Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative

The Indian Express’ interview with Angana P. Chatterji (Co-chair,Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative) discusses her bookMajoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India.

US-based Chatterji’s detailed study onBuried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves, brought focus on the unmarked graves found in Kashmir for the first time. The unearthing happened in March 2008, and thereafter, Chatterji and her groups identified 2,700 such unknown, unmarked and mass graves that contained over 2,900 bodies in 55 villages in Bandipora, Baramulla, and Kupwara districts of Kashmir.

Chatterji had said in an interview, “If independent investigations are undertaken... it is reasonable to assume that the 8,000+ enforced disappearances since 1989 would...

“[T]his was part of an escalating strategy where public intellectuals, civil society advocates, and human rights defenders who are progressive, liberal, with a certain idea of the free university and freedom of speech in a democratic society, were being identified, discouraged, and targeted…it is dangerous to speak up in India today.”

Angana Chatterji, Research Anthropologist and Co-chair of CRG’s Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, is quoted and profiled in aTimemagazine article about increasing threats to academic freedom under the Indian...

A spokesperson for the Indian Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the matter.

For Chatterji, the consequences of her human rights work in India — from Kashmir’s mass graves to Assam’s citizenship tests — have been exacting. In 2010, under India’s Congress government, her spouse, Richard Shapiro, an anthropologist, was deported from the Delhi airport over what the government described as “...