 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today, we have with us Harsh Mandar, who has been covering India with Karwane Mahabhat. Harsh, this has been a discovery of some kind. Why did you start this project at all? Why did you go to these places? See, there are two things that are troubling me very much about India. I think about much of the world, but particularly India since we live here. One is that you are seeing a rising climate of hate. I call it command hate because it is hate that is actually politically generated and legitimized. It has specific purpose. Yeah, and it is legitimized. So, there is a legitimization, a permissive environment led from the top for hate speech and hate violence of a kind that we have never seen since partition. Normalization of hate and violence. Absolutely. And targeting and as a result of that, especially our Muslim minorities, Christian tribal minorities, Dalits in many places, are living with fear as an everyday aspect of life. I don't, you know, those of us who are not in these communities, don't even realize. I mean, Muslim colleagues, for instance, are telling me their mothers will tell them, you know, if you are on a train, if I ring up, don't say salam alaikum, say namaste, you know, don't let people know that you are Muslim. So, you are living continuously in a sense of everyday fear. So, that is one part. And I think that it's really important for us to reach out to say that this is happening and to also express solidarity, that you're not alone. It's not a problem of the minorities. It's a problem of all of us, of what kind of society we want. But the other part is the silence of the majority. The idea, you know, that there is, compared even to the United States where post-Trump we see so much. When you look at film award functions or you look at, you know, television, you look at commentators, you look at everyday people, you know, coming to airports and saying, you know, we oppose the Muslim ban. We have not seen that kind of pushback by the majority community in India. There is a substantial silence and the silence can either be out of, because of fear, because of indifference or actually sharing that feeling of hate. You think there is a complicity in the silence? There is a complicity in the silence. So, in very brief, I feel that we need to do something continuously in this climate of hate. One is a voice of solidarity and the other is a call of conscience. Karwati Mohapat went to places where there is violence. We have covered some of that when your team went around to different places. So, what did you see which was the most striking aspect of this? As a consequence for visits of your visits, what do you think is a long-term follow-up that all of us can do? See, you know, it is a long conversation, but I will just sort of, you are about three or four biggest findings that we did when we travelled across eight states last September in the Karwan. The first of us is the extent of hate, you know, and, you know, once again after the Karwan and after Zul was killed. I mean, I went there and I found that he never knew the man. He never met him in his life and you see him for 30 seconds and you kill him with that brutality. A lot of the other killings that people have been talking about, you not only kill, you lynch somebody, the bodies are mutilated. The amount of hatred that has got unleashed, I think that is one. The videographing, this is almost, you know, that you do it and you videograph it is common across the country. So, it is almost like you are doing this as a public entertainment, also a message to the community about where they stand. So, this is one part that we found. The second was the role of the police consistently across that the police in almost every case actually registers cases against the victim and protects the accused. And so, this environment of permissive violence is reinforced all of that time by the state, very clearly. And the third big thing is the complete absence of compassion or solidarity in local areas by the majority community. The complete silence. I mean, again, because after Zul is most recent, I went to Raj Saban three days, four days after. I mean, it has happened in a district town, 700 meters from where the collector sits and so on. I've been a district collector. I know in small town India, in normal times, there would be a response, but nobody speaks out, nobody reaches out. It's a problem of the Muslim community and they have to deal with it themselves. The failure to express outrage and compassion right from our prime minister downwards, nobody is actually saying they care. And I think, so these are the three big things that I found through all of this journey, which is why it is so necessary for us to continue this work. So, for all of us, what is it, what are the next steps? Of course, resistance in different forms, different ways are things groups are trying. There are solidarity actions that are taking place. But in terms of the big picture, what is it that you would like to do as a follow-up to the Karbani Mahabbath? I feel that both solidarity and conscience have to be consistent long-term actions that we have to do around this climate of hatred and fear. And we have to find a new, almost a new grammar of politics, I think, which is founded on ideas of solidarity and love. And these are difficult, these are new things that we are trying to do. And so we decided that we would continue this journey through at least all of 2018. I hope we will have the energy and the capacity to continue doing it. We thought we will visit at least one state every month and do the same thing. Visit families that have been affected by hate violence, seeing to them that we care and that we stand with you, you are not alone. Look at the issues of justice in relation to those cases and also inform, write, speak. So we are looking for writers, especially whom we call chroniclers, writers, photographers, videographers who will tell the story, news click. We hope we will be part of the entire journey. So this is one thing that we decided to do. Second is we are trying to support work in terms of documentation of the scale of hate violence. I mean, there is so much denial. In the Rajasabha, they have asked how many incidents of mass mob violence and they reported two from January to July 2017. In December they gave this reply, I am so appalled by the lie that they are telling us that there are two incidents of mob. So we have to also document the scale of hate violence in our country as a second thing. But the third is I think that we generally need to talk a lot more about our imagination of the good society. And I think that secularism is not something that we have to be defensive about. It's something that we need to talk about with pride. This is the India which belongs equally to people of every faith and every caste and class and gender and so on. Last question, replication of the local level. Do you see some prospects of this being many more of similar exercises across the country? Absolutely. In two ways. I mean, I feel that every time we are going to a new state, it's very often. I mean, there are some states like Rajasthan and Gujarat where there is a lot of civil society action that we already saw. But in a lot of the other states, Assam, Kosilkanath, Akash, Harikhan, Western UP, Uttar Pradesh, we are finding that the process Madhya Pradesh now, Odisha where we are planning to go in the coming months, Bengal. We are helping catalyze, bring together people who will work at the local level and we are hoping that there will be state-level action, ongoing state-level action in response to hate crime and politics which is trying to divide us. Thank you very much, Harsh, for being with us. We hope that we will be able to partner you with your at least chronicling of what is happening. We see newspaper as a completely, you know, as a very strong partner of this entire exercise and I wouldn't want to go on the journey without news click. Thank you very much. This is all the time we have for news click today. Do keep watching news click, visit our web page and also look at our YouTube channel.