Beginning With Godhra

A wave of destructive communal assaults swept the western Indian state of Gujarat beginning 27 February 2002 and continued for several months. The assaults began with an attack by Muslims in the town of Godhra on a train carrying hundreds of karsevaks, Hindu pilgrims who were returning from the legendary birthplace of Lord Rama in the north Indian town of Ayodhya. The pilgrims harassed Muslim kiosk owners on the Godhra station platform and the Muslims responded with their own attack on the train. A fire broke out in train carriage S-6, apparently a deliberate act of arson by the Muslims. Fifty-nine passengers were burned to death.

Previous trainloads of pilgrims had established a reputation for harassing Muslims along the way,Footnote ¹ and Godhra Muslims had their own reputation for violence: ‘Few Gujaratis have forgotten the burning alive of a family of five Sindhis by Godhra's Ghanchi Muslims during the 1980 Sindhi-Ghanchi riots. The town is notorious for communal riots.’Footnote ² Between one-third and one-half of the city's population of 150,000 is Muslim and many of the Hindus are refugees or descendents of refugees who fled Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947. Godhra's population was politicized and communalized.Footnote ³

Pogrom in Gujarat

By the next day reprisal attacks on Muslims began through much of Gujarat state. Almost 2,000 people were killed and some 140,000 were left homeless, mostly in Ahmedabad, the state's largest, and most politicized, city. The chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, immediately explained the sequence of events as ‘action-reaction.’Footnote ⁴ He referred to the events in Godhra as a ‘deep rooted conspiracy and a pre-planned, cold-blooded attack’, supported by Pakistan. India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, speaking a month and a half later, echoed this interpretation, blaming the Muslims for initiating the violence and provoking the response: ‘If there had been no Godhra, the tragedy in Gujarat would not have occurred. If a conspiracy had not been hatched to burn alive the innocent passengers of the Sabarmati Express, then the subsequent tragedy in Gujarat could have been averted. . . . . The subsequent events were no doubt condemnable, but who lit the fire?’Footnote ⁵

Gujarat's tragedy has received abundant scholarly and journalistic attention as one of the worst outbreaks of communal violence in India since independence and partition. Most accounts and interpretations are highly politicized. For example, because of the intimate connection between Godhra and Ahmedabad, the events surrounding the train deaths were investigated repeatedly, although never convincingly. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Gujarat Police argued that a core group of 15 to 20 people laid elaborate, conspiratorial plans to burn the train. Subsequently, however, their main witness reversed himself, asserting that the police had coerced his testimony. Meanwhile other senior police officials characterized the attack on the train as a spontaneous reaction to the confrontation on the station platform.

Two separate commissions of inquiry were established. The Gujarat Government, ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), appointed one under retired Supreme Court Justice G.T. Nanavati on 6 March 2002.Footnote ⁶ In 2004, in national elections, the Congress Party replaced the BJP as the dominant power in New Delhi; the new railway minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, called for a new committee of inquiry headed by another retired Supreme Court judge, Justice U.C. Bannerjee. The Bannerjee Committee concluded that the fire was an accident, ignited from one of the portable cookstoves of women preparing breakfast in the train carriage.Footnote ⁷ On the same day that the Bannerjee Committee submitted its report, the Hazards Centre, a Delhi-based non-governmental organization of professionals from various engineering disciplines, concluded similarly that the fire could not have been started from outside the train. Both reports were critical of the police investigations. The BJP, in its turn, charged that both of these new reports were politically motivated.Footnote ⁸ It seems unlikely that any explanation of the events at the Godhra station will ever be fully accepted.

Within 24 hours of the attack in Godhra, Hindus throughout the state, but mostly in its north and central areas, began retaliatory raids on Muslims. The raids appeared to be pre-planned. By the evening of 27 February, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), an intensely militant Hindu organization, allied with the BJP, called for a state-wide bandh, a general strike, for the next day. Historically, at times of such acute tensions, such bandhs served as only-vaguely-disguised calls for rioting and violence. Gordhan Zadaphia, a senior VHP activist and Minister of State for Home, was quoted as saying, ‘We will teach a lesson to those who have done this (burning of the bogie). No one will be spared and we will make sure that the forces behind this act will never dare to repeat it.’Footnote ⁹

For the first three days, the bloodiest period, the police, apparently under orders from the state's chief minister, did little to intervene. Sometimes they joined in the attacks. The attacks thus became a pogrom, that is, an assault by one community on another in which the government turns a blind eye or even supports the attackers.

By mid-April the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimated trade losses of Rs. 7,280 crores [US$2,300 million], production losses of Rs. 2,258 crores [US$550 million], loss to the self-employed of Rs. 700 crores [US$160 million] and, at the height of the rioting, losses to the state of Rs. 20 crores [US$5 million] per day in sales taxes.Footnote ¹⁰ Fifteen thousand business establishments, including 1,100 Muslim-owned restaurant/hotels, 3,000 handcarts and over 5,000 cars, trucks, taxis and auto rickshaws were badly damaged or completely destroyed in an attempt to cripple the Muslim community economically.Footnote ¹¹ Hindu militants circulated leaflets urging Hindus to boycott all Muslim businesses.Footnote ¹²

As in previous communal attacks, looting accompanied the violence. This time, however, richer people joined in: ‘A section of Ahmedabad's elite excitedly rushed to the stores, grabbed whatever they could and filled their cars with such goods.’Footnote ¹³ They continued their looting even when captured in the act by television cameras and reporters.Footnote ¹⁴

Hindu militants attacked a car carrying one team of reporters and beat up a reporter from another, also burning his camera.Footnote ¹⁵ Several others were beaten and kicked.Footnote ¹⁶ ‘In some areas of Ahmedabad cable operators were even warned to black out news telecasts.’Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, ‘the Indian networks covering the violence provided saturation coverage, with gruesome images of the violence beamed round-the-clock. This obviously magnified their impact.’Footnote ¹⁸

Gangs of young thugs, members of the VHP youth divisions, the Bajrang Dal, roamed the streets. On April 7 they broke up a peace meeting in the historic ashram of Mahatma Gandhi himself, forcing some of Gujarat's best known figures to flee. The ashram then closed its doors to further peace-keeping efforts.

Militants targeted Muslim students in the schools. VHP workers demanded that headmasters of exclusive English schools turn over lists of their Muslim students and transfer them out. Headmasters called Muslim parents warning that they could no longer guarantee the safety of their children.Footnote ¹⁹

Even the dead were not immune from attack. In efforts to blot out glories of the Muslim legacy in Ahmedabad, tombs of revered saints and scholars were vandalized, destroyed and paved over, sometimes with state resources. The tomb of the famous seventeenth-century Urdu poet Shah Wali Gujarati,Footnote ²⁰ located just outside the city's main police headquarters, was destroyed on 2 March and a make-shift Hindu temple with a saffron flag was briefly put in its place. On 3 March, that temporary shrine was leveled and by 5 March, the site was paved over, removing it from view if not from memory.Footnote ²¹

Sadism, especially sexual sadism against women, amplified the horror and has been described elsewhere at great, and horrifying, length.Footnote ²² Mobs totally destroyed the Gulbarg Society neighbourhood and burned alive 39 persons, including the former Congress Party Member of Parliament, Ehsan Jafri. ‘Jafri had campaigned against Narendra Modi in his bye-election for the state assembly in the Rajkot constituency.’Footnote ²³

Investigations into the causes of the violence cited the Gujarati language press as a force instigating and perpetuating it. The Editors Guild of India dispatched a Fact Finding Mission to Gujarat on 31 March which found that most local and national reporting had been exemplary and impartial, with the glaring exception of the two largest Gujarati language newspapers in the state. A women's fact-finding group also cited both the Gujarat Samachar and Sandesh, each of which sells nearly a million copies each day across the state, for publishing especially inflammatory, false, accounts of attacks on Hindu women.Footnote ²⁴ Subsequently, Chief Minister Modi congratulated Sandesh, the more flagrant of the two, on the high quality and even-handedness of its reporting.Footnote ²⁵

Television reporting divided similarly between local broadcasting, which tended to condone the violence, and national broadcasting, which tended to condemn it.Footnote ²⁶ Modi accused the national press of hostility towards the Hindus of Gujarat and presented himself as the ‘“Hindu Hrudyasamrat”, the sole defender of the Hindu majority’.Footnote ²⁷

Sociologist Ghanshyam Shah cited four major categories of participants in the violence: those who organized the destruction; carried it out; instigated the mobs; and joined them. Many were of upper and middle castes and belonged to the VHP. They included Brahmin leaders who organized the attacks and sometimes led them personally, BJP party workers and elected Members of the Gujarat State Legislative Assembly. Shah also noted that in 2002, for the first time, Dalits, ex-untouchables, participated in substantial numbers in the violence against Muslims. In previous communal riots, the Dalits had usually remained aloof, or defended Muslims in an alliance of the downtrodden.Footnote ²⁸

Most of the leading literary and cultural figures kept silent. Some publicly condoned the violence. K.K. Shastri, a past president of the Gujarat Literary Society, and chairman of the VHP, spoke out in appreciation of the violence against Muslims: ‘It had to be done, it had to be done. We don't like it but we were terribly angry. Lust and anger are blind . . . the rioters were well bred Hindu boys . . . charged because in Godhra women and children were burnt alive. The crowd was spontaneous. All of them were not VHP people . . . They are angry because Hindutva [the Hindu nation] was attacked’.Footnote ²⁹

Fear of violent retaliation muted the voices for peace. A few did speak out. Esther David, an Ahmedabad artist and writer, published ‘The Night Is Long, the Swords Unsheathed’, giving poetic expression to her shock and horror as mobs of thousands raged around her home on one of the borders between Hindu- and Muslim-majority areasFootnote ³⁰:

‘Blood flows in our city of sorrow.

Clogging our lives with shrouds without forms’.

The feminist poet, Saroop Dhruv, wrote passionately in defense of Muslim victims, and especially Muslim women. Dhruv, a Hindu, identified with Muslim women who were attacked and violated. She wrote her poem, ‘What Is the Reason That I Have Been Given Life’, on 8 March 2002, as she notes ironically, international women's day:

Some, but not many, old-line Gandhians spoke out.

The business community was generally silent – not wanting to be on the wrong side of the government – and perhaps tacitly approving of the violence. Despite the large proportion of Jains, for whom ahimsa [non-violence] is a fundamental principle, and of Hindu Vaishnavas, for whom it is also an important value, business organizations did not speak out against the violence. In my own, unsystematic interviews with business leaders I heard repeatedly that ‘it was time to stop living in fear of Muslims,’ time ‘to teach Muslims a lesson’, although most did not seem to approve of the level of violence that occurred.

The violence went on for months, although in less intense and more scattered form. The center continued to be Ahmedabad. In early May, when incidents of violence spiked again, the central government dispatched the former director general of the Punjab Police, K.P.S. Gill to serve as an advisor to Chief Minister Modi on bringing the city and state back to normal. Gill encouraged dialogue between Hindus and Muslims. He found that many police officers had been allied with the Hindu mobs; he had them transferred out of their positions and replaced by others. Three months later Gill reported in an interview that his work was done.

Failure of Government: From Riot to Pogrom

The greatest shock of the 2002 violence was the failure of the government to put down the violence quickly and firmly. At the highest levels, the government chose not to intervene, and, on the contrary, inflamed the situation. When the VHP insisted on bringing the bodies of all 59 victims of the Godhra carnage to the Sola civil hospital in Ahmedabad, Chief Minister Modi agreed to their demand despite the fact that only 26 of the victims were from Ahmedabad and despite fears that this public demonstration would provoke further communal violence.Footnote ³³ When the VHP further called for a state-wide bandh, the BJP agreed to this as well.

Modi convened the state's top law enforcement officials, including the Director General of Police (DGP); the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad; the Home Secretary; the Secretary to the Home Department; the DGP, Intelligence Bureau (IB); and several officers from his own office. Participants described the meeting. Some protested Modi's decision, but ‘By the end of it, the Chief Minister ensured that his top officials – especially the police – would stay out of the way of Sangh parivar men. The word was passed on to the mobs.’Footnote ³⁴ The speed and organization with which the attacks were carried out, especially in the first three days, supported this view as did the lack of police response. Officials and local police later testified that they were ordered not to respond.Footnote ³⁵ Arson often took place in full view of police stations. Officers who protested were transferred.Footnote ³⁶

Outside, reliable, official and semi-official analysts severely criticized Modi for his actions and inactions. The National Human Rights Commission concluded that there was a ‘comprehensive failure of the State to protect the Constitutional Rights of the people of Gujarat’.Footnote ³⁷The Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report of the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties charged that there had been a ‘diabolical plan’ distributed to the top 50 leaders of the major Hindu militant organizations spelling out the method and manner in which the initial three-day assault on the Muslims was to be carried out.Footnote ³⁸ The Report called Godhra the ‘pretext’, rather than the cause, of the massacres.

Julio Ribeiro, the police official who had put down severe riots in Ahmedabad in 1985, came to the city in 2002 to assess the performance of the police and to recommend future policy. He wrote in the Times of India:

The President of India himself, R.K. Narayanan, charged that behind the violence in Gujarat was a ‘conspiracy’ between the Central and state governments.Footnote ⁴⁰

Past experience in Ahmedabad and Gujarat demonstrated that when the government used its powers forcefully, violence could be contained and sometimes even prevented entirely. Police responded when higher authorities made it clear that they were expected to do so, and they failed when they did not. Recognizing the role of government in suppressing violence or allowing it, the people of Ahmedabad regularly speak of violence being ‘engineered’.Footnote ⁴¹

In 1985, for example, rioting and assaults plagued Ahmedabad. The central government waffled for six months before forcing the state government to resign. Only then did it send in police, under Julio Ribeiro, who finally stopped the rioting. In 1986, when assaults once again began in Ahmedabad, the central government immediately dispatched the Union Minister of State with charge for internal security to oversee peace-keeping. Despite public skepticism, the minister announced that the situation would be under control within 24 hours. Immediately 54 companies of state reserve police, central reserve police, border security forces and other security personnel were called in to patrol the city, and the situation was, indeed, brought under control within 24 hours.Footnote ⁴²

Similarly in 2002 itself, the BJP government demonstrated twice-over that it was entirely able to suppress violence when it chose. First, K.P.S. Gill was quickly able to bring an end to the still-sputtering violence when he was appointed by the central government to serve as Modi's security advisor on 2 May 2002. Stronger evidence came in September 2002, when the Swaminarayan Akshardham Temple was attacked by two Muslim invaders. On 24 September 2002, just seven months after ‘The Godhra Incident’, two masked murderers leapt over the wall into the precincts of the temple, ‘spraying bullets indiscriminately’Footnote ⁴³ and tossing grenades. They murdered one swami and four volunteers of the temple, two state policemen, one member of India's elite National Security Guard and 23 visitors to the site before they were killed by an elite anti-terrorism unit of the Indian police.

The Akshardham attack might be considered even more provocative than Godhra: dozens of innocent people were killed in one of Gujarat's most prominent and elegant Hindu temples, the headquarters of one of Gujarat's most powerful Hindu sects, in the heart of the state capital, adjacent to some of its most important offices and residences, by two Muslims, later identified as Pakistanis, almost certainly aided by local guides. The government's response, however, was entirely different from Godhra.

Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, whose constituency is Gandhinagar, arrived at the scene on the evening of the attack. Prime Minister Vajpayee arrived the next day. ‘District police chiefs were activated within an hour. As soon as the VHP announced its bandh, the army was alerted. The corpses of the victims were not assembled together in procession, as they had been after Godhra’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Why the difference in response between Godhra and Akshardham?

Elections – The Real Trigger

Politics was the key. The BJP leadership was making strategic decisions on the value of violence in its election campaigning, sometimes finding violence useful in building majorities, sometimes finding it counter-productive. After the Muslim attack in Godhra, the BJP leadership felt that the charge of Muslim terrorism, followed by ‘teaching them a lesson’, would inflame the Hindu masses and lead them to vote for the BJP as the party that could protect them. By September, with elections scheduled for December, the BJP strategy had changed. Now the ruling party wished to demonstrate that it could properly maintain law and order.Footnote ⁴⁵India Today reported that Advani and Vajpayee warned Modi, ‘A repeat of the post-Godhra violence would be disastrous. Aside from being a severe embarrassment, it would have had an impact on the Supreme Court case on the Election Commission's decision to delay the Gujarat assembly elections. [Also] the chief minister [himself] did not want an interruption in his perceived smooth ride to the elections’.Footnote ⁴⁶

By the time of the Akshardham attack, much of civil society had begun to reject further extreme violence against Muslims. Several Hindu and Jain priests had already called on the BJP government to exercise greater restraint.Footnote ⁴⁷ Immediately following the attack, Pramukh Swami, head of the Temple and its powerful sect, refused Chief Minister Modi's request to state publicly that the two terrorists who attacked Akshardham were connected to Pakistan's ISI [intelligence bureau].Footnote ⁴⁸ Modi was not asked to speak at the memorial ceremony for the dead, attended by some 15,000 mourners.Footnote ⁴⁹ At that service Pramukh Swami declared, ‘All religions are good. Everyone must have a sphere to observe his religion’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Congress called for a Gujarat Bandh on 25 September, apparently seeking an opportunity to embarrass the BJP government, but the bandh did not materialize. The VHP issued its own bandh call on 26 September, which shut down the state but – this time – was kept within peaceful bounds.

The alternating decisions to seek electoral gains sometimes through violence and sometimes through efficient law enforcement, reflected, in part, changing attitudes towards violence within the electorate, as evidenced by the time of Akshardham. They also reflected deep divisions within the BJP leadership and within the leadership of the broader Hindu nationalist movement of which the BJP is the electoral wing.

Gujarat was the only state in India that the BJP held on its own, without the need for coalition partners, and the party sought to preserve its bastion. Party leaders chose Modi to serve as Chief Minister of Gujarat to shore up its faltering position prior to the 2003 elections with full knowledge of his history of militancy, his openness to the use of violence and his thirst for political power.

The BJP had taken control of the government of Gujarat beginning with a sweeping victory in the elections of 1995. However, despite its overwhelming majority of 122 out of 182 seats in the legislature, the party found governing more difficult than getting elected. Factionalism proved a stumbling block. By 1996, Shankarsinh Vaghela, another powerful local politician, claimed that the BJP Chief Minister, Keshubhai Patel, and the BJP General Secretary for Gujarat, Narendra Modi, were arrogating too much power to themselves, and not enough to him. Vaghela split the party, bringing down Keshubhai's government in favor of a compromise candidate, who then proved unable to gain a majority in the state assembly. President's rule from New Delhi replaced the conflicted legislature for the next six months. Vaghela left the BJP to found a new party, taking 48 BJP MLAs with him. Vaghela himself became Chief Minister in late 1996, with Congress support. The Congress, however, was also split into factions, and a rift within its leadership forced him from office. Vaghela's chosen successor managed to hold power for only a few months. In the face of disarray in both major parties, the voters brought the BJP back to power with 117 seats in 1998.

By late 2001, however, it appeared that the BJP would lose the next state-wide election, which was to be held no later than March 2003. The party was not doing well nationally, having lost the state assembly elections in UP, Punjab and Uttaranchal. Within Gujarat, too, it was doing poorly. ‘The Congress captured the district and taluka [sub-units of administration], panchayat [village-council] elections in 2000 and continued to win every subsequent bye-election. The BJP won only 27% of the Zilla [district] Panchayat seats in 2000 compared to 82% seats it had won in 1995. Municipal elections in Ahmedabad and Rajkot were lost by BJP after a long time and this was followed in many bye-elections’.Footnote ⁵¹

The BJP was losing not only popularity but also patronage. The BJP was also losing out in non-governmental institutions, like cooperatives, with the additional opportunities for patronage that they provided.Footnote ⁵² In addition, in Ahmedabad, a scandal arose following the devastating earthquake of January 2001. Buildings which should have been earthquake-proof collapsed because of illegal, shoddy construction. The contractors who had built them had close relations to the BJP. Fearing the loss of its flagship state, the party's national leadership dispatched Narendra Modi to Gandhinagar to replace Keshubhai as Chief Minister in August 2001.Footnote ⁵³

Narendra Modi's adult lifetime had been spent primarily as a pracharak, an organizational worker, of the Hindu militant cultural organization, the RSS. Born in 1950, Modi was running a canteen on contract in the Gujarat Road Transport office in Ahmedabad in 1968 when he was recruited to the RSS. He earned an MA in political science from the Gujarat University. He became a leader in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student organization of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu militant cultural organization. He participated in the Navnirman political agitation that brought down the state's government, in 1974–75. In 1986 he was drafted into the Gujarat BJP, the political party allied to the RSS, as organization secretary. He became General Secretary beginning 1988/89. Modi effectively piloted the BJP's electoral campaigns in Gujarat between 1986 and 1995, the period in which the BJP first won control of the state government. ‘It was during this period that the party was put on the political map at the grass-roots level in Gujarat’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1990 L.K. Advani recruited Modi as an organizer of his Rath Yatra, a religious-political procession that crossed north India demonstrating the power of flamboyant Hindutva to incite violence and to attract votes.

Modi was a polarizing personality. Shankarsinh Vaghela, for example, blamed Modi's abrasive and imperious style for his revolt against the party in 1995. Modi was kicked upstairs to Delhi in 1995 to serve as general secretary of the BJP for the three northern states of Himachal, Punjab and Haryana. In 1998 he became national general secretary of the party.

Until Modi was appointed chief minister, he had no experience in governing. Party leaders, the RSS and Advani believed, however, that Keshubhai Patel could not win the next election but Modi could. India Today reported that, ‘As soon as his [Modi's] name started doing the rounds as the party's choice for the next chief minister, there was virtual celebration at the state headquarters of the BJP, as also that of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But Keshubhai's constituency, Patels in the western, region of the state, sulked.

Four pieces of evidence suggest that Modi, as chief minister, accepted the use of violence for its electoral value, and that the BJP leadership knew this and approved. First, his very appointment as chief minister. Modi's background was not in running a government but in running election campaigns, including the use of incitement to violence as a means of winning votes. Second, almost immediately following the worst of the pogrom, and while violence continued, the BJP called for early elections in the belief that the violence would increase their electability. This decision was a victory for Modi's aggressive and combative Hindu militance even over India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who seemed publicly troubled by the violence.

Vajpayee took his time before visiting Gujarat after the violence. He came only after a month had passed since the worst of it. He visited the Shah Alam refugee camp in Ahmedabad in early April. Shocked by what he saw, he expressed shame and agony over the results of the violence, and it appeared that he might dismiss the Modi government. More militant party leaders evidently told him, however, that if he tried to dismiss Modi they would turn against him. One week later, when Modi ritually offered his resignation from the party at the annual organizational meeting of the RSS, at Goa, the resignation was not accepted. ‘Even if the prime minister thought Modi's resignation prudent for the sake of both his personal image and the unity of the coalition, there was absolutely no way he could go against the ferocity of the pro-Modi sentiment’.Footnote ⁵⁶ ‘At Goa, it was clear that the party organization had already taken the decision to go to the polls in Gujarat on the Hindutva platform under the leadership of Modi’.Footnote ⁵⁷

At Goa, Vajpayee also publicly accepted Modi's ‘action-reaction’ justification for the pogrom in Ahmedabad. He blamed the Godhra attacks – and Muslims collectively – for inciting the massacres. He accepted the principle of majoritarian rule as passed in the RSS All-India General Council in Bangalore, 18 March 2002, in response to the Ahmedabad and Gujarat pogrom: ‘Let the Muslims understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Times of India called Vajpayee's reversal in Goa a ‘grave shock’ to the nation.Footnote ⁵⁹ It spoke of the BJP's apparent electoral strategy as ‘cynicism of the worst kind (that) constitutes a dangerous assault on the democratic fabric’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The BJP's enthusiastic endorsement of Modi in Goa frightened off its allies from confronting the party or the chief minister. They criticized but they did not desert. Chandrababu Naidu, head of the South Indian Telegu Desam Party, one of the principal coalition members of the BJP-led central government, called on the BJP to dismiss Modi.Footnote ⁶¹ However, when the opposition Congress brought a vote to Parliament calling for the dismissal of Modi and a commission of inquiry into the violence, Naidu's party abstained. The motion failed 284 to 182. Modi had polarized Gujarat and India. India's most popular newsweekly, India Today, put him on its cover on 29 April 2002, and captioned his picture, ‘Hero of Hatred’.

Although the BJP pushed for early elections, an investigative team dispatched by the Election Commission of India concluded that Gujarat was not yet ready for fair and free elections.Footnote ⁶² The Commission set the date for December 12.Footnote ⁶³

The tenor of the election campaign itself gave a third indication that the post-Godhra violence had been orchestrated to win the coming election. Modi was already giving speeches throughout the state in mid-July. Those who criticized him for failing to contain the riots and for failing to rehabilitate the Muslim community he labelled enemies of the state. A brilliantly powerful and persuasive speaker, Modi crafted his speeches to characterize his political opposition not as the Gujarat State Congress, but rather as the Congress' national leader, Sonia Gandhi, whom he repeatedly derided for her Italian birth and upbringing, and Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan.

On 10 September Modi began a ‘Gaurav Yatra’, a ‘procession of pride’ to reassert the good name of Gujarat and Gujaratis, who, he claimed, had been unjustly vilified following the violence of February and afterward. Continuing until just days before the election, Modi travelled thousands of kilometers, criss-crossing Gujarat, visiting 165 of the state's 182 constituencies and addressing more than a thousand meetings.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sometimes he spoke of economic and social development, for example, bringing Narmada River water to Gujarat, and getting girls from the most backward villages into schools. Mostly, however, he represented himself as Gujarat's bulwark against Muslim violence and terror both from within India and from across the Pakistan border. That message stirred the crowds to adulation.Footnote ⁶⁵ Modi was back on the cover of India Today on 25 November. ‘Riding the Hate Wave’ was the caption this time, as the state election campaign moved into its final stage.

Praveen Togadia, General Secretary of the VHP, and personally based in Ahmedabad, led the VHP's campaign on behalf of the BJP. Earlier in the year, at the time of the rioting, Togadia had rejoiced in the violence.Footnote ⁶⁶ During the election,

Even the BJP disavowed these statements, but they did not reject the VHP's election help. Togadia himself announced a plan for his own yatra, which would include some 2,000 Hindu religious figures, beginning in Godhra on 17 November and ending in Ahmedabad on 6 December. The Election Commission banned the procession for its unconstitutional use of religion in an election campaign. Only days before the yatra was to set out, Prime Minister Vajpayee called for the enforcement of the Commission's directive and officially banned the procession.Footnote ⁶⁸

Nevertheless, the message of Hindu militancy had penetrated so deeply into Gujarat that Shankarsinh Vaghela, the former RSS member who had bolted the BJP in 1995, had become the leader of the Congress party. Vaghela had started his own party and later joined the Congress. Vaghela avoided addressing the issue of violence in Gujarat forthrightly, and he counselled Sonia Gandhi to follow a similar course. Even when she came to campaign in Ahmedabad, she did not visit the widow of Ehsan Jafri, the former Congress MP who had been burned to death. Congress seemed frightened lest it be labelled anti-Hindu. It campaigned on a platform later referred to as ‘soft-Hindutva’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Congress nominated only five Muslim candidates throughout Gujarat. Nevertheless, Muslim voters had nowhere else to turn, and in the last week before the election the All-India Muslim Ulema Council issued a directive asking Muslims to vote 100% for the Congress. The BJP had a field day in heaping scorn on their antagonists' use of religion in politics!Footnote ⁷⁰

On election day, 12 December 2002, the BJP scored a smashing victory, taking 126 seats in the state legislature, with 51% of the vote, to 51 for the Congress, with 38%. The party's most lop-sided victories were in the regions where the assaults had been most severe: the central and northern parts of the state, and its eastern regions with their substantial proportions of Adivasis. ‘The BJP bagged 79 of the 102 seats in the 13 riot affected districts in central, north, and south Gujarat’.Footnote ⁷¹ Maya Kodnani, accused of inciting riots in labor neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad in March, won her seat, in just those areas, with 75% of the vote.Footnote ⁷²

In areas where violence had been less, the BJP did less well. In Saurashtra, where the influence of Keshubhai Patel, Modi's rival in the BJP, was strongest, the Congress gained 14 seats over 1998, the BJP lost 13; in South Gujarat, the Congress gained 4, the BJP lost 4; in the north, the Congress gained 3, the BJP lost 2. The BJP's triumph came in the Central Region where it gained 38 seats while the Congress lost 23. Communal violence was the BJP's ticket to victory. Regions that did not participate actively in the pogrom – mostly outside central and northern Gujarat and the adivasi, tribal, areas – did not vote heavily for the BJP; they seemed to disavow both the pogrom and the party.Footnote ⁷³

On 6 January 2003, India Today designated Modi ‘Newsmaker of the Year, 2002’, and for the fourth time in 10 months put him on its cover, captioned, this time: ‘Narendra Modi: MASTER DIVIDER’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Modi's electoral victory

Why Ahmedabad and Gujarat?

Why had this communal violence, engineered to win an election, occurred especially in central Gujarat and most especially in Ahmedabad?Footnote ⁷⁶ Violence here seemed particularly ironic. Gujarat was the home region of Mahatma Gandhi and he established his ashram headquarters in Ahmedabad for 15 years, 1915–30. He chose the city, in part, because of its combination of economically successful business people and conservative Hindu religious valuesFootnote ⁷⁷ – a combination that also marked many of the Hindu militants a half-century later. Within this cultural framework, the Mahatma helped to produce a highly politicized city. Paradoxically, Gandhi's non-violent organizational work in Ahmedabad may have helped to pave the way to violent Hindu political militancy. Gandhi always tempered politicization with his absolute insistence on non-violence, and on Hindu–Muslim alliances. When he was out of the city, however, his influence seemed to diminish. In 1919, for example, when Gandhi was arrested in north India for defying government orders forbidding public assemblies, Ahmedabad exploded in violence. After Gandhi's departure from Ahmedabad in 1930, and the aging and death of his colleagues, the politicization remained, but the non-violence did not. In 1941, as independence appeared on the horizon, and Muslims began to demand their own political territory, Ahmedabad experienced intermittent, but extremely destructive, Hindu–Muslim rioting. Local political leaders, like Gandhi's principal lieutenant, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, condemned the violence as unworthy of the people of the city.Footnote ⁷⁸

Two decades after independence, riots broke out repeatedly: 1969, 1981, 1985, 1986, 1993 and 1999. The year 1969 was the worst. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people were killed, the overwhelming majority Muslims. Communal assaults began when a policeman was perceived as throwing a copy of the Quran to the ground, and Muslims were perceived as harassing cows belonging to Ahmedabad's Jagannath Temple. The official judicial investigation characterized the outbreak as partially spontaneous, but incited and encouraged by members of extremist Hindu political organizations.Footnote ⁷⁹ The official report criticized the government for not being alert to propaganda and provocations that had begun to fester in both communities, but especially among Hindus. In Parliament, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi taunted Atal Behari Vajpayee asking whether it was ‘a coincidence that when people who belong to the RSS or the Jan Sangh [precursor of he BJP] go somewhere, soon afterwards there is a riot close to that place’?Footnote ⁸⁰

As the Reddy Commission speculated following riots in 1969:

Economic and social problems also provide some explanation for the violence of the 1980s. In the 1970s and 1980s most of Ahmedabad's 76 textile mills, the mainstay of its economy, closed forever, and about 90% of its 150,000 workers were laid off. The labor union, founded with Gandhi's crucial support, collapsed, and the millowners, who had formerly controlled the city's politics, fell from power. Adding to the turmoil, the state government, controlled by Congress, proposed special ameliorative programs for low caste people, provoking an upper caste backlash.Footnote ⁸²

By the early 1990s, the central government began to promote a neo-liberal economy, leaving India open to the unpredictable and uncontrollable forces of the international marketplace and the social divisiveness created by growing disparities of wealth and poverty. The new economic regime created new opportunities, but it also left many people anxious and uncertain. Meanwhile Congress government policies of protective discrimination [affirmative action] in favor of Dalits [ex-untouchables] and OBCs [Other Backward Classes] upset historic hierarchies and left people, both high and low, even more anxious and uncertain of their place.Footnote ⁸³ Increasing wealth could cause social unrest just as could increasing poverty.

Ahmedabad's political culture moved in conflicting directions. On the one hand, it fostered islands of civic order, professionalization, creative NGOs and a resilient economy based on such old-fashioned industries as soap and textiles and new ones such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals and diamond polishing. On the other hand, a culture of illegalities undermined public confidence in the police and public officials, both elected and civil service. Bootlegging – with the complicity of policemen and politicians – was prevalent throughout Gujarat, a state that had instituted total prohibition in honor of its Gandhian legacy. Illegal construction and zoning practices, tax evasion and even political assassination added to the mix in challenging the foundations of the rule of law and the solvency of public institutions. Ahmedabad's moral order held in parts, but it was under severe attack.Footnote ⁸⁴

Two new influences also challenged older values. First, visits to the developing countries of east and southeast Asia – Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea – alarmed Ahmedabad leaders who saw with their own eyes the evidence that they were falling economically behind countries that had once trailed them. Ahmedabad business leaders declared themselves ready to restructure the economy in order to compete.

Second, hundreds of thousands of Gujaratis who were living overseas kept closely in touch with their homeland through frequent visits and, by the 1990s, through e-mail and world wide web communication.Footnote ⁸⁵ These NRIs, non-resident Indians, or NRGs, non-resident Gujaratis, brought more detailed news of the outside world and opened people's imagination. Their cash remittances fuelled some of an expanding consumerism in Ahmedabad and Gujarat. Their overseas homes provided bases for visits by increasing numbers of Gujaratis who went to see for themselves. With the old influences waning, and new horizons and challenges opening, Ahmedabad found itself deeply conflicted by a struggle to determine the political culture that would prevail.Footnote ⁸⁶

A profound battle also raged in Ahmedabad's religious life, a fault-line in the heart of Hinduism. ‘Tradition’, often described as an anchor in the face of change, had instead become a battlefield. Some groups believed that Hinduism should serve as the basis for political rule. They labelled their political-religious combination ‘Hindutva’ and called for a ‘Hindu Rasthra’, ‘a Hindu nation’ that functioned primarily for Hindus. Many of the NRIs also contributed to this infusion of Hinduism into public life. Many were more conservative socially and religiously than their stay-at-home relatives.Footnote ⁸⁷ Their religious enthusiasm overseas encouraged stay-at-homes to increase their religious participation and to think of India as a Hindu nation, rather than as a secular nation in which Hindus formed the great majority.Footnote ⁸⁸ Others argued, however, that Hinduism was a more private religion, that it should not be involved in politics. They believed in an administration and a rule of law that would recognize and protect equally the rights of all citizens.

Many of Ahmedabad's struggles over the appropriate role of Hinduism in politics appeared also in other cities and regions of India. Ahmedabad's extreme violence suggested, however, that its struggle was more profound. Ahmedabad brought together almost a century of high levels of (Gandhian) politicization; deeply felt religious identifications augmented by the support of overseas relatives and friends, and sometimes expressed in an opposition to the ‘other’; an economy in total transformation from an industrially oriented past to an uncertain future; an economic leadership eager to emulate the successes of other developing regions resulting in increasing disparities of wealth and poverty; a public culture riddled with illegalities; and years of experience with the use of violence for political purposes. Against this background of highly diverse and conflicting understandings of the past and goals for the future, it was not surprising that a new political leader would once again gamble on a strategy of communal violence based on a platform of Hindutva.

The RSS, BJP, VHP, Sangh Parivar

The principal coalition which asserts the unity of the Hindu religion and the Indian nation is the Sangh Parivar, the ‘family of organizations’ of militant Hindus that includes the parent cultural organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers' Union); the religious organization, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council); and the political party to which they gave birth, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People's Party). The motto of the Sangh is ‘Hindutva’, its claim that Indian nationalism and the Hindu religion are synonymous. Hindutva often includes the assertion that non-Hindus cannot be real Indians. Nowhere is the Sangh more popular and more aggressive than in Gujarat.

The RSS, established in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, is organized in local branches, shakas, which extend to the village or neighbourhood level. The men in charge of expanding the shakas in number and quality are pracharaks, RSS organizers and propagandists. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, was a lifelong RSS pracharak; that was his professional background prior to assuming the chief ministership of Gujarat.

The RSS was not active in the independence struggle, and one of its members assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, in the belief that he was too accommodating towards Muslim political demands. For many years after independence the organization was burdened by this history and, for a time, it was banned from participation in public politics. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the RSS was ready to mobilize. Its leaders claimed that the Westernized elites who dominated India in the first decades after independence – and who tended to identify with the Congress – had lost touch with the masses.Footnote ⁸⁹ Its vehicle was the Rama Janmabhoomi – birthplace of Lord Rama – movement. This movement asserted that the Hindu God Rama had been born in the North Indian town of Ayodhya, that a temple had been built exactly at the place of his birth and that Muslim invaders had destroyed the temple in the sixteenth century, replacing it with a mosque. Despite historical research that challenged these beliefs, and despite the violence that threatened to explode, they demanded the destruction of the mosque and the building of a new temple in its place. In 1990 the RSS led an elaborate procession across North India raising awareness of their claims and provoking rioting and murders throughout the country. The procession began on the western seacoast of Gujarat, at the Temple of Somnath, allegedly also destroyed by Muslim invaders, but later rebuilt. The procession, or rath yatra, was conceived and headed by BJP leader and Member of Parliament, Lal Krishna Advani, whose political constituency was Gandhinagar. Narendra Modi was one of its organizers. Government action in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh prevented the procession from reaching its destination. In 1992, however, newly organized mobs of VHP youths succeeded in destroying the mosque, with Gujarat supplying the largest contingent of the karsevaks.Footnote ⁹⁰ The demolition of the mosque ‘taught the Muslims a lesson’ and enabled the militants to ‘say with pride, we are Hindus!”Footnote ⁹¹ It also led to violent Hindu–Muslim confrontations across India in which thousands died. The militants’ second goal, constructing a Hindu temple on the grounds of the destroyed mosque, remains a smouldering volcano inflaming Hindu–Muslim relations. The train at Godhra, for example, was filled with karsevaks returning from a pilgrimage to Ayodhya.

The revived militancy brought growth. By 2004 the RSS reported 30,053 shakas and 43,535 upshakhas, or secondary branches, across India.Footnote ⁹² In Gujarat in 2003, it reported 800 shakas with 100,000 members.Footnote ⁹³ On the eve of the Gujarat state election in late 2002, Praveen Togadia, General Secretary of the VHP, and a Gujarati, pledged that nearly 500,000 VHP cadres in 10,000 villages would campaign for the BJP.Footnote ⁹⁴

Overseas, assiduous recruitment by the VHP among Indian emigrants brought both financial and morale support to the BJP. The Sangh's global network reaches more than 20 countries. The RSS claims shakhas in 25 countries, 150 of them in the United States and 72 in Great Britain, although under a different name. The percentage of Gujaratis in these overseas Indian communities is very high, with estimates running to about one-third of the entire Indian community in the United States.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Sangh Parivar took especial interest in Gujarat, for this was the one state which it has controlled politically without the need for electoral alliances with any other parties. The BJP's electoral vote for state assembly seats in Gujarat rose steadily from 15% in 1985 to 27% in 1990, 43% in 1995 and 45% in 1998; the number of seats from 11 in 1985 to 67 in 1990, to 121 in 1995, with a slight decline to 117 in 1998.Footnote ⁹⁶ Because of this political power, the Sangh Parivar often refers to Gujarat as its ‘Laboratory for Hindutva’.

The BJP built its electoral victories in Gujarat on many foundations: caste, class, overseas support and its promise to provide an uncorrupted administration, in addition to its appeal to Hindutva. In any given election, however, a vote for the BJP was often simply a vote against its chief rival, the Congress. Congress policies in the 1980s favored lower castes – Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims (the KHAM strategy). These policies alienated the upper castes – Brahmans, Vanias and Patels – and precipitated their migration to the BJP.Footnote ⁹⁷

By 1998, the RSS had established its presence in about one-fourth of the villages of Gujarat.Footnote ⁹⁸ Its shakhas in Ahmedabad increased from 150 in 1998 to 305 in 1999.Footnote ⁹⁹ In January 2000 the RSS organized a sankalp shibir (training camp) in Ahmedabad attended by about 26,000 swayamsevaks.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ By August–September 2001 many of the younger leaders had attended weekly camps organized by the Bajrang Dal. There the main ‘target of hatred’ was Muslims, and participants were assured of protection from the police in the coming ‘war’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By mid-2003, the RSS in Gujarat claimed 100,000 members and looked forward to expanding to 180,000 by 2006, ‘with shakhas in almost every village’, according to the state RSS leader in charge of the expansion.Footnote ¹⁰²

Voters gave the BJP the benefit of the doubt on its claim that it would bring clean government. The business community, which had valued earlier development programs of the Congress, found itself equally comfortable with the BJP, which also promised economic growth. For example, the BJP adopted as its own the huge project of bringing the waters of the Narmada River to arid Gujarat, which the Congress had advocated for years.

The Muslim Community and Its Image

The violent killing that took place in Ahmedabad required even more than demagogues and paid murderers. At some level it also required demonization. Unfortunately, through a generation of incitement and propaganda, many of Ahmedabad's Hindus had been taught to hate Muslims. Julio Ribeiro, in the course of his assessment of the state police in 2002, cited this fear and suspicion as the most significant obstacle in bringing peace to Ahmedabad:

Incendiary statements by local and national political leaders confirmed the accuracy of Ribeiro's lament. India's prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, charged the Muslim community with spreading terror:

The fact that Gujarat shares a border with Pakistan increased the fear that local Muslims might be potential allies of India's most feared and hated enemy. Reports of smuggling of contraband into the state, especially guns and drugs, has become a staple of police and news reports. Whenever an assault takes place by Muslims in Gujarat, the hand of Pakistan is seen, directly or indirectly, correctly or incorrectly, further inflaming the climate for violence. Gujarati political leaders at first charged Pakistani involvement in Godhra, although they later reversed themselves. The killers at Akshardham were apparently Pakistanis.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Narendra Modi frequently invoked the attack on the World Trade Center in New York as an example of a worldwide Muslim terrorist movement.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Hindus began to think of Muslims as transgressing the bounds of civil as well as political behaviour. This image was nurtured by the career of Ahmedabad's most prominent bootlegger and extortionist Abdul Latif, a man reviled as a criminal by most Ahmedabadis. During the communal riots of the mid-1980s, Latif provided assistance to Muslim neighbourhoods under attack. They, in appreciation, voted him into municipal government, even while he sat in jail, although they, too, condemned his criminal activities. Captured and jailed, on a later occasion, Latif was ultimately assassinated by the police in a ‘fake police encounter’, in an alleged attempt to escape from imprisonment.Footnote ¹¹⁶ A decade later, the gangster Fazlu kidnapped the eminent Ahmedabad businessman Gautam Adani in 1997 for a huge ransom. Fazlu targeted others as well, including Karsan Patel, head of the huge Nirma soap empire. When Fazlu was arrested in 2006, he had ‘at least 30 cases of extortion and murder registered at police stations across the country’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Repeatedly, in formal interviews and in general conversations, I heard the remark that until 2002 ‘we Hindus lived in fear of the Muslims, now they will live in fear of us. We have taught them a lesson’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Fracturing Ahmedabad Society

For at least two decades, from the Hindu–Muslim violence of 1985 until 2002, Ahmedabad's social geography had continued to fracture. Hindus perceived danger in living in Muslim majority areas, and, far more typically, Muslims felt even more endangered in Hindu majority neighbourhoods. Waves of migration followed each outbreak of violence as Hindus and Muslims sought the safety of their own homogeneous ghettoes. Inside the old city, residents of many pol neighbourhoods repaired old gates, which could close off each pol from the rest of the city, to ensure that they were functioning properly, and, in some cases, replaced older wooden gates with new ones of iron.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Outside the old city, too, each had withdrawn into its own community ghettoes. They referred to the streets that divide the area of one community from the other as ‘borders’, and the communities themselves as ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’. This has become standard terminology even in casual conversation, and a walk down one of these streets immediately confirms the reality of the border and the terminology.Footnote ¹²⁰ Walls have been constructed along many of these border streets, reinforcing the separation. Dalits and Muslims who used to live adjacent to each other have also separated.Footnote ¹²¹

The Muslim ghetto in the vicinity of the Shah Alam Mosque and Lake Chandola at the southern limit of the city has grown into a large Muslim slum-ghetto, while the Juhapura area at the western side of the city has grown into a Muslim ghetto of some 250,000 people. Juhapura is so large that it contains a wide range of class and income groups, united only by their common Muslim identity. Police keep the ghetto under tight surveillance, in fear of retaliation against the government and the people who have forced the residents to live here.Footnote ¹²²

My first visit to Ahmedabad in 1964–66 was to a very different city socially than existed in 2002. In those days people from various communities had friendships and apparently easy relationships with one another. By 2002 this was not often the case. Through decades of stereotyping, it had become acceptable, even in highly educated circles, to openly express deep prejudices against Muslims. I have discussed this social separation with many friends and colleagues in informal conversations, and with officials in more formal settings. All – from the most devoted advocate of a composite society to the General Secretary of the VHP – have agreed that this perception of the decline in personal relationships across religious lines is accurate. Most of my friends were dismayed by the alienation. Pravin Togadia, on the other hand, was delighted. In the wake of the 2002 pogrom he declared:

‘In Gujarat, for the first time there has been a Hindu awakening and Muslims have been turned into refugees. This is a welcome sign and Gujarat has shown the way to the country’.Footnote ¹²³

In light of the threat of the Sangh Parivar in Ahmedabad and Gujarat, the Muslim community pulled in several directions. One group turned inward and emphasized religious orthodoxy. Others, however, believed they had to try to join the mainstream, even in the face of massive rejection. Hanif Lakdawala, one of the proponents of reform, discussed the new situation:

The level of violence suffered by Ahmedabad's Muslims was rare in India, but their isolation and depressed status was not. Data presented in 2006 by the Prime Minister's High-Level Committee on the Social, Economic, and Educational Status of Muslims throughout India, headed by Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, Rajinder Sachar, shows that ‘the bulk of Indian Muslims suffer grave deprivation in social opportunity, because of lack of access to education, health care and other public services, and to employment. For the most part, they are even more disadvantaged than Dalits and are emerging as, if they have not already crystallized into, India's principal underclass’.Footnote ¹²⁵

Kulturkampf: The Battle for the Culture of Gujarat

The Sangh Parivar's struggle to create a Hindu Rashtra based on Hindutva in Gujarat was not limited to ghettoizing the Muslim community and crippling its economic and educational base. The Sangh waged a multi-pronged kulturkampf, a battle for control of the culture of the state, and especially of Ahmedabad. The political-religious philosophy of Hindutva would usher in cultural uniformity, economic growth and military power. To achieve its cultural goals, the Sangh Parivar sought to assert its control over the educational system, the distribution of public information, the freedom of cultural expression and the independence of non-governmental organizations.

The local struggle was part of its national project. BJP governments at the center and in states that the party controlled were commissioning textbooks which presented India as a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, marginalizing the contributions of others, and often representing them, especially Muslims and Christians, as historic enemies of Hindu India.Footnote ¹²⁶ BJP-led central governments, after 1998, appointed political operatives to head India's central institutions for history and the social sciences. They suspended publication of scholarly volumes that revealed that the RSS had not joined in the freedom struggle, but had sided with the British government.Footnote ¹²⁷ The BJP in Gujarat adopted a similar educational strategy:

The Tenth Standard high school social studies textbook published by the Gujarat State Board of School Textbooks presents a very favourable assessment of German Nazi leader Adolph Hitler, perhaps because the RSS had long held Hitler's extreme nationalism and racism to be virtues in nation-building rather than horrendously destructive aberrations. The textbook asserts:

The first sentence of the paragraph above was deleted from the text in 2005, and the 2006 edition carried an additional adjective referring to Hitler as ‘cruel’. The Ninth Standard social science textbook praised Hitler for his ‘co-ordination of nationalism and socialism’.Footnote ¹³⁰

Public information was controlled and suppressed. Professor Indira Hirway of the Centre for Development Alternatives, Ahmedabad, and Dr. Darshini Mahadevia, of the School of Planning, Ahmedabad, prepared for the State of Gujarat the Gujarat Human Development Report 2004.Footnote ¹³¹ The state went ahead with publication, however, only after the authors agreed to delete a discussion of its failure to control the riots of 2002.Footnote ¹³²

VHP and Bajrang Dal extremists succeeded in banning books and films. In 1999 they burned copies of Arundhati Roy's The Greater Common Good Footnote ¹³³ because of its attack on the Narmada Dam project and they threatened bookstore owners with vandalism if they sold it. Crossword, Ahmedabad's leading bookstore for English language books, removed the book from its shelves.Footnote ¹³⁴

In May 2006, spurred on by the BJP youth wing, almost all the movie theatres of Gujarat withdrew the new, highly successful film, Fanaa, because of opposition to its star, Aamir Khan. Khan had spoken out in favour of proper rehabilitation of the people who were displaced by the Narmada Dam. The political youth group vowed not to allow the film to be screened until the star apologized to the people of Gujarat. Khan replied in a magazine interview: ‘Why should I apologize? All I have said is that people should be rehabilitated. I am only repeating what the Supreme Court has said. Are we a democracy? Don't people have a right to speak without being targeted?’Footnote ¹³⁵ The BJP was not alone in pushing for the ban. Although the Congress party officially opposed the ban, Youth Congress members supported it. As reporter Dionne Bunsha wrote, ‘There is barely any opposition to the party. The Congress in Gujarat is more like the BJP's B team’.Footnote ¹³⁶

The attack on Khan ostensibly targeted his statements about the Narmada Dam. But surely the message of his films must also have been offensive to Hindu militants. Lagaan, in which he starred, told the fictional story of an Indian village cricket team, composed of members of many different Indian communities, including high caste Hindus, a Dalit, a Muslim and a Sikh, that defeated a British team in 1893 and won a three-year reprieve from land taxes. The moral was that a united India could overcome all obstacles. The film was nominated in 2001 for an academy award in Hollywood as the best foreign language film of the year. Fanaa portrayed a Kashmiri Muslim family, and especially its beautiful, blind daughter, in a highly sympathetic light, as loving people, deeply patriotic to India. Aamir Khan is himself, of course, a Muslim.

In early 2007, one of the leaders of the Bajrang Dal, Babubhai ‘Bajrangi’ Patel, shut down the showing of the film Parzania, threatening theatre owners with violence: ‘We will not allow the movie to be screened for public till it is shown to us’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The film is based on the true story of a 13-year-old Parsi boy, Azhar Mody, called Parzan, who went missing from Naroda Patiya during the massacre there in 2002. It was being screened to great success throughout India, except in Gujarat. Bajrangi was himself one of the main accused persons in the Naroda Patiya massacre case.

Unrestrained by the government, Bajrangi also proclaimed himself the ‘savior’ of Hindu families. He hounded couples in which Hindu women chose to marry Muslims or Christians. Members of his group beat up the men and threatened the women and their families.Footnote ¹³⁸ In June 2006, Bajrangi proposed that any Hindu girl wishing to marry a Muslim boy must first seek the consent of the chief minister of Gujarat!Footnote ¹³⁹ By December 2006, he claimed to have saved 706 Hindu women from their non-Hindu husbands, especially from Muslim husbands. ‘If it's a Musalman, we definitely use force even if the girl doesn't want to leave. Musalmans don't have a right to live in our country. How dare they marry our girls?’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

On 9 May 2007, a group of VHP activists led by a local leader of the BJP attacked the art work of a student at a student exhibition at the M.S. University of Baroda, Gujarat's most renowned school of art, about 60 miles south of Ahmedabad. Police followed the attackers and arrested the artist. When the Acting Dean of the School of Fine Arts tried to intervene, he was threatened with arrest and was subsequently suspended. No charges were brought against the attackers, who claimed that the exhibition wounded the religious feelings of Hindus and Christians, some of whom joined them. When students attempted to file a criminal charge (an FIR, or first information report) against the attackers, the police refused to accept it. The University Vice-Chancellor refused to file an FIR; instead he met with the attackers and asked the artist and the Acting Dean to apologize to them, which they refused.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) planned a demonstration a few days later against the assault on the arts, but the police forced its cancellation, stating that they feared violence against the protesters. Nationally renowned artists mounted public protests in Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore, partly in fear that the vigilante suppression of art that went unpunished in Gujarat might spread.Footnote ¹⁴²

The reputation of Gujarat for extra-legal assassinations – fake police encounters – was also growing. In an encounter in Karnataka in 2005, two Gujarat police officials, joined by one from Rajasthan, killed a criminal while his wife, who was traveling with him, apparently went missing. Following an investigation ordered by India's Supreme Court, the three police officers admitted killing the wife. Police encounters are not unusual in India and the veteran journalist B.G. Verghese has asked for an inquiry into 21 of them in Gujarat alone between 2003 and 2006. This case stood apart, however, because of the high rank of the officers involved: a Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Border Range, Gujarat; a Superintendent of Police, Intelligence Bureau, Gujarat; and a Superintendent of Police, Alwar, Rajasthan.

With the law being enforced only selectively, Muslims, especially, feared further attack not only by Hindus, but also by the government. Rowena Robinson, in the course of interviewing Muslim women victims in mid-2003 reported: ‘Once someone said to me: “You could be arrested for coming to a Muslim area and talking to us like this, about these things. With this government anything is possible”’.Footnote ¹⁴³ The fact that virtually none of the perpetrators of the violence have been brought to justice increased the mistrust and fear. The bias of the Gujarat police and courts were so great that the Supreme Court of India demanded that two highly publicized cases be re-investigated by India's Central Bureau of Investigation and then transferred out of state for trial in Mumbai. The first was the Best Bakery case, in which a bakery in Vadodara, owned by Muslims, was burned down, and some 12 people were murdered, many of them burned to death. The second was the case of the gang rape of a Muslim woman, Bilkis Yakoob Rasool, and two others, and the murder of several of their Muslim neighbours from Randhikpur Village, not far from Godhra.

On a symbolic level, names were also contested. In the 1990s, when the BJP first came to power simultaneously in the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and in the state government, it proposed changing the name of the city itself. Ahmedabad was named for the Muslim Sultan who had founded the city in 1411. The BJP city and state governments proposed ‘Karnavati’ instead, the name of a Hindu town that had flourished in the vicinity in the 1200s. The name change would in effect characterize the Muslims as invaders who had captured and destroyed an earlier Hindu civilization. It would depict the Sangh Parivar as the restorers of that earlier, pristine, proper culture. The central government, under Congress control, blocked the name change. The BJP municipal government, however, continued to print ‘Karnavati’ on its official stationery.

The highway bridge (‘flyover’) being constructed over the Shreyas railway crossing had been named in early 2005 for Rafiuddin Shaikh, a very popular Congress mayor of Ahmedabad, 1980–84, and a Muslim. Later in the year, the newly elected BJP municipal government announced that Shaikh's name would ‘hurt the feelings of Hindus’ and renamed the flyover for Vasant Gajendra Gadkar, the founder of the Gujarat unit of the BJP.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The BJP state government also moved to undermine and control independent non-governmental organizations. Chief Minister Modi mocked them as ‘pseudo-secular five star NGOs’ and claimed that they were rife with incompetence, corruption, favoritism towards minorities and lack of accountability. In 2005 his government targeted the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a spinoff association of a labor union which Gandhi himself helped to create and one of India's most honoured organizations, nationally and internationally. It has organized some 700,000 poor working-class women, about 150,000 of them in Ahmedabad, another 350,000 in the rest of Gujarat, into labour unions and production cooperatives. About one-third of its members are Muslims, and about one-third Dalits. Its headquarters is in Ahmedabad. During the violence of 2002, SEWA had been very visible and active in relief work in the camps. Lest it evoke further violence, however, SEWA did not issue public statements critical of the government. Even so, two unexploded pipe bombs were discovered at the entrance to its Ahmedabad headquarters.

In one of the many assistance efforts following an earthquake in 2001, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a UN agency, had provided a loan of $15 million to fund a seven-year livelihood security program in some 400 villages. IFAD channelled the money for ‘Jeevika’ through the central and state governments, the normal procedure in UN transactions, but, in an unusual vote of confidence in a non-governmental organization, it designated SEWA to implement the project. For two years the program seemed to run smoothly, but in 2005 the State of Gujarat unexpectedly charged SEWA with lagging performance, financial irregularities and nepotism in its administration of the program. SEWA replied that new programs, especially those working with the poorest of the poor, begin slowly; independent audits revealed no irregularities; and all personnel employed in the project were the most qualified.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The state disallowed and cut back about 15% on the reimbursement for expenses claimed by SEWA and remained months in arrears of other payments due. The government refused to meet with SEWA to work through the disagreements over budgeting so that the project could continue. Moreover, it added demands that SEWA return some government funds from programs dating back to 2000 and already completed.

SEWA's founder and long-time leader, Elaben Bhatt, charged the state with politicizing the work of rehabilitation and punishing SEWA because of its constituency of poor women, about a third of them Muslim. She accused the state administration of attempting a power grab: ‘The space for voluntary agencies, especially those with Gandhian values, has shrunk in Gujarat and it has become difficult to work freely’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ ‘It is because we now have a little power and they do not want any power centers outside their party. . . . the message is since you are not with us, you are against us . . . The tragedy is that Jeevika is finished. And poor women are the ones who are suffering’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

On 7 October SEWA withdrew from all programs funded by the Government of Gujarat, some 20 projects touching 150,000 people. The government called SEWA's withdrawal irresponsible and proposed transferring the Jeevika program to its own officials and agencies of its own choice.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ IFAD rejected the state's proposal and terminated the project.

Modi's attack on SEWA also seemed to signal a challenge to the leadership of Prime Minister Vajpayee and his control over the BJP. Bhatt had frequently organized social welfare projects requested by the prime minister, including a program for Muslim widows in the 2002 relief camps. In SEWA's 2005 struggles with the Gujarat government, however, Vajpayee did not, or could not, intervene effectively on SEWA's behalf.

SEWA itself, following its withdrawal from projects funded through the Government of Gujarat, began to restructure its operations. It re-emphasized earlier models of self-reliance based on increasing the economic activities, productivity and earnings of its members. Although its staff decreased as the Jeevika program closed, its membership actually increased as many poor women, especially Muslims, saw SEWA as their best line of defense against harassment and their best opportunity for earning their livelihood.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Although SEWA was its most prominent target, the government also stopped payment of World Bank funds to numerous other NGOs involved in nearly 2,500 women's self-help groups in rural areas. The government sought control over these resources just as it had sought control over the $15 million Jeevika program.

During my last two visits to Ahmedabad, in 2003 and 2006, one academic and professional friend after another – most of them well-off Hindus – told me that the violence, the existence of youth gangs and Modi's autocratic style had narrowed their sense of the freedom of speech in Gujarat. They were more careful, even privately, of what they said to whom. Several of them felt that they were being watched by people who might attack them, and they had been warned about their public expression and the company they kept. With the passage of time after 2002, these feelings diminished, but they did not disappear. Ahmedabad journalist and human rights activist Achyut Yagnik, for example, wrote in 2006 of Gujarat's ‘present cocktail of Hindutva, parochialism, and violence where the space for debate and dialogue has disappeared’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Not all cultural expression opposed to Hindutva was silenced. The state branch of the People's Union for Civil Liberties continued its campaigns throughout the violence and after. Prashant (a centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace) and the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF) organized a Kavi Sammelan (poetry recital) in Ahmedabad in June 2002. Poets of different communities from Gujarat and beyond recited poems of anger and pain over the violence and opposition to communal propaganda.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Saumya Joshi's drama, Dost! Chokkas Ahi Nagar Vastun Hatun (My Friend, Surely There Was a City Here),Footnote ¹⁵² opened in 2003 and played some 56 times across India including major performances in Mumbai and Delhi. Forty-three of the performances were in Gujarat, about 35 in Ahmedabad. The play imagined two anthropologists in 4003 uncovering the remains of a destroyed city on the site of Ahmedabad. The ruins spoke to them of the communalism, and the class warfare, in the dead city. ‘Were there two kinds of human beings in those days?’ one of the archaeologists asks. ‘There weren't two kinds of people. There just were two communities. And this abstract, invisible, meaningless difference triumphed over all similarities. This difference was the main cause of the city's burial’.

They envision a politician who instigated the killings between communities distributing trishuls (three-pronged daggers, a symbol of Lord Shiva) among his followers: ‘People will suddenly swell with the pride of belonging to a community. They will have a new adversary now, not hunger, not thirst, not illness. The new enemy will be every person of the other community’.

The Bollywood film Dev (2004), directed by Govind Nihalani, based on a screenplay by Meenakshi Sharma, provided a generic depiction of communal riots, but the allusion to Ahmedabad 2002 resonated clearly. A state chief minister orders his police force to allow attacks against the Muslim population under his jurisdiction. Om Puri plays the police official who agrees with the chief minister and carries out his orders. Amitabh Bachchan, India's most honoured film idol, plays his antagonist, a police official who rebels against the illegal orders, at the price not only of his office but also of his life. Ahmedabad's kulturkampf had gone national.

Paying the Price for Violent Hindutva

The advocates of Hindutva in Ahmedabad won significant victories, but they also paid heavy prices. For example, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the force behind the BJP election victories in the state in 2002, in Ahmedabad in 2005, and in local elections in 2006, also had his enemies. Some came from the even-more-militant right: The RSS and VHP accused Modi and his BJP of compromising principles in quest of votes. In electoral politics, and in governing, even the BJP could not accept the most extreme religious and cultural rigidity and exclusivity of the RSS and VHP, nor could it publicly condone the further use of violence.

Personal and ideological antagonisms burst to the surface dramatically in Ahmedabad a few days before municipal elections in 2005. The police raided the office of the city general secretary of the VHP, believing him to be responsible for distributing anti-BJP pamphlets. RSS volunteers did not campaign for Modi

Some antagonism involved personality clashes. Modi removed from office even allies who challenged his pre-eminence. Surendra Patel was removed from his position as chairman of the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) and as chairman of the steering committee of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. He was kicked upward to a position in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament in New Delhi; ‘his aides at AUDA were kicked out and his recommendations for building plan approval turned down. His projects too have been stalled’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Patel was widely regarded as the chief political advocate of professional planning of the physical development of the city and region. The developers' lobby was deeply upset by his removal.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Haren Pandya, former Home Minister of Gujarat State, and Modi's fiercest opponent in the State BJP, was assassinated on the morning of 26 March 2003, outside Law Garden in Ahmedabad, apparently while he sat parked in his car. Suspicion first fell on the BJP as Pandya's father asserted that the assassination was ‘a political murder’. He would not allow Modi to garland the corpse. Publicly, he did not blame Modi for ordering the killing, only for not providing adequate protection when it was needed.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Muslims also had motives for committing the murder since ‘Pandya was present among mobs responsible for the mass killings that began on February 28, 2002’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The Gujarat Police and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) conducted a joint investigation and found that the murder could have been committed by Muslims, ‘intended to avenge the pogrom of February-March 2002’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Although the courts prosecuted Muslims for the crime, Pandya's father remained unconvinced. Each interpretation had its advocates, reflecting the strength of political tensions in the city.

Fears of Muslim retaliation for 2002 continued to haunt many RSS–BJP leaders. In June 2004, Ahmedabad police authorities shot dead four members of a Muslim militant group who were planning to assassinate the former Union Home Minister, L.K. Advani.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ On 11 July 2006, bombs were detonated almost simultaneously in the first-class train compartments of seven different commuter trains in Mumbai. Nearly 200 people were killed and hundreds more injured. Many of them were Gujaratis. The Times of India seemed to have little doubt that these explosions – and some other, previous, smaller ones – were revenge for 2002. ‘There is still self-denial that the real targets were Gujaratis – those who inhabit the neighbourhoods along Mumbai's western suburban railway line and travel first class’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The Times added a headline story a few weeks later, proposing international dimensions to the siege mentality: ‘Saudi NRIs funded 7/11 to avenge Gujarat riots’.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Modi is protected by heavy police coverage within Gujarat and outside. For example, during his three-hour visit to Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, on 29 January 2007 to participate in an RSS function,

In March 2005, the United States Government refused to issue Modi a visa. In 1998 the United States had passed the ‘International Religious Freedom Act’ and set up a Commission on International Religious Freedom (CIRF). Pursuant to this act, the United States sent several officials to examine the situation in Gujarat. In 2002, the CIRF reported that

The report noted that ‘particularly severe violators of religious freedom [are] ineligible for visas and inadmissible for entry into the United States until 24 months have passed since the last violation for which they were responsible’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The Asian American Hotel Owners Association, a predominantly Gujarati organization, invited Modi to give a keynote address in Florida on 24 March 2005. In addition, Sangh Parivar members in the United States formed the Association of Indian Americans of North America and invited him to speak at Madison Square Garden in New York City on 20 March. He was to come on a diplomatic visa. Thirty-eight organizations and 10 supporting groups and individuals banded together to form the Coalition against Genocide (CAG) to protest the visit. The CAG called on Chris Matthews, a television interview host, to cancel his speech at the AAHOA convention; they asked American Express to rescind sponsorship; and they called for Modi's visa to be revoked. They were successful on all counts.

Modi then also cancelled a planned three-day trip to England during 25–27 March. He was advised by the Home Ministry that there were concerns about his security. Civil rights campaigners were preparing to picket him, and there was a movement to serve him with an arrest warrant. The British foreign office made it clear that it would have no contact with Modi nor provide official security. Three British citizens had been killed in the violence of 2002.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Legal challenges within Ahmedabad followed later. The first FIR against Modi, and 62 others, was registered only in July 2006, by Zakia Jafri, the wife of the murdered former MP, Ehsan Jafri. ‘Among the others mentioned in the complaint are top Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders (Praveen Togadia, Jaideep Patel and Keka Shastri), 11 Ministers, five Members of the Legislative Assembly, and senior police officials and bureaucrats’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ The case was widely viewed as quixotic, but it kept the issues of 2002 alive.

The continuing power of Hindutva in elections was not clear. In the Parliamentary elections of April 2004, the BJP suffered sharp losses and the Congress won substantial gains. In Gujarat, the Congress Party's seats in the state delegation to the national parliament went up from 5 to 12 while the BJP's fell from 21 to 14, out of a total of 26.

Many potential voters stayed home. Only 44% of the Gujarat electorate voted in the national elections of 2004, compared to 61.5% in the state elections of 2002. Although it is normal that state elections draw far more voters than national ones, analysts believed that two-thirds of the non-voters had supported the BJP in 2002. They were not willing to vote for the Congress in 2004, but neither did they wish to vote BJP.

The apparent principal reason for Congress' victory in the Parliamentary elections was an anti-incumbency vote protesting the BJP's inadequate response to needs for more water supplies, more and better roads and more and better jobs. But Modi came in for a large share of blame personally. The blame came from the right, including the VHP, which complained that Modi had de-emphasized Hindutva, when he should have proclaimed it as his strongest suit. And from the left, as more moderate members of his own BJP, such as Murli Manohar Joshi, and such BJP allies ‘as the Telegu Desam Party, the Nationalist Trinamool Congress, and the Janata Dal (United) have singled out the Gujarat violence and Mr. Modi's rhetoric as the most likely cause of their electoral rout. Even the Shiv Sena . . . has joined in the game of Modi-baiting’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The same violence that was credited for victory in the 2002 election in Gujarat was blamed for the loss in national elections in 2004. Some voters also resented Narendra Modi's abusive rhetoric towards Mrs. Gandhi and even towards members of his own party.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ For the moment, Hindutva and ‘Moditva’ seemed in remission at the national level.

Following the 2004 victory of its coalition at the center, the Congress party proceeded to reverse some of the most extreme policies of Modi's and Vajpayee's governments. It established new review committees to look into the content of textbooks. It appointed the Bannerjee Committee to reinvestigate the causes of the fire at Godhra. It re-examined the conditions under which government could apply the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), the stringent, and some said unconstitutional, legislation by which suspects could be held for up to six months without formal charges. ‘Of the 240-odd persons in Gujarat detained under POTA by September 2003, all were Muslims’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

In Ahmedabad, on the other hand, the BJP continued victorious. The city held municipal elections on 13 October 2005. Modi campaigned vigorously for BJP candidates and the party won an overwhelming victory, recapturing the Municipal Corporation after five years out of power, with 96 seats to only 32 for the Congress and 1 independent.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Within the city, the leader and the party appeared more powerful than ever.

2007: New Directions?

Five years after Godhra, the violence of 2002 had little apparent lasting effect on the overall economic health of the state or the city. The city was expanding geographically and politically. A new 146-kilometer ring road connected 300 villages to each other and to Ahmedabad. In 2006 the state government extended the boundaries of the city to this new outer ring road, increasing the geographical area of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation by more than 100%, and raising its population from about 3.5 million to 4.4 million.Footnote ¹⁷²

The Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation was restructuring a 20-kilometer stretch of property along both sides of the river that runs through the heart of Ahmedabad. The project would provide a public promenade, amenities for recreation and private land development, which would pay for the project and enhance Ahmedabad's commercial life. The project, formulated by local architect and urban planner Bimal Patel, attracted national attention.Footnote ¹⁷³ Critics, however, doubted that the slum dwellers whose shacks lined the Sabarmati would ever receive the resettlement land promised to them in accordance with the plan.

The Modi government, having shattered the Muslim community in its first months in office, now stressed general social and economic development. In an interview concerning the legacy he wished to bequeath to Ahmedabad and Gujarat, Modi stressed the economic side of development and said nothing of Hindutva.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ He claimed that his business campaign, ‘Vibrant Gujarat’, brought investments of $100 billion to the state in 2007.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ His promotion of ‘Brand Ahmedabad’, a marketing program to encourage foreign investment in the city, enlisted some of the city's most prominent business leaders as international ‘ambassadors’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶

Gujarat State actively implemented a new national policy of creating Special Economic Zones (SEZs), clearing parcels of land, setting them aside for industrial development and offering a 10-year income tax holiday. In one year, 2005–06, the State of Gujarat sanctioned 150 SEZ projects, six of them in and around Ahmedabad, with two more awaiting clearance and three more applications expected. These included SEZs dedicated to the production of pharmaceuticals, ready-made clothing, electronics and engineering industries.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

Pankaj Patel, president of the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry, welcomed Modi's enthusiastic support for business. Patel asserted that Modi's administration did not harass, interfere with, make unfair demands upon or extort payoffs from business.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ He seemed convinced that the kind of unrestrained violence that took place in 2002 would never happen again, and suggested that the business community would oppose such violence in the future.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

Although they did not denounce the violence of 2002 when it had occurred, many in the business and cultural communities in Ahmedabad now tried to distance themselves from it. Voices of condemnation from overseas increased their sensitivity to the issue. Nevertheless, they showed little tolerance of the Muslim community and they were willing to accept a limited inclusion of lower castes, Dalits and Adivasis in exchange for the exclusion of Muslims. They have not spoken out for freedom of expression within civil society, but they do appear to disavow open violence. Sociologist Ghanshyam Shah reports that ‘Society, by and large, does not approve of what happened in 2002. We did a survey and only 7% said it was right, 74% of those surveyed said they disapproved’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Some of the Muslim economic elites profited from the new business expansion,Footnote ¹⁸¹ but the Muslim community generally remained excluded and oppressed. Social activist Hanif Lakdawala believed that the situation post-Godhra actually worsened economically, socially and politically. ‘A new ghetto called “Bombay Hotel Area” is developing “rapidly”. It has 10–12 thousand households – population about 80,000 – but no drinking water, no sewerage, no health facilities! It did not exist in the minds & heart of the A.M.C. [Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation]!’Footnote ¹⁸² ‘Children and the young generation are growing up with hatred. They are very conscious of their religious identity. Here human relations are determined on the basis of religion’.Footnote ¹⁸³

The Sangh Parivar institutions are firmly rooted in Ahmedabad and throughout Gujarat and they have not altered their cultural beliefs. In 2002, even the Congress Party was headed by an RSS veteran, who had left the BJP over factional differences. NGOs and other institutions that encourage independent thought and action continue to feel themselves under attack.

On the other hand, the factionalism within the Sangh Parivar may fracture the organization, as the defections of RSS and BJP veterans demonstrate. Accusations of responsibility in the assassination of Haren Pandya, even if not true, suggest deep levels of distrust among BJP leaders. Similarly, the conflict between the leaders of the VHP and the RSS, on the one hand, with their demands for religious and cultural militancy, and the BJP on the other, with its sensitivity to the need to win votes, has led to significant antagonisms among them. In addition, at the moment, national and state governments are divided between a coalition headed by the Congress at the center and the BJP ruling alone in Gujarat. This balance between political powers opens some space for greater diversity of expression and action, although major NGOs continue to feel threatened.

Five years after Godhra, Gujarat continues to be ‘The Hindutva Laboratory’, and Ahmedabad is a ‘shock city’, in which nation-wide issues are confronted most dramatically. The city's residential geography is almost totally fragmented between Hindus and Muslims. All of the stereotypes and antagonisms that the Sacher Committee depicts as undermining and crippling the Muslim community throughout India appear here in extreme form.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Ahmedabad represents an Indian example of a distinctively modern, global type. Like American and European cities it contains ethnic/religious enclaves of excluded and impoverished populations coexisting alongside modern, highly productive and expanding economies. Its violence has been extreme, as is the degree of exclusion of minorities. Nevertheless, the state and the city deserve careful observation to see how they themselves continue to develop, and to what degree they are models which others accept or reject.

State Electrons, December 2007

Gujarat State held elections in December 2007, the first since 2002. In an essentially two-party state, the Congress was hopeful of major gains, perhaps even capturing the state legislature. Narendra Modi's political enemies had deserted him. The VHP did not campaign for Modi, feeling that he had become too pragmatic in quest of votes and not sufficiently militant in his opposition to Muslims. High-ranking members of his own party actively opposed him. ‘Former Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel, former Home Minister Gordhan Zadaphia and 11 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) left the BJP, complaining against Modi's authoritarian ways. Seven of these MLAs and five other rebels contested the elections on the Congress ticket’.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The Tehelka newsmagazine conducted a sting operation that captured several of Modi's allies on video directly implicating the chief minister in the violence of 2002.

Meanwhile Modi campaigned throughout the state actively, vigorously, ubiquitously. He took credit for promoting Gujarat's continuing economic expansion. He minimized his emphasis on the anti-Muslim aspects of Hindutva, but stressed his opposition to terrorism, especially emanating from Pakistan, and took credit for a fake police encounter against two Muslims in ways that left his audience in little doubt of his sentiments. He read his audiences correctly. The Congress, for example, made few references to the Tehelka revelations, in the belief that Gujarat voters approved of Modi's role in the violence of 2002. In addition, the Congress field of state-wide candidates was regarded as weak.

In the final voting, Narendra Modi led the BJP in a decisive victory, capturing 117 out of 182 seats in the state legislature. The victory was widely attributed to him personally. He had won without the support of the VHP, despite the rebellion in his party, regardless of the incriminating evidence gathered by Tehelka.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Modi's critics, on the left and on the right, worried about the future. Muslims, especially, and Christians, to some extent, worried about their future freedom from violence. Academics and artists were concerned for the future of free cultural expression. Some NGOs were apprehensive about their future freedom from state control. Modi's far more numerous supporters, however, looked forward to his potential rise to national leadership, despite his reputation as a Gujarati chauvinist, and to an increasing role for Hindutva in national politics. Modi's brand of Hindutva, however, had brought novel realignments within the Sangh Parivar. It had splintered his BJP party and alienated the militant VHP. In the laboratory of Gujarat, under Narendra Modi, Hindutva was in the process of redefinition.