The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rana Ayyub on India’s Crackdown on Muslims

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

In August, India suspended the autonomy of the state of Kashmir, putting soldiers in its streets and banning foreign journalists from entering. Dexter Filkins, who was working on a story about Narendra Modi, would not be deterred from going. To evade the ban, he sought the help of an Indian journalist, Rana Ayyub. Ayyub had once gone undercover to reveal the ruling party’s ties to sectarian and extrajudicial violence against the Muslim minority. In a conversation recorded last week, Filkins and Ayyub tell the story of how they got into Kashmir and describe the repression and signs of torture that they observed there. Ayyub’s book “Gujarat Files,” about a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, has made her a target of Hindu nationalists; one of the book’s translators was killed not long ago. She spoke frankly with Filkins about the emotional toll of living in fear of assassination. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a bonus episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour. Dexter Filkins has spent a lot of time in conflict zones, whether it's the war in Afghanistan, the American occupation of Iraq, and the uprisings in Syria and Yemen. But one conflict older still than all of those wars is the trouble in Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in India. Dexter traveled to Kashmir earlier this year to observe firsthand a violent crackdown instigated by the Indian government,

and his article, Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi's India, was just published by the New Yorker. Here's Dexter. Like so many things in the modern world, the current conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir dates to the dissolution of the British Empire in 1947. And what happened was, it's a fascinating story. Generally speaking, the Muslim majority states became Pakistan. The Hindu majority states became India. Kashmir nestled high up in the Himalayas is split in half, basically two-thirds to India, one-third to Pakistan, and it's been that way ever since. And in the beginning, when the Indians wrote the Constitution, they gave Kashmir a special status, essentially recognizing it as its only Muslim majority state.

And the special provisions in the Constitution were essentially designed to preserve that character, that special character. And basically what they did was grant really broad powers of autonomy and self-rule. But since the very beginning, there was always a strain, a very powerful strain in Indian politics. And there was always a strain of Indian political leaders who resented the special status that Kashmir got and resented the fact that what they regarded as special treatment, favorable treatment for Muslims. And they always vowed that they would change it. And they never did. They kind of paid lip service to it. They never had the power to do it.

Norander Modi became Prime Minister of India in 2014, was just re-elected in 2019. He's now the most powerful prime minister that India has had in decades. And upon his re-election earlier this year, one of the first things he did was to essentially suspend the special status of Kashmir. He just did it in a stroke. Modi flooded Kashmir with Indian troops and has basically tried to. to lock down the state. They've cut off internet. They've cut off television. They've cut off telephone service, everything. So basically, Kashmiris are cut off from the rest of the country and they're also cut off from each other. So it's really, really tough moves. I think what Modi is

doing in Kashmir is the logical endpoint of Hindu nationalism. The vision of Modi is to impose on Kashmir, essentially his vision for the rest of India, which is first and foremost India's for the Hindus and the minorities, including the Muslims, are second class. I was trying to figure out a way to write this India story and to write the Kashmir story and more important to get into Kashmir from which foreign reporters have been banned. And so it's off limits to foreign correspondents. They don't want any of them there now. How could I do that?

So I decided to call this very interesting woman, very compelling woman, and really one of the most prominent investigative reporters in India. Her name is Rana Ayyub. She's 35 years old and a Muslim, and utterly fearless and completely bold. And so I called her up out of the blue. I said, Rana, my name's Dexter. Can I come out and can we go to Kashmir together? Long pause in the phone. Sure. So I flew to Mumbai. We got an airplane together. and we flew to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. We landed in the airport. There were, you know, there were soldiers and police everywhere. There's a big sign when you walk in saying foreigners register here.

I had put on local dress and I kind of stared very intently at the ground. And we walked out together. Rana, how are you? I'm good, Dexter. Good to hear from you. So we went up to Kashmir together. And so as I understand it, it's okay for you to. go. Even if you ask a bunch of trouble making questions, as you know that did, it wasn't okay for me to go.

So I did my best to look cashmere and put on a curta, the local outfit. It wasn't very convincing. You know, you were kind of laughing at me, I think, at one point and said, you know, I'm about 99% sure that you're going to get arrested. And but we made it through. Like we got, you know, we got on the plane. We, we, we got on the plane. We We flew the Srinagar and I thought we did pretty well. Yeah. You know, from the time that you wore the kirtah to the time that we boarded the flight, until the time we landed in Srinagar, I was convinced that this is not going to happen. And then when it did happen, it was quite a journey.

It was remarkable the way things were there. The scale of the violence and the scale of attention and how a story is big as that, of that intensity was actually, you know, being hidden from the world. media. Explain to people, you know, people in the United States, they kind of hear about Kashmir and they go, God, it's really bad over there. What's this all about? There's a kind of history there, which I think most people don't know. Like, what is, what's Modi trying to do? And why are the Kashmiri people so angry? Because I think we find a lot of anger there. Right. Oh, yes, we did. So Kashmiris have a special status in the sense that non-Kashmiris

cannot buy land in the valley, cannot invest in the valley. And it is a sensitive place. It's on the border of India and Pakistan. There has been a struggle, which has been going on for its own statehood, for its independent statehood, for decades now. And there has been insurgency in the valley. The special status that has been granted to Kashmir was revoked by the Indian government without consulting the stakeholders in Kashmir,

without consulting the democratic leaders who were put behind bars, who are still behind bars, the human rights activist, every single human rights activist is behind bars in Kashmir. So you and I, I think we had that one really remarkable day when we once again,

we got in a car and we snuck out of Srinagar, out into the villages, where I think it's fair to say the insurgency has a lot of support. And remember, we went to that little vision, village, I think it was called Paragram. And we interviewed those two, those two young guys and his dad, but those two young guys had been, had been arrested or just, just grabbed by the Indian Army a couple weeks before. And remember, they, they walked us through that kind of what they had

been through. And, you know, when you do that as a reporter, you often just don't know what, you know, they said, well, we were beaten, we were tortured, we were interrogated, they beat us with, they beat us with bamboo rods. And they even used electricity on us. And I remember, I think his name was Musafar. He rolled up his leg and he showed us those burn marks on his legs. And that, you know, that was the moment I knew, okay, this is real. Then, of course, the further he went talking about it, he started crying.

I mean, these teenagers that we met, central paramilitary forces and the rastry rifles took the brothers away, threatened the woman in the family that now that Kashmir, the special status in Kashmir has been revoked, they can marry their woman. One of the women said that she had to hide her daughter-in-law

because the central paramilitary forces threatened them with rape. So that's the kind of story. I mean, not just that. The story of the 13-year-old boy, Ashek, you know, when we went there, he was playing cricket. And I almost thought for a second,

I said, hang on, this boy was behind bars for 30 days. And why is it so normal? Why is he playing cricket? And his father said, this is the way of life in Kashmir. He was also detained 30 years ago. It's like a cycle of injustice. And this boy comes to us. And, you know, when we were recording his interview,

he showed his marks on his back and the wounds. And it was just, it was inhuman. It was inhuman to say the leads that they could inflict this on a 13-year-old. So let's talk about you for a second. You know, I think what we saw in Kashmir and what we, I think it's fair to say what we've been seeing in India since Prime Minister Modi was first elected in 2014. It's become a tough place to be a Muslim in India. I think it's fair to say. And I, the sort of Hindu Muslim divide has been in India forever. But you've lived your whole life on that divide when you were just.

Just the girl in 1992, there were really horrendous bloody riots that kind of swept Mumbai. And yet your family was got caught right in the middle of that and you had to flee. Tell us about that moment. So we lived in a pretty cosmopolitan society near the Sahad International Airport, where we were the only Muslim in a predominantly Hindu society. And we never really felt threatened. I mean, we never really had a religious society. identity to ourselves because my father was a part of the progressive writer's movement.

He was also a government school teacher. So we were never really seen with a religious identity. So I did not know what it was to be like a Muslim in India. I mean, there has been post-partition bitterness. And with the Hindu nationalist believing that if Muslims chose to live in India and decided not to go to Pakistan, then they must live in India as second-class citizens. However, we do not have a taste of it till 6 December 1992, when, When suddenly that evening, all hell broke loose in the country.

Our neighbor was a Sikh guy, Mr. Buggar. He was sweating when he knocked at our door. And my father opened the door and he said, your daughters need to be taken somewhere because the mob is rushing towards your house. They have swords in their hand. And my father said, what happened? He said, you're the only Muslim family here.

We have to save you. You will not be spared because they're all coming for you. And they are just blocks away from you. I have to take them out. So we were risked off and we lived in a Sikh household for three months and everybody was to come in the house and ask, okay, who are these people? And the hosts would say, oh, they're refugees. They're in a house for a couple of months. They're Muslims.

And that's the first time the word, oh, they are Muslims, really stuck to me because till then I did not see myself as a Muslim. The entire episode that gave me a religious identity perhaps was the most traumatic episode of my life. And from then on, it's only been a downward slide where in my journey into adulthood and then my journey in journalism has, it runs in a way parallel to India's majoritarian slide, the route that Mr. Moti is now taking India into. So when those riots happened in Mumbai in 1992, you were, I think you were nine years old. 10 years later, there was another really horrific series of riots in the state of Gujarat. And you're famous for writing about those riots, and we're going to get to that in a second. And, you know, riots is in the case of Gujarat, it's not a very good descriptive word, because really most of that violence, after kind of an initial attack, most of that violence was one way.

It was Hindu on Muslim, so it's better really to describe what happening. Gujarat as a pogrom, I think probably 1,500 dead, maybe 150,000 people homeless. But you were 18, 19 years old. You were living in Mumbai. And then this is a wonderful story. You told your mom you were going trekking in the Himalayas. But you didn't do that. Tell us what you did instead.

So I told her that I was going on a trek. But a night before, I had seen on television, the first time visuals from the Gujarat riots were Hindu nationalists and the local crowd were basically boasting on national television there is a line in Hindi that they said Mullahaka, Aikistan, Pakistan, Pakistan,

basically Muslims have just land, which is Pakistan. And I saw that and it felt like I was reliving my childhood. What I saw at 9, it was repeating itself when I was 19. And it was traumatic again and I didn't want to be helpless. So there was a friend whose sister was with the International Red Cross and she was traveling. So I tagged along with her.

We took a train from Mumbai Central Station. We landed in Ahmedabad and then we went to Baroda. And my name is Rana, so there is a lot of ambiguity around my name because it can pass off as a Hindu name. So I went around as Rana with a bindi on my forehead. And so we'd go around relief camps wherein we witnessed women who were really really. raped and who were left there to just die. There were children with trauma written all over them. I mean, just traumatized eyes.

Their wounds bleeding. There were flies all over their bodies. And it was the worst thing any human being could actually witness. It made me realize that I did have a purpose and I cannot afford to be weak anymore. And the Gujarat riots essentially helped me determine my way for. and helped me understand that I needed to be a part of a profession that would allow me to get justice for these people, not just for these people, but for the marginalized and for the discriminated. It also helped me become a journalist. Well, yeah, I think the Gujarat riots are a real turning point in modern Indian history. And I just, I want to pause on those for a second. The remarkable thing, of course, looking back, is that the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, at the time was none other than Narendra Modi, who later became the prime minister. And I think

it's fair to say at the time and for years after, there were great suspicions that his government and even Modi himself had aided and abetted the riots and allowed them to happen and allowed them to kind of proceed. And in the aftermath of the riots, instead of recognizing and publicly declaring what a catastrophe this had been for the country. Modi really capitalized on those riots and on the kind of this upsurge in Hindu feeling and Hindu identity that came out of them. That became a great swell, a ground swell, and he rode that. Really, I think it's fair to say he rode that all the way to the prime minister's office 12 years later. Explain that paradox. because it is, it's still just incredibly puzzling to me.

So, yes, I mean, when the Gujarat riots happened, so we had a Hindu nationalist leader in Mumbai. His name is Bal Tarkhri, and, you know, he was seen as this true Hindu nationalist. And Mr. Modi always aspired to be the next Bal Tarkaray. Mr. Thakray gave provocative speeches during the Mumbai riots that led to the nationwide killing of Muslims. Mr. Modi repeated the same formula in Gujarat, wherein he said, relief camps are child-producing factories. What do you expect me to do? I mean, that was clearly aimed at the minorities.

He was brazening it out because the audience was loving this Hindu nationalist leader who was giving them what they essentially deserved. They wanted Muslims to be second-class citizens because Gujarat had a history of communal, flare-ups. There had been Hindu-Muslim riots in the past. And Mr. Modi used the Gujarat riots to his opportunity. He became a mascot of the Hindu nationalist because the BJP nationwide wasn't exactly doing well. Most of their leaders were, you know, they were losing most of their states. Another stalwart, Mr. L. K. Edwani came forward and said, no, we need this man because, you know, if our party needs to survive, we need men like him. Yeah, he can save us. That moment, literally led to the rise and rise of Narendra Modi because Modi was not elected nationwide in

2014 despite what he did but because of what he did in 2002 because he endured himself to the country as somebody who could take revenge on behalf of the Hindu nationalists and revenge would mean the killing of Muslims during the Gujarat riots and looking the other way the extrajudicial murder of Muslims who were labeled as terrorists so he built this entire image of a Hindu nationalist under attack from Islamist. And the nation was singing his praise. You see what's happening right now in the country? It's just the Gujarat model being repeated on a national level. So let's talk for a second about the book that made you famous. In famous. It's about the riots in 2002. You basically decided that the only way you're going to

find the truth is to wear. a disguise to pretend to be a filmmaker and then just insinuated yourself into Gujarati society. And you insinuated yourselves into the whole world of the Hindu nationalists there. So convincingly that they all ended up telling you their own roles in what happened and what they believe happened in 2002 and what really happened in 2002. Your book gets published. It becomes a bestseller. It makes you famous.

It's kind of amazing. And on the other hand, you become the target of a really vicious social media campaign, which if you kind of look at closely, you see that the people who are orchestrating this campaign are many of the people who are orchestrating the campaign and supporting it and really going after you with vicious stuff, including pornographic videos, which we'll talk about. they're Hindu nationalist and specifically BJP supporters. And even people who are, if not, sitting next to the prime minister, people who would certainly like to be.

Tell us about that social media campaign that really blasted you. So there were these social media campaigns against me. And each time in the past, also every time I've done a big story or a big investigation, there has been a social media trend. From Rana Yub's sex CD to Rana Yub, sleeping, etc. these hashtags have run. It took a more menacing toll in 2017 when I published the Hindi edition of the book and around the same time.

And I also given the youth icon of the year award by a magazine. And I spoke about my book being converted into a film. And the next day, there are these fake tweets generated and photoshopped and generated in my name. The one tweet says, I support child rapist in the name of Islam. and that tweet spreads like wildfire. In a couple of hours, another tweet is generated that says, I hate India and I hate all Indians, and that also creates an outrage.

I'm sitting with my friend, I'm discussing this, and I'm telling her that, you know, this should not have happened, and why is this happening to me? And then a source of mine from the ruling party, the BJP, sends me a message saying, I'm going to send you something, but please don't be upset. And I ask him to send it to me. It's a porn video, a porn video, like two minute, 30 seconds,

with my image morphed on it. And I couldn't watch it beyond like four to five frames. And I started vomiting. And I said, what's this? I mean, how could this? I mean, why have they done this to me? And I just, it felt like my world had crumbling down upon me. It felt like my world had ended.

For three days, I was just a lifeless person. It was a struggle to even live. the thought that the country was watching a video, that was not me, but that was suggested it was me. It was everywhere. It was on my social media. It was on everybody's phone in India. It was on WhatsApp. It was on Instagram.

It was on Facebook. And every two minutes, somebody would send me a message saying, hey, we saw a video of yours. And the fact that this video came from a member of the ruling party and it was circulating in their WhatsApp group, which means that they had the initial access to the video. Second, the number of people who were threatening me with rape on social media were followed by the prime minister, were followed by the Home Minister, were followed by the Civil Aviations Minister on Twitter. So it wasn't direct, but it was done by people who owed allegiance to the BJP. A spokesperson for the party says, if you get out in the rain, you should be willing to get drenched. That was his reaction to the deep fake video that was created of me. Well, let me ask you a question.

And I hate to ask you this question. I really do. But you're out there, you know, you won't leave India. You're banging away. Do you fear for your life? Your parents fear for your life? Actually, not as much my life, but the life of my family and the way it could be targeted. You know, a couple of months ago, which I told you about, there was a dosier that an IB official gave me about each one of my family member and what they were doing.

doing and where they're working and what was the daily routine like. So it's not just, it's not about me that I fear. You know, when the book, my friend Gori Lankish, she was a journalist, you know, she was one of the most vocal journalist who was critical of the government. She was shot dead in 2017. One of the reasons being that, you know, she was fighting these Hindu nationalists. She was speaking about the right-wing groups operating in the south where she was working. What Gori-Lonkech also did was three years. weeks before she was killed, she translated my book into a regional language. And when she was shot dead, we had spoken the night before, and we were laughing at the kind of harassment that

came our way. And she said, Rana stays strong. And the moment she was killed and the news trickled in, I felt like, I felt a knot in my stomach that, okay, next could, I could be next, or anybody else for that matter. And it just felt like, and it's just sometimes feels that death is too close sometimes. But sometimes when I'm in a traffic jam and there are two cars next to me, one on the left and the right, and I'm crammed between them. I always keep looking around. What if somebody is trying to get into my car? What is somebody? I don't know. There is this fear. I mean, I won't deny it. Of course I do live in fear. Rana Ayub writes from India for the Washington Post and other publications. Her book,

Gujarat Files, Anatomy of a Coverup, came out in 2016. And you can find Dexter Filkins's article, blood and soil in Narendramode's India at New Yorker.com. Thanks for listening.