ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experiential, literary, and analytical to offer a memorial account that will try to treat the Gujarat pogrom and its aftermath not as an exceptional, but an ordinary event. The 2002 Gujarat pogrom was an essential marker of the ideology of the Indian nation as Hindu supremacist, and it serves additionally as a marker of the governmentality of the Indian state as neoliberal triumphalist. Most of the English language media was critical of the Narendra Modi government, but their characterization of what was happening in Gujarat followed the standard cause-and-effect explanation. By the Gujarat government’s own admission made to the Supreme Court of India, of a total of 4,252 cases that victim-survivors registered with the police, nearly half were summarily closed by the police and thus never progressed to the trial stage. Gujarat has been called the ‘Hindutva laboratory’ that executed the pogrom as an experiment to teach Muslims in India ‘a lesson’.
