are committing “culture murder” in India. Mitra—whose Hindu nationalist party is one of India’s two major political forces—takes a more evenhanded stance. Christian NGOs may be indoctrinating children with Christianity, he says, but they are also educating and feeding an entire community that would otherwise remain overlooked.
For its part, COI believes that its religious message helps break down some of the barriers that keep Shahbad Dairy’s residents in poverty. “The caste system has dehumanized human beings,” says Ramesh Landge, COI’s executive director. “We need to help these children, give them a reason to live, and provide them with a childhood.” Among “the few hundred families that have adopted our changes, our teachings,” Landge adds, “we’ve seen success.” He notes that before COI began working in the slum, none of the children had birth certificates, making it nearly impossible for them to enroll in government schools.
Donald Miller, a professor of religion and sociology at the University of Southern California, points out that the evangelical Christian organizations working in India today tend not to fit the colonial-era stereotypes: brazen missionaries coming over to save souls by any means necessary. “Conversion by these groups is more often a side effect as opposed to a direct, manipulative attempt to indoctrinate people,” says Miller, who studies the social ethics of religion. It’s not that they don’t want to see conversions take place. But today’s faith-based humanitarian work, particularly by evangelical organizations, “has much more language about partnership and shared goals,” he says.
Before it was a slum, Shahbad Dairy was cattle country, settled by a Hindu Haryana community of dairy farmers. In 1987, the Indian government ceded a small parcel of land to the local inhabitants to build slum dwellings. Today, most of the shanties in Shahbad Dairy are illegal. Their occupants are immigrants from across India, who left their villages to find work in the sprawling city of Delhi, India’s second largest.
Rahul’s family is originally from Uttar Pradesh, a state about 500 miles to the north. His mother, Reena Kumar, supports the family by extracting the iron from automobile tires to sell as scrap metal. Asked why she moved to the slum, far from her ancestral homeland, Kumar’s response is simple: “To survive.”
The Kumar home in Shahbad Dairy amounts to four scantily constructed shacks, which house Rahul, his mother, and five siblings. A lone television is mounted in the master bedroom, powered by stolen electricity patched in from a nearby power line.
Back from school, Rahul navigates the Indian airways to his favorite Bollywood channel. His brothers, sisters, and friends pack the tiny room, waiting to watch him perform the dance steps.
Gnanaolivu watches the children with a smile. The work that his Christian group is doing, he says, will give children like Rahul much-needed opportunities, so that one day they can achieve their dreams—in Bollywood and beyond. “If they can be given that direction and sustained love … then we can save them.” In the end, it still comes down to saving souls.
They come here from all over India to wait for death, in the most auspicious place for dying. This is the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India. Here, the eyes can witness the crimson sun rising from the Ganges’s waters at the break of day. Here stands Manikarnika, the burning ghat, a stone crematorium built on a massive bank over the River, right at the point where she finishes her bend to the north and once again turns to the east.
Here, men burn away the dead, and burn away history.
I stand at the third-floor window of a hospice building in the city’s center, watching Manikarnika. It is the hour of dusk. The heat of the day departs, leaving thin mist and burning stones behind. The sweet fragrance of sandalwood ascends from four funeral fires below. Boats loaded with firewood are roped to the bank. Boys shout and spring from them, swimming and playing catch in water murky from the ash.
Hindu men, most of them dressed in the mourning color of white, surround the fires. Women are not permitted at the cremation site, for their cries would taint the soul’s journey. In Varanasi, death is the ticket to liberation, an ending to the painful cycle of rebirths.
The corpse in the pyre on the far left has been completely consumed by flames. A man with a shaven head, the deceased’s eldest son, turns his back to the fire and lifts an earthen pot filled with water from the Ganges. He throws it over his right shoulder. The flames hiss. The vessel shatters. Men collect the smoldering ashes, and cast them into the river.
In the brownish water millions of lives merge into one. And from this Mother, lives are born again. How many generations have been carried away like this?
From a narrow lane stretching to the ghat I hear a chant. The words accompany the procession of a colorful bier as it makes its way to the fires.
“Raama naam satya hai, Raama naam satya hai.” God’s name is truth.
I had come to Varanasi from the former Muslim capital of Delhi, a city dotted with tombs, both splendid and ruined, that stand and fall as the legacy of the Mogul rulers. The beauty and size of the tombs testify to the greatness of the rulers interred within, and their determination to mark their lives for posterity.
After arriving in Varanasi, I met up with my Hindi teacher, Abhiji. We talked about Indian history, and soon started discussing an essay I had just read. The article, which was written by an English scholar, said that the Aryans came to India from Central Asia and laid the foundation to what became the upper tiers of the caste system. The former inhabitants—both indigenous and recently arrived—evolved into the untouchables.
When I mentioned the article’s thesis to him, Abhiji erupted. Foreign historians were propagating lies in order justify invaders of their own kind, he insisted. “The Britishers could never accept that the Aryans, including the English, originally came from India.”
I had little reason to doubt the English scholar’s account, but Abhiji’s outburst troubled me. It reminded me of the agenda-loaded history books I had skimmed despairingly in a Delhi bookstore a few days earlier. History for Indians, even educated ones like Abhiji,appeared to mean advancing their own political objectives. Perhaps it was a legacy of the colonial era, when rejecting the doctrines of their British rulers was a matter of liberty or oppression. In any case, it seemed that I could rarely find a book or enter a debate in which a genuine attempt was made to find the truth about past events.
Later that day, however, I realized that I had misunderstood the reasons behind Abhiji’s belief. In the shadow of Manikarnika, I watched ashes being poured from the pyres. I watched those human remnants as they dispersed on the water surface, slowly drifting downstream and then vanishing. In the emptiness left behind, I imagined the gorgeous tombs of the Mogul rulers in Delhi, and the simple gravesites clustered around village churches back in my homeland, the Czech Republic.
The ashes and the tombs. Compared with the fire-drenched stones of Manikarnika, the memorials of my Catholic and Czech culture and those of the Muslim culture of the Moguls are much alike. They both speak to the same need to remember, to preserve and magnify the memories of life. And yet here was a culture that had always dissolved the material remains of man—the stuff upon which any factual history is based.
The divide that separated me from Abhiji suddenly became clear to me. I remembered working as a tour guide in Prague, and taking Americans through Czech graveyards in search of their great-grandfathers. In the Western cultures, history is the words written on a stone, the lives carved into a tombstone. Abhiji, on the other hand, once explained to me how his caste is defined by a common ancestry from one rshi, or semi-divine sage. For Abhiji, there is no chronology to say when that sage existed, and when his great-grandfather lived, and so the two men merge in his perception; imagination creates history.
This difference between his view and mine appeared stark and irreconcilable. If the two of us differ so fundamentally in our conception of what constitutes our own past, how can we argue about history?
Abhiji has always struck me as a much-contented person, blessed with a happiness that comes from his strong faith in his gods and his ability to feel the divinity within himself. Perhaps the divine spirit pulses in his veins precisely because the tales of the past that he hears and tells are of gods. He grows into what his roots are. What is the point of forcing him to think “historically,” to separate myth and history, to argue about stones instead of relying on his own imagination?
In the past Abhiji imagines and lives by, the sacred Ganges is the womb from which all men once came and to which they return. The threat he hears in the English historian’s article is not so much the argument itself, but the habit of looking for concrete evidence to support an objective explanation. By defining Abhiji’s past for him, the historian also shapes what Abhiji believes himself to be.
In Abhiji’s perspective, history is part of one’s own belief and each individual has the right to create or choose his or her own. Thus, each individual also accepts that another person may choose a completely different version of the same story. The true origin of the Aryans is irrelevant. What is really at stake is how much claim the objective historian has over an area that is inherently private.
The dusk had deepened in Varanasi. The smoke-curtained sunset dazzled me. By and by I forgot both Abhiji and the Aryans, and another thought occurred to me: never before had I appreciated how much history defines who I am. I had seen the past as something that could be dug up and analyzed by others for me. I had seen the past as a stone. But perhaps if I considered the past to be a stone, I would become one, too. By surrendering to objective “truth,” I might forfeit the freedom to create and recreate myself.
Inside, I rebelled against the heaviness of that truth. There was an art to this act of living, I thought, and my life was too precious to be dictated by fossils.
Perhaps it was this thought, or just the evening sun, but the Ganges suddenly seemed to be more than the river I observed. She was vast and ageless and powerful. In her waters millions of lives merged into one.
I walked down along the river to a stone square where boys played cricket. Not ever doubting the superiority of soccer among games, I had never stopped before to watch a cricket match. That evening, however, I enthusiastically joined the youngsters in chasing wickets.
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