Aftermath of a Riot Foretold: Violence, Impunity and Sovereignty in Gujarat, India Public
Chatterjee, Moyukh (2015)
Abstract
This dissertation examines sociolegal processes that allow Hindu nationalists and state officials to perform mass, public, anti-minority violence in Gujarat in ways that expand and deepen their power. I argue impunity is not merely the breakdown of law and order but a systematic and ongoing process of legitimizing and performing Hindu sovereignty in India. Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted over eighteen months in Gujarat, I describe long-term official and unofficial practices by which political violence against Muslims is denied and authorized within a liberal secular state. This research delineates legal trials that declare victims' testimony inconsistent and exaggerated, police documents that transform anti-minority violence into a generic 'riot,' and a legal apparatus that renders mass violence often unaccountable. Through an investigation of legal technologies, state writing practices, and everyday techniques of Hindu nationalist activists in Ahmedabad, I uncover the legal and political infrastructure of impunity that outlives recurring episodes of anti-minority violence in contemporary India. I take as my ethnographic entry point one of India's most gruesome episodes of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, a Western state in India, often called the "laboratory of Hindutva" or militant Hindu nationalism. The perpetrators, armed groups of Hindu nationalists with the support of the local police, politicians, and government attacked and killed Muslims in 2002. The attacks were justified as 'reaction' to the deaths of 59 Hindu activists killed by a Muslim mob in Godhra. Subsequently, the police told Muslims "we have no orders to save you." About 1000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed in the attacks. Around 150,000 were displaced and forced to take shelter in relief camps. In 2014, Narendra Modi, who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat during the attacks against Muslims and widely criticized for allowing the violence, won a historic mandate in the national elections to become the Prime Minister of India. Scholars, civil society, and activists often describe the recurrent exoneration of perpetrators of public violence against minorities as the failure of the rule of law. I suggest that legal frameworks of modern states sometimes function very effectively to confer impunity on perpetrators of state-abetted violence. I demonstrate that these state practices of exonerating violence are better understood as a technique of governance - a form of state authority based on the ability of those in power to control, subdue, and punish minorities within postcolonial states. Traditionally, legal processes and law-enforcement agencies are expected to address and rectify such wrongs. In contemporary India, however, legal practices frequently impede accountability after everyday and extraordinary violence against minorities. This generates an urgent problem in Indian society: Why is political violence against minorities most often legally unaccountable? In 2010-13, I spent eighteen months attending criminal trials, interviewing survivors, paralegals, NGO workers, Hindu nationalist activists, and analyzing police and legal documents in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. My fieldwork included both Muslim and Hindu communities, activists, courts and NGOs. By embedding modes of unaccountability in the heart of everyday legal and state practices, I show why 'spectacular violence' does not disturb everyday politics, but is an important force to claim public legitimacy and strengthen state power.
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction 1
Why Gujarat? 8
Ahmedabad: A Divided City 11
Action and Reaction 15
The Paradox of Gujarat 2002 24
Activism and Trials in the Aftermath 32
The Impunity Effect 44
Communal Violence in India 52
The Paper Trail 56
Law and Order in India's "Hindu" State 60
Chapter Outline 66
Conclusion 71
Chapter Two: Putting Victims on Trial 74
Meeting the Witness 78
Activism as Proceduralism 83
Breaking the Witness 91
Producing the Survivor as Non-Witness 98
The Verdict 106
Crime and Punishment 111
Legal Technologies of Denial 114
Conclusion 117
Chapter Three: The Paper Trail of Impunity: Tracing the Police FIR 121
The Beginning is the End 124
The Preface: Action and Reaction 127
The Omnibus FIR 131
Gujarat Bandh: The Erasure of Witnesses 137
Languages of Violence 143
The Trace 147
Conclusion 149
Chapter Four: Exaggeration and Contradiction: Violence against Women 154
Sexual violence in the Gujarat pogrom 162
The Unspeakable? 167
Unmaking Evidence 171
The Question of Rape 175
Gendered Violence as Exaggeration 178
How Law Denies 185
Conclusion 186
Chapter Five: What Kind of Hindu Are You? Everyday Techniques of Hindu Nationalism 188
Beyond the Exception 189
Bajrang Dal and the VHP 194
Meeting the "Boys" 199
The Rule of the Mob 202
Temple # 2 211
Cow Protection 215
Conclusion 221
Chapter Six: Once Upon a Riot: Narrative Analysis and the Identity Theory of Hindu-Muslim Violence 225
What Everyone Knows... 226
Rioting and Impunity 232
Writing the Riot 236
The First Information Report 242
Mediating the Riot 246
Beyond the Riot. 249
Unraveling the "Riot" 253
Narratives and Violence 257
Conclusion 259
Chapter Seven: Conclusion 263
Works Cited 279
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