Violence, Stripped To Its Core

Most of the facts presented in this book, the sentiments of outrage at the events and the laments for a lost Gujarat that accompany them, are unimpeachable. The slight exception is Jyoti Punwani's complex opening narrative of the carnage at Godhra. Although Punwani refuses to condone the burning of the train at Godhra, her account comes perilously close to framing Godhra within a provocation narrative. The relatively greater emphasis of this essay on the actions of the kar sevaks almost seems to suggest that the burning of the carriages was an over-determined outcome of their own actions, such as their intimidation of Muslims at the platform and so forth. This is perhaps an unwitting result of two things. First, we seem to know more about the kar sevaks' actions than we know about those who perpetrated the violence. What is the sequence of events amongst those who inflicted the violence? Second, the very enterprise of trying to explain the events in terms of motives or a comprehensible narrative risks explaining away the incident. Even Punwani's careful account, which contains rare sympathetic interviews with survivors at Godhra, succumbs to these hazards. If Gujarat teaches us anything, it is this: the language of provocation is too self-justifying and self-fulfilling and should be interrogated in all contexts.

But while the exact causes of Godhra still remain something of a mystery, the pogroms and atrocities that followed against Muslims are not. The violence was organised, systematic, brutal and carried out with state support. The patterns of violence are well described by Nandini Sundar and Barkha Dutt; the abdication of the judiciary and the police are well documented by Teesta Setalvad and Vrinda Grover; and the role of the press in both producing violence and exposing it is ably discussed by Rajdeep Sardesai and Siddharth Varadarajan. Anil Chamaria's essay leaves the overwhelming impression that it was not just the vernacular press in Gujarat that played a particularly subversive role in producing violence by its partisan coverage, even major Hindi channels like Zee TV and Aaj Tak were sloppy in the way they highlighted Muslims as perpetrators but not as victims of violence. This essay suggests that there was almost no Hindi-language reporting that got the balance right in the way Star News almost did. The collapse of Hindutva and Hindi is almost complete. Although plausible, I am not sure the documentation in this book is enough to warrant such a drastic conclusion, but this is a matter that will bear more investigation. In any case, if secularism remains the province only of the English press, we are in deep trouble and much of what this volume has to offer will carry little authoritative weight.

Ramachandra Guha's characteristically lucid essay tries to make a plea to the vhp to listen to alternative voices within Hinduism. But it is difficult not to come away with the impression that those voices are muted indeed. Sure, many citizens will recoil at the scenes of atrocity that this book so powerfully presents, but whether that will lead to a delegitimisation of the ideological premises of Hindutva is more doubtful. This volume, with the exception of Ghanshyam Shah's essay, does not even attempt to explain much of what happened. But perhaps that is altogether a good thing. We have, for too long, exonerated heinous crimes by thinking that there must be some explanation for such acts of violence, some motives, some historical considerations that explain why people burn trains or brutalise minorities. But perhaps it is a mistake to think that perpetrators of such violence share anything beyond a readiness to commit atrocity. The sobering message of this book is that there are too many people living simply to commit atrocities and many of them are part of the Indian state.