Gujarat Riots

In "Communal Riots in Gujarat: Examining State Power and Production of Marginality in the Attempt to Constitute the Past" (EPW, 19 December 2015) Pooja Bakshi seems to have had access to the raw data and has reclassified the responses to draw some conclusions about perceptions of Hindu versus Muslim respondents as a proxy for general Gujarati Hindu and Muslim views. Her treatment of the data raises serious analytical issues. Keeping the methodological infirmities in view, this response examines the strong conclusions derived by Bakshi and suggests that the same data can have alternate explanations, albeit of a more modest and tentative nature as befits the data itself.