'Who here is a bigger terrorist than the police?' Photography as a politics of encounter in Delhi's Batla House (original) (raw)
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The deadly violence in India’s capital in February 2020 did not end with the anti-Muslim pogrom that it was. It continues in the politics of being termed a riot, an old tactic of flattening the gigantic power inequality between the country’s Hindus and Muslims. It isn’t mere verbal gymnastics; naming is critical to the diagnosis of the problem as also to its prevention. Indeed on naming rests, in many ways, life as well as death. To safeguard the chastity of language, and my own ethical integrity, I will, therefore, not call the violence in Delhi a riot, as it’s being widely called. But let me name it what it truly is: a pogrom. I explore the subject in this essay