ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore Final Solution (2005), Parzania: Heaven & Hell on Earth (2005), and Firaaq (2009), three nationally and internationally acclaimed fi lms dealing with the 2002 state-led genocidal violence perpetrated against the Muslims in Gujarat. These attacks were performed a day after nearly sixty Hindu karsewaks (religious volunteers) were burnt to death in a train carriage. They had been travelling home to Gujarat from Ayodhya. The Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi’s highly provocative and unsubstantiated statement that the torching of the train carriages was a handiwork of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, and his ordering of a public procession of the “charred bodies in an emotive and incendiary cavalcade from Godhra to Ahmadabad” (Arundhati Roy, 2003) did not help the matters. The Godhra train-burning incident was followed by state-wide acts of anti-Muslim reprisals in which nearly 2,500 Muslims were killed, several thousand Muslim homes and businesses destroyed, and nearly 200,000 Muslims rendered permanently displaced. Such an expression of hatred of one religious community towards another shocked those that believed in the country’s secular tradition based on tolerance of religious diff erence, in the reality of the country constituting a common heritage to all, and in the belief that communal carnage and riots were only perpetrated by self-serving criminal elements of the society or some marginal fanatical religious zealots. What took most people by surprise was that the anti-Muslim attacks were not a spontaneous response of ‘ordinary’ Hindus to the Godhra train-burning incident but that it was a state-sponsored, meticulously planned pogrom against minority Muslims. Communalism is not new to India and this incident brings to mind the anti-Sikh attacks following the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi or the frenzy of killings that accompanied the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque. However, what sets the Gujarat carnage apart is the conspicuous absence of the state’s eff orts in containing the anti-Muslim violence of the Hindu groups that rendered the incident “regime-supported” and not “regime tolerated” (Baxi cited in Needham and Sunder Rajan, 2007: 17). Further, the extensive participation of the adivasis and tribals in the violence was equally bewildering. And fi nally, in spite of the reports put
forth by the Human Rights Watch and the National Human Rights Commission, Modi was brought back to power soon after the carnage, winning an implausible 127 seats out of a total of 182.
