10 Ways to Fight Hate: Support the Victims

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Liz Waid and Bruce Gulland tell about an important way to stop hate – supporting victims of hate crimes and hate-based incidents. This is the third program in a series on ten programs on fighting hate in your community.

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Welcome to Spotlight. I’m Liz Waid.

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And I’m Bruce Gulland. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live.

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In April 2019, Natasha Badhwar was preparing for a trip. She was going to visit a few small villages in northeastern India with a team of people called the Karwan-e-Mohabbat. In English this means “Caravan of Love”.

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Karwan-e-Mohabbat is a group that supports victims of hate crimes and other injustice. Since 2017, this group travels all around India. They meet with victims of hate crimes. They give legal and social help. On their website, Karwan-e-Mohabbat says that many places they go they meet minorities living in fear. These minorities often accept that hate and violence are a normal part of life for them. And many people in the majority community do not seem to care. What was Badhwar going to do there? Why would she travel with this group?

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Today’s Spotlight program is the third in a series of ten programs. In this series of programs, we look at ten ways to fight hate.

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Hate is powerful enough to destroy people and communities. So the Southern Poverty Law Center has made a list of ten ways to fight hate in your community. On today’s Spotlight program we will look at the third way to fight hate in your community: Support the Victims.

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Natasha Badhwar wrote about her experience on Mint, a news website in India. During her trip, Badhwar met a mother named Manju Devi. Her son had been killed. In her community, it was not permitted for people to fall in love with someone who was not Hindu. People had killed Devi’s son because they thought he was in love with a Muslim girl.

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After this attack, there was more violence. Four other Muslim men were killed. Shabnam Khatoon survived this violence. Khatoon said that he did not want revenge for his friends who had been killed. He told Badhwar:

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“We want justice. We want peace. Do we not deserve to rebuild our broken lives?”

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One of the other members of Badhwar’s group was Mohammad Aamir Khan. He had spent 14 years in prison for a crime he had not done. He spent time locked away alone in solitary confinement. Guards beat him. He had lost his parents. He did not deserve what had happened to him. It was difficult. But he refused to be defeated.