The Caravan

Something Rotten

On 8 June, around noon, four people in ordinary clothes abducted me from the front of my house in Mandawali, on the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border. “You had tweeted against Baba ji,” they said, referring to the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath. “Now face the consequences.” On hearing this, the first thought that entered my mind was that these people must be from the Bajrang Dal or the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Out of them, two had worn chappals, which made it difficult to confirm whether they were from the police. The car in which they pushed me appeared to be private car, not a police vehicle. They raced it to Noida, inside Uttar Pradesh. After an argument in the car, they revealed that they belonged to the Lucknow police and had come to arrest me. When asked what the matter was, they replied that it was my tweet about Adityanath in which a woman claimed that she was Adityanath’s lover. I had written the

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Caravan

The Caravan2 min read
The Bookshelf
A book that confronts the disinformation in the official narrative after the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir in 2019, looking closely at how the past three years have impacted the lives of Kashmiris. HARPER COLLINS, ₹699, 408 PAGES A memoir that
The Caravan2 min read
Editor’s Pick
ON 6 APRIL 1994, Hutu extremists in Rwanda began a genocidal campaign that killed more than eight hundred thousand people, most of whom belonged to the minority Tutsi community. Around 2 million Rwandans fled the country, and over three hundred thous
The Caravan24 min read
The Bangalore Ideology
“THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE of government is a platform,” the tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani declared in the 2015 book Rebooting India: Realizing a Billion Aspirations, which he co-authored with the software engineer Viral Shah. “We are talking about r

Related Books & Audiobooks