BehanVox: Truth, Imprisoned
This week in BehanVox: a Census worker's testimony from Maharashtra, protests against GRAMG, and more
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Hello and welcome to BehanVox!
We start with a worrying development. Mahrang Baloch was all of 16 when her father, a political activist, Abdul Ghaffar Langove, went missing. Balochistan has a long history of insurgency that has been repressed with a rough hand. The family’s painful search for him set Mahrang on the path to resistance in an area that has a long history of insurgency. Three years later his body was found, the family say, with marks of torture. Since then she has been the face of the campaigns seeking answers about the people who have disappeared in Balochistan. Three years ago, she led hundreds of women on a 1,600km march from Turbat to Islamabad. She was arrested twice during the journey and then again last year. Mahrang, now 33, faces life term after a hurried online trial this week which she refused to attend. Activists and rights groups allege that ethnic Baloch people have disappeared in thousands over the last 20 years, and condemned the verdict.
Now onto regular programming. This week we bring you a close look at the workday of a teacher who is working as a Census enumerator in Maharashtra. And our weekly dose of recommendations to keep you company over the weekend.
Story So Far
She has another name but we call her ‘Garima’. She is among the 33 lakh enumerators out on the field across India initiating the mammoth task of enumerating the country’s more than 1 billion citizens, their livelihoods, choices and identities. And for obvious reasons she cannot talk openly about her anxieties, except under an assumed name.
But there is nothing fictional about Garima’s workday and worklife as an enumerator, it mirrors the reality of every single person who has undertaken the task – the heat, dust, repetitive physical labour, the mental and emotional effort of interacting with people who may or may not be cooperative.
A teacher from Maharashtra, she has been visiting close to 300 houses under the merciless sun of an exceptional summer. Her discomfort is the same that several ASHA workers from Mumbai spoke about for this BehanBox story. Each home needs at least three visits, entering people’s data into an app and answering questions. Then Garima has to draw maps of the area annotated with house numbers, roads, other landmarks, with guiding arrows. These will be verified later using geo-tagging, and submitted as hard copies for her work to be considered complete.
“It’s funny they are calling this a digital Census,” she says, given the disproportionate amount of time being spent on manual work.
Read a chronicle of her workday here.
Talking Point
War Crimes: A UN commission of inquiry has concluded that about 30% of those killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since the war began in October 2023 were children. The report released this week said that attacks on maternity and neonatal units, along with an aid blockade, have hit children’s chances of survival in Gaza. The children’s institutions that have been destroyed are orphanages and schools. It also reported that Palestinian children have been arrested, tortured and subjected to sexual abuse in detention. A UNICEF report estimates that over 50,000 children have been killed or wounded in this war, with at least one Palestinian child killed on average every day.
Protest Next Week: Agricultural workers, labour unions and grassroots activists will launch a nationwide protest on July 1 against the Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) or VB-G RAM G. This is the day the new law will be enforced in place of the critical Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). As BehanBox had explained through an interview and an analysis (here and here), this will mark a profound shift in India’s approach to rural livelihoods because it will dismantle a rights-based framework that had become a lifeline for millions of rural women farmers and workers. MGNREGS is a critical instrument of economic citizenship for women, offering them bargaining clout in the employment market and an alternative to exploitative labour practices. The new Act also significantly dilutes the MGNREGS’ decentralised architecture while shifting a greater fiscal burden onto states.
Iranian singer: Parastoo Ahmadi, an Iranian singer, and eight members of a production team, have been reportedly sentenced to 74 lashes for performing in a concert livestreamed on her YouTube channel in 2024. The criminal court of Qom province sentenced them to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on artistic activities for recording and publishing “vulgar and immoral content” online. In short, for appearing without a hijab. In a unique pushback against this kind of brutal policing, a London-based artist of Iranian origin, Farbod Mehr has created a robot ‘singer’ of resistance songs, Nava. She is obviously beyond arrest and whipping.
BehanVox Recommends
A collection of fun, witty as well sobering reads to keep you company over the weekend.
Suitcase Of Language: Russian author Maria Stepanova’s lecture from April, published in Equator, makes for a tender read on language, home, and identity when all three collapse in the face of political exile. It is requiem for the homeland lost, and a revival of oneself. Language, Stepanova says, “is impossible to leave behind; there is always space for it in the suitcase, even if it won’t be of much use in the future. In a sense, language is the suitcase. It carries everything else, and turns ordinary possessions into a museum exhibit of a now-defunct universe.”
Utopian Promises: There are a few texts considered blasphemous, prophetic, fantastical, a holy writ — all at once — in the same way Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is. The 1985 essay presented a vision of feminist hybrid utopia, while being presciently aware of the inherent violence of technology, the exploitation of labour and the decline of narrative in the pursuit of perfect communication (AI slop we see you). Consider this: “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert.” This Yale Review article considers what the manifesto means today to feminists, and offers a timely reminder: to counter the skew of ideology and concentration of power, we need stories — speculative and radical and impossible — to widen our realm of possibility.
Smile For The Simile: Cool as hell, this Pudding article. Here’s a wildly fascinating analysis of similes used in popular fiction, ones that follow the “as XX as XX” form. Birds, bees, cats and cucumbers, authors’ usage of comparisons reveals much about the qualities we ascribe to people, places, and things. Our favourites, though, are the ones full of irony and whimsy. Why be just happy when you can be as happy as a catfish at a rodeo to take you on in a war of words?
Want to explore more newsletters? In Postcards, we send you missives on the places, people and ideas that brought Team BehanBox joy. Our monthly offering Postscript invites you, the reader, into our newsroom to understand how the stories you read came to be – from ideation to execution. Subscribe for more.
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