Hostname: page-component-669899f699-qzcqf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-04T02:48:28.725Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002: Neighborhood Perspectives

Review products

Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State. By WardBerenschot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. xiii, 236 pp. $40.00 (cloth).

Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India. By ParvisGhassem-Fachandi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 335 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity. By ArafaatValiani. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. xiv, 266 pp. $95.00 (cloth).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2013

Howard Spodek*
Affiliation:
Temple University
Get access

Extract

The 2002 pogrom in the Indian state of Gujarat, and especially in its largest city, Ahmedabad, left about 1,000 Muslims dead in the city, another 1,000 dead in the state, and about 140,000 homeless, some of them still living in relief camps today. The killing, one of the worst in India since partition in 1947, drew responses of horror from across India and the world. Although the assault on Muslims followed an apparent (all the facts will never be known) assault on Hindu pilgrims travelling through the railway station at Godhra, in eastern Gujarat, in which fifty-nine Hindus burned to death, most observers have argued that the response was not commensurate with the attack, and, of course, it targeted not the criminals who may have set the fire, but a community of Muslims 100 miles away.

Type
Review Essays—South Asia
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2013 

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.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable