India has always been a profoundly violent country. Yet the vocabulary about this violence remains deeply muted and limited. The routinized violence experienced by the country’s marginalized—Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, poor, and women—is not only denied but also hidden behind a language of neutrality. Like in Adrienne Rich’s words, “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you,” the language used to report, narrate, and understand these acts of violence and dehumanization remains the language of the oppressor.

The contemporary moment in India—lynching, caste violence, and judicial apathy that repeatedly fails to convict murderous men—thus demands that we think about these grotesque acts of violence not as a spectacle but as a continuum, not in isolation but in relation to language, history and media representations of caste and religion. In 1996, African-American reporter and then South Asia bureau chief of Washington Post Kenneth J. Cooper wrote, “India’s majority lower castes are minor voices in newspapers.” After 20 years, Cooper observations remain valid. Here oppression, erasure, and obfuscation of truth all occur in copy-editing. 

In India, there are only a handful of reporters who have now consistently and accurately reported on the recent upswing in violence. In this conversation, Suchitra Vijayan of The Polis Project speaks to Sagar, a Delhi-based journalist who uses only one name. From the frontlines of reporting on caste and identity-based violence comes a tour de force of observations that implicates the nature of media, the politics of identity and representation, and most importantly how truth dies in the pursuit of justice. Sagar’s candid and raw considerations shine a stark and disturbing siege against India’s more vulnerable and how the fissures of caste and religion have grown into epistemic fractures that have birthed a new republic—of fear.