The 2002 violence in Gujarat, Godhra and after was reported widely by the media, both Indian and Global. The nature of the violence, the role of the state government, and also of the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi were massively debated and discussed. Many contrasting views have been expressed worldwide about the topic. This book reveals exactly what happened. With meticulous media research, it gives contemporary newspaper reports, official statistics and comprehensive analysis to reveal the full truth of the 2002 riots, and removes many misconceptions. It also gives a special chapter on the findings of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team. With comprehensively documented arguments, this is like an encyclopedia on the 2002 riots, reveals everything you need to know about the Gujarat violence. Was the state government of Narendra Modi culpable, or did it handle the riots effectively? Was the violence after Godhra one-sided or was it plain riots in which both sides suffered? Were some reported incidents exaggerations or were they real brutal facts? The answers to all these questions are given comprehensively. A simple reading of the book will throw enough light and arm the readers with strong facts to make up their mind.

This book is intended to be a permanent public archive of the communal violence in Gujarat in early 2002. Drawing upon eyewitness reports from the English, Hindi and regional media, citizens and official articles by leading public figures and intellectuals, it provides an account of how and why the state was allowed to burn.

Gujarat Files is the account of an eight-month long undercover investigation by journalist Rana Ayyub into the Gujarat riots, fake encounters and the murder of state Home Minister Haren Pandya that brings to the fore startling revelations. Posing as Maithili Tyagi, a filmmaker from the American Film Institute Conservatory, Rana met bureaucrats and top cops in Gujarat who held pivotal positions in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of the sting operation reveal the complicity of the state and its officials in crimes against humanity. With sensational disclosures about cases that run parallel to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah's ascent to power and their journey from Gujarat to New Delhi, the book tells you the hushed truth of the state in the words of those who developed amnesia while speaking before commissions of enquiry, but held nothing back in the secretly taped videos which form the basis of this remarkable read.

In 2002, after an altercation between Muslim vendors and Hindu travelers at a railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat, fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. The ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party blamed Gujarat's entire Muslim minority for the tragedy and incited fellow Hindus to exact revenge. The resulting violence left more than one thousand people dead--most of them Muslims--and tens of thousands more displaced from their homes. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi witnessed the bloodshed up close. In Pogrom in Gujarat, he provides a riveting ethnographic account of collective violence in which the doctrine of ahimsa--or nonviolence--and the closely associated practices of vegetarianism became implicated by legitimating what they formally disavow. Ghassem-Fachandi looks at how newspapers, movies, and other media helped to fuel the pogrom. He shows how the vegetarian sensibilities of Hindus and the language of sacrifice were manipulated to provoke disgust against Muslims and mobilize the aspiring middle classes across caste and class differences in the name of Hindu nationalism. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Gujarat's culture and politics and the close ties he shared with some of the pogrom's sympathizers, Ghassem-Fachandi offers a strikingly original interpretation of the different ways in which Hindu proponents of ahimsa became complicit in the very violence they claimed to renounce.

Investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 critically examining the logic of political violence.

No instance of communal violence has provoked as much controversy as the Gujarat 2002 carnage, in which over 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. And none has been subjected to as much fact-finding, especially under the monitoring of the Supreme Court. Sifting through the wealth of official material, this book contends that the fact-finding - riddled as it was with ambiguities and deceptions, gaps and contradictions - glossed over crucial pieces of evidence, and thereby shielded the powers that be. Though it gave a clean chit to Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2012, the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) left unasked a range of key questions on the anti-Muslim violence following the burning of a train in Godhra carrying Hindutva activists. How could Modi claim, Manoj Mitta asks, to have been unaware, for nearly five hours, of the first post-Godhra massacre, which took place at Ahmedabad's Gulberg Society? How does this claim square with his admission that he was tracking the violence as it unfolded? Why did Modi take five days to visit riot-affected areas in Ahmedabad and a month to meet Muslim victims in a refugee camp? Why were forensic experts called to see the burnt Godhra coach only after two months, although it had been open to the public throughout that period? What exactly did Modi celebrate in his Gaurav Yatra, which he launched within six months of the carnage? Why did the Gujarat police sit for six years on the call data records of the riot period? Scrupulously researched, The Fiction of Fact-finding draws telling parallels between Gujarat 2002 and the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi to underline an insidious pattern in Indian democracy: the subversion of the criminal justice system, under a shroud of legal platitudes, by the ruling dispensation.

This book is a compilation of articles, editorial, investigative reports, surveys, memoranda and other significant material on the Gujarat carnage. The final report of the Human Rights Commission (that took a direct interest for the first time, of its own accord, in communal violence) is included in it. Useful material and information will be found in it by future researchers, academics and lay readers. As the specific event of the grim year are blurred and glossed over by other issues and by time, it is important to have such a compilation that preserves the lessons learnt in one of the most horrifying and ominous periods in India s modern history.