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.

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.

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.

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.

What kinds of civic ties between different ethnic communities can contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence? This book draws on new research on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to address this important question. Ashutosh Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities—one city in each pair with a history of communal violence, the other with a history of relative communal harmony—to discern why violence between Hindus and Muslims occurs in some situations but not others. His findings will be of strong interest to scholars, politicians, and policymakers of South Asia, but the implications of his study have theoretical and practical relevance for a broad range of multiethnic societies in other areas of the world as well. The book focuses on the networks of civic engagement that bring Hindu and Muslim urban communities together. Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and Muslims along communal lines.

Human History Is Not Just A History Of Cruelty, But Also Of Compassion, Sacrifice, Courage, [And] Kindness. What We Choose To Emphasise In This Complex History Will Define Our Lives& Howard Zinn In February 2002, A Violent Storm Of Engineered Sectarian Hatred Broke Out And Raged For Many Months In Gujarat; Blood Flowed Freely On The Streets And Tens Of Thousands Of Homes Were Razed To The Ground. An Estimated 2000 Men, Women And Children, Mostly From The Muslim Community, Were Raped And Murdered, And More Than Two Hundred Thousand People Fled In Terror As Their Homes And Livelihoods Were Systematically Destroyed. However, Gujarat Abounds With Thousands Of Untold Stories Of Faith And Courage That Endured Amidst The Fear And Hate Dhuraji And Babuben Thakur Who Sheltered 110 Muslims For Ten Days In Their Home; Of Rambhai Adivasi Who Restored His Muslim Neighbour S Roof In The Face Of Local Opposition, Rabiya Of Ratanpur Who Waits In The Hope That The People From Her Village Will Call Her Back One Day And Then Every Thing Will Be All Right, Bilkis Bano And Niyaz Bibi Whose Perseverance And Determination Have Made Them Symbols Of Courage In The Face Of Adversity. Harsh Mander S Fear And Forgiveness: The Aftermath Of Massacre, Written Over The Past Six Years, Is Not Just About The Grim Events Of 2002, Of The State S Lack Of Accountability And The Failure Of Justice, Of The Numerous Commissions And Their Reports, Of The Indiscriminate Use Of The Draconian Prevention Of Terrorism Act 2002, Of Police Brutality And The Trauma Of Relief Camps. It Is About The Acts Of Compassion And Courage, Of The Hundreds Who Risked Their Own Lives And Those Of Their Families And Their Homes To Save Innocent Men, Women And Children, And Even Today Help The Betrayed And Shattered Minority Heal And Rebuild. The Book Compels Us To Acknowledge The Flaws In Our Judicial, Social And Rehabilitative Structures While Showing That The Way Forward Must Be One Of Sympathy, Understanding And Forgiveness.

This Book Deals With The Carnage That Swept Through Gujarat In February 2002 And Its Aftermath. It Also Analyses The Grave Implications Of Gujarat 2002 For The Futre Of Our Society And Polity.