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chapter 12 Godhra, the Gujarat Pogrom, and the Consequences The real task of tomorrow is the rehabilitation of “hearts and minds,” of getting people to live and work together in the same occupations, and to study together in the same schools. We have to organise and join hands in the same organization. That is the India to which we belong. That is our tomorrow. —Self-Employed Women’s Association, Shantipath (2002) A book on the twentieth century would normally end with the year 2000. But the pogrom of 2002, which left almost 1,000 people dead in Ahmedabad, another 1,000 dead in the rest of Gujarat, and rendered about 140,000 people temporarily homeless, makes that impossible in this case. This pogrom, one of the worst in India since independence, made Ahmedabad once again a shock city for India, in both senses of the word.1 The events were shocking in themselves, and they vividly represented the communal conflicts that afflicted many parts of India, as well as the degraded social and economic situation of most Muslims in India generally. The pogrom also brought Ahmedabad to world attention. The city’s mixed record of rapid physical and economic growth on the one hand, and profound failure to achieve social equity among its diverse inhabitants on the other must have seemed familiar to residents of New York, Paris, Berlin, and numerous other metropolises around the globe, although the complete failure of government to keep the peace among them in 2002 put Ahmedabad in a special category. In many ways, Ahmedabad had become a shock city to the world. Kulturkampf: Culture Wars and Communal Violence Communal violence returned to Ahmedabad in the 1990s, although not so severely as in the 1980s or as in other parts of India. The trigger was a 1990 religious procession that traversed large swaths of north India, aiming ultimately to reach and destroy the Babri Masjid, a Muslim mosque in the city of Godhra, the Gujarat Pogrom, and the Consequences 249 Ayodhya, and replace it with a Hindu temple. The organizers of the procession , the Sangh Parivar, argued that nearly 500 years earlier, the builders of the mosque had destroyed a temple that marked the birthplace of the Lord Rama. They now intended to restore what they claimed was the original order. They called their movement Rama Janmabhoomi, the campaign for the birthplace of Lord Rama. The Sangh Parivar, the family association of militant Hindu organizations, succeeded in raising the Rama Janmabhoomi issue to national consciousness. The Sangh included its parent organization, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, National Volunteers Organization), a cultural organization, and its offspring : the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Assembly), a religious organization; the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, Indian People’s Party), a political party; the Bajrang Dal, a youth organization; the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, All India Student Assembly), a university-based student-faculty organization; and a wide variety of others. Through a series of Rath Yatras, religious chariot processions that traveled thousands of miles across north India, the Sangh succeeded in politicizing and inflaming the issue. The largest of the Rath Yatras, launched on September 25, 1990, by L. K. Advani, president of the BJP, was credited with increasing the votes for his party, especially in Gujarat. It also precipitated communal riots that killed 116 people across India, 26 of them in Gujarat. In subsequent violence related to the temple movement, 1,342 people died, 258 in Gujarat.2 In Ahmedabad, in support of the 1990 procession, BJP and VHP leaders called for a bandh, a general strike, and forcibly shut down Muslim shops that did not acquiesce, leading to violence in the industrial areas of the city. The wealthier residential areas, the home of the city’s new cultural and educational institutions, had relatively few Muslim residents; some of them were now attacked. Muslim-owned shops in exclusive shopping areas were burned down. Goods were burned or stolen. A young Muslim pharmacist was killed. Telephone cables worth Rs. 30 million were destroyed, and some railway tracks were damaged. Random stabbings occurred in the city. A second general strike called for October 30 brought violence against property so severe that the army was called in. In the suburban outskirts, upper-caste Hindus and Muslims attacked each other and torched each others’ homes. In the industrial areas, Dalits and Muslims shot at each other with handmade guns and hurled homemade acid and petrol bombs. The divisions hardened: “By the end...

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