The End of Karma Read online

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  India is not alone among modern secular democracies in having to balance free speech and public order.

  The rise of Islamist extremism has made this an urgent challenge for many Western governments. In March 2015, just as India was throwing out the controversial law under which Rinu and Shaheen were arrested, a court in France ruled against a Facebook post by a comic named Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. In the aftermath of the brutal attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket that January, M’bala M’bala declared on Facebook that he felt like “Charlie Coulibaly.” It was a blend of the popular rallying cry “Je Suis Charlie,” the slogan championing the free speech rights of the newspaper, and the name of one of the gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four people at the supermarket. A court found M’bala M’bala guilty of condoning terrorism. Critics said the verdict showed French selectivity in enforcing the right to free speech. France, like other European countries, has long banned anti-Semitic speech.

  Private companies that run social media platforms have also been forced to scrutinize what amounts to their own jurisprudence. Twitter, for instance, had come under intense criticism for letting the Islamic State spew violence on its site, including by posting pictures of executions. In April 2015, it announced new rules for users of its service, threatening suspension for those who promote violence against others.16

  The debates over free expression online are nowhere more challenging, in my view, than they are in India. The country has a horrific legacy of sectarian strife. Tempers can be riled easily. The damage can be grave.

  It makes it all the more remarkable that Indians have insisted on their right to speak their minds rather than trade it away for a sterile, but peaceful, model of authoritarianism. This is by no means a done deal. How much can be said, sung, filmed, or written is still very much being negotiated—and it is Rinu and Shaheen’s generation that is pushing the envelope.

  In some ways, India at noonday is clearly more modern, more open than the nation had been at midnight. But it is also less so. There’s no telling who will be offended next, and how they will react. And so it’s hard to know what you can write or how you can paint, let alone what you can “like” on Facebook. Tolerance is in short supply.

  Kailash Satyarthi, the child rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner, drove home this point when I met him in the spring of 2015, as I was wrapping up the writing of this book. I asked him what he worries about most when he thinks about the future of his country’s young.

  He said he worried about two things. One of them, he said, was a lack of tolerance.

  “We are not able to inculcate the value of tolerance, of listening to each other” is how he put it. “Intolerance is going to result in irreparable violence if we cannot control it now.”

  He said he was keen to speak to the nation’s prime minister about this. (The other thing he worries about, he said, is that young people seem more interested in competing with each other than in cooperating.)

  The trespass of the Facebook girls, the outrage of their peers, and the subsequent judgment by the Supreme Court of India were in many ways an emblem of the pressures that India’s digital generation is putting on its elders. These negotiations are likely to continue for some time, as India’s leaders seek to placate the sensitivities of its many constituencies, while also allowing its citizens to express themselves as they demand. The Supreme Court ruling on Section 66A also made it slightly more onerous on the government to demand that websites and Internet service providers block content. It made sure that those service providers—and the users whose speech was being contested—could be heard in court, and it insisted that any restrictions on speech be “reasonable.” That was the term that Ambedkar had insisted on adding to India’s First Amendment.

  This may not be so easy for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Some of his fellow travelers in the Hindu nationalist movement have been notoriously intolerant of their critics. To wit, Wendy Doniger, a scholar at the University of Chicago, found herself at the mercy of a Hindu right-wing gadfly who went to court to argue that her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had run afoul of a section of the Indian Penal Code that prohibits “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings” of Indian citizens. Her publisher, Penguin India, after fighting the lawsuit for four years, agreed in a 2014 out-of-court settlement to destroy the remaining copies of the book in India.

  In late August 2015, as this book was going to print, M. M. Kalburgi, a rationalist critic of the Hindu right and a member of the government-funded Sahitya Akademi, the National Academy of Letters, was gunned down in his home in the southern state of Karnataka. In October, right-wing Hindu activists smeared black paint on the face of a political analyst, Sudheendra Kulkarni; they were objecting to his hosting a talk with a former Pakistani minister. Incidents like these prompted an outcry, leading dozens of India’s leading writers to return the awards they had received from the Akademi.

  In 2015, Mr. Modi’s government unexpectedly banned hundreds of porn sites online, only to reverse itself in days, following public outcry. Not surprising, perhaps. India at noonday is a thriving market for Internet porn.

  I visit Rinu and Shaheen in Palghar, three weeks after their arrests.

  Shaheen, who has recently finished her bachelor’s in management science at a local college, is waiting to hear back from a bank, where she has applied for a job. She used to log in to Facebook five, six times a day, posting little snippets, looking at pictures her friends had posted. “Actually I am addicted to Facebook,” Shaheen confesses. She has acute withdrawals after deactivating her account on the day of her arrest. She watches television to make up for it. “I’m quite bored,” she says.

  Shaheen’s Facebook fast lasts about a month. Conveniently for her, Facebook doesn’t actually delete the contents of her account just because she deactivated it. As a matter of policy, Facebook stores everything—every picture, every status update, lists of friends, every blithe “like” for several months. It’s all there, in a data center somewhere in the world, in case someone changes her mind about quitting Facebook and, like Shaheen, becomes “quite bored.”

  By January 2013, Shaheen is back on the social network, though with a promise to her parents to be more circumspect about her political opinions. “I should be more careful,” she says. “I will think twice about what I’ll be posting.”

  Since then, I notice, she sticks to commenting on movies and liking her friends’ pictures. She likes a lot of pictures. In 2013, she announces her engagement, and in 2014, her wedding. She posts some vacation pictures, a few jokes.

  Then, on March 24, 2015, she lets out this uncharacteristic yelp: “Supreme court quashed section 66 A.. LANDMARK VICTORY.. Thanks media for ur support..— feeling proud.”

  Rinu reactivates her Facebook account faster than Shaheen. She doesn’t seem to mind the fame that this Facebook kerfuffle yields. Rinu still dreams of being the next Miley Cyrus. And if her singing career doesn’t quite take off, she plans to run her own recording studio.

  In 2014, she takes a course in audio engineering, and is on her way to do an internship at a recording studio in Chennai. She doesn’t get to vote in the 2014 general election, because on Election Day she is away from her polling booth in Palghar. She is shocked by the election results. She had been rooting for Aam Aadmi. She is no Modi fan. But in our Facebook chat, she quickly puts a positive spin on it. “If he can do something for this country. I’ll be happy,” she writes. She records a song for a film produced in Kerala. She teaches herself to play guitar. She posts a lot of dog photos on Facebook.

  Her father is her biggest defender. He says Shiv Sena supporters should not have been so upset by a young woman’s personal opinion, expressed on Facebook. She meant no disrespect to their leader, he says. She merely pointed out that a shutdown of the city meant that people couldn’t work. He is pleased that his daughter speaks up for what she believes in. “I’
m proud of her. It’s putting your mind out and feeling for poor people,” he says.

  Rinu and her dad are close. She describes him on Facebook as “the only Superman I know.”

  APOSTATES

  When They Dared to Love

  From the corner of her eye, Monica spies him looking at her. She is on a cycle-rickshaw on her way to college. He is on a motorcycle. They stop at a red light at the same time.

  Monica allows herself to look back and notice how handsome he is, how stylish. In time, she allows herself to give him her cell phone number, to whisper when no one is in earshot, to fall in love. Finally, on a rainy night in July, she allows herself to run away with him, sit cross-legged on the floor at an Arya Samaj temple far from home, and exchange garlands.

  Monica is twenty, the carefully guarded daughter of a Gujjar family on the northern outskirts of Delhi. The handsome man is Kuldeep, a year older, the younger of two sons from a Rajput family, who lives around the bend. Exchanging garlands, they vow to be together for the rest of their lives.

  This turns out to be a fatal indiscretion. In Monica’s community, a girl was not to step across the line like that. She was not supposed to want a man like that, certainly not to choose him. Monica had trespassed further by falling in love with a man from a rival caste, from the same neighborhood.

  Both the Gujjars and Rajputs wield power in the area. They both own plenty of real estate, which makes them equally well off. Never, ever have there been cross-caste marriages. Or so everyone is told growing up.

  The neighborhood, known as Wazirpur, is an in-between place, suspended between modern and medieval, between day and night, unsure which it would rather be: city or gaon. If there was a soundtrack to this state of being, it would be in the raga multaani, the melodic scale meant to be played in the late afternoon, not quite in the fullness of the day, but well before dark, in a state of unbelonging.

  At independence time, Wazirpur was a village on the outskirts of small, sleepy Delhi. The Gujjars and Rajputs had land. They grew wheat and mustard; in their kitchen gardens they cultivated vegetables. The Gujjars, traditional herdsmen, had an additional asset: they kept cows and buffalo in their yards.

  After independence, as Delhi swelled with refugees fleeing bloodshed on the country’s new western border with Pakistan, Wazirpur’s fortunes changed. The city authorities needed more land, so they acquired plot after plot of farmland. Delhi began to stretch its arms around Wazirpur, as if to say, You might think of yourself as a village. But your children will be smitten by the city. You’ll see.

  Wheat fields disappeared. Up came factories and office buildings. The landowners, both Gujjars and Rajputs, got money in their pockets, but they had no more land to till. They were rich and fallow.

  Under city code, Wazirpur remained one of several incorporated villages within Delhi. In truth, it was just one of the many dingy neighborhoods in the capital. Starting in the early 1990s, as India began to open its economy, Wazirpur’s fortunes changed once more. Land values shot up. Their squat village houses, with cows in the courtyards, turned into skinny, higgledy-piggledy apartments. Migrants from all over the country flocked to Delhi for work. They needed a roof over their heads. They squeezed into these one- and two-room flats. Rents spiked. Shops opened: tailors, grocers, doctors, cell phone top-up booths, cybercafés.

  The Wazirpur boom embodied the transformation of Delhi, as its population doubled between 1990 and 2015, to more than 25 million, well on its way to becoming the world’s second most populous city, after Tokyo.1

  All this meant that Wazirpur’s homeowners grew ever more prosperous. They tacked on more rental units to their buildings. They installed air conditioners, then satellite dishes. First came motorcycles, then cars.

  Cows still roamed the narrow alleys, but now the houses were so tall and so tightly pressed against one another that the sun couldn’t enter. Wazirpur was dark even at high noon.

  Another Wazirpur generation—children raised in the years of economic liberalization—did not have to work, whether they were Rajput or Gujjar. They didn’t need an education. They didn’t need anything close to Anupam’s fire in the belly or Mani’s courage. They lived off of rents from their family’s real estate. They were certainly not poor. They had opportunities. But there were plenty of men who whiled their days away on the corner, jumped on their motorcycles for joyrides at night.

  Kuldeep and his older brother, Amit, were different. They too could afford to live off of the family property. Their father owned two buildings. Plenty of rent money came in. They didn’t have to work, but they wanted to. The aspiration bug had rubbed off on them. “Working and earning money improves a person,” Amit said.

  Amit was the shorter, squatter, more traditional of the two. He found a good job in the garment industry, and he rose up the ranks to manage a factory that stitched women’s clothes for export to Europe. He was dedicated to his job. The factory was all the way across Delhi, so his daily commute was a two-hour drive.

  Amit was the low-key one of the two. He didn’t care much about brand-name fashion. He rarely went out for dinner. He had never been to a nightclub. His favorite drink was fresh milk. He let his parents choose a bride for him, one who was from the same Rajput caste but a different gotra, as was the norm. His wife was pretty and quiet-spoken. She dressed in simple salwar suits and came to live in the family house in Wazirpur.

  His brother, Kuldeep, three years younger, shared many of his aspirations. He worked in a call center. He had risen up the ranks too, to become a team leader, and he wanted to rise further, which is why he took advantage of the management courses that his company offered on-site. But Kuldeep was the bon vivant that his older brother was not: he dressed well, ate out, and once he married Monica, took her out to the mall. “I can say he was like a brand ambassador for Benetton,” Amit said of his brother’s sense of style, which was also his way of saying how different they were.

  Kuldeep loved going out. His friends were “hi-fi” kids who grew up across the main road, in a neighborhood known as Ashok Vihar and who considered Wazirpur’s fly-choked lanes to be ganda. Kuldeep knew early on he wanted out. Amit had never considered it.

  Amit knew Kuldeep had a thing for Monica. He even warned his brother not to take it too far. He figured it would pass, a brief romance. Not in his wildest imagination did Amit envision that love would drive Kuldeep to risk everything.

  In fact, Amit didn’t know anyone who had fallen in love. “We never knew what is love marriage” is how he put it. “It never happened in our family.”

  But then it did. During the rains in 2007.

  Amit is the first to get a call that night from Monica’s infuriated father. His daughter hasn’t come home, he says. He accuses Kuldeep of kidnapping her. Amit tries to put him at ease. Don’t worry, Uncle, he says. We will find them. Amit searches for Kuldeep everywhere. He goes to the gym where Kuldeep usually works out. He goes to the pool hall where he sometimes meets friends. He calls and calls Kuldeep’s cell phone; it is turned off.

  This is when Amit starts to get a sinking feeling. He knows Kuldeep can’t have kidnapped Monica. He wonders: Could they have eloped?

  The rains have just broken over Delhi. Heat rises from the black tar. Tin roofs turn into drum sets. Amit doesn’t sleep that night. No one in his house sleeps that night.

  The next morning, Amit’s apprehensions turn out to be correct. He gets a call from the courthouse a few miles away from home. There he finds Kuldeep and Monica. After exchanging garlands at the temple the previous evening, they have come to court to register their marriage with a judge. They are both over eighteen. Adults. The judge makes it clear that they have the right to choose to marry each other. In the eyes of the law, no one can take that away.

  Amit doesn’t have it in him to be angry at his little brother. What can he do but give his blessings? His parents too embrace Monica. Welcome to our family, they say, but please don’t live in Wazirpur. Find yourself somewhere safe,
far away from her people.

  “Beta, they’ll kill you both,” Kuldeep’s mother says.

  Monica is no rebel. She obeys the rules. She dresses in a salwar kameez when she visits her in-laws. She wears jeans—which has, strangely, become a metonym for the loose woman—when she goes to the movies or to the mall, which she does only with her husband. She complies with her husband’s wish that she not work outside the home. She is devoted to him: if Kuldeep is on a night shift at the call center where he works, she stays awake until he comes home.

  Monica asserts herself in one notable way: she chooses to love him. She chooses to love.

  After living on the other side of the city for the first couple of years of marriage, Monica makes peace with her parents. Monica and Kuldeep return to be closer to both their families. Not to Wazirpur—but the more modern, more pukka Ashok Vihar, the next neighborhood over. In Ashok Vihar, there is no cow dung to step over on the way home. Most people have cars and office jobs. They go for morning walks. They dress well. Monica and Kuldeep rent a second-floor apartment that overlooks a shady neighborhood park. Monica speaks to her sister-in-law, Amit’s wife, Reshu, on the phone almost every day. She visits her mother regularly. She is no longer afraid of her people. To Reshu, Monica seems happy.

  Things take a turn when two other daughters of Wazirpur stray. Sisters named Shobha and Khushboo, they live along the same alley as Monica’s family. They are known in the neighborhood as dancers. What sort of dancer, no one can quite tell me, but just to be known in this community as a dancer means having a shady reputation. One woman tells me she heard they were models— also considered shady.

  Shobha and Khushboo have a domineering brother: Mandeep, a high school dropout and an occasional used car salesman who mostly cruises around on his motorcycle and lords over his sisters.