[Reader-list] Folding the national upon the local

[rehan ansari]

IT is stunning to read historian Gyan Pandey’s book
Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and
History in India, which was published in 2001 and has
just come out in paperback, and find it relevant for
reading Gujarat 2002. 

For Pandey, the Delhi riots of 1947 fall under a
concept he terms “folding the national upon the
local”. Under the Partition logic everything was
divided into Pakistan and India, which means Muslims
and where they lived in Delhi, taking Delhi as an
example of the local, became Pakistan where they
stood. 

Pandey also has a concept of the local folding upon
the national. Gujarat is an example of that. A
massacre occurs in Godhra and we hear Gujarat Chief
Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpayee claiming that the hand of the Inter-Services
Intelligence, that is Pakistan, is behind it. 

“The ‘local’ is also an index of power; and the way it
is folded into the ‘national’ has much to tell us
about the particularities of a state or nation, and
the course of its history.” Fit into this scheme of
Pandey the relationship of the Modi administration
with the anti Muslim pogroms in villages and cities in
Gujarat, the election platform of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) in the Uttar Pradesh elections (the threat
of Pakistan) and the demands of the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad in Ayodhya.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage
http://sports.yahoo.com/