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Evidence of Suspicion: A Writer's Report on the War on Terror

Amitava Kumar

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Completed on 10 August 2022
ISBN : 9780330514026

Bureaucratic in its convolutions and brutal in its deceptions, the war on terror has had an impact on our lives that we do not yet understand. We sense it. A growing claustrophobia, wariness, suspicion, the stickiness of constant surveillance. But for those who are actually entangled in it, the trap has teeth and they are fierce. Author and teacher Amitava Kumar examines the mangled lives of some of those who tripped. In a US court Hemant Lakhani, an old man with a congenital heart condition, stands trial for selling a fake missile to an FBI informant; in another court Shahawar Matin Siraj, inveigled by the NYPD into a conspiracy to bomb a subway, is sentenced to thirty years in prison. In New Delhi Kumar interviews S.A.R. Geelani, the mild-mannered professor apprehended for he 2001 Parliament attack, jailed and tortured. He also tries to speak to Tabassum Guru, the wife of the man on death row for the same attack, at the Sopore hospital in which she works. A few kilometers away, in Srinagar, he visits an army camp, where he sees the peculiarities that develop in an everyday battle-zone that is also a living, working city. And, he catalogues, with the critic’s compass and a curator’s zeal, the fierce renewal in art and literature that has evolved out of the war. Spanning the subcontinents of India and the USA, part reportage, part philosophy, this is a book whose importance cannot be exaggerated. Its intellectual power and moral force will keep the reader pinned to the page. 

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Great book. The war on terror has had an influence on our lives that we do not yet fully comprehend. It is bureaucratic in its complexities and ruthless in its deceptions. We can feel it. an increasing sense of claustrophobia, caution, mistrust, and the tyranny of ongoing monitoring. However, the trap has sharp teeth for those who are truly caught in it. Amitava Kumar, a writer and educator, analyses the shattered lives of some of those who fell. In a US court, an elderly man with a congenital heart problem named Hemant Lakhani is on trial for selling a phoney missile to an FBI informant; in a different court, Shahawar Matin Siraj, who the NYPD tricked into joining a plot to bomb a tube, is given a thirty-year prison sentence.

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