Pogrom in Gujarat

Pogrom in Gujarat
Author: Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2012-04-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691151776

In 2002, after an altercation between Muslim vendors and Hindu travelers at a railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat, fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. The ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party blamed Gujarat's entire Muslim minority for the tragedy and incited fellow Hindus to exact revenge. The resulting violence left more than one thousand people dead--most of them Muslims--and tens of thousands more displaced from their homes. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi witnessed the bloodshed up close. In Pogrom in Gujarat, he provides a riveting ethnographic account of collective violence in which the doctrine of ahimsa--or nonviolence--and the closely associated practices of vegetarianism became implicated by legitimating what they formally disavow. Ghassem-Fachandi looks at how newspapers, movies, and other media helped to fuel the pogrom. He shows how the vegetarian sensibilities of Hindus and the language of sacrifice were manipulated to provoke disgust against Muslims and mobilize the aspiring middle classes across caste and class differences in the name of Hindu nationalism. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Gujarat's culture and politics and the close ties he shared with some of the pogrom's sympathizers, Ghassem-Fachandi offers a strikingly original interpretation of the different ways in which Hindu proponents of ahimsa became complicit in the very violence they claimed to renounce.

Keeping the Peace

Keeping the Peace
Author: Raheel Dhattiwala
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108497594

Investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 critically examining the logic of political violence.

Gujarat, the Making of a Tragedy

Gujarat, the Making of a Tragedy
Author: Siddharth Varadarajan
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780143029014

This book is intended to be a permanent public archive of the communal violence in Gujarat in early 2002. Drawing upon eyewitness reports from the English, Hindi and regional media, citizens and official articles by leading public figures and intellectuals, it provides an account of how and why the state was allowed to burn.

Gujarat Files

Gujarat Files
Author: Rana Ayyub
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Government executives
ISBN: 9781533341525

Gujarat Files is the account of an eight-month long undercover investigation by journalist Rana Ayyub into the Gujarat riots, fake encounters and the murder of state Home Minister Haren Pandya that brings to the fore startling revelations. Posing as Maithili Tyagi, a filmmaker from the American Film Institute Conservatory, Rana met bureaucrats and top cops in Gujarat who held pivotal positions in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of the sting operation reveal the complicity of the state and its officials in crimes against humanity. With sensational disclosures about cases that run parallel to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah's ascent to power and their journey from Gujarat to New Delhi, the book tells you the hushed truth of the state in the words of those who developed amnesia while speaking before commissions of enquiry, but held nothing back in the secretly taped videos which form the basis of this remarkable read.

Gujarat Riots: the True Story

Gujarat Riots: the True Story
Author: M D Deshpande
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2014-12-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1482841630

The 2002 violence in Gujarat, Godhra and after was reported widely by the media, both Indian and Global. The nature of the violence, the role of the state government, and also of the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi were massively debated and discussed. Many contrasting views have been expressed worldwide about the topic. This book reveals exactly what happened. With meticulous media research, it gives contemporary newspaper reports, official statistics and comprehensive analysis to reveal the full truth of the 2002 riots, and removes many misconceptions. It also gives a special chapter on the findings of the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team. With comprehensively documented arguments, this is like an encyclopedia on the 2002 riots, reveals everything you need to know about the Gujarat violence. Was the state government of Narendra Modi culpable, or did it handle the riots effectively? Was the violence after Godhra one-sided or was it plain riots in which both sides suffered? Were some reported incidents exaggerations or were they real brutal facts? The answers to all these questions are given comprehensively. A simple reading of the book will throw enough light and arm the readers with strong facts to make up their mind.

Fear and Forgiveness

Fear and Forgiveness
Author: Harsh Mander
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0143102214

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

New Perspectives on Kristallnacht

New Perspectives on Kristallnacht
Author: Steven J. Ross
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Jews
ISBN: 9781557538703

On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi leadership unleashed an unprecedented orchestrated wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young Polish Jew, but in reality to force the remaining Jews out of the country. During the pogrom, Stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and ordinary Germans murdered more than a hundred Jews (many more committed suicide) and ransacked and destroyed thousands of Jewish institutions, synagogues, shops, and homes. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Volume 17 of the Casden Annual Review includes a series of articles presented at an international conference titled "New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison." Assessing events 80 years after the violent anti-Jewish pogrom of 1938, contributors to this volume offer new cutting-edge scholarship on the event and its repercussions. Contributors include scholars from the United States, Germany, Israel, and the United Kingdom who represent a wide variety of disciplines, including history, political science, and Jewish and media studies. Their essays discuss reactions to the pogrom by victims and witnesses inside Nazi Germany as well as by foreign journalists, diplomats, Jewish organizations, and Jewish print media. Several contributors to the volume analyze postwar narratives of and global comparisons to Kristallnacht, with the aim of situating this anti-Jewish pogrom in its historical context, as well as its place in world history.

Scarred

Scarred
Author: Dionne Bunsha
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 8184758979

Did it really start with the burning of a train? Scarred: Experiments with Violence in Gujarat asserts the existence of a much larger politics of violence, and tells the story of a disaster in Hindutva’s laboratory which etched deep faults in Gujarat’s social landscape. While capturing the predicament of the Sabarmati Express survivors, Scarred is an intense, moving portrait of refugees whose lives have been changed forever by the violence that followed. It tells the story of people fighting for justice amidst fear and turmoil, unable to return home. It is also an insightful look into the minds of the perpetrators of this violence, and the world they seek to construct—a world where the ghettoization and socio-economic boycott of Muslims have become the norm. What exactly happened in Gujarat in February 2002? Why did the country’s political leaders fiddle while Gandhi’s Gujarat burned? In this honest and thought-provoking book, Dionne Bunsha tries to answer these and many of the questions that we are still left with.

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India

The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India
Author: Paul R. Brass
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2011-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295800607

Chronic Hindu-Muslim rioting in India has created a situation in which communal violence is both so normal and so varied in its manifestations that it would seem to defy effective analysis. Paul R. Brass, one of the world’s preeminent experts on South Asia, has tracked more than half a century’s riots in the north Indian city of Aligarh. This book is the culmination of a lifetime’s thinking about the dynamics of institutionalized intergroup violence in northern India, covering the last three decades of British rule as well as the entire post-Independence history of Aligarh. Brass exposes the mechanisms by which endemic communal violence is deliberately provoked and sustained. He convincingly implicates the police, criminal elements, members of Aligarh’s business community, and many of its leading political actors in the continuous effort to “produce” communal violence. Much like a theatrical production, specific roles are played, with phases for rehearsal, staging, and interpretation. In this way, riots become key historical markers in the struggle for political, economic, and social dominance of one community over another. In the course of demonstrating how riots have been produced in Aligarh, Brass offers a compelling argument for abandoning or refining a number of widely held views about the supposed causes of communal violence, not just in India but throughout the rest of the world. An important addition to the literature on Indian and South Asian politics, this book is also an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the interplay of nationalism, ethnicity, religion, and collective violence, wherever it occurs.