This Unquiet Land Quotes

“One-third of the world’s poorest 1.2 billion people live in India where 1.4 million children die before their fifth birthday—making this the highest percentage in the world. Despite a reduction in the official poverty figures and an improvement in various human development indices, one in four children is still malnourished and 3,000 children die every day from poverty. This is the India that we would prefer not to see, the India that inconveniently comes in the way of slogans and news headlines of India Shining, India galloping forward, India being welcomed to exclusive clubs of the world’s rich and powerful nations.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“In the notoriously fickle drawing rooms of Delhi, I had often heard Rahul being described as not-too-bright (in far less charitable terms). But the few times I had spoken with him I had thought otherwise. He was well read, respectful of academic expertise, and keen to meet specialists to mine their minds. His problem was not that he had read too few books—it was that he had a clinical, statistical approach to a profession that was often about instinct and human connections. He was like a man looking for the exactitudes of mathematics in the mysteries of poetry.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“We could all learn from the dignified but strong way in which Sartaj summed up his feelings about Dadri. His words contained within them both the tragedy and the promise of our country’s future. ‘I just want to say a small thing and make a plea. We have all read the song, we all know the words,’ he told me. ‘Saare jahan se accha, Hindustan hamara, mazhab nahin sikhata, aapas mein bair rakhna... If we could just follow the sentiments expressed in this song, we will be fine as a country.’ The words were heartbreaking for the sheer generosity of spirit they displayed. They showed perhaps the only way in which the fault lines of this unquiet land can be mended.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“It was sobering to think that the enormous power of the earthquake and the tsunami it had generated had managed to kill 230,000 people in fourteen countries but had still been unable to break down the wall that separated India’s Dalits from their countrymen.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“In March 2015, sixteen accused policemen were acquitted of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre, making minorities even more cynical about the promises of justice from secular parties. The case dated back to 1987 when riots had erupted in Meerut. Men from UP’s Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) dragged out young Muslim men, most of them poor daily wagers and weavers, drove them to the Upper Ganga Canal in Ghaziabad instead of to the police station, and threw them in one by one. V. N. Rai, who was superintendent of police in Ghaziabad, wrote a chilling account of how the police—who described Meerut as a ‘mini Pakistan’ and held the Muslims solely responsible for the violence—had behaved. ‘Every survivor who hit the ground after being shot at tried hard to pretend he is dead and most hanged on the canal’s embankments with their heads in water and the body clutched by weeds to show to their killers that they were dead and no more gunshots fired at them. Even after the PAC personnel had left, they lay still between water, blood and slush. They were too scared and numbed even to help those who were still alive or half dead.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“But the Congress also played an insidious role in creating the circumstances that led to the demolition of the mosque. Though Rahul Gandhi once grandly claimed that the mosque would never have been brought down had a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family been at the helm of government, it was his father, Rajiv Gandhi, who on the request of the VHP first ordered the locks on the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid complex to be opened in 1985. And in 1989, with one eye on the elections, it was Rajiv who sent his home minister, Buta Singh, to participate in the ‘shilanyas’, or the symbolic temple foundation laying ceremony, at a site near the Babri Masjid but outside of what he understood to be the disputed site. After his assassination in 1991 it became the responsibility of Narasimha Rao to safeguard the mosque from demolition. The Liberhan Report said Prime Minister Rao and his government were ‘day-dreaming’; his own party colleagues and those who met him in the days leading up to 6 December say his inaction was deliberate. Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar even went so far as to suggest in his memoirs that Rao ‘sat at a puja when the kar sevaks began pulling down the mosque and rose only when the last stone had been removed’.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“I have always felt, in the many years that I have observed him, that Modi’s ambitions are personal not ideological. His political career may have had Hindutva roots, but it was clear to me that if he needed to abandon these in the pursuit of a political legacy, he wouldn’t think twice. Given Modi’s amplified sense of self and his well-earned satisfaction at having reached where he has, it would not be an exaggeration to say that what guided him was probably the desire to go down in history as one of the greatest and longest serving prime ministers the country had ever had. But this could hardly be possible if his government remained mired in sectarian and divisive controversies. Why was Modi not reining in right-wing extremists in a visible way? Was he reining them in at all? It was hard to explain how a government that was voted in at least partially on the strength of its effective messaging and communication had lost control over the development narrative so soon. Was it incompetence, ideological confusion or simply a mild contempt for a liberal media that the BJP had in any case always seen as biased?”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“In 1990, when the insurgency first erupted, only 1,762 people were diagnosed with mental disorders. After a decade of inexorable violence, those numbers shot up to 38,696. Behind these figures was the fatigue, mental and emotional, of a people both battered and bruised. This was their private hell, one that remained invisible to the cameras and the public gaze, this was the loneliness that came with the feeling that you were losing your mind.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“In that year began the tragic bookending of the Indian debate on secularism with two unspeakable pogroms. From that time onwards the 1984 riots in Delhi that took place on Rajiv Gandhi’s watch and the 2002 Gujarat riots that took place on Narendra Modi’s watch would be used to checkmate one another in what might be called the chessboard of competitive communalism. And secularism, the foundation of the republic, fashioned out of our astonishingly diverse society, would find itself challenged again.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“As I grew older, and more experienced in my profession, I recognized that every achievement would provoke a round of antipathy; it just came with the turf.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“But the internet, with its army of anonymous hatemongers, still tried to keep the absurd story alive.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“By the time I was an adult and a working journalist, the India I grew up in had been transformed radically. So had its cultural moorings. In an environment exploding with mobiles and McDonald’s, economic and social ascent became the key drivers of dreams, creating a country within a country; one in which citizenship was no profound, or even, argumentative pact with nation-building but almost a corporate membership in a rewards programme designed to give maximum returns. Liberalization and rapid growth had also played midwife to the birth of a neo middle-class consumed by its own daily battles for survival and self-fulfilment.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“When I filed my stories on the ‘Children of the Tsunami’ I had thought there was no special eloquence needed to convey such visceral sadness and loss. Children dead in their thousands in one of the worst natural disasters the country had experienced—this was a story that told itself. But that night, after the telecast, I got a call from a friend who said, ‘Do we really have to watch this depressing stuff on television right now?’—as if life’s grim reality was an optional item on a movie menu in a hotel room and you could pick out only the cheery stuff to view. In several of my reports I actually began editorializing more than ever before, appealing directly to those vacationing in happier, sunnier spots to pause and at least think about these children. The callousness of the well-heeled was eye-opening. To be reminded that for a section of Indian society the deaths of the children of poor fisherfolk mattered not at all was both disconcerting and disturbing.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“The intricate reality of the state means that there are many simultaneous and seemingly contradictory truths; the inbuilt volatility of the situation creates pressure to take sides and be boxed in by simplistic labels of for and against. If you feel empathy with or admiration for the men in uniform who have over the years battled both venom and violence, dubbed ‘occupiers’ by separatists in a conflict that was not of their making, you are instantly called a jingoist and a status-quoist. If you speak honestly about the emotional alienation in the Kashmir Valley or condemn any violent subversion of the law or extra-judicial killings you are classified as treacherous and anti-national. It was rare to have both labels foisted on the same person—that privilege was mine.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“Author and political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has pointed out that Rajiv’s keenness to appease both Hindu and Muslim extremists was lethal. ‘From the Shah Bano case to the opening up of the Masjid on VHP’s request to launching his election campaign from Faizabad calling it Ram’s land, he was playing Hindus against Muslims and vice-versa,’ he said. It played right into the hands of the BJP.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“Every time terror returned to haunt us we tried to seek cover behind that terrible cliché called ‘resilience’. Or in Mumbai’s case, its fabled stoicism. When people turned up at work the morning after a terror strike, we pretended that our collective spirit had stared down the barrel of a gun and had not blinked. But truthfully, life carried on because of a strange combination of compulsion and fatalism. For most, their economic condition mandated what they needed to do; others counted on the law of probability and hoped that it was something that happened to other people. Many of us had grown to be strangely fatalistic about terrorism, a consequence of living in a country that was extraordinarily vulnerable to terror attacks.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“India—the land of Buddha, Mahavir, Ashoka and Gandhi—imagines itself to be a civilization rooted in non-violence. But the fact that these great apostles of peace belong to India only accentuates the terror that has blighted this land for centuries. Unfortunately, the history, geography, composition and reality of Indian society make terrorist violence almost inevitable. This would be true of any society with similar characteristics—a hugely diverse population that is riven with divisions and inequities. And it is our misfortune that we have rarely been blessed with a strong, non-partisan, non-sectarian leadership that can keep turbulence in check.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“I walked away loving the mountains. Mountains don’t see the difference in colour, caste, creed, no Pakistan, no India. They judge everybody the same way. They are pure. It’s we human beings who mess things up.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“(This might be regarded as) politically incorrect, but I would just say this much; I don’t think any soldier would want a war. It’s the developments and the situations, whatever. So basically everybody is just following orders… We kill because of our profession and not by choice, right? If we kill someone, one of ours will also die. So, it’s part of a job. Take it or leave it.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“In a country where it is not uncommon for Hindi cinema to indulgently show a persistent suitor who never takes no for an answer, courting and cajoling, even breaking into song whilst pulling at the heroine’s dupatta, the idea that a woman had the right to set her own boundaries of space and privacy was still an alien one.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“You have to deal with your nightmares, you have to deal with the memory of the sixteen hands that groped you, you have to deal with the pain and shame and loneliness that you are going through, because you can’t talk to anyone. If you tell anyone they will always say you asked for it. I don’t feel my face needs to be blurred: I think the men who did this to me should hide their faces. But what bothers me is from the time this happened to me twenty-four years ago till this moment, the attitude of our society has not changed.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“Pakistan,”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“Subsequently, the two prime ministers were able to meet quietly in the privacy of Jindal’s hotel room in Nepal, where they are said to have spent an hour together. Elections in the sensitive state of Jammu and Kashmir were just a month away and Modi explained that while he was keen to find ways to reopen some formal channels, circumstances did not permit him to do so immediately. Sharif, in turn, told him about the constrictions imposed on him by the security establishment in Pakistan—his negotiating power with the army had been gradually whittled away. Both agreed they needed some more time and greater political space to move forward publicly.”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

“internet,”
― Barkha Dutt, This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines