“These evictions in Dhalpur are part of the BJP’s drive to politicise and dismantle the citizenship rights of the Bengali Muslims in Assam, and this is a very dangerous path,” saidAngana Chatterji, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley, who recently wrote a study on the alleged abuses in Assam.
“We see the chilling nationalist fervour that these evictions induce. It reiterates their violent divide-and-conquer policy...
The Indian Express’ interview with Angana P. Chatterji (Co-chair,Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative) discusses her bookMajoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India.
Narendra Modi’s op-ed in The Guardian includes Angana P. Chatterji’s (Co-chairPolitical Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative) co-authored book, Majoritarian State to discuss the political climate in India.
US-based Chatterji’s detailed study onBuried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves, brought focus on the unmarked graves found in Kashmir for the first time. The unearthing happened in March 2008, and thereafter, Chatterji and her groups identified 2,700 such unknown, unmarked and mass graves that contained over 2,900 bodies in 55 villages in Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara districts of Kashmir.
Chatterji had said in an interview, “If independent investigations are undertaken... it is reasonable to assume that the 8,000+ enforced disappearances since 1989 would...
“[T]his was part of an escalating strategy where public intellectuals, civil society advocates, and human rights defenders who are progressive, liberal, with a certain idea of the free university and freedom of speech in a democratic society, were being identified, discouraged, and targeted…it is dangerous to speak up in India today.”
Angana Chatterji, Research Anthropologist and Co-chair of CRG’s Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, is quoted and profiled in aTimemagazine article about increasing threats to academic freedom under the Indian...
How many of us first developed an understanding of the Indian subcontinent and its peoples from the writings of Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie or Rohinton Mistry? Their stories, A Suitable Boy, Midnight’s Children and A Fine Balance, introduced the rest of the world to the socio-political...
A spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the matter.
For Chatterji, the consequences of her human rights work in India — from Kashmir’s mass graves to Assam’s citizenship tests — have been exacting. In 2010, under India’s Congress government, her spouse, Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist, was deported from the Delhi airport over what the government described as “...
Critical elections are proceeding in five states in India, including in its most populous state and political nerve center, Uttar Pradesh. The election there in particular illustrates the majoritarian nationalism that is driving...
Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley notes that the Rajasthan murder is horrible in its specifics, but has to be considered in the larger context of repeated targeting of unarmed, ordinary Muslims by Hindu nationalist violence. “Systemic violence by state institutions and Hindu vigilante groups against Muslims are bound to commence cycles of violence,” she says.
‘‘Hindu Lives Matter’ presumes those lives have been overlooked. Hindu lives have not been overlooked in a Hindu majoritarian state,” Chatterji says. “This is a revisionist...
