[Reader-list] HOW SECULAR IS INDIA TODAY?

[Britta Ohm]

I'm not sure if this makes still sense, as it is re-entering the  
'debate' at a point from which it has, particularly after Shuddha's  
mail, moved on. Yet after Partha's intervention it maybe does. I re- 
post below at the admin's advise the mail I had sent out yesterday and  
which had been withheld because of the attached pdf-file. As both  
Chanchal and Tapas have responded to it, it may be of interest to  
others too.

There is no guarantee, apparently, that Tapas will not die in a 'riot'  
- which he himself is very aware of and which your whole rhetoric,  
Chanchal, moves even more into the realm of likelihood. It is also not  
any more self-evident that I will not die in a pogrom when I come to  
India next and travel to Orissa or Gujarat again, because I might be  
mistaken for a Christian, even though I am without religion - not the  
same as secular - but these are precisely the small differentiations  
that do not count in the face of a caricatured 'Bharat Mata' (who  
would, I'm sure, cringe at what you're doing to her if she could). The  
reactions to Samina's wonderful and important piece - that fell victim  
to 'editorial necessities' (??) at India Today - have again, in the  
foreseeable fashion, undercrored this. The unwillingness to accept  
differentiations - rather than essentialising 'cultural differences' -  
is tantamount to the refusal to accept plurality. The resulting form  
of uncompromising hatred against minorities and their varied  
existences that has taken root in India over the past two decades  
deeply scares me and many others, particularly because it is  
increasingly carried, enacted and formulated by parts of the  
population itself, even if it still thrives most where the state and  
para-state organisations lend legitimacy to it.
I know that there is no use trying to discuss with you, Chanchal, or  
with the rest of the Hindutva mob on this list, that pedagogical and  
reasonable explanations and enlightenment are lost on you. It is as  
fruitless virtually as it is on the street, or, for that matter, in a  
seminar room - because it is a myth that Hindutva only appeals to non- 
intellectuals. I know your 'arguments', so please, kindly, spare me -  
or erupt again, if you can't help it, it hardly makes a difference.  
And that's the actually scary part, the communication breakdown. But  
maybe you can give it a thought that nobody on this list has so far  
called for your expellation or has suggested you find other fora to  
express your views. What do you think it means that people here endure  
your discriminations and calls for conversions without calling for  
your own? Could it have something to do with democracy? In the face of  
the latter's volatile situation, however, what is left, it seems, is  
to use the 'points' you keep raising as a documentation of this  
hatred, particularly for those in the 'West', who are in the wake of  
the 'war on terror' partly re-inforced in their  romanticist ideas of  
'tolerant Hindus' and 'aggressive Muslims'. I'm attaching an article  
of mine that was published in the EPW in December last year, just  
before the Assembly elections in Gujarat. I advise you not to read it,  
Chanchal, but maybe, hopefully, it is of interest to some others.
Best -- Britta



  silences in gujarat
december 8, 2007 Economic & Political Weekly

Narratives of the Underbelly of Democracy
Britta Ohm

Five years after the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, the victims want  
to talk about their continued sufferings. No one prevents them from  
doing so. Only, there are no listeners. For the Gujarat government  
they simply do not exist, for the media their story is not immediate  
and urgent, and for the majority their harping on grievances is proof  
of an unwillingness to bury the past. In post-democracy Gujarat,  
policies take precedence over the political and victims of pogroms or  
genocides are merely obstacles to economic progress.

The Gujarat pogrom of 2002 has by now trickled into the larger global  
debate as the signifier of a turning point in Hindu-Muslim relations,  
state action and India’s position in the “war on terror”. Despite the  
obvious absence of evidence, though, the internationally accepted  
narrative, in which freedom and democracy are being defended against  
Islamist terrorism, is till today ready to explain it as a reaction to  
the burning of the train in Godhra by “a Muslim mob”. The disinterest  
in researchable facts that concern democratic law and order, which is  
revealed in the readiness to accept this narrative, thus extends far  
beyond Gujarat and India.
In India itself, this disinterest may have been one of the reasons  
why, after the Gujarat pogrom had been the focus of unprecedented  
media attention in 2002, post-violence Gujarat had so consistently  
vanished from the headlines.
The vanishing was accidentally helped by the swelling amount of  
commercialised and democratised 24x7 news channels and the expanding  
number of newspapers, magazines and e-media, which increasingly  
individualise the recipient and user, swinging their attention ever  
faster from disaster to murder to investigation to natural catastrophe  
to disaster and thus painting layer after layer over the turning point  
with regard to India’s democracy that the Gujarat pogrom signified.  
Gujarat’s increasing invisibility in an ocean of imagery beyond  
everyday politics and symbolised fragments such as the Best Bakery  
case did not merely leave the impression that the pogrom has been a  
mere speck with no severe implications. It also suggested that Gujarat  
was only vaguely related to the rest of India, which added not merely  
to the pronunciation of Gujarati nationalism but also to the  
invisibility of the Muslim plight.
When I had returned to India in the company of a friend earlier this  
year for some follow-up research on a project on Indian media under  
transnationalisation1, it had been the lingering indifference to what  
had actually happened and the absence of coverage on Gujarat in the  
mass media that provoked our decision to travel to Ahmedabad. I just  
wanted to see what a few reports told me was anything but “back to  
normal”. The very fact that there was no difficulty in accessing  
sites, people or organisations in the Muslim community, already  
underlined that their recognition was a matter of choice rather than  
of possibility.
In this sense, Prashant Jha’s suggestion that Gujarat is a “fascist  
realm”2 is slightly misleading, as it conjures up ideas of  
authoritarian regimes, like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under  
Stalin, that would do anything to hide their crimes, suppress their  
critics and silence their victims, making an investigation an  
existential endeavour. The Gujarat victims’ readiness to talk should  
still not be mistaken for an actual freedom to do so. Insofar as open  
suppression has, at least on the surface, been replaced largely by  
denial and the insistence on “normalcy”, however, Jha is right if one  
understands “fascist realm” as a manifestation of “everyday fascism”,  
i e, as the Austrian writer Elisabeth Reichart has defined it, “as an  
authoritarian and hierarchical mode of thought and behaviour based on  
discrimination and lack of equality, [that] renders attempts at self- 
definition futile and interpersonal relations hence potentially  
exploitative and explosive”3 and that is not directly opposed to  
democracy.
The atmosphere was probably most comparable to Germany after the war,  
when Germans, already mesmerised by the emerging economic boom, went  
about the rubble and debris in their cities, unable and unwilling to  
realise the degree of destruction beyond their own property and the  
dimensions of cruelty and suffering they had tolerated and supported.
In today’s Gujarat, though, things appear indeed far more “normal”,  
able to convey to the non-specified first-time visitor, who does not  
venture into Muslim areas, an image of the non-interrupted every day.  
A tourist couple from Italy who had just returned from Ahmedabad,  
where they went mainly to look at the fabulous textile museum, had  
heard about the “riots” but described the situation in the city as  
“normal. People told us there had always been violence between Muslims  
and Hindus, but now you can see in the old city, there is one Muslim  
shop and one Hindu shop next to each other and no trouble.” This is  
the other commonly acceptable narrative, the cultural version of  
“natural” Hindu-Muslim antagonism since time immemorial that “breaks  
free” at times and is independent from changing political conditions  
and technologies. Yet the non-normal lies in Ahmedabad so immediately  
under the surface, and actually so obviously supplants it, that its  
perception is not a matter of physical possibility.
We tried to avoid linking up with an non-governmental organisation  
(NGO) or local organisation in order to get an entry into the  
“normality” first. Our first exploration began with the walled city  
(or old city). To the more experienced eye it became obvious that  
Hindu and Muslim areas were strictly segregated along an almost  
invisible pattern, while the displayed goods were mainly household  
utensils in plastic or metal and an extremely limited choice of nylon  
saris and salwars. The breathtaking, Jumma Masjid was hardly  
frequented and the exceptional ‘jalis’ (lattice work) in Sidi Sayiad’s  
mosque were badly kept. An “audio-synchronised walking tour through  
the historic walled city” that the ethno-styled house of MG offered  
with colourfully designed leaflets4 – which featured state-of-the-art  
portraits of Muslim and Hindu faces in different folkloristic attire  
and pertinent signs of both religions – seemed like a forlorn bright  
ray of light in a darkened landscape, indicating the stark contrast  
between what was and what could be.

Beyond the Border
It was Naroda Patia that was first on our list, the outskirts north- 
east of the city centre that had seen the most ruthless violence in  
2002 and that Sudhir Chandra, in the same year, had described as a  
place of “inhumanity to which these dark silhouettes of burned houses  
bore mute witness”. 5 And it was also Naroda Patia that first  
demonstrated to us what would become the pattern to be met with in the  
other places of post-violence Muslim habitation: the power of the  
majority to create “facts” and the muted and futile struggle of the  
minority to produce proofs. Waiting close to Ellis Bridge, below a  
huge billboard that showed, like so many others in the city, Narendra  
Modi’s smiling face – in this case advertising that Gujarat was the  
only Indian state where villages were as glittering as the cities and  
24-hour electricity supply was provided – we were asked by a food  
vendor if we knew that this was Narendra Modi, the “saviour” of  
Gujarat, who was engaging in “so many good things” for the state.
Our rickshaw driver, by contrast, immediately spoke of “the border”  
and offered to take us first to the one and then to the other side,  
but said he himself would not enter the first. Innumerable tiled Hindu  
shrines have nearly everywhere in the city replaced and outnumbered  
the dargahs which used to be common at junctions. Upon entering the  
Naroda Patia main market our driver, who had introduced himself as  
Mura Bey, suggested he would wait while we took a walk round what he  
described as the Hindu area. I was surprised to find at the entrance  
of the bazaar, a statue of the eldest son of a significant Sindhi  
saint, and it became obvious that what immediately worked itself out  
here as well, below the surface of mere Hindu-Muslim antagonism, was  
the endless story of Partition. Many in the area are descendents of  
Sindhis who had been expelled from Pakistan.
In the residential neighbourhood behind the small bazaar nothing  
remained of the “rows and rows of burnt houses, with burnt and bent  
bicycles, scooters and three-wheelers outside” that Sudhir Chandra had  
described five years before. The area was thoroughly cleared, with  
some reasonably affluent residences next to poorer houses, which  
opened after a while into a large empty space, the erased Muslim part,  
in which now cows sought shade under a single tree and a small Hanuman  
shrine was the only building. Along the adjacent wall was written in  
large red letters: “Jai Ambe! Aum! Jai Mahakali! Jai Shri Krishna!  
Nobody should urinate in this particular place. A strict warning!” One  
could hardly think of a more grotesque prohibition in a place where  
many had been butchered and at the same time of a more macabre  
indication of the resolve to keep it “clean” at any cost.

Naroda Patia
In contrast to the confident self-representation in the bazaar it was  
indeed as if someone had turned the volume off when we passed Nurani  
Masjid and entered the area in which the remaining Muslims of Naroda  
Patia are now segregated. Low houses, some of them not bigger than  
huts, huddled along narrow sandy paths. Mura Bey stopped a few young  
boys, who politely showed us the way to the local branch of the Islami  
Relief Committee, which was housed in the small school – with young  
children, just coming out in a surprisingly orderly fashion. The man  
at the desk waved us in eagerly and introduced himself as Nazir Khan  
Pathan, teacher and social worker. We learned that the Muslims in  
Naroda Patia had suffered during the pogrom because they had been  
(more than elsewhere in the city) exposed to their Hindu neighbours  
and organised groups of the Sangh parivar. In contrast to places like  
the old city or Juhapura, where Muslims have since long been in the  
majority, they had only started to settle in Naroda Patia after the  
1970s and numbered around 10,000.
As we were still talking, about the complete absence of rehabilitation  
through the government, the isolated efforts of Muslim organisations  
and NGOs and the difficulties to get the school running again – which  
is one of the reasons why Muslim families stay in the vicinity – Nazir  
Khan seemed not to trust in our attentiveness, even though I was  
taking notes. He started writing a meticulous description of how the  
pogrom had started and unfolded. The two page-long report ends with  
the number of those who Khan felt were under his responsibility and he  
could not save: “35 young or youth, 45 young ladies, 20 innocent  
children, 20 senior citizens”. He handed me the paper, which clearly  
had the character of a testimony, and urged us to also take a worn  
2004 issue of Communalism Combat, which has a short report on his life- 
risking success to save the Hindu children in his tuition class, whom  
he feared would be mistaken for Muslim children and killed.6
However, the forlorn and isolated existence in Naroda Patia, which, in  
a sense, accounted for the “Hindu area” as well, represented only a  
part of the picture. Through Mura Bey we met Ahmed Shaikh, secretary  
of the local headquarters of the Deobandi Jamiat Ulma-i-Hind off  
Relief Road in the old city. Shaikh, a fragile elderly man suffering  
from a severe eye-related ailment that forces him to wear fluorescent  
sunglasses most of the time, became our guide into a world in which  
hope and hopelessness have merged to become inseparable. When I asked  
him about recent written material on the state of the Muslim  
population he first insisted we meet Gagan Sethi from the Centre for  
Social Justice (Janvikas), which has its office in the western part of  
the city and outside Juhapura, not far from the new shopping malls and  
the sparkling International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKcON)  
temple in the area that is so aptly called Satellite.

Dependence on NGOs
The link, as Shaikh Bey’s insistence demonstrated, with the “regular”,  
“secular” NGOs is vital for the religious Muslim organisations active  
in relief work, as legal matters and access to state institutions are  
essential, and the secular NGOs, however odious to the government, can  
still be less easily stigmatised and sidelined than the Muslim  
organisations (which includes secular Muslims, as the systematic  
forcing of the Vikas Adhyayan Kendra in Ahmedabad, headed by activist  
Sophia Khan, from “Hindu” Narayanpura to “Muslim” Juhapura underlines). 
7 This hierarchical order, in which the Muslims are dependent on the  
(Hindu) secular NGOs and which shows up the traditional, rather  
benevolent attitude of secularists towards Muslims was evident in our  
meeting with Sethi, into which Shaikh Bey clearly entered as a  
petitioner rather than as an equal partner. The contrast between the  
hidden-away, dilapidated, basically empty headquarters of the Ulma-i- 
Hind and the well-equipped, bright office of Janvikas could hardly  
have been bigger, and it was obvious that the two men would under  
other circumstances never have had much to do with each other.
It is not merely the well-established standing of Janvikas that  
guarantees, in contrast to other active organisations, some non- 
ignorable yet strenuous agency for justice. It is perhaps also this  
not always easy cooperation on the basis of a nevertheless common  
cause, of a shared interpretation of justice and the necessity of  
participation and inclusion that is devoid of larger metaphysical  
visions and “bhai-bhai” romanticism and that has apart from Janvikas  
and the Ulma-i-Hind roped in more than 20 very different  
organisations, which meet on a regular basis once a month to  
coordinate their activities, that allows for a glimpse on a viable and  
realistic model of future interaction in (Gujarati) society. This  
potentially includes swamis and sadhus of the influential and  
ubiquitous Swaminarayan sect, patronised by the Modi government, whom  
the Ulma-i-Hind had already invited to their first post-violence  
conference, and, as Shaikh Bey pointed out proudly, “they came”!
The attempts at reaching out to the Hindu community, despite the  
horrors suffered, indicates the degree of existential need to prove  
that Muslims are doing “nothing wrong”. Along with active relief work  
– that includes the earthquake region of Kutch8 and the reorganisation  
of the Muslim community through housing, schooling, etc – this is the  
domain of organisations such as the Ulma-i-Hind and the Jamaat-i- 
Islami. Janvikas, whilst supporting these efforts, operates more on  
the legal front. Questioned about the ongoing harassment through the  
Sangh parivar and the government and the likeliness of future  
violence, Sethi said that all that was still there on a day to day  
level and there was no reliable safety at all, but their focus was  
more the problem of systematised and denied internal displacement,9  
random detainments of Muslims under POTA, of which there were still  
nearly 300 cases (the Modi government has opposed the repeal of POTA  
in 2004), as well as over 2,000 pending cases of violence.
Since the pogrom, around 200 Muslims in the city have dedicated  
themselves fully to relief work and legal assistance, and more than a  
thousand can be activated when needed. The absence of a landline phone  
number on Shaikh Bey’s visiting card is significant: “We only use  
mobile phones now, nothing else, our phones are never switched off  
because during the violence nobody could be reached in time, and the  
violence spread so fast because it was organised over mobile phones”.

Madni Nagar Camp
After leaving the main road and wobbling for a while along a dirt-road  
through fields and barren land we reached Madni Nagar, a colony  
erected by the Ulma-i-Hind that houses nearly 250 families in long  
rows of identical concrete blocks on ground-level, with 12 square  
metres per family, including a dark, windowless room, a tiny kitchen  
and toilet and a small backyard. Madni Nagar is one of today’s 69 so- 
called “semi-permanent camps” in Gujarat and six around Ahmedabad.  
After the government proclaimed “normalcy” and closed the refugee  
camps that had been set up in 2002, they are maintained by NGOs.  
Altogether they shelter around 25,000 Muslims. Here, the basic  
struggle is not even to prove that Muslims at large were neither  
guilty of instigating violence nor of lacking loyalty towards the  
Indian nation but to prove that they exist at all. The “semi”  
symbolises the faint hope of being restored at least citizens rights  
while the “permanent” indicates the more likely possibility of having  
to come to terms with a deprived life outside “mainstream society”.

Non-existence
The problem, as Shaikh Bey pointed out, “is not so much the money. We  
[the Ulma-i-Hind, BO] have over one million members worldwide, and  
they donate only one rupee a month, so we could build shelters like  
this colony.” The problem is that “we are not registered by the  
government”. As Janvikas has documented, in many of the camps  
including Madni Nagar, self-organisaton has resumed in form of the  
Antarik Visthapit Heeth Rakshak Samitees, the first demand of which is  
not any more rehabilitation but to be officially counted. This, most  
critically, is the precondition for the reissuing of ration cards and  
voter-IDs, many of which have been burned or lost during the pogrom  
and never been replaced.
The feeling of being systematically reduced to official non-existence  
became obvious during a meeting with women that took place in a large  
hall. The hall, Shaikh Bey explained, has been erected recently after  
it had become clear that the roads back into society were more  
consistently blocked than after earlier violence. It serves as a  
community centre where courses in basic skills are held. In another  
sad irony, the hall itself is thus somewhat a symbol of uneasily  
accepting the unavoidability of permanence. Apart from the  
institutionalised non-reachability of the city’s market areas due to  
the remoteness of the Muslim camps, many jobs that have been  
traditional Muslim domains, like the sale of fruit and vegetables,  
have become impossible as vendors cannot push their carts any more  
into now “cleansed” Hindu neighbourhoods where once their own houses  
stood. The same context applies for the primary school which was  
planned on a then still empty ground opposite the hall: the nearest  
school is too far away, and those who have taken upon them the trouble  
to go anyway have turned out to be marginalised, discriminated or even  
attacked by pupils and teachers alike.
We found a large group of women sitting on the concrete floor in  
obvious expectancy and one middle-aged woman, who introduced herself  
as Sameeha Begum and had apparently been nominated as a speaker told  
her story, complemented by bits and pieces thrown in by others that  
ended with an appeal. Her family had lost four members, their house  
and source of livelihood, a rickshaw. After the pogrom, they could not  
afford to buy or even rent a new one, and her husband, who had  
survived with injuries, was too scared and traumatised to even try and  
get back into the business. Even after five years, the burden of her  
story was the utter disbelief of what had happened to her and her  
family, how this could possibly have happened for “no reason” in the  
land of her father and forefathers and, how it was possible that  
nobody cared.
Madni Nagar brought to consciousness the Sisyphus-character of  
Janvikas’ work, its race against time, as the camp represented in the  
most pointed manner the uncompromising politics of exclusion that aims  
not merely at “undoing” Muslim participation in public resources and,  
crucially, elections. Especially in view of the small children – many  
of them obviously already born in Madni Nagar – playing about in the  
dusty lanes between the concrete blocks, it also bears another and, as  
it seems, almost inevitable scenario of future Gujarati society,  
namely, the raising of a whole Muslim generation that is cut off from  
its history and that is systematically forced to unlearn all skills of  
interacting with other communities.

The Juhapura Camp
The whole dimension of today’s paradoxes of Muslim life in Ahmedabad,  
and their continuous reproduction, however, showed itself in Juhapura,  
the large district south-west of the city, whose number of inhabitants  
has swelled to 3.5 lakhs – and if one includes the whole stretch down  
to Sarkej Roza to nearly seven lakhs – since the pogrom. In fact,  
Juhapura is probably the largest refugee camp of Gujarat, where  
Muslims gathered, when a return to their homes was by their neighbours  
“allowed” only “if they withdrew legal cases, stopped using  
loudspeakers for the azaan, quietly moved out of certain businesses,  
and basically learned to live with downcast eyes”.10
We met Iqbal Mirza, head of the local branch of the Jamaat-i-Islami  
that also maintains a number of camps like Madni Nagar. In contrast,  
however, to the limited number of their inhabitants – the Ulma-i-Hind,  
for instance, was able to erect a water tower in Madni Nagar that is  
now irregularly supplied with water bought from private sources – the  
vast Juhapura is virtually left to oblivion. “Even if we [the Jamaat-i- 
Islami, BO] built a water tower here, the demand would be so big we  
could not satisfy everybody, and competition and fights would break  
out. We just can’t help them all.”

Choice of Camps
The choice is thus to live in one of the organised camps cut off from  
all regular society and be provided with basic facilities or to  
maintain some illusion of a non-organised settlement and face slow but  
sure deterioration. And even that is not quite a choice as the camps  
are basically for those who have lost their homes during the pogrom  
and have no other place to go to. The same catch-22 applies for  
education. Mirza, who holds a degree, pointed out that his own  
children “will not have the option of higher education. We have some  
primary schools and madrasas here, but all institutions of higher  
education are outside Juhapura, and they don’t take Muslims. We will  
have to build our own schools, but then we don’t have enough teachers.”
We met a young man, whose story is symptomatic of the continuous and  
wilful reproduction of Muslim silence and invisibility. A graduate in  
English literature, he has been jobless for years. To our question on  
self-organisation in Juhapura he exclaimed cynically, “How? They are  
asking for moderate Muslim leaders, they are asking for Muslim  
representatives they can refer to, but the moment somebody raises his  
voice he is detained. This is not POTA; this is for all sorts of petty  
accusations. It’s enough if three people meet at a street corner, the  
police snatch them away on some feeble account. The prisons are full  
with people who do not even know their case and who never get to see a  
lawyer. And when they come out – if they come out – they will  
obviously try and avoid even more to stick their neck out.”
There are no publicly accessible numbers on detainments in Gujarat  
other than POTA cases. Whereas random arrests of Muslims were reported  
repeatedly in the aftermath of the pogrom11 and are highlighted after  
violent incidences – for instance, after the demolition of a big  
dargah in Vadodara in 2006 through the Vadodara Municipal Corporation  
(VMC)12 – detention as an institutionalised practice has so far hardly  
been investigated.

Reproducing Exclusion
Apart from two exceptions, which were the main border roads, there was  
not a single paved street in Juhupura. Demarcated by police outposts,  
the lanes are all sandy and dusty. The immense contrast to the  
expensive designer wear shops and sparkling, marble-floored shopping  
malls along CG Road and Ashram Road (some of them maintained by the  
Vaishnava Hare Krishna ISKCON society, next to the Swaminarayan sect  
the second big Hindu religious organisation operating in Gujarat)13  
and the quickly growing amount of department stores in Satellite,  
where expensive cars have difficulty finding parking spaces and ATM  
machines encourage consumers to shop, underscored the merciless  
priority – and its unquestioned acceptance as “deserved by merit” – to  
keep the obtained resources for a limited Hindu strata of the  
population that a neo-liberal economy in its easy cooperation with  
resourceful religious organisations enables.
Juhapura does not have a single ATM machine or a bank or even a post  
office. Beyond barren land, which is partly used as a garbage dump,  
one can just about see the nice and proper apartment blocks of the  
adjacent Hindu area. Along one stretch, where Juhapura borders more  
directly a poorer Hindu neighbourhood, a long wall marks the  
demarcation that brought to mind the Berlin before 1989. In another  
section the wall was a bit lower, and we could see – with the Cricket  
World Cup in full swing at the time – boys playing cricket on both  
sides of the border. When the ball of the Muslim boys accidentally  
landed behind the wall, it was not thrown back.
Muslim life – or rather existence – in today’s Ahmedabad, but  
potentially in all Gujarat, is characterised by this trap of getting  
no reply and of being forced to produce the conditions that in turn  
provoke even further marginalisation. Even though it has become  
obvious how uneasy and desperate Muslims are at their exclusion and  
how strong the urge is to take part while regaining a minimum of  
dignity – the focus on education, citizens rights and legal justice  
was most striking in all three places of Muslim habitation we went to,  
the skilful maintenance of a vicious circle appears unbreakable: the  
denial of acceptance through the majority and the government,  
exemplified in the disinterest in proof, creates the increasing  
necessity of setting up parallel, “own” structures of survival, which  
inevitably serve, in the manner of self-fulfilling prophecies, as a  
pretext for the solidification of prejudice – “Muslims don’t  
integrate”, “Muslims build their own schools to infiltrate children’s  
minds with jihad”, “Muslim’s loyalty is with Pakistan” – and the  
increase of exclusion.

Speaking Different Languages
Gujarat today shows that the main difference between the minority and  
the majority is not in terms of religion or even economic resources  
which are mere indexes of a deeper and indeed new difference of  
thought and terminology. In this sense the problem derives from the  
fact that they have come to speak “different languages” and to operate  
in different reference systems that refer to democracy but do not  
translate into each other.
The “tolerable narratives” of the majority, on the other hand, are  
framed in terms of what thinkers like Jacques Rancière and Colin  
Crouch have called, with regard to a global context, post-democracy,  
which signifies the non-abolishment of nominal democracy and its  
reinterpretation along “negative rights” that “protect the individual  
against others, especially against the state: rights to sue, rights to  
property.”14
One of the prominent features of post-democracy is de-politicisation  
in the sense of a devaluation of the political vis-à-vis a  
strengthening of policies, the reversal, so to speak, of the anecdote  
that Rancière mentions with regard to the hierarchical relation  
between the patricians and the plebeians in ancient Rome that has a  
particular significance for the situation in Gujarat. For the  
patricians, who were used to exclude the “nameless” plebeians from  
their policymaking – or rather: whose policymaking was intrinsically  
dependent on the plebeians’ exclusion – there came a time when their  
practice was challenged not by the plebeians’ martial revolt but by  
their proving of having precisely the capacity that the patricians had  
claimed only for themselves: the capacity of logos, of speaking and of  
being counted. “In short, they act as creatures that have names”.15  
“There is politics, because those who do not have the right to be  
counted as speaking creatures count themselves as partakers and  
establish a community by collectivising injustice”.16

Legitimising Exclusion
Gujarat today can be understood as a place where the reversal of this  
process, the de-collectivising of injustice and denying the  
disadvantaged the right of being counted as speaking members, is in a  
global context most pointed and literally enacted. While post- 
democracy describes basically a policy of the status quo that rejects  
all critique as anti-democratic and potentially terrorist, whose  
administrative characteristic is, according to Rancière, the  
uncontrolled agency of the police (as a self-proclaimed protector and  
executor of policies) and which appears to be a post-disciplinarian  
society by transferring discipline from an authority into the  
individual (resulting, for instance, in commonly accepted “tolerable  
narratives”), in Gujarat these features are complemented not merely by  
clearly undemocratic measures within a still democratic framework.
The most symbolic aspect here is probably that it is not any more  
elections that are abolished or manipulated but unwanted – political –  
voters that are with a fine range of policies and strategies made  
“undone” in order to naturalise a culturally majoritarian electorate.
The main problem with the above-mentioned reversal from the political  
to policymaking is that it is, in the same way as was the process  
towards politics in ancient Rome, perceived as a progress that  
classifies demands for political rights and justice not merely as  
“exaggerated” or undemocratic, but also as somewhat outdated. This  
attitude reaches well beyond different political parties and makes the  
Congress, as has become palpable over the past years, less and less a  
realistic political alternative. While it can employ a differing  
political rhetoric, it cannot – and probably does not want to – in  
effect alienate a majority that perceives itself as progressive by  
defending its liberation from the ideological (political) aspects of  
democracy and that represents itself as “just living it”. Post- 
democracy, in interaction with a liberalised economy, is thus able to  
legitimise exclusion more effectively than a mere authoritarian  
regime, as much as post-democracy and pogroms and genocide do not  
necessarily exclude each other if it can be agreed (rather than  
proven) that the victims were enemies of democracy or  
“terrorists” (subtext: that they were a hindrance to economic progress).
Given, however, the basic questioning of teleological progress that  
the contemporary “post” in front of modernity’s classic terms  
signifies and the fact that those who defend injustice today do it  
eventually as much at the cost of their own progress (and sanity) as  
did the patricians 2000 years ago, the chance is to considerably  
shorten the time span of change. To understand the “reversal of the  
reversal” as progress is the only possibility for democracy.17
Notes
1 Forthcoming, The Televised Community: Culture, Politics and the  
Market of Visual Representation in India, Routledge, New Delhi/London/ 
New York.
2 Prashant Jha, 2006, ‘Gujarat as Another Country: The Making and  
Reality of a Fascist Realm', in Himal Southasian, Vol. 19/7, at: www.himalmag.com/2006/october/cover_story.htm 
.
3 Introduction to Elisabeth Reichart’s work at: http://webpub.allegheny.edu/employee/l/ldemerit/reichtrans 
. html.
4 The tour is also advertised on the House of MG-web site at: www.houseofmg.com/ 
.
5 Sudhir Chandra (2002), ‘A Lament for a Decade’ in K N Panikkar and  
Sukumar Muralidharan (eds), 2003, Communalism, Civil Society and the  
State. Ayodhya 1992 – Gujarat 2002: Reflections on a Decade of  
Turbulence, Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), New Delhi, p 12.
6 ‘Good News from Gujarat: A Tribute to the Extraordinary Deeds of  
“Ordinary” People at the Height of the Genocide – Gujarat 2002’,  
Communalism Combat, June 2004, Year 10, No 98, p 12.
7 See Jha 2006.
8 See Islami Relief Committee, Gujarat (Jamaat-i-Islami), Horror of  
Earthquake and Genocide: A Journey of Pain and Relief, Report up to  
2004 (B-4, Karishma Complex, Sarni Society, Juhapura, Ahmedabad 380  
055); Report on Jamiat Children Village, Rehabilitation and  
Educational Project of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, published by the  
headquarters in 1, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi 110 002.
9 Centre for Social Justice, The Uprooted. Caught between Existence  
and Denial: A Document on the State of the Internally Displaced in  
Gujarat (Centre for Social Justice, C-105, Royal Chinmay, Bodakdev,  
Vastrapur, Ahmedabad 380 054), The Uprooted, p 6.
10 Centre for Social Justice, The Uprooted, p 6.
11 See, for instance, the Human Rights Watch Report, 2002, Impunity in  
the Aftermath at: http://hrw.org/reports/2002/india/India0402-06.htm.
12 See People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Report, 2007,  
Vadodara Violence on Gujarat’s “Gaurav” Day, Promilla and Co  
Publishers/Bibliophile South Asia, New Delhi/Chicago.
13 See www.iskcon.com/.
14 Colin Crouch, 2004, Post-Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, p 13.
15 Jacques Rancière, 2002, Das Unvernehmen. Politik und Philosophie,  
Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, p 36 (translation mine).
16 Ibid, p 38.
17 I thank Reshma Jain for her strong support and her fast help with  
translations.

Britta Ohm (ohm at zedat.fu-berlin.de), social anthropologist, teaches at  
Europa-University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany


Am 18.10.2008 um 12:35 schrieb Partha Dasgupta:

> Hi,
>
> As a follower of this list, would like to say that the discussion  
> (?) is
> getting a bit ridiculous.
>
> I do not think the level of responses I have been seeing from many  
> people
> who have been great contributors (whether I agree with the point of  
> view or
> not) is worth reading now, and responses are now being done to  
> irrelevant
> sub-sections of a mail completely aside fro the topic.
>
> Do not wish to name anyone, but I do hope all of us respect the list  
> and the
> time that all of us spend reading mails.
>
> Rgds, Partha
> .................................
>
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 3:52 PM, Tapas Ray <tapasrayx at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> I do not remember seeing any abusive language in Prabhakar's posts.
>> That he agrees ideologically with the really abusive ones should not
>> be reason enough to lump him with them. Incidentally, Chanchal is not
>> just abusive. She has even threatened physical violence against not
>> only "us" but also "our children". Is this going to be tolerated?
>> Please see below.
>>
>> 2008/10/17 chanchal malviya <chanchal_malviya at yahoo.com>:
>>
>>> We will wait for the time.. If not you, your children will surely  
>>> have to
>> answer to your anti-national concept of Secularism and anti- 
>> Hindutva...
>> Because you are betraying the very character of this motherland -
>> Hinduism....
>>>
>>
>>
>> 2008/10/18 Prabhakar Singh <prabhakardelhi at yahoo.com>:
>>> Aarti has written without even reading my mails.I dare her to  
>>> point out
>> even one instance where I have used any abusive language so far.In  
>> her
>> description she has been using only mild abuses by her standards  
>> and now we
>> have to be prepared to tolerate her real hard abuses.If the
>> Administrator/Moderator does not wish to take action against such  
>> people,
>> he/she should be kind enough to delist me and save me from such  
>> abuses.We
>> are respectable people not used to this kind of abuse and insult.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----
>>> From: Aarti Sethi <aarti.sethi at gmail.com>
>>> To: Aditya Raj Kaul <kauladityaraj at gmail.com>
>>> Cc: sarai list <reader-list at sarai.net>
>>> Sent: Saturday, 18 October, 2008 2:37:02 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [Reader-list] HOW SECULAR IS INDIA TODAY?
>>>
>>> Dear Crybabies,
>>>
>>> This is fantastic. After two years of spewing disgusting vitriol at
>> anyone
>>> who is not a right wing Hindu apologist, you now turn around and  
>>> urge the
>>> moderator to intervene on your behalf! Why? Because Shuddha called
>> Chanchal
>>> a 'moron'. 'Moron'  'fool' 'idiot' and 'nonsense' according to  
>>> Prabhakar
>> is
>>> "filthy language". I actually thought it so mild compared to the  
>>> filth
>> that
>>> routinely issues from the likes of Chanchal, Aditya, Vedavati,  
>>> Prabhakar
>> and
>>> radhukarajen (who has thankfully left us), that I really don't see  
>>> why
>> you
>>> are so upset. Perhaps because Shuddha is not trading in invective,  
>>> he is
>>> simply calling Chanchal out on his ridiculous views.
>>>
>>> The trouble is you think that you have a divine right to say  
>>> whatever you
>>> wish to the "psuedo-secularists" right? Because by in large we are
>>> well-mannered people, unwilling for the most part to indulge in
>>> invective-trading no matter how much we are provoked. We care a  
>>> great
>> deal
>>> about this list, about rational discussion and so on. So even  
>>> though you
>>> routinely abuse everyone's intelligence, time, faith and beleifs in
>> sexist,
>>> racist, misogynist prose, we solidier on. Trying to steer the
>> conversation
>>> in other directions, knowing that your immaturity and stupidity  
>>> should
>> not
>>> be held against you. But sometimes everyone's patience runs out when
>>> confronted with evidence of such blatant ignorance at the service of
>>> prejudice that they are forced to react in exasperation. Thus  
>>> Shuddha
>> called
>>> Chanchal a moron when Chanchal made the astounding statement that  
>>> Hindus
>> do
>>> not have special personal laws when in fact the most rudimentary
>> knowledge
>>> of Indian law would reveal that every "community" has separate  
>>> personal
>>> laws. However in this case I think Shuddha is wrong.
>>>
>>> Here is a small sample of Chanchal's views on a variety of issues:
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Muslim women:
>>>
>>> "He..he.. does it matter... you marry four or as many as  
>>> possible... four
>> is
>>> from your own religion.. and the rest is that your Right hand
>> possesses..."
>>>
>>> "You do not require rape in your community... there is freedom of  
>>> having
>>> more than one wife.."
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Hindu Women:
>>>
>>> "This is the basic culture of Hindus... The events that you talk  
>>> about
>>> (mistreatment of women) takes place with girls and women who have
>> discarded
>>> their religion.. they want freedom like western girl and they are  
>>> facing
>>> problems alike western girls...  I am very clear on a simple point  
>>> - if a
>>> girl or woman knows to have respect and honor for herself, no  
>>> Hindus will
>>> ever try to even look at her even
>>> in disguise - this is the true meaning of Satitva"
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Indian History:
>>>
>>> "They [Muslims] looted, massacred and raped Indians (Hindus) in  
>>> the name
>> of
>>> Infidels. Captured all our temples and palaces including Taj Mahal  
>>> and
>>> declared that it is their property....
>>>
>>> Chanchal on International relations:
>>>
>>> "The world knows that trucks of Women are exported by Pakistan to  
>>> India
>> (all
>>> HIV effected) for spreading AIDS in India."
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Art:
>>>
>>> "I am sure, a person who paints his motherland nude, must have  
>>> done much
>>> more nonsense to his mother and sister (though he may not be  
>>> exposing it
>> to
>>> the world)..."
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Sex:
>>>
>>> "Sex is nothing but the power of nature to brood."
>>>
>>> Chanchal on Secularism:
>>>
>>> "Hinduism is the mother of this nation and this nation remains  
>>> secular as
>>> long as Hindus are in majority."
>>> "Let India be a pure HIndu country again... For Muslims or  
>>> Christians -
>> all
>>> are safe in the hand of Hindus only..."
>>>
>>> Shuddha you are wrong to have called Chanchal a moron when it is  
>>> obvious
>> we
>>> are in the presence of a deeply learned person. I would request  
>>> you to
>>> immediately apologise.
>>>
>>> Warmly
>>> Aarti
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 12:00 PM, Aditya Raj Kaul
>>> <kauladityaraj at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Seems the SARAI Moderator WAKES UP only when some particular  
>>>> members are
>> in
>>>> trouble in an argument and have no words left. This is most  
>>>> shocking on
>>>> part
>>>> of so called List Administrators..
>>>>
>>>> So called Freedom Lovers....Pathetic Liberals....in dreams of  
>>>> their own.
>>>>
>> _________________________________________
>> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>> Critiques & Collaborations
>> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with
>> subscribe in the subject header.
>> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
>> List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Partha Dasgupta
> +919811047132
> _________________________________________
> reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
> Critiques & Collaborations
> To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with  
> subscribe in the subject header.
> To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list
> List archive: &lt;https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>

___________________

Britta Ohm
Postdoc
University of Zurich
UPRP Asia and Europe

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