by Shivani Parikh, Board Member, Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus

In 2002, 59 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya were killed in a fire inside the Sabarmati Express train near Gujarat’s Godhra railway station. 97 Muslims were killed by a mob of approximately 5,000 people, organized by the Bajrang Dal, a wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. An official estimate states that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed during the riots, with 223 more missing. But the consequences are more far-reaching, as India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also the Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time. Modi has always denied complicity or turning a blind eye, yet he was denied a U.S. visa in 2005 because he failed to stop religious pogroms. 

Final Solution is a 2004 documentary film, and one of the few available films with testimonies and invaluable archival footage, captures the graphic communal violence and how Muslims were intentionally and explicitly targeted by political right-wing extremists that were looking for a way to justify long-restrained desires by rising Hindutva leaders to carry out organized attacks, rapes, and murders against them. Importantly, it also shows the displacement and ghettoization of the Muslim families that had been living in Naroda Patiya.

In 2017, I studied abroad through the School of International Training to Sao Paulo, Brazil, Cape Town, South Africa and Ahmedabad, India. when I visited the place they live now, a site next to a landfill on the outskirts of Ahmedabad called “Citizen Nagar,” I was asked by the Muslim IIM-Ahmedabad student who tutored there and led our cohort as our local translator in Gujarati what my family thought of me coming on this trip. I started my sentence saying that they knew that I was learning about social justice and urban issues, but trailed off midway and broke eye contact with him as he nodded curtly in understanding. He did not need to hear me say out loud to know that as an upper-caste Hindu, their stance was predictably aligned with a majority of those of their caste & religion - that they largely did not know or care about these families’ predicament or the terrible conditions they lived in. When it rained, the waste from the landfill flooded their doorless homes; rabid street dogs captured from the city were dropped off there; there was no running water, so it was brought weekly by a truck in tankards; the only school there offered education only until the sixth grade; and there were no healthcare professionals living amongst them and so the clinic they had was operated on a monthly basis by volunteers. Without public transit, more of the families lived in total poverty and most of the men were chronically unemployed. All the while, ironically the Historical City of Ahmedabad had just received the designation as a UNESCO World Heritage City and Modi had proposed his Smart Cities initiative to incentivize various India states to invest in urban renewal and economic development programs.

On Sunday, January 20, the Bharatiya Janata Party of Gujarat tweeted a photo of Muslim men in nooses to celebrate a state court’s decision to sentence 38 people to death. These were individuals who were found responsible for the Ahmedabad serial blasts that killed 56 people in 2008 and were apparently in direct response to the 2002 communal riots in response to and the modern informal normalization of Hindu political leaders’ usage of Muslims as scapegoats. While now removed from Twitter, the tweet is indicative of the ongoing suppression of Muslims’ religious freedoms in India, including the state of Karnataka’s hijab ban; Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati’s (the 58-year-old head of the powerful Dasna Devi temple in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) call for the genocide of Muslims; and national leadership’s silence to this growing militant community which actively seeks to dehumanize them as a means of polarizing what is an already Hindu-majority nation.

This brief timeline, which ties my peripheral and brief diasporic relationship to the 2002 Gujarat riots, is one that will inevitably challenged by my diaspora peers who agree with Modi’s apathy then, who agreed the the BJP’s permissive attitude towards anti-Muslim rhetoric now, and even believe that the diaspora should donate to and sponsor the creation of India as an exclusively Hindu rashtra. The narrative has now become that a Hindu who decries and opposes the violation of Muslims’ human rights in India is self-loathing, traitorous, or (at best) needs paternalistic guidance to understand why such enmity should be validated and propagated.

There is no authentic Hinduism, a religion that centers ahimsa, dharma, and daya, that can align with a desire to silence and oppress members of another faith. 20 years later, will Hindus be bystanders to those who, in the name of our religion, proclaim our faith as a violent one again?