Gujarat riots 10th anniversary: Revisiting the symbols of genocide
By Shiv Visvanathan
The history of violence in modern India has been marked by certain images. Perhaps the most haunting in collective memory is the train.
The train to Pakistan is the unforgettable symbol of the Partition. The train enacted the everydayness of genocide, the reciprocity of violence between Lahore and Amritsar. Sadat Hasan Manto immortalised it with that simple line, “The train to Amritsar was seven hours late.” Just that glancing reference to the lost time was sufficient to convey the mayhem that accompanied the event.
The train rears its head again with Godhra. The Sabarmatri Express in 2002 carrying kar sewaks from Ayodhya was burnt at the station leaving 59 dead. In retaliation, Hindus went berserk and went on a riot which lasted over two months and left over a 1,000 dead.
On the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the lingering question remains: could the tragedy have been anticipated? There is enough evidence to show that intelligence reports were aware of the impending violence. But the gap between intelligence as information and politics as judgment would prove a costly one. The chief minister’s use of the law of physics to explain the gap, claiming “every action has an equal and opposite reaction” revealed bad taste, bad physics and bad politics.
A picture of this Indian Muslim man begging to be rescued from Hindu rioters became the lasting image of the Gujarat carnage of 2002. Reuters
Yet what made the riots even more macabre was the use of two other technologies. One was the use of the mobile phone to create a connectivity among the rioters, and second was the deliberate use of chemicals during arson. Survivors speak of the use of numerous tiny bottles of foreign import which not only ate into the skin but scorched the walls indelibly.
There are other images of the materiality of riots. Walking through the slums, one sees thelari (the hand cart on cycle wheels), inverted, piled one against the other, like strange sculptures, as if in tribute to the missing. Each empty lari represents a lost livelihood. Of the 13 districts for which we have state data, 70,000 people have not returned to their homes in Gujarat.
It’s a myth that life returns to normalcy after a riot. Ordinary people are not allowed to return to their livelihoods. Often a man parking his lari in his usual space on the street encounters the goon or the Bajrang Dal enthusiast who prevents any return to his usual livelihood. There are also reports that show how Hindus wanting to sell their houses to Muslims were prevented from doing so through sit-ins and social pressure.
Riots are too simplistically viewed as a communal problem. Constructed this way, riots are seen as occasional bursts of emotion, episodic outbursts against a particular community. But riots in India appear to be more systemic.
A Muslim informant, an experienced activist told me that riots appear to be an act of economic leveling, that whenever Muslim communities build through their enterprise, a riot emerges to level their hard work. But beyond this, riots seem a part of planned urbanization. They set the stage for an urban cleansing equivalent to an ethnic cleansing. When homes are emptied, real estate is born. The sudden upsurge of urbanization in various parts of Gujarat like Naroda Patia makes one wonder if riots consciously or unconsciously are a part of a deeper plan.
Studying the materiality of loss makes me wonder if riots are, in fact, a form of economic warfare. Today, riots along with dam projects have become a major cause for large-scale, collective displacement.
In fact, the idea of development is used to implicitly condone riots. Many middle-class people seem to think that the past should be forgotten so we can focus on the more important task of development. In fact, the plea for development allows the erasure of the memory of riots.
While riots create urban real estate in one part of the state, they also serve to ruthlessly exile minorities to another. Anyone who doubts this should visit the camp at Citizen Nagar in Ahmedabad. Ironically dubbed a ‘transit’ camp, it clings to a huge garbage site. The dump was a small one in 2002. Today, it is a gigantic structure, a mountain of waste, smelling of garbage and chemicals, acrid with smoke, the delight of birds of prey.
Here then is the question: What kind of urban planning would locate a group of survivors near a dump site of this size? The very act juxtaposes two allied forms of waste – urban waste and urban survivors wasted by riots. It is a damning symbol of the indifference of the Modi regime to normalcy, survival and justice; of the deliberate destruction, symbolically and materially, of a group that is culturally different.
The train, the waste dump, the gas cylinder, the dharyu, the mobile phone are the new material mnemonics of genocide in Gujarat. The city becomes a museum of its own violence unconsciously commemorating a drama it cannot erase.
Shiv Visvanathan is a Social Science nomad.
India's Gujarat riots: 10 years on
Arko Datta photographed Qutubuddin Ansari praying for help in 2002. BBC Hindi's Rupa Jha was with them when they met 10 years later
How does it feel, I ask World Press Photo award winning photographer Arko Datta, to meet the subject of his best-known picture for the first time?
Ten years ago, Arko's picture of a tailor named Qutubuddin Ansaribecame the face of religious riots which left nearly 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead in Gujarat.
In the picture, Mr Ansari, then 28 years old, is standing on a narrow veranda. He is wearing a light checked shirt stained with dried blood. His faintly bloodshot eyes are glazed with fear. His hands are folded in an expression of obeisance, hiding a mouth agape. It's a disturbing study of fear and helplessness.
"An Indian Muslim stranded in the first floor of his house, along with a few other Muslims and surrounded by a Hindu mob begs to the Rapid Action Force (Indian paramilitary) personnel to rescue him at Sone-ki-Chal in Ahmedabad, March 01, 2002," said the caption of the picture put out byReuters news agency, for whom Arko worked at the time.
The Gujarat riots were among the worst in India since Independence. The Hindu nationalist BJP state government, led by Narendra Modi, was accused of not doing enough to bring the violence under control.
Memories
Ten years later, Arko and I are standing under the same veranda of an awkward looking two-storey building in a crowded lane, running alongside a busy highway in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's main city.
Next door, literally risen from the ashes, are a motorcycle showroom and a sooty garage. A rebuilt madrassah, which was gutted during the riots, is packed with cheery students.
A new flyover loops over the highway, offering the only change in a drab landscape of squat homes and grubby shops.
The photographer and his subject have just met. There has been a limp shaking of hands and both have hugged each other hesitantly. Arko told him how glad he was to see him. Mr Ansari had smiled shyly.
Qutubuddin Ansari has returned to Ahmedabad after living in different parts of India
Now, Arko is telling us that the meeting is bringing back a lot of memories, some good, others bad.
The unchecked rioting had entered its second consecutive day when Arko and a bunch of fellow photographers found themselves outside the building where Mr Ansari was trapped on the morning of 1 March 2002.
Earlier they had hitched a ride with a van full of soldiers trying to bring the city under control.
When the van entered the highway before midday, Arko says, the sky was black with smoke from the fires and the road was strewn with bricks and stones. The military van moved with its headlights on.
"It was darkness at noon. There was frenzy all around. The city had gone mad."
Mobs armed with swords and stones from Hindu neighbourhoods across the highway were crossing over and attacking and setting fire to Muslim shops and homes on the other side. People watched this grisly show from their homes across the road.
The van sputtered on past the building where Mr Ansari stood when Arko looked back for a moment and saw his subject for the first time. He looked through the telephoto lens, and clicked, "three or four shots possibly, all in a fraction of a second".
'Defining image'
Then he turned around and asked the soldiers to stop the van.
"Looking through the fog of smoke, we spotted the group of people trapped on the balcony of a burning house. We told the soldiers that we were not moving until they rescued them," says Arko.
Qutubuddin Ansari and Arko Datta meet at the former's home
I pick up the rest of the story from Mr Ansari, who is listening carefully. A curious crowd collects around us.
"We were trapped on the first floor for over a day, and we couldn't go down because fire was raging below.
"And when I saw the military van pass by, I thought, 'This is our last chance'. I began shouting Sahib! Sahib! to the soldiers and folded my hands, and when I did that they looked back and returned," he says.
A few soldiers were immediately positioned outside the house, and later in the day, as the fires below ebbed, Mr Ansari and his friends came down a stairwell built outside the house.
Next morning, Arko's picture of Mr Ansari had made it to the front pages of newspapers around the world. They called it "the defining image of the Gujarat carnage".
The problem was Mr Ansari didn't even know about it until a week later, when a foreign journalist hunted him down in a relief camp for riot victims, carrying a newspaper with the picture across an entire page.
"Then my life went into a tailspin. The picture followed me wherever I went. It haunted me, and drove me out of my job, and my state," he says.
He ran away to Malegaon in neighbouring Maharashtra to live with his sisters and had been working there for a fortnight when a co-worker walked into the shop with a newspaper carrying his picture. His boss didn't want any trouble and fired him immediately.
Next year, he left for Calcutta, but returned after a few months when he heard that his mother had a heart problem.
Over the next few years, Mr Ansari lost half-a-dozen jobs as people recognised him and journalists hounded him relentlessly. Political parties used the picture to woo Muslim votes. A group blamed for dozens of bomb attacks across India used the picture in an e-mail claiming to have carried out an attack. Muslim organisations freely put out adverts using the picture.
The picture brought a few happier moments. The owner of a clothes shop in Calcutta recognised him and gave him a discount on a T-shirt. An officer pulled him out of a queue for picking up papers to vaccinate his mother for her trip to Saudi Arabia for Haj, arranged for her inoculation quickly, and remained in touch with him. A resident of Poona wrote to him, giving him all his contacts and asking him to get in touch with him if he ever needed any help.
Mr Ansari became the "face" of the riots
"I feel very bad, very sorry to hear that my pictures caused so much problems for you. I apologise," Arko tells Mr Ansari, as we settle down in his home in a slum, not far away from the house with the veranda.
Mr Ansari is sitting opposite him, and his eyes drop to the floor for a moment.
"Nobody is to blame, brother," he tells Arko. "You did your job. I was doing mine, trying to save my life. Your picture showed the world what was happening here. What happened to me eventually was kismet, destiny."
"And as things stand, my life is on the mend. I have a beautiful family, I have work, I have my own little home."
A few years ago, Mr Ansari bought a two-room tenement with a small tailoring shop for 315,000 rupees ($6,400; £4,000) from his paltry savings and loans from friends and family. It is a modest home with a raised bed, a television, a few utensils, a shiny red refrigerator and a washing machine tucked away behind a curtain. Upstairs, he and his co-workers stitch more 100 shirts a week, and he earns up to 7,000 rupees ($142; £90) a month.
Moving on
His family has grown to include an eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. The eldest daughter is now 14 and wants to become a teacher.
Arko has also moved on - he quit Reuters after nearly a decade of rich work, including covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and began aphotography school in the city of Mumbai.
Now Arko tells Mr Ansari of a personal tragedy that marked his coverage of the riots.
He says he was sent to cover the riots even as his mother was in the last stages of cancer. His wife had called him every day during the time he was taking pictures of the mayhem, imploring him to return to be by his mother's bedside.
Eight-year-old Zishan and four-year-old daughter Zakia were born after the riots
"By the time I returned, she had slipped into a coma. I never got to speak to her. Three or four days later, she died. I have no siblings, and my father died when I was one. And I couldn't even exchange a last few words with my mum," he says.
Silence descends on the room.
Then Mr Ansari speaks.
"I can understand your pain. Allah sent you to save us, brother. You did a greater good," he says.
One event, two lives, both bookended by personal tragedies.
"It feels strange. I have mixed feelings," Arko says, as we take leave.
"On one hand, Qutubuddin was empowered by my picture. On the other, he lost his privacy and a bit of his life."
"I just hope he remembers me as a friend. We met as strangers as I think we parted as friends."
"I now want to remember him as a smiling, happy man. Not the frightened man on the balcony."
Memorial to a Genocide: Insist on justice
Would those who encouraged the victimisers to kill in Gujarat be willing to apologise or make a conciliatory gesture to the victims? That would be a confession of guilt and guilt is what Narendra Modi is constantly denying
Romila Thapar
In 1947, Partition was accompanied by massacres so gruesome that many said they would not allow this to happen again. But we have been through three genocides since then and the perpetrators of the violence continue to be powerful members of our society. The three I am referring to are the anti-Sikh genocide in Delhi in 1984, the anti-Muslim in Gujarat in 2002, and more recently, the anti-Christian Dalit in Orissa. Genocide seems to follow a pattern in India post-1947. In each case it is the majority Hindu community that targets and kills those of a minority community of a specific and different religion, and in numbers far larger than are killed in communal riots. The justification for the killings is said to be some action on the part of the non-Hindus that is said to have angered the Hindus who then seek revenge. But, apart from the accusation being true or not, does any such action justify genocide? The actual motive often lies in the politics of the region. Religious antagonism or conciliation is what gets discussed in the aftermath, while the political and economic motives get brushed aside.
This raises many questions. These are not irrelevant and we need to have clear answers.
Does this have to do with religion or with the way religion is mobilised politically with religious organisations becoming the agencies of political ideologies? Are Hindus by nature more given to killing, despite all the hype about belonging to a non-violent and tolerant culture? Or, why is it that the agencies of law and order — the police and administration — seem not to protect those attacked when they are members of a religious minority, or Dalits or women? Are they so infiltrated by religious extremist influence — Hindus in the main — that they do not bother to defend those attacked?
Or, does nationalism define ‘Indian’ now to mean ‘Hindu’, and therefore the Hindu has primacy as citizen? Does this make non-Hindus dispensable? One wonders what has happened to the earlier concept of being Indian, a category inclusive of all communities; a concept that my generation of Indians stood by? If the violence is spontaneous, and in the name of a religion, then it is a blot on the religion of the community that perpetrates the violence, be it Hindu, Muslim or Sikh. If it is orchestrated by the State, then a State resorting to genocide can hardly claim to be a well-administered State. Only an incompetent government is unable to control what turns into genocide. This negates claims of good governance.
Given the scale and type of violence, there is little doubt that in Gujarat the police and administration were ineffective, to say the least. These are agencies which, now, all over the country, see themselves not as those whose duty it is to protect citizens, but rather as primarily having to be subservient to political authority, their function being to carry out the orders of those governing. There are a few, but unfortunately too few, who still see themselves as protectors of citizens and defenders of the rights of citizens. Among these few, there have been some police officers and administrators who have suggested that the violence in Gujarat was orchestrated by those governing. Their views cannot be easily dismissed.
If the administration in Gujarat is as efficient as is projected by Modi and his supporters, then some questions still remain to be answered. Even on the specific issues linked to the genocide, there are gross inefficiencies.
The assault on women is particularly vicious. Women are the most devastated victims because the attack on them cuts both ways
Of those accused of setting fire to the coaches at Godhra, I am told that 84 are still awaiting judgement. Ten years is a long time for there to be no judgement on what is held to be a simple case of arson. Is it a simple case of arson? Why is it that almost 50 per cent of the persons said to be missing — over 200 persons — cannot be traced, and records are missing? As is usual in such incidents, the paying of full compensation has been delayed. This smacks of normal corruption in the administration from which the Gujarat administration is obviously not free.
Going beyond 2002, there is a need to understand why there was a genocide, particularly in Gujarat. The anti-Sikh and anti-Christian Dalit killings were concentrated in limited areas, but, in Gujarat, the killings were widespread. If Gujarat is a well-administered, prosperous state, where was the need for the killings?
The patedars lived off the rich income from their lands, there was money pouring in from Gujarati NRIs living in the West, and the corporates were investing in Gujarat. What is it that the rich Hindus feared and fear? Is it that there would be a loss of subordinated Muslim labour, employed by thepatedars, if the standard of living of the labourer improves? The import of unskilled labour from UP and Bihar seems to point to a problem with local labour. Is there a competition for employment, making it necessary to destroy skilled Muslim artisans? Is there a fear of the upward mobility of Muslim OBCs and Dalits, also asking for quotas? Why is the Gujarat government unable to bring water to parched areas to relieve the desperation of farmers?
The enrolment of the Scheduled Tribes in the killings also needs investigation. In all tribal societies of central India, the money-lender — the dhiku — is the object of antagonism, and for obvious reasons. Who are the money-lenders in the tribal areas of Gujarat? Where they are Muslim, the instinctive dislike can be channelled into violence. But there has to be some agency legitimising this violence. Who is that?
If the State is so well-administered then how can Hindu extremist gangs vandalise teaching departments in a university — the Faculty of Fine Arts in the MS University in Baroda — manhandle the faculty, and have the department closed? All this is done in the name of one action of the department having supposedly hurt the sentiments of some Hindus. What was once the prestigious MS University is now powerless to defend its employees and to take action against political gangs. Is this a demonstration of good administration?
The assault on women is particularly vicious. Women are the most devastated victims because the attack on them cuts both ways. It is bad enough that they are raped, but the fact that they are raped by the attacking community makes them doubly unacceptable to their own community. This attitude has not changed since 1947. Why do we avoid acknowledging that rape is also an index of
sexual perversion?
sexual perversion?
The rath yatra of BJP to Ayodhya was flagged off from Somnath. It was described as Hindus avenging their trauma— even if it was late by a thousand years
Where communal conflicts occur we need to know much more precisely the identity of the perpetrators of the killings and rape, and that of the victims. Categories such as ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ are at one level, too broad. A closer look at neighbourhoods, communities, who employs whom and what they work at, relating to both victims and victimisers, would tell us something about whether the antagonism is spontaneous or is rooted in other factors.
In addition to all this, there is an ideological build-up of almost a century in Gujarat, encouraging hatred between Hindus and Muslims. Two major theories have enflamed this.
There has been a historical distortion of the raid of Mahmud on Somnath. It has been converted into the theory that it resulted in trauma among the Hindus which they have nurtured for a thousand years. This theory was first put forward by British colonial historians in the 19th century. It was then taken up by KM Munshi and people of his ilk, who turned it into popular historical novels, eagerly read by the Gujarati middle class.
The rath yatra of the BJP to Ayodhya was flagged off from Somnath. It was described as the Hindus avenging their trauma — even if it was late by a thousand years. Munshi left out crucial evidence in his version of the raid by Mahmud, such as major contradictions in the Persian and Turkish texts about the event and what was attacked; as also that the Sanskrit inscriptions refer to commercial deals involving the estates of the temples in the town and their trade with Arab traders, a couple of centuries after Mahmud; or that the temple was restored by a Jain ruler and was in use for a long period before it declined. This nullifies the idea of Hindu trauma.
Nationalism emerges when society modernises with the growth of industrialisation and capitalism. We choose what goes into the construction of our nationalism. The choice draws from the way we interpret our historical past or our imagined historical past and this often depends on the requirements of the present. Therefore, history is central to the construction of nationalism.
Mahmud’s raid on Somnath was converted into an idiom of Hindu-Muslim relations by the British. Subsequently, both Hindu and Muslim historians of the earlier 20th century continued to present it in the same way. The wider context of the event in local history and what followed was ignored. There was just the repetitive chorus of Hindu-Muslim antagonism.
The other idea which also had a political fall out effect in later years was that of asmita — the unity of being Gujarati, or Gujarati-ness. This was based on Hindu Gujarati culture of the upper castes. Muslims and Christians were therefore aliens.
This view also reflects the theories of Savarkar and Golwalkar that only Hindus could be citizens of India, because India is their pitri-bhumi, the land of their ancestors, and their punya-bhumi, the original home of their religion.
It is not surprising that Modi has chosen Vivekananda as his symbol, since Vivekananda’s definition of Hinduism was upper-caste and exclusive. This is also linked to the definitions of Indian culture by the more influential NRI groups, which again do not include non-Hindu culture as Indian. Such groups are vocal in legitimising Modi’s Gujarat.
This inevitably raises the question of secularism. Should we continue to define secularism in a specifically Indian way to mean merely the co-existence of all religions, irrespective of the status they may have? Given that the followers of these religions in India have an unequal status, there is bound to be conflict. This was a definition specific to Indian nationalism at a time when communal politics were coming to the fore. Today, we need to return to the original meaning of secularism. As originally discussed, a secular society is one where all human rights are ensured by the State, and where religious organisations do not control the essentials of the social, political and economic functioning of a society.
Genocides are frightening because killing is seen as the political solution to problems…Ghettos are easy to control and easier to destroy, as we know from the extermination of Jews in Germany
Gujarat is not a secular state since it does not conform to either of these two definitions. Neither does it have religious co-existence, nor are the functions of civil society kept distinct from religious organisations or from political organisations with a religious ideology. To that extent itssystem of governance negates one of the fundamental principles of the Indian Constitution.
And what about the victims of genocide?
We hear so much these days about cultivating a sense of forgetting and forgiving, and even repentance. Victims cannot forget what they have been through. The resulting fear and hatred, festers. This would also apply to those who have suffered in communal riots and terrorist attacks by a variety of religiously inspired organisations — Hindu, Muslim and Sikh — that bring death and destruction.
Apologies from the perpetrators of violence could be a prelude to the process of reconciliation. But the right conditions have to exist for this to happen. Reconciliation requires an equal parity between victimisers and victims, where the victims are no longer victims but have the power to propose and implement reconciliation. It would require an acknowledgement from the victimisers that they have victimised the victims. But would those who encouraged the victimisers to kill, in Gujarat, be willing to apologise or even make a conciliatory gesture to the victims? That would be a confession of guilt and guilt is what Modi is constantly denying. If this is not likely to happen, then the victims can only choose the pursuit of punitive justice.
Genocides are frightening because killing is seen as the political solution to problems. These are the beginnings of fascism, which targets a particular community as the internal enemy. This encourages the isolating of that community, forcing it to live in ghettos. Ghettos are easy to control and easier to destroy, as we know from Gujarat, and as we also know from the extermination of Jews in Germany.
To recognise the initial stages of fascism and to confront it, it is necessary to prevent it from being seen as a political solution. To insist on
justice, therefore, is, at this point, an imperative.
justice, therefore, is, at this point, an imperative.
Romila Thapar is an eminent historian and Professor Emeritus,Centre for Historical Studies (CHS), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru, University, Delhi
Memorial to a Genocide: Memory as Resistance
Many more public memorials to the dead are required. These may serve as constant reminders to us, heirs to a century of massacres, and spinners of dreams for a better world
Mukul Mangalik
I feel honoured to have been asked to speak on this solemn and rare occasion, the Jamia moment, as it were, in the historic initiative underway at the behest of the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP), to create a public memorial to the dead, murdered, brutalised and dispossessed children, women and men from Gujarat 2002, a memorial equally to the dogged fighters for justice from that time on.
I feel doubly honoured to be speaking at an event inaugurated by Prof Romila Thapar. She taught me at JNU during the 1970s. Her example continues to inform my own teaching while her academic rigour and passion for history, her willingness to stand up and be counted, to speak her mind with lucidity and grace on issues that matter and the values that she holds dear, continueto inspire many of us, especially in trying times.
I would like to begin by reading out a passage from an article I had written after a group of students from Delhi University and I returned from Gujarat in May 2002.
“No matter how much we may already know about the systematic savaging of the lives of Muslim citizens in Gujarat, it is when you step into the theatres of destruction, into the worlds of victims and survivors, most with nothing but their lives left to protect, the sun screaming murder, no water to drink, flies and the stench of urine and shit all around, it is then the hugeness of the tragedy that Narendra Modi, the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal have wrought in Gujarat, blows a hole in the solar plexus and hell into your being.”
I chose to read out these lines today to remind ourselves of the barbarism that engulfed Gujarat in 2002, the full horror and implications of which may never have come home to many students and me but for our close encounters with people and places in Gujarat during the fateful summer of that year. This tragedy must never be forgotten. It must be remembered and understood for it to never happen again, for justice to be done and for the living to breathe in freedom and peace.
I understood instinctively for the first time why Theodor Adorno, in 1949, might have felt compelled to reflect on whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz. As time passed, however, almost unnoticed by me, a poem made its way into, became part of, and sharply impacted my memories of Gujarat. ‘Nanhi Pujaran’ written by Majaz way back in 1936, had nothing to do with Gujarat 2002, but, to me, perhaps because it spoke of such innocence and vulnerable beauty, it has ended up getting intertwined with its macabre, threatening opposite, rendering my memories of 2002 more unbearable and Gujarat even more impossible to forget. The ways of remembering, and through the act of remembering, resisting, are many. I can no longer read ‘Nanhi Pujaran’ without thinking of the killing fields of Gujarat and vice versa, and this invariably brings a lump to my throat.
I understood instinctively for the first time why Adorno, in 1949, might have felt compelled to reflect on whether there could be poetry after Auschwitz
The mass murder of Muslims in Gujarat was bad enough in itself. It was bone-chilling that this happened in an orgy and celebration of bloodletting, and dangerous like hell for having been equally an assault on secularism, democracy and modern republican citizenship, for having been, as Thomas Mann wrote on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German Chancellor, “against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice”.
Gujarat did not happen — it bears repeating ad nauseum — because Hindus and Muslims were living side by side and this was never meant to be. It happened because religion was successfully used to construct an exclusivist nationalism that we, in South Asia, refer to as communalism and which readily lends itself to the politics of hate, murder and authoritarianism. This could not have come to pass without the deadly totalising role of the Sangh Parivar. Nor could it have happened without the unforgivable criminal complicity of the State. Above all, however, it would be well to remember — and this is what makes Gujarat 2002 fascistic and extraordinarily terrifying — that the targeted mass killing of Muslims happened due to, and amid widespread popular acclaim and participation, manipulated maybe, but mass communal enthusiasm nonetheless.
‘Nanhi Pujaran’ by Majaz in 1936 had nothing to do with Gujarat 2002, but, to me, perhaps because it spoke of such innocence and vulnerable beauty, it has ended up getting intertwined with its macabre, threatening opposite…
Add to this the enormous spread and historical depth of communal and related forms of narrow identity politics, each feeding into the other in majority and minority incarnations on a world scale, not to mention the practice of other kinds of murderous politics and wars waged in the name of either development and nation or even revolution, and the mind boggles.
Many more public memorials to the dead of the kind being created in Gujarat are required. These may serve as constant reminders to us, heirs to a century of massacres, and spinners of dreams for a better world, that we need to pay urgent attention to creating public cultures, political cultures that value universal rights and liberties and affirm human life in the everyday. This could become perhaps our best hope that popular passions and movements in times of anxiety and desperation do not easily give up on freedom and democracy, do not fall prey to a politics of killing and getting killed, of martyrdom and the glorification of violence either for the sake of national/community unity and purity or for whatever else; and swing instead towards creating a political practice with real promise for a fairer, freer future.
Let me end by saying that I can’t even begin to express the extent of my appreciation for the Memorial to a Genocide: Gulberg, Gujarat 2002-12, because I am overwhelmed at the mere thought of the sorrow and courage, thought, hard work, imagination and commitment that must be going into breathing life into this. My appreciation is the deeper because I know for myself that much as I wish to do the things that most need to be done, much of the time I wander through life reciting random lines from poems like Majaz’s ‘Awara’:
Ae game dil kya karoon, ae vahshate dil kya karoon…
Mukul Mangalik is Associate Professor, Department of History, Ramjas College, University of Delhi.
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