Living to Fight Another Day

How the India-Pakistan conflict undermined civil-rights movements / Politics

- / SAGAR

The mood for war drummed up rather quickly in the days after militants killed 26 people in Pahalgam. As India blamed Pakistan for the attack, and both governments undertook a slew of diplomatic measures and fired at each other across the Line of Control, the narrative of “peace” in Kashmir was not the only casualty. “We had been asking for the caste census and how it would be conducted,” Ali Anwar, a former Rajya Sabha member and the founder of the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz, an organisation demanding constitutional safeguards for Pasmanda—or marginalised-caste—Muslims, told me. Anwar, who is also a leader of the Indian National Congress, said that India’s civil-rights movement had worked painstakingly to highlight the need for a caste census at the national level, alongside other demands for social justice for Dalits, Bahujans and Pasmanda Muslims. In recent months, the Congress as well as the Bharatiya Janata Party had joined the chorus of regional parties promising a caste census if voted to power in state assembly elections. However, according to Anwar, as the military action grew imminent, the issue of power-sharing and the rights of these communities “did not just take a backseat—we zipped our lips.”