Gujarat riots

A modern democracy cannot tolerate matters of faith trumping over matters of citizenship rights. There can be no question of tolerance when citizens are denied their status as equal citizens. With an intolerant secularism that insists on the inalienable rights of citizens and on the due process of the law, it is easier to mount public pressure against minority hunters and sectarian killers. Here we cannot make exemptions, or look for mitigating circumstances, on grounds of being a minority or impoverished and unemployed.

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The second act of the catastrophe in Gujarat was carried out within parliamentary portals, in the course of the debate on the Gujarat violence which exposed the hypocrisy that while political discourse might concern itself with people's anguish, it is in reality driven by aspects of competitive politics. Even as extraordinary violence was perpetrated on Indian women, it was women's bodies that provided the necessary domain for the assertion of competitive party politics - a fact reflected in the arguments and counter-arguments offered during the debate. As this essay suggests, the ominous final message that seeps through is that constitutional governance can achieve little except normalise violence, almost as a social cost of democratic politics, in which even structured practices of governance are established that deny as well silence women's sufferings. The task for the 'active citizen' thus is to frame imaginative patterns of social action that would not merely empower victims but also adequately present the voices of suffering, giving voice to the anguish - a task that could effectively challenge the newly instituted narratives of 'pride' and 'honour'.

Given the fate of the survivors of the 1984 Congress-led anti-Sikh carnage, who are still awaiting the judicial punishment of the guilty, it is no surprise that the first judicial verdict on the Gujarat riots has acquitted all accused. The list of those denied retributive justice in India runs long and is growing day by day.

What is new about Gujarat, it is argued here, is best exemplified by what happened to Muslim women and children on the days of the long knives. Not just their killing, not just the sadism, but the larger symbolic purpose behind the killing and the sadism that sums up the nature of ethnic cleansing, the shape of Hindu Rashtra.