Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:20:24.677Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

In the Hindutva Laboratory: Pogroms and Politics in Gujarat, 2002

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2008

HOWARD SPODEK*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Abstract

Communal violence wracked the state of Gujarat and the city of Ahmedabad once again in 2002, leaving some 2,000 people dead. Because the ruling BJP party had proclaimed Gujarat the ‘Laboratory of Hindutva’, analysts throughout India saw the violence as BJP policy and debated its possible spillover effects elsewhere. This paper finds that in a period already marked by stressful economic and cultural change and attended by political uncertainty, some BJP leaders gambled that an attack on Gujarat's Muslims, and on the rule of law in general, would attract followers and voters. Their gamble proved correct at least in the short run. This paper examines the cultural, social, geographical and educational restructuring that is occurring, through legal and illegal struggles, and the impact of the violence upon these processes. It examines the declining status of Muslims as a result of continuous propaganda against them. It analyzes the degree to which the state was damaged as a result of the decision for violence and asks about the degree to which leaders do, or do not, wish to ‘put it behind them’, and suggests that Ahmedabad's problems are widely shared in both the developing and developed worlds.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Cited from Sondhi, M.L. and Mukarji, Apratim, eds. The Black Book of Gujarat (New Delhi: Manak Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2002) Annexure IAGoogle Scholar. Francine, Frankel, India's Political Economy 1947–2004. 2nd edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 738Google Scholar.

2 Punwani, Jyoti, “Godhra Revisited,” in The Hindu newspaper, cited in Asghar, Ali Engineer, ed. The Gujarat Carnage (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003), p. 34Google Scholar.

3 Praveen Swami, “Godhra Questions,” in Frontline, 16–29 March 2002, XIX(6). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1906/19060120.htm

4 Interview by Sudhir Choudhary, Zee TV, 1 March 2002. Reproduced as Annexure 4A in Patel, Aakar, Padgaonkar, Dileep, and Verghese, B.G.. Editors Guild of India Fact Finding Mission Report (New Delhi, 3 May 2002), and cited in Varadarajan, Siddharth, ed., Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 2002), p. 22Google Scholar.

5 Times of India, 15 April 2002.

6 For a summary of the variety of differing early explanations of the Godhra violence, see Zakaria, Rafiq, Communal Rage in Secular India, (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2005) pp. 117Google Scholar Zakaria writes previous to the Bannerjee report.

7 Praful Bidwai, “But Who Lit The Fire?” Frontline, 11 February 2005, XXII(3). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2203/stories/20050211001909200.htm

9 Cited in Gujarat Carnage, 2003, pp. 8, 9 and in Frankel, p. 750.

10 Cited in Robinson, Rowena. Tremors of Violence. Muslim Survivors of Ethnic Strife in Western India (New Delhi: Sage, 2005), p. 80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Frankel, p. 743.

12 The Statesman newspaper, 4 April 2002, cited in Engineer, p. 115.

13 Dionne Bunsha, “Riding the Hate Wave,” Frontline, 21 December 2002 to 3 January 2003, XIX(26). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1926/stories/20030103007812600.htm

14 Mehta, Nalin, “Modi and the Camera: The Politics of Television in the 2002 Gujarat Riots,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies XXIX, no. 3 (December 2006), 395–414Google Scholar.

15 Engineer, p. 27.

16 Reporters without Borders, Reporters san frontières, Annual Report 2003. http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6468

17 Engineer, p. 27.

18 Nalin Mehta, p. 401.

19 Sajeda Momin, “In the Ghetto” in Engineer, p. 114.

20 Shah Wali Gujarat was a seventeenth-century Urdu poet, who pioneered Ghazal writing in its present form. He was also the first poet to have compiled a collection of prose ‘Divan-e-Vali’- which contained hundreds of ghazals and other forms of poetry.

21 Jasani, Rubina, The Indian Express, 13 March 2002Google Scholar.

22 Sarkar, Tanika, “Semiotics of Terror in India: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu RashtraEconomic and Political Weekly Vol. 37 No. 28 (13 July 2002), 2874Google Scholar.

23 Engineer, p. 20. Also Bunsha, p. 38.

24 Reporters without Borders, Reporters san frontières. 2003 Annual Report, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6468. Also see A Women's Fact Finding Panel, “The Survivors Speak” reprinted in Engineer as “How the Gujarat Massacre Affected Minority Women.”

25 Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar, and B.G. Verghese. Rights and Wrongs: Ordeal by Fire in the Killing Fields of Gujarat, Editors Guild of India Fact Finding Mission Report (New Delhi, 3 May 2002), reprinted in Dayal, John, ed., Gujarat 2002: Untold and Re-told Stories of the Hindutva Lab (New Delhi: Media House, 2003), p. 717Google Scholar, also available online. For a critique of the Editors' Guild perspective, and a more sweeping critique of the English language press' alleged pro-Muslim bias in its general coverage of Hindu-Muslim confrontations, see Ashish, “Indian English Medias Biased Reporting on Gujarat,” Independant Media Center. http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/02/3068.shtml

26 Nalin Mehta, p. 413.

27 Ibid., p. 415.

28 Cited in Varadarajan, pp. 418–419.

29 Frankel, p. 750.

30 Times of India, national edition, 20 March 2002.

31 Dhruv, Saroop. Hastakshepa (Interference) (Ahmedabad: Sanvedan Sanskrutik Manch 2003), p. 83Google Scholar. Reference and translation provided by the Gujarati poet Panna Naik in a paper, “The Outsider-Muslim in Gujarati Literature,” delivered at the Association of Asian Studies Annual meeting, 2004, San Diego.

33 Testimony of former additional chief secretary (home) Ashok Narayan before Nanavati-Shah commission of inquiry. Bunsha, p. 32.

34 Outlook, 3 June 2002. Engineer, p. 424.

35 Human Rights Watch, “We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat,” widely reprinted, and available also, in full, at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/india/. See also accounts in Engineer, p. 20, Bunsha, pp. 15, 59.

36 Engineer, p. 20.

37 Frankel, p. 742.

38 Ibid., p. 743.

39 Ribeiro, Julio, Times of India, 23 April 2002, reprinted in Engineer, pp. 156157Google Scholar.

40 ‘There has been government participation in the Gujarat riots . . . . There was a Central-State conspiracy behind the riots’, cited in Bunsha, p. 9. Since only a part of the President's testimony to the Nanavati Commission was made public, calls continued to be issued for its complete publication. ‘CIC [Central Information Commission] calls for correspondence between KRN [K.R. Narayanan] and Vajpayee’, Times of India, 9 August 2006.

41 This common understanding of the ‘engineering’ of violence finds expression, more academically, in the extensive writing of political scientist Paul Brass. Brass explains further that after the violence is engineered, attempts are made by the engineers to disguise their work: ‘Their violent manifestations appear spontaneous, undirected, unplanned – and even the most carefully planned and well-organized assaults on the other community are designed to appear so. Since such riotous violence is illegitimate and the elements of preplanning in it are disguised, the struggle that takes place afterwards to explain it – that is, to control its interpretation – is crucial’. Paul Brass. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), p. 14. For a similar analysis, see Steven I. Wilkinson. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

42 Spodek, Howard, “From Gandhi to Violence: the 1985 Ahmedabad Riots in Historical Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies XXIII, No. 4 (October 1989), 765795CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 India Today, 7 October 2002, p. 13.

44 Ibid., pp. 17–18.

45 Cf. Deepal Trevedi, “Gujarat Regained,” Asian Age (30 September 2006). For a more general comment on the engineering of violence in Gujarat, see Varadarajan, p. 29.

46 India Today, 7 October 2002, p. 17.

47 Bunsha, p. 129.

48 Sheth, Pravin. Global Terrorism: Melting Borders, Hardened Walls (Jaipur: Rawat, 2005), p. 245Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., p. 246.

50 Ibid., p. 246.

51 Thakkar, Usha, “The Gujarat Assembly Elections 2002 – Results and Ramifications,” in Institute of Regional Studies. Current Domestic Policy Challenges and Prospects in South Asia (Islamabad: Institute of Regional Studies, 2003), 6280Google Scholar.

52 Achyut Yagnik and Nikita Sud, “Hindutva and Beyond: The Political Topography of Gujarat,” Conference on State Politics in India in the 1990s: Political Mobilisation and Political Competition, December 2004. Yagnik and Sud, carry the comparative analysis of Zilla Panchayat elections, with their deep swings in results, back to 1987. Zilla Pachatyat Election comparison by Number of Seats: 1987, 1995, 2000

54 India Today International, 15 October 2001.

55 Ibid.

56 India Today International, 29 April 2002.

57 Frankel, p. 752.

58 Cited in Frankel, p. 751.

59 Ibid., p. 754 from Times of India, 15 April 2002.

60 Ibid., from Times of India, 16 April 2002.

61 Financial Times, 12 April 2002, http://search.ft.com/nonFtArticle?id=020412009999

62 Order of the Election Commission of India No. 464/GJ-LA/2002, 16 August 2002, reprinted in Sondhi, M.L. and Mukarji, Apratim, eds. The Black Book of Gujarat (New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2002), pp. 448449, full report, pp. 420453Google Scholar.

63 Ibid., p. 453.

64 India Today International, 25 November 2002, p. 20 and 30 December, p. 32.

65 India Today International, 30 December 2002, p. 10.

66 Varadarajan, p. 23, cited from Asian Age, 7 June 2002.

67 Frankel, p. 760.

68 Ibid., p. 762.

69 Two years later, in the national elections of 2004, Mrs. Gandhi reversed direction and confronted Hindutva head-on with her own call for ‘all-inclusive, composite, pluralistic nationalism’. Frankel, p. 777.

70 India Today International, 30 December 2002, p. 33.

71 India Today International, 30 December 2002.

72 Ibid., p. 38.

73 The Congress may have done well in Saurashtra because of anger over Modi's displacement of Keshubhai Patel as chief minister. Saurashtra, and especially the Patel communities there, are Keshubhai's base. Modi is identified as an OBC (Other Backward Caste) from north Gujarat.

74 The third was 30 December 2002, captioned ‘Moditva and Beyond’.

75 Frankel, p. 764.

76 Political scientist Ashutosh Varshney reports that for the period 1950 to 1995 ‘The West Indian state of Gujarat, in fact, has the highest per capita rate of deaths in communal incidents, at around 117 per million of urban population’. Varshney, Ashutosh. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 97Google Scholar. The next highest is Bihar, far behind at 80, with Maharashtra third at 45. Within Gujarat, the cities of Ahmedabad and Vadodara account for 75% of the deaths. Ibid., p. 103.

77 Cf. Gillion, Kenneth. Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

78 Parikh, Narhari, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Vol. II (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press., 1953), p. 445Google Scholar.

79 Reddy, Jaganmohan. Report, Inquiry into the Communal Disturbances at Ahmedabad and Other Places in Gujarat on and after 18th September 1969 (Ahmedabad: Government Home Department, 1971)Google Scholar.

80 Lok Sabha Debates, 10th Session, 4th Series Vol. XLI, No 58, 14 May 1979 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat), p. 323, cited in Wilkinson, Steven. Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Reddy Commission Report, p. 228.

82 Spodek, “From Gandhi to Violence.”

83 Spodek, Howard, “Crises and Response: Ahmedabad 2000,” Economic and Political Weekly XXXVI, No. 19 (12 May 2001), 16271638Google Scholar.

84 Spodek, “Crises and Response.” Also, Howard Spodek. Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Forthcoming)

85 “The World Gujarati Conference, 2006,” a festival of Gujaratis held in New Jersey, in September 2006, attracted 30,000 participants. Others were turned away for lack of space. Gujarat Times (in Gujarati) (New York City), 15 September 2006.

86 Achyut Yagnik, a Gujarati political activist, journalist, and a highly respected political analyst explained Hindu militancy in Gujarat as an attempt to build a new sense of nationalism based on religion in a state perplexed by the speed and pervasiveness of social and economic changes. Yagnik saw the call for Hindutva – nationalist politics based on Hindu militance – as a search for stability and order. Yagnik regarded Hindutva as a mistaken and dangerous path, but to the political leadership of Gujarat it appeared successful, or at least electorally popular, at least in the short run. Nandy, Ashis, Trivedi, Shikha, Mayaram, Shail, and Yagnik, Achyut, eds. Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi Movement and the Fear of the Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 100123Google Scholar.

87 Prema Kurien, “To Be or Not to Be South Asian,” Journal of Asian American Studies (October 2003), 261–288; Kurien, “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism; the Development of an American Hinduism,” Social Problems Vol. 51, No. 3 (2004), 362–385.

88 Interviews with Ghanshyam Shah, Pravin Togadia, and others.

89 Personal interview with Pravin Togadia, 3 August 2006.

90 Nagindas Sanghavi, “In Free India: Only Politicians, No Statesmen; Only Netas, No Leaders,” http://www.liberalsindia.com/freedomfirst/ff456-06.html

91 Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Sangh Parivar: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar

92 Ibid., p. 4.

94 Cited in Frankel, p. 760.

95 Togadia interview, 3 August 2006.

96 Patel, P., “Sectarian Mobilization, Factionalism and Voting in Gujarat,” Economic and Political Weekly, 21 August 1999, 24232433Google Scholar, cited in Jaffrelot, p. 300.

97 Spodek, Howard, “From Gandhi to Violence: the 1985 Ahmedabad Riots in Historical Perspective,” Modern Asian Studies XXIII, No. 4 (October 1989), 765795CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Jaffrelot, p. 299.

99 Ibid., p. 302.

100 Ibid., p. 299.

101 Frankel, p. 743.

102 Times of India, 22 August 2003.

103 The usual term used for tribals in India today is ‘Adivasi’, original inhabitants, suggesting that they had inhabited the Indian subcontinent before the arrival of the Aryan peoples. The Sangh Parivar claims that the Aryans had always inhabited India and therefore refers to the tribals as ‘vanvasi’, or forest dwellers.

104 Shah, Ghanshyam, Under-Privileged and Communal Carnage: A Case of Gujarat (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam; Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, 2004), p. 21Google Scholar.

105 ‘In the 1986 communal riots in Ahmedabad, which broke out during the Rath Yatra of Lord Jagannath, the impression was widespread that the Dalits and Muslims were killing each other’. Nandy et al., pp. 103–104.

106 Bunsha, Dionne, “Hindutva's Triumph in Gujarat,” Frontline, 21 December 2002–3 January 2003Google Scholar. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1926/stories/20030103005900400.htm

107 Cited in Shah, p. 23 from Concerned Citizens Tribunal Gujarat 2002 (Mumbai: Citizens for Justice and Peace, 2003)Google Scholar.

108 Yagnik, Achyut and Sheth, Suchitra. The Shaping of Modern Gujarat: Plurality, Hindutva, and Beyond (New Delhi, India: Penguin Books, 2005)Google Scholar.

109 Shah, p. 26.

110 Engineer, “BJP's Riot-Free India,” in Engineer, p. 82.

111 Kancha Ilaiah, “The Rise of Modi,” The Hindu (online), 26 December 2002.

112 Ribeiro, Julio, “Lost Middle Ground: A Community Loses Hope in Gujarat” from Times of India, 23 April 2002, reprinted in Engineer, pp. 157158Google Scholar.

113 Frankel, p. 753. The Prime Minister's Office released a transcript which read ‘Wherever such Muslims live . . . .’ Members of the audience reported that the word “such” did not appear in the speech, a videotape confirmed this, and later, under questioning in Parliament, the prime minister admitted this. The Hindu, 17 May 2002, cited in Varadarajan, p. 26

114 Seshadri Chari, guest column in India Today International, 30 December 2002.

115 See for example Modi's introductory letter of commendation to Manohar Lal Batham. Aatankvaad: Padakar ane Sangharsh [Terrorism: Challenge and Response] (Ahmedabad: Gurjar Grantha Ratna Karyalay, 2005). Also see Sheth, Pravin. Aatankvad: Padkar, Pratikar, ane Parivartan [Terrorism: Challenge, Resistance, and Revolution] (Jersey City, NJ: Gujarat Foundation, 2003)Google Scholar. In revised form, this book has been published with co-author Parekh, Bhikhu, in English, as Global Terrorism: Melting Borders, Hardened Walls (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2005)Google Scholar.

116 Spodek, Howard, “Crises and Response: Ahmedabad 2000,” Economic and Political Weekly XXXVI, No.19 (12 May 2001), 16271638Google Scholar. Journalist Dionne Bunsha notes that bootlegging was also politicized. She cites a local police officer: ‘After the BJP government came, Hindu bootleggers have become more powerful than the Muslim ones’, he said. Frontline, Dionne Bunsha, “Riding the Hate Wave.”

117 Times of India, 8 August 2006.

118 Cf. the pronouncement of Hareshbhai Bhatt, vice-president of the Bajrang Dal in Bunsha, p. 31.

119 Times of India, “Amdavadis Turn to Walls, Iron Gates to Replace Trust,” 30 May 2002.

120 Personal experience. See also Rubina Jasani, ‘“Sarkar nadi ke us-par rehne wale logon ke liye hay” (The State exists for the people living on the other side of the river) - Violence and Minority Citizenship in Ahmedabad’ (unpublished paper for Gujarat Studies Association, Great Britain) and Rubina Jasani, ‘Violence, Re-construction and Islamic Reform: Stories from the Muslim ‘Ghetto’.” Modern Asian Studies (2008) XLII(2-3), pp. 431–456, delivered at South Asian Anthropologists’ Group Meeting, Goldsmith's College, London), The Future for South Asia: Revolution? Disaster? 3–4 July 2006. Robinson, Rowena notes that similar terminology is widely used in other areas of India as well. Robinson. Tremors of Violence: Muslim Survivors of Ethnic Strife in Western India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121 Valjibhai Patel, interview with Yogi Sikand, 15 November 2005. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9126.

122 Robinson. Tremors, pp. 54–55, and personal interviews.

123 Varadarajan, p. 23 cited from Asian Age, 7 June 2002.

124 Hanif Lakdawala head of Sanchetna, an NGO-based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, working primarily with Muslims and Dalits, interviewed by Yogi Sikand, 15 November 2005. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9123

125 Bidwai, Praful, “Combatting Muslim Exclusion,” Frontline, 1 December 2006, p. 106Google Scholar, summarizing key findings of the report. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2323/stories/20061201003910600.htm

126 Lal, Vinay. The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar presents a useful account of this rewriting of history. Many prominent historians have addressed the issue in numerous books and in articles for both scholarly and more general audiences. See, for example, writings by Bipan Chandra, K.N. Panikkar, Sumit Sarkar, and Romila Thappar.

127 Engineer, p. 297. See also Davis, Richard H., “The Cultural Background of Hindutva,” in Ayres, Alyssa and Oldenburg, Philip, eds. India Briefing: Takeoff at Last? (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), pp. 107139Google Scholar.

128 Engineer, p. 203.

130 Times of India, 15 June 2006.

131 The Greater Common Good (Ahmedabad: Mahatma Gandhi Labour Institute, n.d.).

132 Interviews with the authors.

133 (Bombay: India Book Distributors, 1999). This essay was subsequently re-published as an essay in a larger volume, Arundhati Roy. The Cost of Living (New York: Modern Library, 1999).

134 See IPI Global Journalist Online http://www.globaljournalist.org/archive/Magazine/Rhyme-19994q.html. Also personal observation of the disappearance of the book from the bookstore and conversation with the bookstore owner.

135 Dionne Bunsha, “Heights of Intolerance.” Frontline, 16 June 2006. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2311/stories/200606163110800.htm

136 Ibid.

137 Times of India, 26 January 2007.

138 Dionne Bunsha, “Organised Intolerance,” Frontline, 26 March 2004. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2106/stories/20040326004301700.htm

139 Times of India, 17 June 2006.

140 Dionne Bunsha, “A seriel Kidnapper and his ‘mission’” Frontline, 29 December 2006. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2325/stories/20061229001810100.htm

141 In response to the Vice Chancellor's actions, the highly respected civil-rights activist Achyut Yagnik said, ‘In most universities Vice Chancellors are with the RSS. They are political appointees and try to be more loyal than the king. There is intellectual poverty here’. Frontline, 1 June 2007. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2410/stories/20070601004903000.htm

142 Anupama Katakam, “Communalism: Attack on Art,” Frontline, 1 June 2007. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2410/stories/20070601003902600.htm

143 Robinson, p. 140.

144 Times of India, 23 June 2006.

145 See, for example, Indian Express, 14, 15, 16 September and 8 October 2005; Times of India, 22 September and 8, 9, 10, 13, 21 October 2005 all Ahmedabad editions. Nationally, the Hindu, 8, 17 October; Hindustan Times, 8 October; Asian Age, 8 October. The two page Frontline article, 18 November 2005, Dionne Bunsha, “A Spat in Gujarat,” http://www.flonnet.com/fl2223/stories/20051118002604800.htm presented with facing pictures of Bhatt and Modi, summarizes the issues very well. SEWA's website carries updated reports of newspaper accounts of the dispute and reports of its auditors, for example, “SEWA's Ongoing Struggle: Independent Audit: ‘Clean Chit to SEWA,’” www.sewa.org. Similarly, the Government of Gujarat website carried its version under reports on rural development, but more recently, the website's listing for Jeevika states simply, “The project has been closed.” http://www.ruraldev.gujarat.gov.in/jeevika.html

146 The Hindu (online), 17 October 2005.

147 Quoted in Joanne Omang, “Women's Union in India Buttles state charges,” in Women's e News, Jun 22, 2006. http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2610/context/archive

148 Government of Gujarat. Note on Jeevika Project. This note was posted on GoG website, removed after the Jeevika project was closed.

149 Interviews with several leaders of SEWA.

150 Times of India, 16 June 2006.

152 Translation is by Jayant Joshi, the playwright's father. As yet, neither the play nor the translation has been published.

154 Times of India, 1 July 2006.

155 Ibid.

156 Dionne Bunsha, “Probe or Persecution.” in Frontline, 23 May 2003, XX(10). http://www/frontlineonnet.com/fl2010/stories/20030523003403900.htm

157 Praveen Swami, “A circle of Hute,” Frontline, 11–24 October 2003, XX(21). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2021/stories/20031024002705500.htm

158 Ibid.

159 The Hindu (online), 10 January 2006.

160 Times of India, 15 July 2006.

161 Times of India, 2 August 2006.

162 The Hindu (online), 29 January 2007.

163 Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, p. 37. http://www.uscirf.gov/countries/publications/currentreport/2002report.pdf

164 Ibid.

165 Noorani, A.G., “Modi and His Visa,” Frontline, 09–22 April 2005, XXII(8), pp. 4750Google Scholar. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2208/stories/20050422000704700.htm

166 Hasan Suroor, “A Diplometic No,” Frontline, 09–22 April 2005, XXII(8) p. 51. http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2208/stories/20050422000705100.htm

167 Dionne Bunsha, “Taking on Modi,” Frontline, 15–28 July 2006, XXIII(14). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2314/stories/20060728002803400.htm

168 Editorial, “Narendra Modi as Super Scapegoat,” The Hindu, 31 May 2004 http://www.thehindu.com/2004/05/31/stories/2004053101591000.htm

170 Times of India, 15 September 2003, cited in Robinson, p. 226.

171 The Hindu (online), 16 October 2005, http://www.hindu.com/2005/10/16/stories/2005101605480800.htm

172 Times of India, 21 July 2006.

174 Interview with the Chief Minister, 17 August 2006. Questions about 2002 were designated as out-of-bounds. For a similar interview and similar responses, compare Jo Johnson, “Radical Thinking,” Financial Times, 30 March 2007. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/24b366ca-dcc9-11db-a21d-000b5df10621.html

176 http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2006/12/23/stories/2006122302891900.htm. The business community of Ahmedabad was one of Modi's staunchest advocates. In February 2003, when national leaders of the Confederation of Indian Industries publicly criticized Modi and Gujarat, a group of leading Gujarati industrialists objected so strongly that CII Director General Tarun Das flew to Gandhinagar on 6 March and apologized on behalf of his organization. Times of India, 7 March 2003.

177 Times of India, 1 August 2006 and 14 August 2006.

178 Personal interview, 21 August 2006. On the fifth anniversary of the Godhra conflagration, Patel told the Reuters news service, “Gujarat today is about good governance, pro-active bureaucracy, solid infrastructure.” http://in.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007–2-27T105047Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-289315-1.xml

179 Interview with Pankaj Patel, 21 August 2006.

180 Shakeel Akhtar, “Old Scars Yet to Heal in Gujarat,” BBC News online, 26 February 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6396223.stm

181 E-mail communications from Bimal Patel (10 March 2007) and Hanif Lakdawala (9 April, 11 April, 2007).

182 E-mail communication, 9 April 2007.

183 Akhtar.

184 Report on Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India, Rajinder Sachar, chair, New Delhi, November 2006.

185 Dionne Bunsha, “Modi's Mandate” Frontline, 05–18 January 2008, XXV(01). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2501/stories/20080118509812400.htm

186 Jaffrelot, Christophe, “Gujarat: The Meaning of Modi's Victory,” Economic and Political Weekly, XLIII (15), 1218 April 2008, 1217Google Scholar.