Peace and Justice

15

Let’s Start with State Accountability: An Essay for a Mother

Uma Chakravarti

The Context

This piece was written in anger and anguish when the issue of fake encounters in Jammu and Kashmir became news early in 2007 and I regard it as one kind of reaction from civil society that expresses extreme dissatisfaction both with state practices that feed on hyper-nationalism and the role of the media in manipulating consent for repressive acts of the state. In a sense, my history is that of an ordinary citizen born before Independence and the Partition of the subcontinent, sharing the pain and the hopes that Partition represented in our history. In the first few decades after Independence, in a vague sort of way we made some sense of the happenings ...