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.
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