Ananya Vajpeyi Reviews Ward Berenschot’s ‘Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State’

THE PHRASE “Gujarat 2002” has, for the past decade, struck fear and shame in the hearts of many Indians. It marks a period of about three months, from late February 2002, when the Western state of Gujarat, and especially its first city, Ahmedabad, erupted into ugly mass violence targeted at local Muslim communities. About 2,500 people died (though official figures claim half that number), and tens of thousands were displaced, many of them permanently.

The episode produced a sense of national crisis: the violence seemed overwhelmingly directed at the Muslim minority (though Hindus also died); much of it was heinous and brutal (particularly for women and children); and by all independent accounts, it proceeded with the full knowledge, support, and complicity of the state government, led by the Hindu supremacist Bhartiya Janata Party. Worse, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has been re-elected to power twice in Gujarat since that dark time. The state’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, enjoys such absolute political popularity on his home turf that he is currently presenting himself as a possible contender for Prime Ministership in India’s general elections in 2014. In the moral conscience of secular Indians, both within Gujarat and elsewhere, 2002 remains a calamitous setback for India’s diverse and democratic polity.

In the bloody tumult of Gujarat in 2002, one incident that stood out for its heinousness took place in a locality called Naroda Patiya, an industrial suburb of Ahmedabad, where close to a hundred Muslims were massacred on February 28. The details of the rape, gang rape, and mutilation of women are too awful to bear repeating—in any case media reports at the time, as well as subsequent recollections, have been graphic enough. This year, on August 29, a verdict pronounced by a fast-track Gujarat court on the basis of a report filed by a Special Investigative Team (SIT), convicted 32 persons for their role as perpetrators in the Narodiya Patiya massacre. Those sentenced include Maya Kodnani, a gynecologist, a thrice-elected legislator from Naroda constituency, and a former minister for Woman and Child Development in Modi’s cabinet, as well as Babubhai Patel or Babu Bajrangi, a local leader of one of the Hindu nationalist organizations on the far right, the militant Bajrang Dal. Kodnani faces 28 years of imprisonment; Patel, a life-sentence. Neither one was sentenced to be hanged, even though India still upholds the death penalty.

The Gujarat verdict has been ubiquitously described as “stunning,” because so few expected any justice would be done, and because powerful politicians such as Kodnani and Patel, protected and promoted by the BJP, and by Modi personally, were indicted at long last. Never before in the history of India’s courts has a sitting legislator been given what is effectively a life-sentence for inciting mass violence. Stunning also was the fact that Kodnani is a woman and a doctor; that she was repeatedly elected to her seat in the Gujarat legislature; and that Modi actually rewarded her ghastly instigation and abetment of violence (for example, by distributing sharp weapons to rioters) by appointing her a minister—with ghoulish irony—in charge of the welfare of women and children.

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