The 2002 pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, and especially in its largest city, Ahmedabad, left about 1,000 Muslims dead in the city, another 1,000 dead in the state, and about 140,000 homeless, some of them still living in relief camps today. The killing, one of the worst in India since partition in 1947, drew responses of horror from across India and the world. Although the assault on Muslims followed an apparent (all the facts will never be known) assault on Hindu pilgrims travelling through the railway station at Godhra, in eastern Gujarat, in which fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, most observers have argued that the response was not commensurate with the attack, and, of course, it targeted not the criminals who may have set the fire, but a community of Muslims 100 miles away.

Accounts of the pogrom abound. Most (including my own) stress the political-electoral motivations for the attack, despair bred by the still faltering economy of the city's textile-industrial base, the collapse of the institutions that had generally kept order in the city, as well as the generational shift in leadership since the more peaceful years when Mahatma Gandhi lived in the city. The three accounts here accept that general perspective, but seek to penetrate more deeply to the street and neighborhood level, and to the perspective of the attackers, a viewpoint that has been heard before, but never so clearly and so intensely. The three perspectives are different, yet they complement each other. Fundamentally they ask: Granted that state and city political leaders encouraged the attack—as all the authors agree—why did local people of the neighborhoods and the streets accept that leadership? How could the murderers and attackers be so bloodthirsty and cruel?

Each of the authors had been studying Ahmedabad for years prior to the attack; that is, they did not suddenly descend on the city after the fact to write an exposé. The political-religious-communal life of the city was already the subject of PhD dissertations for each, and, by chance, two of them were in the city carrying out research when the pogrom occurred. The third was not present during the events, but returned to the city three years later to pick up his ongoing research and to sharpen its focus.

Ward Berenschot is Dutch, completed his dissertation at the University of Amsterdam, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at KITLVN, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi is of Iranian ancestry, was brought up in Germany, completed his dissertation at Cornell, and is now an assistant professor at Rutgers University. Arafaat Valiani is “of Gujarati origin” (p. 31), is “a native speaker of ‘unadulterated’ Gujarati” (p. 28), completed his dissertation at Columbia University, and is now an assistant professor at the University of Oregon. Ghassem-Fachandi and Valiani are Muslims who nevertheless were able to enter directly into Hindu neighborhoods and organizations even during times of ongoing violence. All three give riveting accounts of the violence, especially that which they witnessed personally, along with their more theoretical analyses.

During fifteen months of research in Ahmedabad, in 2005–06, Berenschot lived in three different neighborhoods—one predominantly middle- and upper-caste Hindu, which experienced some violence during 2002; one poor, with large Muslim and Dalit (formerly untouchable) populations, with intense violence; and a third with a mixed Dalit, Muslim, and low-caste Hindu population, which nevertheless experienced very little violence. In each neighborhood, Berenschot follows political and social leaders of the neighborhoods—politicians, party workers, social workers, and goondas (thugs) on their daily rounds—and engages in extensive conversations with everyday residents. He wants to know why the responses of the neighborhoods were so different from one another. Did the violence essentially begin in the locale and spread outward and upward, or did it originate top-down? Was the neighborhood violence orchestrated by “riot specialists” or by the ordinary neighborhood leaders?

Berenschot finds his answers in India's “mediated state” structure. Government lacks the resources to supply adequate services to its citizens. Shortages of medical care, educational opportunities, and jobs frustrate people's aspirations, especially the aspirations of the poor, who cannot afford to supplement government resources with their own. Therefore local organizers, especially political organizers, make their reputations and gain election to local office by “mediating,” identifying and providing access to available limited resources where possible. To the extent that they can satisfy the demands of the neighborhood population, the “mediators” enlarge their own political and economic power to extract their own profits from the situation.

But since resources are limited, they cannot satisfy everyone; they choose their beneficiaries carefully. In Isanpur, the neighborhood of greatest violence, they have chosen to exclude the Muslim minority and to favor the combined majority of Caste-Hindus and Dalits. This choice produces an us-versus-them mentality and reality; Hindus and Muslims begin to regard each other as blocs, as competitors and enemies in the quest for resources. By invoking violence by Hindus, and especially by Dalits, against Muslims, “mediators” consolidate their position among the majority. Those who dare oppose them, seeking to defuse violence, may find themselves assaulted by goondas, who ally themselves with—and are often hired by—the dominant local politicians. As Isanpur polarizes, there is no separation between local leaders and the sponsors of violence. They are mostly one and the same.

Raamrahimnagar—the name is a composite of a Hindu god and an Arabic name for god—has earned a national reputation as a neighborhood where local Hindu and Muslim leaders have spent decades successfully working out peaceful resolutions of local issues, developing trust, and keeping hate-mongers out. The “mediators” in this neighborhood—just as impoverished as in Isanpur—have chosen communal peace as one of their goals. Because of their solidarity, they have, nevertheless, been able to secure many benefits from government. Maneknagar, overwhelmingly Hindu, and wealthier than the other two neighborhoods, simply favors its Hindu majority without much need for violence.

Neighborhood leaders can supply benefits to their local dependents only by satisfying the upper-level elected officials on whom they, in turn, depend. Today, the Hindu-militant Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) controls those upper levels of the state government and its resources. This was not always the case. “Over the last forty years, the patronage networks through which people gain access to the state have changed considerably” (p. 60). Berenschot devotes a chapter to a historical analysis of how the politically powerful alliance between the Congress party, Ahmedabad's Gandhian labor movement, and the textile mill-owning elites controlled the levers of state power. Then, in the 1970s, the mills, and with them the union and the older elite coalitions, collapsed, while the Congress split at the national level. The advocates of Hindutva, an alliance of religion and politics, seized the opportunity created by this power vacuum and organized their way to power—at all three levels. By 2002, these BJP state authorities believed that violence against Muslims would win them votes, and neighborhood leaders shared that belief. So when BJP officials let it be known that violence against Muslims would be tolerated and even welcomed, neighborhood leaders were prepared to organize and unleash their dependents and the dependents were prepared to follow. Access to benefits determined their responses.

Ghassem-Fachandi seeks “to unravel the specific cultural and psychological processes of individual and collective identification that were then prevalent in central Gujarat” (pp. 1–2). He understands implicitly that even if anti-Muslim feelings were endemic in the area, they exploded in catastrophic violence only when politicians mobilized them. So he asks: “How was the chief minister of Gujarat able to mobilize city residents psychologically for violent action while, at the same time, extricating the political from the event?” (p. 3). How did local newspapers play on deep psychological fears and antagonisms to fan violence? How was the geography of the city manipulated to encourage violence? How have categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim” been reified into two specific blocs, increasingly antagonistic to one another, when the underlying reality is of a multitude of diverse groups within each supposed camp? How were principles of nonviolence, deeply cultivated in this city that Mahatma Gandhi called home from 1915 to 1930, reconfigured into policies and practices of communal violence?

In a brief opening, Ghassem-Fachandi traces several decades of efforts by the forces of Hindutva, politically militant Hinduism, led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) cultural group and the allied BJP political party, to turn Hindus against Muslims. He finds the RSS and BJP successful in institutionalizing resentment and in persuading Hindus to blame the victim, proclaiming that Hindus are the victims of Muslim violence, even as they butcher Muslims. He applies anthropological and psychological theory to argue that Hindus believed that their sacrifice of Muslim lives would invigorate their own. Many of the print media referred to the sacrifice of Muslim lives in quite distant places as an appropriate ritual response to the burnings at Godhra. In addition they often suggested that Muslims might be sacrificed because they are meat eaters, and therefore participate in a kind of sacrifice and slaughter on a regular basis, in contrast with the stereotypical, and often real, Hindu vegetarians. The RSS and its Hindutva allies exploited the attack in Godhra to call on Hindus to rise in self-righteous anger against the killers of people and animals and thus restore their own sense of power and pride. Paradoxically, the pogrom against Muslims was construed as consistent with the nonviolence of ahimsa, for true ahimsa can be practiced only when practitioners feel strong enough to say that they are choosing ahimsa over violence, not falling back on the mantra of ahimsa only when they lack the power to be violent. The Hindutva argument was that only after showing that one can be violent can one choose ahimsa.

Ghassem-Fachandi's research interests emerged as he tried to understand his own direct experiences living in five different neighborhoods of the city: “During the darkest days of the pogrom, I was not simply a researcher but a trembling witness and puzzled bystander, a participant in events that far surpassed any professional preparation or expectation” (p. 25). He seeks to understand the event as a ritual drama. He explains as best he can the relationship of gender, including rape and sexual mutilation, and the relationship of ahimsa to the violence. He adds that “as a German national only three generations removed from the Holocaust and the Second World War, violent collective phenomena such as pogroms carry a peculiar resonance” (p. 10). He also seeks to understand the apparent alternations between sporadic, explosive violence and everyday peace: “In Ahmedabad, a city where not a year passes without deadly violence between Hindus and Muslims, one can encounter Hindus at Muslim stands consuming kebab at night and debating the world around them” (p. 226).

As Berenschot focuses on the political and Ghassem-Fachandi on the psychological, Valiani emphasizes the importance of the physical. He studies the RSS shakhas (neighborhood branches), which attracted youth in large part through sponsoring physical games, exercises, and drills as the road to personal, moral, social, and national improvement: “Daily physical training is at the heart of popular religious nationalist sentiment in many parts of contemporary India” (p. 11). Since the RSS also stressed antagonism to Muslims as part of its religious/cultural message, physical exercise and communal antagonism went hand-in-hand. “Violence against Muslims was driven by orientations and practices that were internal to routine physical training sessions as much [as] by hate, fear, and explicit incitements by movement leaders” (p. 185).

The 2002 pogrom is the climax of Valiani's narrative and analysis, for it capped decades of martial-style drills practiced in thousands of RSS shakhas all across India, especially western India. The shakhas and their drills were modeled, in part, paradoxically, on Gandhi's organizations for physical training. Valiani analyzes Gandhi's programs for physical activity and drills in general, and specifically in the Bardoli no-tax movement of 1928, which was thoroughly nonviolent. He looks also at the 1942 Quit India movement, although in this case some of Gandhi's lieutenants relaxed the restraints on violence, especially against property. The RSS coopted Gandhi's physical drills, but omitted his insistence on nonviolence.

These studies complement each other. Individually and collectively they raise intriguing questions: For Berenschot, granted that the previous Gandhian-Congress synthesis had come to an end, how was Hindutva able to supplant it? For the succession in leadership occurred not only at the neighborhood level, but also at the city, state, and national levels. Indeed, neighborhood change, dependent on the support of higher levels of government to deliver services, necessarily had to come second. What role did ideology, psychology, and passion play, as suggested by Ghassem-Fachandi? For Ghassem-Fachandi, as for all students of all pogroms, the question remains as to why and how psychological antagonisms sometimes emerge violently and sometimes remain latent and at least superficially peaceful. His analysis of the power of Chief Minister Narendra Modi's rhetoric of “terrorism” in opening the way to the 2002 pogrom is masterful; we need to know more about the rhetoric—his and others'—of the return to peace. For Valiani, we need more evidence of the connection between the physical training in the shakhas and the actual attacks on Muslims—carried out not with the lathis of RSS training, but with swords, guns, and exploding petrol canisters. Valiani gives some limited evidence of some trained RSS volunteers exceeding their orders, but he presents no systematic data. Nor do we know the degree to which the attackers—there were tens of thousands of them—were products of the shakha physical drills, or of the neighborhood economic and political dependency cited by Berenschot, or of the psychological indoctrination highlighted by Ghassem-Fachandi.

The 2002 pogrom has been studied from many different perspectives, yet each of these local neighborhood studies adds still newer ones, and they open up new issues for study that transcend Gujarat in 2002. They deserve careful reading, and they will be the basis of much further discussion.